as simple architecture is concerned, what a variety lay before him! And yet from all its richness and variety he turned now and then, to paint the humble window of the little _bourgeois_ or little tradesman’s house; the window-sill with its few pots of green-leaved and blossoming flowers, seen, some of them, against the brown-red shutter; fragile fuchsia, and healthy geranium. But whether Francis James is occupied with flower painting, or with church interiors of Germany or the Eastern Riviera, or with landscape pieces, or with studies of the village shop, it is always the same spirit of broad interpretation that dominates his work. Its business is to recall an impression--artistic always, whether beautiful or quaint--it is not generally its business to be imitative, strictly imitative, of actual object or scene. Quite an infinity of detail is pleasantly suggested by a drawing of the grocer’s shop at Bewdley--the Post Office of the country town--and just as much by ‘Shop Front, Bewdley,’ which shows us the deep bow-window of Mr. Bryan, the bookseller; a background before which some quiet figure out of Jane Austen might conceivably have passed. But the detail is not obtruded. If you peer closely into the paper, it is not dryly made out. In a sense, ‘_il n’y a rien_.’ Stand away a little, and then again, ‘_il y a tout_.’ But, of course, Mr. James’s preoccupation with a quaint little world of the provinces, whose combinations of colour, as he here shows us them, are curious rather than lovely--that preoccupation of his is occasional rather than constant; and we shall never therefore take his measure by an inspection of work like this. Some quaint line it possesses, and to the interest of quaint as well as of lovely combinations of line, Francis James is quite alive. But it is where the combinations of line may be lovely--where they may have their highest quality herein--and yet more where with beautiful lines there must (to do justice to the theme) be associated beautiful colour; it is here that Mr. James is most characteristic. ‘Autumn, Asolo,’ shows this to some extent; and so do other landscapes in which the world to which he has addressed himself, whether of Lombard or Venetian plateau, or of Alpine height, is dealt with with intrepidity. But it is to churches and flowers--or sometimes to the interiors of drawing-rooms or bedrooms lived in by tasteful people, and full therefore of objects that should gratify the eye in their happy, well-arranged union--it is to churches and flowers in the main, and most of all flowers, that we must come back, to find Francis James quite at his most exquisite, quite at his most characteristic.