he is to sell. Apparently he cares little for fame; so the public gets
few opportunities of coming acquainted with his work.

Duncan Grant is the best English painter alive. And how English he is!
(British, I should say, for he is a Highlander.) Of course, he has been
influenced by Cézanne and the modern Frenchmen. He is of the movement.
Superficially his work may look exotic and odd. Odd it will certainly
look to people unfamiliar with painting. But anyone who has studied
and understood the Italians will see at a glance that Duncan Grant is
thoroughly in the great tradition; while he who also knows the work of
Wilson, Gainsborough, Crome, Cotman, Constable, and Turner will either
deny that there is such a thing as an English tradition or admit that
Duncan Grant is in it. For my part, I am inclined to believe that an
English pictorial tradition exists, though assuredly it is a tiny and
almost imperceptible rill, to be traced as often, perhaps, through
English poetry as through English painting. At all events, there are
national characteristics; and these you will find asserting themselves
for good or ill in the work of our better painters.

Duncan Grant's ancestors are Piero della Francesca, Gainsborough, and
the Elizabethan poets. There is something Greek about him, too; not the
archæological Greek of Germany, nor yet the Græco-Roman academicism of
France, but rather that romantic, sensuous Hellenism of the English
literary tradition. It is, perhaps, most obvious in his early work,
where, indeed, all the influences I have named can easily be found.
Then, at the right moment, he plunged headlong into the movement, became
the student of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, though not, curiously enough,
of Bonnard, the modern artist with whose work his own has the closest
affinity, and, for a year or two, suffered his personality to disappear
almost beneath the heavy, fertilizing spate. He painted French