With the artist’s personal development has come maturity of craftsmanship. His latest series of “Mother and Child” are marked by fluency of composition both in the lines and masses and in the colour schemes. But with the ripening of his powers has scarcely followed increase of individuality. He has freed himself from the hard, evenly lighted, rather tight character of Gérôme’s manner only to yield himself to the fascination of the old Italian style. It is a little surprising that one whose imagination is so individual should have failed to discover a really personal language of expression. It would seem as if the lack of facility was beyond his power to remedy, and that, feeling the need of broadening his method, and conscious that breadth with him would mean chiefly a larger kind of precision, he had found in the example of some of the Italian masters just that union of qualities. Then, too, if he were searching for precedents it is to the dignity and quietude of the Florentines that such a temperament as his would turn. And in these later pictures one is conscious of these qualities. They have an air of noble sweetness, serenity, and high and earnest purpose, creating, wherever they appear, an atmosphere of their own, pure and elevating as that of the upper air. Yet, as creative work, I think many will rank them lower than the promise of his early days. Their motive is a borrowed one--borrowed with their technique. True, it is one of beautiful human significance, but its representation, especially to one who is a husband and a father, makes a comparatively small demand upon the imaginative faculties. So that, if we feel the evidence of these faculties in painting to be the rare and superlative thing, the artist’s persistence upon a somewhat lower plane of endeavour must seem regretful. It is rather a merging of the artistic prepossession in the human. And I wonder whether this may not be the explanation. In early manhood, while the impulse was from within, he sought the objective for it in the world outside, characteristically choosing those scenes which would least interfere with the seclusion of his own mind. In later years he has found the seclusion in his own home, yielding to the natural tendency, as the years grow upon one, to feel the world to be less and less, and those closest to one more and more. And, it must be remembered, the conditions of the world were never quite to his liking, while his home is what he has made it and would have it. Yet this, after all, represents the evolution of a man rather than of the artist--a yielding to circumstances, inclinations, conveniences, rather than a following of one’s star. I write these words with hesitation, as it may be my own fault that I do not detect in these later works as much evidence of elevated imagination as in the Indian studies. If so, I would plead in extenuation my enthusiasm for those earlier pictures. X ALEXANDER H. WYANT