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MEN I HAVE PAINTED It would be as difficult to prove that Art is hereditary—unless the Japanese artists are proof of it—as to prove, on the Darwinian hypothesis, that physical individual characteristics are inherited and pass from father to son. But it may be said without much fear of contradiction that Art is traditional, and is, unfortunately perhaps, liable to lapses. In Spain Art has fallen from the height which it attained with the ascendancy of Zurbaran and Velasquez, and in Italy from the time when Uccello, Crevelli, Titian, and Veronese held their glorious sway. In fact all Art between the time of Phidias and that of Michael Angelo suffered an ever-increasing eclipse, until Botticelli and Giotto opened the windows anew to a ray of light, which again was shut out before the close of the sixteenth century, to remain extinguished until our own time.

All great Art—I am speaking now of painting—centres around the year 1600. A few names will show that, with the exception of the Van Eycks, who came just a little before them, the great painters of the Low Countries, of Italy, and of Spain, lived in the same period. Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Raphael, Titian, and other Italians too numerous to mention, and the Spaniard Velasquez, were contemporaneous painters, and great painting expired with them. The English are the only artists that have revived the tradition: and strange enough it is to have to relate that before this revival, which came through Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Raeburn, Gilbert Stuart, and Benjamin West, the English had produced Hogarth only.

About the time of the end of the reign of the Georges this great revived tradition died again in England, and remained dead until the French Manet took up the threads, and, handling them in a very imperfect way, passed them