In our consideration of the varying points of view held by painters we have been placing the responsibility for the variations upon the human eye. The argument has been that people see differently one from another; and from that you have perhaps inferred that there is a difference in the construction of eyes. It is true that there may be a physical difference through imperfections of sight, as when one is near-sighted or has some astigmatism or is color-blind. But defective vision does not account for the individual view and is not a factor in the present consideration. The physical make-up of the eye may be assumed as practically the same with all men. The retina is merely a mirror which receives an impression of a scene or object. But the reception of the impression is not the beginning and the end of seeing. The complete act requires a mental recognition of what is seen—requires perception. The word “seeing” then should be understood as meaning not only the mirror-work of the retina, but the perception of that work by the mind.

In the matter of perception there may be differences among men and still be no great display of what we have called individuality. Some people perceive much while others seem almost blind. You know that the eyes of an unconscious person may be wide open, with the retinas mirroring everything, and yet the mind perceiving nothing. And so people who are quite conscious may look at things and not see them. The blue shadows cast upon the snow were, no doubt, seen centuries ago, but not perceived until the very recent time of the impressionists; and the Hebrews must have seen the difference between the blue sky and white light as the Greeks the difference between the hues of yellow and orange without being aware of what they saw.^[4]

The eyes of the workmen who select the skeins of colors for the Gobelin tapestries are physically not different from other eyes, but they recognize scores of tints and shades that your perception and mine cannot grasp at all. This is usually assumed to be the result of the training of the eye; but the eye cannot be trained like the hand. It is passive and receptive; not active. The training is that of the mind to note the sensations of the eye. So far as keenness and clearness of vision are concerned, I know of no people more remarkable than the Papago and Yuma Indians, and yet in the Colorado Desert I have frequently called their attention to the lilac shadows upon sand-banks, to the pink and yellow hazes of sunset, to the blue-steel glow of mountain walls at noonday, without ever finding one of them to nod an affirmative. They know form, outline, movement, and crude color in large masses, but the refinements of hue, the subtleties produced by light-and-shade, though doubtless seen by the eye, are not recognized by the mind.

Much of the fumbling with the paint brush found in present-day pictures is no doubt due to an inadequate perception of the model. In the studios you will often hear painters declaring that they can see things clearly enough, but their “technique bothers them;” they cannot get their fingers or canvases or colors or brushes to work properly. But the trouble is really more fundamental. It is their lack of perception that bothers them. Whenever a person in art or in literature knows his subject thoroughly there is no difficulty about words or lines or colors to express it. Men like Leibl and Meissonier, who see acutely every feature before them, are not worried by a want of technical expression. That their work, with all its cleverness of hand and keenness of vision, is somewhat mechanical—lacking in inspiration—may suggest that clearness of view is not the only requisite of art. It is, no doubt, a valuable accomplishment with any painter, and yet if the picture tells only a tale of facts it has fallen short of the highest aim. Keen eyes and a clever hand will not take the place of that vital quality of all great art—the imagination of the artist. For the imagination is, perhaps, the very essence of artistic seeing.

In the ordinary acceptation of the word the imagination is little more than the image-making power—the ability to see a thing in the mind’s eye. We all of us have the power in some degree and can summon up scenes out of the past at will, travelling fair lands that we have not known for years, and seeing faces that have long been shut away in the grave. In boyhood, when the imagination is active and disposed to build air-castles, you doubtless saw yourself many times as the hero of imaginary deeds of daring, carrying off the beautiful princess from the enchanted castle, just as older people like Dumas saw the adventurous D’Artagnan, and painters like Rossetti saw the Blessed Damosel leaning from the gold bar of Heaven with eyes far

Such flights of the imagination as these, you will understand, are connected and associated with “memories,” of which we shall have something to say further on; but they are not the less connected with the image-making power.

When the object or the cause is present before us instead of far back in the past, the process of image-making is not radically different. We see and comprehend by an image in the mind. A portrait painter, to take an example at once from pictures, does not exercise his imagination upon a sitter by conceiving him as a great lawyer, a great poet, or a great general. He does not think of him in connection with what he has done or has been. Nor does he eliminate the Mr. Hyde from his appearance, and give only the good Dr. Jekyll part of him. That would not be pictorial imagination so much as pictorial falsehood, the popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding. What he really does is to look over his sitter with an eye to his exterior appearance; then he imagines him as he would look upon canvas, and finally he takes up a brush and tries to paint the image he sees in his mind. That image in his mind is his conception, his idea—yes, his ideal, if you choose to use that badly misused word. His imagination has rounded and shaped the appearance, and just as is the weakness or the strength of his image-making power so will be the weakness or strength of his portrait, the execution, for the present, being disregarded.

