t us and the
picture gave us a good excuse for crying in public, and so we did
so--freely and openly. Grant if you will that our taste was crude and
raw and provincial, yet we knew what we liked and the bulk of us weren't
ashamed to say so, either. What we liked was a picture or a statue which
remotely at least resembled the thing that it was presumed to represent.
Likewise we preferred pictures of things that we ourselves knew about
and could understand.

Maybe it was because of that early training that a good many of us have
never yet been able to work up much enthusiasm over the Old Masters.
Mind you, we have no quarrel with those who become incoherent and
babbling with joy in the presence of an Old Master, but--doggone
'em!--they insist on quarreling with us because we think differently. We
fail to see anything ravishingly beautiful in a faded, blistered,
cracked, crumbling painting of an early Christian martyr on a grill,
happily frying on one side like an egg--a picture that looks as though
the Old Master painted it some morning before breakfast, when he wasn't
feeling the best in the world, and then wore it as a liver pad for forty
or fifty years. We cannot understand why they love the Old Masters so,
and they cannot understand why we prefer the picture of Custer's Last
Stand that the harvesting company used to give away to advertise its
mowing machines.

Once you get away from the early settlers among the Old Masters the
situation becomes different. Rembrandt and Hals painted some portraits
that appeal deeply to the imagination of nearly all of my set. The
portraits which they painted not only looked like regular persons, but
so far as my limited powers of observation go, they were among the few
painters of Dutch subjects who didn't always paint a windmill or two
into the background. It probably took great resolution and
self-restraint, but they did it and I respect them for it.

I may say that I am also drawn to the kind of ladies that Gainsborough
and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted. They certainly turned out some mighty
good-looking ladies in those days, and they were tasty dressers, too,
and I enjoy looking at their pictures. Coming down the line a little
farther, I want to state that there is also something very
fascinating in those soft-boiled pink ladies, sixteen hands high, with
sorrel manes, that Bouguereau did; and the soldier pictures of
Meissonier and Detaille appeal to me mightily. Their soldiers are