photograph.  Next we have the Italian youth who has come over specially to be a model, or takes to it when his organ is out of repair.  He is often quite charming with his large melancholy eyes, his crisp hair, and his slim brown figure.  It is true he eats garlic, but then he can stand like a faun and couch like a leopard, so he is forgiven.  He is always full of pretty compliments, and has been known to have kind words of encouragement for even our greatest artists.  As for the English lad of the same age, he never sits at all.  Apparently he does not regard the career of a model as a serious profession.  In any case he is rarely, if ever, to be got hold of.  English boys, too, are difficult to find.  Sometimes an ex-model who has a son will curl his hair, and wash his face, and bring him the round of the studios, all soap and shininess.  The young school don’t like him, but the older school do, and when he appears on the walls of the Royal Academy he is called The Infant Samuel.  Occasionally also an artist catches a couple of gamins in the gutter and asks them to come to his studio.  The first time they always appear, but after that they don’t keep their appointments.  They dislike sitting still, and have a strong and perhaps natural objection to looking pathetic.  Besides, they are always under the impression that the artist is laughing at them.  It is a sad fact, but there is no doubt that the poor are completely unconscious of their own picturesqueness.  Those of them who can be induced to sit do so with the idea that the artist is merely a benevolent philanthropist who has chosen an eccentric method of distributing alms to the undeserving.  Perhaps the School Board will teach the London gamin his own artistic value, and then they will be better models than they are now.  One remarkable privilege belongs to the Academy model, that of extorting a sovereign from any newly elected Associate or R.A.  They wait at Burlington House till the announcement is made, and then race to the hapless artist’s house.  The one who arrives first receives the money.  They have of late been much troubled at the long distances they have had to run, and they look with disfavour on the election of artists who live at Hampstead or at Bedford Park, for it is considered a point of honour not to employ the underground railway, omnibuses, or any artificial means of locomotion.  The race is to the swift.

Besides the professional posers of the studio there are posers of the Row, the posers at afternoon teas, the posers in politics and the circus posers.  All four classes are delightful, but only the last class is ever really decorative.  Acrobats and gymnasts can give the young painter infinite suggestions, for they bring into their art an element of swiftness of motion and of constant change that the studio model necessary lacks.  What is interesting in these ‘slaves of the ring’ is that with them Beauty is an unconscious result not a conscious aim,