“The students called in the afternoon, and found awaiting them a most genial and delightful host. He told stories and showed them his palettes to prove that he practised what he preached, and pictures and sketches were exhibited to them never seen by the public, among the surprising ones being some allegorical studies. He served them with champagne and fruits and cakes, and was most solicitous as to their enjoyment. One of them asked him how he arranged his subjects so as to produce the low tone noted in his pictures. He posed a visitor, pulled over the shades so as to shut out all light, save from one window, and there before them was a living Whistler ‘arrangement’ ready to recede behind a frame, as he says all portraits should do.” It is a pity to ever subject his pictures to the trying light of the usual gallery, and it is a still greater pity to exhibit them at night in competition with foot-lights and foyer. His work should not be made the attraction for either a “five-o’clock tea” or a dress rehearsal. People who will not go during the day are not worth inviting. The fact that people are content to view the best paintings of all time by artificial light, and even profess to find a “softness” and “charm” lacking by day, is but additional evidence of that want of susceptibility and fine feeling which characterizes the modern world, artists and laymen alike. For no picture that was painted by daylight should be seen at night, if all its beauties are to be felt. * * * * * A room for the exhibition of his pictures should be of precisely the right tone, and this is a matter of no little difficulty. When president of the Society of British Artists, in 1886, his arrangement of the rooms was criticised as being “tentative,” because he had left the battens on the walls; whereupon he wrote that in the engineering of the light and the treatment of the walls and the arrangement of the draperies everything was intentional; that the battens were meant to remain, “not only for their use, but as bringing parallel lines into play that subdivide charmingly the lower portions of the walls and add to their light appearance; that the whole combination is complete.” There is a hint to all managers of exhibitions. * * * * * To summarize the foregoing suggestions: The tone of the walls should be such as to keep them in the background. The monotonous blankness of the walls may be broken by unobtrusive lines, not arbitrarily for effect, but justifiably for use and effect. Only such draperies should be used as are absolutely necessary to reduce vacancies or to soften harsh lines, and these should lose themselves in the tone of the room. Floor should be low in tone, the rich, dark brown of old oak keeping its place under foot best of all.