CHAPTER VIIIFREDERICK WALKER

THE HUGUENOTFrom the picture by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.By permission of Messrs. Methuen andMessrs. Henry Graves and Co.To face page 92.

THE HUGUENOT

From the picture by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.

By permission of Messrs. Methuen andMessrs. Henry Graves and Co.

To face page 92.

It would be difficult to cite any other master of our school, or indeed of any school, who possessed this special power in quite the same degree. Reynolds and Gainsborough have left examples in the region of female portraiture that render in almost matchless perfection the permanent facts of gentle character; and the different kinds of beauty which they have saved for us bear the unmistakable stamp of a type that is national as well as individual.

But with Millais, whose art no less than theirs rests finally upon this power of interpreting individual features, there was sometimes added, when the model and the subject combined to inspire him, this finer grace of delicate and tender feeling which no one of his predecessors could command. Though not a constant quality of his art, it reappeared from time to time during the whole of his career. He never parted with it as he had parted with that earlier quality of design, which he had only shared for a while with men to whom it was all in all. Though intermittent in its manifestation, it remained with him to the end, and constituted a rare attribute of his art which belonged to him by right of nature and belonged to him alone. It was the appreciation of this quality which caused Watts to write to him in 1878 in regard to “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received a decoration in Paris: “Lucy Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” And what is true here is true in a supreme degree of the face of the lady in “The Huguenots” and the face of “Ophelia.”

The contrast between Millais and Leighton, both as regards individual character and the character oftheir art, was as striking as could be presented by two men of the same generation.

Millais’s manner was spontaneous, careless, and buoyant; Leighton was ever graceful and courteous, but never quite without the sense of conscious and deliberate effort. I remember an Italian painter who had been his friend for many years saying to me one day, “Leighton wills to be a good fellow,” and I think the criticism that is here conveyed very aptly describes, or suggests, a certain feeling of constraint that was always to be felt in Leighton’s companionship.

Despite all his accomplishments and grace he left the impression that he was never quite at ease, and as though he felt that that must be the plight of others as well as himself he seemed to be constantly striving to rid his companion of an embarrassment which was often only his own.

The essential difference between the two men was made very manifest by an incident that occurred at a dinner given by the Arts Club to celebrate Leighton’s election as President of the Royal Academy.

Leighton’s speech, of course, was expected to be the speech of the evening, and so in a sense it was. But Leighton never spoke without the polished preparation of every word, and though his gifts as an orator were conspicuous, there was always, even upon the happiest occasion, a sense of something artificial in his aptly chosen phrases; and on the evening of which I am thinking, the fact of his being fast bound and fettered by a string of carefullyforged and graceful sentences proved disastrous to the speaker.

Before Leighton rose to make his acknowledgment of the compliment that had been paid to him, Millais had his part in the programme to discharge, and although he could never boast any considerable gifts as a speaker, there was a directness and simplicity in his utterances that placed his audience in quick sympathy with the man.

When I complimented him afterwards he replied, “Yes, my boy, but you see I had a story to tell.”

And so he had; but that was not the whole secret of the great impression he made upon his hearers that evening, for though the story was simple enough in itself, it was told with such genuine feeling and with such frank revelation of his own character that it moved his audience not a little.

He recalled a day of his youth when he had been summoned by Mr. Thackeray, who lay ill in bed, to receive some instructions for designs that Millais was making for theCornhill Magazine. The business ended, Mr. Thackeray turned to him and said:

“Millais, my boy, you must look to your laurels. There’s a young fellow in Rome called Leighton who is making prodigious strides in his art. He speaks every European language, and is an accomplished musician as well. If I’m not mistaken that young man will one day be President of the Royal Academy.”

And then Millais turned to us, and in words of the simplest candour confessed that Mr. Thackeray’s prophecy had somewhat hurt him—“For I will own,” he said, “that at that time, with the ambition of a boy, I cherished the hope thatImight some day be President of the Royal Academy.” And then after a pause he added, “But now, looking back, I can say, ‘Mr. Thackeray, you were right, and the right man has been chosen.’”

It is not easy to convey the effect which that speech made upon the crowded audience, most of whom were artists, but the depth of the impression was shortly realised when Leighton rose to respond.

It would have been impossible for any speaker born to his task to have followed Millais without betraying in response a sensibility to those deeper chords of feeling which his simple words had touched. But Leighton was incapable of resuming the unfinished melody Millais had so finely tuned; incapable by his habit and temperament of discarding what he had prepared; and so it happened that the discourse he delivered, though no less perfect and polished than was his wont, left his audience gravely disappointed and wholly unmoved.

Of Leighton I had also written in those earlier articles in a manner perhaps that showed too little consideration for his great gifts and great accomplishments, but he was characteristically courteous in his reply to my request for some particulars of the days of his studentship, and the pains he had evidently taken to assist me as far as he could in the project I had in hand bears strong witness to that ungrudging demand he always made upon himself when any duty came before him. He wrote:

HollyerLORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.From the painting byG. F. Watts, in the National Portrait Gallery.To face page 96.

Hollyer

LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.

From the painting byG. F. Watts, in the National Portrait Gallery.

To face page 96.

