Hans Holbein and Some Other Masters

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

THIS is a lawless age in matters of art. There are as many “ schools ” as there are painters clever enough to impose their ideas, or eccentricities, on two or three men younger than themselves. Dumas used to say that all he needed for the making of a drama was two trestles, some boards, and a passion. Nowadays all that is needed for the making of an artistic “ movement ” is a handful of brushes, some colors, and a new trick. I remember the first exhibition of the New Salon, — it was new once. There was probably not a man there whom somebody or other was not calling “ cher Maître.” Well, these “schools” disappear. Even Whistler’s following, that wonderful source of Whistlerian symphonies which in essence were neither Whistlerian nor symphonic, is not to-day what it was. But while the old cliques pass new ones arise, and the general tendency of artists to run after this or that specious novelty is always with us. It is comforting, therefore, whenever a book appears like the one which Mr. Gerald S. Davies has published on Hans Holbein the Younger.¹ This author brought out, a year ago, a book on Frans Hals which showed that he was well qualified to assume the duties of an historian of art. He has knowledge, sympathy, taste, and common sense. These qualities have gone to the making of a book on Holbein which was much needed, for the bibliography of the subject has hitherto included nothing in English sufficiently comprehensive, nothing embodying all the fruits of recent research. Wornum’s book is nearly forty years old, and the last edition of the translation of Woltmann’s Holbein und Seine Zeit dates from 1872. Both works are of value, but for the preparation of a really definitive biography Mr. Davies has had practically a clear field. He has entered it not only well equipped as a writer, but with all the advantages which modern reproductive processes could give him. His illustrations include fine photogravures of the paintings, tinted facsimiles of the drawings, and good reproductions of Holbein’s decorative designs and of the Dance of Death.

Somewhere, in contemplating the writings of the Fathers, and the huge mass of literature based on the firm foundation they provided, Matthew Arnold speaks of the disposition of the man of imagination, “ in spite of her tendency to burn him,” to gravitate toward the Church of Rome. In spite of its tendency to freeze him, the connoisseur must always, sooner or later, gravitate toward the school whose principles make for law and order. It does not smother idiosyncrasy, but it has a way of putting that element of artistic interest in its proper place. It implies, no doubt, certain renunciations, and the rank and file in any age, but especially in our own, find it difficult, if not impossible, to accept its conditions. But there have been great masters to whom the keen airs on the heights most congenial to the methods of this school are as the very breath of life, and Hans Holbein was one of them. He is great, first by virtue of the clearness of his vision, and then through the perfection of his skill in realizing what he saw in terms of form and color, without even the most trifling deviation into obscurity or mannerism. He, too, made his renunciations, though it is perhaps more accurate to say that his works involve renunciations for us rather than for him, since he was indubitably unconscious of just what was sacrificed to the realistic trend of his genius. The point refers, of course, to the diminution of the force of the spiritual motive in Holbein by the assertiveness of that material fabric which it was his peculiar gift to express. Mr. Davies takes a more favorable view of the matter, but this is due, I fear, to the common weakness of biographers, who cannot well live absorbed for a long period in the works of a single master without unconsciously seeing them too much with that master’s eyes.

He says of the central figure in the Solothurn Madonna that “ nothing more womanly, more pure, more gentle, more sweet, and yet more strong has been given to us by any painter who has essayed this subject and made us richer by this vision or by that of divine motherhood.” Passing from this to the Meier Madonna at Darmstadt, he maintains the same attitude. It is hard to quarrel with him. Both pictures have great sweetness and beauty as religious conceptions. But in such conceptions the North must yield to the South, and though a completely Italianized Holbein would have been a Holbein weakened, it seems to me that admiration of his Madonnas should rest, if it is to be discriminating, somewhere on the safe side of the ecstatic. Mr. Davies is even more provocative in what he has to say in describing the two panels in monochrome at Basel, the Ecce Homo and Mater Dolorosa. Both designs are powerful, but when this biographer remarks that “ the figure of Christ in the Man of Sorrows has, for its expressiveness of its great theme, few equals in Art,” he is overstating the case. Is it really possible, in studying this famous panel, to place the artist’s purely anatomical preoccupation in the subsidiary position to which it should be relegated ? I doubt it. The difficulty, and the loss that it implies, will be made manifest even more clearly, perhaps, by a comparison of the Entombment, also at Basel, with, say, Mantegna’s Dead Christ, in the Brera, with Michael Angelo’s Pietà, in St. Peter’s, or with the latter’s beautiful drawing in the British Museum. Instantly Holbein’s want of tragic passion makes itself felt. But to dwell on his limitations would be, after all, seriously to distort the perspective in which Holbein must be seen, and it is pleasant, in returning to the qualities that give him his high rank, to find the best possible light thrown upon them in a passage by Mr. Davies.

