I like best:  the Dr. Williamson I rather suspect.  I mean that when he was at Messrs. Chepstow, the publishers, he must have mugged up some of the real Dr. Williamson’s art publications.  Whether in the Louvre, or National Gallery, or in Italian towns, he always goes for the right thing; sometimes you wish he would make a mistake.  Bad artists, of course, are often excellent judges of old pictures and make excellent dealers, and I am not denying the instinct of C. W. S.; but I cannot think it all came so naturally as Mr. Hind would indicate.

The reason why Claude Williamson Shaw discovered ’that he would not find a true expression of his temperament’ in painting readers of this ingenious book will discover for themselves.  Assuming that he had any innate talent, I do not think he went about the right way to cultivate it.  His friend Lund gave him the very worst advice; though we are the gainers.  It is quite unnecessary to go out of England and gaze at a lot of pictures of entirely different schools in order to become a painter.  Gainsborough and our great Norwich artists evolved themselves without any foreign study.  There was no National Gallery in their days.  A second-rate Wynants and a doubtful Hobbema seem to have been enough to give them hints.  It would be tedious to mention other examples.  The fortunate meeting of Zuccarelli and Wilson at Venice is the only instance I know in which foreign travel benefited any English landscape painter.  Foreign travel is all very well when the artist has grown up.  Paris has been the tomb of many English art students.  M. Bordeaux, who gave Mr. Hind’s hero tips in the atelier, seems to have been as ‘convincing’ as the famous barrel of the same name.  Far better will the English student be under Mr. Tonks at the Slade; or even at the Royal Academy, where, owing to the doctrine of contraries, out of sheer rebellion he may become an artist.  In Paris you learn perfect carpentry, but not art, unless you are a born artist; but in that case you will be one in spite of Paris, not because of it.  But if C. W. Shaw had been a real painter he would have seen at Venice certain Tiepolos which seem to have escaped him, and in other parts of Italy certain Caravaggios.  Yes, and Correggios and Guido Renis, too hastily passed by.  He was doomed to be a connoisseur.

(1906.)

EGO ET MAX MEUS.

’How very delightful Max’s drawings are.  For all their mad perspective and crude colour, they have, indeed, the sentiment of style, and they reveal with rarer delicacy than does any other record the spirit of Lloyd-George’s day.’  This sentence is not quite original:  it is adapted from an eminent author because the words sum up so completely the inexpressible satisfaction following an inspection of Mr. Beerbohm’s caricatures.  To-day essentially belongs to the Minister who once presided at the Board of Trade.  Several attempts