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he believed that, as it would be a shame for a rich man to eat copiously in the midst of the starving, so it is a shame that only an artist, his friends and patrons, should enjoy what he has realized. Therefore, proclaimed he, art should be brought to those who cannot or do not come to it. Such places as railway stations, courthouses, churches, and museums, should be decorated with frescoes, for there all the people can freely enjoy them. To make his deeds speak louder than his words, the

young artist offered to decorate the great waiting-room of Euston Station (the terminus of the London and Northwestern Railway) with the "History of Cosmos." The sapient directors refused their permission. A parallel to this unappreciation occurred in later years when, to our shame, a place in the White House was refused to the noble picture which Mr. Watts had generously presented to the American people. Nothing daunted by his first rebuff, the painter sought and

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obtained permission to decorate the new Hall of Lincoln's Inn. What he might have done for the education of the throng who daily pass through the railway station may be gathered from his frescoes in the lawyers' hall, and from those in the Church of St. James the Less. When our artist began his preaching, great public walls in London, which every one could see, were undecorated; now, among others, there are not only Mr. Watts's frescoes, but the equally remarkable ones of Mr. Walter Crane at the South Kensington Museum and of Sir William Richmond at St. Paul's.

This, however, was only half the task. Art would be doubly enforced, said the reformer, if things that every one uses showed artistic endeavor-such intimate environments as tools, utensils, door-knobs and knockers, lamps, stoves, chimneys, chairs, tables, cupboards, wall-paper, and pavements. True, the Venetians and others had long since lessoned the world in this regard. If, however, in politics England had progressed by centuries further than other European nations, in art the Continent had seen the rise and fall of the mighty Italian, Flemish, Spanish, and Dutch schools, while, before our painter's day, England had produced hardly an artist of first-rate originality save Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner. Still less was there any attempt to bring art to the masses. When Mr. Watts began his crusade, British household gods and goods were heavy, unlovely, of the earth, earthy; now they show the talent expended on them by the best artistshimself. Burne-Jones, Herkomer, Morris, Crane, Richmond, Holiday.

The man who, more than any other, has accomplished these two reforms stands before us not only a true altruist and idealist, but also one of the most eminent of living portrait-painters. He is distinct from his fellows in that we feel in all his works not so much any good or bad technique as his own attitude of mind. Here again he is an idealist, and first of all in his subjects. If we realize this foremost in those suggestive, symbolic canvases, "Love and Life," "Love and Death," "Paolo and Francesca," "Sir Galahad," and the rest, we feel it secondarily, but almost more forcibly, in his portraiture. Such subject-heads as Carlyle's (though

the Sage of Chelsea declared that he was painted like a mad laborer), Gladstone's,1 Walter Crane's, and Tennyson's were ideal. The last named, his friend and neighbor, he painted half a dozen times. The poet had projected for his last volume a poem descriptive of his admiration for Mr. Watts's pictures and of their common love of the yellow crocus. Tennyson once asked the painter to describe his notion of what a true portraitist should be. The reply so impressed the poet that he embodied it in the "Idylls of the King :"

As when a painter, poring on a face, Divinely, thro' all hindrance, finds the man Behind it, and so paints him that his face, The shape and color of a mind and life, Lives for his children, ever at its best. That is the way our painter paints his portraits. He sees the best in life, he paints the best, he brings the greatest good to the greatest number.

When the venerable artist does a portrait, he gets more by listening to his sitter and talking with him than by looking at him. He knows that some one trait must differentiate each subject from a mankind, and he talks and listens until he has discovered it-a something never to be found merely by looking. found merely by looking. Such a method cannot fail to produce strongly marked individuality in each canvas.

Again, he prefers certain subjects not for themselves alone, but because they are types. He might almost say here, as he does of his other work: "I paint ideas, not things." He seeks typical nobleness before he seeks beauty. When we see one of his portraits, we note first of all the individual man, and then we note something more the universal man. We have at once the individual and the type—a union rarely realized elsewhere. This largeness of view is just as much a Watts characteristic as is lightness of touch. He works with a spirit as broad as it is elevated. He does more; he communicates it to any one beholding his pictures; for from the work of what other portraitpainter do we receive such inspiration? We feel that the man himself must dwell in a lofty mountain-sphere of intellect and soul.

The chief charm of these canvases, however, is that they live. They live

See May, 1898, Magazine Number for illustration of

this portrait.

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physically as well as spiritually. The as spiritually. The portraits are no wax figures; the heads are painted against no apparent background-whether warm, like that of the French artists, or cold, like Professor Herkomer's. The Watts heads have, in one sense, no background at all; they are surrounded with atmosphere. This patient, persistent shadow-effect, this trembling vaporousness, this twilight of tone-in short, this atmosphere-transports us, not out of

the world, but into it. Thus a subjective painter accomplishes objective aims. His portraits are not forced upon the sense as are those of MM. Carolus-Duran and Bonnat, or even those of Mr. Herkomer. We learn to know and love the Watts subjects as we do the real people all about us; for the most part not suddenly, but slowly, and with the quiet dignity becoming an acquaintance that daily deepens into something very much like actual friendship,

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