IN THE COLOURS OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTINGS

Red Ridinghood . . . . . . . . . . G.  F. Watts Frontispiece

Richard II. before the Virgin                             page
and Child  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  33

The Three Maries . . . . . . . . . H.  Van Eyck . . . . .  48

St. Jerome in his study  . . . . . Antonello da Messina   65

The Nativity . . . . . . . . . . . Sandro Botticelli . .  76

The Knight’s Dream . . . . . . . . Raphael . . . . . . .  85

The Golden Age . . . . . . . . . . Giorgione . . . . . .  96

St. George destroying the Dragon . Tintoret  . . . . . . 102

Edward, Prince of Wales,
afterwards Edward VI.  . . . . Holbein . . . . . . . 111

A Man in Armour  . . . . . . . . . Rembrandt . . . . . . 126

An Interior  . . . . . . . . . . . P. de Hoogh . . . . . 134

Landscape with Cattle  . . . . . . Cuyp  . . . . . . . . 141

William II. of Orange  . . . . . . Van Dyck  . . . . . . 146

Don Balthazar Carlos . . . . . . . Velasquez . . . . . . 161

The Duke of Gloucester . . . . . . Sir J. Reynolds . . . 170

The Fighting Temeraire . . . . . . Turner  . . . . . . . 177

THE CHILDREN’S BOOK OF ART

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid story by a really nice person.  There is not the least occasion for the story to be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are the best—­those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talk twenty times better than most human beings ever do, and where extraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at all like our world of every day.  It is so fine to be taken into a country where it is always summer, and the birds are always singing and the flowers always blowing, and where people get what they want by just wishing for it, and are not told that this or that isn’t good for them, and that they’ll know better than to want it when they’re grown up, and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so often happening in this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days come and go in such an ordinary fashion.

But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like to listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be some one who could draw pictures for me while talking—­pictures like those of Tenniel in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  How much better we know Alice herself and the White Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures than even from the story itself.  But my story-teller should not only draw the pictures