These visions of colour are taking the place of obscurity and gloom, for the great impressionists, Claude Monet, Manet, the Barbizon school also and its disciples, have abjured the old dark shadows and substituted violet washes, seeming to share the privilege with the saints and sages of “seeing blue everywhere.” All true artists live “within the sphere of the infinite images of the soul.” These seers are their own masters, and, as Theodore Child says so exquisitely, “they are of rare and special temperaments, and through their temperament they look at nature and see beautiful personal visions. They fix their visions in colour or marble and then disappear forever, carrying with them the secrets of their mysterious intellectual processes.” Such a special temperament was bequeathed to Whistler. He submitted himself to the Japanese influence, not imitating but imbibing oriental methods, and following them, notwithstanding Philistine clamour, for the English art doctrines of the time were diametrically opposed to these innovations. Regardless of sneers, he followed the bent of his genius, which led him into oriental fields. He felt the sweet influence of such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige. He took advantage of the centuries of thought given to drapery, in the land where, as with Greece, dress is a national problem; where no fads and follies of fashion fostered by commercialism are allowed; where the artists design dress, and the people gratefully and sincerely adopt their ideas. When we can follow them and allow art to rule, then hideous vagaries and vulgarities, distortions of the figure by hoops and wires, and monstrosities in sleeves will cease. Then may we hope to be an æsthetic nation. We need our American Moronobus to design and embroider and paint dresses for their beautiful and intuitively tasteful countrywomen. The colour vision of the Oriental far surpasses our own. His eyes are sensitive to colour harmonies which, applied to landscape, at first seem unreal, impossible, until we realize that though they present objects in hues intrinsically foreign to them, yet the result justifies this arrangement, and its integrity is recognized, for the impression we receive is the true one. And this chaotic massing of colour we notice in a landscape by Hiroshige was employed by many of the old masters. Of the stormy passion of Tintoret, Ruskin says: “He involves his earth in coils of volcanic cloud, and withdraws through circle flaming above circle the distant light of paradise.”