ity, often, in
transferring a drawing to wood.

With this discovery, however, of making available even the roughest
drawing, the simplest blot in color or a scratch in charcoal, and
photographing its exact _textures_ upon a wooden block, the camera
reducing it in size and thus perfecting it, the artist immediately
took the place of the draftsman, and at the same time introduced into
the work an artistic quality, a dash, a vim and spirit entirely
unknown before.

Three things were needed to utilize this marvellously useful
discovery: first, a painter of rank; second, an engraver who could
express the textures and technics of the several artists--that is,
reproduce the exact values of an original in wash, an original in
charcoal, or an original in oil; and third, a magazine with sufficient
capital, taste, and intelligence to reproduce these results upon a
printed page. We had the painters, and the engravers developed
rapidly. The third requirement, of taste and intelligence, was found
in Mr. A. W. Drake, then art director of _Scribner's Monthly_, and,
after its merging into the _Century_, the distinguished art director
of the _Century Magazine_.

When the Tile Club was formed in New York it consisted of a group of
men (I was its scullion for seven years, its entire life, and, being
thus an honored servant, was familiar with its many affairs) who
represented at the time the leading spirits of the different schools:
William M. Chase, Arthur Quartley, Swain Gifford, A. B. Frost, George
Maynard, Frank D. Millet, Alden Weir, Edwin A. Abbey, Charles S.
Reinhart, Elihu Vedder, William Gedney Bunce, Stanford White, Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, and one or two others. The club was limited to eighteen
members, there being twelve painters and six musicians. If I am not
very much mistaken, not a single painter of this group had ever drawn
upon a wooden block, and yet each one of them, as the records of our
periodicals have shown, was admirably qualified for illustrative work.
At the time, the illustrations in _Harper's_ and _Scribner's_,
compared with the illustrations of to-day, reminded one of the early
primers of the New England schools, with their improbable trees and
impossible animals.

I remember distinctly the first meeting of the Tile Club, in which the
subject of drawing for _Scribner's Monthly_ was first mooted, and I do
not believe I overestimate the importance that the position of the
club, taken at that time, has had an