Art and Modesty | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 6, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 30.

Art and Modesty.

We do not wonder that in all ages many excellent people have regarded the fine arts as prejudicial to piety and morals. Everybody knows that they ought to be the handmaidens of religion, virtue, and everything that elevates and strengthens. But art culture so often leads to disregard of everything but beauty, form, pleasure, and sensual delight, that its results appear to be, on the whole, debasing to the heart, degrading to the intellect, debilitating to the national as well as individual character. Hundreds of persons, very far from being bigoted religionists, have had this impression after a stroll through the halls of the annual exhibition of the Paris Salon.

An art company in this city has instituted legal proceedings for the recovery of photographs which an artist retains on the ground that they are his property, the living persons who acted as models being ladies who would be unwilling to have their identity made known. It is to be hoped that no lady would be led by her enthusiasm for art, to act in any way that would bring discredit through the accident of a law suit. When a French woman belonging to an imperial family was asked by a friend whether she did not feel uncomfortable when she reclined as a model for Canova's Venus, it is said that she replied, "No, the room was quite warm."

We have not reached this point of aesthetic development in America. It were better that all the art schools in the land were turned into Quaker meeting-houses than that they should in any way impair the delicate sensibilities of our young people in regard to what is pure and true in heart, speech, and behavior. That the manners and customs of many art schools are extremely detrimental to moral purity we have reason to know. Our magazines have given illustrated records of their methods, which are enough to condemn them utterly in the minds of those who regard the interests of the young more than the gratification of the senses in pictures and statuary.—N. Y. Observer.