A NEW ART-GUILD.

An admirable proposal has lately been made at Liverpool for the formation of an ‘Art-workers’ Guild,’ with the view to the diffusion of sound principles of decoration, and to the encouragement of workmen and others desiring to undertake decorative work of all kinds. The general object would appear to be to find good art-workmen, and to bring them into communication with those who require their work, and also to form a collection of good examples of decorative work of various kinds. Perhaps one of the best results of this sort of effort will be to bring forward the actual worker himself—the real artist, in fact—and thus get rid of the middleman or art-tradesman who hires the genuine artist to do the work, and then stamps it with his (the tradesman’s) own name, as though the work were actually his own, whilst, in fact, he is merely the employer of highly trained and perhaps highly talented art-labour—a system at once as unfair as it is unjust. It has been said that the ugly patterns in calico-printing seem to sell as readily as the pretty ones; and one of the objects of the proposed Guild is to try to alter this—to endeavour to produce a better taste. But teaching a prejudiced and often ignorant public to improve itself on subtle questions and nice points of art-excellence is at best a difficult if not a hopeless task; and if the Guild raises the artist-worker to a better position and gives him direct employment, it will certainly be conferring a benefit on a worthy class of men, never yet properly recognised.