CHAPTER XXXVII

ENGLAND

To English painting the acquisitions of the French could now give little that was radically novel, for the epoch-making labours of the pre-Raphaelites were already in existence. Apart from certain cases of direct borrowing, it has either completely preserved its autonomy, or recast everything assimilated from France in a specifically English fashion. It is in art, indeed, as it is with men themselves. The English travel more than any other people, for travel is a part of their education. They are to be met in every quarter of the globe--in Africa, Asia, America, or the European Continent; and they scarcely need to open their mouths, even from a distance, to betray that they are English. In the same way there is no need of a catalogue at exhibitions to recognise all English pictures at the first glance. English painting is too English not to be fond of travel. The painter delights in reconnoitring all other schools and studying all styles; he is as much at home in the past as in the present. But as the English tourist, let him go to the world's end, retains everywhere his own customs, tastes, and habits, so English painting, even on its most adventurous journeys, remains unwaveringly true to its national spirit, and returns from all its wanderings more English than before; it adapts what is alien with the same delicious abnegation of all scruple with which the English tongue brings foreign words into harmony with its own sense of convenience. A certain softness of feeling and tenderness of spirit induce the English even in these days to avoid hard contact with reality. Their art rejects everything in nature which is harsh, rude, and brutal; it is an art which polishes and renders the reality poetic at the risk of debilitating its power. It considers matters from the standpoint of what is pretty, touching, or intelligible, and by no means holds that everything true is necessarily beautiful. And just as little does the English eye--so much occupied with detail--see light in its most exquisite subtleties. Indeed, it rather sees the isolated fact than the total harmony, and is clearer than it is fine.

For this reason _plein-air_ painting has very few adepts, and the atmospheric influences which blunt the lines of objects, efface colours, and bring them nearer to each other, meet with little consideration. Things are given all the sharpness of their outlines, and the harmony, which in the French follows naturally from the observation of light and air saturating form and colour, is the more artificially attained by everything being brought into concord in a bright and delicate tone, which is almost too fine. The audacities of Impressionism are excluded, because painting which starts from a masterly seizure of total effect would seem too sketchy to English taste, which has been formed by Ruskin. Painting must be highly finished and highly elaborated; that is a _conditio sine qua non_ which English taste refuses to renounce in oil-painting as little as in water-colour, and in England they are more closely related than elsewhere, and have mutually influenced each other in the matter of technique. In fact, English water-colours seek to rival oil-painting in force and precision, and have therefore forfeited the charm of improvisation, the _verve_ of the first sketch, and the freshness and ease which they should have by their very character. Through a curious change of parts oil-painting has a fancy for borrowing from water-colours their effects and their processes. English pictures have no longer anything heavy or oily, but they likewise show nothing of the manipulation of the brush, rather resembling large water-colours, perhaps even pastels or wax-painting. The colours are chosen with reserve, and everything is subdued and softened like the quiet step of the footman in the mansion of a nobleman. The special quality in all English pictures--putting aside a preference for bright yellow and vivid red in the older period--consists in a bluish or greenish luminous general tone, to which every English painter seems to conform as though it were a binding social convention, and it even recurs in English landscapes. In fact, English painting differs from French as England from France.

France is a great city, and the name of this city is Paris. Here, and not in the provinces, lives that fashionable, thinking world which has become the guide of the nation and the censor of beauty, by the refinement of its taste and its preeminent intellect. The ideas which fly throughout the land upon invisible wires are born in Paris. Painting, likewise, receives them at first hand. It stands amid the seething whirlpool of the age, the heart's-blood of the present streams through all its veins, and there is nothing human that is alien to it, neither the filth nor the splendour of life, its laughter nor its misery. All the nerves of the great city are vibrating in it. Paris has made her people refined and, at the same time, insatiate in enjoyment. Every day they have need of new impressions and new theories to ward off tedium. And thus is explained the universally comprehensive sphere of subject in French painting, and its feverish versatility in technique.

But London has, in no sense, the importance for England which Paris has for France. It is a centre of attraction for business; but the more refined classes of society live in the country. As soon as one is off in the Dover express country houses fly past on either side of the train. They are all over England--upon the shores of the lakes, upon the strand of the sea, upon the tops of the hills. And how pleasant they are, how well appointed, how delightful to look at, with their gabled roofs and their gleaming brickwork overgrown with ivy! Around them stretches a fresh lawn which is rolled every morning, as soft as velvet. Fat oxen, and sheep as white as if they had been just washed, lie upon the grass. Thus all rustic England is like a great summer resort, where there is heard no sound of the ringing and throbbing strokes of life. Nor is painting allowed to disturb this idyllic harmony. No one wishes that anything should remind him of the prose of life when his work is done and the town has vanished. Schiller's assertion, "Life is earnest, blithe is art," is here the first law of æesthetics.

English painting is exclusively an art based on luxury, optimism, and aristocracy; in its neatness, cleanliness, and good-breeding it is exclusively designed to ingratiate itself with English ideas of comfort. Yet the pictures have to satisfy very different tastes--the taste of a wealthy middle class which wishes to have substantial nourishment, and the æesthetic taste of an _élite_ class, which will only tolerate the quintessence of art, the most subtle art that can be given. But all these works are not created for galleries, but for the drawing-room of a private house, and in subject and treatment they have all to reckon with the ascendant view that a picture ought, in the first place, to be an attractive article of furniture for the sitting-room. The traveller, the lover of antiquity, is pleased by imitation of the ancient style; the sportsman, the lover of country life, has a delight in little rustic scenes; and the women are enchanted with feminine types. And everything must be kept within the bounds of what is charming, temperate, and prosperous, without in any degree suggesting the struggle for existence. The pictures have themselves the grace of that mundane refinement from the midst of which they are beheld.

England is the country of the sculptures of the Parthenon, the country where Bulwer Lytton wrote his _Last Days of Pompeii_, and where the most Grecian female figures in the world may be seen to move. Thus painters of antique subjects still play an important part in the pursuit of English art--probably the pursuit of art rather than its development. For they have never enriched the treasury of modern sentiment. Trained, all of them, in Paris or Belgium, they are equipped with finer taste, and have acquired abroad a more solid ability than James Barry, Haydon, and Hinton, the half-barbaric English Classicists of the beginning of the century. But at bottom--like Cabanel and Bouguereau--they represent rigid conservatism in opposition to progress, and the way in which they set about the reconstruction of an august or domestic antiquity is only distinguished by an English _nuance_ of race from that of Couture and Gérôme.

_Lord Leighton_, the late highly cultured President of the Royal Academy, was the most dignified representative of this tendency. He was a Classicist through and through--in the balance of composition, the rhythmical flow of lines, and the confession of faith that the highest aim of art is the representation of men and women of immaculate build. In the picture galleries of Paris, Rome, Dresden, and Berlin he received his youthful impressions; his artistic discipline he received under Zanetti in Florence, under Wiertz and Gallait in Brussels, under Steinle in Frankfort, and under Ingres and Ary Scheffer in Paris. Back in England once more, he translated Couture into English as Anselm Feuerbach translated him into German with greater independence. Undoubtedly there has never been anything upon his canvas which could be supposed ungentlemanlike. And as a nation is usually apt to prize most the very thing which has been denied it, and for which it has no talent, Leighton was soon an object of admiration to the refined world. As early as 1864 he became an associate, and in November 1879 President of the Royal Academy. For sixteen years he sat like a Jupiter upon his throne in London. An accomplished man of the world and a good speaker, a scholar who spoke many languages and had seen many countries, he possessed every quality which the president of an academy needs to have; he had an exceedingly imposing presence in his red gown, and did the honours of his house with admirable tact.

But one stands before his works with a certain feeling of indifference. There are few artists with so little temperament as Lord Leighton, few in the same degree wanting in the magic of individuality. The purest academical art, as the phrase is understood of Ingres, together with academical severity of form, is united with a softness of feeling recalling Hofmann of Dresden; and the result is a placid classicality adapted _ad usum Delphini_, a classicality foregoing the applause of artists, but all the more in accordance with the taste of a refined circle of ladies. His chief works, "The Star of Bethlehem," "Orpheus and Eurydice," "Jonathan's Token to David," "Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon," "The Daphnephoria," "Venus disrobing for the Bath," and the like, are amongst the most refined although the most frigid creations of contemporary English art.

Perhaps the "Captive Andromache" of 1888 is the quintessence of what he aimed at. The background is the court of an ancient palace, where female slaves are gathered together fetching water. In the centre of the stage, as the leading actress, stands Andromache, who has placed her pitcher on the ground before her, and waits with dignity until the slaves have finished their work. This business of water-drawing has given Leighton an opportunity for combining an assemblage of beautiful poses. The widow of Hector expresses a queenly sorrow with decorum, while the amphora-bearers are standing or walking hither and thither, in the manner demanded by the pictures upon Grecian vases, but without that sureness of line which comes of the real observation of life. In its dignity of style, in the noble composition and purity of the lines which circumscribe the forms with so much distinction and in so impersonal a manner, the picture is an arid and measured work, cold as marble and smooth as porcelain. "Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis" might be a Grecian relief upon a sarcophagus, so carefully balanced are the masses and the lines. The pose of Alcestis is that of the nymphs of the Parthenon; only, it would not have been so fine were these not in existence. His "Music Lesson" of 1877 is charming, and his "Elijah in the Wilderness" is a work of style. And in his frescoes in the South Kensington Museum there is a perfect compendium of beautiful motives of gesture. The eye delights to linger over these feminine forms, half nude, half enveloped with drapery, yet it notes, too, that these creations are composed out of the painter's knowledge and artistic reminiscences; there is a want of life in them, because the master has surrendered himself to feeling with the organs of a dead Greek. Leighton's colour is always carefully considered, scrupulously polished, and endowed with the utmost finish, but it never has the magical charm by which one recognises the work of a true colourist. It is rather the result of painstaking study and cultivated taste than of personal feeling. The grace of form is always carefully prepared--a thing which has the consciousness of its own existence. Beautiful and spontaneous as the movements undoubtedly are, one has always a sense that the artist is present, anxiously watching lest any of his actors offend against a law of art.

