since last the painters
received their friends, and perhaps a few of their enemies. These visits
to studios are very exciting to ladies who have read about studios in
novels, and believe that they will find everywhere tawny tiger-skins,
Venetian girls, chrysanthemum and hawthorn patterned porcelain, suits of
armour, old plate, swords, and guns, and bows, and all the other
"properties" of the painter of romance. Some of these delightful things,
no doubt, the visitors of yesterday saw, and probably some painters still
wear velvet coats and red neckties, and long hair and pointed beards. But
the typical artist is not what he was. He has become domesticated.
Sometimes he is nearly as rich and "apolaustic" as a successful stock-
broker, and much more fashionable. Then he dwells in marble halls, with
pleasing fountains, by whose falls all sorts of birds sing madrigals. He
has an entirely new house, in short, fitted up in the early Basque style,
or after the fashion of an Inca's palace, or like the Royal dwelling of a
Rajah, including, of course, all modern improvements. This is a very
desirable kind of artist to know at home; but, after all, it is not easy
to distinguish him from a highly-cultivated and successful merchant
prince, with a taste for _bric-a-brac_. He is not in the least like the
painter of romance; perhaps he is better--he is certainly more fortunate;
but he is not the real old thing, the Bohemian of Ouida and Miss Braddon.
One might as well expect a banker to be a Bohemian.

Another class of modern painter is even more disappointing. He is
extremely neat and smooth in his appearance, and dresses in the height of
the most quiet fashion. His voice is low and soft, and he never (like
the artist of fiction) employs that English word whereby the Royalist
sailor was recognized when, attired as a Portuguee, he tried to blow up
one of the ships of Admiral Blake. This new kind of artist avoids studio
slang as much as he does long hair and red waistcoats. He might be a
young barrister, only he is more polished; or a young doctor, only he is
more urbane. No doubt there exist men of the ancient species--rough-and-
ready men as strong as bargees, given to much tobacco, amateurs of porter
or shandygaff, great hunters of the picturesque, such wild folk as
Thackeray knew and Mr. Charles Keene occasionally caricatures. These are
the artists whom young ladies want to see, but they are not in great
force on Show Sun