REALITY & SHADOWS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 August 1938, Page 10

REALITY & SHADOWS

APPEAL OF GREAT PAINTINGS. “The great works of art, whether they be in the form of painting or of sculpture or of music or of literature, are a permanent possession of mankind,” said Mr Neville Chamberlain, speaking at the Royal Academy banquet. “In the dining room opposite the table where I am accustomed to sit at Chequers, there hangs a magnificent picture painted more than four centuries ago by an artist in a foreign land. As I gaze at that masterpiece I am reminded of an observation that was made long ago by an aged monk to a visitor who was looking at the picture of ‘The Last Supper.’ ‘I have sat here,’ said the monk, ‘nearly three . score years in the presence of that picture. I have seen my companions dropping off one by one, and since I first came here more than one generation has passed wholly away, yet those figures have remained throughout unchanged, until sometimes I wonder whether they are not the reality and we the shadows.’ Such pictures,” Mr Chamberlain added, “need nothing to explain them, and they make the same appeal to the present as to the past generations.”