The Intimate-and-friendly Moving Picture, the photoplay of painting-in-motion, need not be indoors as long as it has the native-heath mood.  It is generally keyed to the hearthstone, and keeps quite close to it.  But how well I remember when the first French photoplays began to come.  Though unintelligent in some respects, the photography and subject-matter of many of them made one think of that painter of gentle out-of-door scenes, Jean Charles Cazin.  Here is our last clipping, which is also in a spirit allied to Cazin.  The heroine, accompanied by an aged shepherd and his dog, are in the foreground.  The sheep are in the middle distance on the edge of the river.  There is a noble hill beyond the gently flowing water.  Here is intimacy and friendliness in the midst of the big out of doors.

If these five photo-paintings were on good paper enlarged to twenty by twenty-four inches, they would do to frame and hang on the wall of any study, for a month or so.  And after the relentless test of time, I would venture that some one of the five would prove a permanent addition to the household gods.

Hastily made photographs selected from the films are often put in front of the better theatres to advertise the show.  Of late they are making them two by three feet and sometimes several times larger.  Here is a commercial beginning of an art gallery, but not enough pains are taken to give the selections a complete art gallery dignity.  Why not have the most beautiful scenes in front of the theatres, instead of those alleged to be the most thrilling?  Why not rest the fevered and wandering eye, rather than make one more attempt to take it by force?

Let the reader supply another side of the argument by looking at the illustrations in any history of painting.  Let him select the pictures that charm him most, and think of them enlarged and transferred bodily to one corner of the room, as he has thought of the sculpture.  Let them take on motion without losing their charm of low relief, or their serene composition within the four walls of the frame.  As for the motion, let it be a further extension of the drawing.  Let every gesture be a bolder but not less graceful brush-stroke.

The Metropolitan Museum has a Van Dyck that appeals equally to one’s sense of beauty and one’s feeling for humor.  It is a portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Lennox, and I cannot see how the author-producer-photographer can look upon it without having it set his imagination in a glow.  Every small town dancing set has a James like this.  The man and the greyhound are the same witless breed, the kind that achieve a result by their clean-limbed elegance alone.  Van Dyck has painted the two with what might be called a greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling that is nothing but courtly convention and strut to the point of genius.  He is as far from the meditative spirituality of Rembrandt as could well be imagined.

Conjure up a scene in the hereditary hall after a hunt (or golf tournament), in which a man like this Duke of Lennox has a noble parley with his lady (or dancing partner), she being a sweet and stupid swan (or a white rabbit) by the same sign that he is a noble and stupid greyhound.  Be it an ancient or modern episode, the story could be told in the tone and with well-nigh the brushwork of Van Dyck.