Thursday, Nov. 27, 1873.Dear Sir—I should have answered your letter sooner had I been more master of my time. I am divided between my readiness to serve you and my embarrassment as to how to satisfy your request concerning my past life of which you already possess the outline. I find on looking atMen of the Timethat the facts there given under my name are copied from theIllustrated London News, to which I furnished some such skeleton to accompany the customary portrait on my election to membership in the Royal Academy. They are accurate, barring misprints, such as calling my old friend Robert Fleury, Robert Henry. I hardly know what I can add without egotistic display to this account of a life in which, whilst there has been, and, as I hope, still is, steady growth and development, there had been no peripateia.I scarcely have any earlier recollection than a passionate wish and a firm purpose to be an artist, and having become one, I have never failed or swerved from my deep desire to leave behind me something in Art which should be not ignoble in its aim, and in which Form and Style, the highest attributes of Form, should be chiefly sought, and I may own to a hope, which has not been much fed by experience, that I might in some degree disseminate my artistic faith in this country where the seed is little and the soil rocky, and where what is to me vital and essential in Art is generally either repudiated or held a matter of obsolete dilettantism.The only apparent change in my work, the change from mediævalism to classicism, is in reality no change but only a development.The love of mediævalism, the youth of Art, which is almost invariably found in youths, was strengthened and nourished in me partly by an early love for Florence and Tuscan art in which all grace is embodied, and partly by the example of my master Steinle, for whom I had, and have retained, a great reverence, and who wasfervently mediæval. For a long time I treated none but subjects from the Italian Middle Ages—going to history, Dante, Boccaccio, and preferring in Shakespeare the Italian plays. (I have sometimes wondered, by the bye, that the atmosphere of Faust and the Niebelungen Lied and the worship of Cornelius, in which, as a German student, I lived for many years, should really have left so little mark on my work.)By degrees, however, my growing love for Form made me intolerant of the restraint and exigencies of costume, and led me more and more, and finally, to a class of subjects, or, more accurately, to a set of conditions, in which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand. These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles, therefore, of abstract form, which is a thing not of one time but of all time, these subjects can never be obsolete, and though to many they are a dead letter, they can never be an anachronism.But you did not ask me for a profession of faith. You see, meanwhile, that though shifted to another channel the stream of my artistic life has remained the same.The dominant personal influence of my early development is that of my dear master Steinle, under whom I worked at Frankfort for several years. His stamp is still upon me, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for guidance, restraint, and upholding in the search of whatever is elevated, and for example of steadfastness and singleness of heart which I cannot ever repay.One word more in candour. I have written these few lines because, unless my memory deceives me, you have written about Art with a sense at least of its place and dignity—a grace too rare amongst English critics; but I do not therefore accept entire solidarity with your standpoint, with which in some respects I am much at variance.If there is any special point concerning which you care to inquire I shall be happy to answer.—I am, dear sir, faithfully yours,Fred Leighton.P.S.—Having lived much abroad during my young years, the years when one is wax, I have been in turn, thoroughly and sincerely, an Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist. I need not say that, though every man is of a nation (and I am most emphatically an Englishman), all Artintentionallynational is an error to my thinking. But I think I have gained in balance and insight by my varied experience.

Thursday, Nov. 27, 1873.

Dear Sir—I should have answered your letter sooner had I been more master of my time. I am divided between my readiness to serve you and my embarrassment as to how to satisfy your request concerning my past life of which you already possess the outline. I find on looking atMen of the Timethat the facts there given under my name are copied from theIllustrated London News, to which I furnished some such skeleton to accompany the customary portrait on my election to membership in the Royal Academy. They are accurate, barring misprints, such as calling my old friend Robert Fleury, Robert Henry. I hardly know what I can add without egotistic display to this account of a life in which, whilst there has been, and, as I hope, still is, steady growth and development, there had been no peripateia.

I scarcely have any earlier recollection than a passionate wish and a firm purpose to be an artist, and having become one, I have never failed or swerved from my deep desire to leave behind me something in Art which should be not ignoble in its aim, and in which Form and Style, the highest attributes of Form, should be chiefly sought, and I may own to a hope, which has not been much fed by experience, that I might in some degree disseminate my artistic faith in this country where the seed is little and the soil rocky, and where what is to me vital and essential in Art is generally either repudiated or held a matter of obsolete dilettantism.

The only apparent change in my work, the change from mediævalism to classicism, is in reality no change but only a development.

The love of mediævalism, the youth of Art, which is almost invariably found in youths, was strengthened and nourished in me partly by an early love for Florence and Tuscan art in which all grace is embodied, and partly by the example of my master Steinle, for whom I had, and have retained, a great reverence, and who wasfervently mediæval. For a long time I treated none but subjects from the Italian Middle Ages—going to history, Dante, Boccaccio, and preferring in Shakespeare the Italian plays. (I have sometimes wondered, by the bye, that the atmosphere of Faust and the Niebelungen Lied and the worship of Cornelius, in which, as a German student, I lived for many years, should really have left so little mark on my work.)

By degrees, however, my growing love for Form made me intolerant of the restraint and exigencies of costume, and led me more and more, and finally, to a class of subjects, or, more accurately, to a set of conditions, in which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand. These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles, therefore, of abstract form, which is a thing not of one time but of all time, these subjects can never be obsolete, and though to many they are a dead letter, they can never be an anachronism.

But you did not ask me for a profession of faith. You see, meanwhile, that though shifted to another channel the stream of my artistic life has remained the same.

The dominant personal influence of my early development is that of my dear master Steinle, under whom I worked at Frankfort for several years. His stamp is still upon me, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for guidance, restraint, and upholding in the search of whatever is elevated, and for example of steadfastness and singleness of heart which I cannot ever repay.

One word more in candour. I have written these few lines because, unless my memory deceives me, you have written about Art with a sense at least of its place and dignity—a grace too rare amongst English critics; but I do not therefore accept entire solidarity with your standpoint, with which in some respects I am much at variance.

If there is any special point concerning which you care to inquire I shall be happy to answer.—I am, dear sir, faithfully yours,

Fred Leighton.

P.S.—Having lived much abroad during my young years, the years when one is wax, I have been in turn, thoroughly and sincerely, an Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist. I need not say that, though every man is of a nation (and I am most emphatically an Englishman), all Artintentionallynational is an error to my thinking. But I think I have gained in balance and insight by my varied experience.

It is not possible to question the justice of this brief record of his aims in Art with which Leighton so courteously supplied me, and that he never swerved from his fidelity to those aims may be generously acknowledged even by those who were never deeply moved by his painting.

If he failed to reach the goal towards which he was ever striving, it was from no lack of persistent purpose or earnest faith; and the courage and devotion which he exhibited in his life as an artist were no less manifest in the discharge of every duty which his high official position called upon him to perform.

I was an occasional visitor to his studio for many years after this first introduction to him in 1873, but I cannot boast of ever having been, in any true sense of the word, his friend. To my temperament he was a man easy to know, but difficult to know well; of unfailing kindness in any service demanded of him, but with no quick link of sympathy to encourage a closer intimacy.

Gifted with an appearance at once imposing andpicturesque, it was impossible not to agree with Millais that the choice of the Academy when they elected him as their President was rightly made. For all the official duties that are attached to that office he was admirably equipped, but it was difficult in ordinary converse to feel that he had ever quite thrown off his official garb.

