tion?
With respect to portraits less than other subjects, can we expect to find
them reflections of the artist's personality. But some of the ablest,
while interpreting another's character, frequently add somewhere in it
their own. The old masters rarely signed, feeling that they wrote
themselves all through their works.

The sure thing regarding the great portraitist is that he is a man of
refinement. This all history shows.

Is our artist a genre painter: then does his mind see small things to
delight _in_ them, or to delight us--if this, he is our servitor or little
better,--does he go at the whole thing with the sincerity of an artistic
purpose and somewhere place a veritable touch of genius, or only represent
one item after another until the whole catalogue of items is complete,
careful that he leave behind no just cause for reproach? Has the man
dignified his subject and raised it to something above imitative art, or
does he clearly state in his treatment of it that imitation is the end of
art?

Is he a painter of historic incident; then does he convince you that his
data are accurate, or allow you to conjecture that his details are
makeshifts? Is the scene an inspiration or commonplace? Has he been able
to put you into the atmosphere of a bygone day, or do his figures look
like models in hired costume and quite ready to resume their own clothes
and modern life?

Is he a painter of flowers; then is he an _artist_ or a botanist? Is he a
marinist; then, as a landsman has he made you feel like one, or has he
painted for you water that can be walked on without faith? Has he shown
you the dignity, the vastness, the tone, and above all the movement of the
sea?

Is he a landscape painter? Then is he in a position to assert himself to
a greater degree than they all? The farther one may remove himself from
his theme, the less of its minutiae will he see. The process of
simplification is individual. What he takes from nature he puts back out
of himself. The landscape painter becomes an interpreter of moods, his
own as well as nature's, and in his selection of these he reveals himself.
Does he show you the kingdoms of the world from some high mount, or make
you believe they may be found if you keep on moving through the air and
over the ground such as he creates? Does he make you listen with him to
the soft low music when nature is kindly and tender and lovable, or is his
stuff of that robust fibre which