rather than in studios. All literatures and all the sciences have been
pressed into the service of painting, and an Academy catalogue is in
itself a liberal education. In it you can read choice extracts from
the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Goethe, from Dante. You can dip into
Greek and Latin literature, history--ancient and modern--you can learn
something of all mythologies-Pagan, Christian, and Hindoo; if your
taste lies in the direction of Icelandic legends, you will not be
disappointed in your sixpennyworth. For the last hundred years the
painter seems to have neglected nothing except to learn how to paint.

For more than a hundred years painting has been in service. She has
acted as a sort of handmaiden to literature, her mission being to make
clear to the casual and the unlettered what the lettered had already
understood and enjoyed in a more subtle and more erudite form. But to
pass from the abstract to the concrete, and, so far as regards
subject, to make my meaning quite clear to every one, I cannot do
better than to ask my readers to recall Mr. Luke Fildes' picture of
"The Doctor". No better example could be selected of a picture in
which the subject is the supreme interest. True that Mr. Fildes has
not taken his subject from novel or poem; in this picture he may have
been said to have been his own librettist, and perhaps for that very
reason the subject is the one preponderating interest in the picture.
He who doubts if this be so has only to ask himself if any critic
thought of pointing to any special passage of colour in this picture,
of calling attention to the quality of the modelling or the ability of
the drawing. No; what attracted attention was the story. Would the
child live or die? Did that dear, good doctor entertain any hopes of
the poor little thing's recovery? And the poor parents, how grieved
they seemed! Perhaps it is their only child. The picture is typical of
contemporary art, which is nearly all conceived in the same spirit,