the interest that a strange costume suggests. There are painters who
have never been further than Maidenhead, and who bring back what I
should call _notes de voyage_; there are others who have travelled
round the world and have produced general aspects bearing neither
stamp nor certificate of mileage--in other words, pictures. There are,
therefore, two men who must not be confused one with the other, the
traveller that paints and the painter that travels.

Every day we hear of a painter who has been to Norway, or to Brittany,
or to Wales, or to Algeria, and has come back with sixty-five
sketches, which are now on view, let us say, at Messrs. Dowdeswell's
Galleries, in New Bond Street, the home of all such exhibitions. The
painter has been impressed by the savagery of fiords, by the
prettiness of blouses and sabots, by the blue mountain in the distance
and the purple mountain in the foreground, by the narrow shade of the
street, and the solemnity of a _burnous_ or the grace of a _haik_
floating in the wind. The painter brings back these sights and scenes
as a child brings back shells from the shore--they seemed very strange
and curious, and, therefore, like the child, he brought back, not the
things themselves, but the next best things, the most faithful
sketches he could make of them. To understand how impossible it is to
paint _pictures_ in a foreign country, we have only to imagine a young
English painter setting up his easel in, let us say, Algeria. There he
finds himself confrontedwith a new world; everything is different: the
costumes are strange, the rhythm of the lines is different, the
effects are harsh and unknown to him; at home the earth is dark and
the sky is light, in Algeria the everlasting blue must be darker than
the white earth, and the key of colour widely different from anything
he has seen before. Selection is impossible, he cannot distinguish
between the important and the unimportant; everything strikes him with