Significant Art Books

THE development of the art book as a really active factor in current literature here and in England is recent enough for certain questions of form to have failed, as yet, to get themselves settled. Since I began these annual surveys of the subject in the Atlantic, I have had occasion to note more than one definite step of policy taken by the publishers in what has looked like a regular campaign toward the establishment of a practicable and profitable method. Readers on both sides of the ocean have been extraordinarily stimulated to interest themselves in art matters, and little by little the books intended for this rapidly expanding public have been taking the right shape. Attention was drawn last year in this place to the increase in the number of books projected less as handsome gifts than as thorough studies of valuable themes, adequately but not too luxuriously produced as regards press work and illustration. At the same time half a dozen works were recorded which had been brought out in sumptuous form, — works like The Prado and its Masterpieces, by Mr. Ricketts, The History of Portrait. Miniatures, by Dr. Williamson, or the Romney of Mr. Humphry Ward and Mr. W. Roberts. This year it would seem as if the manufacture of these imposing quartos and folios had been almost entirely abandoned. One or two examples will presently be touched upon, and it may be remarked in passing that art books on a great scale, when they have a certain character, will always be successful; but on the whole it looks as though the less expensive volume were destined to be accepted as the type.

The art student of modest means longs to possess many a monumental book, but its price places it beyond his reach, — for a time at least. If he has patience he may ultimately be able to acquire the coveted book. A number of the costly publications I have in mind have proved doubtful ventures, though of great intrinsic merit, and copies of them have lately been displayed for sale in those shops which make a business of disposing of “remainders” at seriously reduced prices. This fate seems to have overtaken more particularly the book devoted to a single master, I suppose for the reason that the student can, as a rule, find all that he wants to know about such a subject in some inexpensive volume, and he feels that, to pay twenty-five dollars, say, for a collection of fine photogravures, is, for him, an extravagance. Hence the fact that the superbly made books of the present season are not biographical monographs, but works of a miscellaneous character, appealing to the collector even more than to the student.

The first of these publications is The Royal Collection of Paintings at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,¹ brought out by command of the king in two magnificent volumes, with an introduction and descriptive text by Mr. Lionel Cust. It contains one hundred and eighty photogravures of generous dimensions, and it forms a precious record of one of the finest collections in the world. This collection, founded in Tudor times, embraces many more masterpieces than one would assume to be in it, in view of the fact that the royal house of Great Britain has not been, in every generation, a house of connoisseurs. The truth is, however, that, what with the commissions executed by court painters, the gifts received from foreign sovereigns, and the purchases frequently made by the kings and queens of England, the artistic property of the crown remains to-day positively resplendent, despite even such a catastrophe as that which followed the execution of Charles I, in the dispersal of his pictorial and other treasures by order of Parliament. Mr. Cust gives an interesting account of the way in which many of the martyred king’s belongings were recovered for England, and he shows how precious additions were made to the royal collection even in the Victorian epoch, which has always had a feeble reputation in matters of art. The popularity of painters like Winterhalter and Von Angeli at court has seemed to spell a wholly backward tendency in respect to taste in that quarter; but Mr. Cust justly makes much of the fact, hitherto very little known, save among critics and historians, that the late Prince Albert was advanced enough in connoisseurship to have purchased some highly interesting examples of the early Italian school. Indeed, this book will go far to establish in an unexpectedly favorable light more than one of those who have helped to make the royal collection. People who have given to Henry VIII and Charles I more credit, as lovers of art, than they have given to any of their successors, will acquire from Mr. Cust’s pages a new sense of what was done in the same field in the Georgian epoch and later. The superb photogravures in this book illustrate masterpieces of the Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Flemish, French, German, and English schools, which have been known before as priceless, but which have not before been placed so effectively in the perspective of England’s social history.

By a rather striking coincidence the second of the elaborately made publications which I have to record also relates to England. This is the smaller, but still ample, volume called British Painters and Engravers of the Eighteenth Century from Kneller to Reynolds,² which has been brought out with text by Mr. Edmund Gosse. It is not so much a history of the subject as it is a collection of plates after those mezzotints, “plain and colored,” in which the enchanting portraits painted by fashionable artists who were also men of genius, were reproduced with an elegance and a skill unsurpassed by the originals. The plates in their turn are so well made that in some, if not in all cases, they actually rival the qualities of the mezzotints from which they are taken. Mr. Gosse’s text provides an instructive accompaniment to the illustrations, but it is as a picture gallery in little that this will find its appreciative public. It is to be followed next year by a similar volume in which the succession of painters and engravers will be carried on from Reynolds to the nineteenth century.