Alluding to the German’s realistic method, which is, “ in the hands of any man of less genius, apt to degenerate into mere laborious accuracy, or to take the place and usurp the interest in the picture which ought to be left for the products of the higher imagination,” he points out that with Holbein it never takes this pedestrian turn, and continues: “ It is to him the natural and only method of expressing himself, — absolute perfection of craftsmanship, in all that he handles, carried into every part of the picture, and yet all of it so kept in due relation and due subordination, because of the dominating presence of the higher interests and aims of the picture, that you are unconscious, until you begin purposely to forget these higher interests in order to search into his way of doing things, that you are looking at a work in which industry and perfect craftsmanship have borne their part in carrying out the master thought.” There is a sure touchstone here, ready to the hand of the student of Holbein ; and it is gratifying to observe that Mr. Davies renders a further service to his reader in laying stress upon the fact that while his artist’s method is wholly unlike that of later painters, such as Velasquez, Frans Hals, and Van Dyck, “ neither method is righter than the other.”

If Holbein’s method rests too much upon a basis of reality to lift his religious pictures to the loftiest plane, it serves, at all events, to make him one of the supreme masters of portraiture. In what he has to say under this head, Mr. Davies rarely provokes dissent. His efforts to deprive Holbein of the Dorothea Offenburg and the Lais Corinthiaca, and to give them to Cesare da Sesto, are more zealous and ingenious than convincing, — I do not believe the Milanese ever saw either of the two, — but in traversing the bulk of the master’s work as a portrait painter, he is content to avoid adventurous hypotheses. He might have taken safely a firmer line in following Miss Hervey’s opinion, rather than that of Mr. W. F. Dickes, in the curious controversy over the identity of the figures in the Ambassadors, of the National Gallery. The main point, however, is that he does full justice to those incomparable portraits, like the George Gyze, at Berlin, the Derich de Born, at Windsor, and the Erasmus, at Longford Castle, which, for insight into character, heroic simplicity, and beauty of style, stand as monuments, so to say, to the glory of realistic art. Holbein is, in these portraits, a painter if ever there was one, despite the glib assumption made in some quarters that only Velasquez and one or two others deserve the title; yet there is no denying the great part which a purely linear quality plays in these very works. Mr. Davies rightly pays attention to the drawings as of no less significance than the paintings, for in Holbein’s line, wherever we find it, we have the most characteristic reflection of his genius ; in it he illustrates, with crystalline clearness, the power of knowledge and authority in art.

He stumbles over no details, he evades no problems, but draws with a kind of naked force, and proves, what it is always so important to remember, that in the artistic interpretation of beauty it is not in the least necessary to be esoteric, or to torture technique and experiment with the point or with the brush, until the truth is lost in a maze of self-conscious or eccentric “ method.” In his portraits, painted or drawn, you have art in its bare integrity. It is a testimony to the illimitable scope of art taken in that estate, that it still gives the freest sway to individuality. Holbein is almost scientific in his precision, but his style remains one of the most original in the annals of European painting. He is a standing protest against the theory that emotional rapture is the only source of great achievement in art. From his triumphs, as from those of Raphael, for example, we may know that intellectual power is also a key to artistic immortality.

