in the rhythms of the monstrous figures.  Bathos is in the design of Lucifer swimming in deepest hell upon waves of fire and filth; yet the lugubrious arches of the caverns in the perspective reveal Blake’s fantasy, so quick to respond to external stimuli.  Martin saw the earth as in an apocalyptic swoon, its forms distorted, its meanings inverted; a mad world, the world of an older theogony.  But if there was little human in his visions, he is enormously impersonal; if he assailed heaven’s gates on wings of melting wax, or dived deep into the pool of iniquity, he none the less caught glimpses in his breathless flights of strange countries across whose sill no human being ever passes.  There is genuine hallucination.  He must have seen his ghosts so often that in the end they petrified him, as did the Statue Don Giovanni.  Martin was a species of reversed Turner.  He spied the good that was in evil, the beauty in bituminous blacks.  He is the painter of black music, the deifier of Beelzebub, and also one who caught the surge and thunder of the Old Testament, its majesty and its savagery.  As an illustrator of sacred history, the world may one day return to John Martin.

ZORN

Anders Zorn—­what’s in a name?  Possibly the learned and amiable father of Tristram Shandy or that formidable pedant Professor Slawkenbergius might find much to arouse his interest in the patronymic of the great Swedish painter and etcher.  What Zorn means in his native tongue we do not profess to know; but in German it signifies anger, wrath, rage.  Now, the Zorn in life is not an enraged person—­unless some lady sitter asks him to paint her as she is not.  He is, as all will testify who have met him, a man of rare personal charm and sprightly humour.  He, it may be added, calls yellow yellow, and he never paints a policeman like a poet.  In a word, a man of robust, normal vision, a realist and an artist.  False realism with its hectic, Zola-like romanticism is distasteful to Zorn.  He is near Degas among the Frenchmen and Zuloaga among the new Spaniards; near them in a certain forthright quality of depicting life, though unlike them in technical and individual methods.

Yes, Zorn, that crisp, bold, short name, which begins with a letter that abruptly cuts both eye and ear, quite fits the painter’s personality, fits his art.  He is often ironic.  Some fanciful theorist has said that the letters Z and K are important factors in the career of the men who possess them in their names.  Camille Saint-Saens has spoken of Franz Liszt and his lucky letter.  It is a very pretty idea, especially when one stakes on zero at Monte Carlo; but no doubt Anders Zorn would be the first to laugh the idea out of doors.

We recall an exhibition a few years ago at Venice in the art gallery of the Giardino Reale.  Zorn had a place of honour among the boiling and bubbling Secessionists; indeed, his work filled a large room.  And what work!  Such a giant’s revel of energy.  Such landscapes, riotous, sinister, and lovely.  Such women!  Here we pause for breath.  Zorn’s conception of womanhood has given offence to many idealists, who do not realise that once upon a time our forebears were furry and indulged in arboreal habits.  Zorn can paint a lady; he has signed many gentle and aristocratic canvases.