Art, and society meet on polished terms in Mr. Gosse’s pages, and, in fact, the world of his painters and engravers seems also so much the world of urbane statesmen and stately beauties that one might easily forget that the artists had their Bohemia in that flashing epoch. It is very much worth while, therefore, to consider, with the other works under discussion, a book, which, while not strictly speaking an art book, does a great deal to increase our knowledge of the milieu in which British art was produced at a critical stage of its history. The new edition of the Reminiscences of Henry Angelo,³ which has been printed in two well-proportioned volumes with a wealth of illustrations, is a blessing, since it gives new life to the observations of a man qualified to speak with equal authority on the figures of the Court and those of the studios in the eighteenth century. A scion of a family renowned in the annals of professional swordsmanship, he was brought up in the brilliant society crowding the rooms of the fashionable fencingmaster of an age jealous of the point of honor. Great nobles sought the tuition which, of all men in Europe, Angelo’s father was best qualified to give, and the lordly patron then was often, in his condescending way, the friend of those who served him. Both as a boy in his father’s house, and afterwards, when himself a tower of strength to the young bloods about town, Angelo had every chance to use his sharp eyes and equally attentive ears, and to store up impressions of his celebrated contemporaries.

Throughout his career, too, artists, musicians, authors, and wits generally were among his intimates, and he was able, in consequence, when he wrote his reminiscences, to show the reader many a great man at play, unbending and talking about his profession without reserve, humanizing himself, as it were, for the edification of posterity. Thus the student who has seen only the monumental significance of a certain historic portrait by Reynolds has but to turn to Angelo to be brought closer to the mood in which the painter actually approached his work. Here is the revealing anecdote: 44 Garrick, one day dining at the elder Lacy’s in Berners Street, where the late President West was of the party, and speaking of Sir Joshua’s incomparable portrait of the Marquess of Granby and his horse, observed, ‘I was complimenting my friend on the nobleness and grand simplicity of the composition, and the candid-minded painter, with a simplicity no less noble and grand, returned: “Sir, I took the hint for that composition from a common woodcut, the headpiece to a worthless ballad.”’”

Angelo’s book is thickly studded with these bits of workshop gossip, free anecdotes of artists and others whose eminence he fully appreciated, but whose everyday walk and demeanor friendship authorized him to sketch with an utterly unhampered pen. He tells us of the actor Quin, and of the way in which that blithe spirit used to talk to Gainsborough. “Sometimes, Tom Gainsborough,” he would say, “the same picture, from your rigmarole style, appears to my optics the veriest daub — and then — the devil ’s in you — I think you a Van Dyck.” We see the painter in his hours of enthusiastic but not too patient effort to master one musical instrument or another; we see Rowlandson getting to the bottom of his twelfth glass of punch as he exchanges stories with Peter Pindar and other old cronies; or we see George Morland, half drunk, and diverting that rare Bohemian, the Right Honorable Charles James Fox, with his bemused humor. The king himself frequently passes across the stage, mingling with artists, and playing, in a manner all his own, the æsthetic wiseacre. In short, these Reminiscences recreate the very life and movement of the time. The court painter and the caricaturist jostle one another in the volumes, and we are made to feel how the suave ministrations of a Reynolds and the boisterous, heavy-footed satire of a Rowlandson or a Gillray, were nourished at the same fountains of social habit. The numerous plates, often in color, from mezzotints and other prints in the collection of Mr. Joseph Grego, who supplies notes on them for this edition, complete an invaluable record. They include, in addition to many portraits, some capital views and a number of humorous pieces. In more than one case the illustration is unfamiliar, and in every case the subject is so interesting, the artistic quality of the original work is so high, and the reproduction has been so perfectly made, that Mr. Grego’s share in the publication is hardly secondary in importance to the text.

With this book we take leave of the collector and his editions de luxe, passing to the student and to the works framed for his use, which, as I have indicated, dominate at this time; but we will remain on English soil. English writers have busied themselves with uncommon energy over the history and criticism of art in the last few years, and of late they have been especially attentive to their own heroes and institutions. The books treating of these form a group which serves to bring up the whole question of what the relation of the genius of the people has been to art from the very beginning.

We have seen from Mr. Cust’s book what Britain’s rulers have done to assemble a great body of work by the masters, and to contribute thereby, whether consciously or unconsciously, to the development of a standard of taste. We have been reminded by Mr. Gosse’s book and by the Angelo “ Reminiscences” of that fruitful period in which it must have seemed to those who lived in it that an English school had at last been raised upon a firm foundation. But in neither case have we been made aware of one of those long-continued creative forces of which the student is conscious when he is traversing the history of one of the Continental schools. To think of the eighteenth century in English art is to think of masters like Reynolds and Gainsborough, who appeared upon the scene as practically unheralded gifts from the gods, and, dying, left practically no heirs. Hogarth alone survives as a truly racial type, and there has never been a second Hogarth. To think of Mr. Cust’s royal connoisseurs is to remember that the salient Tudor painters were foreigners like Holbein and Moro, and that as years went on it was to alien hands — to those of a Van Dyck, for example — that the court was wont to go for its paintings. Native talent, when it cropped up, was for a long time apt to be crassly imitative.

