Mr. Frank Fowler, dark on a ground of Naples yellow, not altogether unlike some religious effects.

Sargent justifies the good opinions he won for himself on his first appearance. A white-waisted, pink - skirted, brown girl of Capri meditates in an olive orchard, leaning against a crooked stem across which her arms are nonchalantly thrown back, disclosing a crease between the slender shoulder-blades. There are usually masters to whom the strongest of the new men can be traced. This one recalls Michetti, a charming, quaint bright-colorist whom some want of appreciation has kept thus far from being much imitated. This is not cited in depreciation, but to aid those knowing the greater to comprehend the less, if by chance there be any prevented from falling in with him. The resemblance extends to a striking of the same kind of note. It is in the olive orchard, the kind of a peasant girl, the - what an English equivalent should be found for as soon as convenient-chic of the whole.

Before Sargent's other picture, at the Academy, Neapolitan Children Bathing, Michetti's 's very singular Springtime and Love, at the Paris Exposition, cannot fail to be remembered. This is not at all so full of figures, and they are boys instead of girls, but the same bluish and violet shadows are scattered about among them, and it is the same vivid blue sea against which the rosy flesh tints are projected. Such groups are seen of a blazing July day from the window of a train to Castellamare. The chubby little fellows, and one particularly who has two bladders, shining with water and giving out shell-like reflections, attached to his shoulders, are made to look like young cupids.

Thayer does not equal his down-hill procession of cattle last year, exceptionally good as a subject, but he surpasses it much in other qualities. He may well be recommended to show to tyros how the dreamy, mysterious effects at which they aim are consistent with knowledge and painstaking accuracy. A soft white cow of large size, repeated by others at a distance, stands knee-deep

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in a pool of the river Moselle. The surface is so glassy still that none of them can have stirred for a long time. absence of a single curving ripple indicates absolute calm. A heavy atmosphere clings about the principal figure, but does not make a ghost of it. It emerges with a delicate clearness when scrutinized. The colors are demure and unusual, hardly more than some drabs, white, and pale green. The animal is of a homely type, or else it is the fault of the point of view that the serrated backbone and hollow hips, from which the barrel-like body is swung, appear with such prominence. Cut off at the knees, too, by the opaque water, it has an awkward shortness, which the reflection thrown below has not counteracted, although evidently relied upon to do so.

What was considered settled by the first display of this society was that the new men coming from abroad were possessed of excellent technical ability, that they knew how to paint. A natural form of succeeding curiosity was as to what they would do with it when they got home. J. A. Weir is the principal one who attempts to find something here on which to exercise it. His large picture is attractive, and has a Courbet kind of air across the room. What is the American subject that an artist who knows how to paint has selected — for Eakins's life-size Clinic, being a commission for a medical college, cannot be considered a deliberate choice as the best thing he knew of for a six-feet canvas? It is a crowd about a bench in one of the paths of, apparently, Washington Square. The intention evidently is to take a group from every-day life and show what can be made of it. Now this is the kind of theme that requires the talent for the hitting off of character, and Mr. Weir does not show here that he possesses it strongly. It does not seem an American group. The loafer leaning on the back of the seat is like a Teniers' boor; the flower-girl is of the conventional pallor that hardly occurs out of Sunday-school literature; the tall young lady in blue looks very German. Nor is it at all probable that the gen

tlemanly person in the cloak in front would ever be found sitting cheek by jowl with the squalid, blind beggar and the rest except for the purposes of this very exhibition. But there are more elementary faults. The composition is without climax or agreeable balance, and the drawing is so obscure that the people appear to be marching in procession. Only after a long while is it realized that they are sitting on the bench. The best point is decidedly the head of the young working woman listening to the loafer. She is a jolly, bold girl, with a scrap of crimson scarf around the neck, over her black dress. She is shown to even better advantage in a special study close by. That is capital. She laughs, and her teeth show. Done in creamy smears of paint, with a high light on the round near cheek, she is as fresh and cheerful as a polished apple.

