And further, the artist does not take whatever comes to hand in the appearance of his sitter, but works to a thought-out arrangement of colour and form, to a design.  This he selects from the moving and varied appearance of his sitter, trying one thing after another, until he sees a suggestive arrangement, from the impression of which he makes his design.  It is true that the extremes of fashion do not always lend themselves so readily as more reasonable modes to the making of a good pictorial pattern.  But this is not always so, some extreme fashions giving opportunities of very piquant and interesting portrait designs.  So that, however extreme the fashion, if the artist is able to select some aspect of it that will result in a good arrangement for his portrait, the work will never have the offensive old-fashioned look.  The principles governing good designs are the same in all times; and if material for such arrangement has been discovered in the most modish of fashions, it has been lifted into a sphere where nothing is ever out of date.

It is only when the painter is concerned with the trivial details of fashion for their own sake, for the making his picture look like the real thing, and has not been concerned with transmuting the appearance of fashionable clothes by selection into the permanent realms of form and colour design, that his work will justify one in saying that it will look stale in a few years.

The fashion of dressing sitters in meaningless, so-called classical draperies is a feeble one, and usually argues a lack of capacity for selecting a good arrangement from the clothes of the period in the artist who adopts it.  Modern women’s clothes are full of suggestions for new arrangements and designs quite as good as anything that has been done in the past.  The range of subtle colours and varieties of texture in materials is amazing, and the subtlety of invention displayed in some of the designs for costumes leads one to wonder whether there is not something in the remark attributed to an eminent sculptor that “designing ladies’ fashions is one of the few arts that is thoroughly vital to-day.”

XVIII

THE VISUAL MEMORY

The memory is the great storehouse of artistic material, the treasures of which the artist may know little about until a chance association lights up some of its dark recesses.  From early years the mind of the young artist has been storing up impressions in these mysterious chambers, collected from nature’s aspects, works of art, and anything that comes within the field of vision.  It is from this store that the imagination draws its material, however fantastic and remote from natural appearances the forms it may assume.