The absence of an inborn feeling for art in the British nature is exposed with obviously unintentional clearness by the authors of The Royal Academy and its Members, 1768-1830,⁴ a book in which one would expect to find, if anywhere, some evidences of a national predilection. Without unfairly exaggerating what was, doubtless, a kind of accident, we may, nevertheless, find a rather uninspiring significance in the “first cause” of England’s most famous art institution. In the book under consideration, written by the late Mr. J. E. Hodgson, and Mr. Fred A. Eaton, with the aid of Mr. G. D. Leslie, it is related that the talk in London in the eighteenth century about starting a more or less official society was brought to a head by the financial returns of an exhibition got up for the benefit of the Foundling Hospital. “That charitable exhibition in Great Coram Street,” we are told, “was the germ of the Royal Academy.” Exhibitions were organized, with lively anxiety as to the possible profits, and as we go through this volume it is difficult not to feel that it commemorates a purely economic phase in the development of British art. There is something very characteristic about George the Third’s solicitude for what he loved to call “My Academy.” He had a real share in its administration, undertaking “to supply any deficiencies between the receipts derived from the exhibitions and the expenditures incurred on the schools, charitable donations to artists, etc., out of his own privy purse;” and though the artists, as they prospered, gladly dispensed with his aid, he never ceased to interfere when their actions in money matters struck him as injudicious. From the start, admission to the Academy conferred solid benefits upon an artist; it meant that he had achieved a definite and honorable standing, and reassured the hesitating purchaser of a picture as nothing else would have reassured him. So it was in the eighteenth century, and so it is to-day.

Neither in the old days nor in the new has the Academy stood for an artistic inspiration. The presence of a handful of great men in its earlier councils, such men as Gainsborough or Reynolds, invested it with a passing glamour, but nothing could make the Royal Academy a really constructive influence, for the excellent reason that the art of the country, broadly speaking, has not potently enough reacted upon its affairs. Messrs. Hodgson, Eaton, and Leslie leave the reader only the more convinced that the institution of which they are so proud stands not as a proof of artistic impulse, but as a monument to prosaic prudence. It is fitting to mention here a work now in course of publication under the title of The Royal Academy of Arts.⁵ This is a complete dictionary, compiled by Mr. Algernon Graves, of exhibitors from the foundation of the Academy in 1769 to the year 1904. With each name in the alphabetical list the titles are given of the works exhibited by the owner, the date of exhibition and the catalogue number being affixed. As each letter in the alphabet is dismissed, blank pages are inserted, so that the record can be carried on almost indefinitely. Two volumes have thus far been published, bringing the list down to “Dyer.” As a work of reference for the historian, whether dealing with the Academy or with any one of a tremendous company of artists, this handsomely printed compilation commands the warmest praise. It is the kind of book which, when needed at all, is needed sorely. The biographer of an artist, wishing to settle a question of date, may easily find just the information he needs on having recourse to Mr. Graves. The only thing to regret is that he should have been chary of the piquant notes, which, as he has shown in a few instances, he is well qualified to write.

Of the few masters whose biographies touch the history of the Royal Academy, Reynolds is the one figuring most conspicuously among recent publications. Sir Walter Armstrong’s excellent critical life of him,⁶ which was first published a few years ago in a massive folio, is now available in a convenient, inexpensive, but still well printed and illustrated, octavo, similar to the reprint of his Gainsborough, issued a year ago. There is also a new book on the subject, Mr. William B. Boulton’s Sir Joshua Reynolds, P. R. A.,⁷ which, if less vigorous in its ideas than Armstrong’s work, has the merit of telling the story of the painter’s life with much entertaining detail. Mr. Boulton is not altogether to be blamed for saying nothing new. The subject has been pretty nearly written to death. In one respect he does something to correct the impression left by his more brilliant predecessor. Armstrong does not give a wholly sympathetic view of Reynolds as a man. Mr. Boulton denies that he was hard-hearted, and brings some fairly conclusive evidence to prove his case. This book and the Armstrong reprint are cited as good examples of the kind of useful publication that is nowadays being put at the service of the student with a slender purse. Another popular volume that deserves commendation is Mr. Roger Fry’s new edition of Sir Joshua’s Discourses delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy.⁸ The editor, in his introductions and notes, does a great deal to minimize the insidiously dangerous effect of much that is old-fashioned, and, indeed, actually wrong-headed, in the text. He cannot quite turn the Discourses into a living work of instruction, which the reader may enjoy without constantly being on his guard against misconceptions due to Reynolds’s identification with a very early stage in the modern study of art. On the other hand, there is much good reading in this celebrated book, for the student who knows how to make the proper deductions for himself or can use caution in taking advantage of Mr. Fry’s guidance. Above all things he will learn something of the lofty spirit in which the representative men of the British school have labored. That spirit has been,indeed, England’s chief artistic possession. She has reared up comparatively few painters of the first rank, but she has brought forth many an artist whose noble rage wins sympathy for work that would otherwise be forgotten.