Eakins, who has shown heretofore a considerable talent for making a naturally attractive subject disagreeable, — like his woodeny Philadelphia belle of last year, supposed to be standing as a model for the sculptor William Rush, has in a ghastly scene in a dissecting-room a subject to his mind. It is a swarm of surgeons and assistants performing an amputation in a lecture-room, the surrounding air of which is faintly full of student heads, like attendant spirits. It is powerful work, and there is a fine seriousness in the principal figure, lifting a silvered, intellectual head momentarily from the grim labor. For its purpose and from its point of view, it is doubtless right, but for any less special destination the realistic dwelling on the raw, quivering limb, the gory hands that hold the scalpels, the blood spurted in jets over the white wristbands, would be horrid and inexcusable. The subject is but too impressive in itself, with these details withdrawn as much as possible from notice.

II.

The Academy exhibition, the fiftyfourth in the annual series, opens as the other closes. It cannot be recommend

ed to the public to attend an exhibition on varnishing day, because it is not, as it were, expected; but if it has happened, it is interesting for once to have been there. It is the time of final adjustment, set for a day or two before the opening. Contributors arrive in the morning. They note how they have been treated, and what adaptations, if any, the work needs to its new quarters.

It would hardly take a profound student of human nature to separate from the throng on varnishing day the benign and generally interested artist whose picture is found to have been set upon "the line." Yonder darkling man, on the contrary, is one who clearly divines whose personal malice it was that caused his cherished work to be placed so high above the ordinary range of vision.

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It is the custom to hang the pictures at the Academy about three rows deep, in a belt of perhaps twelve feet wide, beginning at the top of the wainscot, two feet and a half from the floor. the magic line there is no flicker on the varnish. The texture of the work, as well as its effect, can be examined at leisure. The next zone is not unfavorable. The topmost, though many a good picture goes there, and they are sloped at an angle to counteract the distance, it must be agreed is not well seen by the middle-aged eyes that buy. It is not strange, therefore, that the line, or something as near to it as may be, is an object of solicitude. The hanging is conceded to be good at the Academy this year. It may not be unimproving to make a section of it the principal wall of the south (main) room - - the object of a little special study. It would hardly be thought that so much symmetry could be secured with so heterogeneous a collection of materials.

Supposing the four hundred rejected contributions eliminated, and the six hundred and fifteen accepted ranged about the receiving rooms, face outward, what does an enlightened hanging committee proceed to do? It makes a selection from the largest pictures, — a large picture of a certain merit has an advantage from brute size alone, and places them

in the centres, the secondary centres, and the cut-off corners of the rooms, the positions of honor. Points of departure thus given, the intervals are filled up in keeping.

If the work be very large it must have an end wall, since the width of the room alone is not enough for a clear view. Thus Thomas Moran's Ponce de Leon, a band of small, gayly-caparisoned figures in a malarious-looking Florida everglade, is at one end of the long south room, and Inness's wide stretch of country from North Conway in Spring at the other. In the last a commonplace figure of the artist in a sketching attitude shows much too conspicuously in the otherwise rather vacant foreground. Both appear to better advantage in smaller works elsewhere.

For the side of the long gallery mentioned there were found, in the first place, two life-size, full-length portraits: Beckwith's, in the late French manner, in which a lady is effaced in a gorgeous crimson dress; and Huntington's, of a lady in black, in his well-known style. These, spaced a quarter of the distance each from the end of the room, were first set for two nuclei. A large landscape of McEntee's, a strange, melancholy scene, made up of absolutely nothing but a treeless and desert moor with rolling gray clouds dragging low down upon it, is set in the centre of the side. Over it a shrimp girl of the Normandy coast, pleasing in all but the rainy coldness of its color, by Edward Moran. The three figures constitute a kind of pyramidal structure when looked at together.

On one side of the landscape Fuller's Gypsy Girl offsets Porter's portrait of a lady. There is not absolute repetition, of course, since one is standing and the other sitting, but just the agreeable resemblance that gives balance. frames are of about the same dimensions and the heads the same height. On each side, again, a pair of horizontal landscapes of the same size superposed,

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Wyant and Bicknell against Minor and Tait, and a pair of smaller ones on top. This brings us to the full

length portraits. It takes three pictures to go to the corner from Beckwith's against two from Huntington's, because the latter is the wider. The balance is less here, but by no means abandoned. A sitting old gentlemen in black in the upper row of the one is over against a sitting middle-aged gentleman in black in the other.

