often feel, as we look at the ejf'ace and nice portraits of ladies in our exhibitions, that the aim of the painter has been not to reproduce what he sees
in his model, but to paint what he thinks his sitter
wishes him to see. The marked contrast between
the excellence of contemporary masculine portraits
and the feebleness of feminine ones is mainly due,
we believe, to tliis cause. The painter is terribly
hampered by the exactions of feminine vanity.
The dress and accessories that distinguish so many
female portraits discover notable deficiencies in the
treatment of dress by English painters. The exact
reproduction of ' fal de rals' fmAs its- reductio ad
ahsurdum in the recently published criticism of the
Academy Exhibition from the point of view of a
journal of the drapery trade. In France the lady
sitter will often consent to ignore her dressmaker
for the moment in order to accept the guidance of
her portrait-painter as to what is suitable and
becoming ; and thus her draperies seem mystically
imbued with something of her own personality, and
become another subtle expression of her best self.
This is but the intelligent tribute paid by her to
the artist's power of recognising with his more
cultured eye and trained insight that which con-
stitutes her veritable identity as a spiritual being.
Each of us has a variety of personalities, and the
personality the painter sees, often, it must be remem-
bered, may not commend itself to the sitter, espe-
cially if she be a woman. May be it is to be found
often in those lines that the great artist Time has
imprinted upon our form, though we may deplore
them as they stand reflected in our mirrors.
An example of the admirable result of this
latitude allowed to the artist by his sitter in France
may be found in the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt
by Clairin. The divine Sarah was thin to gaunt-
ness in those days. Clairin saw his opportunity of
making this preternatural thinness his strong point
for artistic purposes. He painted Sarah lost in the
foam and flow of laces and silk, half stretched on a
sofa, a spectral hand supporting the meagre cheek,
and a great dog lying at her feet. The picture
was a marvellous representation of delicacy and
force ; and it lost none of its true effect by the
better motif. Dumas the younger said that it was
' a capital study of a dog watching a bone.'
Sometimes in France there is a revolt against the
painter's insistence in rendering his model as he sees
her. Usually the revolt comes from the foreigner.
Meissonier painted a millionaire American with
such merciless fidelity to his impressions that the
story of the lady's refusal to accept the portrait,
and her ultimate treatment of the canvas, furnished
one of the liveliest scandals of its year.
Notwithstanding the trammels and temptations
with which fashion and vanity surround the portrait-
painter, England remains what Charles Blanc has
called it, the land of portraiture. All the circum-
stances of life — social, political, religious — tend to
develop robust individualism and strongly marked
physiognomies. Painters would do well to lift their
ideal of portrait-painting out of the depressing
region of pot-boiling, and to consider it as belong-
ing to one of the highest branches of art. The
generation that has seen some of its most eminent
men painted by the brush of Frank Holl, and
that counts among its portrait-painters men like
Professor Herkomer, Mr. Watts, Sir John Millais,
and Mr. Ouless, need not fear yet the decay of
an art which the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds
and Gainsborough, of Hogarth and Romney, almost
raised to a rivalry with that of the Venetian masters.
Alice Corkuan.
THE EXHIBITION OF DECORATIVE HANDIWORK
At the Roval Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.
FURNITURE and poeti-y would seem at first thought to have but little in common with each other. Yet genuine old pieces of furniture, though they have their highest value in the carving and ornaments that set them off, and the skill and ingenuity with which they are put together, have yet beyond this the added association of their having been in actual use, and of their remaining silent witnesses, attesting the truth of the facts of history, or affording material for the compilation of such history. Furniture which has remained un- altered, and which belongs to a number of epochs, gives us an insight into the fashions and usages of most of the modern nations of Europe, and to study and describe is to go back to the days in which these objects have been made, and to the wants and manners, the habits and sentiments, of bygone ages. Thus we may see chairs from which royalty has issued its man- dates ; cabinets that have held the secrets of state ; buffets and sideboards that have figured at mediaeval feasts ; tapestries that have looked down on groups of men and women, as brilliant in colour as the dyes of their own threads ; mirrors that have flashed back the faces, and caskets that have held the trinkets of beauties whose sons and daughters for generations have long gone to the dust; spinning-wheels trod by grand