This thought springs naturally from the perusal of a book into which, I dare say, the art student preoccupied with technique would scarcely think of dipping: I refer to B. R. Haydon and his Friends,⁹ by George Paston (Miss Symonds). Rarely has a professional man had a career more bitter than that which fell to the lot of this friend of Keats and Lamb. He had an incurable gift for misfortune. Poverty and disappointment hounded him until he chose suicide as the only release from an intolerable burden. Yet he could write in his journal, on going to see one of Sebastiano del Piombo’s pictures, “If God cut not my life prematurely short, I hope I shall leave one behind me that will do more honor to my country than this has done to Rome.” In other words, he cherished high ambitions with a splendid sincerity, and the concise, well-balanced account of his career which George Paston has prepared is well worth reading for its reproduction of the atmosphere in which generations of British artists have lived. In the persistence of his misery Haydon is unique, but in his point of view, in the very soul of him, he is curiously representative. Nobody thinks of admiring his portentous compositions any more, but no one who studies his life and personality fails to recognize the gleam of the divine fire that he possessed. How often has this boon been granted to British artists without the other endowments necessary for its happy exploitation! Their name is legion. Again and again the school has produced men like Haydon, who have had the artist’s enthusiasm in its purest estate, all the devotion to high ideals that the most philosophical criticism could ask; and again and again these zealous workers have fallen short of success for the tragically simple reason that they have never, in the strict sense, known how to manipulate paint. This is the lack that we feel behind the strange history of the Royal Academy. This is the handicap which a rare being like a Gainsborough, a Hogarth, or a Constable has escaped, but which Haydon and hundreds of others have found nothing less than crushing. One thinks of it with a sharp sense of the vanity of human effort, as one turns to an art book of absorbing interest issuing from the press almost at the moment in which I write these words. The relation of technique to the spirit of the artist is a problem opened anew by Mr. W. Holman Hunt in his Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.¹⁰

The book is absorbing because it gives with minute particularity the reminiscences of a man who was born in 1827, began to paint at an early age, has been painting ever since, and, throughout his long career, has been a man of original ideas and of interesting friendships. He is the patriarch of English Pre-Raphaelitism. He writes as one who assisted at the birth of a celebrated movement, and now, in dignified isolation, defends its principles against an unsympathetic generation. Perhaps “defends” is scarcely the right word, for it is doubtful if in many studios occupied by types of young England the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites would be discussed with much feeling. In young England’s eyes they are played out. To Mr. Hunt they still burn as they burned in the days when he and Millais and Rossetti lived largely on poetry and dreams, and planned a rejuvenation of English art. In turning his pages one is torn between admiration and despair. On one side we have the spectacle of youth kindling with a magnificent purpose and living laborious nights and days in a passionate attempt to create forms of beauty. Simply for its pictures of that old life, for its vivid anecdote, for its riches of personalia, and for its manly tone, the narrative is readable and delightful to a wonderful degree. But there is the other side to the medal; there is the group of young zealots resolutely walking into the impasse so favored by their countrymen in matters of art, the impasse of an inartistic method.

Mr. Hunt makes an allusion to this question of method which is touching in its sincerity — and futility. “ It is now high time,” he says, “to correct one important misapprehension. In agreeing to use the utmost elaboration in painting our first pictures, we never meant more than to insist that the practice was essential for training the eye and hand of the young artist; we should not have admitted that the relinquishment of this habit of work by a matured painter would make him less a Pre-Raphaelite. I can say this the better because I have retained, later than either of my companions did, the restrained handling of an experimentalist.” Pre-Raphaelitism must bear the burden of what the Pre-Raphaelites actually produced. Millais, who was most the instinctive painter in the group, developed, as we all know, a method of his own — and ceased completely to be a Pre-Raphaelite. Rossetti, it is true, broadened in his style to some extent, but he retained, no less than Hunt did himself, the essential temper of the cult, and that was all for a meticulous realism which was hung like a millstone around the neck of every man dedicated with greater or less fervor to the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite idea. Hunt, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, — these and all the others made the same mistake. Many commentators have proceeded as though there was something deeply esoteric about the Pre-Raphaelites; they have taken the movement with an appalling seriousness, as though it had something dramatically memorable about it, instead of being an episode which, on the Continent, would long since have been put in its place and forgotten. The true point for the student, of course, is not what Hunt and his comrades meant when they formed their Brotherhood; it is not the priority of this or that contributor to the scheme, though this is fair game in an historical byway. No, the true point is simply that the Pre-Raphaelites, as Mr. Hunt shows, sought to return to nature, to build their works on the rock of truth, and, in the effort to do this, forgot to learn what to leave out.