But now observe, if you please, that the painter, in looking over his sitter, does not necessarily see him as the lens of a camera might see him. The imagination may insist upon his seeing less accurately and more positively—perhaps abnormally. The man before him may have a peculiar breadth of forehead, an unusual width between the eyes, a hollowness in the cheek, a pinched look in the nose and mouth; or it may be he has a foxy eye, a puffed cheek, a flabby, vicious-looking lip, and a sensual-looking hand. These may be the very features that the imagination seizes upon and emphasizes. Then when the painter takes up his brush he paints these features strongly because they appeal to him strongly. And what is the result? The look—perhaps in the one case scholarly and thoughtful, like Van Dyck’s “Cornelius Van der Geest” (Plate 3), or in the other case crafty-looking like Velasquez’s “Innocent X” (Plate 13)—the look that betrays the character of the sitter appears in the picture, appears more strongly emphasized than in the original; and all through the proper exercise of the imagination.

The pictorial imagination almost always lays emphasis upon prominent features, and may at times distort them without falsifying them as art. The very first act, the seeing of things pictorially—that is, as they would appear in a picture rather than as they appear in real life—is necessarily a translation if not a free rendering. Everyone knows that George Morland, who saw English tavern-life cut up into beautiful pictures and hanging upon the walls, did not see accurately or scientifically; but he certainly saw pictorially and imaginatively. The actual would have left us cold, where the imaginative excites admiration.

We can see something akin to this even in the work of the camera. The ordinary photograph of a flock of sheep is prosaic enough, but we have all seen photographs of sheep taken when the camera was a little “off-focus,” when some of the sheep at the side did not get into the line of light and were somewhat distorted and magnified in bulk. In this “off-focus” view the sheep immediately become pictorial in appearance, and we notice how much like Millet’s sheep they look. Of course the unusual appearance is caused by a perversion of light in the camera, but I do not know that Millet’s sheep are not caused by a perversion of sight in the man. Genius is supposed to be closely allied to insanity; and imagination may be allied to distortion.

Certainly there is in the pictorial view something of the distorted view. A modern athlete in the gymnasium is a very different athlete from those that writhe upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Did not Michael Angelo’s imagination see the model abnormally, and thus persuade his hand to emphasize all the powerful attributes? A running horse as seen by the instantaneous camera is no doubt accurate enough in all respects, save the sense of motion. He does not run. The camera arrests his flight, holds him poised in air momentarily. But Fromentin’s imagination, as shown in his pictures, saw the horse running, saw him distorted, drawn out in body from head to tail. You know from the report of the camera, again, how human beings fall through the air in jumping, diving, plunging; but what a different report you get from Tintoretto’s fall of the damned in his “Last Judgment.” There is a tremendous rain of elongated bodies falling from heaven to hell. The exaggeration of the imagination is here most apparent, but the result is wonderfully effective. We are made to feel that the bodies are really falling.

The reason for the pictorial distortion in the instances cited must be obvious enough. There is no great attempt to present things precisely as they are in nature. We have already arrived at the conclusion that this would be impossible. The object presented to the imagination is sought to be represented by the sign or symbol, and it requires the radical translation, possibly the distortion of the sign or symbol to show the imaginative conception. What was the actual bulk of the battle-ship Téméraire I do not know, but I feel quite sure that Turner in painting that vessel (Plate 11) saw it in exaggerated proportions, saw it lifted high out of the water, its height additionally emphasized by the smallness of the towing tug. In the same way Claude and Poussin saw trees and groves of phenomenal height and thickness (Plate 26), as Courbet saw sea waves of astounding bulk, and Claude Monet saw exaggerated lights and colors upon the towers of Rouen Cathedral. The exaggeration is quite within the province of the imagination—quite necessary to all imaginative art. It is more apparent in some painters than in others, and yet is not the less existent in almost all pictorial expression. From the caricature of the child to the conception of the skilled artist there is apparently only a step. The boy in school who draws the face of a companion on the fly-leaf of his book, giving it perverted features and a wide smile of countenance, is distorting the sign to convey a certain ludicrous impression; but the Egyptian sculptor who carved the mysterious smile upon the face of the Sphinx—that face which under burning suns and midnight stars has looked out across the silence for so many centuries—was using the distorted sign, too, using it imaginatively to tell people his idea of the majesty and serenity of the sun-god Harmachis.