A considerable continuity of tone, rather gray and temperate on the whole, is also preserved through the side. Each piece, abandoning being an object in itself for the moment, plays a part in a general decorative scheme. Even Beckwith's crimson lady does not destroy it. How good it all is can be better appreciated by finding a corner where perhaps the effort has been given over in the haste of finishing. Heads, landscapes, still-life, and action, of all shapes and sizes, are thrown together helter-skelter.

The picture of Thomas Moran's which is better than his large one is a very luminous, pearly view towards New York across a surface of New Jersey shore, full of sparkling shallows. The commercial features of the scene, a looming pier of the Brooklyn bridge, and even a smoking locomotive and train, wrapped in a moisture- surcharged atmosphere, lend themselves to the picturesque purpose easily.

Inness is better in a hazy morning, over a quiet river winding up to distant woods touched with the first hues of autumn. A man of remarkable originality in the study of nature, he throws a strangeness into its more ordinary aspects. He particularly delights in it at moments of transition. The gleam which strikes between the rolling clouds, now in the foreground, now the middle distance, of his peculiar olive - green landscapes is to rest but a moment. He shows here a sunset entirely unlike anybody else's. It is one of those that change from instant to instant. sun is a great ball going down behind impressive masses of foliage, and sending light, catching along the furze, to the front. There are half-defined rays, the sun "drawing water," as a common expression is. Small clouds against the

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light are purplish and crimson; others above it are orange. Through rifts some patches of sky are seen, clear green, suffused in radiance and immensely dis

tant.

Miller's view at Wehawken is the landscape for which the highest price — it may be interesting to state it, two thousand dollars - is demanded. This is a sunset, too, but of the more regular kind. It is in the woods in autumn. The light is all reddish. Miller is adopted among the progressive men, and exhibits at the Kurtz gallery, too. His pictures are like both Dupré and the more remote Rousseau. There is a russetness, and a texture over them comparable to tree bark. The compositions are undoubtedly of merit, but labored and artificial. There is too little out-ofdoors in them. His cows are conventional spots, whose only purpose is to allow the resting of desirable spots of illumination on their backs.

It will be hard to reconcile us to the slipshod treatment of the small figures, either animals or human beings, in landscapes, however long the practice may be continued. Elaboration to the injury of the purposes for which they are needed is not demanded, but examples like Macy's show that this is not necessary. His figures of this kind have all the requisite breadth and freedom, but each an individuality, as if studied from a living subject.

Such a one is the brownish-clad girl going along the path in the scattering shadows of the great tree which frames the prospect of his fresh and lovely Early Summer. There is a rather remarkable absence of blue to indicate distance. Its place is filled by drabs. The bold yet tender treatment of the young vegetation, which begins to be luxuriant and to envelop the two brown and white Bavarian cottages in its midst, the taste and sentiment of the scene, are admirable. Here again is a happy medium. It is a reproach to W. T. Richards, Fitch, and Hetzel on the one side, who model the forest interior and all the stratifications of the rocks as finely as if they were but reproductions to a micro

scopic scale, and yet leave us cold, as well as to all the tribe of feeble and disorderly on the other.

The two Harts continue their even work. James, who paints the larger cattle pieces, displays especially good draughtsmanship and extensive general knowledge. One concedes all that is claimed for them, but some tameness and formal respectability in these excellent pictures prevent the outburst of ill-regulated enthusiasm. A suspicion of something of the same kind hangs about Dana's fine sea-weed gatherers on the coast of Brittany. Perhaps it would please better were it less perfectly composed,—if there were a suggestion of something more angular in the forms, a hint of something transitory in the attitudes. The heavy cart horses seem too rounded and resignedly drooping. The sails of the fishing-boat droop, too, as though no breeze should ever blow again. One finds it enervating.

Next to it Clement Swift throws out three large figures of Breton wreckers crawling up a bank to watch the coming of a distressed craft in the offing, with a rugged simplicity and boldness that is an example of exactly the opposite feeling.

