We cannot end our chat on signs by French artists without mentioning the name of Victor Hugo, to whom we owe so much information about the wealth of signs that still existed at his time in France and the countries bordering on the Rhine. He was himself a clever draughtsman and occasionally sketched “des dessins aux enseignes enchevêtrées,” reminiscences of the real signs he used to admire on his wanderings. The following quotation may show how great was his love for signs: “À Rhinfelden, les exubérantes enseignes d’auberge m’ont occupé comme des cathédrales; et j’ai l’esprit fait ainsi, qu’ à de certains moments un étang de village, clair comme un miroir d’acier, entouré de chaumières et traversé par une flotille de canards me régale autant que le lac de Genève.” [Illustration: Enseigne du Rémouleur·Paris] Among the great Dutch masters Paulus Potter, Albert Cuyp, and Wouwerman are cited as occasional sign-painters. Even Potter’s famous “Jonge Stier” in The Hague is claimed as a butcher’s sign. It would perhaps seem like doing too much honor to the art of sign-painting if we numbered this remarkable work of the twenty-two-year-old artist among them. And what beautiful white horses, bathed in mellow sunlight, Cuyp may have painted for the “Rössle” taverns! Another Dutch artist, Laurens van der Vinne (1629-1702), is even called the Raphael among sign-painters. We do not know much about his work, but I am afraid he did not take this title as a compliment. To find Rembrandt’s great name in connection with our art seems stranger still, but there is a tradition that copies of his pictures--we may think of his good Samaritan arriving with the wounded man before an inn--were used as signs. As we shall see later, his own portrait was occasionally hung out by a patriotic and art-loving landlord over the tavern door. Among English artists Hogarth, whom we already know as a keen observer of London signs, deserves the first place. He is supposed to be the author of a sign, not very gallant to the fair sex, called “A man loaded with mischief.” It represents a wife-ridden man. All kinds of delicate allusions hidden in the background of the composition seem to hint at the sad fact that this impudent woman on his back holding a glass of gin gets sometimes “drunk as a sow.” I doubt if Hogarth engraved this plate himself; it is signed “Sorrow” as the engraver and “Experience” as the designer. It would do little honor either to Hogarth the man or the artist. All satirical art has this great deficiency, that it is hard for the public to judge whether the satire means to combat seriously the vices and errors of men or whether the smile of the satirist is not a smile of complacency. But such doubts must not detain us from visiting with good humor an exhibition of signs, the spiritual promoter of which Hogarth seems to have been. At any rate, he contributed quite a few of his own works under the transparent pseudonym “Hagarty.”