Art: The Dutch and Flemish Pictures in New York

THE collection of pictures forming the germ of what it is so agreeable to have the Revue des Deux Mondes talking of currently as the Musée de New York, has recently been lodged in a handsome and convenient gallery, masked by one of the residential brown-stone fronts of the Fifth Avenue. These pictures, one hundred and seventy-five in number, are, as we may remind our readers, with some dozen exceptions, of the Dutch and Flemish schools. They consist for the most part of the substance of two private collections, purchased in Paris and Brussels respectively, in the summer of 1870. Their authenticity has in each case been attested by proper evidence and by the judgment of experts, and in possessing them the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an enviably solid foundation for future acquisition and development. It is not indeed to be termed a brilliant collection, for it contains no first-rate example of a first-rate genius ; but it may claim within its limits a unity and continuity which cannot fail to make it a source of profit to students debarred from European opportunities. If it has no gems of the first magnitude, it has few specimens that are decidedly valueless. We shall by no means attempt a full enumeration of its contents, but we shall make a few remarks on the more important works, — a task rendered more easy by the altogether exemplary and artistic Catalogue.

In a corner of the gallery are ranged half a dozen indifferent examples of archaic masters, which will be hardly more than glanced at as an overture to the main spectacle. The visitor will turn with little delay to the Rubens ; he will turn from it perhaps with some disappointment. The picture has a fair share of the Rubens mass and breadth, but it lacks the Rubens lustre, — the glowing relief which we demand as the token of a consummate Rubens. The subject is a “Return from Egypt,” and contains four figures, — Mary and Joseph leading the Child between them, and the Deity watching them benignantly from the clouds. It is brown and dull in tone, and the figures have not the full-blooded aspect of most of the Rubens progeny; but like all emanations, however slight, of a great talent, it improves vastly on acquaintance and puts forth a dozen reminders of its distinguished kinship. The real success of the picture is in the free and sweeping contour of Mary, and in her extremely handsome head, the outline and relief of which, with her hair and its falling drapery, seems to us vividly characteristic of the master. Rubens alone, too, could have made his Virgin so gracefully huge and preserved the air of mild maternity in such massive bulk. His Mary is a gentle giantess. The picture altogether, though inadequate as an example, is a powerful and delightful reminder. The great Flemish master is represented by a second piece, of large dimensions but limited interest,— a couple of lions chasing an antelope. His lions are of the same mock-heroic order as the pictorial charger of that period, but they bound forward with a fine ferocious glare and spring. The name next in importance to that of Rubens is that of Van Dyck, who contributes two imperfect, but interesting works, of which more anon. Jacob Jordaens, a smaller name, is represented by a work of larger substance than either of these. His “ Visit of Saint John to the Infant Jesus,” falls very little short of being a masterpiece ; it would have needed only to be pitched a note or so higher in the scale of the ideal to challenge comparison with Rubens at his best. But these high notes, we take it, Jordaens never struck, and he remains simply one of the first of the secondary masters. He has been happily called “ a plebeian Rubens ” ; which possibly signifies that, if he was a duller and narrower genius, he had a stronger grasp of much of the more immediate detail of nature. What he lacks on the side of Rubens he shows a tendency to recover on the side of Rembrandt. He seems oppressed and sobered by that sense of reality which sat so lightly on the buoyant spirit of his master. The present composition represents the infant Jesus,—a tall, lusty, ugly baby, with his feet planted on a terrestrial globe and trampling a serpent, leaning with a sort of sturdy shyness against his mother’s side, looking in childish surprise — with an air even of timid envy of his toy — at the little Saint John who rides toward him on a lamb. The Virgin is a sweet-faced young woman whom the painter evidently meant to make pretty within the limits of Flemish probability, and the child has an odd look of having just waked up the least bit cross from a nap. Above these figures are distributed Joseph and the parents of John, looking on with homely tenderness, the pious concentration of which is deepened by the conibre vertical light in which the group is steeped. The Joseph, as we take him to be, leaning his grave and furrowed face on his big brown hand, is a triumph of expression and of execution. A plebeian genius, we repeat with emphasis. We doubt that there has ever been a more spontaneous reflection of the hard-handed lowliness of the entourage of Christ. A work classified by its dimensions, if not quite by its merit, with this finely sober Jordaens, is the large and brilliant Gaspard de Crayer which hangs in the place of honor in the gallery. This “Diogenes and Alexander” figured for some time in the collection of the Empress Josephine at Malmaison. It is a pleasing, almost a charming composition; for although it is an attempt at the heroic-historical, it is treated with a frank good faith which keeps it within the range of one’s immediate sympathies. The frank, boyish surprise of Alexander, with his steel-clad chest and his comely head, is very happy and natural, and recalls, at a distance, the superb modern physiognomy of the generous youth who stands for the hero in Paul Veronese’s great “ Alexander ” in London. Crayer was not a Paul Veronese, but he was a rich and agreeable colorist, and he diffused through his work an indefinable geniality which reproduces, in an infinitely lower key, the opulent serenity of Rubens. This picture, with its slight vulgarity and want of mystery, of tone, is perhaps the “ loudest ” piece of coloring in the gallery. We ought not to omit mention of the little page who holds Alexander’s red cloak and peers from behind at the recumbent Diogenes. His head has charming vivacity and relief, and is almost a compensation for that of the dappled Bucephalus who prances officially in the rear. An immense “Jason” by Van Diepenbeck, a pupil of Rubens, is rather a vacant production.