Even in those earlier days, before he became President, he was apt in his hearing to convey the feeling that he was playing a part. His mind seemed always to move in some carefully chosen raiment which it was impossible for his nature ever wholly to discard.

As he said in the postscript of his letter, “I have been in turn thoroughly and sincerely an Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist”; and so in his life he was in turn thoroughly and sincerely either a polished member of society or the careless Bohemian.

I remember once noticing him in the stalls of the Palais-Royal Theatre in Paris habited in a brown velveteen jacket, and suggesting to me that he was in this way resuming the days of his studentship in the Quartier Latin. His appearance on that evening seemed to me a little characteristic of the man. But among the many phases of his varied life, the sense of his personality as an artist was always uppermost; and however distinguished might be the throng of fashionable visitors who filled his studio, the entry of any one who had any call upon him as an artist would at once claim his attention.

To his older friends I know he was untiring in his devotion, and one of them once told me that at alittle Christmas party in a remote quarter of London to which he had been bidden, nearly all the other guests kept away by reason of a severe snowstorm, but that Leighton turned up faithful to his appointment, having walked all the way from Kensington to keep his engagement.

I think it was a criticism of Sidney Colvin’s in thePall Mall Gazetteupon his picture called “The Plough” that first drew me to a closer study of Fred Walker’s work. Sidney Colvin had preceded me as Art Critic of thePall Mall, and I am very conscious that in my first efforts in art criticism I closely modelled myself upon his style.

He and Bernal Payne had already done much to direct public attention to the new movement in Art before I entered the field. And it was not wonderful, in view of Colvin’s eloquent advocacy of the men whom I most deeply admired, that I should have been drawn to the art of Fred Walker, whose talent he had particularly distinguished.

A little later I got to know Walker himself, but he was difficult to know well, not by reason of any deliberate reserve, but because of an unconquerable shyness which was deeply rooted in his character. Shy in his ordinary converse as a man, he was no less so in regard to his pictures. As one entered his studio he would always turn the work upon which he was engaged with its face to the wall, and

A WOMAN IN THE SNOWFromGood Words.ByFredrick Walker, A.R.A., R.W.S.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)To face page 103.

A WOMAN IN THE SNOW

FromGood Words.

ByFredrick Walker, A.R.A., R.W.S.

Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)

To face page 103.

could rarely be induced to allow his visitor any glimpse of it.

Shortly after his death, which occurred in 1875, I wrote the introductory note to the catalogue of his collected works exhibited in Bond Street, and, wishing for some closer knowledge of the man than I could boast, I had recourse to Mr. George Leslie, who had known him long and well.

I find an interesting letter of his written to me about that time, and concerning, among many other things, Walker’s stay in Algiers, where he had gone for his health. Leslie had asked me to meet Miss Jeykell, who had been in Algiers at the time, but as I was unable to accept his invitation he very kindly jotted down for me some notes of his conversation with her, adding at the same time some interesting reflections upon Walker’s character which throw much light upon his temperament as an artist.

“Miss Jeykell,” he writes to me in a letter dated February 10, 1876, “was there with Madam Bodichon when Walker arrived, and came home with him. She says that nothing could have exceeded his delight on arriving, with the light, bright climate and the novelty of everything, and he had immediately a great wish to send for his sister to come out and live there. But very soon, in about a fortnight or three weeks, his strong family affections began to tell on him and he grew terribly home-sick, and gradually took a sort of horror for the whole place. This feeling grew and grew on him, and he became quite ill. He longed to be back in England. With almost despair he said if he could only be in a hansom cab once again he shouldbe quite happy. Madam Bodichon and Miss Jeykell one day took him out with them for a driving excursion round the country and along the sea-shore, and this, she said, seemed to be one of the only days he enjoyed thoroughly. The shores were very picturesque and rocky, and they visited beautiful little bays of pure sand and quaint shells, where Fred Walker strolled about and seemed very much struck, no doubt contemplating his intended picture.

“They left him alone when he seemed to wish it, and he sat gazing at the rocks and sea in deep thought. He had his flute with him, and would accompany Miss Jeykell, who used to sing. She said, what I can endorse myself, that he played in a manner quite peculiar, full of tender feeling and prettiness.

“Finally his illness and his growing disgust of the place grew so much worse that they got quite anxious about him, and when Miss Jeykell and her companion were about to return home they proposed to take him with them. In a perfectly helpless way he eagerly accepted the kindness, allowing them to do everything for him, even packing his pictures for him, securing his passage, and paying his bills, etc. He went on board the steamer so ill that Miss Jeykell felt anxious about him, fearing he might not survive till he reached home.

“But the morning after they started, when she had gone to look for him in his cabin, she found him walking the deck in his little shooting-jacket, and quite revived with the idea of home. He relapsed, however, in his journey through France,and the hatred of Algiers returned at the very sound of the French tongue.

“They arrived, however, quite safely at last, and Miss Jeykell at Charing Cross Station said, ‘There, Mr. Walker, is a hansom cab.’ He got in, waved his hand in a playful excited way, and that was the last time she ever saw him.”

And then follows a very interesting comparison between the characters of Fred Walker and Sir Edwin Landseer, which Mr. Leslie was well qualified to make, as he had known them both for many years.

“I used to see them both,” he writes, “for several years during the same time, and so was always being reminded one of the other. They were both disposed to be a little tyrannical in disposition; they both expected everything to be done for them. They were both extremely sensitive to criticism and public opinion, and they both possessed a tender and intense feeling for music.

“Walker could not play before friends, as the tears would run down his cheeks, and I have heard Landseer sing with the tears in his eyes. Landseer had not much voice, but a very sweet pathetic feeling. They both had strong family affections, and each possessed a devoted sister who ministered to their every want.

“They each had the same reluctance to show their pictures. Even when they had gone to the Exhibition, they would fret and worry and make themselves ill as to what would be thought of them. They both possessed an intense ambition to excel in Art. Walker once confessed to me that hemeant to bethebest artist, or the ‘very top,’ as he said, and Landseer had quite the same ruling passion.

