We will not even pretend to ourselves that the pictures we buy are necessarily the best. Why assume a good taste to which we cannot live up, if we possess it not? I think it probable that a person will get more good, as well as more happiness, out of a comparatively indifferent picture which he really likes, than out of a first-rate one which says nothing to him.

Remember also this: that pictures are painted, so to speak, in many languages, and can only be appreciated by those who know the tongue. This is to say, that if a picture depends for its beauty on certain refinements of color, and we are insensitive to such subtlety, it is not one which we should wisely purchase. The same, mutatis mutandis, is true of form, and again the same of chiaroscuro-this last, especially, which gives the greatest delight to many people, being absolutely repulsive to others. Without analyzing the various dialects, we may sum up this portion of the matter by saying that the picture-buyer should take every lawful advantage to ensure his future enjoyment. He should look for what specially interests and pleases him, entirely neglecting that which pleases and interests others.

Let me be clearly understood. This advice is not given with the idea of training the aesthetic faculty. It is simply the common-sense method of proceeding by which the man in the street can extract from his picture-purchases the utmost amount of satisfaction possible to him. Were I to deal with the question from the point of view of what is ideally desirable, a very different series of considerations and principles would have to be suggested. But I am simply exploding a fallacy skilfully concocted by shopkeeper and journalist for the confusion of the vulgar; that fallacy being that people ought all to buy, because they

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ought to like, the same pictures. ought to do nothing of the kind. Let us take an average couple of the upper middle-class, and see what help can be given them which shall be, so far as it goes, applicable, without knowing their personal tastes. Let us, in short, struggle for two or three first principles in the purchase of pictures. Now, to some extent, the same problems will await all such people. They must determine for color or black-andwhite; for oil-painting, water-color drawing, or reproduction; the questions of size and shape will come in, and that of expenditure; the number of rooms in their house must be considered, and whether each chamber is to have its set of pictures; the rank of their friends and themselves will also be a factor in choice; and it is only when all these considerations have been given their due value that those of personal idiosyncrasy will come up for solution. From the above list one point of primary importance has been omitted-as it is, indeed, usually omitted by the picture-buyer-and that is the question of decoration; but this more properly belongs to the subject of the right hanging and disposition of pictures in a dwelling-house.

Let us return to the young couple whom we have kept waiting so long. We will give them an income of one thousand pounds and a double-belled house in a desirable locality, and suppose that they wish to make that house into their home. What, so far as the purchase of pictures is concerned, should be their first step? I suppose it will sound very Irish to say that they should not buy any. Certainly such omission will provoke a howl from prudent relations, and a discreet smile from æsthetic friends. Yet it is evidently best to start with none at all. Reasons? Oh yes, plenty of reasons. Till you have lived in a house a short time to take the first), you do not know

ly certain that no pleasure we should get from a work of art which was obnoxious to the majority would make it worth our while to hang up such a picture where the majority would see it. For this reason, the whole range of the nude is unsuitable in the ordinary dwelling-house; and so too is the religious picture once so much in vogue.

You will find by experience that figure subjects are more attractive and interesting to people in general than landscapes, yet they are far less easy to obtain of a satisfactory quality. The shortcomings and excesses of an artist are bound to show in his figure-work; and though they exist in his landscape, they are not nearly so evident. Besides which, the atmosphere of the studio does not refine upon nature, and those who paint habitually in studios do become, on the whole, less delicateminded and more blatant than landscape painters. They acquire a definite manner earlier; they are not brought face to face with a different set of difficulties each time they set to work; they are not kept humble by the absolutely infernal difficulties they encounter. Another point: figure pictures are not only more difficult to procure of good quality, but they are considerably more expensive; the difference may be said to be more than five-and-twenty per cent. in favor of the landscape purchaser. Lastly, while an indifferent landscape is almost certain to possess some points of interest or beauty, to be at least tolerable, an indifferent figure picture may very well be the reverse. The result of all this is, not that the picture-buyer should confine himself entirely to the purchase of landscapes, but that he should be content to have these predominate. In a room containing, say, twenty pictures, four figure subjects as against sixteen landscapes would be quite sufficient to prevent the latter appearing monotonous; and it is a curious fact that while landscapes

rather help one another than not, figure subjects in juxtaposition frequently injure one another considerably. This is due to their more marked individuality and frequent trickiness.

Proceeding to the question of subject, there is still some guidance to be obtained from first principles. Apart from personal idiosyncrasy, one may say broadly that subjects of the heroic character, and historical, religious, or abstruse compositions, especially such as are of a mythological or allegorical nature, are not specially good to live with. The mind needs to be carefully attuned to them; they are unsuitable for moments of relaxation, and generally speaking, unsympathetic. On the other hand, there is a range of subjects of the domestic kind whose very banality and triviality are even more unendurable than those just spoken of. Pictures of the "Daddy won't buy Me a Bow-wow" type and, generally speaking, incidents of infant and domestic animal life, whether or not they be given alluring titles, are apt to pall upon close acquaintance; all such are more or less of the confectionery-box order, and are seldom based upon the realities of life or concerned with its deeper feelings. Moreover, they yield up their secret readily, and it is an exasperatingly insignificant one. This is not to say that commonplace occurrences, whether of the house or street, form essentially bad subjects; they do so only when dressed up for representation. The truth is, that for ordinary artists' work, the literary intention of the picture should seldom be allowed to override, or indeed greatly to interfere with, its æsthetic motive. It may be granted, perhaps, that where the two factors obtain in perfect balance, the highest art results, or at all events the picture which gives the greatest pleasure to the greatest number; but in ordinary cases the literary motive may be almost non-existent without loss.