Boggs's Street Corner in Paris is a very attractive, dashing piece of work, one of the best of those into which art for art's sake enters for a legitimate share of enjoyment. It is in both the subject and the free, vigorous manner of handling. The corner is possibly one of those on the upper side of the Boulevard Clichy. Its wine shop, around which hangs a group of blouses taken out of the kind of life of Zola's Assommoir, it might be the Assommoir itself, though it is lettered the Chariot d'Or, - is pale green; the end wall of the building rising above it is time-stained gray limestone and plaster. There are two vulgar little shops, a fruiterer's and a second-hand-furniture dealer's, in the low, yellow-washed block running off to the left, and a leafless tree sprouts from the curb-stone in front of it. A sewinggirl is crossing the street, an old fellow sweeping it, and the end of a loaded

omnibus just disappearing out of the picture. There is nothing whatever that needs going to Paris for. The art is in the maker, who has the talent to put the old cavalry jacket depending from the line, the basket of lemons, the open joint in the paving-stones, just where it will do the most good, and to leave out as much more that does not consort with the agreeable patchwork he has a mind to frame of this every-day life.

It is the commonest of subjects. A hundred thousand as good or better will be found in New York. There are subjects in the transition state of the upper part of the island a French painter would give everything for. If the wild shanty life, the goats, the fragmentary forts, the cemeteries, and the colonial mansions among the great bowlders, the bold trace of the engineering improvements cutting through them, the market gardens, the gleams of color in isolated brick and red stone blocks rising in the midst, be allowed to pass away without some transmission into art, it will be one of the crimes of the age.

A much more unlikely subject has come into art in the person of no other than Jim Bludsoe, by A. W. Willard. We behold him in the attitude of keeping the nozzle of the steamboat Prairie Belle agin the bank, till the last galoot 's ashore. He is not pretty, in the coppery light which the conflagration is made to throw over him as he clings to the wheel, but the head looks like an excellent rendition of a type of about the probable kind, under circumstances of strong excitement.

Guy gives us this year the same serious little girl who was last year reading to herself a Sunday-school lesson, now seated on the side of their bed, in the evening, reading a story to two little children. If it be the object to put them to sleep, it does not seem in train to be accomplished. Two pairs of round little eyes peep above the coverlet, wideopen with wonder at the tale. The perfection of finish, the effort at illusion, are made to consist, as is not often the case, with higher qualities. If it were, the style would have less said in disparage

ment of it. The masses of light and shade are most agreeably distributed. Though the very threads of the textures are discerned, the illumination of the gas-light falls in a broad and mellow flood across them.

Gilbert Gaul's returned sailor lad showing some orphan - school boys his tattooed arm through a railing is scarcely worked out with the skill that befits so good a subject. Burns, in his young fisherman coming down the beach calling Halloo-o-o! well gives the action he intends. Magrath's Irish farmer smoking his pipe on a hill-side, contentedly overlooking his estate, is a graphic piece of character set into a landscape of a charming, temperate color. One feels inclined to a superlative at once, to say that it is the best thing he has ever done. J. G. Brown repeats, in an accurately individualized strolling German band, a composition similar to the row of newsboys pointing at a passing show, so well received at Paris.

Homer is sure to have enough in anything he may send to save it, even if it be not successful. His Cotton-Pickers is thoroughly so. The shepherdess, of the Little Bo-Peep style, bearing up against a stiff breeze, and the girl in yellow sitting on the beach against a breaking wave, of the solid dark blue the sea takes on some lazy days after an agitation, are both nice; but the former and her landscape are frigid, and the purplish and leaden sky of the latter does not seem to consort with the afternoon light that throws so long a shadow from the girl's figure over the crest of the ridge. The field of tall cotton-plants, crossed and tangled in front, and spotted with the large, soft, white pods, with two women of the African race half shrouded in the midst, is very decorative; and there is made to be something mysterious and sphinx - like about the women against the sky.

The two Smillies are much to be congratulated on the odd and pleasing inspiration they have found, - the one in

a simple hill-top crested with cedars, to which a goat path winds, the other in a snow-covered, climbing road, across