These three fine works share their supremacy with half a dozen strong portraits, to which, as scources of instruction, we feel tempted to offer an even more emphatic welcome. The “ Miss De Christyn ” of Van Dyck stands first among them, and is perhaps the most delicate of the stronger pictures. This portrait is, oddly, the more interesting for being hardly more than a thirdrate specimen of the master ; for it seems that, if we are to have first-rate names, we are, yet awhile, to have them with abatements. The abatement here is a poverty of coloring, possibly aggravated by time, which the Catalogue but imperfectly disguises under the designation of “ extreme delicacy in the tones.” This delicacy the picture possesses, but the spectator unfamiliar with Van Dyck may judge of what it lacks by turning to the smaller example, the “ Saint Martha interceding for the Cessation of the Plague at Tarascon,” and noting the lovely flesh-glow of the tumbling cherubs who uplift the pretty postulant into the blue, and who form, with the warm purple of her robe, the main success of the picture. The subject of the portrait perhaps is half its merit, — a pale, plain - faced, bright-eyed young gentlewoman carrying her ruff and fan with peculiar distinction. The physiognomy is excessively, almost morbidly, refined, and the painter has touched it with proportionate acuteness. Close beside this elegant work hangs a masterpiece of inelegant vigor, “ Hille Bobbe of Haarlem,” by Franz Hals, — a broadly grinning street-wench dashed upon the canvas by a brush superbly confident of saving science in the midst of its hit-or-miss rapidity. The picture is in hardly more than two or three gradations of brown, but it is instinct with energy and a certain gross truth. The face is a miracle of ugliness ; but it is noticeable how little of fantasy, of imaginative irony, there is in the painter’s touch. It needed a Dutch Franz Hals — sturdy artist that he was — to attribute to woman such hideousness as a plain matter of course.

Two portraits of equal vigor and of greater delicacy are a “ Burgomaster,” by Van der Heist, and a “ Gentleman,”— a perfect gentleman, — by Aadrian de Vries. In the former picture the subject and the artist are rarely well matched, and the result is a work of the most harmonious completeness, — the perfect prose of portraiture. We doubt that the mouth and chin of small local authority were ever more inexorably fixed in their pursy identity than these comfortable attributes of this most respectable Dutchman. It seems almost hyperbolical to talk of Van der Heist as an artist; genuine painter as he was, his process is not so much the common, leisurely, critical return upon reality and truth as a bonded and indissoluble union with it; so that in all his unmitigated verity you detect no faintest throb of invention blossoming into style and straggling across the line which separates a fine likeness from a fine portrait. But it sounds like arrant frivolity to breathe a word of disparagement against this richly literal genius, and we can easily fancy that, if Nature were to give her voice, and appoint once for all her painter-in-ordinary, she would lay a kindly hand on the sturdy shoulder of Van der Heist, and say, “ One must choose for the long run : this man I can trust.” And yet the really beautiful De Vries proves that a little style spoils nothing. Just a little, this portrait contains ; but that little is of the best quality, as may be inferred from the fact that this painter’s works were habitually made to pass by the dealers for productions of Rembrandt, to the great curtailment of the author’s proper fame. Rembrandt, of whom the Museum contains no specimen, need not have disowned this mellow and vigorous head. It is taking rather a harsh tone, in general, to refer our young painter’s offhand to the prime masters, and to expect in their labors a direct and undiluted reflection of Rembrandt and Titian ; but here is an artist modes enough to be approached as a peer, and yet of substantial attributes as a teacher. The unpretending firmness of this work gives it a value rarely possessed by clever modern portraits, and sets us wondering once more what mystic and forgotten influence it was that governed the art of portraiture during the happy span of years in which this master and his precursors flourished, and kept success a solemn rule and usage. We are inclined to think that our modern degenerescence — we assume it to be incontestable — is less a loss of skill than a defect of original vision. We know more about human character, and we have less respect for human faces. We take