Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/248

Rh at which they can be said to have shown any diminution in the earnestness of their artistic intentions.

"The school to which they belong is one which has latterly gathered to itself a very large number of adherents among the younger painters—a school that, for want of a better name, can be called that of the new Pre-Raphaelites. It has grown up, apparently, as an expression of the reaction which has recently set in against the realistic beliefs taught so assiduously a quarter of a century ago. At the end of the seventies there was a prevailing idea that the only mission of the artist was to record with absolute fidelity the facts of nature. . . . Today the fallacy of that creed is properly recognized, and the artists on whom we have to depend in the immediate future for memorable works have substituted for it something much more reasonable. . . . There runs through this new school a vein of romantic fantasy which all thinking people can appreciate, because it leads to the production of pictures which appeal, not only to the eye by their attractiveness of aspect, but also to the mind by their charm of sentiment. ... It is because Mr. Young Hunter and his wife have carried out consistently the best principles of this school that they have, in a career of some half-dozen years, established themselves as painters of noteworthy prominence. Their romanticism has always been free from exaggeration and from that morbidity of subject and treatment which is occasionally a defect in the work of young artists. They have kept their art wholesome and sincere, and they have cultivated judiciously those tendencies in it which justify most com-