d during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject,
you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting
as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always
engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted
romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for
instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and
its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above,
where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the
appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of
landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or
two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with
pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than
not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the
richness of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.

I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of
amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the
Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other
superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously
painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of
mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand
with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been
hampered in no way with the banality of school technique learned in
the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally
invent expression out of a personally accumulated passion for beauty
and they have become aware of it through their own intensely
personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period,
and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and
of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the
Marine Museum in Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of private
experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know,
the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many
surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of
expression.

Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual
years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally
driven to painting in order to establish his own psychic entity. And
so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in
the cons