the weighing of conflicting evidence and the exclusion of irrelevant matter, so as to make the most judicious use of the material at hand and to bring the story neatly within the prescribed limits, have presented the most serious difficulties to the biographer. But the results of his labors, as here bestowed, are such as to fulfill all the requirements of his task as a popular writer. Michael Angelo, at war with the world, divinely preoccupied by the great imagery of his thought, but not consoled by it, walks alone, embittered by a fortune which is not adjusted to his exacting ideal, and permitting no approach to break his chosen solitude; Raphael, the happy prince of art, with his outer and his inner being completely balanced and harmonized, an ideal creature, surrounded by an adoring court, burns brightly to the early end; Leonardo, the restless schemer, the audacious investigator and enthusiast, anticipating science by a hundred years, in his intervals of repose stoops to conquer in the world of art, and, with half a dozen works, founds a new school, and opens to posterity a new world of contemplative delight. These imposing figures are clearly presented to view in these little volumes, - perhaps the more clearly because the volumes are little, and because the limitation of space has compelled a careful rearrangement of the story, to the end that it may develop in each case with directness and completeness. The literature of the subject is enormous in quantity and embarrassing in quality, and it requires literary skill, patience, and industry of no common kind to separate all the wheat from the chaff, and to give a presentment sufficiently lucid and bright, without any undue demand upon the imagination or judgment of the reader. Brevity has its sweet uses as well as adversity.

Out of the ponderous records of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Gilbert, Northcote, Vasarine, Blanc, etc., the figure of Titian emerges in like manner, with the same pleasing clearness and fidelity; a semi-pagan, devoting himself with equal power and interest to sacred and profane subjects, his prolific art seemed

to stand as a type of the Italian civilization of the sixteenth century, by turns, so far as regards subject, spiritual and gross, religious and corrupt, but always abounding in life and color. Whether he delineated Venus or the Virgin, he gave himself up to the subject with the same frankness and ardor. No man since has been able to unravel the secret of his marvelous technique, and he bequeathed to posterity an inspiration of color which has conferred upon the ideals of art a new and unapproachable mystery of beauty. In strong contrast to this tumultuous life of sensuous energy, the progress of which left immortal and shining foot-prints in every gallery of Europe (there are nearly four hundred known and accredited pictures or groups of pictures from the hand of this master), the sweet mysticism and spiritual purity of Fra Angelico are the last expression of mediæval devotion. The rhetorician could not ask for a happier theme than the delineation of these two typical biographies, so significant, as they are, of the spirit of the two great eras of intellectual activity on the one hand, and of religious contemplation and aspiration on the other. The art of Titian was a part of the pomp and circumstance of the princes of his time, and the secular part of his life - if the part not directly concerned with his professional labors may be so defined — was given up to the duties of the courtier and the man of the world, and mainly concerned with contracts, intrigues, disputes about commissions, and petitions for the payment of arrears of salary and pension. The art of the Angelic Brother was never sold for hire; it was simply and innocently at the service of religion. wherever and whenever it was needed. He painted less than two hundred panels and canvases, but they were all acts and incentives of worship. As a matter of technique, he is represented as subject to three separate influences: the first, that of tradition; the second, that of nature; the third, the result of his visit to Rome, that of the antique. Thus, although essentially spiritual, he was an artist, and exquisitely sensitive to ar

tistic impressions; but the complicated ideal bequeathed to modern art by the masters of this time owes to this gentle ascetic a distinct element of spiritual grace and pure aspiration. This remote and cloistered life has been treated mainly by the Dominican brothers, Edmund Cartier and Padre Marchese, in a rapturous and ecstatic fashion, and the cool biographer of modern times must have had great ado, with such authorities, to eliminate the panegyrical elements without leaving for his readers a dry husk, destitute even of the virtues of dates and facts, with never a purse to gild it or a prince to give it color. But he has nevertheless succeeded in showing us, in his little book, the soul of the religious art of the fifteenth century; because it is merely one out of a dozen or fifteen other little books uniform with it, it should not be regarded as a piece of perfunctory literary task - work. It is better than that, - it deserves life for its own sake; it would be instructive and profitable to read it consecutively with Delaborde's Lettres et Pensées d'Hyppolite Flandrin, or perhaps with Mrs. Lear's Christian Painter of the Nineteenth Century, to illustrate what curious differences are made by time and circumstance in the character and motifs of art.

