things are seen together, each one does explain and add something to the lesson of the last; the mind is kept in a single mood, and the observation, as it passes from one example to another of work wrought by the same hand, or at any rate conceived in the same spirit, gets not only range but penetration in the exercise.

Already, in traversing the regular picture exhibitions which the Academy have now held for ten successive winters, we have been used to suffer in the same way from too many and too sudden changes, so to speak, of the artistic climate and temperature. Supposing it were possible to go back, and to exhibit all the same pictures over again in the same number of years, not miscellaneously, but in deliberately selected groups, giving the predominance to the Venetians in one year, to the Florentines in another, to the Umbrians, the Milanese, and so forth, in others, in one to Velasquez and the Spaniards, in another to Rubens and Vandyck, in another to Rembrandt and his contemporaries, and in English art sometimes specifically to portrait, sometimes to landscape, sometimes to history or genre-supposing this possible, how much more even than we have gained as it is should we gain by the opportunity thus offered for organised and comparative study. Any attempt of the kind, it is true, would necessarily be very incomplete, so long as not more than half the great historic galleries of private owners in England are opened in response to the invitations of the Academy. A Titian exhibition without the Titians from Bridgewater House, a Raphael exhibition without the Raphaels from Blenheim and Panshanger, such exhibitions-and the list, alas! is capable of being indefinitely extended-would be deprived of half their lustre. And it really seems as if there were no hope of contributions from these and half a dozen other galleries of equal or almost equal fame. Meantime, the conflagration of some great house contributes each year its percentage to the lamentable account of masterpieces destroyed, and supplies an ironic comment to the precautions of those who imagine pictures to be in greater peril at the Royal Academy than at home. This year, excepting the Royal galleries, which have always been opened without stint, and excepting the Duke of Buccleuch's great contribution of miniatures, Clumber and Holkham are the only great houses from which much has come. The systematic exploration of English country-sides may yet, no doubt, yield many treasures that have hitherto escaped notice; and from the results of such exploration, as well as from the generosity of those who have been generous before, we may still hope for a continuance of our yearly feast of pictures. Might not the principle for which we have been pleading, the principle of selecting single schools and groups of painters for systematic illustration each year, be applied more fully in the future than has been done in the past?

Passing to the Grosvenor Gallery, the inestimable service rendered

last year by the experiment of a public exhibition of sketches and studies of the great masters was to some extent marred, as many thought, by the fault of crowding, of heterogeneousness, and of a somewhat too ready acceptance of doubtful or even strictly inadmissible examples. This year, the crowding and the heterogeneousness have increased, and the doubtful examples are not absent. An ideal exhibition would contain perhaps half the present number of examples, illustrating certainly less than half the present number of schools and artists, and arranged in not more than two tiers, so that no drawings should be placed, as very many are now placed, too high for scrutiny. In the case of this intensely personal form of art, even more than in the case of pictures, it would seem necessary that only kindred things should be grouped together, and that the groups should not be very numerous, in order that we may not be called upon to adapt ourselves in too quick succession to the intimacy of too many masters utterly unlike in mind and sentiment.

But, it may be said, it is very easy to lay down in the abstract what for students may be the ideal of an exhibition; but what is the use of doing so when, as a matter of practical experience, the getting together of an exhibition at all is a work of the utmost difficulty and delicacy; when the feelings of owners have to be considered, and, in order that their best things may be secured, their second best must be accepted too; and when, moreover, to tell the true from the doubtful is a matter of nice discrimination, for which the opportunity often arises only when both are actually exhibited side by side? What, finally, is the use of assuming that there are students enough to make an exhibition, so sifted and limited as you would desire it, successful?—it is not only students, but people in general, that have to be conciliated, and what people in general like is abundance and variety. With reference to the first part of the above contention, assuredly it is only under the fullest sense of the difficulty of the task, and of the immense gratitude that is due to those who have undertaken it, that any one has a right to call for what he may think improvements in the way of carrying out the undertaking. With reference to the second part, I believe that abundance and variety, carried to the point at which we find them this year, are apt to prove as bewildering to the general public as they are overwhelming to the special student. And besides, it is surely fair to assume of the people who frequent these winter exhibitions, that they are not as the aimless summer crowds of the Academy, but that they come with some real object of study; and if so, then the exhibitions should be arranged so as to put them in the best way for study. And that, we say, is to be done not by dispersing, but by concentrating, their attention-not by showing them a vast quantity of things of all sorts, but a moderate quantity of things of a few sorts not too unlike.

