Patronize Home Art.
Reading edition
Chicago, Ill.
To the Editor.—Why is it that Western people are so hasty to go daft over the doings Down East, yet are so slow to recognize and to encourage meritorious home enterprises? Quite recently, for instance, Chicago and other Western cities have been all agog over the sale of certain arteffects of a New-York lady, the widow Morgan, a relict of undoubted taste, and possessing abundant 188means wherewith to gratify that taste. Thousands of dollars went out of the West to purchase certain articles of the Morgan collection at the recent sale in New York. A wealthy pork-packer who lives near my house, brought back from the Morgan sale two “rare pieces of virtue,” as he terms them: one was a cut-glass potato-salad dish, manufactured in the third century by Ptolomy Dago, a Spanish stone-cutter of wonderful ingenuity; the other was a superb oil-painting representing mountaineer life in Holland, and painted by Beethoven, the famous Italian sculptor. These “articles of virtue” could not have cost less than twenty thousand dollars. But why go East for these works of art? I understand that a great art-sale is about to take place on the West Side; that the rare and costly collection of one of our wealthiest soap-manufacturers, recently deceased, is about to be disposed of at auction. Why are the papers, which are so ready to advertise Eastern art-sales, silent now touching this home enterprise? Why is our public, ever on the alert to blow in good money for Yankee notions, so slow to patronize this West-Side slaughter of genuine rarities? I think Chicago ought to be ashamed of herself; but here is an excellent opportunity for her to redeem her reputation.
Yours, etc.,
SILAS G. HARDCASTLE.
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