individual talent for painting woman in her first bloom, when the bud is about to burst into the rose and the child is about to become a maiden.  As in the Eighteenth Century all the world was somewhat libertine, even the moralists, Greuze, when he painted an Innocence, always took pains to open the gauze and give a glimpse of the curve of the swelling bosom; he puts into the eyes a fiery lustre and upon the lips a dewy smile that suggests the idea that Innocence might very easily become Voluptuousness.

[Illustration:  LA CRUCHE CASSEE.
        Greuze.]

La Cruche Cassee is the model of this genre.  The head has still the innocence of childhood, but the fichu is disarranged, the rose at the corsage is dropping its leaves, the flowers are only half held in the fold of the gown and the jug allows the water to escape through its fissure.

    Guide de l’Amateur au Musee du Louvre (Paris, 1882).

PORTRAIT OF LADY COCKBURN AND HER CHILDREN

(REYNOLDS)

FREDERIC G. STEPHENS

The number of Reynolds’s portraits of ladies has never been given, probably it cannot be ascertained with precision; it is beyond all question marvellous, but not less so is the variety of the attitudes in which he placed the sitters, that of the ideas he expressed, and of the accessories with which they are surrounded; to this end, and to show how successfully he fitted things together, background and figure, compare the portrait of Elizabeth Hamilton, Countess of Derby splendidly engraved by W. Dickinson, with that of Lady Betty Delme.  It is the same everywhere.

We believe that Reynolds, of that English school of portrait-painters of which he was the founder, was the happiest in introducing backgrounds to his works; to him we are for the most part indebted for that aptitude of one to the other which has so great an effect in putting the eye and mind of the observer into harmonious relationship with what may be called the motive of the portrait, which, indeed, elevates a mere likeness to the character of a picture, and affords a charming field for the display of art in pathos, which is too often neglected, if not utterly ignored, by Reynolds’s successors.  We think he exhibited more of this valuable characteristic than any other contemporary artist.  Lawrence aimed at it, but with effect only commensurate to his success in painting.  Of old, as before the Seventeenth Century in Germany and Italy, the art of landscape-painting per se was inefficiently cultivated, at least expressed with irregularity, although occasionally with force enough to show that the pathos as well as the beauty of nature were by no means unappreciated or neglected to anything like the extent which has been commonly represented by writers on Art.  Reynolds probably took the