Perhaps the most fortunate part of Mr. Sweetser's work is the opportunity offered him, in the lives of Guido, Claude, and Murillo, of presenting the first monographs on these subjects in the language, no small merit in these days of sleepless research and incessant compilation. If the paucity of record as regards the details of these three careers (especially in the case of Claude and Murillo), as compared with the abundance of circumstance at the command of the biographer of Angelo, Raphael, or Titian, has a tendency to render the personal narrative in places rather meagre and thin, the spaces thus opened for a fuller critique of their works and genius, and for a larger treatment of the accessories, have been used with industry and discretion.

As for Guido, it is worth while to tell

the tale of this noble but eccentric genius; for while we are under the spell of the broad and vigorous technique of the modern French school, which now completely possesses our best work, that of Guido is stigmatized as effeminate, dainty, and affected, and the phase of art which this master seems to represent is for the moment neglected as unworthy of consideration. Although this little book does not, of course, attempt any scientific analysis of his style, and does not enter into any detailed study of his manner of composition, yet enough is said, in quotations from accepted authorities and otherwise, to convey to a public to which the originals or even good copies of this master are absolutely inaccessible a distinctive notion of his real claims to immortality. The excellent list of Guido's accepted works which closes the volume contains more than five hundred titles, and yet, by a strange caprice of fortune, the master is known in this country only as the painter of the Aurora and the Beatrice Cenci, two works which, however, may in a manner be accepted as fairly representative of the artist's first and second styles, the former painting being rendered familiar to us by engravings and photographs, the latter by such innumerable copies that the fair face, to which the ingenuity of modern criticism has attributed such strange complications of emotions, has become a haunting image. The most important contribution to the popular knowledge of Guido, therefore, in this little book is contained in the ample evidence herein collected to prove not only that the title to this picture is extremely doubtful, but that it is not a work of Guido's, although undeniably a production of his school, and characteristic of one of his manners of portraiture. It is written that two hundred of his pupils became famous; these so multiplied the expressions of his exquisite ideal, and so impressed his style upon the history of art, that to know Guido is to know one of the great eras of artistic thought.

In like manner as regards Claude: here is a master who is known in this

country only by engravings, which of course give no impression of color, and by the criticisms in Ruskin's Modern Painters, wherein this artist is used merely as an offset to Turner, and wherein his position in the history of art is not fairly recognized. But in the little volume devoted to this master, who "first set the sun in heaven," are collected the critical summaries of Ruskin, Lanzi, Lübke, Blanc, Reynolds, and others; and out of the obscure or scattered records of Sandrart, Baldinucci, Meaume, Blanc, and others have been rescued or collected enough of his personal history to make a connected narrative, and to leave a clear impression of the true position of this modest but most important figure in the history of landscape art.

The titles and positions of three hundred and eighty-five priceless Murillos are given in the proper place. Among these the traveler may gather what he can of knowledge of the prolific genius which left behind him scarcely another sign of his existence. His life is mainly set forth in perpetual visions of ecstatic saints, seraphic madonnas, the hosts of heaven, and the Holy Mother with her child. But our author's industry has been well spent in collecting for the first time, from various sources, mainly from the Diccionario Histórico of Cean Bermudez, and in setting in order, the few authentic incidents of the master's career, and in relating how, when, for whom, and for what purpose his greatest works were produced; in describing the condition of the contemporary art in Spain, Italy, France, and the Low Countries, and also in giving the proper historical accessories among which the short-lived era of Spanish art was developed and a Murillo became possible.

