slightest drawing is informed by an idea, nearly always a beautiful one, however exotic.  The faceless head and the headless body of shivering models dear to modern art students were absent from Solomon’s designs.  His pigments, both in water-colour and oils, are always harmonious, pure in tone, and rich without being garish.  We need not try to frighten ourselves by searching too curiously for hidden meanings.  His whole art is, of course, unwholesome and morbid, to employ two very favourite adjectives.  His work has always appealed to musicians and men of letters rather than collectors—­to those who ask that a drawing or a picture should suggest an idea rather than the art of the artist.  Subject with him triumphs over drawing.  He is sometimes hopelessly crude; but during the sixties, when, as some one said, ‘every one was a great artist,’ he showed considerable promise of draughtsmanship.  His pictures are less fantastic than the drawings, and aim at probability, even when they are allegorical, or, as is too often the case, odd in sentiment.  He is apparently never concerned with what are called ‘problems,’ the articulation of forms, or any fidelity to nature beyond the human frame.  Unlike many of the Pre-Raphaelites, he showed a feeling for the medium of oil.  His friends and contemporaries, with the exception of Millais, and Rossetti occasionally, were always more at ease with water-colour or gouache, and you feel that most of their pictures ought to have been painted in tempera, the technique of which was not then understood.  Since Millais was of French extraction, Rossetti of Italian, and Solomon of Hebrew, I fear this does not get us very much further away from the old French criticism that the English had forgotten or never learnt how to paint in oil.  It must be remembered that Whistler, who in the sixties achieved some of his masterpieces, was an American.

It is strange that Solomon did not allow a sordid existence to alter the trend of his subjects, for these are always derived from poetry and the Bible, or from Catholic, Jewish, or Greek Orthodox ritual—­a strange contrast to the respectable, impeccable painter, M. Degas, the doyen of European art, nationalist and anti-Semite, who finds beauty only in brasseries, in the vulgar circus, and in the ghastly wings of the opera.  How far removed from his surroundings are the inspirations of the artist!  I believe J. F. Millet would have painted peasants if he had been born and spent his days in the centre of New York.  With the life-long friend of M. Degas—­Gustave Moreau—­Solomon had much in common, but the colour of the English Hebrew is much finer, and his themes are less monotonous.  I can imagine many people being repelled by this troubled introspective art, especially at the present day.  There is hardly room for an inverted Watts.  At the same time, even those who from age and training cannot take a sentimental interest in faded rose-leaves, whose