more liberties with those that are offered us ; we analyze and theorize and rub off the bloom of their mystery, and when we attempt to reproduce them, are obliged to resolve a swarm of fine conflicting impressions back into the unity and gravity of fact. A painter like this quietly wise De Vries (and a fortiori a painter like Van Dyck or like Titian) seems to have received and retained a single massive yet flexible impression, which was part and parcel, somehow, of a certain natural deference for his subject. There is little in the remaining works of this order, however, that we need despair of equalling. An exceptionally large Terburg (a likeness of the painter) has lost in interest what it has gained in magnitude. The famous white satin dress of Terburg, however, is represented with almost equal brilliancy in a charming Netscher. The head of a “ Lady,” by Lely, is fairly pleasing and uuwontedly decent and collet-monte; and a “ Duchess of Mazarin, by Nicholas Maas, is worth comparing with the “ Miss De Christyn ” for an illustration of the difference between factitious and sincere elegance. This portrait, with the Lely in a less degree, has a poverty and impurity of coloring which almost denotes moral turpitude in the painter. The unlovely cadaverous tones of the Nicholas Maas are, for that matter, in perfect harmony with the sinister flimsiness of his Duchess. Portraiture is once more strongly exemplified in the one important Italian work m the collection, a Paris Bordone; a fine - eyed, sweetmouthed lad in armor, with a scarf of genuine Venetian purple. This is a noble piece of coloring, and stands out in agreeably vivid Venetianism. The picture gains by juxtaposition. We know what it is to have turned with a sort of moral relief, in the galleries of Italy, to some small stray specimen of Dutch patience and conscience, and we have now a chance to repair our discourtesy and do homage to Italian “ style.” An Italian master, whatever his individual worth, possesses this grace as a matter of course; with the Dutch painters and the smaller Flemings it is a happy accident. With how little genuine strength it may occasionally be allied, may be seen in the three small specimens of that tardy fruit of the Venetian efflorescence, G. B. Tiepolo. Sincerity, and even sense, with this florid master of breezy drapery and fastidious pose, is on its last legs ; but he retains the instinct of brilliant and elegant arrangement. He offers a desperately faint but not unmusical echo from the azure - hearted ceilings of Paul Veronese. Elegance for elegance, however, we prefer that of the small Sassoferrato, the usual Sanctissima Virgo, breathless with adoration, with her usual hard high polish of creamy white and chilly blue. We confess to a sneaking relish for a good Sassoferrato. It may have but a pinch of sentiment, but it is certain to be a pretty piece of work. The artist had nothing to offer but “ finish,” but he offers this in elegant profusion. The French school is adequately represented only by a small Greuze, which, however, is indubitably French in manner, — a finished sketch for the head of one of the daughters in the well-known “ Malediction Paternelle.” It represents a rustic minois chiffonné, as the French say, in tears and dishevelment, and includes the usual gaping kerchief which marks the master and the time. It is at once solid and charming ; with a charm owing partly to the skilful clearness of those whitish-gray tones which mark the dawn of the sober coloring of modern French art. The great name of Velasquez is attached to a composition characteristic only in its rugged breadth of touch, — a map of mighty Spanish pomegranates, grapes, and figs, blocked into shape by a masterly brush, upon that gloomy ground-tone which we associate with the Spanish genius in general, and which, in the works of this, with Cervantes, as we suppose, its greatest representative, oppresses and troubles the spectator’s soul. This picture may be said to express the roughly imaginative view of fruit; for a most brilliantly literal treatment of the same subject the observer may turn with profit to a noble piece by Franz Snyder, the great Flemish animal - painter. The comparatively modern Spaniard, Goya, contributes a little “ Jewess of Tangier,” — a sketch, by a cunning hand, of a doll-like damsel, bundled up in stiff brocade and hung about with jewels. The picture is slight, but salient. The remaining strangers in the gallery demand little notice, and consist chiefly of an indifferent Sir Joshua Reynolds and several questionable specimens of Albani, the painter of allegorical infancy.