“They both had a keen sense of humour, and both drew admirable caricatures. Landseer would, with three or four lines, give you the very essence of any one’s face, and you know how well poor Fred Walker did this. They were both very silent about Art, or rather about pictures; they neither of them had very much education, but somehow were far more neat in their choice of words than most other artists.

“They both were extremely fastidious in their work, altering and altering again and again; often a picture took up a year or two.

“Lastly, in dress they were something alike, both very fond of rather a sporting style, and indeed they were both decided sportsmen in taste. They were both, too, when I knew them, tinged with a kind of despairing feeling of melancholy, not of a slow languishing kind, but with a quick intense fever, covered over with a pretty sparkle of wit and cheerfulness when in the society of friends. The thing that always struck me about Walker and Landseer was, that the young man of thirty was like the other of sixty, and I have often said to Marks, ‘He could never live, he has already arrived at what is the end of Landseer.’”

Poor Walker died in 1875 at the early age of thirty-five. He had exhibited once in the Royal Academy after his return from Algiers, and it was while his picture was hanging upon the walls at Burlington House that we heard of his suddendeath, due to a violent chill he had contracted during a fishing excursion in Scotland.

It was not very long before his death that I paid my last visit to his studio, and although, as was his custom, the canvas upon which he was engaged was speedily wheeled round and turned with its face to the wall, I caught just a glimpse of his subject, which afterwards formed the matter of our talk. It was to be called “The Unknown Land,” and it is characteristic of the whole bent of his talent, and of the special way in which his imagination worked, that the last of his designs, left a mere fragment at the date of his death, was no more than a development of a drawing which he had contributed years before to the pages ofOnce a Week.

But it is to be acknowledged that Walker was never prolific in his inventions in the ordinary sense of the term. Nothing is more remarkable in his gradual progress than the strong and enduring attachment he displayed to certain motives in composition that at first found expression in his boyhood. As his art advanced, this inspiration of his earlier days was taken up again and enforced with all the riper resources of his manhood.

His great picture of “The Bathers” must have already been suggested to him by one of a series of illustrations representing the seasons which had also appeared in the pages ofOnce a Week, and many another instance might be cited which would tend to show the strong allegiance of his maturity to ideas which had first won his devotion as a boy.

Mr. Leslie’s vivid sketch of Walker, and his just appreciation of his character, corresponds closelyenough with the man as I knew him in the later days of his life. He seemed to me to be always to the last degree fastidious in his own judgment upon his work, and so exacting in his demands upon himself that I think it was from this source there sprang up the disinclination which he always showed to submitting his pictures to the criticism of others.

The struggle he went through with himself in endeavouring to carry to a successful issue the thought that had formed in his brain was so severe that it left him, when the task was complete, with no courage to face an opinion which might, as he feared, be even less favourable than his own.

But although he shunned any discussion upon pictures painted by himself, he was, as I recall him now, always eager and enthusiastic in his talk of the wider and more general ideals of Art, enthusiastic also in his occasional references to those among his contemporaries whom he specially admired. Looking back upon his achievement now, it is easy to perceive, and it would be folly not to acknowledge, that some of that higher beauty which he sought to find in those rustic subjects that were dear to him was occasionally imposed upon reality by a conscious and wilful reference to the beauty of the antique.

But even if this criticism be admittedly just, his claims as a painter remain undisturbed. The added grace that he bestowed upon reality was resident in nature itself, and there is reason to think that if time had allowed his powers to be fully developed he would have achieved what he sought without direct dependence upon classic example. The two separate elements of his art—his direct

LUCY GRAY, or SOLITUDETo-night will be a stormy night,You to the town must go,And take the lantern, child, to lightYour mother through the snow.William Wordsworth.By SirJohn Gilbert, R.A., P.R.W.S.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)By permission ofMessrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.To face page 109.

LUCY GRAY, or SOLITUDE

To-night will be a stormy night,You to the town must go,And take the lantern, child, to lightYour mother through the snow.William Wordsworth.

By SirJohn Gilbert, R.A., P.R.W.S.

Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)

By permission ofMessrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.

To face page 109.

and searching study of the facts of the actual world, and his passionate love of the beauty of the antique—were in process of being united but they were not yet absolutely fused in one. His early death left the story of his art life incomplete, but there is enough and more than enough to vindicate his position in our school.

On the occasion of one of my rare visits to his studio he had given me some brief account of the first years of his studentship. When he first quitted school at the age of sixteen he occupied himself in copying from the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. For a while his purely artistic studies were interrupted by his apprenticeship to an architect, but after only eighteen months of labour that was never congenial to him we find him once more at the Museum, while during the evenings of this period he attended the classes in Leigh’s School in Newman Street, making there the acquaintance of several other young artists with whom he remained on terms of closest friendship during the rest of his life.

A little later he entered the school of the Royal Academy, and about the same time began to employ himself with drawing on the wood which he learnt from Mr. T. W. Whymper, in whose establishment he remained for a period of three years.

At that date Sir John Gilbert was the accepted model for young men who desired to succeed in book illustration, and I remember Walker telling me that in all his earlier essays he was rigidly held to a strict conformity with Gilbert’s style. But it was not long before he formed a method of his own, and,soon afterOnce a Weekwas established in 1859, Walker became a constant contributor to its pages. Later again he sought and found employment from Mr. Thackeray on theCornhill Magazine, where he illustrated the editor’s own story ofPhilip.

He used often to tell me of his visits to Thackeray’s house, where he went to settle with the great novelist the subject of the next illustration. During a considerable part of the time Thackeray was ill and confined to his room, and the young draughtsman would sit at the side of the bed and listen to the details of the story as they came from Thackeray’s own lips.

THE UNJUST JUDGEFromThe Parables of our Lord.By SirJ. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)To face page 111.

THE UNJUST JUDGE

FromThe Parables of our Lord.By SirJ. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)

To face page 111.

It was inevitable that the new movement in Art, with its deeper research of truth in the rendering of human form and the facts of outward nature, should have led to a renewed study of certain forgotten qualities of design. And it is, indeed, impossible to understand the aim and impulse of the leaders of this new movement without reference to the engraved work of the time. It was a necessity of the straitened means which affected nearly all of them that they should at first employ themselves in the work of illustration, and there is no higher tribute to the genius which this new spirit had evoked than is to be found in the engraved work that was produced in England during the ten or fifteen years dating from the middle fifties.

