water-colorists, because his gifts for expression have been evolved almost entirely through this medium. There is then a fine American achievement in the art of water-color painting which may safely be called at this time a localized tradition. It has become an American realization. THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always said for myself that the kodak offers me the best substitute for the picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake. It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain, that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation. Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.