Lord Leighton's pupils, Poynter and Prinsep, followed him with a good deal of determination. _Val Prinsep_ shares with Leighton the smooth forms of a polished painting, whereas _Edward Poynter_ by his more earnest severity and metallic precision verges more on that union of aridness and style characteristic of Ingres. His masterpiece, "A Visit to Æsculapius," is in point of technique one of the best products of English Classicism. To the left Æsculapius is sitting beneath a pillared porch overgrown with foliage, while, like Raphael's Jupiter in the Farnesina, he supports his bearded chin thoughtfully with his left hand. A nymph who has hurt her foot appears, accompanied by three companions, before the throne of the god, begging him for a remedy. To say nothing of many other nude or nobly draped female figures, numerous decorative paintings in the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's, and St. Stephen's Church in Dulwich owe their existence to this most industrious artist.

_Alma Tadema_, the famous Dutchman who has called to life amid the London fog the sacrifices of Pompeii and Herculaneum, stands to this grave academical group as Gérôme to Couture. As Bulwer Lytton, in the field of literature, created a picture of ancient civilisation so successful that it has not been surpassed by his followers, Alma Tadema has solved the problem of the picture of antique manners in the most authentic fashion in the province of painting. He has peopled the past, rebuilt its towns and refurnished its houses, rekindled the flame upon the sacrificial altars and awakened the echo of the dithyrambs to new life. Poynter tells old fables, while Alma Tadema takes us in his company, and, like the best-informed cicerone, leads us through the streets of old Athens, reconstructing the temples, altars, and dwellings, the shops of the butchers, bakers, and fishmongers, just as they once were.

This power of making himself believed Alma Tadema owes in the first place to his great archæological learning. By Leys in Brussels this side of his talent was first awakened, and in 1863, when he went to Italy for the first time, he discovered his archæological mission. How the old Romans dressed, how their army was equipped and attired, became as well known to him as the appearance of the citizens' houses, the artizans' workshops, the market and the bath. He explored the ruins of temples, and he grew familiar with the privileges of the priests, the method of worship, of the sacrifices, and of the festal processions. There was no monument of brass or marble, no wall-painting, no pictured vase nor mosaic, no sample of ancient arts, of pottery, stone-cutting, or work in gold, that he did not study. His brain soon became a complete encyclopædia of antiquity. He knew the forms of architecture as well as he knew the old myths, and all the domestic appointments and robes as exactly as the usages of ritual. In Brussels, as early as the sixties, this complete power of living in the period he chose to represent gave Alma Tadema's pictures from antiquity their remarkable _cachet_ of striking truthfulness to life. And London, whither he migrated in 1870, offered even a more favourable soil for his art. Whereas the French painters of the antique picture of manners often fell into a diluted idealism and a lifeless traffic with old curiosities, with Alma Tadema one stands in the presence of a veritable fragment of life; he simply paints the people amongst whom he lives and their world. The Pompeian house which he has built in London, with its dreamy vividarium, its great golden hall, its Egyptian decorations, its Ionic pillars, its mosaic floor, and its Oriental carpets, contains everything one needs to conjure up the times of Nero and the Byzantine emperors. It is surrounded by a garden in the old Roman style, and a large conservatory adjoining is planted with plane-trees and cypresses. All the celebrated marble benches and basins, the figures of stone and bronze, the tiger-skins and antique vessels and garments of his pictures, may be found in this notable house in the midst of London. Whether he paints the baths, the amphitheatre, or the atrium, the scenes of his pictures are no other than parts of his own house which he has faithfully painted.

And the figures moving in them are Englishwomen. Among all the beautiful things in the world there are few so beautiful as English girls. Those tall, slender, vigorous figures that one sees upon the beach at Brighton are really like Greek women, and even the garb which they wear in playing tennis is as free and graceful as that of the Grecian people. Alma Tadema was able to introduce into his works these women of lofty and noble figure with golden hair, these forms made for sculpture--to use the phrase of Winckelmann--without any kind of beautifying idealism. In their still-life his pictures are the fruit of enormous archæological learning which has become intuitive vision, but his figures are the result of a healthy rendering of life. In this way the unrivalled classical local colour of his interiors is to be explained, as well as the lifelike character of his figures. By his works a remarkable problem is solved: an intense feeling for modern reality has called the ancient world into being in a credible fashion, whilst it has remained barricaded against all others who have approached it by the road of idealism.

It is only in this method of execution that he still stands upon the same ground as Gérôme, with whom he shares a taste for anecdote, and a pedantic, neat, and correct style of painting. His ancient comedies played by English actors are an excellent archæological lecture; they rise above the older picture of antique manners by a more striking fidelity to nature, very different from the generalisation of the Classicists' ideal; yet as a painter he is wanting in every quality. His marble shines, his bronze gleams, and everything is harmonised with the green of the cypresses and delicate rose-colour of the oleander blossoms in a cool marble tone; but there is also something marble in the figures themselves. He draws and stipples, works like a copper engraver, and goes over his work again and again with a fine and feeble brush. His pictures have the effect of porcelain, his colours are hard and lifeless. One remembers the anecdotes, but one cannot speak of any idea of colour.

_Albert Moore_ is to be noted as the solitary "painter" of the group: a very delicate artist, with a style peculiar to himself; one who is not so well known upon the Continent as he deserves to be. His province, also, is ancient Greece, yet he never attempted to reconstruct classical antiquity as a learned archæologist. Merely as a painter did he love to dream amid the imperishable world of beauty known to ancient times. His figures are ethereal visions, and move in dreamland. He was influenced, indeed, by the sculptures of the Parthenon, but the Japanese have also penetrated his spirit. From the Greeks he learnt the combination of noble lines, the charm of dignity and quietude, while the Japanese gave him the feeling for harmonies of colour, for soft, delicate, blended tones. By a capricious union of both these elements he formed his refined and exquisite style. The world which he has called into being is made up of white marble pillars; in its gardens are cool fountains and marble pavements; but it is also full of white birds, soft colours, and rosy blossoms from Kioto, and peopled with graceful and mysterious maidens, clothed in ideal draperies, who love rest, enjoy an eternal youth, and are altogether contented with themselves and with one another. It might be said that the old figures of Tanagra had received new life, were it not felt, at the same time, that these beings must have drunk a good deal of tea. Not that they are entirely modern, for their figures are more plastic and symmetrical than those of the actual daughters of Albion; but in all their movements they have a certain _chic_, and in all their shades of expression a weary modernity, through which they deviate from the conventional woman of Classicism. Otherwise the pictures of Albert Moore are indescribable. Frail, ethereal beings, blond as corn, lounge in æesthetically graduated grey and blue, salmon-coloured, or pale purple draperies upon bright-hued couches decorated by Japanese artists with most æsthetic materials; or are standing in violet robes with white mantles embroidered with gold, by a grey-blue sea which has a play of greenish tones where it breaks upon the shore. They stand out with their rosy garments from the light grey background and the delicate arabesques of a gleaming silvery gobelin, or in a graceful pose occupy themselves with their rich draperies. They do as little as they possibly can, but they are living and seductive, and the stuffs which they wear and have around them are delicately and charmingly painted. It is harmonies of tone and colour that exclusively form the subject of every work. The figures, accessories, and detail first take shape when the scheme of colour has been found; and then Albert Moore takes a delight in naming his pictures "Apricots," "Oranges," "Shells," etc., according as the robes are apricot or orange colour or adorned with light ornaments of shell. Everything which comes from his hands is delightful in the charm of delicate simplicity, and for any one who loves painting as painting it has something soothing in the midst of the surrounding art, which still confuses painting with poetry more than is fitting.

Such a painter-poet of the specifically English type is _Briton-Rivière_. He is a painter of animals, and as such one of the greatest of the century. Lions and geese, royal tigers and golden eagles, stags, dogs, foxes, Highland cattle, he has painted them all, and with a mastery which has nothing like it except in Landseer. Amongst the painters of animals he stands alone through his power of conception and his fine poetic vein, while in all his pictures he unites the greatest simplicity with enormous dramatic force. Accessory work is everywhere kept within the narrowest limits, and everywhere the character of the animals is magnificently grasped. He does not alone paint great tragic scenes as Barye chiselled them, for he knows that beasts of prey are usually quiet and peaceable, and only now and then obey their savage nature. Moreover, he never attempts to represent animals performing a masquerade of humanity in their gestures and expression, as Landseer did, nor does he transform them into comic actors. He paints them as what they are, a symbol of what humanity was once itself, with its elemental passions and its natural virtues and failings. Amongst all animal painters he is almost alone in resisting the temptation to give the lion a consciousness of his own dignity, the tiger a consciousness of his own savageness, the dog a consciousness of his own understanding. They neither pose nor think about themselves. In addition to this he has a powerful and impressive method, and a deep and earnest scheme of colour. In the beginning of his career he learnt most from James Ward. Later he felt the influence of the refined, chivalrous, and piquant Scotchmen Orchardson and Pettie. But the point in which Briton-Rivière is altogether peculiar is that in which he joins issue with the painters influenced by Greece: he introduces his animals into a scene where there are men of the ancient world.

