As the lover of pictures looks back over the period of his conscious interest in exhibitions and galleries, it is not improbable that his earliest memories attach themselves to those paintings which most closely resembled the object represented. He remembers the great wonder which he felt that a man with mere paint and canvas could so reproduce the reality of nature. So it is that those paintings which are perhaps the first to attract the man who feels an interest in pictures awakening are such as display most obviously the painter's skill. Whatever the subject imitated, the fascination remains; that such illusion is possible at all is the mystery and the delight. But as his interest in pictures grows with indulgence, as his experience widens, the beholder becomes gradually aware that he is making a larger demand. After the first shock of pleasurable surprise is worn away, he finds that the repeated exhibition of the painter's dexterity ceases to satisfy him; these clever pieces of deception manifest a wearying sameness, after all; and the beholder begins now to look for something more than mere expertness. Thinking on his experience, he concludes that the subjects which can be imitated deceptively are limited in range and interest; he has a vague, disquieting sense that somehow these pictures do not mean anything. Yet he is puzzled. Art aims to represent, he tells himself, and it should follow that the best art is that which represents most closely and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill; and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ essentially from the adroitness of the juggler who keeps a billiard ball, a chair, and a silk handkerchief rotating from hand to hand.