trivial motive that dulled and devitalized life instead of intensifying and penetrating it. Their pictures now cover the walls of our big municipal galleries, and it is surely one of the most pathetic things in the public history of our art that the awakening of the great cities to knowledge that art had something to give them ended in the filling of their new galleries with the topical stupidities of the time. Each silly "picture of the year" added to these galleries, and confirmed the indolent mentality and false sentiment that beset the practice of art in Victorian England. In the twentieth century the attitude of the time, as expressed by the patron, has quite changed. Every day at Christie's sees a growing intolerance of the complacent ideals and methods of the Victorian favorites. We have other foolishness, no doubt, and are still paying thousands for second-rate Barbizon pictures and dubious old masters, and "Cries of London" (that are not from the heart); but on the whole the instincts of the time are better.

been

The best indication of the difference between the Georgian and the Victorian eras is the extraordinary enlargement of the public acquaintance with Old Masters. Their art has analyzed, discussed, and illustrated with a thoroughness that we used to give only to the supernatural. Photography, that to its old-fashioned devotees (like Mr. G. B. Shaw) seemed at one time likely to supplant the Old Masters, has been tied to their chariots and made to testify to their glories. Although concern with art in any of its manifestations is visible only in a minority of people of any class, the concern for Old Masters runs vertically through the nation, and touches every degree of culture. However our new art may develop, however wild may be its extremists, the insular self-satisfaction of Victorian

art is gone forever. The artist again lives in a highly critical cosmopolitan surrounding, the patron is again the student of art, and the philosopher is always at the artist's elbow, asking "What is art?"

It is unnecessary now to trace the pedigree of the movement for full freedom to express visual truths that was termed "Impressionism." In landscape the link is the work of Turner, Bonington, and Constable at the beginning of the century. If their countrymen treasured only the ashes of their art, France stole some of its heat, and its influence on the Barbizon men, who in turn influenced Monet and the Impressionists, is admitted by every Englishman. One English Impressionist there was whose long life spanned the gaps between the going and the returning of the new desire for atmosphere and luminosity, and the flowering of color on canvas and on paper; although his first exhibition was not till 1892 when he was in his seventy-second year. The public were certainly not till then ready for Hercules Brabazon Brabazon's lovely art, shell-like in its small iridescent perfections.

At the time when Brabazon died Impressionism had been accepted in England, and the Royal Academy had assumed the aspect that the independent societies wore about ten years earlier, while in these societies signs were appearing that the desertion from Impressionism to a more synthetic and self-revealing art had already begun. The increasing seriousness of purpose and revival of draughtsmanship, that were soon to make themselves felt, owed their inspiration, not to official schools nor to a great native exemplar, but to Alphonse Legros, a French artist deeply versed in the Old Masters, who lived the main part of his long life in England and devoted his many gifts to the discovery and

teaching of what is permanent and communicable in the great art of the past. He had a sort of second sight which enabled him to see Old Masters at work in the fields of Watford and Wembley Park. The new feeling for style and form, which is characteristic of our time, owes much of its quickening to him.

But in the first decade of the new century these signs were only apparent to the close student of art. The impetus of Impressionism which we had received from France began to slacken in sympathy with the turn of the tide there. Our new forces were experimenting, in strange eclectic company, for a form to express their new sensibility. Work, whose merit was its individualist character, was being done in isolated quarters, but as a whole there was a general weakening of intention and questioning of reputations that corresponded to the trend of the national temper of the time. The inquiry into the administration of the funds of the Chantrey Bequest had shaken the reputation of the established corporation of English art beyond repair in our day. This became very evident as time went on, and the Academicians themselves, being mainly old men and seing the heavy fall in the price of their pictures in the auction market, and the steady conversion of Bond Street to Old Masters and etchings, perceived clearly that art was in a bad way and, as is customary, looked across the Channel for the cause of this distressful state of affairs. Very little observation was required to satisfy them that a new movement had arisen there and was known everywhere but in England. That was Post-Impressionism.

