workaday world, with accessories of tin pots and pans, corduroy
breeches and clay-pipes, can be only depicted by a series of ellipses
through a mystery of light and shade.

Beauty of some sort there must be in a work of art, and the very
conditions under which Mr. Clausen painted precluded any beauty from
entering into his picture. But this year Mr. Clausen seems to have
shaken himself free from his early education, and he exhibits a
picture, conceived in an entirely different spirit, in this Academy.
Turning to my notes I find it thus described: "A small canvas
containing three mowers in a flowering meadow. Two are mowing; the
third, a little to the left, sharpens his scythe. The sky is deep and
lowering--a sultry summer day, a little unpleasant in colour, but
true. At the end of the meadow the trees gleam. The earth is wrapped
in a hot mist, the result of the heat, and through it the sun sheds a
somewhat diffused and oven-like heat. There are heavy clouds overhead,
for the gleam that passes over the three white shirts is transitory
and uncertain. The handling is woolly and unpleasant, but handling can
be overlooked when a canvas exhales a deep sensation of life. The
movement of mowing--I should have said movements, for the men mow
differently; one is older than the other--is admirably expressed. And
the principal figure, though placed in the immediate foreground, is in
and not out of the atmosphere. The difficulty of the trousers has been
overcome by generalisation; the garment has not been copied patch by
patch. The distribution of light is admirable; nowhere does it escape
from the frame. J. F. Millet has painted many a worse picture."

Mr. Solomon and Mr. Hacker have both turned to mythology for the
subjects of their pictures. And the beautiful and touching legends of
Orpheus, and the Annunciation, have been treated by them with the