They went in for excessive definition, and in wreaking themselves on unimportant details they paralyzed what we may call the nerve centres of artistic freedom; they narrowed their vision until they saw all the petals of a rose and not the rose; they cramped their brush hands within the limits of an almost calligraphic style, until all that meant the bold caressing of pigment became to them a sealed book. The frontispiece to Mr. Hunt’s first volume offers a perfect illustration of the point. It is from his painting of The Lady of Shalott, that incomparable design which, in the woodcut made for Moxon’s edition of Tennyson, years ago took captive every lover of subtly woven line. The painting, as we see it in the frontispiece aforesaid, is a glorious invention; the romantic figure with its waving tresses is set in a scene that is itself all fascination; and here you have, indeed, a poetical conception which owes quite as much of its quality to Hunt as it owes to Tennyson. Yet to apprehend it on these high grounds the critic has to shut his eyes to a hundred details, to passages in the delineation of the figure and the accessories which are hopelessly overdone. So it is with all of Hunt’s pictures; so it is with all Pre-Raphaelitism. The Lady of Shalott is finely imagined; so are The Eve of St. Agnes, Valentine and Sylvia, The Light of the World, and The Hireling Shepherd, and so are all the rest. But only at the rarest intervals, in a portrait or in a glimpse of landscape, has Mr. Hunt relaxed, or given the appearance of relaxing, the tension of his research into detail. The painter, no less than the poet, must, if he is to achieve anything, “see life steadily and see it whole;” he must not exalt the substance over the form, any more than he must exalt form over substance. He must establish a perfect harmony between the two, and he must learn that if there is a passion which feels the beauty in a thing of nature’s making, there is a passion which feels the beauty in a stroke of paint laid on the canvas with an inspired sense of the genius of sheer paint. When these two passions are blended into one, the artist produces a masterpiece.

Regret over Mr. Hunt’s failure to put the highest kind of work to his credit is deepened by appreciation of the tone in his book, to which reference has already been made. In his preface he has this passage: “Burne-Jones, once conversing upon the shortness of human life for the attainment of maturity in art, impulsively said to me that at least three hundred years were needed. This, though an unpremeditated exclamation, was not a baseless guess.” Here you have the key to Mr. Hunt’s reminiscences; his high aspirations have never quenched in him a certain beautiful modesty, and the story of his struggle to attain to mastery in his profession touches the imagination of the reader as some chronicle of heroic things might touch it. Is it not doubly hard, then, to have to admit that the painter’s effort has been only half rewarded, that his pictures have never been stamped with the authority which ought to have been granted to the holder of such ideals ? Remembering all that the history of the British school suggests, one speculates idly as to whether the fate of Holman Hunt, and, for that matter, of all the other English Pre-Raphaelites, has not been determined as much by the force of national temperament as by the mistaken method they adopted. Does not the group illustrate once more the presence of something in the air of England which has militated so strongly against the development of ideas of technique that only a few born masters have been able to triumph over their surroundings? Certainly one English artist after another has confirmed this hypothesis. Witness, for example, another of the new books, Mrs. Russell Barrington’s G. F. Watts: Reminiscences.¹¹

The author of this affectionately fashioned memorial reveals no critical qualifications for her task, and her volume is to be taken only as a stop-gap to serve while Mr. Spielmann is preparing the official biography. Mrs. Barrington has apparently little, if any, knowledge of Watts’s limitations. She scarcely realizes that, while he occasionally drew like a master, he more often drew no better than the average student. Though she admits, in speaking of his color, that “at times it could become almost smoked and murky, too suggestive, I think, of decay,” she is not aware of the frequency with which Watts, as a colorist, deserved this condemnation. But, on the other hand, her reminiscences are decidedly welcome, inasmuch as they amplify, with illuminating anecdotes, the saying which the painter once uttered in her hearing. “I am nothing,” he exclaimed. “Oh! you will find out I am nothing. One thing alone I possess, and I never remember the time I was without it, — an aim toward the highest, the best, and a burning desire to reach it!” As with Hunt, so it is with Watts. The man is a creature of spiritualized visions, of grand thoughts; but no matter with what energy he seeks to translate his conceptions into terms of form and color, he ends by exciting admiration for his moral fibre and for his imaginative qualities, rather than for the envelope of æsthetic beauty in which he tries to present those elements. He once told Mrs. Barrington that he “was always seeing Titian in nature.” He saw much else there; he saw a world so full of humanitarian and grandiose ideas that his mind was rapt away from the mundane issues of the studio, and his best pictures became, from a purely artistic point of view, lucky hits rather than the inevitable expression of a true artist’s view of his material. Struggling about in him were powers of design worthy of the great Venetians, and the grand style was in his blood; but he conveys the impression of a man who never succeeded in really organizing his resources, if, indeed, he ever seriously tried to do anything of the kind. Think of what his majestic allegories would have been made, think of what we would behold in the many portraits he painted from the leading spirits of his time, if he had subjected himself with a good will to a long period of academic training! He moves us, as it is, through his spiritual and intellectual qualities; but with a perfected technique he would not simply have recalled the memory of the old masters, he would have actually revived their tradition as a fructifying force; and his influence, which has done so much to purify artistic ideals, would have also affected matters of method. We relinquish Mrs. Barrington’s book, as we relinquish Mr. Hunt’s, with an emotion of gratitude for the teachings of character, and with a poignant consciousness of how little character alone can do, in art, to withstand the tooth of time, if it is not aided by consummate powers of eye and hand.

