books into general circulation, but it is less than half a century since photography brought good pictures within general reach. It is no wonder, then, that many who are well versed in reading are still more or less ignorant of art. Some of us whose childhood fell in the seventies were brought up among well-filled bookshelves, while the home pictures were few in number and crude in quality.
The last twenty-five years have seen a complete revolution in this matter. The home and the school may now be decorated with the same art treasures that millionaires enjoy, and all through the magic of process reproduction. The photographer has carried his camera into every corner of the earth and has photographed all the wonders of nature and architecture. Without setting foot out of doors we may travel all around the world in imagination by covering our walls with photographic views. Even more remarkable is the photographic work done in all the great galleries of painting and sculpture, reproducing for us the world’s masterpieces. The Greek marbles of the Vatican and the British Museum, and the works of Michelangelo, may now be as familiar to the children of America as they once were to the children of Athens and of Florence. The paintings of Raphael and Titian, of Holbein and Dürer, of Rembrandt and Frans Hals, of Rubens and Van Dyck, of Velasquez and Murillo, of Reynolds and Gainsborough, of Corot and Millet, of a multitude of contemporary painters, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Scandinavian, English, and American, are all within our
