It is in the second-hand art market, not the new, that the most accurate judgements of quality are made. Artists and dealers may price paintings by their size but, watching a sale at Christie's or Sotheby's, the spectator will at once see that size does not matter, that size is an irrelevant criterion, and that the bids are made, not for acreage, but for beauty and distinction, perfection and pre-eminence, and that for a fine Augustus John or Sickert, the price for each square inch of a small panel is likely to exceed by far the figure for each square, foot of flapping canvas. Small in art is not necessarily beautiful, but it very often encapsulates all that a painter has to say, swiftly succinctly and straight to the essential point, and does not clutter the images with afterthought and superfluous embellishment.

Small, however, has small chance in the field of the art prize and competition. Was the Turner Prize ever given for small work? Does the Royal Academy ever give its annual prize for 'the most distinguished work' of the year to anything diminutive? Of all the significant prizes given every year only the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery can occasionally be described as not influenced by size. Size looks impressive on a distant wall or over the heads of massed drinkers at a vernissage. Size looks convincing to our ignorant press and makes a better publicity photograph. Size pleases the sponsors, for feet match the money and millimetres do not. No judges would now give a prize to Elsheimer for the tiny paintings on copper that so delighted Rembrandt, nor to Goya for his etchings of The Disasters of War, nor to Paul Maitland for his poetic views of Kensington Gardens painted on the lids of cigar boxes - yet all these men were masters and made small masterpieces. Now we prefer to reward the flashy and the obvious, the unmanageable and the cumbersome, the impossible to house in any normal circumstance, no matter how shallow the content and how transitory our enjoyment of it.

This has been the case for decades. It was Michael Reynolds, a painter on all sorts of scales, not only small, who late in the 1980s started the quiet rebellion against the empty and futile bombast of then contemporary art. A slow business, support was almost always in words and rarely deeds; sponsorship was not eager and space not volunteered, but with perseverance and a certain capacity for wiliness, he eventually achieved the first Discerning Eye in 1990. It was an uncertain start, and it faltered, almost terminally, but not before it had gained the energetic sympathisers who were, in time, to set it on its present course. As Michael Reynolds faded, others took the baton.

I worked twice with Michael. We saw every single work of art submitted - well over 3,000 in both years - held them in our hands, propped them on our knees, discussed them in detail, gave ourselves time to respond to them and eased the chores of judging for those judges who had less time and energy than we. No one could have been fairer or more generous than Michael, his patience and diligence inexhaustible, his eye discerning merit even when that rare commodity seemed to the rest of us to be entirely absent. I learned a great deal from him, far more than from, dare I say it, the President of the Royal Academy who was our partner the first year. He set a pattern of judging that is far more just and wise than that of any other prize on which I have worked, a pattern driven only by the search for quality, not by any art-political agenda.

As a consequence The Discerning Eye is different from all other prize-awarding exhibitions, not a party to any influence, tendency or faction, and utterly fair, reasonable and sane but for its mantra and its raison d'être - small is beautiful and that is an engaging madness that has my unquestioning support.

Brian Sewell
Art Critic

 

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