Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/44

Rh us, and that human brains and hands could not have invented and put in operation the innumerable changes in our daily life during the last half-century.

When, in the same way, we review the changes that have taken place in the domains of science, in scholarly research in all directions, in printing, bookmaking, and the methods of illustrating everything that is printed—from the most serious and learned writing to advertisements scattered over all-out-of-doors—when we add to these the revolutions in many other departments of life and industry, we must regard the nineteenth as the century par excellence of expansion, and in various directions an epoch-making era.

When we turn to our special subject we find an activity and expansion in nineteenth-century art quite in accordance with the spirit of the time. This expansion is especially noticeable in the increased number of subjects represented in works of art, and in the invention of new methods of artistic expression.

Prior to this period there had been a certain selection of such subjects for artistic representation as could be called "picturesque," and though more ordinary and commonplace subjects might be rendered with such skill— such drawing, color, and technique—as to demand approbation, it was given with a certain condescension and the feeling was manifested that these subjects, though treated with consummate art, were not artistic. The nineteenth century has signally changed these theories.

Nothing that makes a part in human experience is now