And then there are the great masters of one generation, who have not been great masters at all in another: their excellence, seen late, escaped the appreciation of their contemporaries or of their immediate successors. Fashions in art change, and Van der Heist, exalted by Sir Joshua above Rembrandt, drops later to his proper place. Each age, we may be sure, has something right in its criticism: the great Sir Joshua himself, who thought that ‘Bruges afforded but scanty entertainment to a painter,’--Bruges, with its masterpieces of the sacred art of Memling--had the keenness to see the style and the beauty under the orgies of Jan Steen. But to this inevitable variation and inconstancy of taste is due, alas! much permanent loss--things that were treasures once being now not to be guarded, or things of no account until now, being treasures for to-day. And the loss is felt most surely in the case of drawings--so short a period of neglect being enough to destroy them. It may be that certain artists unrepresented in collections, or represented inadequately, drew very little. All did not multiply studies with the fertility of William Van de Velde; but all must have drawn, and the work of some is missing to us. The flying sheets of long unvalued artists, on which Hobbema pencilled the forms of many trees, with a patient precision which in modern art only Crome has equalled--on which Wynants drew his narrow path, wandering over the sandhills or by the side of the farm--on which Jan Steen caught the rare girl’s prettiness and the last subtleties of vivacious gesture--on which De Hooch or Metsu drew tenderly faces of grave quietude, absorbed in daily and common occupation--these flying sheets, one fears, were dust and refuse two hundred years ago. (_Introduction to Burlington Club Catalogue_, April 1878.) VELASQUEZ AT THE NEW GALLERY