The chief strength of the collection resides in a number of those works which we especially associate with the Dutch school, —genre subjects, rustic groups, and landscapes. In this line figure several excellent specimens of eminent names, — a superb Teniers, a good example of each of the Van Ostades, a fine Jan Steen, three capital Solomon Ruysdaels, a lovely Berghem, an interesting Hobbema. The little Teniers— the “ Lendemain des Noces" — is not only a masterpiece of its kind, but may almost be termed the gem of the Museum. It presents, in remarkable purity, every merit which we commonly attribute to those vivid portrayals of rustic conviviality which Louis XIV. dismissed with a “ Take away those magots, — those little monsters ” : elaborate finish, humor tempered by grace, charm of color, and mingled minuteness and amplitude of design. It swawns with figures, of indescribable vivacity and variety, and glow’s -with an undimmed clearness of tone which promises a long enjoyment of its perfections. May it speak to our children’s children with the same silvery accent, and help them to live for an hour, in this alien modern world, the life of old bucolic Flanders ! To drink and to dance, to dance and to drink again, was for the imagination of Teniers the great formula of human life; and his little bonshommes—picked out in the tenderest tints of gray and blue, russet and yellow — lift their elbows and lock their hands and shake their heels with a rich hilarity which makes each miniature clown of them, whether in jacket or in kerchief, seem a distinct and complete creation. They are assembled here in a great audible swarm before a meadow-side tavern, at a couple of tables spread beneath the trees, and in scattered groups and couples of dancers in the foreground. Genuine boors as they are, however, and full of rustic breadth and roundness, they yet have a touch of grace and finesse which separates them widely from the grotesque creations of the two other noted interpreters of similar scenes here present, Jan Steen and Isaac Van Ostade. They pay a certain tribute to elegance. The painter is very far from partaking of the naivete of his figures ; he is a humorist, and he observes them from without; and while he pulls the strings which set them dancing, he keeps an eye on the spectator, and cunningly modulates and qualifies his realism. It is an audacious thing to say, doubtless, but we cannot help thinking that Louis XIV. took a narrower view of the matter than befitted his exalted position, when he pronounced the artist capable of producing the little man in the scarlet cap to the right of the present picture a mere painter of magots. Teniers has taken the measure of this sturdy reveller, as he falls into step with arms akimbo and eyes askance, with an acuteness which has the advantage of not being blunted by contempt. Isaac Van Ostade, however, with his “ Fiddler at the Cottage Door,” treats us to magots with a vengeance. Never was human hideousness embalmed in a richer medium than the precious atmosphere of this composition. In its luminous centre is seen the front of a hovel, before which a decrepit fiddler is scraping his instrument for the delectation of a horrible crone who leans over the low half-door, and of several children who come sniffing round him with the motion of so many blind puppies. To the right, in the dark brown foreground, overarched with an equal duskiness, three or four drinkers are gathered round a barrel. The poor little peasants, fixed in this mellow impasto as helplessly as flies in amber, with their huge pendulous noses and their groping and bungling gestures, seem stultified with facial deformity. It is impossible to conceive a more unprotestingly sordid view of humanity; and it takes its final stamp from the pitiless ugliness of the innocent children. We can only repeat of this singular genius what we had occasion to say of Franz Hals ; that it is a marvel to see the artistic faculty so vigorous, and yet so limited; dealing so freely with the pictorial idea, and yet so servile to base fact. Teniers, beside him, is a Veronese of low life. A work of much greater charm, indeed of the greatest, is the little picture by Aadrian Van Ostade, elder brother and master of Isaac. In this delicious cabinet - piece sits a “ Smoker,” filling his pipe amid a wealth of mellow shadows. His figure is full of homely truth and finish, but the only bit of detail is a door vaguely opening in the brown gloom behind, to admit a person whom you hardly discern. This work, a veritable gem, is almost misplaced in a general collection. It ought to hang on the library-wall of the most fastidious of amateurs, and be shown solemnly to a chosen friend, who holds his breath for fear of tarnishing its lucid bloom. Of Jan Steen, noted for his vigor and his crudity, there are two strong specimens. One of these, a Dutch “ Kermesse,” with the usual boors footing it before the usual tavern, is chiefly remarkable for the figure of a buoyant wench, with flying cap-strings, tossing her head to the music, and shaking her skirts with admirable spirit and glee ; the other, No. 127, a finer piece of painting, offers as frank a treatment of a coarse subject as often finds its way upon canvas. Mainly noteworthy are the strong handling of the mass of tumbled bedclothes which occupies the foreground, and the broad realization of the face, such as it is, of the Dutch Molly Seagrim, who figures as heroine in the episode. Never was a certain redeeming grace more brutally dispensed with. This is more than an ugly picture; it is an offensive act. It makes one think more meanly of the human imagination.

