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pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken first and last as genuine works of art in their own way, which is the only way that true works of art can be taken seriously. The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs. Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration, barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience. Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces and cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling
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