When he was little more than a boy, and before he had gained any accomplishment as a painter, Rossetti had already produced some beautiful work in black and white, and we know from their published illustrations that Millais and Holman Hunt were already striving in the same direction.

The first important display of this renewed energy in design is to be found in the illustratededition of Tennyson’sPoemspublished in 1857, for there, side by side with much that belongs to an earlier manner, the drawings of Hunt and Millais and Rossetti stand out with vivid distinctness as a separate achievement. Not that even at that time these three artists ought to be considered as actuated by a single motive; the individuality of each had been already asserted, and it was hardly necessary for Mr. Hunt in his recently publishedReminiscenceto labour the point that the aims of Rossetti were not in their essence the aims of Millais and himself. Nor, on the other hand, can the supremacy of Rossetti in regard to imaginative impulse and power be rightly challenged by any one who has had the opportunity of studying the work of the time.

It is not easy to perceive the motive of those who seek so hotly to contest Rossetti’s influence upon his fellows. The very fact that Millais’s art, and even, though in a lesser degree, the art of Mr. Holman Hunt, took afterwards a different direction, is rather to be taken as evidence that in some of the essays of these earlier years they were, for a time at least, under the sway of an individuality in its essence widely different from their own. The champions of the genius of Millais need be under no anxiety to claim for him entire independence of spirit. In his later achievements this independence is announced without reserve. They make it clear that the finer poetic feeling, which is evident in some of his earlier paintings, and more especially in some of his earlier drawings, was not destined to be the dominating factor in his artistic life. But it is no less true, as it seems to me, that there was a time of

THE LEAVENFromThe Parables of our Lord.By SirJ. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)To face page 113.

THE LEAVEN

FromThe Parables of our Lord.By SirJ. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.

(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)

To face page 113.

his youth when he willingly surrendered himself to this spirit, and if, as we come now to perceive, it was not enduringly implanted in his nature, there can be no reason for disputing the suggestion that it sprang at the time from comradeship with a man in whose work, whatever other changes it may have suffered, this quality remained always supreme.

“I believe,” said Mr. Ruskin, speaking of Rossetti shortly after the date of his death, “that his name should be placed first on the list of men within my own knowledge who have raised and changed the spirit of modern Art—raised in absolute attainment, changed in direction of temperament.”

And if we turn with these words in mind to the Tennyson illustrations, it will seem not possible to dispute Mr. Ruskin’s verdict.

Beautiful as are the drawings of Millais and Mr. Hunt, the final impression left by that volume rests in a pre-eminent degree upon Rossetti’s exquisite design of “Sir Galahad” and his beautiful illustrations of the “Palace of Art.”

Within two years of the issue of Tennyson’s volume, the illustrated periodical calledOnce a Weekwas established, and its pages for many years afterwards bore admirable witness to the wide influence which these three great leaders were already exercising upon their generation. Indeed, it may be said that it is impossible to understand the real trend of this new movement, and to appreciate at their just worth the many and varying individualities engaged in its support, without a constant reference to these earlier volumes of a now defunct periodical. There we find in rich profusionthe earlier, and in many cases the more interesting, experiments of men like Du Maurier, Charles Keene, Frederick Sandys, Frederick Walker, and John Tenniel, side by side with numerous illustrations by Millais himself. Even Mr. Whistler was an occasional contributor, though his work, except in its very earliest essays where he frankly accepts the ruling convention of the time, quickly takes a place apart as a thing of purely individual temperament.

Afterwards, in the days of the Arts Club, I learned to know personally many of those men whose work I had loved when a boy as it appeared in the pages ofOnce a Week. Charles Keene, who had first been made known to me by his illustrations of Meredith’s novel ofEvan Harrington, was a constant figure there during the time when he was already a valued member of the staff ofPunch. He was a quaint and amiable character, with a head that suggested Don Quixote, and I recall him now as he used to sit for many an hour of the afternoon and evening with his cup of coffee kept hot upon the bars of the old fire-place in the front room of the Club, filling and refilling one of those tiny clay pipes dating from the period of Charles II., which had been unearthed during some building excavations in the City. Taciturn by habit, and perhaps by preference, he yet always willingly entered into conversation when the occasion arose. Sometimes I would go down and see him in his little house in Chelsea, and turn over his elaborately careful etchings of boats, made by the sea.

It cannot be said, I think, that he was ever deeply stirred in his own work by the movement to

To seek the wanderer, forth himself doth comeAnd take him in his arms, and bear him home.So in this life, this grove of Ignorance,As to my homeward I myself advance,Sometimes aright, and sometimes wrong I go,Sometimes my pace is speedy, sometimes slow.Life’s Journey.—George Wither.FromEnglish Sacred Poetry.ByFrederick Sandys.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)By permission ofMessrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.To face page 115.

FromEnglish Sacred Poetry.ByFrederick Sandys.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.

(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)

By permission ofMessrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.

To face page 115.

which I have specially referred, though he was full of generous appreciation of what was being done in that direction. The effects for which he was specially seeking in black and white demanded a style of execution peculiarly his own, and, when his mastery in the use of the material was complete, the result, more especially in the rendering of light and shade, was a thing distinct and incomparable.

The one man of all the group who showed, perhaps, the surest hold of the essential qualities of design was Fred Sandys. Though not of the body, he was closely associated with the pre-Raphaelite movement, and already inOnce a Week, in such drawings as his illustration to Meredith’s poem of “The Old Chartist,” he had exhibited a complete command of technical resources. Sandys remained to the last a remarkable talker, keenly critical, and on occasion warmly appreciative. There was a period during his later life when he might be found almost any afternoon in the lower room of the Café Royal, and there, over a cigar and a cup of coffee, he would gossip freely of those earlier days during his association with Rossetti, always taking care, as it seemed to me, to let it be understood that when his own association with any one of the men of that time had ceased, they had ceased to be afterwards very interesting or notable.

I remember Whistler used to give some very humorous imitations of incidents that occurred in Sandys’ studio, and he was particularly happy in the reproduction of a scene between the painter and his father—real or fanciful I cannot pretend to say—in which something of the haughty reticence andreserve exhibited on both sides was very entertainingly reproduced.