With Holbein the drawing and the painting are practically interchangeable if we are pursuing the secret of his art; but, with most men, work with the pencil or chalk has meant a more spontaneous disclosure of personal qualities than usually goes with work in oils, and this circumstance has given to drawings a special place in the history of connoisseurship. Such souvenirs of a great artist have, of course, a strictly historical value, and are of much practical use in the clearing up of questions of attribution and the like. But if a study in chalk for some famous picture or decoration has much the same curious and instructive interest as attaches to a poet’s first draft for some famous composition, it possesses, also, much more than the literary sketch, an intrinsic charm. The pressure of an artist’s hand upon his crayon is an affair peculiarly self-revealing; it is like the violinist’s pressure upon his bow, with this difference, that your musician must blend his personality with a definite idea if he is to make a successful appeal, whereas, in the case of the artist, it sometimes scarcely matters whether he has anything important to say or not; it is his way of saying it, it is his accent, which he can convey in the veriest trifle, that counts.

Mr. Berenson’s work on the Drawings of the Florentine Painters ² possesses unusual importance on its scientific side alone. The two huge volumes — too huge for mere convenience — were undertaken in a spirit of severe research. The author has classified his material, he has threshed out many questions of authenticity, and he has framed a catalogue, embracing nearly three thousand numbers, which constitutes in itself an indispensable work of reference. Surveying his draughtsmen, from the Primitives down to Pontormo and Rosso, in chronological order, he has annotated their works with a fullness of detail that places the student in search of critical information deeply in his debt. The facsimiles he gives are among the finest reproductions I have ever seen; they are, for ordinary working purposes, equivalents for the originals as nearly exact as could be desired. But I confess that it is not of the workshop that I am disposed to think longest in considering Mr. Berenson’s book. I am grateful for the additions he has made to the tools of art criticism, but I am grateful also for the influence which the volumes must exert in developing artistic taste where it is too often weak.

I once heard a drawing of Dürer’s criticised because the man it portrayed was made to appear cross-eyed. Perhaps the poor creature was really so afflicted, but, supposing that Dürer had libeled him, we might deplore the slip without losing sight of the linear beauty with which the drawing brims over. Beauty of this sort does not need to be impeccable as regards fidelity to nature. In Holbein’s drawings truth happens to be of prime significance. With many other masters, whether truth be present or not, our pleasure remains the same. It is the pleasure which you find in a delicately turned phrase, in an intonation, or even in a sudden and well-placed silence, — the counterpart of the omission in linear art, one of the most potent of all sources of effect. Line is, in short, a language by itself, susceptible of being used for the conveyance of great thoughts or for the most casual and intimate purposes. The early Florentine fascinates you by flinging some new and beautiful creation in all its freshness upon the paper, giving it a poignancy which may disappear when he comes to elaborate it into a formal scheme ; or, with the best intentions in the world, seeking to carry out a given idea within the limits of a drawing, he actually ends by leaving you indifferent to his subject, as subject, and absorbed in what I may call purely autographic qualities. Mr. Berenson well clarifies this point in speaking of Botticelli’s illustrations to Dante. “ Their value,” he says, “ consists in their being drawings by Botticelli, not at all in their being illustrations to Dante,” and he happily remarks of the Florentine that “ he loved to make the line run and leap, to make it whirl and dance.” Botticelli, being what he was, — a poet and a dreamer,— wove his line into beautiful forms, and he moves the imagination, as he satisfies the eye, in these Dantesque drawings; they have the glamour of his fancy as they have the glamour of his style. But it is the glamour of style that we could not afford to do without.

It is the same with all the masters discussed by Mr. Berenson, and the fact ought never to be forgotten by the student, since it explains and justifies the survival across the ages, as objects of enthusiasm among artists and collectors, of drawings sometimes very nearly meaningless so far as subject is concerned. The merest scrap will often exert this perhaps sensuous spell upon the discerning critic. Witness Van Dyck’s celebrated sketchbook at Chatsworth, which contains odds and ends of no earthly interest save as fragments of that language which the painter used when he dashed off a pictorial memorandum, a note on some masterpiece he saw in Italy. On the other hand, Mr. Berenson’s collection of facsimiles emphasizes once more that element in Italian art which makes it unique, the instinctive and often, no doubt, unconscious expression, on the part of every painter or sculptor of any consequence whatever, of a feeling for the imponderable beauty that seems somehow bound up with all that was finest in the Italian genius of the golden age. They had something to say even when they were not themselves aware of it. That is, they put into their work character, distinction, the things that come from imaginative fervor. It is interesting to place an old Italian study of a limb or bit of drapery beside similar drawings from any modern studio, no matter how eminent. The old work quivers with inspiration, it has a kind of soul. The modern work may be all compact of cleverness, it may suggest a wonderful eye and an extraordinarily skillful hand, but beside the other it is like an empty shell. Mr. Berenson gives us abundant data to support this contention, confining himself to the Florentines. I hope the preparation of a similar book by him, treating of the North Italian masters, is only a question of time, — and not simply, I may add, because he writes about drawings to such good purpose, but because, in the course of his work, he has so much to say that is worth reading on the general aspects of Italian art. His chapters on Leonardo and Michael Angelo in this book are so suggestive, they are so rich in the fruits of scholarship, presented with far less pedantry than has hitherto marred his criticisms, that they deserve publication in a form more widely accessible. It might easily be worth while to publish the text and catalogue given in these volumes in a handy octavo, the illustrations being put in portfolios by themselves.