That there are occasions on which the inexorable law may be suspended is shown by the history set forth in Kate Greenaway,¹² by Messrs. M. H. Spielmann and G. S. Layard. The most charming of all the modern illustrators of children’s books could never quite bring her art to the point of technical perfection which even Ruskin, who was the last man in the world to put form before substance, was constantly urging her to seek. Perhaps, she felt that, in her minor sphere, technical perfection was not of transcendent consequence. At all events, she went her way, doing the best she could, but shrinking with ineradicable sensitiveness from the life studies which Ruskin advised, and contenting herself with the effects easily within her grasp. It is impossible to say that she was wrong. Perhaps, if she had followed too assiduously the precepts of the schools, she would have lost some of the sweetness, some of the naïveté, some of the freshness which is like unto the freshness of childhood itself, in which we recognize, when all is said, a touch of genius. Mr. Spielmann and Mr. Layard paint a most winning personality in this book, printing many delightful letters written by Kate Greenaway or by Ruskin and other friends of hers; and the numerous illustrations in colors round out the record of a life summed up in the one word “felicity.” Kate Greenaway lived apart from the main currents of British painting, and from the nature of her work it is probable that the historian of the school will always assign to her a subordinate position. We can imagine the scorn which would be excited in some circles by a sentence in a little note she wrote to Lady Maria Ponsonby, some ten years ago. “Tell Mr. Ponsonby,” she says, “I hate Beardsley more than ever.” Yet I venture to say that she, who had not a tithe of Aubrey Beardsley’s technique, has left infinitely more than that young decadent has left which the world will not willingly let die. After all, she drew well enough to say what she wanted to say, and her bewitching little figures have an unfading vitality. As has recently been said of them, they are the embodiment of the civilized world’s child ideal; “they belong to the eternal spring, with whose sweet freshness the artist so often surrounded them in her drawings, — to the tender grass, the golden-eyed narcissus, the capering lamb, the rosy apple bloom, the blue sky with its floating fleece of cloud, in which she so delighted.” That is enough, and we willingly let the life studies go, despite Ruskin’s playful pleadings. I must briefly glance at a book about one other of his friends and disciples, an Englishwoman who was never in any serious sense a maker of works of art, but whose contributions to art history were of lasting value. I speak of the late Lady Dilke, whose four volumes on the French art of the eighteenth century it has been my privilege to praise in the pages of the Atlantic. Under the title of The Book of the Spiritual Life,¹³ her husband has published half a dozen imaginative pieces of hers, prefixing to them a short but adequate memoir. This souvenir of a brilliant and scholarly woman, the intimate of some of the best thinkers of her day, and herself an accomplished and substantially useful writer, should be read by every one interested in the literature of art.

We have been long in the atmosphere of things English in this survey of the year’s art books, and we do not altogether leave it in taking up one of the most important of the publications peculiarly our own, Mr. Samuel Isham’s History of American Painting.¹⁴ This forms part of the admirable series on American art, which Professor John C. Van Dyke is editing. It divides itself naturally into two sections, the early and the modern, and in the first of these Mr. Isham proves himself a competent historian. Our eighteenth-century painters were less the founders of a new school than they were the missionaries of an old one. Men like Gilbert Stuart and Copley worked from a point of view which had been originally established by Reynolds and his followers, and if we subordinate patriotism to critical principles, we are bound to be reconciled to a moderate estimate of their standing. We cannot plume ourselves on them as upon new creative types, sprung from our own soil. But neither need we overstate what they owed to English precedent, and it is on this point that Mr. Isham’s book is gratifyingly strong. He narrates the career of our early men of distinction at some length, giving a clear idea of their personalities and of the world in which they lived, and bringing out all those merits which could fairly be called individual. He makes it plain, that is to say, that if Stuart was an Anglo-American artist, he was also a good one; and what he does for the greatest in the group he does for the rest, rendering credit where credit is due for a higher level of proficiency than the casual reader might be disposed to attribute to our pioneers.

Mr. Isham shows discrimination as well as sympathy in this first part of his book; and in his treatment of the immediately succeeding phases of his subject, as well as of the members of the Hudson River school, he uses precisely the discretion called for in a history which has no authoritative predecessor. We have always had a tendency to think pretty well of ourselves; and since our art history is only about a hundred years old, it is very desirable that it should be described with a sense of measure. For the student no one could be a more inspiriting or a safer guide than Mr. Isham is, among the painters who flourished before the middle of the nineteenth century. He makes an equally good interpreter of those landscape men, like Innes, Wyant, and Homer Martin, who slowly emerged from the rather arid conditions of the fifties and sixties, and assisted enormously in the extension of our range. If he had been able to remain outside his subject, as it were, seeing to its very centre, but preserving otherwise the detachment of the natural critic, he might have dealt with the modern artists no less luminously than with those who have disappeared from the scene. Unfortunately, Mr. Isham is an artist himself, and in handling the works of his contemporaries he writes as if perpetually in fear of letting himself go.

