On books and arts

_In the pages that here follow I have gathered up such of my more or less critical contributions to various Reviews, and to one great daily paper, as I am least unwilling to pre...

But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful thing? The ordinary reader, of cou...

In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the Bristol bookseller: ‘You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on adding very rapidly to my stock of poetry. Do come and let...

An idealist, anyhow, Balzac was at the beginning; an idealist he remained to the end. The ‘_amitiés d’épiderme_,’ as he excellently called them, attracted him but little. In my...

Only well-to-do people can buy, in any large numbers and in those fine impressions which alone rightly represent their subjects, the etchings of Rembrandt; but it is a wonder, a...

From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The man himself had troubles: not difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, th...

On Saturday I went to _Thérèse Raquin_ at the Royalty Theatre; and while I found the piece itself--as indeed I expected to find it--far less of a melodrama than certain of its c...

Between that early etching, the first of his mother’s portraits, and this final one, his last record of the body, to which he has imparted a slimmer charm than the charm that be...

It was one of the characteristics of the great men of the Renaissance, that they tried many arts and were masters of many. It was one of the characteristics of the Seventeenth C...

Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin--a man of the _bourgeoisie_, as original as Hogarth--was born on the 2nd November 1699. It was in Paris, in the quarter of St. Sulpice, in the tradi...

I have indicated now, by a brief line or two, the direction in which Moreau le Jeune must chiefly be studied, and the places in which he may be seen if men would see him at his...

The large ‘View at the Mouth of the Thames’ is one of the most realistic, one of the least poetic, of Gainsborough’s pictures. It is an instance of how well this curiously flexi...

It was in 1823, I think, that Cotman left Yarmouth: a married man in early middle age, with five young children. He did it to establish himself again at Norwich, hoping perhaps...

For the second time within a few months the Royal Academy has lost its chief, while English Painting is deprived of its most popular representative, and contemporary English Art...

Johannes Bosboom was born at the Hague in 1817. He died in 1891, aged seventy-four, and in the artistic world of Holland he had by that time long enjoyed complete and cordial re...

The beautiful story of “Orgéas and Miradou” is typical of Mr. Wedmore’s power of expressing and translating the poignancy of human emotion. It is charged with depth of feeling,...