Du Maurier was one of the constant attendants at the Arts Club during the afternoon, and was always a delightful companion. He loved discussion, loved especially to appraise and value the different ideals of contemporary painting in eager, and sometimes excited, dispute in regard to the merits of men whose work made, perhaps, a stronger appeal to me than to him. But our talk, even when it was most animated, never grew embittered. With Du Maurier, indeed, that would hardly have been possible, for the innate charm of his nature, linked with a constant desire to be just and fair, even to those towards whom his judgment was sometimes unfavourable, sufficed in itself to keep even the most heated controversy agreeable and urbane.

Despite his partly French origin, or perhaps by reason of it, he possessed an enthusiastic appreciation for the purely English type of beauty, whether in men or women. The athletic sanity of our English life appealed to him strongly, and it was, perhaps, the consciousness of something in himself of the Gallic spirit, something that leaned towards greater refinement and delicacy, that kept him obstinately devoted to the more solid ideals of the land in which he dwelt. It was this, I am sure, that so strongly attracted him to Millais, whose robust character, both as expressed in the man and exhibited in his art, he passionately admired. And I think it was the suspicion of a danger lest he might be tempted to surrender himself to something not so healthy inits outlook that left him with a constant sense of reserve in his appreciation of men like Rossetti and Burne-Jones. And yet he was far too gifted an artist not to be sensible to the genius of both.

But it was as a man, and apart from any profession of faith, that he was so wholly delightful. His professed principles, though always sincerely held and admirably expressed, and his constant respect for the steady decorum of English character, gave scarcely a hint of the special charm of his own temperament. In moments of gaiety his high spirits were infectious, and he became on certain occasions, when the mood stirred him, the veriest and most delightful of Bohemians.

I recall him, at one of the annual feasts at Maidenhead held by a little club called “The Lambs,” keeping the whole table in roars of laughter by an impromptu speech wherein he gave free rein to his humour and fancy—a speech which, I think, made us all feel that his constantly expressed reverence for the English ideal must have occasionally suffered some sense of fatigue that needed for its cure a sudden reversion to the land of his blood. We none of us suspected in those days—he himself perhaps least of all—that he was destined to win such world-wide fame as an author, and it was perhaps not until he became an author that it was possible to realise in what affectionate remembrance he held the days of his studentship in Paris.

Du Maurier’s early contributions toOnce a Weekscarcely gave more than a hint of that humorous quality which he afterwards developed in the pages ofPunch. It was there that he translated withcaricature the extravagances and eccentricities of that æsthetic cult which had indeed little counterpart in real life, excepting in so far as they were summed up in the conscious affectations of poor Oscar Wilde.

But at the time they were accepted by the public as in some sense a satire upon the newer school of painting, and—although that, I know, was no part of Du Maurier’s intention—these drawings served in no small degree to encourage the spirit of ridicule with which some of the more serious work of the time was received.

Humour, as we may here perceive, was always at Du Maurier’s command, and yet it is not specially by this quality that his best contributions toPunchare distinguished. They hold a place apart, as compared, for instance, with the caricatures of John Leech or Charles Keene, by reason of a certain grace and beauty which was their constant attribute. They formed a just and sometimes a flattering picture of the English social life of the time, betraying, in the rendering of form and in charm of bearing, the artist’s devotion to that type of English beauty—fitting models for which Du Maurier could always find without wandering beyond the limits of his own home.

One or two of his most highly finished drawings I was enabled to publish in theEnglish Illustrated Magazine, and there is one in particular called “A Nocturne” which shows with what a fine sense of reality he could render on occasion the most delicate effects in landscape.

Du Maurier loved music, and by common consentwas an accomplished musician, though his voice boasted no great range or power. But when he chose to sing to his intimate friends—and he never cared to seek a wider audience—it was impossible to resist the taste and charm which belonged to him as surely in music as in the traffic of social life. Even here, however, as in pictorial art, he could never quite determine with himself to what school he owned the strongest allegiance, and I have often heard him declare that he was torn in divided admiration between the perfect vocalisation of a singer like De Soria and the more passionate appeal of some of the later German music as it was interpreted by Henschell.

Richard Doyle—or Dicky Doyle, as he was better known to his countless friends—seemed rather by the quality of his work, which claims a certain kinship with the style of Sir John Gilbert, to belong to an earlier generation, and yet he was well known and well loved by even the youngest of those who were working under a newer impulse.

He was a welcome guest in nearly all of the great country-houses in England, and yet he preserved to the end a strange boyishness and shyness of manner, beneath which, however, there lurked a constant sense of kindly humour.

I met him first as a fellow-guest of Sir Coutts Lindsay at Balcarres, and I remember his telling me that he had such a horror of his modest wardrobe being overhauled by the footman who valeted him that it was his habit, on retiring for the night, to lock his clothes securely in a drawer, and then to watch with half-opened eyes in the morning, and with achuckle which he could not always conceal beneath the bed-clothes, the wild despair of the footman in his fruitless search for the secreted garments.

When the Grosvenor was established, Doyle became a constant contributor to the exhibitions, sending every year some delightful specimens of his fanciful treatment of fairy subjects.

But it is perhaps mainly by his earlier drawings on the wood that he will be best remembered, drawings which display the fecundity of his inventions exhibited in countless forms and faces, which he could multiply apparently without effort or trouble. One of the best of these drawings is that representing the Custom-House at Cologne, where he shows in a supreme degree his extraordinary power of granting individual character to every diminutive face that is introduced into the design.

A younger artist, who had perhaps something of the personal charm of Du Maurier, was Randolph Caldecott, whom I got to know soon after the publication of his hunting scenes.

He had been ordered to the South for the sake of his health, and at the suggestion of his friend and mine, Mr. Thomas Armstrong, who so greatly aided him in those earlier days in securing public recognition, he undertook to make the illustrations for a book written by my wife calledNorth Italian Folk.

In manner Caldecott was as gentle as Du Maurier, and even more reserved, yet this reserve could yield on occasion to the wildest high spirits, when the humour that is never absent from his drawings found delightful utterance. Poor Caldecott always had about him the shadow of failing health,and yet it never, I think, disturbed the deep tenderness of his nature that was revealed even in his most buoyant moods.

