performance and preachment accomplished its mission so many years ago. He studied with Madox Brown, and perhaps others of the school in England, and has reproduced their spirit in his pictures with a good deal of sympathy, but without special accentuation. To his work of this sort his drawings in black and white, of which this magazine has contained many examples, seem preferable,-done with more freedom, and therefore more characteristic. Such a portrait as that of Mr. Edison, which appeared here, shows powers of draughtsmanship and of characterization that are noteworthy, and have, indeed, long been recognized. But his strictly decorative work is not so well known, and in it he is probably at his best. He was Mr. La Farge's main reliance-we presume it may be said without disrespect to his associ ates in that work-in the decoration of Trinity Church in Boston, and to his tact and invention, and (at that time certainly no less valuable a quality) his skilled knowledge of what had been done and is practicable in decoration, no small part of the success of the whole is to be attributed. Of the decoration at Bowdoin College we cannot speak with knowledge. Persons who have visited Trinity Church may be reminded of a graceful and delicate band which runs around the chancel dado, and which certainly testifies to a very nice and artistic sense of pure decoration. Even now that the domain of decoration is being invaded by the painters to such a noticeable degree, so much taste as this one thing evinces is uncommon. Much the same thing may be said of Mr. Tiffany, with obvious qualifications, of course. He was for some years a very clever painter of oriental phenomena, the attractiveness of which was also appreciated with the same keenness by Mr. Colman and Mr. Swain Gifford. But no more than these painters did he find them exclusively interesting, and though both he and Mr. Colman have clung pretty closely to cathedrals,-representations of which, in general, have a vogue that may be explained on religious grounds, perhaps,-he has ranged as far afield upon occasion as either of the others, and with equally felicitous results. Some of the most attractive of his works that we remember were of the naturally unromantic, not to say hideous, "localities" to be found in this city. In particular, the impression left by a miniature portrait of an uptown green-grocer's shanty and garden remains with us still, though it certainly had nothing of factitious interest

about it. This seemed for a time, indeed, so clearly Mr. Tiffany's true line that it is hardly probable that he has seriously compromised the qualities to which he owed his success in following it, and far more likely that he carries these into the new sphere of professional decoration which he has entered. And his decorative work, such of it as is to be seen in this city, does in truth show the same freedom from conventionality in intention and generally in accomplishment which he first gave the rein to in his street studies. Of course, he is in a much more agreeable and congenial atmosphere in dealing with rich stuffs and frescoes than in painting cabbage-gardens; but what is worth noticing is that, upon such work as the windows and wall-painting at the new Union League Club, he brings to bear all the invention and taste with which he is endowed, and that at the beginning of his career as a painter he was content to lean upon whatever intrinsic interest might belong to such material as deserts and dromedaries.

Any review, however cursory, of the younger painters of the country would err in neglecting the work of shall we say the few, or the many ?-American women who have helped to make it an impertinence to question the ability of their sex to acquire a contained and dignified plastic expression of the artistic susceptibilities in which it has always been assumed to be so strong. Indeed, in a society whose attention has only recently been given with any seriousness to fine art, which it had therefore long popularly regarded as an accomplishment, painting, to some extent, fell into the sphere of feminine effort synchronously with pianoplaying and embroidery. Of course, not much was to be accomplished in it while it was thus classified even by women themselves. We all remember with emotion the "specimens" of feminine skill and feeling which won distinction at the fashionable boarding-school, and afterward gladdened the family heart and decorated the family drawing-room. One cannot do much in art without any notion of the dignity or of any other quality which makes art admirable, certainly; but the long apprenticeship which feminine art in this country served as an accomplishment merely was probably not entirely thrown away. Quite as much, perhaps, as a natural feminine aptitude,— and at the present day to distinguish aptitudes sexually may have a musty sound,

