erials, the cost of putting them up seems very exorbitant.
This is of little consequence, indeed, in painting easel pictures of no
great size; but if we are to proceed on the large scale, which the
Commission for the Fine Arts encourages, it would become a matter of some
consideration. It has been supposed that the first colour-shop in London
was set up by a servant of Sir Godfrey Kneller's; but there is reason to
believe, from some incidental remarks, that the trade existed in De
Mayerne's time. Some painters of great eminence had their favourite
colour-makers, employed, probably, by themselves exclusively. In a letter,
Titian regrets the death of the man who prepared his white,--and De
Mayerne says of Vandyke, "He spoke to me of all exquisite white, compared
with which the finest whitelead appears gray, which he says is known to M.
Rubens. Also of a man who dissolved amber without carbonising it, so that
the solution was pale yellow, transparent." We learn from this that there
were then colour-makers and varnish-makers, and also that the brilliant
white of Rubens may not always have been whitelead.

There seems to have been in the fourteenth century a kind of painting
practised in England which much attracted the notice of foreigners. It was
of water-colours on cloth--"on closely woven linen saturated with gum
water. This, when dry, is stretched on the floor over coarse woollen
frieze cloths; and the artists, walking over the linen with clean feet,
proceed to design and colour historical figures and other subjects. And
because the linen is laid quite flat on the woollen cloths, the
water-colours do not flow and spread, but remain where they are placed,
the moisture sinking through into the woollen cloths underneath, which
absorb it. In like manner, the outlines of the brush remain defined, for
the gum in the linen prevents the spreading of such lines. Yet, after this
linen is painted, its thinness is no more obscured than if it was not
painted at all, as the colours have no body." This does not at all
resemble the kind of tempera painting in use in Flanders to imitate
tapestry; for it is noticed as peculiar to England by a native of
Flanders. May not this method be again, with some advantage, restored for
the getting in the subjects of large pictures? The cloth so painted might
easily be put on other cloth prepared with a ground.

The subject of grounds is not omitted: it is one of importance; and the
artist will do w