Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/413

 *room table. To quote his own words in an advertisement, "No lady's Scrap Book can be perfect without a series of these." Nowadays higher prices are given by collectors who like that sort of thing. They are mostly of small size, varying from about 3 in. by 4 in. in area. Summer, haymakers beneath a tree (2-3/8 in. by 2-7/8 in.), is priced at 15s. in a recent catalogue. His Hollyhocks and the Gardeners Shed with flowers and fruit (both 15 in. by 10-3/4 in.) are priced at three and a half guineas apiece. Lake Lucerne after Turner (10-1/4 by 15 in.) and the Day before Marriage after Corbaux (14-1/2 in. by 10-1/2 in.) are both priced at five guineas. Baxter executed some four hundred prints in colour, and it should not be difficult to procure a fair specimen for a few shillings.

Perhaps it is a healthier taste to collect the colour work after Walter Crane with his Pan's Pipes and Flora's Feast, Kate Greenaway in her Almanacs, Marigold Garden and Pied Piper, and Randolph Caldecott in his inimitable series of Nursery Books—but these things belong to days gone by. The advent of the three-colour photographic process has put an end to book illustration by any other means, so that the fine and sustained excellence of the reproductions in colour after the delightful drawings of the three artists we have mentioned must take their place as classics of a past generation.