Briton-Rivière is descended from a French family which found its way into England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and he is one of those painters--so frequent in English art--whose nature has developed early: when he was fourteen he left school, exhibited in the Academy when he was eighteen, painted as a pre-Raphaelite between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and graduated at Oxford at seven-and-twenty. In his youth he divided his time between art and scholarship--painting pictures and studying Greek and Latin literature. Thus he became a painter of animals, having also an enthusiasm for the Greek poets, and he has stood for a generation as an uncontested lord and master on his own peculiar ground. In his first important picture, of 1871, the comrades of Ulysses, changed into swine, troop grunting round the enchantress Circe. In the masterpiece of 1872 the Prophet Daniel stands unmoved and submissive to the will of God amid the lions roaring and showing their teeth, ready to spring upon him in their hunger, yet regarding him with a mysterious fear, spellbound by the power of his eye; while his great picture "Persepolis" makes the appeal of a page from the philosophy of history, with its lions roaming majestically amid the ruins of human grandeur and human civilisation, which are flooded with moonlight. The picture "In Manus Tuas, Domine," showed St. George riding solitary through the lonely and silent recesses of a primitive forest upon a pale white horse. He is armed in mail and has a mighty sword; a deep seriousness is imprinted on his features, for he has gone forth to slay the dragon. In yet another picture, "An Old-World Wanderer," a man of the early ages has come ashore upon an untrodden island, and is encompassed by flocks of great white birds, fluttering round him with curiosity and confidence, as yet ignorant of the fear of human beings. The picture of 1891, "A Mighty Hunter before the Lord," is one of his most poetic night-pieces: Nimrod is returning home, and beneath the silvery silence of the moon the dead and dying creatures which he has laid low upon the wide Assyrian plain are tended and bemoaned by their mates.

Between whiles he painted subjects which were not borrowed from ancient history, illustrating the friendship between man and dog, as Landseer had done before him. For instance, in "His Only Friend" there is a poor lad who has broken down at the last milestone before the town and is guarded by his dog. In "Old Playfellows," again, one of the playmates is a child, who is sick and leans back quietly in an armchair covered with cushions. His friend the great dog has one paw resting on the child's lap, and looks up with a pensive expression, such as Landseer alone had previously painted. But in this style he reached his highest point in "Sympathy." No work of Briton-Rivière's has become more popular than this picture of the little maiden who has forgotten her key and is sitting helpless before the house-door, consoled by the dog who has laid his head upon her shoulder.

Since the days of Reynolds English art has shown a most vivid originality in such representations of children. English picture-books for children are in these days the most beautiful in the world, and the marvellous fairy-tales and fireside stories of _Randolph Caldecott_ and _Kate Greenaway_ have made their way throughout the whole Continent. How well these English draughtsmen know the secret of combining truth with the most exquisite grace! How touching are these pretty babies, how angelically innocent these little maidens! Frank eyes, blue as the flowers of the periwinkle, gaze at you with no thought of their being looked at in return. The naïve astonishment of the little ones, their frightened mien, their earnest look absently fixed upon the sky, the first tottering steps of a tiny child and the mobile grace of a schoolgirl, all are rendered in these prints with the most tender intimacy of feeling. And united with this there is a delicate and entirely modern sentiment for scenery, for the fascination of bare autumn landscapes robbed of their foliage, for sunbeams and the budding fragrance of spring. Everything is idyllic, poetic, and touched by a congenial breath of tender melancholy.

And this aerial quality, this delicacy and innocent grace and tenderness, is not confined alone to such representations of children, but is peculiar to English painting. Even when perfectly ordinary subjects from modern life are in question the basis of this art is, as in the first half of the century, by no means the sense for what is purely pictorial, by no means that naturalistic pantheism which inspires the modern French, but rather a sense for what is moral or ethical. The painter seldom paints merely for the joy of painting, and the numberless technical questions which play such an important part in French art are here only of secondary importance. It accords with the character and taste of the people that their artists have rather a poetic design than one which is properly pictorial. The conception is sometimes allegorical and subtle to the most exquisite fineness of point, sometimes it is vitiated by sentimentality, but it is never purely naturalistic; and this qualified realism, this realism with a poetic strain to keep it ladylike, set English art, especially in the years when Bastien-Lepage and Roll were at their zenith, in sharp opposition to the art of France. In those days the life-size artisan picture, the prose of life, and the struggle for existence reigned almost exclusively in the Parisian Salon, whereas in the Royal Academy everything was quiet and cordial; an intimate, inoffensive, and heartfelt cheerfulness was to be found in the pictures upon its walls, as if none of these painters knew of the existence of such a place as Whitechapel. A connection between pictures and poems is still popular, and some touching trait, some tender episode, some expression of softness, is given to subjects drawn from the ordinary life of the people. Painters seek in every direction after pretty rustic scenes, moving incidents, or pure emotions. Instead of being harsh and rugged in their sense of truth and passion, they glide lightly away from anything ugly, bringing together the loveliest and most beautiful things in nature, and creating elegies, pastorals, and idylls from the passing events of life. Their method of expression is fastidious and finished to a nicety; their vision of life is smiling and kindly, though it must not be supposed that their optimism has now anything in common with the _genre_ picture of 1850. The _genre_ painters from Wilkie to Collins epitomised the actual manners of the present in prosaic compositions. But here the most splendid poetry breaks out, as indeed it actually does in the midst of ordinary life. If in that earlier period English painting was awkward in narration, vulgar, and didactic, it is now tasteful, refined, beautiful, and of distinction. The philistinism of the pictures of those days has been finally stripped away, and the humorously anecdotic _genre_ entirely overcome. The generation of tiresome narrative artists has been followed by painter-poets of delicacy and exquisite tenderness of feeling.

Two masters who died young and have a peculiarly captivating individuality, George Mason and Fred Walker, stand at the head of this, the most novel phase of English painting. Alike in the misfortune of premature death, they are also united by a bond of sympathy in their taste and sentiment. If there be truth in what Théophile Gautier once said in a beautiful poem, "_Tout passe, l'art robuste seul a l'éternité_," neither of them will enter the kingdom of immortality. That might be applied to them which Heine said of Leopold Robert: they have purified the peasant in the purgatory of their art, so that nothing but a glorified body remains. As the pre-Raphaelites wished to give exquisite precision to the world of dream, Walker and Mason have taken this precision from the world of reality, endowing it with a refined subtlety which in truth it does not possess. Their pictures breathe only of the bloom and essence of things, and in them nature is deprived of her strength and marrow, and painting of her peculiar qualities, which are changed into coloured breath and tinted dream. They may be reproached with an excess of nervous sensibility, an effort after style by which modern truth is recast, a morbid tendency towards suave mysticism. Nevertheless their works are the most original products of English painting during the last thirty years, and by a strange union of realism and poetic feeling they have exercised a deeply penetrative influence upon Continental art.

"_Æquam semper in rebus arduis servare mentem_" might be chosen as a motto for _George Mason's_ biography. Brought up in prosperous circumstances, he first became a doctor, but when he was seven-and-twenty he went to Italy to devote himself to painting; here he received the news that he was ruined. His father had lost everything, and he found himself entirely deprived of means, so that his life became a long struggle against hunger. He bound himself to dealers, and provided animal pieces by the dozen for the smallest sums. In a freezing room he sat with his pockets empty, worked until it was dark, and crept into bed when Rome went to feast. After two years, however, he had at last saved the money necessary for taking him back to England, and he settled with his young wife in Wetley Abbey. This little village, where he lived his simple life in the deepest seclusion, became for him what Barbizon had been for Millet. He wandered by himself amongst the fields, and painted the valleys of Wetley with the tenderness of feeling with which Corot painted the outskirts of Fontainebleau. He saw the ghostly mists lying upon the moors, saw the peasants returning from the plough and the reapers from the field, noted the children, in their life so closely connected with the change of nature. And yet his peasant pictures more resemble the works of Perugino than those of Bastien-Lepage. The character of their landscape is to some extent responsible for this. For the region he paints, in its lyrical charm, has kinship with the hills in the pictures of Perugino. Here there grow the same slender trees upon a delicate, undulating soil. But the silent, peaceful, and resigned human beings who move across it have also the tender melancholy of Umbrian Madonnas. Mason's realism is merely specious; it consists in the external point of costume. There are really no peasants of such slender growth, no English village maidens with such rosy faces and such coquettish Holland caps. Mason divests them of all the heaviness of earth, takes, as it were, only the flower-dust from reality. The poetic grace of Jules Breton might be recalled, were it not that Mason works with more refinement and subtlety, for his idealism was unconscious, and never resulted in an empty, professional painting of beauty.

When he painted his finest pictures he suffered from very bad health, and his works have themselves the witchery of disease, the fascinating beauty of consumption. He painted with such delicacy and refinement, because sickness had made him weak and delicate; he divested his peasant men and women of everything fleshly, so that nothing but a shadow of them remained, a spirit vibrating in fine, elusive, dying chords. In his "Evening Hymn" girls are singing in the meadow; to judge from their dresses, they should be the daughters of the peasantry, but one fancies them religious enthusiasts, brought together upon this mysterious and sequestered corner of the earth by a melancholy world-weariness, by a yearning after the mystical. Fragile as glass, sensitive to the ends of their fingers, and, one might say, morbidly spiritual, they breathe out their souls in song, encompassed by the soft shadows of the evening twilight, and uttering all the exquisite tenderness of their subtle temperament in the hymn they chant. Another of his pastoral symphonies is "The Harvest Moon." Farm labourers are plodding homewards after their day's work. The moon is rising, and casts its soft, subdued light upon the dark hills and the slender trees, in the silvery leaves of which the evening wind is playing. "The Gander," "The Young Anglers," and "The Cast Shoe" are captivating through the same delicacy and the same mood of peaceful resignation. George Mason is an astonishing artist, almost always guilty of exaggeration, but always seductive. Life passes in his pictures like a beautiful summer's day, and with the accompaniment of soft music. A peaceful, delicate feeling, something mystical, bitter-sweet, and suffering, lives beneath the light and tender veil of his pictures. They affect the nerves like a harmonica, and lull one with low and softly veiled harmonies. Many of the melancholy works of Israels have a similar effect, only Israels is less refined, has less of distinction and--more of truth.