Mr. Berenson’s heroic folios rather dwarf the other contributions which have recently been made to the literature of Italian art, but several of these nevertheless command high respect. I would place well in the forefront of this comparatively minor group of publications what is, in great measure, an old book, yet practically a new one, the revised edition of Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s History of Painting in Italy,³ which has long been out of print. Though it has never lost its usefulness, it has been much in need of correction. Sir Joseph Crowe, before he died in 1896, had finished the rewriting of more than a third of the book, and with the help of the additional manuscripts he left, and their own not inconsiderable resources, Mr. Langton Douglas and Mr. S. Arthur Strong have undertaken to overhaul this classic of criticism and bring it abreast of the latest modern research. The publishers are giving it substantial if not luxurious form, numerous good half-tones being used as illustrations, with a few photogravures. The edition is to be completed in six volumes, two of which have thus far appeared, devoted respectively to Early Christian Art and Giotto and the Giottesques. In the first of these volumes there are brief sketches of the two authors, in which Mr. Douglas speaks of them with appreciation not only of their historical and critical aptitudes, but of their admirable personal qualities. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have suffered too much patronage at the hands of certain later writers, who, pinning their faith upon Morelli, have liked to assume that only from him — or from themselves — could the student expect to receive the pure milk of the word. Mr. Douglas, with a little needless temper, redresses the balance. The fact is that one has only to dip into these familiar pages to recall the services the devoted pair have rendered in illuminating many a bewildering question, and to realize anew with how much insight and thoroughness they did their work. Of course to-day they require editing. In Mr. Douglas’s notes on the Rucellai Madonna, which he prefers to give to Duccio rather than to Cimabue, we have a good instance of the desirability of reëditing periodically a work of the sort. But it is noticeable that occasions for the drastic rehandling of any matter dealt with by Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not been frequent. This is one of the new art books which the student could not possibly ignore. With it must be bracketed the translation, bearing the hybrid title of The Anonimo,⁴ of those anonymous sixteenth - century notes which have been familiar to specialists in the original, but which have not hitherto been put into English. They record the observations of an intelligent traveler, whose pages are useful inasmuch as they give the original locations of certain famous works of art, describe others which have since been lost and may some day reappear, and give suggestive hints to the critic hunting down mysteries of attribution. The book has been well translated by Paolo Mussi, and Mr. G. C. Williamson has discreetly edited it. This edition contains, moreover, a number of good illustrations.

A book to be commended not only to the student but to the layman with artistic predilections is Mr. Charles Holroyd’s Michael Angelo Buonarroti,⁵ which is really a translation of Condivi’s Life, with the three famous dialogues by Francisco d’ Ollanda placed at the back. Modern biographies of Michael Angelo, like the one which Symonds made almost but not quite definitive some ten years ago, are numerous enough, but Condivi’s first-hand narrative has virtues to which none of his successors can lay claim, and. which make it difficult to understand why it was not sooner put into English. It is full of living personal details. The tragic story of the tomb for Pope Julius has never been set forth elsewhere with the direct and vivid touch which we find in Condivi. Mr. Holroyd supplements his translation with some chapters of his own on Michael Angelo’s work, exhibiting acumen and an admirable faculty for the blending of critical with biographical notes ; and his version of the Portuguese dialogues rounds out a book which has a much more tangible reason for existing than is often to be discovered where art publications are concerned. It is the first volume in a series published under the general title of the Library of Art. It has been followed by a monograph on Donatello,⁶ by Lord Balcarres, a carefully written production, supplying guidance that is trustworthy, but none of the glow which it would be good to find in a study of such an inspiring theme. Both books are attractively made and have many half-tone illustrations. Only subjects of the highest importance are to be treated in the series. It is to include volumes on Titian, Dürer, Correggio, and Pisanello, and there are to be others on groups or schools of painters, as, for example, Ghirlandajo and the Earlier Florentines, Raphael and his School in Rome, and the Three Bellini and the Earlier Venetians. The prospectus is exceptionally promising, and the two volumes briefly touched upon above warrant the assumption that the series will be maintained upon a level of serious, authoritative workmanship.

