BY WILL H. LOW.


When shepherds watched their flocks by night, and the angel appeared,
bringing the tidings of good-will, a new vocation, until then unknown,
was given to men. Tradition has it that one of the earliest of the
followers of the Child born that night was a painter, and in the
pictures of the primitive Dutch and Italian schools a not uncommon
subject is St. Luke painting the Virgin and Child, while in more than
one church in Europe the original(?) picture may be seen. Perhaps the
most notable of these is the beautiful though quaint picture by Rogier
van der Weyden, now in the Old Pinakothek, in Munich. And the
tradition is a pleasant one, showing how early the services of the
painters were enlisted in spreading abroad the new gospel of peace on
earth.

When we consider that, even stripped of divinity, the birth of a
child, its first dawning intelligence, its flower-like tenderness of
aspect, are one and all motives which excite the best that is in man,
there is little wonder that the Christ-child should have been and
should still be the best subject that a painter could demand. In many
forms, in fact, do we of a later day and of less fervent faith
celebrate the beauty of mother and child. How much more ardently,
therefore, in the days when faith and the painter's craft were so
intimately linked, have the painters approached their task. Almost
transfigured to divinity is the woman with the child at her breast
that shines upon us in so many galleries; quite divine in the devout
painter's thought it was as he wrought.