it is to be credited with the unmistakable turn for decorativeness which American women-painters have shown; or, at least, the aptitude may be said to have grown out of it. And so, when the opportunity came for serious work to be done in art, they were some of them as capable as they were enthusiastic to embrace it. Boston is, like the State of which it is the metropolis, the most chivalrous of American centers of intelligence. Either in virtue of its superior mental activity, or of the peculiar adaptedness of its activities to the feminine capabilities, or of the significant disclosures of every census, it gives to women a freedom and opportunity which, though at present somewhat crude, no doubt, may very fairly stand for the beginnings of a seemly, nineteenth-century, practical substitute for the Middle Age ideal of chivalry. Accordingly, it is natural to find in Boston a coterie of women artists, whose work has already gained some distinction and is still more striking in its promise. The late William M. Hunt stands sponsor for these clever painters, in popular estimation. He used to take great interest in their progress, and many of them had the benefit of his instruction. To them were addressed the series of "Talks," which one of them jotted down so successfully that he had them copyrighted, and which may therefore be taken as an authentic précis of his teaching and criticism. Almost every one has read more or less of these, and will be able to verify the remark that their effect upon their immediate audience is very evident. Mr. Hunt was, of all American painters, perhaps, the most alive to impressions of a vivid and vigorous kind. His impresHis impressionableness was, indeed, his main characteristic, and its predominance in him over the reflective and imaginative faculties is probably responsible for that diffusion of effort which, while it is always a witness of the power of a genius, accounts also for whatever alloy of transitoriness there may be perceived in its interest. His audience exactly suited him in this respect. A more impressionable body of students, taken as a whole, it would be difficult to find anywhere outside of the pale of a modern ritualist congregation, it is probable, than that which hung upon the lips of his eloquence, and for which he did in great measure the thinking. He was from the first recognized by them as something other than the picturesque character, acute observer, and powerful painter which he appeared to the dispassionate and disinterested-as, rather, a

prophet and a sage; and they illustrated an exception to the general rule in such cases, and did him great honor in his own country. The result was what was to be expected. Some of his pupils (indirectly the number of his pupils was larger than his conscious responsibility included) were greatly helped by him, and their almost reverential admiration of him has undoubtedly a just basis of gratitude. He awakened in them the genuine as contrasted with the conventional art impulse, freed their minds from traditionary commonplaces, and stimulated them strongly to real and serious work. Others did his instruction less credit, and disclosed their need of a different kind of teaching. Aristotle, said Plato, needed the bit, and Speusippus the spur, but Mr. Hunt apparently did not distinguish thus, as, indeed, being not distinctively a teacher, he was, of course, not called upon to do. Nevertheless, since his teaching was all spur, we may fairly charge it with a part of the superficiality which some of its recipients have displayed. If these were like Aristotle in needing restraint upon their ardor, they lacked his perception of the virtue that lies in the mean and the error involved in the excess of qualities, and before long rioted in an exuberance rightly to be called license rather than freedom.

To say this is not to affirm any special eccentricity of their work, though here and there its essential whimsicality was noticeable; but what we have in mind is the impatience of anything academic which it evinced. Mr. Hunt felt this defect in them very sensibly, we believe. He used to say, half-humorously, half-vexedly, that he couldn't pretend to do the things "these girls' girls" tackled with cheery confidence, and pronounced them altogether too clever. "These girls" had spent a few months in Paris, and had there picked up tricks of technic with which they delighted themselves and their admirers, but for which he himself felt only impatience. It might have been replied to him that his own experience showed something analogous, and that before he had met Millet he had been as fond of Couture as any of them all, but nothing save his own modesty could have foreborne the rejoinder that what was mere experiment with him was likely to be fatal with a less robust genius. Yet the weight. of what they heard from him tended irresistibly-and we do not think it can be denied-if not to confirm tricks of technic, at least to belittle severity of training and

exalt "originality." Some of "these girls," | as we said, had the natural force to bear this, and carried within themselves the checks from good sense and seriousness which, doubtless, he relied upon them to apply. Others, whether they would of themselves have accomplished anything or not, certainly interpreted what they heard in a way disastrous to their prospects of any real success. Translated by them, Hunt's protest against formalism seemed a distressing jargon. Any one who reflects upon the years of study and practice upon which every painter of any importance has based the work that has made his reputation, upon

the apprenticeship which of necessity precedes even journey-work in every art, and in the art of painting in particular, must have marveled at finding put forth as distinctly held tenets that nothing but harm could come of the weariness of the flesh involved in much study; that "the soul" of nature was only obscured by attention to the dross of external forms; that the subtleties of perspective were chevaux-de-frise erected by hard and "correct" pedants between the painter and his expression, and poor substitutes for the unaided eye; that definition, explicitness, fidelity were the terms of antiquated error; that sug

mulation of these into the rudiments of a new grammar of art has its amusing, not to say pathetic, side. To put it baldly, the cant mysticism of which we have been speaking proceeds on the notion that a beginner in painting is a genius-like Hunt. Unhappily, however, as a New York painter once testified apropos of an analogous matter, genius "is such a rare thing that there's no use in talking about it." With not a few of those who had at various times the benefit of his

had been "taken in hand," instead of "humored."

This qualification once made, it is with nothing but satisfaction that one turns to some of the painters, whether pupils of Mr. Hunt in any sense or not, who have risen out of the crowd of aimless aspirants. For the purposes here in view still narrower limits suffice, and in taking Miss Elizabeth H. Bartol, Mrs. L. W. Whitman, and Miss Helen M. Knowlton as representatives of