The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model.
This is now understood indifferently well—at least by dressmakers. In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the Prophète, or the Huguenots' hymn in the opera of that name.
A Rebuke
No Birmingham election, no Chamberlain speech, no Reynolds or Dispatch article, The World, Dec. 9, 1885. could bring the aristocracy more strongly into ridicule and contempt than does the coarsely coloured cartoon of "Newmarket" accompanying the winter number of Vanity Fair. From it one learns that the Dukes, Duchesses, and turf persons generally, frequenting the Heath, are a set of blob-headed stumpy dwarfs....
ATLAS.
"Les points sur les i"
I agree with you, O Atlas of ages, that completeness is a reason for ceasing to exist; The World, Dec. 16, 1885. but even indignation might be less vague than is your righteous anger at Vanity's Christmas cartoon. Surely you might have helped the people, who scarcely distinguish between the original and impudent imitation, to know that this faded leaf is not from the book of Carlo Pellegrini, the master who has taught them all—that they can never learn?
