In pictures like “The Music Room,” there is a further step toward abstraction. So far as it represents the interior of a room with walls of ivory-white set off with dainty rose-sprigged curtains, in which a lady in black riding-habit stands by a marble mantelpiece, while a child in white frock sits a little farther back reading, it is a _genre_ picture of that sort that Alfred Stevens painted, done not for any particular significance in the figures, but for the opportunity which it yields of a delicate scheme of colour and exquisite adjustment of values, and for the pure enjoyment of representing the æsthetic significance of these qualities. But it is at once more subtle and more daring than Stevens could have wrought. It involves a problem, the very difficulty of which no doubt keyed the artist to enthusiasm, to keep the child in white behind the figure in black, and to make the latter a distinguished ornament in the picture, while still preserving its pliant relation to its light surroundings--a problem not improbably suggested, in part at least, by one of Outamaro’s prints, at any rate in its Caucasian transposition worthy to be compared with the work of the Japanese master. Nor is it only a problem in skill. Jet is beautiful in tone and texture, and so is ivory, and the combination of the two, set off with delicate accents of rose, creates a beauty of its own. “Variations in Flesh and Green--The Balcony” may be selected as a still further advance toward abstract sensation and expression. These girls in kimonas, standing, sitting, and reclining on the edge of a river with a glimpse of factory chimneys across the water, mean nothing in a “subject” sense, and lack even the reasonableness of the figures in the previous picture. They are parts of a fantasy, pure and simple, to which they contribute impersonally; an artist’s dream of atmosphere and colour, which you will enjoy or not, according as you can enter into the abstract intention of the artist. Reaching the essence of beauty to a degree still less alloyed is such a picture as “Bognor--Nocturne”: blue smooth water with shadowy shapes of trawlers gliding like dusky phantoms, and of figures standing in the shallow surf; blue sky and atmosphere, penetrated with silvery luminousness. It is a scene of exquisite refreshment to the spirit, mysteriously etherealized, the artist being so absorbed with the spiritual presence of the summer night that his own soul echoes its very heart-beats. [Illustration: From the collection of Charles L. Freer, Esq. NOCTURE—BOGNOR By James A. McNeill Whistler.]