uguste Bonheur's large cattle-piece, Inness' "Autumn Oaks,"
Corot's "Ville d'Avray," Knaus' "Madonna," Cabanel's kneeling female
figure, Koybet's "Card Players," "Jean d'Arc," by Bastian Lepage; "The
Baloon," by Julian Dupre; Wylie's "Death of the Vendean Chief," Leutze's
"Crossing of the Delaware," Meissonier's "1807," the three pictures of
Turner, "Milton Dictating to His Daughters," by Munkacsy, and Knaus' "Bow
at a Peasants' Ball." This list contains the most important works of
these collections, and others might easily be added.

The head by Van Dyck carries with it the repose which belongs to _the
completeness of the circle._

Like Saturn and his ring, this sphere within the circle is typical of
harmony in _unity,_ and for this reason, though detached as we know it to
be, it has a greater completeness than though joined to a body. It is on
this general principle that all circular compositions are based--absorption
of the attention _within the circuit._

[Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne--Tintoretto (Circle and Radius);
Endymion--Watts (The Circle--Vertical Plane)]

In Tintoretto's "Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne," the floating figure
offers us a shock not quite relieved when we recall the epoch of its
production or concede the customary license to mythology. At a period in
art when angels were employed through a composition as a stage manager
would scatter supernumeraries--to fill gaps or create masses--in any posture
which the conditions of the picture demanded, it is not strange that the
artist conceived this figure suspended from above in an arc of a circle,
if in these lines it served his purpose. In this shape it completes a
circuit in the figures, fills the space which would otherwise open a wide
escape for the vision, and, by the union of the three heads, joins the
figures in the centre of the canvas, completing, with the legs of Ariadne,
five radial lines from this focus.

To the mind of a sixteenth century artist, these reasons were more
convincing than the objection to painting a hundred and forty pounds of
recumbent flesh and blood, with the support unseen. To the modern artist
such a conception would be well-nigh impossible, though Mr. Watts gives us
much the same action. Here, however, the movement of the draperies
supplies motion to the figure of Selene, and as a momentary action we know
it to be possible. Were the interpretation of motion by hair and drapery
impossible,