Of no popular series, however, is it safe to predicate absolutely uniform excellence. In the one, for example, edited by Dr. Williamson under the title of the Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture, the Botticelli⁷ by Mr. A. Streeter, which has recently appeared, is a mildly creditable handbook, but nothing more. The Michael Angelo Buonarroti⁸ of Lord Ronald Gower, though painstaking enough, is, on the whole, rather wooden. The same author’s Thomas Gainsborough,⁹ in the British Artists Series, is a better book, and will serve as a rapid sketch of the subject; but it is at bottom a commonplace piece of work, ami is chiefly to be valued for its illustrations, which include a welcome batch of the painter’s drawings and studies. The series of pocket volumes called the Popular Library of Art, edited by Edward Garnett, has thus far preserved, in its modest way, a good standard. Dr. Gronau’s Leonardo da Vinci¹⁰ is a first-rate piece of condensation. Less weighty, but thoroughly intelligent and readable, are the booklets written for this series by Miss Lina Eckenstein on Albrecht Dürer,¹¹ by M. Romain Rolland on Millet,¹² by M. Camille Mauclair on the French Impressionists,¹³ and by Mr. A. B. Chamberlain on Thomas Gainsborough.¹⁴ This series is a good one for beginners. The monographs in it are brief, they contain enough information, and though published at a small price are very well illustrated. The last series I have to mention is the Artist’s Library, in which four new volumes have recently appeared. Two of them, on Van Dyck,¹⁵ are written by Mr. Lionel Cust, who has published a large volume on the Flemish painter, and knows his subject well. He treats it adequately in these brief chapters, and at the same time gives too much the impression of a piece of clever hack work. Miss Frances C. Weale’s Hubert and John Van Eyck¹⁶ is similarly thoroughgoing, and similarly innocent of the faintest spark of kindling emotion. The best of the recent publications in this series is Mr. Herbert P. Horne’s Leonardo da Vinci,¹⁷ which is formed of a felicitous translation of Vasari’s life of the painter, with interpolations by the English critic. It is a somewhat audacious performance, but Mr. Horne knows what he is about, and has brought some really serviceable ideas and facts to the completion of his unconventional task. In these books the full-page illustrations are always at the back, by themselves. The Leonardo plates are particularly welcome since they include some of his drawings.

Every series of popular handbooks on art that is published nowadays follows much the same editorial policy. One may differ from another in size and price, but all are alike in that all run to a sort of specialization. It is assumed that what is wanted by the public addressed is concise instruction on this or that famous man. The system has its merits and its drawbacks. It leads, for one thing, as in literary enterprises of a kindred nature, to the useless duplication by one publisher of projects undertaken by another. Furthermore, as the authors engaged are, as a rule, simply good journeymen, without anything very fresh or startling to communicate, safe but not in the least inspiring ciceroni, the ultimate results threaten to be more imposing in bulk than in quality, and we shall not improbably see many a pretty volume dismembered for the sake of its illustrations, by those who have found out the usefulness of a well-ordered scheme of scrapbooks. In the meantime these innumerable little manuals are fertilizing the soil, — one may cheerfully admit that without taking them too seriously, —and it is good to know, moreover, that the rule of brevity forced upon the writers of them spares us a lot of highfalutin.