This suavity of feeling is characteristic in an almost higher degree of _Fred Walker_, a sensitive artist never satisfied with himself. Every one of his pictures gives the impression of deep and quiet reverie; everywhere a kind of mood, like that in a fairy tale, colours the ordinary events of life in his works, an effect produced by his refined composition of forms and colours. In his classically simple art Mason was influenced by the Italians, and especially the Umbrians. Walker drew a similar inspiration from the works of Millet. Both the Englishman and the Frenchman died in the same year, the former on 20th January 1875, in Barbizon, the latter on 5th June, in Scotland; and yet in a certain sense they stand at the very opposite poles of art. Walker is graceful, delicate, and tender; Millet forceful, healthy, and powerful. "To draw sublimity from what is trivial" was the aim of both, and they both reached it by the same path. All their predecessors had held truth as the foe of beauty, and had qualified shepherds and shepherdesses, ploughmen and labourers, for artistic treatment by forcing upon them the smiling grace and the strained humour of _genre_ painting. Millet and Fred Walker broke with the frivolity of this elder school of painting, which had seen matter for jesting, and only that, in the life of the rustic; they asserted that in the life of the toiler nothing was more deserving of artistic representation than his toil. They always began by reproducing life as they saw it, and by disdaining, in their effort after truth, all artificial embellishment; they came to recognise, both of them at the same time, a dignity in the human frame, and grandiose forms and classic lines in human movement, which no one had discovered before. With the most pious reverence for the exact facts of life, there was united that greatness of conception which is known as style.

Fred Walker, the Tennyson of painting, was born in London in 1840, and had scarcely left school before the galleries of ancient art in the British Museum became his favourite place of resort. Drawings for wood-engraving were his first works, and with Millet in France he has the chief merit of having put fresh life into the traditional style of English wood engraving, so that he is honoured by the young school of wood-engravers as their lord and master. His first, and as yet unimportant, drawings appeared in 1860 in a periodical called _Once a Week_, for which Leech, Millais, and others also made drawings. Shortly after this _début_ he was introduced to Thackeray, then the editor of _Cornhill_, and he undertook the illustrations with Millais. In these plates he is already seen in his charm, grace, and simplicity. His favourite season is the tender spring, when the earth is clothed with young verdure, and the sunlight glances over the naked branches, and the children pluck the first flowers which have shot up beneath their covering of snow.

His pictures give pleasure by virtue of the same qualities--delicacy of drawing, bloom of colouring, and a grace which is not affected in spite of its Grecian rhythm.

Walker was the first to introduce that delicate rosy red which has since been popular in English painting. His method of vision is as widely removed from that of Manet as from Couture's brown sauce. The surface of every one of his pictures resembles a rare jewel in its delicate finish: it is soft, and gives the sense of colour and of refined and soothing harmony. His first important work, "Bathers," was exhibited in 1867 at the Royal Academy, where works of his appeared regularly during the next five years. About a score of young people are standing on the verge of a deep and quiet English river, and are just about to refresh themselves in the tide after a hot August day. Some, indeed, are already in the water, while others are sitting upon the grass and others undressing. The frieze of the Parthenon is recalled, so plastic is the grace of these young frames, and the style and repose of the treatment of lines, which are such as may only be found in Puvis de Chavannes. In his next picture, "The Vagrants," he represented a group of gipsies camping round a fire in the midst of an English landscape. A mother is nursing her child, while to the left a woman is standing plunged in thought, and to the right a lad is throwing wood upon the faintly blazing fire. Here, too, the figures are all drawn severely after nature and yet have the air of Greek statues. There is no modern artist who has united in so unforced a manner actuality and fidelity to nature with "the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the antique. In a succeeding picture of 1870, "The Plough," a labourer is striding over the ground behind the plough. The long day is approaching its end, and the moon stands silvery in the sky. Far into the distance the field stretches away, and the heavy tread of the horses mingles in the stillness of evening with the murmur of the stream which flows round the grassy ridge, making its soft complaint. "Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening" is its thoroughly English motto. The same still mournfulness of sunset he painted in that work of marvellous tenderness, "The Old Gate." The peace of dusk is resting upon a soft and gentle landscape. A lady who is the owner of a country mansion and is dressed like a widow has just stepped out from the garden gate, accompanied by her maid, who is in the act of shutting it; children are playing on the steps, and a couple of labourers are going past in front and look towards the lady of the house. It is nothing except the meeting of certain persons, a scene such as takes place every day, and yet even here there is a subtlety and tenderness which raise the event from the prose of ordinary life into a mysterious world of poetry.

In his later period he deviated more and more towards a fragrant lyricism. In his great picture of 1872, "The Harbour of Refuge," the background is formed by one of those peaceful buildings where the aged poor pass the remainder of their days in meditative rest. The sun is sinking, and there is a rising moon. The red-tiled roof stands out clear against the quiet evening sky, while upon the terrace in front, over which the tremulous yellow rays of the setting sun are shed, an old woman with a bowed figure is walking, guided by a graceful girl who steps lightly forward. It is the old contrast between day and night, youth and age, strength and decay. Yet in Walker there is no opposition after all. For as light mingles with the shadows in the twilight, this young and vigorous woman who paces in the evening, holding the arm of the aged in mysterious silence, has at the moment no sense of her youth, but is rather filled with that melancholy thought underlying Goethe's "_Warte nur balde_," "Wait awhile and thou shalt rest too." Her eyes have a strange gaze, as though she were looking into vacancy in mere absence of mind. And upon the other side of the picture this theme of the transient life of humanity is still further developed. Upon a bench in the midst of a verdant lawn covered with daisies a group of old men are sitting meditatively near a hedge of hawthorn luxuriant in blossom. Above the bench there stands an old statue casting a clearly defined shadow upon the gravel path, as if to point to the contrast between imperishable stone and the unstable race of men, fading away like the autumn leaves. Well in the foreground a labourer is mowing down the tender spring grass with a scythe--a strange, wild, and rugged figure, a reaper whose name is Death.

It was not long before evening drew on for the painter, and Death, the mighty reaper, laid him low.

Of a nervous and sensitive temperament, Walker had one of those natures which find their way with difficulty through this rude world of fact. Those little things which he had the art of painting so beautifully, and which occupy such an important place in his work, had, in another sense, more influence upon his life than ought to have been the case. While Mason faced all unpleasantnesses with stoical indifference, Walker allowed himself to be disturbed and hindered in his work by every failure and every sharp wind of criticism. In addition to that he was, like Mason, a victim of consumption. A residence in Algiers merely banished the insidious disease for a short time. Amongst the last works, which he exhibited in 1875, a considerable stir was made by a drawing called "The Unknown Land": a vessel with naked men is drawing near the shores of a wide and peaceful island bathed in a magical light. Soon afterwards Walker had himself departed to that unknown land: he died in Scotland when he was five-and-thirty. His body was brought to the little churchyard at Cookham on the banks of the Thames. In this village Fred Walker is buried amid the fair river landscape which he so loved and so often painted.

After the pre-Raphaelite revolution, the foundation of the school of Walker indicated the last stage of English art. His influence was far greater than might be supposed from the small number of his works, and fifty per cent. of the English pictures in every exhibition would perhaps never have been painted if he had not been born. A national element long renounced, that old English sentiment which once inspired the landscapes of Gainsborough and the scenes of Morland, and was lost in the hands of Wilkie and the _genre_ painters, lives once more in Fred Walker. He adapted it to the age by adding something of Tennyson's passion for nature. There is a touch of symbolism in that old gate which he painted in the beautiful picture of 1870. He and Mason opened it so that English art might pass into this new domain, where musical sentiment is everything, where one is buried in sweet reveries at the sight of a flock of geese driven by a young girl, or a labourer stepping behind his plough, or a child playing, free from care, with pebbles at the water's edge. Their disciples are perhaps healthier, or, should one say, "less refined,"--in other words, not quite so sensitive and hyper-æsthetic as those who opened the old gate. They seem physically more robust, and can better face the sharp air of reality. They no longer dissolve painting altogether into music and poetry; they live more in the world at every hour, not merely when the sun is setting, but also when the prosaic daylight exposes objects in their material heaviness. But the tender ground-tone, the effort to seize nature in soft phases, is the same in all. Like bees, they suck from reality only its sweets. The earnest, tender, and deeply heartfelt art of Walker has influenced them all.

Evening when work is over, the end of summer, twilight, autumn, the pale and golden sky, and the dead leaves are the things which have probably made the most profound impression on the English spirit. The hour when toil is laid aside, and rest begins and people seek their homes, and the season when fires are first lighted are the hour and the season most beloved by this people, which, with all its rude energy, is yet so tender and full of feeling. Repose to the point of enervation and the stage where it passes into gentle melancholy is the theme of their pictures--this, and not toil.

How many have been painted in the last forty years in which people are returning from their work of an evening across the country! The people in the big towns look upon the country with the eyes of a lover, especially those parts of it which lie near the town; not the scenes painted by Raffaelli, but the parks and public gardens. Soft, undulating valleys and gently swelling hills are spread around, the flowers are in bloom, and the leaves glance in the sunshine. And over this country, with its trim gravel paths and its green, luxuriant lawns, there comes a well-to-do people. Even the labourers seem in good case as they go home across the flowery meadows.

