e of a
bygone success because if he steps out of it the dealer frowns and will
not handle his work, is pitiable, exposing to view year by year the
remonitory canvas with such slight changes as newness demands. It would
be a healthier sign in art if the press and public would applaud new
ventures when it was clear that an artist, thereby, was seeking to do
better things and perhaps find himself in a newer vein. But variety in
art it is maintained need not come of variety in the individual but of a
variety of individuals. So Van Marke must paint cows, and Jacque sheep
and Wouvermanns must be told by the inevitable white horse, and have the
mere mention of the artist's name mean the same sort of picture every
time. This aids the simplification of a many-sided question. The public,
as Mr. Hamerton declares, hates to burden itself with names; to which
might be added that it also hates to differentiate with any single name.
A good portraitist in England one year exhibited at the Royal Academy a
wonderfully painted peacock. The people raved and thereafter he was
allowed to paint nothing else. Occasionally it is shown that this
discrimination is without reason, as many men rise above the restriction.
The Gainsborough portrait and landscape are equally strong, the works of
painters in marble, and sculptors who use color, have proved a surprise to
the critics and an argument against the "specialty."

There are two degrees in the subversion of the natural fact.

If, for example, under the rule in physics, the angle of incidence being
equal to the angle of reflection, it be found that a cloud in the sky will
reflect into water too near the bottom of the picture, a painter's license
may move it higher _in its vertical line;_ but if the same cloud is made
to reflect at an angle several degrees to right or left, the artist breaks
the simplest law of optics. The painter's art at best is one of
deception. In the first case the lie was plausible. In the second case
any schoolboy could have "told on" the artist.

There are good painters who appear to know little and care less for
physical fact. Their business is with the surface of the earth; the whys
and wherefores of the universe they ignore, complacent in their ignorance
until it leads them to place the evening star within the arc of the
crescent moon, when they are annoyed to be told that the moon does not
grow from this shape to the full orb once a month. But ofttimes, t