But to whom is the student to go for general ideas, for the broader edification which, when all is said, is more important to him than the minutiæ of any single artist’s history ? If such ideas are present in the more elaborate works, like those of Mr. Davies and Mr. Berenson at which we have just glanced, they are necessarily incidental to analysis of a leading theme. The few new books in which masters or schools are discussed at large are interesting, but not momentous. The Art of the Italian Renaissance,¹⁸ by Professor Wolfflin, offers a rational interpretation of a subject often enveloped by historians in a haze of metaphysics. The learned author has common-sense views of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and the lesser masters ; and in his explication of the significance of pure form in their work, he takes his reader close to the constructive principle underlying much of the most characteristic art of the Renaissance. He helps to clear the air of æsthetic cant; his artists, when he has completed his surveys of them, are seen more as artists in the true sense, less as the seers and high priests which loosethinking writers like to consider them. Yet the book wants gusto ; it is a shade too professorial. Klaczo’s Rome and the Renaissance,¹⁹ in the agreeable translation which has been made by John Dennie, is not so deeply pondered, and when the author gives rein to his fancy, inventing conversation with the hope of lending verisimilitude to his picture, he is more diverting than instructive. But the work embodies an excellent idea. It portrays Pope Julius in his artistic relations, and the pages on the masters he employed are written partly in exposition of their individual traits, but still more with the purpose of reproducing the atmosphere in which they labored. We have here not a body of technical analysis, but a panorama drawn with scholarship, flexibility, and a constant feeling for the human aspect of artistic affairs.

Since they are not strictly works on art, I may only give a few words to Isabella D’Este, Marchioness of Mantua,²⁰ by Julia Cartwright (Mrs. Ady), and to the new edition of Beatrice D’Este, Duchess of Milan,²¹ by the same author, but they are, as a matter of fact, worth a dozen textbooks as aids to an apprehension of the conditions under which art was produced in the time of which they treat. These great ladies of the Renaissance patronized the painters, sculptors, and artistic craftsmen of their day with ardor and intelligence, and their biographies contain many passages showing their relations with the masters, relations typical of a great epoch in civilization. The story, delightfully told by Mrs. Ady, of Isabella’s efforts to secure for her collection certain marbles, an antique, and a Cupid of Michael Angelo’s, that had fallen into the hands of Cesare Borgia, is exactly the kind of story to set the reader on a clearer notion of Renaissance taste and of those racial springs of high enthusiasm to which we owe such a wilderness of things of beauty. Some interesting sidelights on what the South has done to influence and color European culture are afforded by the Book of Italian Travel,²² a compilation in which Mr. Neville Maugham has put together the impressions recorded by famous travelers as far back as the sixteenth century, and by writers as near our own time as Symonds and Henry James. The patchwork is the outcome of wide but judicious reading, and is deftly arranged. It may not overwhelm the reader with a flood of those general ideas for which he is looking, but it will put him in a frame of mind, giving him something of that glamour of Italy which never comes amiss in the study of Italian art. The efficacy of Cellini’s Autobiography as a means of initiation into the spirit of the Renaissance is a commonplace of criticism. Miss Anne Macdonell has newly translated this classic of picaresque and artistic literature,²³ and though she has not shaken my loyalty to Symonds’s version, I confess that her animated treatment of the text is very beguiling. She has a pointed note on Cellini’s portrait, discrediting the familiar image of a “ white-bearded, benevolent person,” the one prefixed to Symonds’s translation, and identifying with Cellini a certain head, which she reproduces, in a fresco by Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. The portrait bears out her contention. It is of a “ vigorous, fiery man,” and readily persuades us that in it we have, as Miss Macdonell asserts, “ our Benvenuto to the life.”