This is not to say that the picture may be meaningless, but that its meaning must be a derivative force, allied to and growing out of technical excellence. In this way it happens that, for continuous pleasure, small subjects of faultless technique are the perfection of excellence; few pictures, for example, are better to live with than subjects of still life by old William Hunt.

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Again, in choosing drawings for permanent pleasure, there is much to be said in favor of purchasing the sugges tive rather than the highly elaborated and completely expository work. picture which has to be looked at many times should be able to lend itself to several interpretations, and to none which are demonstrably right. For this reason, suggestive pictures of sea, stormy skies, and landscape of evening and morning, or even night, are to be generally preferred to those in which the revelation of full daylight is complete. The latter have their value as contrasts and foils to the former; but it will be found that a number of them together are comparatively uninteresting.

Proceeding to the consideration of the kind of landscape most suitable for house decoration, I have noticed that ail the worst pictures are those which are concerned with mountains, and all the best those which are concerned with plains. Between these there comes an infinite variety, in which cottages and palaces, trees and gardens, scenes of city, suburb, and seacoast, offer themselves in endless profusion. If there be a rule, it is that the more mixed a subject is the less admirable is the result. The so-called classical composition was perhaps the worst type of landscape the world has ever known; though it was frequently used with transcendent ability by admirable artists. My experience of pictures tells me that it is quite possible for an incident in a landscape to become irri

tating and almost intolerable, while the picture itself remains always admirable. Turner's water-colors afford many instances of this, and there is nothing more conspicuous in the philosophy of landscape painting than the extent and manner in which incident ought to be used-the human element introduced. The most perfect example the present writer remembers was in a large picture by the late Henry Moore, A.R.A, entitled, if I recollect aright, "The Bleached Margin to the Shore." This was a great stretch of wet sand and shingle, with the sea beyond, and a vast sky of cumulus clouds through which spread a stormy yellow sunlight; in the middle distance, close to the edge of the waves, there were a cart and horse, and a man gathering seaweed, so perfectly placed and introduced, and so suffused with light and atmosphere, that though they were in the middle of the picture, the forms only revealed themselves slowly, and as it were hesitatingly, after considerable examination; yet the extent to which they improved the work was extraordinary, not only by giving it scale, but by contrast and significance; most of all, I think, by suggestion of the world beyond and outside nature, to which the painter and spectator belonged.

Choose, therefore, your landscape not so much for the picturesque portions of the subject-matter-the purple mountains, hawthorn-blossom, or this and that sentimental episode or charming detail-but rather for its dealing with the larger facts of nature: elementary beauties, skies of tender gradation or overspread with clouds of magnificent form, long sweeps of land or sea gradated by light, or the contours of the water and earth beneath: mysteries of dawn and twilight, effects of sunlight and shadow, but especially those which suggest unexpected qualities of color and form-not common

place things.

Similarly, in pictures which deal with cities, do not seek for a categorical statement of monument, church, or castle for panoramic views of park or boulevard; but for those fortuitous combinations of nature, personality, and architecture which are the essence of metropolitan life: the trivial modern incident flung, as it were carelessly, in the face of a building centuries old, the manifestation of nature frescoing with light or darkness the works of men, the indications of human energy in street or river, the shifting contrasts of poverty and wealth, youth and age, law and disorder, which make up the drama of the street: these are the subject-matter of interesting urban pictures which are good to live with. They need not be of a didactic kind, need not enforce any lesson in distinct words or forms. It is enough that they suggest trains of thought and form a peg for fancy.

Consider now, when you are buying, that if you would get the utmost value for your money (æsthetic, not pecuniary) you must seek in your whole collection something of the mingled variety and concentration which you seek in your life. In other words, that while one meaning runs through and informs the whole, it should not always be evident, nor always on the same plan. That "there are many roads to Rome, and many more to heaven," is as true of picture-buying as of places, only it is also true that some ways distinctly tend in the opposite direction. any money is spent upon a picture, the buyer should ask himself why he wishes to possess it; whether there is any reason which he can trust to be permanent. Is it only that something attractive for the moment has tickled his fancy or pleased his eye, some novel contrast of color, some surface ingenuity?

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For such reasons pictures should never be bought. Still less should they be bought because of the

artist's name, or from any fancied idea that because he has the reputation of being a good artist the picture is necessarily a good picture. Unhappily, this by no means follows. Even artists are men like other people; and when pressed, or harassed, or base in any way, frequently fall below the level of their genius and do work quite unworthy of their name. Besides which, most painters' work the amateur buyer has the opportunity of acquiring has been done more or less to order for the dealers; is that worst species of potboiler-the pot-boiler which was never intended to do anything but boil hastily the smallest pots; the least the artists could produce for an exiguous sum offered him by a tradesman. Nor should one who is buying pictures for his own pleasure ever purchase them because they are cheap. In the first place, he will probably be wrong in thinking so; in the second, it is an unworthy notion, and one which, if once accepted as a ground of acquirement, will end by reducing the amateur to the morality of the dealer. As a matter of detail, good pictures are scarcely ever to be bought cheap. I would say, as a first ground for buying, that any picture which appeals to you as being a specially true representation of nature, or a specially significant one in relation to human intercourse, is worthy of consideration. But I will go a step farther and say that you must then consider whether it will come into the scheme of your collection; whether you will like it in conjunction with what you possess; whether it will not even be too good, if it be not too bad for them. For it is not desirable to disturb the general quality of a collection, even for the better; and it is unfortunately most true that if you have one very good thing you are no longer content to give it indifferent companions. There may be a gain in such disturbance, but only if you are content to set up for yourself