These little books, by their neatness of statement and by their brevity, have at least the merit of facilitating and inviting instructive comparisons of the parallel lives of the Italian, Spanish, and Flemish painters. Indeed, the very uniformity of literary style seems to place the subjects in a position of more significant contrast one to the other, saving

us from the fatigues and distractions of laborious research. Thus, both Guido and Murillo are exhibited to us as religious devotees, "continuing instant" in service to the mother church. Guido, like Titian, imbibed the pagan Renaissance in all its fullness, and divided his art about equally between religion and mythology; his abundant work was bright with joy and sunshine. But the Spaniard was not only a devotee but an ascetic, and in the list of his pictures there is scarcely a pagan example; he was emphatically a serious painter of Christian art, and worshiped his own ideal; he never sported with it, and his pure life betrayed no taint of paganism.

The art of the Netherlands is represented in this series by Rembrandt and Vandyck. The basis of the Rembrandt study is chiefly the elaborate Life and Works by C. Vosmaer; that of Vandyck, Michaelis's Histoire de la Peinture Flamande. Of the former there is abundant record; much of it, however, is painfully derogatory. The jealous Houbraken has taught us to regard the master as mean, vulgar, and obstinate, a phenomenon of avarice and ignorance, and much of the interest which fairly belongs to Rembrandt as an artist has thereby been lost to literature. But the diligent researches of Vosmaer have succeeded in clearing the record to a large extent, and our author has promptly adopted his amendments, to the great benefit of the artist's reputation. He now appears in the more imposing attitude of a dignified and melancholy recluse, proud of his mastery of northern art, disdaining to court the great or to associate with the vulgar; his only intimate companion his own genius, his only occupation its complete development and fulfillment in his art; a man of immense industry and triumphant accomplishments, the acknowledged leader of a great new school, which was the proud rival of those of Italy, and the first to free itself in any degree from the religious and from the pagan service in which it had hitherto found all its inspirations. In short, he introduced the modern methods. This new narrative is most excellent reading,

and the analysis of the master's works in color and etching is based upon that of the highest authorities, but is not without marks of original observation.

Except for W. Hookham Carpenter's memoirs of Vandyck and his contemporaries, published forty years ago, and now practically inaccessible, this picturesque character would be merely a name, like Claude, Murillo, and Guido, at least to American readers. At best, little is known of him as a man, although the greater part of his active life was spent in the full light of the English court, where he became the founder of the English school of painting, and although, like Velasquez, he lived in society, and maintained a certain ruinous state of his own which renders him one of the most interesting figures in the gallery of the masters. But our author has succeeded in filling out the vacant spaces of biography with materials sufficiently authentic, and in completing the story of this luxurious but busy life, the beginning of which has been suggested to us by the smiling portrait of the gallant and handsome master at the Uffizzi, and the close by that at the Louvre, which gives us, as Michaelis says, "the coquettish déshabillé of a man of the world," weary with its pleasures and overtasked by its labors. The number of his works now remaining and known is incredible; but his fame is upheld mainly by the noble series of portraits through which, after his disappointed expectations of accomplishing more worthy and monumental work upon the walls of the banqueting-room of Whitehall and at the Louvre, he succeeded in proving that, although high art could no longer expatiate in the field of sacred and mythological traditions, as in earlier times, there was opened to it, by the changed conditions of life, yet another which genius could render hardly less fruitful.