Mr. La Farge’s Great Masters ²⁴ is a collection of papers on Michael Angelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velasquez, Dürer, and Hokusai, which were originally written for a popular magazine, and have the qualities essential in discourse addressed to a large and miscellaneous audience. The author avoids technical jargon, and, though writing from the artist’s point of view, gives to his fellows a perfect illustration of the way in which to appeal to laymen with no risk of being misunderstood. Indeed, if the book errs anywhere it is on the side of simplicity. The history of each artist is carefully traversed, and his salient characteristics are clearly indicated. Here and there an observation, reminding us that the author has views of his own, ripples the surface of the expeditious and businesslike narrative, but the tone of the book as a whole is neither as original nor as stimulating as Mr. La Farge’s previous excursions into art criticism have caused one to expect. He has gained much in clearness of style, but while his book should prove beneficial when placed in quite inexperienced hands, it leaves the reader who has made any artistic investigations at all practically where it finds him. A popular introduction to the study of some of the masters, as well written as this is, could not but be a credit to any one, even to a painter who is himself a master. Yet it would be a great gain if Mr. La Farge were to give his pen to flights worthier of his powers, if he were to write a book taking a wider sweep and going deeper into the subject. In place of the rich banquet for mature minds which he might spread, he has set forth the mild fare suited to the naïve young reader, and, coming from him, it inspires gratitude tempered with regret. I cannot grudge the multitude of undisciplined seekers after artistic instruction the benefit and pleasure they will derive from these pages, but it is impossible to suppress a wish that Mr. La Farge might at least have given them a freer scope.

He is not the only American who has of late been occupied with the public discussion of artistic topics. Mr. Lorado Taft has written an excellent History of American Sculpture ²⁵ in a new series, treating of all the manifestations of art in this country, which is being edited by Mr. John C. Van Dyke. We have no other book covering the field so thoroughly. Mr. Taft treats in chronological order all of our sculptors down to the men who are still living, and he has given his book the more authority by taking pains to avoid too enthusiastic or too severe a tone. He is just to exploded reputations, he loses sight of nothing that is good in the work of artists generally so feeble as Hiram Powers, or Harriet Hosmer, and he does not lose his head when he is talking about either St. Gaudens or French. A truthful, sober book, which places the American school of sculpture in a clear light, and supplies the information that is needed about all its members, famous and obscure. With Mr. Whistler, of course, the makers of books are already busy, but not, so far as the first fruits of their labors go to show, to very good purpose. Mr. Arthur Jerome Eddy’s Recollections and Impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler ²⁶ is an ill-formed collection of anecdotes and other miscellaneous data. It contains a quantity of raw material which some future biographer may find useful, but it is neither serious biography nor soundly reasoned criticism; it belongs in the category of distinctly ephemeral productions. The illustrations are good photogravures. The Art of James McNeill Whistler,²⁷ by Mr. T. R. Way and Mr. G. R. Dennis, has likewise the defects of the “ occasional ” publication ; it is superficial and scrappy, but the authors keep to a dignified key, and one of them, Mr. Way, through his personal relations with Whistler, has been enabled to contribute some interesting information to the volume, especially with reference to his work in lithography. This book contains many illustrations that have not hitherto been accessible to the student. Whistler’s own book, the Gentle Art of Making Enemies,²⁸ has just been brought out in a new edition with some additional matter, notably the catalogue of the famous exhibition of Nocturnes, Marines, and Chevalet Pieces, in which the artist repeated his trick of discomfiting his critics by reproducing, with ingenious malice, the comments on his work in which they had had the misfortune to indulge. I have so recently discussed the volume in these pages that I merely call attention now to the fact of its reappearance.

Mr. Whistler’s brilliant fellow countryman, the painter whose fame not only equals but has threatened to overshadow his own, the painter whose Carmencita figures no less triumphantly in the Luxembourg than the famous Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, has been made the hero of a book which for divers delightful reasons can only be characterized as astonishing. The Work of John S. Sargent, R. A.²⁹ is, in a way, unique. Other modern men have been celebrated in books, and some of them have deserved the honor. Paul Baudry, for example, was the kind of artist to bear the severe test of an exhibition of his works within the covers of a book, and Ingres has more than deserved the beautiful tribute paid him not long ago through the devotion of M. Lapauze in getting his drawings reproduced. But Mr. Sargent’s case remains an extraordinary one. He has withheld from this volume a great number of his paintings, and he still has years of activity before him. Yet in a selection from his works — including many of his best things, but still only a selection — there is enough genius to keep a dozen ordinary men going all their lives.

