upon which, as any one can see, the artist has bestowed all his loving
care. Nothing of his, however, in the Exposition can compare with his
_Young Mother_, which I saw last year in the Academy at Philadelphia.

Next after Stevens, in point of reputation, comes M. Willems, who really
belongs to the French school of Gerome, but who feels himself under
obligation, in his character of Fleming, to paint nothing but what
Terburg and Metzu painted two centuries before him. The man without a
plumed hat and big boots and a great sword at his side has, for M.
Willems, no existence. I would not say that he does not paint hat, boots
and sword as well as the old Flemish masters themselves did, but while
they drew from the life he paints at second hand, and the modern artist
who passes his days in the vain effort to revivify the models of his
predecessors will always rank below the masters whom he imitates, as M.
Willems does, with so many others whom a false public taste encourages
in a hopeless pursuit.

There are no landscapes in the Belgian section, if one may be allowed to
except the _marines_ of M. Clays, and yet Belgium can boast of at least
one excellent _paysagiste_, M. Cesar de Cock, who, unfortunately, is not
represented in the Exposition.

French painters have often been blamed for neglecting the material
around them, and for trespassing upon the domain of foreign artists by
representing Russian peasants and Italian beggars or selecting subjects
from Spain or Japan; but I have looked in vain through the various
galleries for any evidence that other countries are a whit less
obnoxious to this reproach than our own. Each nation forages in its
neighbor's field. Is it too much to hope that modern art may free itself
from the bondage of a senseless fashion, and may take to the study of
the living types close at hand? Russia and America, for instance, have
shown themselves capable of producing a literature distinctively
national and characteristic: must they ever remain without a school of
art as indigenous to the soil, and shall their painting never have its
Tourgueneff and its Bret Harte? The law of development may require that
the birth of a nation's art shall succeed that of its letters--though
the history of the Renaissance would seem to contradict this theory--but
whether this be so or not, it is certain that one does not imagine one's
self in Moscow while perambulating the Russian _salon_ in the Champ de
Mars, where