But however the imagination may distort, it cannot originate anything entirely new nor create anything outside of human experience. We are sometimes led to think, by the common use of the word “imagination,” that it can

as Shakespeare has put it; but it must be apparent that “out of nothing, nothing comes,” and that it is impossible to make a body from things unknown. All the originality of all the great originals in the world’s history goes no further than the dividing up or the adding to of things already known. You may make a novel landscape perhaps by shutting out the sky with a high sky-line, or you may make an angel by adding bird wings to a human form; but you cannot make an absolutely new form or create one thing that has not some basis in human life or experience. To be sure, you may bring to mind the image of a character in fiction or poetry—Sir Galahad or Roland of Brittany or Amadis de Gaul, for instance—but after all your image is based upon some previous memories of knights in armor. Just so with the likeness of Christ. There is no authentic record of how he looked, either in picture or worded description, and the type of Christ which we accept to-day has been derived from Italian art, which in turn received and blended together two types—one from the Eastern Church at Constantinople and one from the Western Church at Rome. As for the abnormal creations that seem at times quite original—the witches of “Macbeth,” the fairies of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the water babies of Kingsley, the elves and gnomes and dwarfs of Grimm—they are all founded upon the distortion of the human figure. The wonders of the “Thousand and One Nights,” the City of Brass, the diamond windows, the hanging gardens, the genii of the clouds, are not different as regards the manner of their construction. Animal life too, is made monstrous by the quips of the fancy, but again the dragons are all snake-formed and the goblins all bat-winged; the centaur is a combination of man and horse, and Ariosto’s hippogriff is the familiar winged Pegasus of Greece translated into Italian.

In the first exercise of the imagination (that is, by division) we shall find that the mind conceives a part of an object, for instance, as of sufficient value to stand by itself. This is separated from the whole, magnified by emphasis, and finally handed forth as an entity—a new creation, if you please. We can see this well exemplified in poetry, where Keats, for instance, not wishing to describe the entire winter landscape on the Eve of St. Agnes, isolates a few features of the scene and makes them do service for all.

Here we have an owl, a hare, and a flock of sheep magnified out of all proportion as regards their importance in the landscape, and standing by themselves as symbols of a cold winter night. But the suggestiveness of these features is very effective, very complete—much more so than if an elaborate description had been given of snow and icicle, moonlight and sleigh-bells. Claude Monet, when he wishes to show a winter morning on the Seine, does it with very few objects. There are silent ranks of trees, a foggy air congealed to hoar-frost, the swollen river with floating ice crunching and jostling its way; and that is all. But again what an effective winter morning! The heat of summer he describes just as summarily by cutting off a square of vivid sunshine falling on a wheatstack, exaggerating it in brilliancy of color and light, and allowing it to stand in lieu of a whole landscape. Corot is not different in thought and method. He throws all his strength upon light along the hills of morning or evening, and every detail of grass and tree and human being is sacrificed to it (Plate 9).

There are many ways in which the dividing imagination deals with the figure in painting. The model may be treated as part of a group, as an object in landscape, as a whole-length portrait in a room, as a knee-piece, as a half-length, as a bust, or as a head alone. Nothing could be further removed from the actual than a man’s head shown in profile on a coin, but what imaginative art the Greeks made of their coinage! And what superb heads—superb in their character—the Pisani put upon their medals! How well each head suggested the whole man! And was there ever a more virile, living personality, ever a man with a more lion-hearted look, than Antonello da Messina pictured in the head and shoulders of that unknown Italian in the Louvre (Plate 12)? Byron’s ghost portrait of Nimroud as he appears to Sardanapalus in a dream is more colossal, but it is not more intense or forceful than Antonello’s, save as language is always more definite than pigment. Here it is:

To match in bulk such an imaginative picture, we should have to go back to the great king-headed bulls that flank the portals of the Assyrian palaces, or the colossal pharaonic figures in granite that symbolize the Egyptian kings.