Mr. Sargent has something of the fecundity and the power of the old masters. Whether or not he will ever attain to their rank is an interesting problem. If he falls short of it, it will be, I think, because of his limitations as a colorist, and because of his want of spiritual depth. On other grounds he moves us already as we are moved by the great executants of the historical epochs. This collection of sixty large photogravures is dazzling to the eye somewhat as the collection of paintings by Frans Hals in the little old building at Haarlem is dazzling. To keep the latter memorable assemblage of portraits in the mind’s eye, as one considers the portraits in this book, is to revive dubiety as to Mr. Sargent’s ever standing on equal terms with the Dutchman, The latter has a broader humanity. His art, for all that it is so thoroughly realistic, goes deeper. Yet it might fairly be argued that Hals’s sincerity, as we see it, draws a great deal of its virtue from his models, and that the feverish flush on the modern man’s work is there just because he is a modern man, — in other words, that the restless brilliancy so characteristic of Mr. Sargent is but the natural expression of the leading traits in the world he depicts. This much is certain, that no painter of his time could face the future with more confidence in its verdict than Mr. Sargent is justified in feeling. He knows what he wants to do, and he knows how to do it. He paints his sitters with a fluency that no other living artist can rival, and it is not the fluency of the merely clever man, it is that of a positive master.

His range promised at one time to be wider than it seems to-day. He painted canvases like the Carnation, Lily, Rose, and El Jaleo, and in them approved himself a true maker of pictures. But long after, when he undertook the decorations for the Boston Public Library, he got out of his depth, and it is perhaps fortunate that since he has abandoned the pictorial ambitions of his earlier years he has devoted himself more to portraiture than to anything else. There he gives play to his inborn gifts with the ease and buoyancy of some giant exulting in his strength ; he grasps, without apparent effort, one individuality after another, covers scores of canvases with seemingly inexhaustible fertility of design and unchanging sureness of hand, and never for a moment ceases to exert the fascination of an original and splendid style. He is spectacular, if you like, but there is not a trace of vulgarity in the spectacle. Like the giant aforesaid, he is a type of materialism triumphant. But his is a materialism wonderfully refined by intelligence and taste, and if on opening this book of i*eproductions one is seized with an emotion of unquestioning adinii’ation, one closes it with feelings of the most thoughtful respect. It is a pity that the plates are accompanied by an essay by Mrs. Meynell, whose delicate affectations are totally inappropriate to the occasion. Mr. Sargent’s work is too masculine, too brilliant, to be made the subject of pretty vaporings.

The half-dozen publications to which brief allusion remains to be made are works of reference or books of special interest to collectors. Two of the five volumes in which the new edition of Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers ³⁰ is to be completed have thus far appeared. A revision of the text has for some time been required, and many omissions have needed to be repaired. Dr. Williamson is bringing the book up to date with judgment, and the publishers are greatly enhancing its interest by filling it with full-page illustrations, though a rather arbitrary mode of selection slightly discounts their good intentions. Some of the plates seem only to reflect the editor’s whim. The Sculptures of the Parthenon,³¹ by Dr. A. S. Murray, gives in a few terse chapters a vivid description of the marbles, with explanations, never idly speculative, of their significance. The illustrations have been prepared with solicitude for the interests of the student following his researches in his own library. They have been planned so that he may examine the sculptures in their decorative and architectural relations, no less than for their individual character, as nearly as possible as though he were looking at the Parthenon itself.

Mr. J. J. Foster’s Miniature Painters, British and Foreign, with Some Account of Those who Practised in America in the Eighteenth Century,³² a work in two handsome volumes, contains wellwritten text and some very useful lists, but for collectors the significance of the book lies largely in its plates, which reproduce more than two hundred examples. In the department of prints two good books have been issued. Mr. Cyril Davenport’s Mezzotints³³ appears in the Connoisseur’s Library, a series practical in aim and luxurious in form. The author of this volume writes with authority on the technical side of his subject, and discourses pleasantly on the engravers whose works he describes. The plates are beautiful photogravures. Samuel William Reynolds,³⁴ by Alfred Whitman, deals at length with an English master of mezzotint, to whom, of course, Mr. Davenport can only give a limited amount of space. This volume also is fully illustrated. The two indirectly draw attention to a fashion of collecting which has become a fad. The high prices paid in the auction room for eighteenth-century mezzotints are out of all proportion to their intrinsic value. But the best plates of the best men have unquestionably great beauty, and appreciation of them cannot fail to be greatly furthered by the books I have just mentioned.

Royal Cortissoz.