Tranquilly I contemplated the procession of lifeless portraits, noting with amusement the contrast between the grimy but very real hands of the attendant who supported the canvases upon the easel, and the painted hands in the pictures. The attendant’s body was hidden by the canvas, but his hands appeared on either side of the frame clutching it. I indicated the contrast to my companion, a connoisseur, but he saw no humour in the comparison. He was almost sulky. A decorative Francis Cotes, and a luminous Richard Wilson, that he hoped to acquire for a few pounds, had gone into the fifties. He indignantly refused to make a bid for the “Conversation Piece” ascribed to Hogarth. “What a period! what an outlook!” he cried. “William Kent the arbiter of taste, portraits with the clothes done by drapery men. Conversation Pieces with stupid gentlemen and stupid ladies doing nothing stupidly, and Hogarth flooding the town with his dreadful moralities. Pah!” He shook himself, emitted an exclamation of disgust that made the auctioneer glance quickly in his direction, and then said brusquely, “What do you think of Matisse?” [Illustration: PLATE II.--HOGARTH’S SISTER (In the National Gallery, London) This dashing and brilliant portrait probably represents Ann Hogarth, the artist’s younger sister, who died, unmarried, in 1771. Note the vivacious and original way in which Hogarth has handled this sympathetic subject, and the skill with which he has, as it were, “substituted light and colour for paint.”] I was not going to be drawn into that. I knew that Matisse was _le dernier cri_, the newest “master,” the idol of the moment among the “advanced,” who had passed beyond the re-discovery of Cézanne and Van Gogh. Hogarth, the painter Hogarth, not the “pictur’d moralities” Hogarth, had also had his period of re-discovery. Perhaps it began that day in the eighties when Whistler was admiring, “almost smelling,” the Canalettos in the National Gallery, while his companion, Mr. Pennington, was seeing for the first time Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode” series, “fairly gasping for breath,” to quote his own words. “Come over here, quickly,” cried Pennington. “What’s the matter?” said Whistler, turning round. “Why! Hogarth! He was a great painter!” “Sh--sh,” said Whistler (pretending he was afraid that some one would overhear), “Sh--sh. Yes! _I know it.... But don’t you tell ’em._” Whistler had known that Hogarth was a great painter for years. His appreciation of the pugnacious little man of genius, with “a sort of knowing jockey look,” to quote Leigh Hunt, dated from his boyhood. “From then until his death,” says Mr. Pennell, “Whistler always believed Hogarth to be the greatest English artist who ever lived, and he seldom lost an opportunity of saying so.”