What is the difference between the state of mind of an aimless

visitor and of a student, or one who is in a fair way of study, before an old picture? The aimless visitor only asks, and that with the most languid interest, what does it represent? and who did it? and only feels, and that with the faintest thrill, that he either likes or dislikes it he knows not why. The student, according to the measure of his faculty, training, and acquisitions, asks and must find an answer to a hundred questions, and is stirred through a hundred avenues of emotion. The What does it represent?' branches out into a whole system of inquiries, not one of which is irrelevant or superfluous to a just understanding of the work. The subject chosen by the artist, be it a subject of Christian devotion, or pagan poetry, or common reality, be it portrait, landscape, or still life, declares the thoughts that were familiar to his generation, and tells of the men that lived in it and the ideals they lived by, of the scenes they moved among and the objects that stirred their minds or senses to pleasure. From the attributes carried by one figure in a picture, we can tell at the altar of what saint or martyr it was dedicated; from the badge worn in the cap of another, we can recognise the name and family of the donor. In a portrait, these features or those belong to this or that hero whose deeds are a part of history. To find scenes of simple human character and simple landscapes, in the art of any country, taking the place of aureoled saints and Madonnas enthroned among the cherubim, is a sign, for those who know how to read it, of the most momentous of revolutions in thought, religion, and society. The better the student knows how to follow up considerations like these, the fuller and more instructed will become his interest in the subject which any picture represents. But these are considerations which lie to a large extent outside of the picture itself, and belong to the province of historical inquiry rather than to that of the artistic perceptions properly so called. A more vital question for the perceptions is, not 'What has the painter chosen to represent?' but In what manner has he represented it?' The effects of the painter's art are produced by the imitation on a plane surface of three different properties of visible things in nature their configuration, or the direction of their boundary lines; their local colours; and their gradations and oppositions of light and shade. Line, colour, and light-andshade, these are the elements of a picture. How, then, in each case does the painter deal with them? Does he attend most to the definition of his human figures and other objects by precision and purity of line? or to their harmonious variegation by splendour and subtlety of colour? or to their modelling and relief, their projection and retreat, their nearness or distance in the atmospheric medium, as indicated by the relative degrees of darkness and illumination upon their surfaces? What personal predilections has he under each head? What ideal schemes and arrangements of line, of colour, of light-and-shade, or of all three together, and suggested by what aspects of nature, are most congenial

to his temperament? What, finally, can we recognise, in each individual work as it is brought before us, as its governing artistic motive, or special mode of appeal to the perceptions? These are a kind of questions which the casual visitor is not apt either consciously or unconsciously to ask himself, though they lie at the very foundation of all true enjoyment of art. And in the same connection arise the further questions, which every one gifted with natural perception can train himself to answer justly up to a certain point, but which can never be answered with complete authority except by the practical artist—namely, by what methods and with what kind and degree of skill has the painter realised his purpose? What precisely, judged by the double standard of natural truth and pictorial effect, are the peculiarities, virtues, faults, secrets, of his hand, in draughtsmanship, in colour and touch, in conduct of light and shade, both generally and with reference to any given example? Finally, under the questionWho did it?' the student will not be satisfied with a mere reference to a catalogue which may or may not possess authority, but will practise himself in those exercises of recognition and discrimination, of which the problem is, to determine the authorship of any painting from its character and aspect as a geologist determines a mineral or a botanist a specimen. And, the author known, there come next all those particular questions regarding his history and career, his relation to his age, who were his masters and who his followers, which give to the personal or biographical part of the study coherence, vitality, and fulness.

If these, stated hastily and in brief, are the kind of inquiries proper to the study of pictures, the study of sketches and drawings requires to be approached in the same spirit, but with a difference. Sketches and studies are not pictures, but only the first elements for pictures. They do not carry to the same point as pictures that resemblance to the realities of nature which is the chief part of what the vulgar look for in art. The subject represented is not generally a complete scene of any kind, but only separate figures or fragments of nature which are presently to be built together into such a scene. Even in the representation of these, the element of imitative colour is generally left out altogether, and the representation of figures and objects is limited to the phenomena of outline and light and shade. The sketch or study may, indeed, have a charm of colour of its own; but this charm will be an arbitrary and abstract one, depending not upon resemblance to nature, but upon the choice of some pleasantly tinted ground to work upon, or of some pleasant shade of colour, as red, brown, or grey, in the chalk, wash, or other material used to indicate light and shade. The early Italian schools, working in silver point upon a ground tinted in a delicate blue or pink body-colour, produced especially lovely effects of this kind; the German schools, working with the point of the brush on a ground of darker opaque VOL. V.-No. 24.

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brown or green, produced effects stronger and more picturesque. It is strange how willingly the mind alive to the impressions of art accepts these arbitrary suggestions of nature, which leave out her true colours, and interpret in a fancy colour even her phenomena of light and shade; nay, how it delights in them, and seems to find their imaginative charm the greater for the absence of all those final elements of reality. And indeed, in those moods in which we seek in art above all things the direct record of a personal impression, the interpretation of nature in some one and partial aspect that has struck a special chord in the mind of the artist-in such moods we are apt to find these first abstract studies more eloquent than the completed and combined results of many such studies in a painting. They introduce us into the very intimacy of the artist's studio, and as it were reveal to us the secrets of that enchanted laboratory where the common appearances of the world are divested of their commonness, and their essence is distilled for us by the power of the seeing eye and recording hand. The charm of such works, then, as distinguished from paintings, residing in their expression of the essential thought, and their remoteness from imitative completion, there is only one other special point connected with their study. It is this, that many of them can be recognised as being trials, first ideas, or even complete compositions for paintings actually carried out, or for engravings which actually exist. And in such cases the knowledge of the completed paintings or engravings in question of course helps more than anything else our comprehension of the study; and there is an infinite interest in thus watching the progress of an artistic idea from its first inception, often through a number of intermediate trials, to its final maturity.

But enough of preface. In what follows, space would hardly permit us to exemplify our own doctrine, that study to be fruitful must be study in depth, and to draw out the whole lesson of even one or two of the treasures this year exhibited. Without even attempting this, I shall merely direct the reader's attention to a few subjects for study chosen almost at random, first among the pictures, and then among the drawings, set before us.

II.

Concerning the pictures lent this year to the Royal Academy, the most remarkable facts are, that they are even more miscellaneous and represent more schools than usual, and that a large proportion of the most important are anonymous or of doubtful origin. Thus the Venetian school, the school of Lionardo, and some northern school that looks intermediate between Dürer and Holbein, are all three represented by pieces of first-rate value and interest, but of which it seems impossible with certainty to fix the author. The Venetian