The history of the last two decades has indeed wrought a sufficient vindication of the general methods of these young painters, and supremely of their practice as colourists; and it is in the sphere of the colourist that their influence upon contemporary art has made itself felt more deeply, perhaps, than in any other branch of technique. But to the vindication of history has been added in recent years, by the painter most bitterly attacked at the time for his innovations in colour—Sir John Millais—a defence which has now become almost an aphorism in English studios. “_Time_ and _Varnish_ are two of the greatest Old Masters,” says the artist, writing in 1888 under the title “Some Thoughts on our Art of To-day”; “and their merits are too often attributed by critics to the painters of the pictures they have toned and mellowed. The great artists all painted in _bright_ colours, such as it is the fashion now-a-days for men to decry as crude and vulgar, never suspecting that what they applaud in those works is merely the result of what they condemn in their contemporaries. The only way to judge of the treasures which the old masters of whatever age have left us, is to look at the work and ask oneself ‘What was that like when it was new?’ Take the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the National Gallery, with its splendid red robe and its rich brown grass. You may rest assured that the painter of that red robe never painted the grass brown. He saw the colour as it was and painted it as it was—distinctly green; only it has faded with time to its present beautiful mellow colour. Yet many men now-a-days will not have a picture with green in it; some even going so far, in giving a commission, as to stipulate that the canvas shall contain none of it. But God Almighty has given us green, and you may depend upon it, it’s a fine colour.”[4] The writer then describes the gradual fall of Sir Joshua Reynolds before the short-sighted demand for “subdued colour” which had become current among the art _connoisseurs_ of his day, and which at last induced him, against his better judgment, to create immediate “tone,” at the sacrifice of durability, by the use of that pernicious medium, asphaltum; with the result that all his extant work so accomplished is now in a deplorable state of decomposition and ruin.