From the lamentations over the decline of English art that have appeared in the Press during the past twelve months it is easy to construct an approximate image. We must imagine

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English Art as a female Job, sitting in peace in her household and awaiting the arrival of the messengers. The first messenger comes with the tidings that the anecdote picture is dead. The oxen were ploughing and the asses were feeding together when Mr. George Moore rushed down upon them, and only Mr. John Collier was left to paint the tale. And while he was speaking there came another, beating his breast and crying that allegoric high art too had perished at the hands of critics (who were, however, incompetent and unworthy of attention), and he, Sir W. B. Richmond, alone had escaped. And while he also was yet speaking there came another and cried that Impressionism was perishing even in the house of the New English. And lo! even as he spoke behold another came who said "Mr. Sargent has given up painting portraits." Then English Art rose up and rent her garments, and having shaven her head with a potsherd fell down upon the ground and her friends knew her not.

Yes; the complete cessation of portrait painting by the most gifted and powerful portrait painter of the age is certainly the culminating point in the woeful calendar. It is difficult to imagine such a renunciation by a great painter of an earlier time. Have the doubts of the validity of Impressionism begun to assail even him in whose hand it was a wonderful instrument to probe into hidden truths of personality? Mr. Sargent has hinted that it is even so. A couple of years ago a picture by him appeared in the New English Art Club's exhibition showing a landscape painter hugging a large box of paints to his heart and peering solemnly before him for a little subject. The sunshine struck his white shirtsleeves, and made little spiky lights on the latchets of his boots. Great mountains rose all

This is a supreme quality of the rarer masters, one of the most lasting weapons in art's armory, and rarer in proportion to the gifts of the artist which tempt him to demonstration of his powers.

The intense faithfulness to the creatures of the mind, that we identify most clearly in that much-loved master Fra Angelico, is the marking characteristic of John's imaginative art. In his types we see embodied ideals that have been long absent from our art, if indeed they have ever been assembled within it: brute strength, independence, and life on primitive and patriarchal terms. No weak-looking man ever finds a place in his pictures; the old men look cunning and tough, the children untamed and fierce, the women deepbreasted. large-bodied, steady-eyed,

He

like mothers of a tribe. A bracing wind seems always blowing and the hills are darkling in the distance, but there are flowers underfoot. His people are never in an interior, except sometimes in a tent. They stand firmly on the earth and regard civilization with eyes that have judged it and found it wanting. Unlike Brangwyn and Meunier, who have been termed the artists of democracy, John rarely shows a figure at work. Strangest of all the impressions one gets from these wild wayfarers is responsibility. makes you see that his strong men and women in poor clothes, standing with beauty under cold skies, have chosen their part and challenge you to judge them. This is John's message. Nor is it unrelated to a spirit of the age that is reflected in other activities. The distrust of comfort, of cities, of society in its present organization, even of civilization, and the desire for a simple life and the recovery of the virtues that lie in a more physical communion with the earth, are all questions of the time that many writ ers are urging upon the people, and

that many are putting to the test of experiment.

With John one classes several other artists who have set out into a new and untilled field of art through the gap that he had made. Of these the most distinguished is Henry Lamb, who with subtle gifts for color and design in the high Italian tradition seems to be seeking in many strange ways to find pictorial expression for conceptions as far from sentient experience as is music. He has travelled farthest on his way towards the same house as the Post-Impressionists in his inventions of figures in a fantastic setting.

French Post-Impressionism first landed at Brighton in 1910, and reached London about a year later. Naturally a movement so fiercely opposed to the established practice of art in England aroused a shout of condemnation and ridicule, but at the same time artists, critics, and public were unusually ready to expose their sensibility to the action of this new, uncanny art. The works of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh could not be dismissed by serious students as daubs by charlatans, anarchists, and selfadvertisers. Cézanne was a pious Catholic, a rentier, and a good family man. When he laid down the difficult and original lines on which his art was to develop he said good-bye to all prospect of fame, and was sure of nothing but the hostility of dealers and patrons. He only once exhibited a painting during twenty years. He pursued his ideal till the end, when he died with a brush in his hand. Van Gogh and Gauguin, weak in body and miserably poor, found no appreciation in their lifetime, neither did they seek it. Gauguin found his chief inspiration in the people of the Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. Van Gogh's work was all done when living in obscurity in a French town, far from the excite