Religious subjects have an especial attraction for Brangwyn. In his great picture, “The Scoffers,” he shows a man with the bearded curly head of an enthusiast, fastened to a pillory. The scene, as is usual with Brangwyn, is an Eastern town. A crowd, which is amusing by its negro and Moorish types and their charming garments and rags, presses on the prisoner, who is wearing the strange garb of a Western artisan, and reviles him with the words from their mouths opened in sneering laughter; with the glances of their stupid, malicious eyes; with the gesture of their forked and pointed fingers. Pity is mingled with curiosity only in the case of a handsome, brown, young maiden in the foreground, who, with a noble water-pot on her head, evidently returning home from the spring, remains standing in order to gaze at the scene. You may understand the story as you please. Perhaps it is a foreign socialist or anarchist, who tried to preach his doctrines there, and to whom the authorities are giving short shrift, and whose only reward now is the mockery of the stupid crowd to whom he intended to bring a message of salvation. Perhaps the incident has a deeper and more solemn sense, and is the subjective, half-touched-up, half-modernised representation of the mocking of Christ when He was bound to the pillar in order to undergo flagellation. Whether the drama is conceived from a sociological or theological standpoint, it is of supreme power. The great pain of the altruist who sacrifices himself for mankind, and sees his sacrifice despised; the great sin of the populace that is thoughtlessly guilty of the most horrible ingratitude, are strikingly expressed. And in what form is this rich spiritual and moral purport clothed? Such repose and nobility in varied colour; such witchery in the flat triad of dark yellow, reddish purple, and deep blue; such amazing sureness in modelling by means of mere patches of colour without outlines, it has not been my lot to meet with twice in contemporary painting.