It is the colour scheme that conveys it; that note of blue, so clear and flute-like, against the sullen grayness of the sky; the sobering, complementary note of tawny brown, even the chromatic variations of the gray sky that vibrate like music. For all its menace, the sky is beautiful, and in union with the other notes of the scheme produces a throbbing tenderness of harmony that is irresistibly appealing. It is through his colour schemes that Walker tempers his force with persuasiveness. For he is one of that small band to whom colour is as essential a part of their expression as notes are to the singer. You may see pictures in which the colour is little more than tints to differentiate the objects; others in which it is merely an accurate rendering of the phenomena studied; then others, again, wherein the colour is as inseparable from the conception as fragrance from the rose. It is essential, interpenetrating the structure of the picture, complete and indivisible as the components of a passage in music; structurally, æsthetically, and intellectually essential. While one will find this true feeling for colour in all his work, it is only in the later ones, as one would expect, that it reaches its fullest subtlety of expression. One of his early pictures is the “Milking,” a large canvas to which was awarded the gold medal, by the vote of exhibitors, at the exhibition of the American Art Association in 1887. The scene is a stable interior, with drab walls, in which a woman in a blue gown is milking a black and white cow, whose calf is standing near. The light enters by a window on the right, and percolates through the dim recesses of the stable. At first one is conscious of the quiet beast standing across the picture, turning its mild head toward us, and of the woman in half shadow, a strong-bodied form in the easy attitude of a habitual occupation; but by degrees the eye penetrates the surrounding gloom, and discovers another figure and other objects in the background. In this gradual evolving of the subject, art has followed nature, and one feels also the evidence of a dignified reserve, as of a man who does not wear his heart upon his sleeve or admit you hurriedly into the privacy of his thought, but assures himself first of your sympathy and then bit by bit unfolds to you his purpose. Another characteristic of this picture is its grandiose passivity, its suggestion of a liberal acquiescence in nature’s plan. We shall find this same large outlook, under various guises, in a great number of Walker’s pictures. Represented most differently, one meets with it in “Morning,” in which a flock of sheep have just emerged from a shed and are beginning to nose about the meadow, which stretches behind them, glistening with dew and bounded by a coppice of delicately branched trees, through which the morning sky, just quickening with light, is visible.