of the child, how admirable in drawing; and that touch of darker
colour, how it tells the exact form of the bone! To indicate is the
final accomplishment of the painter's art, and I know no indication
like that ankle bone. And now passing from the feet to the face,
notice, I beg of you to notice--it is one of the points in the
picture--that jaw bone. The face is seen in three-quarter, and to
focus the interest in the face the painter has slightly insisted on
the line of the jaw bone, which, taken in conjunction with the line of
the hair, brings into prominence the oval of the face. In Nature that
charming oval only appeared at moments. The painter seized one of
those moments, and called it into our consciousness as a musician with
certain finger will choose to give prominence to a certain note in a
chord.

There must have been a day in Mr. Whistler's life when the artists of
Japan convinced him once and for ever of the primary importance of
selection. In Velasquez, too, there is selection, and very often it is
in the same direction as Mr. Whistler's, but the selection is never, I
think, so much insisted upon; and sometimes in Velasquez there is, as
in the portrait of the Admiral in the National Gallery, hardly any
selection--I mean, of course, conscious selection. Velasquez sometimes
brutally accepted Nature for what she was worth; this Mr. Whistler
never does. But it was Velasquez that gave consistency and strength to
what in Mr. Whistler might have run into an art of trivial but
exquisite decoration. Velasquez, too, had a voice in the composition
of the palette generally, so sober, so grave. The palette of Velasquez
is the opposite of the palette of Rubens; the fantasy of Rubens'
palette created the art of Watteau, Turner, Gainsborough; it obtained
throughout the eighteenth century in England and in France. Chardin
was the one exception. Alone amid the eighteenth century painters he