The three noble little Solomon Ruysdaels may at once close our enumeration of the important group-pieces and open the list of the landscapes. There are pictures in the collection of a far more exquisite touch than these, but none of a franker and more wholesome veracity ; none that help the spectator so effectively to feel the breath of the level and broad-skied landscape of Holland. “ A Kermesse,” the largest of these three subjects, represents a crowd of country folks collected under a wintry morning sky before a little tavern, beside a broad frozen stream. The festival is apparently not yet under way, for there is little movement in the crowd and certainly no great outlay of invention ; yet consisting simply of these stolid little mannikins,— well-wadded burghers, mounted on sturdy nags with buxom wives and sweethearts en croupe, and of a roughly brushed effect of clear winter light, the picture has an indefinable fascination. The scene is specialized, as it were, by a dozen coarsely happy touches ; it seems timed, to an hour. The huge cold sky, with its diffused light, its streaks of pale blue, and the chill-stiffened drag and stretch of its thin clouds, are admirably rendered, and with a want of what we may call the coquetry of the brush and the palette, which leaves us wondering that any degree of illusion should result from such bald simplicity of means. The painter’s means, however, were of course not so simple as they look. The same solid singleness of effect gives his little “ Marine ” a peculiar charm. A sloop tumbles across a bay ; and the toss of the boat, the pulse of the water, the whistle of the breeze, the moist gray light, seem to generate a kind of saline aroma. Never was landscape painted in such prosaic good faith. We should perhaps have given precedence to the great “ Italian Landscape,” by Cornelis Huysmans, — a work of infinite gravity and amplitude, and fit to hang in the council chamber of a prince. It looks as if it had been lifted straight from the walls of the Doria Gallery at Rome, so full is it of all romantic Italian tradition and allusion. Forests, rivers, crags and vales, castles and temples, shepherds and flocks, — everything finds a place in it and only adds to its academic spaciousness and serenity. Such a work as this is to a clever modern landscape what a fine piece of descriptive blank-verse of antique rhythm and savor is to a knowing lyric in a magazine. We know nothing of Cornelis Huysmans; but he too was a painter, and he could handle an immense donnee in truly heroic style. He has handled a smaller one most charmingly in a picture with the same title (No. 12), to whose absurdly azure cliff, rising in the lovely, bosky distance, we confess to having altogether lost our heart. These works are full to overflowing of style and tone ; they would form an inexhaustible fund for our own artistic neophytes to draw upon,— sons of an age which has somehow lost the secret of dignity. The small Hobbema, representing a road through a wood, is pleasing but not brilliant. Hobbema ranks in the Dutch landscape school second only to Jacob Ruysdael, but we doubt if he is ever strictly brilliant. A discreet and chastened grasp of local verisimiltude is his peculiar characteristic. This is achieved in the present case with a notably small expenditure of color. It is a very sober view of nature, though not without a hint of poetry. The little subject is somehow sad, — sad as some sunless hour of the world’s youth. A picture in which poetry is to our sense very much more than hinted at is the veritable pearl of a Nicholas Berghem entitled “ Rest.” We strongly suspect that we overestimate this charming little piece, for we confess that, though it is composed of elements more slender, possibly, than any of its companions, none of these have given us a more unmixed and tranquil pleasure. Surely, if human repose were ever to lose its precarious footing in our Western world, the idea would be tenderly embalmed in this delicious fragment of a pastoral. A bare-legged shepherd, leaning on his staff under a sketchy tree, his wife on the ground nursing her baby, and a couple of meagre sheep, blinking at the noonday light, form the sum of its attractions ; but it lives, it smiles, it glows through the chill of time. Its sentiment is hardly more than a graceful trick ; but the trick, performed for the hundredth time, still draws tears from the eyes. A picture which has yielded us an almost equal degree of contemplative pleasure, and a far more solid piece of work, is the marvellous representation by Jan Van der Heyden of a “ Quay in Leyden.” We doubt whether “ touch ” has ever achieved a more signal victory than in this compact pictorial sonnet, as we may call it, to the homely charms of brick-work. A narrow canal divides the picture ; on each side of it rise a row of plain high-gabled dwellings. On the left, in the shade, stretches a footway, along which a woman in a ruff and hoop leads a little girl ; opposite, the tall red houses dip their feet into the sluggish moat. A sort of antique, palpable