There was a painter once whose personality it would be discreet to hide under the pseudonym of Eric Walker. He had never seen the country. He did not know that trees existed outside the carefully tended borders of Burnden Park. The only other stretch of grass he had ever seen was from the terraces of a football ground. For him the sky had been always dim with smoke, cut by the outline of huge chimney stacks. The only beauty he could understand was the clean, hard efficiency of a machine. With eager eyes he had seen stones lifted into the air by iron arms; he had watched the glow of furnaces flickering on polished steel. For hours on end he had stood beneath the great factory at North Town, while the sunlight cut the wreathing smoke into hard, sharp angles. The noise and glare of machinery enchanted him, and when a discerning teacher had discovered that he could draw, it was only natural that he should try to interpret in terms of line and colour those particular sights and sounds that alone had for him an æsthetic value. Success came to him easily and quickly. He was taken up by the right people, his pictures were discussed in the right circles, and when his exhibition came on the right critics said the right things in the right papers. Eric Walker suddenly found himself rich; he came up to London, was made much of, sold his pictures easily. For six months he was the adored child of Mayfair. After a while, however, his welcome grew less warm. At the time of his reception Gerald Garstin wrote: “Here is a young man who has successfully interpreted the hard, calculating commercialism of the North. In a fury of indignation he has revealed the soullessness of modern conditions. All his life he has been surrounded by squalor and ugliness. What may he not do when he has seen more of life and has learnt to appreciate beauty in its fullest sense?” And Mayfair had endorsed this opinion. “Such a wonderful young man,” they would say to one another. “And to think that he spent all those years in that terrible place, nothing but smoke and chimneys. What a revelation it must be to him to come to London, and how beautifully he will be able to express it.” And the patrons of modern art waited for Eric’s delight to break forth in a riot of form and colour.