ost universally admired for its great beauty and delightful
references to Piero della Francesca) to the little "still life" in the
north corner of the room, there is a vast progression; and beneath these
gay and delicious paintings--so delicious one could fancy them good to
eat--is a struggle with the problems of design and space-composition as
vital as anything here to be found, unless it be in the work of
Marchand. I noticed, by the way, that in _Lemon Gatherers_, a picture on
cardboard, something is going wrong with the colours, and of this I take
rather a serious view as the picture belongs to me. Duncan Grant is the
hope of patriotic amateurs: blessed with adorable gifts and a powerful
intellect, he should, if he has the strength to realize his conceptions
and the courage to disdain popularity, become what we have been awaiting
so long, an English painter in the front rank of European art.

Of the remaining British artists, the most interesting, to my mind, is
Vanessa Bell. The influence of Duncan Grant on her work is unmistakable,
and I hope, unlike most artists, who seem to suppose that for them the
laws of cause and effect and the influence of environment are
inoperative, she will not mind my saying so. Why, in artists so
original as Giotto, El Greco, and Cezanne, at least 50 per cent is
derivative! Vanessa Bell, like all artists, and especially women
artists, is impressionable, but as the effect on her work of familiarity
with one or two English painters and the modern French masters is
altogether for the good, I see no harm in that. At the same time, she
has very personal gifts. Besides a large simplicity of style, there is
about her drawing something oddly sympathetic, and what I should call,
for want of a better word, amusing; while a sense of the peculiar
significance to her of certain forms and relations of forms comes
through and gives to her work an air of intimacy that you will get from
nothing else in this exhibition. Any woman who can make her work count
in the art of her age deserves to be criticized very seriously. In
literature the authoress stands firm on her own feet; only quite
uneducated people--subaltern-poets and young Latin philosophers--believe
that women cannot write; but it is a mere truism to say that no
woman-painter, _pace_ Madame Vigee-Lebrun, has yet held her own with
contemporaries even. To-day there are at least three--Marie Laurencin,
Goncharova, and Vanessa Bell--whose claim to ta