T may be that the future will bring somewhat different results, but the five or six centuries of the history of modern art show a surprisingly small number of women, who have arrived at anything like greatness in the arts of design. This astonishes us the more, because it is in these domains, that it would seem we might naturally expect feminine genius to unfold itself most easily and freely. Many have learned to work with neatness and skill, but how few are the names of women artists known beyond their own little circle and time.

Rosa Bonheur is one of the number of those who have won and deserved lasting fame as a painter. But even in her case the critics have been so ungallant as to say, perhaps with some show of truth, that she is great and successful not by reason of manifesting in her art in high degree the traits and characteristics of her sex, but because she has exemplified so well more masculine qualities, both in her themes and treatment.

Reference is made, of course, to the strength, vigor, boldness and breadth of her style, and the fact that she has chosen to paint not domestic scenes, household pets, or the things with which women have most to do, but the larger animals in the freedom and wildness of their life out of doors.

Brittany is a rock-bound corner of civilized Europe, which still retains in its landscape features, in its people and customs, and even in its domestic animals, something of its original wildness.

RAY was a painter of genre and romantic pieces, who was born and taught in Berlin and, after a long stay in Rome and Venice, settled in Vienna and later in Munich, where he was active as a painter and a teacher of art. He knew how to paint the human figure with breadth and freedom. His color is pleasing, and his effects of air and perspective have been praised, which is fortunate, as his themes are chiefly out of doors.

Kray, influenced by Feuerbach and Böcklin, loved to paint scenes of a poetical and imaginative character, often taken from the legends of Germany, the Lorelei or Undine, water nymphs or fishermaidens, visions of moonlight and fancy, treated in a rather academic yet not unpleasing

manner.

The little idyll which he has called "The Fisherman's Love" shows us, in the happy young couple, a neatly posed group, and all seems for the moment delightful. Yet anyone who has ever actually been out on the open sea, in a boat so small and lying so low in the water, when the whitecapped waves are running thus high and choppy, will see that the old skipper who is so peacefully sleeping in the bow would do well to wake up, if not to look after his daughter, at least to guard his craft against the dangerous breaker, which is rushing on broadside to swamp the skiff and rudely dispel the sweet dreams of love.

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (kō-rō'), 1796-1875

HE critics, who have such a boundless wealth of flowery language with which to bewilder and too often to mislead us, as they rhapsodize over the art of their favorites, have found in Corot and the subtle beauty of his landscapes an inexhaustible theme. "Corot's Art," said Albert Wolff, who

has written much and ably on French art, "is a casement thrown open on nature." If he had said that Corot's art was an open window, through which we may look instead into the artist's gentle and poetic soul and see there nature reflected and transfigured, he would have been more correct, if less epigrammatic.

We must value Corot, not because he has lovingly studied nature and found out her deepest and fairest secrets, but rather since he possessed the power to create, one might say, a lovely and delicate nature of his own, a world of soft, mist-laden landscapes, with trees and foliage not to be identified with any that grow on common earth, with shaded pools sleeping in dim and uncertain outlines beneath soft skies and smiling clouds, and with gentle slopes which rest in the mild radiance of a light, such as flows through happy dreams.

Some one has called this picture "Spring," but it is always spring or summer time in Corot's pictures, or instead an unchanging season of delight, such as paradise may possess. The artist, when he sent it to the Salon in 1864, called it, "A Souvenir of Mortefontaine "; the authorities of the Louvre, where it has been for many years, have forgotten that title and catalogue it merely "A Landscape."