Open Letters From New York

IV.

IF you choose to go up the staircase with me to the eleventh annual exhibition of the Water-Color Society at the National Academy of Design, you will mount with a person who cannot tell you the justness of the prices in the catalogue; who is scarcely so sure of every name on the instant as to know whether it is that of one whose works are to be darted at with rapture, or passed by with self-respecting contempt; who has not a fund of reminiscences from every previous exhibition in the world; and who has even had the ill luck to miss by absence more than one of this very series. But what then? All the world cannot be connoisseurs, and the regular critics have had their say in the regular channels. We can still respect each other. We can still deposit our umbrellas, if we have a taste for this kind of recreation,— I confess for myself I find it hard to keep out of a picture-gallery if there be any way of getting in, — and go up and look about us, in some lull of the courts, the coal stocks, or Extra C sugars, and make note of our impressions, too, I suppose, if we like. If we impute to some designers meanings they never dreamed of, and pass by in others what they thought they had put most obviously on the surface; if we mistake our gradations of merit, and even expend part of our time watching the people as they move about in ihe broad, strong light, standing and giving place with a hitching motion like the figures in a puppet-show, why, there is a myriad of us, and what are they going to do about it?

I have even found it amusing at times to go through in the reverse order, looking for the worst things instead of the best. What in the world do they want to be artists for? I ask these observers of nature only in its tritest aspects, these draggers - about of muddy and frigid carmine and Indian yellow, these depicters of clumsy, inane figures with less anatomy to them than boneless sardines. And what can they mean by hanging them up with modest demands for sixty, seventy-five, and as high as two hundred dollars, when chromos can be had at every Cheap-John stall for the silver quarter of our fathers? But you return in a few days and find the magic placard “Sold” affixed to the corners of some of the most hopeless of the lot. Then you become reflective, and surmise family connections of unlimited wealth who have bought upon the basis of doting fondness and pride in the achievements of their ambitious scions. Or you suspect darkly the stratagem of a purchase by the artist himself, — for all the worst are by no means amateurs, — for the moral effect.

The staircase itself is one of the attractive features of an Academy exhibition. With its oaken solidity, its easy rise, its generous width, and the flowering plants upon its platforms, it has a palatial effect and is a hospitable preface to the entertainment above. It should afford subjects. Let some observing draughtsman note the groups upon it, our expressions of expectancy and exaltation as we rise into the more ethereal atmosphere at the top, and the shadow of returning cynicism as we come down, with the hundred rainbow impressions telescoped together, and the dissatisfied reflection that the fairest form of human achievement can after all do so little for permanent human content. If so much as this be not expressed upon our faces, it ought not to be a matter of insuperable difficulty to put it there. Mr. T. W. Wood, with the Progressive Drawing Book, can supply a formula. Expression is a matter of lifting or pulling down an angle of the mouth and the inner extreme of an eyebrow or so. You are referred for expression to Mr. Wood because I have seen his Circus is Coming at Mr. Edward Brown’s sale, and his Not a Drop too Much at the monthly Union League exhibition, within a few days, besides his Crossing the Ferry here, and I note that he makes a specialty of it. It is the stark skeleton of expression. In the apparent fear that his meaning will be mistaken be caricatures it. Dilution is badly needed. To one part of intelligible meaning, Mr. Wood, add five parts of delicate handling; and there are indications (in the Sick Negro at the Union League, particularly) that the future may bring forth results not unworthy of acceptance. The ferry picture has a fixed-up air, as of a tableau. There is little pictorial in it, furthermore; nothing that could not have been made sufficiently intelligible in words. We have a right, in a time when print, is so easy of resort, to demand of the language of art — and the demand defines a little the province of art — that it shall accomplish something that ordinary language cannot. This view of an every-day circumstance could be wholly embraced in a description: “ I was crossing to Brooklyn,” one might say, “ when one of those little rascals of Italians came into the cabin. He fiddled execrably for a moment, and passed around his cap to the people opposite. An old lady from the country seemed to want to give him an apple from some she had in a carpetbag. On one side of her was a business man in a fur cap and eyeglasses, with a newspaper. He looked at him with a whimsical, half-benevolent air, as if he were thinking, ‘ If I should give you a nickel, you young beggar, I wonder what you would do with it. ’ There was a gaunt, wild-looking man on the other side of her, with spiky hair. He might have been the prophet of a new religion. ' Society was in a pretty state,’ he seemed to say, ' that could have that sort of thing going on.’ Then there was a young woman who just stared and nothing else, and a negro woman with her baby, who stood by looking on. The negro woman had a striped shawl, the old lady a florid carpet-bag, and the prophet a red necktie. If there were only more color,—the floors and white woodwork of the ferry-boats are so insufferably cold, you recollect, — and art in grouping were used, such a scene might be worked up into quite a nice little picture.”

That is positively all there is of it. Every picture can, of course, be roughly described, just as it can be roughly engraved, as in the catalogue illustrations; but there are no subtleties in Mr. Wood’s, nothing I have not conveyed to you. I do not wish to be understood as finding fault with it because it is an every-day subject, for I have a distinct idea that it is the business of artists to hunt out for us the beauty and impressiveness there is in every-day subjects, that they may gradually put us in the way of doing it for ourselves. We are rather slow observers out of our own line of occupation, but when our attention is called we see readily enough. The prevailing school of humorists have scarcely any other claim to an original basis than this. They draw attention to sayings and doings as old as the hills: the talk of the Smiths coming home from church or from a funeral; the horror of Mrs. Cobleigh at hearing of a suicide she thought was Augustus Kinman, and her sudden loss of interest when she learns it is George Kinman, with whom she had no acquaintance; showing that it is an excitement of the sensational order, and not a profound commiseration for the woes of humanity. “Is this funny?” we ask; “we have heard it no end of times. Why, so it is, exquisitely funny,” and we are presently put in the way of looking out for more such things. Something parallel to this process might take place in our art. There is plenty of room for it.

Now that we are up the staircase, is there anything to be gathered from a general preliminary glance? As the eye runs down the bright rooms it catches along, from frame to frame, on bits of blue sky, as a row of small gas jets is touched off by an electric current. Blue is the key-note. It indicates landscapes in full supply, and also the more coquettish and smiling composition of the water-color branch. In the oil exhibitions it is rather red. Oil-painting is like philosophy, water-color like wit; the latter loses by laborious effort more than any exertion can impart to the former. I read this in a book of Kotzebue’s, who wrote The Stranger, and was shot, — not for that, though there are localities where they do it for less. Every water-colorist should cut out the motto, and, if the practical suggestion may be delicately hazarded, paste it in his hat. It looks like a pleasant, social, informal sort of art but it calls for rigid accuracy and a trenchant keenness. The blots of color must be laid on with definite purpose, and once laid must be let alone. It is no time for experimenting. Dragged about, the purity of the color is destroyed, and all is over. It is a lesson that all of these exhibitors have not learned. A heavy manner, often in work of considerable merit in other respects, bears witness to attempts to repair the effects of indecision, to make the journey after the train has gone. It is too late; the most that can be done is to come down by ox-cart instead of by the through express. As might have been expected, the strongest men in the regular department have the best command of means and dexterity of hand to enable them to succeed in this. Samuel Colman, Kruseman van Elten, Wyant, R. Swain Gifford, display a notable familiarity with the resources of the art,—the slight spongings and scratchings, the use of papers of varied tints and grains by which, in addition to the usual washes and stipplings, the transparency and crisp effects of this material are arrived at. The body colorists, W. T. Richards, Bricher, Tiffany at their head, have to be put in a separate category. I am not going to lay this “body color ” at any one’s door as a corpus delicti. It is simply the expedient of mixing white with the pigments, and painting in solid substance upon the paper instead of a transparent film. There are charming things in both styles. One need not decide the question of legitimacy from the present exhibition, as if it contained the sum of all capabilities in either. There is only this remark to be made, and I will make no more: that whatever can be done in body color can be done as well or better in oil, while the other has certain felicities of its own, possibilities in the way of atmosphere, a greater air of naturalness, which constitute a peculiar province. An artificiality attaches to the body-color pictures. They never quite escape a suggestion of scene-painting.

The subjects do not contradict greatly the amiable promise of the first general glance. The minor keys are liberally touched. There is little sentiment of a profound sort, no appearance of prophets enunciating strange sayings from the retirement of their caves, no tragic figures flung wild abroad. There is mainly apparent a taste for cheerful color and the imitation of things in their pretty, ordinary aspects.

La Farge breaks the routine in one of the small things of the exhibition, unique of its kind. It is something to respect and admire, and also to wonder at, to find a man of our commonplace selves exhibiting an angel instead of a fashion plate or a butcher boy. Americans have as good a right as anybody in the upper domain of imagination, but we are so few there that the surroundings all seem to look askance at us, and we walk in it with misgivings. La Farge is not satisfied to be trivial. You can see him stretching out his neck, as it were, after the vanishing glories of a great art. But it is far distant now, and not too distinct. He reproduces ghostly fragments which are perhaps not too well understood even by himself. His angel is a mere sketch, little white and flesh tones scattered thinly over a burnt-sienna colored paper, and framed up in a gold mat. The wings are variegated like those of a butterfly, and some original refinement is attempted in the color, which seems to have minute bits of something like mother-of-pearl inlaid in it.

The only other attempt at the fancifully imaginative is J. C. Beard’s A Child’s Dream of Fairy-Land. A hydrocephalous infant is represented as drawn through a dismal swamp, in a shell, by two vicious-looking swans. No human infant would ever trust himself in such circumstances in the wildest dream. It is worth mentioning only to show the plentiful lack of such things, and for the oddity of its coming from the Beard family, whose province is mainly the parodying of humanity by means of costumed monkeys and terriers.

Perhaps it has a snobbish sound to make so much of them, and I am sure I would not say a word in their favor if I could help it, but here are the foreigners, though few in numbers, in force sufficient to show those of us who need to learn what the standard of excellence is how to generalize and use gracefully a fund of information when we have it. A small figure of a cavalier trying his rapier, by Thomasi, emerges from the rich splashes of crimson lake, siennas, and grays in which it is formed, and with all the local tones upon the flesh and garments that belong to them laid with small, free touches, as if we saw it mistily taking shape in the creative act of the author’s mind. Thomas Windt has a more finished picture of the sympathetic German type: a neat old woman in an humble interior, with a blue crockery plate softly suggested on a dresser. Degas has a spirited group of balletdancers behind the scenes, with the strange shadows of that chaotic region cast over their airy attire; but its pasty finish is left incomplete, and there is nothing to be learned from it about color.

The Ring, by the English artist Killingworth Johnson, and The Reverie, by a Frenchman, Tofano, are naturally contrasted as examples of treatment of nearly the same subject, — a single figure of a young woman in two diametrically opposite styles. The style of Tofano, the broad, free, ornamental manner, the theory that delight in the physical aspects of nature is the legitimate object of art, is the one most defensible; but, thank Heaven, I am not doctrinaire enough to quarrel with such an exquisite piece of character drawing as that elaborated by the other. Tofano’s young woman is disposed diagonally across the paper in a flowered robe, in a boudoir with bouquets, a tiger skin, and flowered wall-paper. It is very pretty, but she is a surface, and that is all. What do you know about her? It may be a simpering, shallow nature, or one of that kind hard as steel, that inhere not rarely in just as dainty bodies. The other has been pronounced not a picture. It might have been made so, I doubt not, by scattering some repetitions of the central features about the parallelogram; but for the present it is simply a figure in a plain room, standing facing us, in front of a mirror in which she is reflected. She holds up to the light her left hand, foreshortened towards you, contemplating the glitter of a new ring,—let us suppose, since the tender expression is by no means that of mere delight in finery, an engagement ring. Here is the subtlety we have missed in our friend Wood. It could not be put in print; no, not if Open Letters from New York were an encyclopædia long. You divine, and yet by an imperceptible influence, the whole nature of ibis gentle girl, her refinement, innate and of surroundings, her trusting and affectionate disposition, her mind of moderate compass, her playfulness and sedateness. From the slender figure, not too well fitted for rugged circumstances, a keen practitioner could gather its constitutional story as well as the family physician. 1 recollect this Killingworth Johnson. In my catalogue of the London water-color exhibition of ’74, which I had the good fortune to see, I find I had marked his two contributions with a triple star of enthusiasm. He wras an artist there. If he be not here, let this be one of the places where we kick over the traces. 1 have sometimes thought, narrowed down as our subjects are by the smoothing out process of civilization, that the art of the future might consist more of this sort of individualism, an intenser insight into character and rendition of it, as mere externals become less available.

Magrath, to give the foreigners no more attention, is a close finisher too. He is a devoted expositor of the charms of robust, barefooted Irish maidens. Sometimes he locates them among the ragged picturesqueness of the Central Park shanties, but not this time, Shelton being the only one who makes use of this very available material, in his nice Winter Twilight; at other times, in the white stone cottages of their own country, of which we have a charming view in his No. 202. His On the Threshold is one of these maidens leaning in a pensive attitude half in and half out of a flood of daylight coming through the open door, through which also a graceful small landscape is seen. The figure is finished to the last degree, yet without the sacrifice of breadth. It detaches itself with perfect relief and brilliancy. It is a piece which leaves little to desire, and would do us no discredit anywhere. His larger Kelp Gatherer, out-of-doors, has not the same opportunity for an ingenious play of light, and has only its intrinsic attractiveness as a character to depend upon, which I do not find great. Though the figure stands against a bright sky the coloring is not more sombre than usual. Jules Breton and Millet, who treat such figures, or gleaners coming home with bundles of grain on their shoulders, project them darkly against the sky, as the case would be, and put something strange and melancholy into the faces.

Miss Jacobs’s girl looking for her cows lias at a distance an air like a figure of Magrath’s, but when you come closer it is a Yankee girl, and a work of less though sufficient finish. She is coming down the hill from the farm-house with a milk-pail, and shading her eyes with her hand. You would wager that her name is Almira, and that she expects a young man along before a great while, if this milking business can ever be got through with, to take her to singingschool. It constitutes a pleasing whole, and is a kind of thing we need as much as possible of, —bold, large figures uniting well with their surroundings, not too large to be able to dispense with accessories, and not too small to be mere accessories themselves. Symington has a number of commendable attempts in this direction, but still crude. He is on tlie way, but has not yet arrived. The pretty child jn blue swinging in a hammock and gazing out at you with blue eyes that match the ribbon in her blonde hair is the best of his five figures. The Sewing-Girl, with a pensive hut not the traditional miserable air, is good; and the senile chuckle of the well-cared-for old gentleman engaged in paring apples, in his Not too Old to be of some Use, is capitally managed. The point to note is the feeling for a bold, impressive mass. It is, on its side, the same characteristic exhibited in the best marines and landscapes of the exhibition.

Pranislinikoff is a naturalized Russian, who studied in Italy and is perfecting his powers in-the training-school of the Harpers’ illustrated paper. He ministers to a fancy stronger in its devotees than that of mere beauty or sentiment, namely, intense action. His Birthday is a wagon-load of drunken peasants lashing a jaded horse over the steppe, with maudlin shouts. Another piece is a pair of smugglers furiously urging their three horses, harnessed abreast, to escape the pursuit of revenue officers galloping up from the distance. They are an epitome of the most brutal chapters of Tourguéneff. They give Tiffany’s Algerian Cobblers, a row of dark, savage men mending shoes in front of a tent in the desert, quite a human air by contrast. It is not an easy matter to judge of the accuracy of such action as this. These plunging legs in actual practice do not wait to be counted. The effect is seemingly natural, however, and there is a thoroughness of elaboration in tlie whole that rivals the usage of Detaille. A want of sympathy in the encompassing circumstances with the flying groups may be noted. In the pictures of Schreyer, to take a large example, and the woodcuts of Kelley, in the “ black and white " room, to take a small one, everything goes with the travelers, — dust, clouds of flying snow, or whatever it may be; the entire view is put in motion. I should think with works of this kind in full view upon a wall continuously the sense of motion would cease after a while, as if the headlong rush were stopped by some Merlin’s incantation. They ought rather to be hung a little aside, where they could be happened on when one was tired of the ordinary tameness of things, and enjoyed as a refreshment.

Eakins is commended for his action, though I think his quiet old lady knitting has more of the qualities of a picture. He shows us a couple of adult negroes, one perhaps the grandfather, the other, with a banjo, the father, educating a small scion of the house to dance the break-down. It is a serious business, and by no means mere levity. The boy has a perfunctory air, as much as if it were an arithmetic lesson. The aged instructor looks on, and doubtless recalls certain classic traditions of the art and laments the degeneracy of times which can of course never equal the old. Still, such as his limited capacity is, the pupil must be taught to do credit to his family and his bringing up. The banjo player’s head is too large for his attenuated limbs, but he plays away gayly all the same, and the action is not vitiated. Mr. Eakins is one of our delegates to foreign schools. He has come home from abroad, and is commendably looking for subjects in the line I have indicated.

Abbey’s Rose in October, a still blooming elderly young lady standing by a country gate, supplements his revolutionary New Year’s callers in the black and white room as evidence of a painstaking intelligence not quite ready yet for a dashing short-hand.

This black and white room is a charming department. It is hard not to overestimate its comparative importance, with its pleasing sketches in charcoal, crayon, and India ink, its etchings by Haden, Whitler, Farrar, Gifford, P. Moran, and Miller, its proof engraving by Marsh, and the simplicity and seeming completeness of its means. It has all those broader aspects we understand as distinctively artistic, and which are such a perpetual miracle to the uninitiated. The useful influence of the publishers of our best illustrated literature, the Scribners and Harpers, appears here. There is a reassurance in witnessing the good imaginative work, and such good genre as that of Reinhart, for instance, done here to fill hasty orders. It ought to result at the proper time in striking and original works in a more important field.

Here is a group of animals and figures by Darley, in his recognizable bourgeois style, recalling the drawing book. P. Moran’s painted horses in the stable, and cows and sheep, are of the same academic, Dusseldorfish sort. One longs for some of the sharp angles of a streak of lightning to run crinkling through them.

But let us leave the figures. From this door-way we can see at once the effect of the two principal architectural subjects at the bottom of different rooms. Colman’s is a transparent, bright picture, a view down a Brittany street of irregular open-timber-framed houses, terminated by a cathedral bathed in the atmosphere of distance. Tiffany’s is a Brittany church also, — nearer at hand, its dark tower threatening against a disturbed sky, —at the top of a flight of steps on which market people offer their wares. Its semblance of the texture and heaviness of stone is an argument for the advantage of the solid method in this kind of subject. The white caps of Colman’s peasant figures in front are got by scratching off the surface of the paper instead of by blots of paint. It is a trick of the trade, but to be satisfactory you ought not to know it. One wants to think that a picture is a mysterious work perfected by means altogether beyond him: if it is to be reduced to a matter of penknives, he feels as if he could do something in that line himself. Sartain’s Street in Venice is a simple rendering of a pleasant effect of shadows and perspective with common buildings. I see plenty of as good opportunities, and better, in my walks every day. I wonder they are not taken advantage of. Silva’s small houses and Moran’s Stable Door, with the calcimining on the wall imitated by the body color, which is indeed itself of the same substance, are suggestions to amateurs and wilt bear much more treatment by professionals. Arthur Quartley’s Old Fishing Town of New England shows a row of weather-beaten gray and red clapboarded houses. There is a very nice feeling in the run of the lines, the curve of the railing, echoed by its own shadow on the ground, which runs around the edge of the wall where it abuts on the beach with its sea-weeds and rocks. Walter Paris’s Lenox Iron Mill shows how a good subject can be spoiled by a commonplace way of looking at it. You are perfectly certain that by climbing around a little, something imposing could have been got out of this irregular collection of stacks, sheds, and gables. As it is, it is only the kind of a view the foreman would like to frame and hang up in the foundry.

Bricher goes much beyond the point of cleverness. It seems as if he could go very much farther yet, but for an overconscientiousness which leads him to finish everything too completely and destroy the quality of mystery. There must remain something unknown to engage our permanent interest, He delights in silvery reflections, the mirroring of dark objects, the greenish light through the crest of a coming wave. His foregrounds show accurately stratified rocks, and beaches of sand with all their débris of sea-weeds, pebbles, and bleached clam shells, each with its particle of water and sand left in the bottom by the departing tide. They are admirable. But the whole is too distinct. It is a fault of too much, not of too little knowledge, and should be easily remedied if it be recognized as in need of remedy.

R. Swain Gifford’s contributions are slighter, sketchy works. There comes from them — this is the merit of the transparent washes in part—a stronger breath of real nature. Let us compare him a little with his equal, Wyant. The quality of mystery, the quality illustrating Emerson’s definition of art as " nature distilled through the alembic of man,” is better exemplified in Wyant than any Other contributor. His attractiveness is of an entirely different kind from Gifford’s. The latter is a more cosmopolitan artist in his susceptibility to impressions from many climes and seasons, but not so sentimental in a limited branch. The impressiveness of Gifford as represented here is in his forms. He likes large bowlders, and cedar - trees with a distinct outline. His best piece is some salt vats. They are simple, grayish planes of light and shadow, thrown out from a clump of brownish trees which are filled up solid against the sky. The sky line is important with him, and you could draw out separate pleasing details. From Wyant you can take out nothing but the whole. Neither foreground, middle distance, nor background is especially important. An atmosphere of melting, unobtrusive colors in small intermingled patches drifts through and suffuses the whole. The craving for texture is satisfied. Have you ever stopped to analyze it? Do you note how we cannot got along without it? how nothing is so dreary as large, unoccupied, smooth spaces? The human brain seems irresistibly driven to put upon everything it originates an uneasy and endless congeries of grain and surface decoration corresponding to the convolution in which it is itself twisted up. The plan of all of Wyant’s pieces is pretty much the same. There is a spot of blue in the centre of the sky surrounded by whirling grays. Below is a delicious intermingling of soft blues, grays, and green, with a few dashes of red, and in the midst perhaps a spot of warm white. Then a thin tree or two standing up towards the front, darkened to throw the distance off. The scene itself is not of importance, as it is not in so many charming landscapes of the French school, whose effect is obtained by casting some sort of tender sentiment over agueish marshes where one would not think of lingering in person. It is the way of our own artists, for the most part, to make a physical appeal to us; to make us say, like Bellows in his elm-sliaded village street, and Bobbins with his farm-house embowered in lilac bushes, " How I wish I were there this very minute ! ”

Newell has a pair of good figures that recall Birket Foster; Hopkinson Smith, numerous landscapes in which the neat draughtsmanship is much to be admired. Some sketches by Stacquet and Ciceri show the best kind of water-color shorthand, and some by Marny the heartless conventional kind. The studios of Vibert ami Berne-Bellecour, by Bourgoin, are an interesting exhibition of the luxurious influences by which these strong colorists surround themselves. They suggest the speculation why it is that our own interiors are not turned to artistic account in this era of decorative furnishing. In an age when more startling ideas are in abeyance, the domestic idea is worthy of homage. Nothing offers a more legitimate field than these apartments newly revised in accordance with correct principles. There should be family groups of small size, disposed about them like genre figures, in the style in which Guy and Wilmarth have sometimes succeeded; except that these latter have never shown any appreciation of the kind oE glowing richness I have in mind, but of a puritanical inharmoniousness instead.

I reserve a paragraph for the vestiges of the once powerful and aggressive preRaphaelites. “ Pre-Raphaelitism,” I say, “thy name is frailty, " as I arrive before a frame of T. C. Farrar’s, who went away long since and settled in London. He used to draw every leaf in the heart of a sun-lit, tremulous forest. Where now are the quivering aspenleaves, the arrow-headed water-plants, the long grasses, the lichens, and the geological strata of the rocks? What little appearance of them there is is scratched out white with a penknife on a brown, muddy ground. Scratch, scratch, the water comes down the rocks, from step to step, like the marks of matches on sand-paper. He has elsewhere a Rochester castle. The Turnerian lines of composition of the castle and the bridge, the repetition of the battlements by windmills on the distant hill, and the run of the ground, are pleasing, but the color is phenomenal. Where it is not it is of an insuperable heaviness. The castle, which rises out of a clump of red-roofed buildings, is of a cold pink, and the ivy of a pure yellow, both unlike anything else in the picture, and unlike any light that ever was on sea or land. That would not make so much difference if it were a decorative passage in itself, but it is the antipodes of it. Still, Farrar never was a colorist. John Henry Hill was more of a colorist. He retains the faculty. His Sunnyside is as cheerful a picture of a blue sky and green grass and a white house, with the sunlight touching it in patches, as you would wish to see. But it is hardly preRaphaelitish, and his view of the Natural Bridge of Virginia not at all so. There is hardly more stratification than in a pile of building sand. Some figures he bas put in to give the scale are so far distant as to be scarcely perceptible, and of course do not accomplish it. These are the only two representatives of the original band, and it will be seen they no longer bear its banners aloft. Occupied in detail, to the neglect of more general qualities, it seems that when they come forth into a broader field they totter with weakness. The conventional people they used to abuse have kept along in the old ruts, and may not have improved much, but now, at the end of ten years, appear quite favorably in the comparison. Yet this is not a just tone of comment. The prospectus of the movement distinctly Stated that the truth to nature at which it aimed would “ with sympathy and reverence make happy and useful artists of those to whom imagination and inventive power are denied.” We ought rather to conclude, not that the principle was not valid, but only that we have happened upon examples from the non-inventive category, whom it would be desirable to see back at their honest vocation at once. The history of this enthusiastic movement for “truth in art,” and the tracing of its permanent influence upon the community, would be an interesting theme. I am sure it would be found to be a powerful influence, although there are those of its disciples who talk lightly of the Ruskin they once believed to be a prophet raised up to enlighten the nations that walk in darkness; and others of them, who have forgotten their strenuous asseverations that the only hope for the future was in the domination of Gothic architecture, are designing buildings in the Queen Anne style. Enthusiasm and really definite ideas are so rare that when once aroused they do not easily subside. There was something very fine about this movement, and the ardent publishing and painting, for principle and not for pay, by which at its height it was characterized, and you may be sure the participants in it were persons of calibre.

There are reminiscences of the movement in Henry Farrar, Mrs. Stillman, and Miss Bridges, if not in its actually affiliated members. The latter was a pupil of W. T. Richards, who, though not, I believe, distinctly known as a pre-Raphaelite himself, was always treated by them with genuine respect as nearly akin in practice. Miss Bridges has a series of exquisite studies in the old manner. I can only mention the subjects: a kingbird swinging on a mullein stalk, a young robin just out of the nest on a dewy morning-glory, swallows in the air, field birds in a tangle of meadow grass and daisies, a flock of bluebirds hopping among the dead leaves on an autumn hillside. If you take them for birds or flowers of the namby-pamby kind you will be mistaken. They are as free and charming as the fresh air of nature in which they revel. Mrs. Stillman’s flat figure of a child looking through branches of apple blossoms shows something of the mediæval side of it. The work of Henry Farrar, a younger brother of T. C. Farrar, is among the best in the gal leries. It is somewhat plodding, — he does not take easily to color, — and the serpent-like road he is fond of running into his scenes needs a masculine straightening out. On the other hand, it is sincere, marked by a deep feeling, and evidently that of a progressive man. The low-toned autumn piece, A Quiet Pool, something in the poetic manner of McEntee, could hardly be better. This, and his etchings, full of the impressiveness of twilight, of long perspective lines, of the catching of light on objects in confined interiors, are the things I am most sorry to go away from, now that our ramble is ended.

Raymond Westbrook.