Though neither of them has been before the public for any considerable period, they have already, by a succession of notable works, earned the right to an amount of attention which, as a rule, can be claimed only by workers who have a large fund of experience to draw upon.  But though they have been more than ordinarily successful in establishing themselves among the few contemporary painters whose performances are worth watching, they have not sprung suddenly into notice by some special achievement or by doing work so sensational that it would not fail to set people talking.  There has been no spasmodic brilliancy in their progress, none of that strange alternation of masterly accomplishment and hesitating effort which is apt at times to mark the earlier stages of the life of an artist who may or may not attain greatness in his later years.  They have gone forward steadily year by year, amplifying their methods and widening the range of their convictions; and there has been no moment since they made their first appeal to the public at which they can be said to have shown any diminution in the earnestness of their artistic intentions.

“The school to which they belong is one which has latterly gathered to itself a very large number of adherents among the younger painters—­a school that, for want of a better name, can be called that of the new Pre-Raphaelites.  It has grown up, apparently, as an expression of the reaction which has recently set in against the realistic beliefs taught so assiduously a quarter of a century ago.  At the end of the seventies there was a prevailing idea that the only mission of the artist was to record with absolute fidelity the facts of nature....  To-day the fallacy of that creed is properly recognized, and the artists on whom we have to depend in the immediate future for memorable works have substituted for it something much more reasonable....  There runs through this new school a vein of romantic fantasy which all thinking people can appreciate, because it leads to the production of pictures which appeal, not only to the eye by their attractiveness of aspect, but also to the mind by their charm of sentiment....  It is because Mr. Young Hunter and his wife have carried out consistently the best principles of this school that they have, in a career of some half-dozen years, established themselves as painters of noteworthy prominence.  Their romanticism has always been free from exaggeration and from that morbidity of subject and treatment which is occasionally a defect in the work of young artists.  They have kept their art wholesome and sincere, and they have cultivated judiciously those tendencies in it which justify most completely the development of the new Pre-Raphaelitism.  They are, indeed, standing examples of the value of this movement, which seems destined to make upon history a mark almost as definite as that left by the original Brotherhood in the middle of the nineteenth century.  By their help, and that of the group to which they belong, a new artistic fashion is being established, a fashion of a novel sort, for its hold upon the public is a result not of some irrational popular craze, but of the fascinating arguments which are put into visible shape by the painters themselves.”