ABSTRACT
In 1858, George Wallis left Birmingham and joined the South Kensington Museum where he became senior keeper of the art collections until his death. His writings in periodicals such as the Art Journal helped to popularize the issues surrounding art education for the industry. George Wallis’s considered fine art as idealised imitation, whereas Industrial art, on the contrary, aims at the embellishment of the works of man, by and through that power which is given to the artist for investigation of the beautiful in nature. To a generation whose wants, feelings, habits, manners, and requirements are so different as the present, the grand works of the past have become but as soulless or misunderstood embellishments on the one hand, or as mere antique curiosities on the other. Artists, too, have deemed the beauty of a tea-pot or a candlestick as things quite beneath their notice, and inconsistently expected the same persons who bought ugly china or mis-proportioned metal-ware to appreciate.
