NOTES DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL.--GOYA AND HIS CAREER.--FOUR ENGLISH
PAINTERS OF FAMILIAR LIFE.--GÉRICAULT, INGRES, AND DELACROIX.

BY WILL H. LOW.


Looking backward to the first quarter of this century, it is hardly
too sweeping an assertion to say that, with a single exception, there
was little that was important in the way of painting outside of France
and England. There were local reputations in all the other countries,
practitioners of the art who joined to a respectable proficiency in
painting an adhesion to the traditions which had been handed down to
them. These men, in their time and place, were notable; and in
the museums of their respective countries their works remain of
chronological interest to students of painting. But to the larger
public which these papers address, they are of little importance,
having exercised but slight influence on contemporaneous art.

The exception already noted was in Spain, and there only in the case
of a single painter. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, "Pintor Español," as
he delighted to call himself, would be, indeed has been, a fascinating
subject for picturesque biography. Charles Yriarte, the well-known
French art critic, has given the world a most interesting and complete
story of Goya's life, which, though it is only separated from our own
day by a span of seventy years, chronicles the exploits of one who
in the history of art must hark back to Benvenuto Cellini in the
sixteenth century to find his parallel.

Goya was born March 31, 1746, at Fuente de Todos, in the province of
Aragon. The son of a small farmer, he was placed when very young