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184 often feel, as we look at the ejf'ace and nice portraits of ladies in our exhibitions, that the aim of the painter has been not to reproduce what he sees in his model, but to paint what he thinks his sitter wishes him to see. The marked contrast between the excellence of contemporary masculine portraits and the feebleness of feminine ones is mainly due, we believe, to tliis cause. The painter is terribly hampered by the exactions of feminine vanity. The dress and accessories that distinguish so many female portraits discover notable deficiencies in the treatment of dress by English painters. The exact reproduction of ' fal de rals' fmAs its- reductio ad ahsurdum in the recently published criticism of the Academy Exhibition from the point of view of a journal of the drapery trade. In France the lady sitter will often consent to ignore her dressmaker for the moment in order to accept the guidance of her portrait-painter as to what is suitable and becoming ; and thus her draperies seem mystically imbued with something of her own personality, and become another subtle expression of her best self. This is but the intelligent tribute paid by her to the artist's power of recognising with his more cultured eye and trained insight that which con- stitutes her veritable identity as a spiritual being. Each of us has a variety of personalities, and the personality the painter sees, often, it must be remem- bered, may not commend itself to the sitter, espe- cially if she be a woman. May be it is to be found often in those lines that the great artist Time has imprinted upon our form, though we may deplore them as they stand reflected in our mirrors. An example of the admirable result of this latitude allowed to the artist by his sitter in France may be found in the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Clairin. The divine Sarah was thin to gaunt- ness in those days. Clairin saw his opportunity of making this preternatural thinness his strong point for artistic purposes. He painted Sarah lost in the foam and flow of laces and silk, half stretched on a sofa, a spectral hand supporting the meagre cheek, and a great dog lying at her feet. The picture was a marvellous representation of delicacy and force ; and it lost none of its true effect by the better motif. Dumas the younger said that it was ' a capital study of a dog watching a bone.' Sometimes in France there is a revolt against the painter's insistence in rendering his model as he sees her. Usually the revolt comes from the foreigner. Meissonier painted a millionaire American with such merciless fidelity to his impressions that the story of the lady's refusal to accept the portrait, and her ultimate treatment of the canvas, furnished one of the liveliest scandals of its year. Notwithstanding the trammels and temptations with which fashion and vanity surround the portrait- painter, England remains what Charles Blanc has called it, the land of portraiture. All the circum- stances of life — social, political, religious — tend to develop robust individualism and strongly marked physiognomies. Painters would do well to lift their ideal of portrait-painting out of the depressing region of pot-boiling, and to consider it as belong- ing to one of the highest branches of art. The generation that has seen some of its most eminent men painted by the brush of Frank Holl, and that counts among its portrait-painters men like Professor Herkomer, Mr. Watts, Sir John Millais, and Mr. Ouless, need not fear yet the decay of an art which the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough, of Hogarth and Romney, almost raised to a rivalry with that of the Venetian masters. Alice Corkuan.

URNITURE and poeti-y would seem at first thought to have but little in common with each other. Yet genuine old pieces of furniture, though they have their highest value in the carving and ornaments that set them off, and the skill and ingenuity with which they are put together, have yet beyond this the added association of their having been in actual use, and of their remaining silent witnesses, attesting the truth of the facts of history, or affording material for the compilation of such history. Furniture which has remained un- altered, and which belongs to a number of epochs, gives us an insight into the fashions and usages of most of the modern nations of Europe, and to study and describe is to go back to the days in which these objects have been made, and to the wants and manners, the habits and sentiments, of bygone ages. Thus we may see chairs from which royalty has issued its man- dates ; cabinets that have held the secrets of state ; buffets and sideboards that have figured at mediaeval feasts ; tapestries that have looked down on groups of men and women, as brilliant in colour as the dyes of their own threads ; mirrors that have flashed back the faces, and caskets that have held the trinkets of beauties whose sons and daughters for generations have long gone to the dust; spinning-wheels trod by grand