Art history is nothing if not a history of values, and the genuine historian is known no more by his accuracy in the recording of facts than by his courage in estimating the subtler elements for which they stand. It is not enough to be told the name and date of an artist, with a superficial description of the kind of pictures he has painted. We want to know whether he is good or bad, whether he is really an artist, or is only a mediocrity, stodgily practicing the rudiments of his profession. Is a given temperament to be seriously considered for its intrinsic merit and as an influence, or is it simply marking time ? Light on these matters is necessary if a reader is to get a workable idea of just what American art, since 1875, has meant or is meaning to-day. Specific influences, like those of Paris in general and impressionism in particular, require to be followed up through the ramifications of all the studios; and we may go farther and say that when this has been done it is the duty of the historian to bring some broad ideas of artistic right and wrong, of progress and decay, to bear upon the data he has assembled. His instinct will tell him where to curb the play of his faculty of generalization. Mr. Isham seems to prefer to remain on the safe side. He runs through the directory of artists, if not with the glibness of an auctioneer, at any rate with little more originality than we would look for in that personage, and the result is an abundance of information of a commonplace sort, but scarcely any enlightened instruction. Here is a typical passage: “Another man excelling in pure painting is William T. Dannat, whose early work showed clearly his training in Munich and under Munkacsy. One of his first works, a Quartette, now in the Metropolitan Museum, was declared by Albert Wolff to be the best piece of painting in the Salon of 1884, and Wolff, if no very subtle critic, knew his trade and voiced accurately the current opinion.” There is more in the same colorless vein. Mr. Dannat is thereby disposed of, roughly speaking, but I wonder if any reader unfamiliar with his work would gather a correct notion of just where he belongs in our artistic hierarchy from what Mr. Isham says about him.

The want of grasp in the second half of this book is to be deplored for two reasons. To begin with, Mr. Isham is, as I have said, the first to write a history of American painting on a generous scale, and with modern research. Secondly, he had a unique opportunity to modify the tendency, previously mentioned, to err in criticism on the side of kindness. No school is ever the worse for the application of the highest standards in the appraisal of its productions. What Americans have lacked in willingness to buy pictures executed by their countrymen, they have made up in printed, postprandial, and other fervid amiabilities, which, if not unforgivable on some grounds, are at any rate harmful in that they retard the growth of the power of discrimination in the public mind. I rejoice in Mr. Isham’s praise of some of his fellow painters, but I would have greater confidence in his book if I could find in it the bitter truth about this or that painter, characterizations of poor work as poor, with the critic’s reasons for his severity. By this process he would accustom the readers in schools, who will form a large part of his audience, to look at pictures with a livelier curiosity and a sharper intelligence. In the history of art a painter must be candidly and rigorously treated, both as a link in a chain, and as an individual. Not otherwise can his rank be fixed.

In some of the current monographs analysis of the individuality of an artist is carried so far as to destroy all sense of proportion; the writer loses his hold on critical principles in a rapture of admiration. This is notably the case with M. Camille Mauclair, whose Auguste Rodin: the Man, his Ideas, his Works, is almost a good book.¹⁵ The interpretation of the French sculptor is helpful at many points, but in the long run it bewilders the reader through its reckless eulogy. I mention this book, in fact, chiefly for the sake of the specimens it contains of Rodin’s talk. They are full of interest as giving us momentary, half-formed glimpses into the workings of his mind. It is worth wading through M. Mauclair’s delirious periods to get at the suggestive reflections which he has quoted from his adored master. A very capable biographer is M. Auguste Bréal, who has written in his Velasquez¹⁶ just the handbook to the Spanish painter which the tourist needs. Some day, I hope, there will be a pocket edition of Mr. Ricketts’s book on the Prado. While we are waiting for it M. Breal promises to hold the field. He has plenty of enthusiasm in his heart, but he writes with moderation, and his little book forms an almost ideal introduction to the study of Velasquez. It appears in the Popular Library of Art, a series of small illustrated volumes in which English and foreign critics have been writing on great subjects in brief and simple fashion. The series is one of the best produced by the recent movement in art literature.