This new province of art, made illustrious first, perhaps, by Titian, the greatest master of portraiture, then by Rubens, Holbein, Velasquez, and Vandyck, has been occupied by innumerable followers in modern times, among whom, conspicuous and rivaling the earlier masters,

appears the familiar figure of Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom Mr. Sweetser devotes one of the most interesting of his biographical series; interesting not only because, perhaps, this career took up and revivified the memories of great and monumental art, but because it was intimately associated with the foremost literati and nobles of the Georgian era, and as such must commend itself with especial force to the man of letters as well as to the critic of art. As Baretti once remarked of Sir Joshua, he was a genius and a mere ordinary mortal at the same time, and thus, more than any other of the great masters, seemed to illustrate in his own person the duality of the artistic nature divided by circumstance. At no point of his experience did the outer and the inner life appear to be reconciled to each other. Between the two there was thrust a world of modern gossip and thrifty business, which kept them wide apart throughout all his career. The record of the apparent life is mixed up with the social history of the time, and is full of entertaining anecdote; that of the higher life is expressed only in his portraits and in his discourses. In the former, at least so far as the technical qualities are concerned, many of the traditions of the heroic and religious art of the Renaissance are preserved and transmitted to the later days, infused, however, with that intellectual character without which they could not be acclimated or adjusted to our uses.

The other modern masters presented in this series are Turner, Landseer, and Allston, the first two essentially modern in their inspiration and their methods; the last a legitimate descendant and heir of the great painters of the Renaissance, a man whose learning and high conceptions furnished him with a lofty ideal to which his art never sufficed. As for Turner, the enthusiasm of Ruskin, the keen and pitiless analysis of Hamerton, the diligent but tedious inspection of Thornbury, are all so united in the little book devoted to this manysided painter that the general reader can have but little more to ask in the service of his biography. In like manner, Land

seer, the painter who is said to have discovered the dog, finds himself, strangely enough, in the august company of masters, but is introduced with such a pleasant narrative of the events and surroundings of his fortunate career that the attention of the reader is claimed to the end; if there is less of art about the book, there is more of life and prosperity.

Not only as a matter of local interest, but as a study of the new conditions under which high art is developed in modern times, the life of our own Allston must always possess a peculiar significance, particularly when placed in contrast with other modern lives which have been devoted to this pursuit. It has been observed that the first artistic developments of new nations, especially those unblessed by the incentive and instruction of accessible galleries of the old masters, have always been in the direction of landscape art. Thus, in the last Paris Exposition, a distinguished critic has placed Russia in the first rank in this department, while the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States claim consideration only for their performances in this branch of art. Nature is always open to study, and the art of interpreting her various moods and aspects is less embarrassed by traditions, less overweighted by precedents, requires far less accuracy and experience in the study of forms, than the religious and heroic art of the great times. When, therefore, a man like Allston devotes himself to this higher art, he is placed in a position of peculiar disadvantage; he is confronted by a complicated and difficult ideal which fascinates and, unless he is exceptionally brave and loyal, dismays him. To such a man art becomes a very serious business indeed, -a thing not to be played with, but to study with devotion and supreme respect, and his life

is little more than a record of unavailing and pathetic efforts to give adequate expression to his thought. Instead of the enormous and easy productiveness of the types which he would emulate, his art, however fruitful in ideas, leaves to posterity only a few unfinished studies, full of great promise, inspired with high intention, but unintelligible to the common mind. Instead of Raphael and Titian and Rubens with a thousand masterpieces, we have Allston with equal inspirations and greater learning, but with a result of only a few tentative canvases, cherished in collections as the rare records of a pure and earnest but unavailing service to art.

Perhaps, after all, the best result from the modest labors of Mr. Sweetser is in the encouragement which they give to a comparison of the genius of the masters. The uniformity of the series, the characteristics of literary style, which are the same of course in all the books, and the apparent freedom from bias which is an excellent part of the author's equipment for this especial task, — all these seem to place the subjects in such relative positions that the reader is invited to note differences and resemblances among them which under other circumstances would have escaped his attention. In the consideration of these differences and resemblances is involved a curious study of the effects of time and conditions upon the evolution of genius, and if Mr. Sweetser can find it to his interest to add to his series the biographies of other ancient and modern masters, treated with the same love for art and with the same intelligence and fidelity, he will have accomplished a work of no little importance, not only to the study of art, but to the wider study of the human mind in its comparative aspects of exceptional development.

Henry Van Brunt.