Englishwomen do not seem to have done much in painting before the generation or two that are just past. Public opinion was against them. The early Victorian conditions under which a woman like Charlotte Brontë produced her great results in another art are more or less familiar to all, and in the matter of painting the voice of prejudice has had still more to say. By these days it has croaked itself into the feeble hoarseness of a respectable and decent old age, and we can already look back to a succession of women painters who seem to have been conscious at first of their leading-strings, but who have shown a development more than corresponding to that of the conditions under which they worked. Kate Greenaway, who died only a few years ago, was no doubt a good example of the charming results to be obtained in leading-strings. To compare her with an artist who works in a similar field to-day is to note an advance, not only of a generation, but of the changing educational conditions within the generation. It is a far cry from Kate Greenaway to Miss Alice Woodward, for instance, and it is difficult to imagine that another age will say anything more, or less, of Miss Woodward than that she was a most distinguished artist. The leading-strings are gone. It will always be a special field for women, the production of work in the first place for children, and it is unnecessary to spend time in emphasising or over-emphasising its importance. Art itself reckons little with motives and much with results. In a more general view it would, perhaps, be better to start this small article with some notice of the women painters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There is Mrs. Mary Beale, who was a child when Cromwell was Lord Protector, and who later on painted a most excellent portrait of Charles II. There is some work of hers in the National Portrait Gallery, London, work of the quiet, genuine kind, and better than most of the painting that came for some time afterwards. Then there is Angelica Kauffman, R.A., who provides us with perhaps the only well-known name of the early periods, and there are some portrait-painters of interest, like Miss Catharine Read, of Reynolds' time, or like Mrs. Anne Mee, of the early part of last century. But it must be confessed that it would be a sorry list for a couple of centuries if it were a fact that women had had the same opportunities and no greater disabilities than the men of the period. It is not indeed until we reach such painters as Margaret Carpenter, the portrait painter, Mrs. Matilda Heming, the landscapist, and Lady Waterford, that more than charming amateur who might have done so much, that we begin to feel we have a reasonable genesis of the worker of to-day. These painters show to us now rather the influences of their time or the limitations of their opportunities, than personalities which are outside such considerations, but they