To another, the Library of Art, a more ambitious venture, which I have dealt with before, there have lately been added several good monographs. Mr. Basil de Selincourt’s Giotto¹⁷ surveys the painter’s works with thorough-going system, and it is rational in criticism. I like especially the way in which the author has shown that care for what he calls Giotto’s “religious earnestness of purpose” is not incompatible with scientific methods of research. Mr. T. Sturge Moore shows a similar freedom from Morellian pedantry in his Albert Dürer,¹⁸ contributed to the same series. He does not attempt to overhaul questions of minute scholarship, but wreaks himself on a broad interpretation of Dürer’s genius; the book is, indeed, simply a long essay, and an essay richly colored throughout by the author’s own temperament. Mr. Moore has ideas as well as insight, and from time to time he strikes fire from his theme. In a series like the Library of Art the best books are those which are the most provocative, which do most to rouse in the reader an interest in the subject in hand. Such a book is Mr. Moore’s. The reader must go elsewhere for a full and formal narrative of Dürer’s career, but Mr. Moore will take him close to the secret of the German master’s art. Mr. M. Henderson’s Constable¹⁹ is a creditable piece of routine composition, but there is more of the inspiring quality which we have found in the Dürer in Mr. G. F. Hill’s Pisanello.²⁰ This is the first book to be written in English about the Italian painter and medalist, and the author has made the most of his chance. Pisanello is a simple and yet a complex type. His style has the purity characteristic of early Italian art; but while in some of his paintings, like the portrait of Ginevra D’Este in the Louvre, or in some of his drawings, his draughtsmanship has a flower-like delicacy, his medals rise to a plane of antique austerity and force. At one moment he recalls the subtle, evanescent charm of Botticelli; at another it is the grandeur of Mantegna that he brings to mind. Mr. Hill paints his portrait and interprets his art with a skill worthy of the theme. In all this collection of monographs there is nothing better than this learned but flexibly written book, and there are only two or three of its companions that are so good.

Italian art does not loom large in the books of the year. Save for Mr. Hill’s Pisanello, nothing has been published worthy to be named with Kristeller’s Mantegna, for example. A work of which much was expected, Professor Charles Herbert Moore’s Character of Renaissance Architecture,²¹ has turned out a sad disappointment. The same author’s Development and Character of Gothic Architecture, first published fifteen years ago, was so well written that it had not seemed possible that he could write a dull book on Renaissance. It would seem, however, as if Professor Moore’s devotion to Gothic had dried up any sympathies he may ever have had for the architecture of the Renaissance in Italy. He has traveled about amongst the beautiful buildings of the South, chiefly bent upon proving that men like Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michael Angelo, Bramante, and so on, used classical motives in ways to violate the sanctity of architectural principle, and the result is a book of nearly three hundred captious, irritating pages. There is something comic about the pedagogical gravity with which Professor Moore summons before his tribunal the men of genius who forgot to consult the rules when they were planning their masterpieces, admonishes them with pathetic earnestness, puts black marks against their names, and dismisses them with a caution. Prejudice could no farther go. But happily, while Professor Moore is reiterating his charges, the architecture of the Renaissance will endure, and those who know a beautiful thing when they see it will go on delighting in Brunelleschi and Bramante. One recalls the words Matthew Arnold supposed himself, in a famous preface, to address in certain circumstances to a portly jeweler from Cheapside. “The great mundane movement,” he said, “would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.” Likewise I feel that Renaissance architecture will survive Professor Moore’s disapproval. Through allowing his tale of its departures from academic correctness to obscure the record of its splendors, he has discounted the legitimate weight of his argument, and given to what ought to have been a work of impersonal scholarship an atmosphere of carping provinciality.

The few books that remain for consideration form themselves into two groups. One is composed of volumes relating to museums. M. Salomon Reinach’s Répertoire de Peintures du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance,²² the first volume of which has lately been published in Paris, is a book which students, critics, and historians everywhere will find a precious boon. It gives in well-drawn outlines the essentials of hundreds of paintings, classified according to subject; and the notes not only locate every picture, but give the different attributions where the doctors have disagreed, and other information. A more practical work of reference in its field could not be invented. Paintings of the Louvre: Italian and Spanish,²³ by Dr. Arthur Mahler, Carlos Blacker, and W. H. Slater, is a judicious handbook to the schools named in the French museum. The small but fairly clear illustrations add a good deal to this volume, which, by the way, is to be followed by one treating of other schools. M. Gustave Geffroy’s lavishly illustrated quarto, The National Gallery ,²⁴ is a book of intelligent and pleasant talk. Printed in handier form and with better illustrations,—most of the photogravures and half-tones in this volume are of a distinctly inferior quality, — it would make a first-rate popular guide ; but under the circumstances it is unlikely to deprive Mr. Edward T. Cook’s well-known volume of its vogue. A meritorious contribution to museum literature is Sir Walter Armstrong’s account of The Peel Collection and the Dutch School of Painting,²⁵ in the familiar series of Portfolio Monographs. The illustrations might be better, but they are pretty good, and the test provides a really valuable description of a signally important group of paintings in the National Gallery. Lastly I have to refer to three volumes intended more especially for the collector. In the Connoisseur’s Library, a series of handsomely made volumes, Mr. Alfred Maskell’s Ivories,²⁶ Mr. Dudley Heath’s Miniatures,²⁷ and Mr. Frederick S. Robinson’s English Furniture,²⁸ have appeared since I last touched upon the enterprise. All are written with authority, and contain the numerous facts which the collector needs.