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EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
gates—keen, critical, jealous observers—who were sent to the great Exhibition of 1862. Nothing seems to have struck them more than the development of our system of art-education and the progress in design of our workers.* Thus the sculptors in ornament say : ‘ The progress made by sculpture in England is immense since the Exhibitions of 1851 and 1855.’ The cabinet-makers : ‘ Comparing the products of England in 1862 with those of 1855 one sees that she has made a gigantic advance.’ The shawl-designers speak of England’s great progress, and envj T her her schools of design. The jewellers, who admit, on several points, England’s superiority to France, regret that all competent men, in the jewelling, carving, engraving, enamelling and goldsmith’s trades should not have been able to go to London to see Kensington Museum. The painters on porcelain dwell on the vast progress of the English workmen within ten }*ears, and attribute it mainly to the ‘ immense extension given to the study of drawing,’ etc.
“ Quite apart, however, from the commercial effects of our public efforts for Art-Education, is the growth, amongst workingmen, of a real sense of the visibly beautiful. Those who have had the opportunity—as students in Mr. Ruskin’s Drawing-Class at the London Workingmen’s College—of seeing the fascination exercised over many a workingman by the gradual discovery of the hidden charms of form and color in the works of God and of man, know that the artisan is as capable of appreciating Art, for its own sake, and pursuing it with disinterested love, as the most refined aristocrat.”
The opinions quoted above, all relate to the progress the people of England have made in improved powers of design, art taste and skill as applied to industry.
It needed the great Exposition, held at Paris in 1867, to show the English another want in their systems of education. It was during the period that this Exposition was open, and since, that a profound and wide-spread interest was awakened in Great Britain in the cause of special scientific or technical education. Endeavors had been made to establish something of the kind in England for a series of years previous, but with little success,—with how little, the Paris Exposition demonstrated conclusively.
The Loudon Society of Arts did a great service, in connec-
* See the interesting volume, entitled “ Rapports des Délégués des Ouvriers Parisiens à l’Exposition de Londres, 1862,” Paris, 1862-1864.