Sculpture affords many good illustrations of parts detached from the whole and magnified by the imagination into separate creations. The Colleoni statue at Venice comes to mind instantly. The great commander and his horse have been taken out of battle and placed upon a pedestal, yet, isolated as it is, how the statue tells the irresistible strength, the pushing power of both man and horse! The “Water Nymphs” of Jean Goujon are separated again in panels, they tell no connected story; but the serpentine grace of the figures, the rippling flow of the draperies, how inevitably they bring to mind the native element, the home of the water people! The Greek youths that ride along the Parthenon frieze, the wounded lionesses that roar defiance from the Assyrian bas-reliefs, the Japanese fish that swim in bronze, though cut off from their background or environment, yet again how perfectly each suggests its habitat through the magnifying imagination of the artist!

The combining imagination (the building up by additions which enhance and enliven) is just the reverse of the process we have been considering. It has to do with associations, with memories; and the combination is brought about by images from hither and yon, that gather and join in the mind. There is some confusion just here between what is imagination in painting and what is mere composition, which Mr. Ruskin has tried to clear up by asserting that the former is intuitive and the latter is labored, that one works by genius and the other by laws and principles. But the distinction itself is somewhat labored, and in its practical working it seems to have small basis in reality. A gathering together of antique pavements, marble benches stained with iron rust, ideal figures clad in Greek garments, with various museum bric-a-brac illustrative of Greek life, such as we see in the pictures of Alma-Tadema, is certainly composition. It may be good or bad composition, it may be academic or naturalistic, it may have been put together laboriously, piece by piece, or flashed together by a momentary lightning of the mind; but, whatever the method or however brought about, one thing seems very certain, and that is, the work, in the hands of Alma-Tadema, contains not one spark of imagination. The same method of combining in the mind or working on the canvas with Delacroix or Turner or even J. S. Cotman would have almost certainly resulted in the imaginative.

It is a fond fancy of Mr. Ruskin, and also of ourselves, that genius despises laborious composition and does things with a sudden burst of inspiration. We think, because the completed work looks easy or reads easy, that it must have been done easily. But the geniuses of the world have all put upon record their conviction that there is more virtue in perspiration than in inspiration. The great poets, whether in print or in paint, have spent their weeks and months—yes, years—composing, adjusting, putting in, and taking out. They have known what it was to “lick things into shape,” to labor and be baffled, to despair and to hope anew. Goethe may have conceived “Faust” intuitively, but it took him something like fifty years to record his intuitions. He composed laboriously, and yet was no less a man of superlative imagination. Listen a moment to his Prologue to “Faust”:

Here is the imagination presenting us with a great cosmic picture that in sublimity I venture to think has no superior in either poetry or painting; yet it cannot be doubted that it was built up thought by thought, line upon line; torn down perhaps a dozen times to be modelled anew with something added or omitted. In other words it has been composed, not flashed together by intuition.

The combining imagination in painting does not work differently from this. The picture is built up; and memories often play a prominent part in the process. One may mingle lines from Greece with colors from Japan and an atmosphere from Holland if he will. The result might be something heterogeneous and incongruous, but it would nevertheless be a true enough display of the imagination. But such a gathering from hither and yon, such a mingling of many foreign elements, would not be necessary or essential or even usual in art. Pictures are made in simpler ways. Here, for example, is a sea-piece from the “Ancient Mariner,” imagined and composed again, but brought together as a homogeneous whole.

There the marine would seem to be quite complete, but Coleridge has yet to heighten the effect of the sunset by introducing a memory of an impression received perhaps in boyhood. His imagination, having conjured up the image of the phantom ship, combines it with the burning sunset:

The introduction of the “dungeon grate” still further increases the effect. We now have the flaming sky, the sea, and the skeleton ship through which the sun mockingly peers, as through dungeon bars, at the dying crew. The effect is weird, uncanny, unearthly, just what Coleridge intended it should be. This, I should say, was the imagination adding and combining. And so far as I can see it is also the intelligent mind composing.

