Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/432

 Victoria and Albert Museum in 1898 some excellent examples of the art there exhibited were culled from newspapers.

In back numbers of the German journal Simplicissimus, during the years 1896 to 1898 and later, some very fine work appeared. Jugend, an illustrated magazine published at Munich, is largely illustrated by lithographs. In the illustrated magazines of France and in the cheaper illustrated press some fine work by Steinlen and Chéret and others has constantly appeared. There is treasured by the writer a small lithograph signed J. Baric, which appeared in the Petit Journal pour Rire, under the heading Nos Paysans (No. 560), some years ago. In size it is only 4-1/2 in. by 5-3/4 in., and depicts an old peasant woman at the washing-tub, standing in sabots and rubbing the wet clothes on a board, and hurling a biting sarcasm to a man who loiters near. It is only a trifle, but it has within it a power to convey indescribable pleasure. This is only one of many thousands ready to hand and waiting for the discriminating lover of truth in art, whether it be in a long-forgotten volume unread and unreadable, or in the fleeting pages of the press, to snatch the wheat and let the chaff go—the chaff that so often in sumptuous guise makes its pretentious appearance in the market-place, where fashion and fashionable ignorance rush blindly to secure something which is nothing after all.

"It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer, but when he has gone on his way, then he boasteth." This is the Oriental lore of Solomon, but its reversal