Surely it is not to be wondered at that a picture seen close to in an exhibition, bought, taken home, hung on the wall and looked at from a distance, turns out a meaningless chaos of dirty-brown. [Illustration: _Albert, Munich._ BOECKLIN. AN IDYLL OF THE SEA.] In the province of mural painting the tendency towards an improvement set in earliest. In England, France, and Germany, almost simultaneously efforts began to be made with the object of restoring to mural painting once more its decorative element. In England Burne-Jones was the first to pay attention to harmony of style between picture and building. Before his time English churches were provided with stained-glass windows in a spurious sort of Cinquecento style that was absolutely unsuited to the building, but Burne-Jones satisfied the most exacting demands of the English Neo-Gothic architecture. All his subjects are brought into style with the slender pillars, the curves of the landscape as well as of the figures harmonise with the pointed arches of the building. Everything, colour as well as line, is so simplified that the pictures retain the clearness of their composition when seen from the farthest possible standpoint. In France, Puvis de Chavannes travelled by another road to the same goal. The decoration of the Pantheon was placed in his hands. Before him many artists had done work there, but the policy of all of them had been to adopt the old style of oil-painting to mural decoration, and so they adorned the Pantheon as well, though it was called a Grecian temple, with oil-paintings founded on Raphael or Caravaggio, mural pictures that would have been far better suited to a church of the Cinquecento or the _baroque_ period. Puvis was the first to realise that in the decoration of a building the artist must be strictly controlled by the style of the architecture; so in his frescoes he avoided all projections, all roundness, all wavy lines, bends, and curves, and dealt exclusively with groups of vertical and horizontal lines, that followed the characteristic lines of pillar and architrave. Similarly in the colours as well as the lines he excluded all detail that would distract the attention, all confusion of colours that would disturb the eye, and thereby gave his works the stately and dominant effect that they produce. Had Fate been kind, poor Hans von Marées might have won the same significance for Germany as Puvis did for France. Though individually his works are faulty, they are all informed with a marvellous feeling for style; one observes how beautifully the lines of the landscape are made to harmonise with the lines of the figures, and with what a finely decorative quality the colours are combined. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ BOECKLIN. VITA SOMNIUM BREVE.]