_George H. Boughton_ was one of the most graceful and refined amongst Walker's followers. By birth and descent a countryman of Crome and Cotman, he passed his youth in America, worked several years in Paris from 1853, and in 1863 settled in London, where he was exceedingly active as a draughtsman, a writer, and a painter. His charming illustrations for _Harper's Magazine_, where he also published his delicate story _The Return of the Mayflower_, are well known. As a painter, too, his brush was only occupied by pleasant things, whether belonging to the past or the present. There is something in him both of the delicacy of Gainsborough and of the poetry of Memlinc. He delights in the murmur of brooks and the rustle of leaves, in fresh children and pretty young women in æesthetically fantastic costume; he loves everything delicate, quiet, and fragrant. And for this reason he also takes delight in old legends entwined with blossoms, and attains a most harmonious effect when he places shepherds and kings' daughters of story, and steel-clad knights and squires in his charming and entirely modern landscapes. Almost always it is autumn, winter, or at most the early spring in his pictures. The boughs of the trees are generally bare, though sometimes a tender pointed yellowish verdure is budding upon them. At times the mist of November hovers over the country like a delicate veil; at times the snowflakes fall softly, or the October sun gleams through the leafless branches.

Moreover, a feeling for the articulation of lines, for a balance of composition, unforced, and yet giving a character of distinction, is peculiar to him in a high degree. In 1877 he had in the Royal Academy the charming picture "A Breath of Wind." Amid a soft landscape with slender trees move the thoroughly Grecian figures of the shapely English peasants, whilst the tender evening light is shed over the gently rising hills. His picture of 1878 he named "Green Leaves among the Sere": a group of children, in the midst of whom the young mother herself looks like a child, are seated amid an autumn landscape, where the leaves fall, and the sky is shrouded in wintry grey. In the picture "Snow in Spring" may be seen a party of charming girls--little modern Tanagra figures--whom the sun has tempted into the air to search for the earliest woodland snowdrops under the guidance of a damsel still in her 'teens. Having just reached a secret corner of the wood, they are standing with their flowers in their hands surrounded by tremulous boughs, when a sudden snowstorm overtakes them. Thick white flakes alight upon the slender boughs, and combine with the light green leaves and pale reddish dresses of the children in making a delicate harmony of colour. Among his legendary pictures the poetic "Love Conquers all Things," in particular is known in Germany: a wild shepherd's daughter sits near her flock, and the son of a king gazes into her eyes lost in dream.

Boughton is not the only painter of budding girlhood. All English literature has a tender feminine trait. Tennyson is the poet most widely read, and he has won all hearts chiefly through his portraits of women: Adeline, Eleänore, Lilian, and the May Queen--that delightful gallery of pure and noble figures. In English painting, too, it is seldom men who are represented, but more frequently women and children, especially little maidens in their fresh pure witchery.

Belonging still to the older period there is _Philip H. Calderon_, an exceedingly fertile although lukewarm and academical artist, in whose blood is a good deal of effeminate Classicism. When his name appears in a catalogue it means that the spectator will be led into an artificial region peopled with pretty girls--beings who are neither sad nor gay, and who belong neither to the present nor to ancient times, to no age in particular and to no clime. Whenever such ethereal girlish figures wear the costume of the Directoire period, _Marcus Stone_ is their father. He is likewise one of the older men whose first appearance was made before the time of Walker. His young ladies part broken-hearted from a beloved suitor, turned away by their father, and save the honour of their family by giving their hand to a wealthy but unloved aspirant, or else they are solitary and lost in tender reveries. In his earliest period Marcus Stone had a preference for interiors; rich Directoire furniture and objects of art indicate with exactness the year in which the narrative takes place. Later, he took a delight in placing his _rococo_ ladies and gentlemen in the open air, upon the terraces of old gardens or in sheltered alleys. All his pictures are pretty, the faces, the figures, and the accessories; in relation to them one may use the adjective "pretty" in its positive, comparative, or superlative degree. In England Marcus Stone is the favourite painter of "sweethearts," and it cannot be easy to go so near the boundaries of candied _genre_ painting and yet always to preserve a certain _noblesse_.

Amongst later artists _G. D. Leslie_, the son of Charles Leslie, has specially the secret of interpreting innocent feminine beauty, that somewhat predetermined but charming grace derived from Gainsborough and the eighteenth century. A young lady who has lately been married is paying a visit to her earlier school friends, and is gazed upon as though she were an angel by these charming girls. Or his pretty maidens have ensconced themselves beneath the trees, or stand on the shore watching a boat at sunset, or amuse themselves from a bridge in a park by throwing flowers into the water and looking dreamily after them as they float away. Leslie's pictures, too, are very pretty and poetic, and have much silk in them and much sun, while the soft pale method of painting, so highly æsthetic in its delicate attenuation of colour, corresponds with the delicacy of their purport.

_P. G. Morris_, not less delicate in feeling and execution, became specially known by a "Communion in Dieppe." Directly facing the spectator a train of pretty communicants move upon the seashore, assuming an air of dignified superiority, like young ladies from Brighton or Folkestone. A bluish light plays over the white dresses of the girls and over the blue jackets of the sailors lounging about the quay; it fills the pale blue sky with a misty vibration and glances sportively upon the green waves of the sea. "The Reaper and the Flowers" was a thoroughly English picture, a graceful allegory after the fashion of Fred Walker. On their way from school a party of children meet at the verge of a meadow an old peasant going home from his day's work with a scythe upon his shoulder. In the dancing step of the little ones may be seen the influence of Greek statues; they float along as if borne by the zephyr, with a rhythmical motion which is seldom found in real school-children. But the old peasant coming towards them is intended to recall the contrast between youth and age as in Fred Walker's "Harbour of Refuge"; while the scythe glittering in the last rays of the setting sun signifies the scythe of Fate, the scythe of death which does not even spare the child.

And thus the limits of English painting are defined. It always reveals a certain conflict between fact and poetry, reverie and life. For whenever the scene does not admit of a directly ethical interpretation, refuge is invariably taken in lyricism. The wide field which lies between, where powerful works are nourished, works which have their roots in reality, and derive their life from it alone, has not been definitely conquered by English art. England is the greatest producer and consumer in the world, and her people press the marrow out of things as no other have ever done: and yet this land of industry knows nothing of pictures in which work is being accomplished; this country, which is a network of railway lines, has never seen a railway painted. Even horses are less and less frequently represented in English art, and sport finds no expression there whatever. Much as the Englishman loves it from a sense of its wholesomeness, he does not consider it sufficiently æsthetic to be painted, a matter upon which Wilkie Collins enlarges in an amusing way in his book _Man and Wife_.

And in English pictures there are no poor, or, at any rate, none who are wretched in the extreme. For although the Chelsea Pensioners were a favoured theme in painting, there were none of them miserable and heavy-laden; they were rather types of the happy poor who were carefully tended. If English painters are otherwise induced to represent the poor, they depict a room kept in exemplary order, and endeavour to display some touching or admirable trait in honest and admirable people. In fact, people seem to be good and honourable wherever they are found. Everywhere there is content and humility, even in misfortune. Even where actual need is represented, it is only done in the effort to give expression to what is moving in certain dispensations of fate, and to create a lofty and conciliating effect by the contrast between misfortune and man's noble trust in God.

_John R. Reid_, a Scotchman by birth, but residing in London, has treated scenes from life upon the seacoast in this manner. How different his works are from the tragedies of Joseph Israels, or the grim naturalism of Michael Ancher! He occupies himself only with the bright side of life with its colour and sunshine, not with the dark side with its toils. He paints the inhabitants of the country in their Sunday best, as they sit telling stories, or as they go a-hunting, or regale themselves in the garden of an inn. The old rustics who sit happy with their pipes and beer in his "Cricket Match" are typical of everything that he has painted.

And even when, once in a way, a more gloomy trait appears in his pictures, it is there only that the light may shine the more brightly. The poor old flute-player who sits homeless upon a bench near the house is placed there merely to show how well off are the children who are hurrying merrily home after school. His picture of 1890, indeed, treated a scene of shipwreck, but a passage from a poet stood beneath; there was not a lost sailor to be seen, and all the tenderness of the artist is devoted to the pretty children and the young women gazing with anxiety and compassion across the sea.

_Frank Holl_ was in the habit of giving his pictures a more lachrymose touch, together with a more sombre and ascetic harmony of colour. He borrowed his subjects from the life of the humble classes, always searching, moreover, for melancholy features; he took delight in representing human virtue in misfortune, and for the sake of greater effect he frequently chose a verse from the Bible as the title. Thus the work with which he first won the English public was a picture exhibited in 1869: "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." A family of five brothers and sisters, who have just lost their mother, are assembled round the breakfast-table in a poorly furnished room. One sister is crying, another is sadly looking straight before her, whilst a third is praying with folded hands. The younger brother, a sailor, has just reached home from a voyage, to close his dying mother's eyes, and the eldest of all, a young and earnest curate, is endeavouring to console his brothers and sisters with the words of Job.

The next picture, exhibited in 1871, he called "No Tidings from the Sea," and represented in it a fisherman's family--grandmother, mother, and child--who in a cheerless room are anxiously expecting the return of a sailor. "Leaving Home" showed four people sitting on a bench outside a waiting-room at a railway station. To awaken the spectator's pity "Third Class" is written in large letters upon the window just above their heads. The principal figure is a lady dressed in black, who is counting, in a somewhat obtrusive manner, the little money which she still has left.

In the picture "Necessity knows no Law" a poor woman with a child in her arms has entered a pawnshop to borrow money on her wedding-ring; in another, women of the poorer class are to be seen walking along with their soldier sons and husbands, who have been called out on active service. One of them clasps tightly to her breast her little child, the only one still remaining to her in life, whilst an aged widow presses the hand of her son with the sad presentiment that, even if he comes back to her, she will probably not have long to live after his return. Not only did Frank Holl paint stories for his countrymen, but he also painted them big in majuscule characters which were legible without spectacles, and he partially owed his splendid successes to this cheap sentimentality.