stillness seems to pervade the scene; the perspective is so delicate and perfect that you fancy the very genius of geometry having retired thither from the academic hum near by, to revolve a proposition. The poetic strain resides in a ruddy golden exhalation from the plumbed and measured surfaces of brick, and in the infinite patience of the handiwork. The picture tells more of Dutch conscience than all its neighbors together. Each individual brick is laid with a sort of mathematical tenderness, squared and nicked and enriched with its proper particle of damp from the canal; and yet in this aggregation of minute touches, space and unity and harmony are cunningly preserved. A tree stands blooming on the edge of the canal, to the elaborate delicacy of whose foliage a microscope alone could do justice. It contains, we confess, more art than nature, and more fine hair-strokes than verdure. Enthusiasm seems almost profane over this exhibition of the very piety of high finish ; but scrupulosity has no business to be so charming. The collection contains a very pretty show of examples of this precious refinement of touch. A couple of exquisite Velvet Breughels, with a brace of David Vinckeboons, and a small J. L. DeMarne, a later Flemish master (the latter, “ A Gust of Wind,” is especially noticeable for the skill with which movement has been combined with fastidious over-finish), represent the supreme of the finical, the sublime of the microscopic. Their air of brittle loveliness suggests that the only proper service for them in the plebeian crush of this world would be to adorn the teacups and chimney-vases of some such exalted personage as that princess of anecdote who conceived cake to be the natural diet of the proletariat during the high bread-rates. It should be distinctly noted, however, that in all these little pictures a large sentiment of landscape survives this excessive condensation. In none of them is theic any chance for breadth of color ; but the two Breughels have in their degree an amount of “ style ” not unworthy of the great Cornelis Huysmans. Their miniature skies and hills and woods are quite in the grand manner. An equally forcible claim to distinction in this line is made by two elegant works by feminine hands ; large and brilliant flower-pieces, signed respectively Rachel Ruysch and Margaret Haverman. They exhibit a magnificent elaboration of detail, an almost masculine grasp of the resources of high finish ; but they offer, too, but the mechanical view of the subject. The poetry, the atmosphere, the metaphysics, as we may say, of flowers, have been better expressed by certain modern talents who, compared with these clever Dutch ladies, are sad bunglers with the brush, but who have at least read Keats and Shelley. We have it at heart to subjoin mention, in another sense — in the way of a “moral”—of two small examples of that forlorn straggler in the march of Venetian art, Francesco Guardi. A Tiepolo of landscape we may call this gentleman. A comparison of his cold, colorless, sceptical reflections of Venetian splendor with the glowing fidelity and sincerity of such a picture as the little “ Quay at Leyden ” is really a theme for the philosopher. It vividly suggests that painfully frequent phenomenon in mental history, the demoralizing influence of lavish opportunity. The Italian, born amid lovely circumstance, and debauched, as it were, by the very grace of his daily Visions, dispenses with effort and insight, and trusts to mere artifice and manner, — and a very light manner at that. He has some shallow faith that the charm of his subjects will save him. The Dutchman, familiar with a meaner and duskier range of effect, feels that, unless he is faithful, he is nothing. He must confer a charm as well as borrow one ; he must bring his grist to the mill and grind it with his own strength; and his little picture, therefore, lives and speaks and tells of perfection ; while those of Guardi are as torpid and silent as decay. We can, perhaps, not close our review more aptly than with the wholesome text that half the battle in art is won in the artist’s conscience, that there are no easy triumphs, and that genuine charm is one of the deepest things in the world. We have neglected mention of many still noteworthy pictures; but we may pay them the compliment of saying that they, for the most part, preach some such sermon as this in good round terms. If we have seemed to exaggerate the merit of their salient companions, our excuse is in our sense of this wholesome moral eloquence. We confess we should be sorry to forget that not an humble masterpiece of them all has anything that one may call imagination. But this makes us none the less willing to hold them up as examples. Imagination is not a quality to recommend; we bow low to it when we meet it, but we are wary of introducing it into well-regulated intellects. We prefer to assume that our generous young art students possess it, and content ourselves with directing them to the charming little academy in the Fifth Avenue for lessons in observation and execution.