It would be difficult to find a parallel in painting to this picture from the “Ancient Mariner.” One thinks at once of Turner’s “Ulysses and Polyphemus” as resembling the Coleridge conception, because of the sea and the sun; but the likeness is superficial. In the Turner the spread of the sea, the golden waves in the foreground, the heave of the mountains out of the water, the spectral figure on the mountain top, the far distance of the ocean with the sun on the uttermost verge, are all highly imaginative; but the real glory of the picture is its decorative splendor rather than its expressive meaning. The “Fighting Téméraire,” as we have already noted, is imaginative in the magnitude of the bulk and there is something of the Coleridge effect in the glare of the red setting sun that peers through clouds, taking its farewell look at the old war-ship being towed to its last berth; but the imagination is not so clear-cut here as with Coleridge (Plate 11).

In some of Turner’s “Approaches to Venice” there is perhaps a better example of the combining imagination, for Turner never hesitated about “composing”—putting things into the picture that were not there in reality; and in the Venetian pictures he sometimes did this with startling results. I have in mind one of these pictures, where Venice is seen a mile or more away; but the domes of the Salute and the tops of the campaniles have been so shifted about to suit Turner’s views of composition that I have never been able to determine whether the city is seen from the east or the west. And apparently Turner did not care anything about geography or topography. His imagination brought up out of the blue-green sea a city of palaces, builded of marble and hued like mother-of-pearl, with distant towers shining in the sun—a fairy city floating upon the sea, opalescent as a mirage, dream-like as an Eastern story, a glamour of mingled color and light beneath a vast-reaching sky glowing with the splendor of sun-shot clouds. It is most beautifully unreal, and yet by dint of its great imagination and suggestion it is more Venetian than Venice itself. It is that kind of distortion by the imagination which sacrifices the form to gain the spirit of things.

Here at Venice one can see the work of the combining imagination very well in some of the old Venetian pictures. Paolo Veronese, for instance, has upon the ceiling of one of the rooms in the Ducal Palace, a towering majestic figure, clad in silks and ermines, crowned with pearls and sceptred with power, seated under a gorgeous canopy in a chair of state, and representing the glory of Venice. She is a magnificent type of womanhood, splendid enough in herself to symbolize the splendor of Venice, but Paolo’s imagination adds to her importance still further by placing her upon a portion of a great globe representing the world, while below at her feet are two superb figures representing Justice and Peace, offering the tributes of the sword and the olive branch (Plate 14).

Another Venetian, Tintoretto, had possibly more imagination than any other of his school—yes, any other Italian in art-history; and yet it is not always possible to say just how his ideas originally took form. No doubt he labored and composed and tried effects by putting things in and taking them out. No doubt the “Ariadne and Bacchus,” or the “Miracle of the Slave” (Plate 15) as we see it to-day, was the third or fourth thought instead of the first; but there is no questioning the exaltation of the final result. The subject of the Resurrection in his day had become a tradition in painting, and was usually shown as a square tomb of marble with a man rising from it between two angels. This stereotyped tradition had been handed down for centuries; but how greatly Tintoretto changed it and improved it in his picture in the Scuola San Rocco! He imagined the side of a mountain, a rock-cut tomb with angels pulling away the great door, and as it slowly opens the blinding light within the tomb bursts forth, and the figure of Christ rises swiftly, supported by the throbbing wings of angels.

However this last-named picture was produced, by combination or association, at least it is purely pictorial—that is, it deals with forms, lights, and colors, things that can be seen. I hardly know what to make of Mr. Ruskin’s remarks upon some of the other pictures by Tintoretto, in the Scuola San Rocco. He seeks to exemplify the painter’s ever-fertile imagination by pointing out, in the “Annunciation,” that the corner-stone of the building is meant by Tintoretto to be that of the old Hebrew Dispensation, which has been retained by the builders as the corner-stone of the new Christian Dispensation; and that, in the “Crucifixion,” the donkey at the back eating the palm-branches recently thrown down before Christ upon his entry into Jerusalem is a great piece of imaginative sarcasm. I confess my inability to follow Mr. Ruskin just here, and I cannot believe that Tintoretto meant anything of the sort about either the corner-stone or the palm-branches. If he did, it was perhaps a mistake. The motives would be more literary than pictorial. I think it all exemplifies Mr. Ruskin’s imagination rather than Tintoretto’s, and in either case it has little to do with imagination in painting as generally understood among painters. Painting and the pictorial conception, it must be repeated, have to do with forms and colors seen by the eye or in the mind’s eye; they have very little to do with a sarcasm or a Hebraic mystery.