Perhaps the quaintest figure among the draughtsmen of that day was the Italian caricaturist Carlo Pellegrini, whose cartoons inVanity Fairbrought him prominently before the public.

Although he was a dweller among us for many years, he never acquired the slightest command of our tongue. Indeed, I rather think that as time went on his English grew persistently worse, but in his brave endeavour to express himself he forged a dialect of his own that was sometimes richly entertaining.

One day at a private view at the Dudley Gallery he went down on his knees to examine and to admire a drawing by Arthur Severn, and then, with sudden enthusiasm, he cried out so that all might hear, “Capital, capital! But why, the blast, he stipple?”

At Pagani’s Italian Restaurant in Great Portland Street he was a constant attendant, and during the later years of his life, when he had fallen upon evil times, I think his kindly compatriots greatly befriended him.

There I constantly met him at lunch at the time when I was at work for the German Reeds, whose room of entertainment in St. George’s Hall stood close by; and afterwards Pellegrini became a regular visitor at our house in Blandford Square, where he would always, at his own request, insist upon bringing some Italian dish to add to the modest feast that had been prepared for him.

Once on Christmas Day, when he was dining withus, I specially warned him that my father-in-law, who was a clergyman, would be of the party, and beseeched him to curb the ordinary exuberance of his phraseology. But despite his solemn promise of circumspection, the ladies had no sooner quitted the dining-room than I found Pellegrini in animated conversation with my father-in-law, conversation liberally enforced on his side by a volley of strange oaths in that dialect that was all his own, oaths which, had they been partially understood by his companion, would, I think, have brought the evening to a sudden termination.

When his indiscretion had been pointed out to him poor Pellegrini was duly repentant, but we had not been in the drawing-room many minutes before he joined in a game of Little Horses which my children were playing upon the floor. At the close of the game he rose with an expression upon his face of deep remorse.

“Joe,” he cried, “you ’ave ruin me! At the Las’ Day the Lord God will say to me, ‘Pellegrini, you ’ave every vice.’ And I could ’ave reply, ‘Lord God, pardon me, I ’ave never gamble.’ Now I cannot say.”

This renewed outburst made it plain to me that I had, on that particular occasion, made a somewhat unwise selection in the guests invited to meet him, and during the remainder of the evening I kept close by his elbow in fear and trembling of some new outrage that might bring our innocent festivities to a sudden close.

Pellegrini was a well-known figure at the Beefsteak Club, where his quaint idiosyncrasies werewelcomed by nearly all, but even there he would occasionally bring a shock of surprise and amazement to some newly elected member who was not yet accustomed to his liberal vocabulary.

There was one fellow-member of the club, himself an artist, who was wont to entertain the table with little impromptu sketches and designs which he executed with a certain degree of facility. This innocent display of artistic power gravely offended Pellegrini, who, possibly moved by a measure of jealousy that any one else should encroach upon his special province, insisted with some vehemence that a club was not the place for such exercises.

“I like the boy,” he said to me one evening, “and when he talk, I listen, but ’tis pity he draw.”

It was only a few evenings later that I entered the room and found the young friend who had been the subject of Pellegrini’s rebuke absorbing the entire conversation of a crowded table. Pellegrini was present, and I could see that he was growing restive under the artist’s unceasing flow of conversation. In a momentary pause he turned to me and in an audible whisper delivered this laconic judgment:

“Joe, I ’ave made big mistake. ’Tis better he draw.”

Poor Pellegrini’s misfortunes dated from the time when, abandoning the practice of caricature, he sought to establish himself as a painter in oils. Soon after he had started upon this perilous enterprise he said to me one day at the Arts Club, “Joe, I will make that you have not told the lie.”

“What lie?” I inquired.

“You have say,” he replied, “that I shall be the finest portrait-painter of the day. You will see—Iwillbe.”

As a matter of fact I had never ventured upon any such daring prophecy, neither did I have any faith in the chances of his success. Nor, I am sure, did he ever believe I had said it. It was rather, I suspect, a wily device of the Neapolitan to pledge my support for the new departure which he had taken in his art.

Towards the close of his life he rarely came to any Club, and I think he felt deeply the failure that had overtaken him.

Very quaintly, as we drove home one night, he gave expression to the consciousness that lay upon him that he had not long to live.

“When I die,” he said, “which ’appen short——” and then he turned away with the sentence unfinished.

Of his talent as a caricaturist there can never be any question. He had the rare power of finding an equation for every face, summarising in a few lines its salient points of oddity. And this same power he exhibited in his shrewd judgment of character. At a dinner-table little that was characteristic escaped his humorous regard. Though alien born, and almost jealously retaining to the end of his life amongst us his individuality as a foreigner, he possessed a quick and just appreciation of our national characteristics, more especially as they lent themselves to humorous portrayal.

He once said to me, “A man may caricature the people of a race that is not his own, but it needs a native to judge them seriously.”

He forgot his own maxim, poor fellow, when he launched out as a painter of portraits, for the source of his failure lay not merely in insufficient power, but in the lack of true comprehension of the deeper qualities of character.

When, for reasons that need not now be discussed, Mr. Hallé and I severed our connection with the Grosvenor Gallery, we at once cast about to establish its successor. It was obvious to us both that if the experiment was to be made successfully it must be made without delay, and, as a matter of fact, the New Gallery as it stands to-day was constructed and completed within the brief period of three months.

One of our initial difficulties was to secure a suitable site, and the second obstacle, scarcely less formidable, was to procure from those who favoured the movement sufficient resources to justify us in proceeding with the work.

The site upon which the New Gallery now stands had at one time been occupied by the well-known livery stables of Messrs. Newman, but shortly before coming into our possession they had been partly transformed to serve the purpose of a provision market. This partial reconstruction aided us very materially in our work. The central hall, so far as the mere outline of the fabric is concerned, did not need entire reconstruction. But the task,even with this help, remained formidable enough, and could not have been possibly carried through within the limited time at our disposal if it had not been for the hearty and zealous co-operation of all of those who were engaged upon the building.

There were many moments during these anxious three months when it seemed indeed impossible of accomplishment. Inevitable delays in the supply of the material required, again and again imperilled the chances of success, and I think we were not a little astonished ourselves to find that our original plan could be carried out in its entirety, and that we were able to open the first exhibition in the month of May.