Almost everywhere the interest of subject still plays the first part, and this slightly lachrymose trait bordering on _genre_, this lyrically tender or allegorically subtle element, which runs through English figure pictures, would easily degenerate into vaporous enervation in another country. In England portrait painting, which now, as in the days of Reynolds, is the greatest title to honour possessed by English art, invariably maintains its union with direct reality. By acknowledgment portrait painting in the present day is exceedingly earnest: it admits of no decorative luxuriousness, no sport with hangings and draperies, no pose; and English likenesses have this severe actuality in the highest degree. Stiff-necked obstinacy, sanguine resolution, and muscular force of will are often spoken of as an Englishman's national characteristics, and a trace of these qualities is also betrayed in English portrait painting. The self-reliance of the English is far too great to suffer or demand any servile habit of flattery: everything is free from pose, plain and simple. Let the subject be the weather-beaten figure of an old sailor or the dazzling freshness of English youth, there is a remarkable energy and force of life in all their works, even in the pictures of children with their broad open brow, finely chiselled nose, and assured and penetrative glance. And as portrait painting in England, to its own advantage and the benefit of all art, has never been considered as an isolated province, such pictures may be specified among the works of the most frigid academician as well as amongst those of the most vigorous naturalist. Frank Holl, who had such a Düsseldorfian tinge in his more elaborate pictures, showed at the close of his life, in his likenesses of the engraver Samuel Cousins, Lord Dufferin, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Wolseley, Mr. Gladstone, the Duke of Cleveland, Sir George Trevelyan, and Lord Spencer, a simple virility altogether wanting in his earlier works. They had a trenchant characterisation and an unforced pose which were striking even in England. It is scarcely possible to exhibit people more naturally, or more completely to banish from their expression that concentrated air of attentiveness which suggests photography and so easily intrudes into a portrait. Even Leighton, so devoid of temperament, so entirely devoted to the measured art of the ancients, became at once nervous and almost brutal in his power when he painted a portrait in place of ideal Grecian figures. His vivid and forcible portrait of Sir Richard Burton, the celebrated African traveller, would do honour to the greatest portrait painter of the Continent.

Amongst portrait painters by profession _Walter Ouless_ will probably merit the place of honour immediately after Watts as an impressive exponent of character. He has assimilated much from his master Millais--not merely the heaviness of colour, which often has a disturbing effect in the latter, but also Millais' powerful flight of style, always so free from false rhetoric. The chemical expert Pochin, as Ouless painted him in 1865, does not pose in the picture nor allow himself to be disturbed in his researches. It is a thoroughly contemporary portrait, one of those brilliant successes which later occurred in France also. The Recorder of London, Mr. Russell Gurney, he likewise painted in his professional character and in his robes of office. In its inflexible graveness and earnest dignity the likeness is almost more than the portrait of an individual; it seems the embodiment of the proud English Bench resting upon the most ancient traditions. His portrait of Cardinal Manning had the same convincing power of observation, the same large and sure technique. The soft light plays upon the ermine and the red stole, and falls full upon the fine, austere, and noble face.

Besides Ouless mention may be made from among the great number of portrait painters of _J. J. Shannon_, with his powerful and firmly painted likenesses; of _James Sant_, with his sincere and energetic portraits of women; of _Mouat Loudan_, with his pretty pictures of children, and of the many-sided _Charles W. Furse_. Hubert Herkomer was the most celebrated in Germany, and is probably the most skilful of the young men whom _The Graphic_ brought into eminence in the seventies.

The career of _Hubert Herkomer_ is amongst those adventurous ones which become less and less frequent in the nineteenth century; there are not many who have risen so rapidly to fame and fortune from such modest circumstances. His father was a carver of sacred images in the little Bavarian village of Waal, where Hubert was born in 1849. In 1851 the enterprising Bavarian tried his fortune in the New World. But there he did not succeed in making progress, and in 1857 the family appeared in England, at Southampton. Here he fought his way honestly at the bench where he carved, and as a journeyman worker, whilst his wife gave lessons in music. A commission to carve Peter Vischer's four evangelists in wood brought him with his son to Munich, where they occupied room in the back buildings of a master-carpenter's house, in which they slept, cooked, and worked. In the preparatory class of the Munich Academy the younger Herkomer received his first teaching, and began to draw from the nude, the antique serving as model. At a frame-maker's in Southampton he gave his first exhibition, and drew illustrations for a comic paper. With the few pence which he saved from these earnings he went to London, where he lived from hand to mouth with a companion as poor as himself. He cooked, and his friend scoured the pans; meanwhile he worked as a mason on the frieze of the South Kensington Museum, and hired himself out for the evenings as a zither-player. Then _The Graphic_ became his salvation, and after his drawings had made him known he soon had success with his paintings. "After the Toil of the Day," a picture which he exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1873--a thoughtful scene from the village life of Bavaria, carried out after the manner of Fred Walker--found a purchaser immediately. He was then able to make a home for his parents in the village of Bushey, which he afterwards glorified in the picture "Our Village," and he began his masterpiece "The Last Muster," which obtained in 1878 the great medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. Since then he found the eyes of the English public fixed upon him. There followed at first a series of pictures in which he proceeded upon the lines of Fred Walker's poetic realism: "Eventide," a scene in the Westminster Union; "The Gloom of Idwal," a romantic mountain picture from North Wales; "God's Shrine," a lonely Bavarian hillside path, with peasants praying at a shrine; "Der Bittgang," a group of country people praying for harvest; "Contrasts," a picture of English ladies surrounded by school-children in the Bavarian mountains. At the same time he became celebrated as a portrait painter, his first successes in this field being the likenesses of Wagner and Tennyson, Archibald Forbes, his own father, John Ruskin, Stanley, and the conductor Hans Richter. And he reached the summit of his international fame when his portrait of Miss Grant, "The Lady in White," appeared in 1886; all Europe spoke of it at the time, and it called forth entire bundles of poems, anecdotes, biographies, and romances. From that time he advanced in his career with rapid strides.

The University of Oxford appointed him Professor of the Fine Arts. He opened a School of Art, and had etchings, copper engravings, and engravings in mezzotint produced by his pupils under his guidance. He wrote articles in the London papers upon social questions, and political economy, and all manner of subjects, an article signed with Herkomer's name being always capable of creating interest. He has his own theatre, and produces in it operas of which he writes the text and the music, and manages the rehearsals and the scenery, besides playing the leading parts.

Yet it is just his portraits of women, the foundations of his fame, which do not seem in general to justify entirely the painter's great reputation. Miss Grant was certainly a captivating woman, and she broke men's hearts wherever she made her appearance. People gazed again and again into the brilliant brown eyes with which she looked so composedly before her; they were overwhelmed by her austere and lofty virginal beauty. "The Lady in Black (An American Lady)" made yet a more piquant and spiritualised effect. There was the unopened bud, and here the woman who has had experience of the delights and disappointments of life. There was unapproachable pride, and here a trait of distinction and of suffering, an almost weary carriage of the body. There would certainly be an interesting gallery of beauty if Herkomer unite these "types of women" in a series. But even in the first picture how much of all the admiration excited was due to the painter and how much to the model? The portrait of Miss Grant was such a success primarily because Miss Grant herself was so beautiful. The arrangement of white against white was nothing new: Whistler, a far greater artist, had already painted a "White Girl" in 1863, and it was a much greater work of art, though, on account of the attractiveness of the model being less powerful, it triumphed only in the narrower circle of artists. Bastien-Lepage, who set himself the same problem in his "Sara Bernhardt," had also run through the scale of white with greater sureness. And Herkomer's later pictures of women--"The Lady in Yellow," Lady Helen Fergusson, and others--are even less alluring, considered as works of art. The reserve and evenness of the execution give his portraits a somewhat clotted and stiff appearance. Good modelling and exceedingly vigorous drawing may perhaps ensure great correctness in the counterfeit of the originals, but the life of the picture vanishes beneath the greasy technique, the soapy painting through which materials of drapery and flesh-tints assume quite the same values. There is nothing in it of the transparency, the rosy delicacy, freshness, and flower-like bloom of Gainsborough's women and girls. Herkomer appears in these pictures as a salon painter in whom a tame but tastefully cultivated temperament is expressed with charm. Even his landscapes with their trim peasants' cottages and their soft moods of sunset have not enriched with new notes the scale executed by Walker.

All the more astonishing is the earnest certainty of touch and the robust energy which are visible in his other works. His portraits of men, especially the one of his father, that kingly old man with the long, white beard and the furrowed brow, take their place beside the best productions of English portraiture, which are chiselled, as it were, in stone. In "The Last Muster" he showed that it is possible to be simple and yet strike a profound note and even attain greatness. For there is something great in these old warriors, who at the end of their days are praying, having never troubled themselves over prayer during all their lives, who have travelled so far and staked their lives dozens of times, and are now drawing their last breath softly upon the seats of a church. Even his more recent groups--"The Assemblage of the Curators of the Charterhouse" and "The Session of the Magistrates of Landsberg"--are magnificent examples of realistic art, full of imposing strength and soundness. In the representation of these citizens the genius of the master who in his "Chelsea Pensioners" created one of the "Doelen pieces" of the nineteenth century, revealed itself afresh in all its greatness.

Beside portrait painting the painting of landscape stands now as ever in full bloom amongst the English; not that the artists of to-day are more consistently faithful to truth than their predecessors, or that they seem more modern in the study of light. In the province of landscape as in that of figure painting, far more weight is laid upon subject than on the moods of atmosphere. If one compares the modern English painters with Crome and Constable, one finds them wanting in boldness and creative force; and placed beside Monet, they seem to be diffident altogether. But a touching reverence for nature gives almost all their pictures a singularly chaste and fragrant charm.