There is still another phase of imagination which figures in metaphysical text-books under the name of fancy. It is sometimes called the passive imagination, apparently for no reason other than distinction’s sake. It is supposed to be temporary and accidental in its association of ideas and images, to be light, airy, capricious, perhaps indefinite; whereas, imagination is said to be more sober, serious, single in purpose, seeking unity of effect. The illustrations usually cited are taken from Shakespeare. The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is said to be a product of fancy, while “Lear” or “Hamlet” is a work of the imagination. But again I must confess my inability to comprehend the distinction. The thought in the one case busies itself with a light or gay theme, and in the other with a sober or tragic theme; but the mental process would seem to be the same in either case. The mind may grow happy over a birth or grieve over a death, but one mind and one imagination would seem flexible enough to comprehend them both. There is a difference in art between what is called the serious and what is called the clever; but the imagination has nothing to do with it. A figure of a soubrette dashed off in a Parisian studio, and sent in a hurry to a Salon or Academy exhibition as a “stunning thing,” may be clever. Mr. La Farge has defined such cleverness as “intelligence working for the moment without a background of previous thought or strong sentiment.” And this definition suggests that the serious in art is just the opposite of the clever. A figure by Millet, such as that of “The Sower,” is serious just because the intelligence has been working upon it for many months. But, in spite of calling a Jacquet soubrette fanciful and a Millet sower imaginative, there would seem to be no difference in the mental processes. The difference is one of subject, time, men, original endowment; not a difference in the kind of thought.

The fantastic is also a product of the imagination, but it is a lighter, more volatile and irresponsible expression than fancy. It is the imagination just escaping from control, dominated by caprice and leaning toward the bizarre. The griffins and the spouting dragons along the gutters of the Gothic churches, and the boar-headed, bird-footed devils of early art are perhaps fair illustrations of it. In modern painting Blake and Monticelli came perilously near the fantastic in some of their creations. Turner in his last years quite lost himself in fantasy, and a number of the painters in France and England might be named as illustrating the tendency to the bizarre. When the bizarre is finally reached we may still recognize it as the working imagination, but uncontrolled by reason. Our dreams which often strike us as so absurd are good instances of the play of the imagination unfettered by reason; and if our dream-land conceptions could be reduced to art we would undoubtedly have what we have called the bizarre. Caricature and the grotesque are different again. They are conscious distortions, designed exaggerations of certain features for effect. They are not ruled so much by either fancy or caprice as by a sensible view of the extravagant.

There is no metaphysical or æsthetic term to designate an absence of the imagination, but possibly the words “baroque” or “bombastic” will suggest the results in art. And there is no lack of material to illustrate it. Unfortunately the master minds in both poetry and painting have been few and far between. The names and works that have come down to us from the past are the survivals from many siftings; and the few geniuses of the present are perhaps still obscured by the bombastic performances of smaller men. The Robert Montgomerys and the Martin Farquhar Tuppers somehow contrive to make a stir and delude the public into considering them as great originals. They have not imagination of their own, so they imitate the imaginative utterances and styles of others. Not one but many styles of many men are thus brought together in a conglomeration that may deceive the groundlings into thinking it genuine poetry; but the judicious soon find out its true character. Of course, all imitators try to imitate the inimitable individualities. The Montgomerys and the Tuppers aspire to no less than Shakespeare and Milton. Just so in pictorial art. Vasari, Guido, the Caracci reached out for the imaginations of Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio. The result was the contorted bombastic art of the Decadence than which nothing could be less imaginative and more monstrous. The mind of a Michael Angelo of necessity distorted the image in the first place and then a Salviati came along to distort the distortion! The figure of a Madonna, for instance, is elongated by Correggio for grace, and Parmigianino following after elongated the elongation! This is what I have called the bombastic. It is indicative of a lack of imagination. Modern painting is full of it. The attempts at the heroic that overstep the sublime and fall into the ridiculous, the rant and high-sounding utterances of the brush, the inflated figures of allegory and the vacuous types of symbolism, are all illustrative of it.

But the bombastic and its companion evils in art need no further consideration at this time. It is not my aim to illustrate the deficiencies of painting, but to point out its higher beauties, and if the reverse of the shield is occasionally shown it is but to illustrate and emphasize the brighter side. Perhaps one may be pardoned for thinking that sometimes the analysis of error is a potent factor in the establishment of truth.