Another wonderful talent is Hans Makart. Such an eye for color, it is quite safe to say, has not been born since Veronese. Had he been born at Venice among his peers, forced to work instead of experiment, outvied instead of foolishly extolled, surrounded by artists to surpass him if he tripped for a single instant, instead of critics to laud his most glaring faults and amateurs to pay thousands for his spoiled paper, we should have had another name to use as explanatory of genius. As it is, he is, according to present indications, utterly spoiled. Only those who know how he can draw if he will, how he has painted--portraits best, perhaps--when he would, are vexed beyond endurance by the folly and the carelessness and the sins he chooses to give us. It has been said that Raphael Mengs was a born genius spoiled by the coldness, the pseudo-classicism, the artificiality and eclecticism of the eighteenth century. A companion portrait is Hans Makart, ruined by the amateurishness, the rhapsodizing, the theorizing, the morbid self-consciousness of the nineteenth. The so-called Spanish school of to-day is as yet too new for us to see exactly whither it tends. Its passion for glaring, metallic, aniline compound tints--tints that "scream," to use a French phrase--its horror of all shade and depth and of pure and simple colors, are, however, most certainly unhealthy. It is a diseased eye that in the desire for violent color loses all memory of chiaroscuro. I have left till now unnoticed the contemporary Netherland artists, though their works are perhaps more entirely satisfactory than those of either of the three schools we have discussed. But their characteristics are less markedly distinct, less available for comparison, and can be best noted and appraised by a previously-gained knowledge of the peculiarities of English, French and German painting. The Belgian school is most closely allied to the French, and in technique is often its equal. In landscape and cattle-painting the types are similar, while Belgian figure-painting gains by the lack of the element which a French critic notes when he says modern art has become _mondain--surtout demi-mondain_. Nowhere does contemporary art seem so healthy and sane, so sure of itself, so consonant with the best nature and gifts of the people, as in the Netherlands: nowhere are its ideals so free from morbidness, affectation or sentimentality. Is it perhaps that in the studios of Amsterdam, in the great school of Antwerp, even in the galleries of Brussels, one is somewhat out of the wildest stream of modern life--less driven to analysis and theorizing and self-consciousness than in London, Paris or Munich? Whatever is cause, whatever effect, the Netherland school shows two things side by side--the least measure of self-consciousness, and the soundest contemporary painting: if not the most effective, it is, I think, the most full of promise. There seems to be forming the most healthy