T LAST we were about to see a "Great Painting." On that very morning The Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague was to be visited, and we were to get an actual glimpse of the Mas

ters. The mental processes of the un

initiated deni

zen of the

West when

he is about to take his first view of a picture which the judgment of time has immortalized as a masterpiece,are peculiarly involved -a medley

of expectancy

and uncertainty.

From the education of the average American student, the realms of painting and sculpture are practically omitted, and the

who knows the roll of great names from King Menes of Memphis to Queen Victoria, and our own presidents, finds himself often, practically in total ignorance when it comes

to the field of art, and he is no more able to distinguish between the shades of a Rembrandt and

the tints of а Titian than the beginner in Latin between a line from

the Eneid and the Metamorphosis of Ovid.

It is not

at all diffi

cult to understand the lack of instruction in this field. Great pictures cannot be duplicated like great literary and scientific productions, and the painter of a masterpiece is never obliged to secure a copyright on his work. There is but one "Sistine Madonna" in the world, in spite of thousands of copies of it, and the

person who is familiar with the literary productions of several languages, and with the scientific progress of the age, who has read extensively on social and religious problems,

blending of colors in Murillo's "Immaculate Conception" has never yet appeared on any of its replicas. It is almost as unsatisfactory to study the ceiling paintings in the Sistine Chapel away from Rome, be their reproductions ever so good, as to depict the majesty of the ocean on a western prairie.

While it is true that the art of painting cannot be studied to its best advantage away from the great galleries of Europe, while a faithful copy does fall far short of the genius of the original, many a person must have regretted, sincerely, that he was not led to understand even the subject-matter of great paintings. Lack of definite information leads to imagina

tive speculation. Repeated references to the greatness of these pictorial produc tions lead us to invest these pictures with

a specula

The mere scenic setting of the picture might be a new revelation of Nature to the man who had seen nothing better than a sunset on an American landscape.

With all this acknowledged greatness is the lingering suspicion that one is to be hugely disappointed. One feels tempted to at once hire a learned guide, and by this critic be ushered into the mysteries of greatness in painting.

This, with lesser or greater exactness, is probably the mental attitude of most persons on their introduction to European galleries. But how different when one has seen and studied them! Instead of

tive halo, as the child does with his characters from Fairyland, or the poet did with the barbaric splendor of "Ormus and of Ind." When the hour for the opening of the gallery had arrived, and the party of untutored art-critics took its way thither, no one knew just what to expect. Repeated reading of the guide books to the gallery had confused, rather than helped us. Each wondered whether the canvas might not possess a magic irridescence, so that colors might seem to be melting and reforming while you looked at it. What imperially dramatic situations the painter must have chosen! What deep philosophy must they reveal!

yield suggestions of universal truth and beauty, to find which, is the artist's province.

A rapidly rotating wheel seen by ordinary daylight shows its individual spokes lost and blended in one continuous whirling haze, but lighted up in the dark by an electric spark the wheel seems for the moment to have stopped, and the individual spokes stand out in perfect clearness. So, in the whirligig of life, which seems to most one indistinct maze of events; the painter, by a flash of genius, lights up a momentary situ

these pictures? Does the perfected skill of the brush figure for nothing? Is a great picture nothing but a reflection of man's inner life? Color is the language of the painter, and tint and shade his rhythm; and the painter is but a poet in another plastic form of speech. As Gray's Elegy, as Holmes' The Chambered Nautilus, as Lowell's Sir Launfal cannot be stripped of their language without practical annihilation, neither can a masterpiece of painting be clothed with anything less than an artist's perfected skill. It

ation, seems to stop the course of things for a time and crystallizes the situation in a form. to be studied at leisure.

It was Emerson, who, after having seen the works of the Italian masters, said that he found in them what he thought he had left behind in his own home-his every-day life. He had gone four thousand miles over land and sea to find portrayed in color and shade what he had already lived in thought and feeling.

Is there, then, nothing in the coloring of

is the very perfection of mechanical skill that renders us unconscious of it.

It is not intended to enter into a critical dissertation on art in this paper; indeed, to the writer such a possibility is precluded, but it is desired to call particular attention to a few masterpieces, acknowledged as such by critic and layman alike. The continued and lingering crowds that daily gather around these pictures in the galleries where they are displayed, in the amplest way corroborate the judgment of time and critics.

The pictures selected are Rembrandt's "School of Anatomy," Murillo's "Immaculate Conception," Michael Angelo's "Holy Family" and Raphael's "Parnassus" and his "Madonna del Sedia."

Another might have varied this selection; in every man's preference lies his personal shadow, but no one in visiting the miles of European galleries would have failed in having these pictures stand out in his mind in a peculiarly prominent way. Guides need not point them out; there is no danger of passing them unobserved. In them, genius is so genuine, that it needs no in

The listeners are depicted with varying intensities of interest in the erudite discourse," while the lecturer is in the act of explaining the function of the tendon which he has laid bare, by showing upon the fingers of his own left hand, the movements which this tendon controls. Although the corpse

is strongly lighted in contra-distinction to the shadowy background which holds the other figures, it is the remarkable property of this picture that the attention of the observer is drawn more to the living than

once apparent. The picture was painted to adorn the hall of the guild of surgeons at Amsterdam. The picture represents the learned Professor Tulp delivering a lecture on anatomy to seven elders of the guild of surgeons.

The accuracy of the whole picture shows that it was painted from actual originals.

to the dead. It has been said by critics that this picture, more than any other in the world, exhibits

in a true and life-like way, the working of human intellect. Remaining a long time in the dissecting room at Amsterdam, it was finally bought by King William I. of Holland for

$16,000, and placed by him in the royal picture gallery at The Hague which it now adorns.

The greatness of Rembrandt consisted in his breaking away from the traditions of the painters before him. Instead of decorating palaces and cathedrals with scenes from mythology and tradition, Rembrandt re