Of course, all the influences which have affected English art in other respects are likewise reflected in landscape painting. The epoch-making activity of the pre-Raphaelites, the passionate earnestness of Ruskin's love for nature, as well as the influence of foreign art, have all left their traces. In his own manner Constable had spoken the last word. The principal thing in him, as in Cox, was the study of atmospheric effects and of the dramatic life of air. They neither of them troubled themselves about local colour, but sought to render the tones which are formed under atmospheric and meteorological influences; they altogether sacrificed the completion of the details of subject to seizing the momentary impression. In Turner, generally speaking, it was only the air that lived. Trees and buildings, rocks and water, are merely _repoussoirs_ for the atmosphere; they are exclusively ordained to lead the eye through the mysterious depths of light and shadow. The intangible absorbed what could be touched and handled. As a natural reaction there came this pre-Raphaelite landscape, and by a curious irony of chance the writer who had done most for Turner's fame was also he who first welcomed this pre-Raphaelite landscape school. Everything which the old school had neglected now became the essential object of painting. The landscape painters fell in love with the earth, with the woods and the fields; and the more autumn resolved the wide green harmony of nature into a sport of colours multiplied a thousand times, the more did they love it. Thousands of things were there to be seen. First, how the foliage turned yellow and red and brown, and then how it fell away: how it was scattered upon a windy day, whirling in a yellow drift of leaves; how in still weather leaf after leaf lightly rustled to the ground from between the wavering brown boughs. And then when the foliage fell from the trees and bushes the most inviolate secrets of summer came to light; there lay around quantities of bright seeds and berries rich in colour, brown nuts, smooth acorns, black and glossy sloes, and scarlet haws. In the leafless beeches there clustered pointed beechmast, the mugwort bent beneath its heavy red bunches, late blackberries lay black and brown amid the damp foliage upon the road, bilberries grew amid the heather, and wild raspberries bore their dull red fruit once again. The dying ferns took a hundred colours; the moss shot up like the ears of a miniature cornfield. Eager as children the landscape painters roamed here and there across the woodland, to discover its treasures and its curiosities. They understood how to paint a bundle of hay with such exactness that a botanist could decide upon the species of every blade. One of them lived for three months under canvas, so as thoroughly to know a landscape of heath. Confused through detail, they lost their view of the whole, and only made a return to modernity when they came to study the Parisian landscape painters. Thus English art in this matter made a curious circuit, giving and taking. First, the English fertilised French art; but at the time when French artists stood under the influence of the English, the latter swerved in the opposite direction, until they ultimately received from France the impulse which led them back into the old way.

In accordance with these different influences, several currents which cross and mingle with each other are to be found flowing side by side in English landscape painting: upon one side a spirit of prosaic reasonableness, a striving after clearness and precision, which does not know how to sacrifice detail, and is therefore wanting in pictorial totality of effect; on the other side an artistic pantheism which rises at times to high lyrical poetry in spite of many dissonances.

The pictures of _Cecil Lawson_ lead to the point where the pre-Raphaelites begin. The elder painters, with their powerful treatment and the freedom and boldness of their execution, still keep altogether on the lines of Constable, whereas in later painters, with their minute elaboration of all particularities, the influence of the pre-Raphaelites becomes more and more apparent.

Where Cecil Lawson ended, _James Clarke Hook_ began, the great master-spirit who opened the eyes of the world fifty years ago to the depth of colouring and the enchanting life of nature, even in its individual details. His pictures, especially those sunsets which he paints with such delight, have something devout and religious in them; they have the effect of a prayer or a hymn, and often possess a solemnity which is entirely biblical, in spite of their brusque, pungent colours. In his later period he principally devoted himself to sea-pieces, and in doing so receded from the pre-Raphaelite painting of detail, which is characteristic of his youthful period. His pictures give one the breath of the sea, and his sailors are old sea-wolves. All that remains from his pre-Raphaelite period is that, as a rule, they carry a certain burden of ideas.

_Vicat Cole_, likewise one of the older school, is unequal and less important. From many of his pictures one receives the impression that he has directly copied Constable, and others are bathed in dull yellow tones; nevertheless he has sometimes painted autumn pictures, felicitous and noble landscapes, in which there is really a reflection of the sun of Claude Lorrain.

With much greater freedom does _Colin Hunter_ approach nature, and he has the secret of seizing her boldly in her most impressive moments. The twilight, with its mysterious, interpenetrating tremor of colours of a thousand shades, its shine and glimmer of water, with the sky brooding heavily above, is what fascinates him most of all. Sometimes he represents the dawn, as in "The Herring Market at Sea"; sometimes the pale tawny sunset, as in "The Gatherers of Seaweed," in the South Kensington Museum. His men are always in a state of restless activity, whether they are making the most of the last moments of light or facing the daybreak with renewed energies.

Although resident in London, he and Hook are the true standard-bearers of the forcible Scotch school of landscape. _MacCallum_, _MacWhirter_, and _James Macbeth_, with whom _John Brett_, the landscape painter of Cornwall, may be associated, are all gnarled, Northern personalities. Their strong, dark tones stand often beside each other with a little hardness, but they sum up the great glimpses of nature admirably. Their brush has no tenderness, their spirit does not lightly yield to dreaminess, but they stand with both feet firmly planted on the earth, and they clasp reality in a sound and manly fashion with both arms. Their deep-toned pictures, with red wooden houses, darkly painted vessels, veiled skies, and rude fishermen with all their heart in their work, waken strong and intimate emotions. The difference between these Scots and the tentative spirits of the younger generation of the following of Walker and Mason is like that between Rousseau and Dupré as opposed to Chintreuil and Daubigny. The Scotch painters are sombre and virile; they have an accent of depth and truth, and a dark, ascetic harmony of colour. Even as landscape painters the English love what is delicate in nature, what is refined and tender, familiar and modest: blossoming apple-trees and budding birches, the odour of the cowshed and the scent of hay, the chime of sheep-bells and the hum of gnats. They seek no great emotions, but are merely amiable and kindly, and their pictures give one the feeling of standing at the window upon a country excursion, and looking out at the laughing and budding spring. In her novel _North and South_ Mrs. Gaskell has given charming expression to the glow of this feeling of having fled from the smoke and dirt of industrial towns to breathe the fresh air and see the sun go down in the prosperous country, where the meadows are fresh and well-kept, and where the flowers are fragrant and the leaves glisten in the sunshine. In the pictures of the Scotch artists toiling men are moving busily; for the English, nature merely exists that man may have his pleasure in her. Not only is everything which renders her the prosaic handmaiden of mankind scrupulously avoided, but all abruptnesses of landscape, all the chance incidents of mountain scenery; and, indeed, they are not of frequent occurrence in nature as she is in England. A familiar corner of the country is preferred to wide prospects, and some quiet phase to nature in agitation. Soft, undulating valleys, gently spreading hills conforming to the Hogarthian line of beauty, are especially favoured. And should the rainbow, the biblical symbol of atonement, stand in the sky, the landscape is for English eyes in the zenith of its beauty.

There is _Birket Forster_, one of the first and most energetic followers of Walker--Birket Forster, whose charming woodcuts became known in Germany likewise; _Inchbold_, who with a light hand combines the tender green of the grasses upon the dunes and the bright blue of the sea into a whole pervaded with light, and of great refinement; _Leader_, whose bright evening landscapes, and _Corbet_, whose delicate moods of morning, are so beautiful. _Mark Fisher_, who in the matter of tones closely follows the French landscape school, though he remains entirely English in sentiment, has painted with great artistic power the dreamy peace of solitary regions as well as the noisy and busy life of the purlieus of the town. _John White_, in 1882, signalised himself with a landscape, "Gold and Silver," which was bathed in light and air. The gold was a waving cornfield threaded by a sandy little yellow path; the silver was the sea glittering and sparkling in the background. Moved by Birket Forster, _Ernest Parton_ seeks to combine refinement of tone with incisiveness in the painting of detail. His motives are usually quite simple--a stream and a birch wood in the dusk, a range of poplars stretching dreamily along the side of a ditch. _Marshall_ painted gloomy London streets enveloped in mist; _Docharty_ blossoming hawthorn bushes and autumn evening with russet-leaved oaks; while _Alfred East_ became the painter of spring in all its fragrance, when the meadows are resplendent in their earliest verdure, and the leaves of the trees which have just unfolded stand out against the firmament in light green patches of colour, when the limes are blossoming and the crops begin to sprout. _M. J. Aumonier_ appears in the harmony of colouring, and in the softness of his fine, light-hued tones, as the true heir of Walker and Mason. A discreet and intimate sense of poetry pervades his valleys with their veiled and golden light, a fertile odour of the earth streams from his rich meadows, and from all the luxuriant, cultivated, and peacefully idyllic tracts which he has painted so lovingly and so well. _Gregory_, _Knight_, _Alfred Parsons_, _David Fulton_, _A. R. Brown_, and _St. Clair Simmons_ have all something personal in their work, a bashful tenderness beneath what is seemingly arid. The study of water-colour would alone claim a chapter for itself. Since water-colour allows of more breadth and unity than oil-painting, it is precisely here that there may be found exceedingly charming and discreet concords, softly chiming tones of delicate blue, greenish, and rosy light, giving the most refined sensations produced by English colouring.

Of course, England has a great part to play in the painting of the sea. It is not for nothing that a nation occupies an insular and maritime position, above all with such a sea and upon such coasts, and the English painter knows well how to give an heroic and poetic cast to the weather-beaten features of the sailor. For thirty years _Henry Moore_, the elder brother of Albert Moore, was the undisputed monarch of this province of art. Moore began as a landscape painter. From 1853 to 1857 he painted the glistening cliffs and secluded nooks of Cumberland, and then the green valleys of Switzerland flooded with the summer air and the clear morning light--quiet scenes of rustic life, the toil of the wood-cutter and the haymaker, somewhat as Julien Dupré handles such matters at the present time in Paris. From 1858 he began his conquest of the sea, and in the succeeding interval he painted it in all the phases of its changing life,--at times in grey and sombre morning, at other times when the sun stands high; at times in quietude, at other times when the wind sweeps heavily across the waves, when the storm rises or subsides, when the sky is clouded or when it brightens. It is a joy to follow him in all quarters of the world, to see how he constantly studies the waves of every zone on fair or stormy days, amid the clearness and brilliancy of the mirror of the sea, as amid the strife of the elements; as a painter he is, at the same time, always a student of nature, and treats the sea as though he had to paint its portrait. In the presence of his sea-pieces one has the impression of a window opening suddenly upon the ocean. Henry Moore measures the boundless expanse quite calmly, like a captain calculating the chances of being able to make a crossing. Nowhere else does there live any painter who regards the sea so much with the eyes of a sailor, and who combines such eminent qualities with this objective and cool, attentive observation, which seems to behold in the sea merely its navigable capacity.