The establishment of the Grosvenor and the New Gallery form an interesting chapter in the history of modern art in England. It is more than probable that neither the one nor the other could have come into existence if the Royal Academy had taken a more generous and liberal view of the functions it had to discharge; but the merest glance at the history of this institution suffices to show that it has at all times adopted the narrowest interpretation of its duties and responsibilities. Anxious for the homage due to a national institution, and intolerant of any protest against its rule, it has nevertheless persistently failed to advance with the growth of new ideas of art, and has steadily declined to undertake any enlargement of the original scope of its labours. Of the more important art movements that have arisen since the date of its creation, the Royal Academy has been little more than a spectator. At a time when the nationalinterest in matters of art was scarcely recognised, it might, by a liberal interpretation of its duties, have become the acknowledged centre of a coherent system of art administration, but it had chosen instead to allow nearly all that was done by way of progress to be accomplished by independent effort.

It might easily have been shown that it was not the intention of the founders of the Royal Academy that it should thus degenerate into a private undertaking. The encouragement which George III. gave to the scheme was given on the ground that “he considered the culture of the arts as a national concern,” and in the instrument presented for his signature it is said that the great utility of such an institution has been fully and clearly demonstrated. Moreover, in the catalogue of the first national exhibition the demand of payment at the doors was made a subject of apology, and the only excuse was that no other means could be discovered of preventing the entry of improper persons.

But although the public and national character of the undertaking was clearly acknowledged at that time, a very few years sufficed to prove that the constitution of the Academy was unfavourable to the right interpretation of its duties. When the Academy was founded the English did not possess a National Gallery, and Barry, who perceived the use of such a collection of the Masters of Art in forming and educating the taste both of art students and the public, proposed to his fellow-members of the Academy that they should devote a portion of their surplus funds on the purchase of pictures by the OldMasters. But the Academy rejected this proposal as promptly as they had discarded the idea of a closer connection with the nation.

That the imperfections of the institution were clearly perceived by distinguished artists who afterwards became members of the body, is not disputed. Before the Commission of 1863 Mr. G. F. Watts expressed himself in no uncertain terms.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that there must be some defect. If it were extremely anxious to develop taste or encourage art I think that some means would have been found. A merchant finds means if he wants to improve his commercial arrangements. Whatever a man wishes to do, he finds a way of doing it more or less satisfactorily. But I do not see that the Royal Academy has done anything whatever.” And again, in relation to public taste and its guidance in all that concerns the erection of public monuments or public buildings, Mr. Watts says, “It seems to be a monstrous thing that the Royal Academy has had no voice in this matter.” And further, referring to independent efforts for the encouragement of public schemes of mural decoration, he most emphatically declares, “I think it ought to have occurred to the Academy, as a body of men having the direction of art and taste, many years before it occurred to the Prince Consort; and I think also that, when the initiative was taken, the Academy ought to have adopted the movement and have given it every advantage possible.”

And this was already matter of history at the time that the Grosvenor Gallery was founded. But thesame spirit that had dwarfed their conception of the duties of a national institution on the administrative side, had also coloured the ungenerous attitude that they had at first betrayed towards that great movement in modern painting which was heralded by the pre-Raphaelite brethren.

In the teeth of a keen opposition that was at first displayed towards his work, Millais had fought his way into the august ranks of the academic body; but with that exception nearly all the great leaders of the new movement still stood without its walls. Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, and the great sculptor Alfred Stevens knew nothing at that time of academic honour, and their work, if it was submitted for official judgment, was either coldly received or was treated in a spirit of active hostility.

It was that which gave to the movement which resulted in the establishment of the Grosvenor its importance and significance.

The battle has long ended now, and the fact that these men did, or did not, receive academic recognition counts for nothing in respect of the place they hold in modern English painting. Such rebel forces as have since come into existence have not been of a kind to win a like distinction, and public interest in art has become so languid in its exercise that if such a body of men were now to arise it may be questioned whether their work would stir the feeble pulses of the time.

But at the period of which I am speaking their gradual advancement was watched and welcomed by enthusiastic admirers, and it was that which made itpossible for institutions like the Grosvenor and the New Gallery to challenge the sleepy self-complacency of the dwellers in Burlington House.

And it will now scarcely be denied that each of these two institutions in its turn has served a useful purpose. In a sense, indeed, they have been almost too successful, for a distinguished success achieved in one or the other has again and again proved the means of obtaining for the artist tardy recognition from the authorities of Burlington House. But the forces ranged on the side of orthodoxy are in this country always formidable, and it may be questioned now whether enough vitality survives in English art to justify the continued existence of independent institutions such as those I have named.

The great prices obtained at public auctions for the earlier masters of our School are sometimes quoted in support of the view that the taste for art remains unimpaired. As a matter of fact I think they may be taken to warrant an exactly opposite conclusion. The buyers of thirty or forty years ago who helped to encourage the painters of their own day were guided for the most part by their own individual preference. Their taste may often have been uninstructed, but at least it was their own. They loved the pictures which they sought to acquire, and, as their collections grew, a better taste grew with them. The modern buyer, on the other hand, is for the most part the mere puppet of the dealer. He buys at the top price of the market because he believes the market will maintain its price, and with a prudence that the dealer is careful to foster he makes his choice from among thoseolder pictures whereof the market value has been appraised by time.

And so long as these purely commercial considerations dominate the taste of the time, the cause of contemporary painting must surely suffer. That a truer feeling will come again with the passing of time need not be doubted, but any one who has followed the movement in English painting since the middle of the last century must perforce experience a feeling of melancholy at the listless apathy and indifference which has taken the place of the earnest enthusiasm of an earlier day.

That enthusiasm was still at its height when Sir Coutts Lindsay founded the Grosvenor Gallery; it survived with scarcely diminished force when Mr. Hallé and I succeeded in establishing the New Gallery, and I look back without regret to my long association with both these institutions. As the child of our own creation the New Gallery has claimed from both of us the larger and the longer service. At the inception of our task we had the loyal support of Burne-Jones, whose art we both deeply loved, and when he died I think we both felt that a part of our mission had gone.

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