surprise when I recently received a
letter from a young American woman who is living and painting in Biskra.
How short a time has passed since this would have been thought
impossible!

It is also true that subjects not new in art are treated in a
nineteenth-century manner. This is noticeable in the picturing of
historical subjects. The more intimate knowledge of the world enables the
historical painter of the present to impart to his representations of the
important events of the past a more human and emotional element than
exists in the historical art of earlier centuries. In a word,
nineteenth-century art is sympathetic, and has found inspiration in all
countries and classes and has so treated its subjects as to be
intelligible to all, from the favored children for whom Kate Greenaway,
Walter Crane, and many others have spent their delightful talents, to men
and women of all varieties of individual tastes and of all degrees of
ability to comprehend and appreciate artistic representations.

A fuller acquaintance with the art and art-methods of countries of which
but little had before been known has been an element in art expansion.
Technical methods which have not been absolutely adopted by European and
English-speaking artists have yet had an influence upon their art. The
interest in Japanese Art is the most important example of such influence,
and it is also true that Japanese artists have been attracted to the
study of the art of America and Europe, while some foreign artists
resident in Japan--notably Miss Helen Hyde, a young American--have
studied and practised Japanese painting to such purpose that Japanese
juries have accorded the greatest excellence and its honors to their
works, exhibited in competition with native artists.

Other factors in the expansion of art have been found in photography and
the various new methods of illustration that have filled books,
magazines, and newspapers with pictures of more or less (?) merit. Even
the painting of "posters" has not been scorned by good artists, some of
whom have treated them in such a manner as to make them worthy a place in
museums where only works of true merit are exhibited.

Other elements in the nineteenth-century expansion in art are seen in the
improved productions of the so-called Arts and Crafts which are of
inestimable value in cultivating the artistic sense in all classes.
Another influence in the same direction is the improved decoration of
porc