ree pictures is the best; but whichever it be, it is the
best picture in the gallery.

With de Vlaminck it is from a word to a blow, from a thrilling emotion
to a finished picture. If Marchand is like a minor Milton--the
comparison is not one to be pressed--de Vlaminck is like Keats. He is
the most lyrical of the younger Frenchmen; the flash and sparkle of his
pictures is the wonderfully close expression of a tremblingly delighted
sensibility. Yet there is nothing sketchy about them. Consider his
landscape (No. 65), and you will be astonished to find what a solid,
self-supporting design these delicately graded tones and lightly brushed
forms compose.

Only one Englishman holds his own with the French painters, and he, of
course, is Duncan Grant. The challenge to another very interesting young
Englishman is, however, more marked since the de Vlaminck of which I
have just spoken has as its rival on the wall, at right angles to it,
_The Mill_ (No. 32), by Mark Gertler. The comparison made, what first
strikes one is that the Gertler, for all its assertion of strength and
its emphatic, heavy accents, looks flimsy beside its lightly brushed and
airy neighbour. But _The Mill_ is not the piece by which Gertler should
be judged; let us look rather at his large and elaborate _Swing Boats_.
I have seen better Gertlers than this; the insistent repetition of not
very interesting forms makes it come perilously near what Mr. Fry calls
in his preface "merely ornamental pattern-making," but it is a picture
that enables one to see pretty clearly the strength and weakness of this
remarkable person.

With a greater artistic gift, Mark Gertler's conviction and conscience
would suffice to make him a painter of the first magnitude.
Unfortunately, his artistic gift, one inclines to suppose, is precisely
that irreducible minimum without which an artist cannot exist. That is
his weakness. His strength is that he exploits that minimum
uncompromisingly to its utmost possibility. Gertler is one who will
never say an idle word in paint, no matter how charming or interesting
or amusing it might be. In his pictures you will look in vain for a
single brush-stroke that does not serve his single purpose; he admits
no adventitious dainties, there is nothing to quote. Happy touches are
not in his way. Should he find some part of his picture empty he will
not fill it with nicely balancing daisies, clouds, or bric-a-brac; he
will begin it again. To him it