Perhaps it is hardly possible nowadays to paint flowers without submitting to some extent to the influence of the Japanese. From them, whatever else you learn, you learn freedom of treatment and a conception based upon essentials. The limitations of Japanese Art it does not happen just now to be the fashion to recognise; though every one who is really educated--every one who understands the Classics of Art, the immense achievements of Europe from Holbein to Turner--must know of these limitations, and must feel them. That does not prevent the perception of the value of those things which Japanese art (among the arts of other peoples indeed) has had some capacity for teaching us. And when Francis James makes his pink and white roses trail over the paper, with tints so pale and delicate, I think sometimes of the Japanese. I think of them much less when he sets a whole posy--a whole group, at least--in a tumbler, and has his massive colour, his rich, great colour, his fearless juxtapositions. And then, perhaps, with the Japanese influence not lost altogether, but still mainly subdued--not displayed at all, and scarcely even insinuated--do I rejoice in Francis James at his best. Among painters, water-colour painters, Francis James is the poet of flowers, as Van Huysum, it may be--two hundred years ago--was their prose chronicler. The public knows Van Huysum best by his work in oils. The rare amateur of noble prints knows him best by Earlom’s two splendid translations of him into the medium of mezzotint. But the not less rare connoisseur of the fine drawings of a past period, knows him by water-colour sketches, such as those possessed by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. And as there are moments, moods, opportunities, when men apparently far apart get nearer together, so, just now and again by Van Huysum’s practice in water-colour--by his pure sketching in that medium--the gulf that separates him from Francis James, is, not bridged indeed, but narrowed. The moment Van Huysum passes beyond the pure sketch, the perhaps even rapid study, something that is of the nature of the artificial, of intentional and obvious intricacy, begins to assert itself. Now, with the delightful artist of the day whose eulogium I am slowly making, that is never the case.