Cox is a great and bold master. The townsman when he first comes into the country, after being imprisoned for months together in a wilderness of brick and mortar, does not begin at once to count the trees, leaves, and the stones lying on the ground. He draws a long breath and exclaims, "What balm!" Cox, too, has not painted details in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites. He represented the soft wind sweeping over the English meadows, the fresh purity of the air, the storms that agitate the landscape of Wales. A delicate silver-grey is spread over most of his pictures, and his method of expression is powerful and nervous. By preference he has celebrated, both in oil-paintings and in boldly handled water-colours, the boundless depths of the sky in its thousand variations of light, now deep blue in broad noon and now eerily gloomy and disturbed. The fame of being the greatest of English water-colour painters is his beyond dispute, yet if he had painted in oils from his youth upwards he would probably have become the most important English landscapist. His small pictures are pure and delicate in colour, and fresh and breezy in atmospheric effect. It is only in large pictures that power is at times denied him. In his later years he began to paint in oils, and in this medium he is a less important artist, though a very great painter. _William Müller_, who died young, stood as leader at his side. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ DE WINT. NOTTINGHAM.] He was one of the most dexterous amongst the dexterous, next to Turner the greatest adept of English painting. Had he been simpler and quieter he might be called a genius of the first order. But he has sometimes a touch of what is theatrical; it does not always break out, but it does so occasionally. He has an inclination for pageantry, and nothing of that self-sufficiency and quiet tenderness with which Constable and Cox devoted themselves to home scenery. He was at pains to give a trace of largeness and sublimity to modest and unpretentious English landscape, to give to the most familiar subject a tinge of preciosity. His pictures are grandiose in form, and show an admirable lightness of hand, but light and air are wanting in them, the local colour of England and its atmosphere. As a foreigner--he was the son of a Danzig scholar, who had migrated to Bristol--Müller has not seen English landscape with Constable's native sentiment. He was not content with an English cornfield or an English village; the familiar homeliness of the country in its work-a-day garb excited no emotion in him. [Illustration: _L'Art._ BONINGTON. THE WINDMILL OF SAINT-JOUIN.]