The painter of the river-port of London and the arm of the Thames is _William L. Wyllie_, whose pictures unite so much bizarre grandeur with so much precision. One knows the port life of the Thames, with its accumulation of work, which has not its like upon the whole planet. Everything is colossal. From Greenwich up to London both sides of the river are a continuous quay: everywhere there are goods being piled, sacks being raised on pulleys, ships being laid at anchor; everywhere are fresh storehouses for copper, beer, sails, tar, and chemicals. The river is of great width, and is like a street populated with ships, a workshop winding again and again. The steamers and sailing vessels move up and down stream, or lie in masses, close beside one another, at anchor. Upon the bank the docks lie athwart like so many streets of water, sending out ships or taking them in. The ranks of masts and the slender rigging form a spider's web spreading across the whole horizon; and a vaporous haze, penetrated by the sun, envelops it with a reddish veil. Every dock is like a town, filled with huge vats and populated with a swarm of human beings, that move hither and thither amid fluttering shadows. This vast panorama, veiled with smoke and mist, only now and then broken by a ray of sunlight, is the theme of Wyllie's pictures. Even as a child he ran about in the port of London, clambered on to the ships, noted the play of the waves, and wandered about the docks; and so he painted his pictures afterwards with all the technical knowledge of a sailor. There is no one who knows so well how ships stand in the water; no one has such an understanding of their details: the heavy sailing vessels and the great steamers, which lie in the brown water of the port like mighty monsters, the sailors and the movements of the dock labourers, the dizzy tide of men, the confusion of cabs and drays upon the bridges spanning the arm of the Thames; only Vollon in Paris is to be compared with him as painter of a river-port.

Apart from him, _Clara Montalba_ specially has painted the London port in delicate water-colours. Yet she is almost more at home in Venice, the Venice of Francesco Guardi, with its magic gleam, its canals, regattas, and palaces, the Oriental and dazzling splendour of San Marco, the austere grace of San Giorgio Maggiore, the spirited and fantastic _décadence_ of Santa Maria della Salute. Elsewhere English water-colour often enters into a fruitless rivalry with oil-painting, but Clara Montalba cleaves to the old form which in other days under Bonington, David Cox, and Turner was the chief glory of the English school. She throws lightly upon paper notes and effects which have struck her, and the memory of which she wishes to retain.

For the English painters of the day, so far as they do not remain in the country, Venice has become what the East was for the earlier generations. They no longer study the romantic Venice which Turner painted and Byron sang in _Childe Harold_, they do not paint the noble beauty of Venetian architecture or its canals glowing in the sun, but the Venice of the day, with its narrow alleys and pretty girls, Venice with its marvellous effects of light and the picturesque figures of its streets. Nor are they at pains to discover "ideal" traits in the character of the Italian people. They paint true, everyday scenes from popular life, but these are glorified by the magic of light. After Zezzos, Ludwig Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Tito, and Eugène Blaas, the Englishmen Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, and Henry Woods are the most skilful painters of Venetian street scenes. In the pictures of _Luke Fildes_ and _W. Logsdail_ there are usually to be seen in the foreground beautiful women, painted life-size, washing linen in the canal or seated knitting at the house door; the heads are bright and animated, the colours almost glaringly vivid. _Henry Woods_, the brother-in-law of Luke Fildes, rather followed the paths prescribed by Favretto in such pictures as "Venetian Trade in the Streets," "The Sale of an Old Master," "Preparation or the First Communion," "Back from the Rialto," and the like; of all the English he has carried out the study of bright daylight most consistently. The little glass house which he built in 1879 at the back of the Palazzo Vendramin became the model of all the glass studios now disseminated over the city of the lagunes.

And these labours in Venice contributed in no unessential manner to lead English painting, in general, away from its one-sided æsthetics and rather more into the mud of the streets, caused it to break with its finely accorded tones, and brought it to a more earnest study of light. Beside his idealised Venetian women, Luke Fildes also painted large pictures from the life of the English people, such as "The Return of the Lost One," "The Widower," and the like, which struck tones more earnest than English painting does elsewhere; and in his picture of 1878, "The Poor of London," he even recalled certain sketches which Gavarni drew during his rambles through the poverty-stricken quarter of London. The poor starving figures in this work were rendered quite realistically and without embellishment; the general tone was a greenish-grey, making a forcible change from the customary light blue of English pictures. _Dudley Hardy's_ huge picture "Homeless," where a crowd of human beings are sleeping at night in the open air at the foot of a monument in London, and _Jacomb Hood's_ plain scenes from London street life, are other works which in recent years were striking, from having a character rather French than English. _Stott of Oldham_, by his pretty pictures of the dunes with children playing, powerful portraits, and delicate, vaporous moonlight landscapes, has won many admirers on the Continent also. _Stanhope Forbes_ painted "A Philharmonic Society in the Country," a representation of an auction, and scenes from the career of the Salvation Army, in which he restrained himself from all subordinate ideas of a poetic turn.

In the same way those artists are important who work according to the demands of decorative painting. A picture in a room should be like a jewel in its setting, in harmony. It should fit agreeably into the scheme of decoration, its colour in unison, its lines melodious, its general effect toning well with the general design.

These principles, taught by Morris, have had a formative influence on the work of a large number of artists. There arose a tendency which, by borrowing characteristic effects from woodwork, carpets, and stained-glass, and by the application of style to line as well as to colour, went one step further than Burne-Jones.

The pictures of _John W. Waterhouse_, for instance, are not only conceived in literary vein, but seen with the eye of a painter. By smooth, thick lines, by the discordant harmony of blues, greens, and violet, he gets a carpet-like effect which is highly decorative.

_Byam Shaw_, still a young man, is just such another master of decorative lines. At the age of twenty-five he painted the picture "Love's Baubles," which now hangs in the art gallery in Liverpool. The subject he took from a poem in Rossetti's "House of Life." Beautiful women snatch after the fruit which a boy carries along on a salver. The whole is a harmony of melodious lines and rich, quiet colours.

In his next picture, "Truth," he ranges himself with Boutet de Monoel or Ludwig von Zumbusch: he strives after the monumental effect that the figures of old Brueghel have.

Next to Byam Shaw, _G. E. Moira_ is the chief representative of this decorative school. His picture of Pelleas and Melisande is a work quite out of the ordinary, original in arrangement, incisive, almost bitter in colour, dull-green, black, lilac, and yellow; fine in the atmosphere of Maeterlinck that pervades the whole. But he does his best work as a decorator, not as a painter of pictures that can be taken away from their setting. In the frieze with which he decorated the Trocadéro Restaurant in London he, for the first time, made use of polychrome relief, that since has played such an important part in the art of decoration, and sought to enhance the colour effect still more by the use of metal. In the Paris Exhibition he attracted considerable attention by the pictures with which he decorated the pavilion of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company--simple lines and fantasies of colour which with their delicate, flowing harmony had an effect like music. His designs for stained-glass windows have the same qualities, and in his position as professor in the National College of Art at South Kensington he is bound to exert a great influence over the younger generation.

_Anning Bell_, well known by his design for the cover of the _Studio_, has also done excellent work in coloured relief, especially in his frieze "Music and Dancing."

_Maurice Greiffenhagen_ surprises one by the ardour of his imagination, his strong emphatic line, and the tapestry-like beauty of his colour. He reminds one of Aman-Jean, such a wonderful "old-master-like" beauty is suffused through the picture "The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters of Men." No less effective is the "gourmandise" with which he gives his interpretation the appearance of an old picture. The colours, though full of sound and movement, are at the same time so etiolated and faint that one would think the picture had hung for centuries in a dusty corner of an old church, or that spiders had spun their webs across it; the frame too is in keeping, and enhances the general effect of solemnity.

The same style is found in the later work of _Frank Brangwyn_, who began by painting out-of-door pictures in the spirit of the French Impressionists, and afterwards, thanks to a visit to the East, was brought into touch with Nature saturated in colour and massive in feature.

All his works are imposing through the decisive way in which he builds up his masses, and the wonderful, rhythmical articulation of forms and colours combined. The picture "Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh" which has been given a place in the Luxembourg, and the large mural painting "Commerce and Navigation" in the Royal Exchange in London, are up to now his strongest work.

_F. Cayley Robinson_, who arrests one's attention with his austere, almost heraldic arrangement of line, and his gloomy acerbity of colour; _Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale_, who awoke high hopes with her picture "The Deceitfulness of Riches"; and that spirited draughtsman, W. Nicholson, whose drawings lead the eye to and fro, backwards and forwards, along heavy decided lines, noting every expressive turn and movement. Almost all these masters have come to us from the applied arts. It was the idea of attaining to unity of effect in decorative ornament that impelled these artists to work in the spirit of to-day, not that each should bring forward his own work of art and let it stand by itself, but that the scheme of decorative architecture, modelling, and painting should work together hand in hand in a homogeneous scheme of decoration.

With all these artists one cannot help noticing that they owe much in the way of light and leading to one who in England, the land of poems-in-paint, proclaimed more outspokenly than anyone else the principle of "Art for art's sake,"--to the great American, James M'Neill Whistler.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY