New Aspects of Art Study

TEN years ago the English or American reader who wished to study the history of this or that painter or school outside the pages of a few compendiums was obliged, in most cases, to seek an authority in a language not his own. He had access, of course, to the sterling works of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, — works still indispensable, — and Morelli was available in English. He could find profit in Ruskin, too, as he can find it to-day, if aided by an instinctive faculty for separating wheat from chaff, sound principles from rhapsody. Symonds’s pages on the fine arts, in his history of the Italian renaissance, were there to give him much instruction and more suggestion, and he could learn something from Walter Pater. Hamerton, at least in his book on etching, was likewise a guide worth following. But even with these authors, and with certain others figuring honorably in the bibliography of his subject, if he wanted to pursue that subject beyond a certain point, he was driven to consult French, German, and other Continental writers. Since that time things have changed, and at the present moment an extraordinary number of art books exist in English, constituting a phenomenon to which, in my opinion, insufficient attention has been paid. The causes underlying their production deserve examination for the light they throw on the development of mechanical appliances, commercial enterprise, and public taste.

If I mention the mechanical aspect of the question first, it is for the very good reason that without the perfecting of reproductive processes the appearance of these books would have been indefinitely postponed. Though it is many years since the proprietors of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts strengthened their magazine by using, in addition to the etchings for which it had long been famous, the heliogravures of M. Dujardin, and Mr. Hamerton improved the Portfolio along the same lines, the costliness of these photographic plates militated against their frequent employment in really popular publications. Heliogravures and photogravures of a high quality are still expensive, but they are more accessible than they were, and with the rapid development of the halftone process, susceptible of yielding remarkably good results, the making of an adequately illustrated book on art became easily possible. Photography having been carried to a high state of perfection by the invention of the isochromatic lens, which assures a faithful reproduction of color values in a print, such a publication is now solidly valuable to the student, which the old picture books were not. To allude to those old picture books is to show where commercial enterprise has found its opportunity. Around the Christmas holidays the serious work on art has taken the place of the cumbrous gift book which for years used to present itself — in all the panoply of ambitious but rarely satisfying engravings, “ graceful ” text, and altogether appalling binding — as the sole literary “ decoration ” for one friend to give to another. Publishers have found that a book on art intelligently written, well illustrated with photogravures or halftones, or both, and printed and bound in good taste, pays quite as well as the monstrosity of a former day, and even better, since its sale is not necessarily confined to the holiday season. The public has promptly shown its appreciation. In the first place it could not but see the improvement lying upon the surface, and, moreover, it has steadily experienced improvement in its taste, owing to the impetus which the half-tone process has given to the publication of art periodicals and to the treatment of artistic subjects in the miscellaneous magazines.

In England, even before Mr. Hamerton’s death, the Portfolio had to be abandoned and the success of the Portfolio Monographs, which took its place, was never what it should have been. But the Studio, which was founded in London some ten or twelve years ago, has been helped, not only by good editing, but by the use of reproductive processes, to great prosperity ; other magazines, like the Art Journal, and the Magazine of Art, have weathered periods of depression, and are now very popular; the Connoisseur, started a couple of years ago, is firmly established ; and only the other day the first number of a new periodical devoted to the interests of the student and collector, the Burlington Magazine, was brought out in sumptuous form. In Paris, the home of art publications, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts prints more plates than ever, which it is fair to assume it would not do if there were not an increased demand for the magazine; M. Leroi has successfully revived his once famous periodical, L’Art; and a new monthly, Les Arts, remarkable for the size and excellence of its half-tones, has been brought out with the text printed in English as well as in French, and has been running with success for more than a year. American art magazines have in the past come up and flourished only to die from neglect, but there is talk of new and ambitious ventures in this field, and it is probable that if they are controlled by a wise and liberal policy, they will be generously supported. Certainly we have shown the fullest hospitality to foreign publications of the sort, and to more than one series of reproductions such as the Hundred Best Pictures, the Cosmos Pictures, the Riverside Art Series, and Masters in Art. Does not all this show that a good deal of water has gone under the bridges in the past ten years, and that the literature of art has attained to a standing and an influence in this country which we may fairly call unprecedented ? It is safe to say that if we have more exhibitions than ever, if more people visit them, and if in architecture and decoration public taste has markedly improved, the wider dissemination of books on art has had a great deal to do with it.

It is interesting, in a brief survey of some of the more recent of these publications, to consider them with special reference to the foregoing remarks. One naturally is curious to see from just what points of view the makers of art books, authors and publishers, are treating their opportunity. Two points may be indicated in regard to the latter. In the first place, they are practically unanimous in making the most of photographic processes, leaving the engraver, who was once so important to them, to shift for himself. In this, I cannot but feel that they are, on the whole, well advised. The American school of wood engraving has in the past achieved so many fine things that one regrets to see it fallen upon evil days, but the logic of events is indubitably against its rehabilitation, unless its members devote themselves to purely original work, as Lepere has done with so much success in France, or cultivate the art of portraiture on wood as Mr. Gustav Kruell has done in such masterly fashion in this country. For reproductive work — and it is reproductive work that is required in the art book of the day — the wood-engraver is at a disadvantage. Witness the latest of the volumes by Mr. Timothy Cole,¹ brought out after the blocks in it had appeared in the Century Magazine. This collection of engravings after the old English masters testifies to Mr. Cole’s individuality and skill as a craftsman, but while such a version as he gives you of a masterpiece by Hogarth, Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Constable, or any one of half a dozen others, may be admired for its own sake, as an attractive piece of black and white work, it is not comparable for a moment to a good photogravure as an equivalent in monotone for the original painting. Decidedly the publishers are right in adhering to the photographic process. Whether they are right or not in bringing out some of their art books on a more than luxurious scale, with no edition at a modest price, is an open question. For my own part, I cannot regard a book as really published, in the proper sense of that term, which is printed at anywhere from seventy-five to three hundred dollars a copy in a very limited edition. Books of this sort are subscribed for by wealthy collectors ; it is no uncommon thing for the list to be completed before the book is off the press, and when it is at last printed, it passes straight from the publisher to some library not generally accessible. It might as well not have been printed, for all the good it does to the world at large. Here, however, we may take leave of the publisher, and consider the labors of the author.

We go to the author primarily for facts, for accurate biographical narrative and systematic description of the works that illustrate the life of his master. These, be it said, we get in abundance, and set forth in admirable fashion. Fine writing seems, fortunately, to have fallen into disrepute, —not the least welcome result of that reaction against Ruskin which it is impossible to ignore, for all that, as I write these lines, there is issuing from the press of his old publisher, George Allen, a new and uniform edition of his complete works. I rejoice in the appearance of this edition, which, under the competent hand of Mr. E. T. Cook, is to be put together in some thirty volumes containing all the old illustrations and many new ones. It will be a fitting monument to the great critic, and it will be very useful. There is nothing more foolish than to imagine, because Ruskin fell into more than one error and has been jauntily “ exposed ” by one critic after another, that he has been permanently invalidated. He is bound to survive among writers on art if only as a source of kindling enthusiasm, as a storehouse of provocative ideas and suggestions, waking in the reader a zest for beautiful things. But by this time the absurdity of trying to use Ruskin’s style without his genius has been pretty generally recognized, and just as the critics of to-day have learned to avoid the whimsical theorizing which he made so popular for a time, so they have learned to tell a straightforward tale in plain language.

As regards the criticism which they bring to the telling of it, it is never inspired, it is often of a decidedly pedestrian order, but in the main it is based on painstaking research, and is trustworthy in a surprisingly large number of its conclusions. It is divided into three schools : the scientific or archæological, founded by the late Giovanni Morelli, whose morphological tests have commended themselves to a vast number of the younger writers of the day ; the popular historical and æsthetic, in which the late Eugene Muntz and the late Charles Yriarte were conspicuous exemplars; and the impressionistic, in which the influence of the studio is paramount, fortified by Fromentin in literature, but even more constant in reliance upon the obiter dicta of Mr. Whistler and those of his colleagues who would confine the criticism of art to artists. Perhaps the most encouraging fact about the situation is that the first two of these schools are not unwilling each to take a leaf from the other’s book, and both are wise enough to make use of what is good in the third, with the result that there is not much confusion abroad and the public is greatly benefited.

Mr. Bernhard Berenson is the salient figure in the first of the groups outlined above, important in his own work and as the master of a goodly number of disciples. He is now putting through the press a book which ought to prove more interesting and valuable than anything he has hitherto produced, an elaborate work on the drawings of the Florentine masters. While engaged upon this task he has published two volumes on the Study and Criticism of Italian Art,² made up of miscellaneous papers previously printed in periodicals. They present some of the most characteristic studies of an extraordinarily clever follower in the footsteps of Morelli, essentially scientific in spirit. He can put his science to good purpose. The patient ingenuity with which he analyzes the Caen Sposalizio, long given to Perugino, and justifies his attribution of it to Lo Spagna, leaves one not only appreciative of Mr. Berenson, but very favorably impressed by the critical method he has adopted. But that method, even in Morelli’s own hands, was always “ suspect ” as having too much in it of the rule of thumb, which leads to arrogance and stodge. Mr. Berenson has hitherto had far too much confidence in it, and dozens of less experienced writers have threatened to bring it into positive disrepute. Happily, in the second of the two volumes just mentioned, the author shows signs of a change of heart. “ In the work of art, at least,” he says, “ genius is, after all, everything,” a broad enough hint, as it seems to me, that there are regions in which science, with its tape measure, cannot offer, after all, the last word of criticism. “The ultimate test,” Mr. Berenson goes on, “ of the value of any touchstone is Quality. . . . The Sense of Quality is indubitably the most essential equipment of a would-be connoisseur. It is the touchstone of all his laboriously collected documentary and historical evidences, of all the possible morphological tests he may be able to bring to bear upon the work of art.” It is doubly comforting to read this candid admission, because Mr. Berenson is bound to profit by turning his back on what is worthless in the Morellian system, and is not unlikely, by this plain speaking, to keep some of his disciples from going too far astray. They have done a great deal of work for the now voluminous series of popular monographs, edited by Dr. G. C. Williamson, under the general title of the Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture.³ These are, in the main, excellent little books, workmanlike in arrangement and style, containing fairly complete catalogues, and often valuable documentary appendices. They are freely illustrated with half-tones, and the frontispiece is always a good photogravure. Not seldom, however, they have been marked by the bumptiousness and erratic judgments which proclaim the amateur, cutting his fingers upon tools forged in the Morellian workshop. I mention the series partly to give it the commendation which in general it deserves, and partly as illustrating the point that the Morellian hypothesis, if it has done some good, has done and may still do harm. Mr. Berenson has discovered its limitations. Perhaps if he continues to make public admission of them, in season and out of season, the half-baked, pseudo-scientific art book will become more and more infrequent. In the meantime other forces are at work, and it is one of these other forces which is productive of the majority of the art books now being placed before the public.

It is well represented by Mr. Gerald S. Davies, whose Frans Hals⁴ is among the important publications of the season. In this book, which is, by the way, a superbly illustrated folio, packed with photogravures and half-tones, an effort is made, typical of recent authorship in this field, to clear up the obscurities in the career of a master, to strip his art of all rhetorical and adventitious accretions, and to put the man and his work before us in the simplest manner possible. Mr. Davies explodes the old conception of Hals as a terrible toper ; grants that he was a materialist, who never painted a picture having for its raison d’être “ either a moral motive or a pathetic motive; ” but insists that he painted the life around him with sincerity and truth, as well as with skill, and is to be valued as a consummate master of realism. He scoffs at the idea that the Dutch struggle with Spain had anything to do with the development of Hals’s art. On the contrary, he maintains that the painter reflected in his work, as a matter of course, the ingrained thoroughness of his race, whether in peace or at war, and, in short, he brings Hals out into the light of day where one may see him as he was and appraise him as a man of entirely ponderable qualities, not in the least an esoteric figure. It is for this common sense, as I may call it, that I am chiefly grateful to Mr. Davies. He might have gone off at a tangent on the subject of what patriotism may or may not have done for Hals. He might have filled pages with the jargon of the studio, where Hals is exalted as a “ painter’s painter,” — and one might, perhaps, have forgiven him, for painter’s painting is undeniably an inspiring theme. But the book is worth having, first and last, because it tells the reader simply what he wants to know, and tells it to him with brevity and clearness. This then is the kind of art book that is most to be desired at the present time, and that, fortunately, is most often published.

It is for their critical sanity and for their unassuming workmanlike character that I would praise the three stately volumes in which three great English masters have lately been commemorated. The first of these is, in part, an old volume reprinted, Mr. Austin Dobson’s classical work on Hogarth,⁵ but in its new form this seems almost a new book. The large folio overflows with fine reproductions of the works of the master, so that we have, in addition to Mr. Dobson’s minutely historical text, a veritable Hogarth gallery. This means much. The special merit of many of these photogravures consists in their having been made, not from the prints through which the satires are chiefly known, but from the original paintings, and in a prefatory chapter Sir Walter Armstrong re-states the case for Hogarth as a colorist and brushman. I say that he re-states it, because there have not been wanting other critics, at least in the last twenty-five years, to lay stress upon Hogarth’s power as a painter. Nevertheless, no book has ever been made about him in which the point has been so well elucidated as in the present publication, or with such an array of really eloquent reproductions. This volume, therefore, like Mr. Davies’s, renders a definite service. We all know that Hogarth was a great satirist. Not all of us know that he was, merely as a manipulator of pigment, worthy to stand beside Velasquez or Hals, especially Hals. He lacked, perhaps, the wonderful maestria of the Dutchman, as shown in the great corporation pieces at Haarlem, and, with a certain accent of restraint, in the Laughing Cavalier of the Wallace Collection. There is a sharper note, there is a more brilliant virtuosity, in one of Hals’s old fish fags, or in the Bohemien of the Louvre, than in Hogarth’s Shrimp Girl in the National Gallery. But I have always felt in that enchantingly vivid sketch, in the Captain Coram, in the Mrs. Salter, and in the satirical canvases in the National Gallery and the Soane Museum, a full measure of that instinct for sheer paint and the magical handling of it for its own sake, which one discerns in Hals. Hogarth’s repute as a satirist and historian of manners is likely to overshadow, as it has long overshadowed, his repute as a painter, as a purely pictorial designer. Sir Walter Armstrong cannot hope completely to reverse the judgment established by the usage of generations, and, indeed, there is no reason why he should ; modification, not complete reversal, is what is wanted. This he seems likely to bring about in many new quarters. By the influence of his introduction to Mr. Dobson’s book the prints can lose nothing of their fame, and the paintings promise to have their merits more widely recognized.

Sir Walter Armstrong had a more difficult task before him when he wrote his new book on Turner,⁶ another folio like the Hogarth, and, like it, richly illustrated with photogravures. He had in this case to defend his hero from unfair critics and to save him from his friends. Ruskin, who has some impeccable passages on Turner, treated him at large with too much enthusiasm, wrapping the painter in a most misleading glamour. Later writers, with the fear of the technical critics before their eyes, have again and again gone to the other extreme, and where Ruskin saw sublime visions of beauty, they have seen a specious iridescence. Sir Walter Armstrong steers between the two schools, and I find him very persuasive in what he says of Turner’s knowledge of landscape structure, of mountain, tree, and cloud forms, and of his sensitiveness to atmospheric effects. But it seems to me that Turner’s “habit of noting down nature as color ” lured him a good deal further away from the essential truths of nature than Sir Walter Armstrong is ready to admit. He asks a very pertinent question : “ Why do so many of those whose souls are moved by beauty, whose emotions are really touched by a fine piece of Nankin, by a Caffieri mount, by a Pisano medallion, by a Dürer drawing, by a Rembrandt etching, by a picture of Titian, Velasquez, or Gainsborough, — why are people of various races who really love, and understand, such things as these, so often unmoved by Turner ? ” The most definite of his answers is that it is because “ Turner was no decorator; ” but a much more satisfactory answer is supplied by putting the painter to a very simple and practical test, by spending an hour or so among his pictures in the National Gallery. One turns away, at last, surfeited of nothing more or less than mere color. In other words, it was by his greatest gift that Turner was betrayed. His “ habit of noting down nature as color ” ended by making him more faithful to his notes than to nature, and turned his great landscapes and heroic compositions into mere prismatic splendors, beguiling for a while, but not permanently satisfying. He was a man of genius, a poet on canvas, a virtuoso incomparable for audacity and a kind of orchestral plangency. He was not, to my mind, a constructive pioneer in modern landscape, a man of durable influence ; in fact, the line of development from the old Italian masters through Poussin and Claude and the painters of the Low Countries, to the rise of naturalism in England and in France and the culminating achievements of the Barbizon school, has always seemed to me to have suffered no more than a temporary dislocation through the ministrations of Turner, great as he is in his own restricted sphere. Sir Walter Armstrong says all that can be said in support of his high opinion of him, and undoubtedly does a great deal to clarify appreciation of him. If he does not give Turner a totally new lease of life, he places him, at any rate, in a more rational perspective, and certainly detaches him, once and for all, from his dubious identification with Ruskin’s phosphorescent prose.

The sterility of Turner’s art, historically speaking, appears in an even clearer light if the reader turns directly from Sir Walter Armstrong’s book to the similarly imposing folio recently published by Mr. C. J. Holmes, Constable and his Influence on Landscape Painting.⁷ In the first, one seems to have turned back, in a mood absolutely impersonal, to the consideration of a great museum hero ; in the second, one is in the current of art as it still flows through the schools of to-day. Mr. Holmes has written, as the title of his book suggests, a critical monograph rather than a biography ; and even though his condensation of personal details were not amply justified by the existence of Leslie’s standard work, I should not be inclined to quarrel with him. Constable’s place in history has needed just the éclaircissement it receives at his hands. That it implies a large share in the growth of French naturalism is well known,—too well known, perhaps ; for, like many a commonplace of the text-books, the record of Constable’s sensational appearance in the Salon of 1824 has been taken by many readers as something talismanic and conclusive, the monument of a masterful and revolutionary incursion into a field waiting for this creative organizer and no other. It does not weaken the famous Englishman’s position, it only makes him the more interesting, to have his relation to those memorable proceedings defined with precision. Mr. Holmes is at pains to show that on the Continent, in the twenties, “ revolution was already in the air,” and that the exhibition of Constable’s pictures, “ however far it may have determined the course of the new movement, was only one of several agents that precipitated the crisis,” — that is, the leading literary and dramatic figures in the Romantic Revival. The artist himself seems to have had no very clear consciousness of having set the Seine on fire. “They are amusing and acute, but shallow,” he said of the French criticisms that his wife translated for him, — and he remains altogether, at this significant epoch in the history of his beloved art, so little stirred by his own reference to it that to see him in the spectacular rôle of the bold innovator is to see him falsely. Mr. Holmes, deftly elucidating the situation as it existed in Paris when Constable’s work first made itself felt there, is equally accurate and instructive in treating the earlier and later phases of his problem. His object is not to sing pæans over the exploits of an individual, isolating Constable as though he were a unique phenomenon, but to trace backwards and forwards from him that stream of artistic principle on which landscape in all ages has alone been able to move toward legitimate success. He misses no point of contact between Constable and the various Old Masters to whose tradition he was, in a measure, susceptible ; but he is decisive on the courage and power with which his painter broke with that tradition under the pressure of his dœmon, and gave impetus to the new régime of broader method, racier truth, healthier sentiment, and sincerer style, which, to the men of our own generation, makes the classical temper almost unthinkable. The book is valuable for its luminous exposition of just what Constable accomplished. It is also valuable for its full and interesting survey of general principles, amounting to a concise résumé of the essentials in the history of landscape art. It closes on a passage so judicious and so apt that I cannot forbear quotation : —

“ Painters and their friends are nowadays as fervent devotees of Nature as then they were devotees of the Old Masters. Indeed, there would almost seem to be a risk of naturalism being made as heavy a chain for the young artist as were the classical canons in Constable’s time. Were that to happen, the painter would forget that nature is not the end of art, but only one of the means towards it, and, by that forgetfulness, would lose the privilege of freedom to do what his soul desires — to reveal the beauty his imagination has constructed — in the fittest possible way that his education and his instinct can invent, however traditional, or novel, or laborious, or summary that way may be. Such personal freedom, and not realism or idealism, or any other hard and fast theory, was the guiding principle of Constable’s life, as it has been the guiding principle of all other true artists before or since.”

If this passage embodies a warning to landscape painters in particular, it pleads, tacitly, for greater catholicity among artists and art students in general. It is a curious paradox that there is no one like your modern artist for the drastic delimitation of the artistic frontier, no one more eager to expel from the sacred soil any type, ancient or modern, not instantly adjustable to certain narrowly defined conditions. Thus I have heard Raphael gravely denounced, and have seen him expeditiously legislated into the limbo of things “ played out,” because he had never learned to paint in the manner of Velasquez. Consternation and compassion were written upon the face of a great painter to whom I happened to say, not long since, that I thought of traveling from Paris to Montauban in order to see the rich collection there of drawings by Ingres. I believe he thought that I had lost all sense of the value of time. It still seems to me, however, as I wrote in this magazine nine years ago, that in knowledge of what is good in all the schools lies the path to the truest freedom, and I have watched with peculiar satisfaction the growth of public interest in those earlier Italians, for a revival of whose influence, as I pointed out at that time, there is great need. They occupy the larger proportion of the series of popular handbooks edited by Dr. Williamson to which I have referred, and the more ambitious volumes devoted to them are constantly increasing in number. How important these studies have become to the English-speaking public is shown in the first place by the appearance of such excellent monographs as the Fra Angelico ⁸ of Mr. Langton Douglass, which has lately been printed in a second edition, and by a fact in the highest degree creditable to publishers and readers, I mean the issuance of scholarly works by foreign critics in English before their publication in the tongue of the author. In 1901 Herr Kristeller’s authoritative book on Mantegna ⁹ was published in an English translation before the German edition was got under way. One of the best books of the season now closing, Ricci’s Pintoricchio,¹⁰ was written at the request of a London publisher, Mr. Heinemann, who put English and French translations of it simultaneously upon the market, in handsome form. I may mention, by the way, that this book is notable for the colored plates it contains, promising, if not wholly successful, specimens of a process which is destined to play a great part in illustration ; but the first merit of the work is that it does tardy justice to a fascinating painter. It is the fashion to decry Pintoricchio, as though, since he is of lighter calibre than Perugino and Raphael, he could not ask to be taken seriously. Dr. Ricci so takes him, realizing that if he had not the ecstatic sensibility of Perugino, or the creative force of Raphael, he had technical ability, great resource in pictorial narration, and a rich fund of that naïve sweetness which passed as by a kind of artless clairvoyance into the paintings of the Umbrian school. It is a mistake to assume from the absence of dramatic weight, of spiritual sublimity, and of the “ grand style ” in his work, from his expression of even his most poignant ideas in terms of graceful narrative, that he had nothing in him of the heroic strain which we associate with the masters of the Renaissance. The sheer bulk and variety, and the unfailingly decorative rectitude and beauty of his wall paintings at Rome, Siena, and Spello, testify to his possession of more than ordinary powers. He has in these and in his Madonnas and portraits, if any Italian of his time has it, charm ; and the craftsmanship which he brings to the exploitation of it is so polished and so personal in its edge that I confess I find it very difficult to perceive what the writers are driving at who balk at giving him a commanding place in the artistic Pantheon. It is true that he was inferior to Raphael or Mantegna in passion and in intellectual grasp, but he was none the less a superb decorator, and, I repeat, a man of the most persuasive charm. It is exhilarating to find Dr. Ricci celebrating his genius and career with loving care, doing him justice with no less discretion than zeal, and making it, when all is said, a little more difficult than before to wave away Pintoricchio’s claim to high renown.

There are one or two other studies of Italian themes which I must notice. Mr. Douglass, the author of the monograph on Fra Angelico already cited, has written in his History of Siena ¹¹ not only a spirited account of the development of the famous hill town, but some uncommonly sympathetic and useful pages on the Sienese school of painters and sculptors. Unlike the great folios at which I have been glancing, this is a handy volume, well calculated at once for use in the library and for the traveler. Similar in form is the Story of Siena and San Gimignano,¹² by Mr. Edmund G. Gardner, but this author, while not inattentive to the artists, gives them no such illuminating treatment as they receive at the hands of Mr. Douglass; he blends his descriptions of pictures and monuments with a systematic narrative of Sienese history. Both books are well illustrated ; Mr. Douglass’s with photogravures and half-tones, Mr. Gardner’s with plates made by the same processes, and a quantity of clever pen drawings by the late Helen M. James. Mr. Fletcher’s Andrea Palladio ¹³ is a rather baldly written but nevertheless welcome sketch of an architect whose influence, filtering through English practice, was once not without effect in this country, and may very easily be of service to us again. American architecture has shown itself extremely sensitive to the example of an essentially idiosyncratic genius like the late H. H. Richardson, but for a number of years it has gravitated, in its eclectic way, far more to the neo-classical models provided by the Italian Renaissance, and despite the recent vogue of French academic ideas, brought back by our younger men from the École des BeauxArts, a recrudescence of the Palladian mood is easily possible. It might not be altogether desirable if it were guided too literally by Palladian precedent. The purer and more creative style of Bramante remains by all odds our best inspiration in the Renaissance. But there is something very beguiling, very effective in a picturesque way, in the masterpieces of Palladio. At Vicenza especially, his native town, which is richly endowed with monuments of his genius, he has always struck me as possessing an almost romantic amplitude and humanized stateliness, and our public buildings would not suffer if the designers of them were to profit by his teachings. They would lose nothing in the qualities of balance and proportion, and they would gain in breadth of feeling, in play of light and shade. The scholarship on which many an official facade in America is based might be bettered by a tinge of that robust quality which is characteristic of the Vicentine architect at his best, for if our scholarship is often sound it also often yields results as thin and bloodless as they are correct. Mr. Fletcher’s book, filled with good halftones and line drawings, may contribute something to the enforcement of this point.

To the completion of Lady Dilke’s great work on the French art of the eighteenth century, signalized by the appearance of her volume on the Engravers and Draughtsmen,¹⁴ it is impossible to make more than the briefest allusion ; an adequate criticism of the four volumes would require all the space devoted to this article. I cannot refrain, however, from noting the immense debt of gratitude which we owe to the author of these books. Every year students are learning that the eighteenth century was most decidedly not the mother of dead dogs that it was once supposed to be, and in art, especially, the lesson is sinking deep. Lady Dilke has shown, as no one else has shown in English, the true value of the French architects, painters, sculptors, decorators, furniture-makers, draughtsmen, and engravers of the time ; her work is a mine of important facts, most conveniently arranged; it abounds in good criticism, and it is lavishly illustrated with first-rate photogravures and half-tones. The student could not do without it, and it is equally significant for the collector, who has of late begun to take a livelier interest in the masterpieces of the earlier French school.

I have referred to the impressionistic criticism which is active in these days, though productive of fewer books than emanate from the scientific and historical schools. It has just been illustrated by two excellent volumes, a sumptuous folio on Nineteenth Century Art,¹⁵ by Mr. D. S. MacColl, the critic of the Saturday Review, and a pocket collection of Views and Reviews,¹⁶ by Mr. W. E. Henley. Mr. MacColl has written nominally to commemorate the last Glasgow exposition, but he has ignored many of the works there exposed, framing an independent analysis of the development of nineteenth-century painting. He is an original and stimulating thinker, with an extensive vocabulary and a very terse, convincing way of putting things. His book is so well worth reading that I wish it could be reprinted in handy form for popular circulation. Mr. Henley’s knowledge of art is less technical than Mr. MacColl’s, and he gives his essays on modern men and movements a more literary flavor. He is more self-assertive into the bargain, and has to be read with greater care. But he, too, is stimulating, and the reader who takes his book, Mr. MacColl’s, and Mr. W. C. Brownell’s admirable French Art, studying all three together, will find his equipment for the appreciation of modern painting and sculpture enormously strengthened. I commend to the same reader, as suggestive introductions to a wider range of study, the Meaning of Pictures,¹⁷ by Professor J. C. Van Dyke, and the Enjoyment of Art,¹⁸ by Carleton Noyes, both judicious and entertaining little handbooks. Finally, to the lover of the curious in this field of investigation, I may point out the fresh interest of Mr. Theodore Andrea Cook’s Spirals in Nature and Art,¹⁹ wherein, by a cogent process of reasoning, the open staircase at Blois, in Touraine, is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

Royal Cortissoz.