who asked him with what he mixed his colors, "With brains, sir!" is but partly true of Turner, whose pigments seemed dissolved in the unconscious fluid of a faculty more spontaneous even than thought, something closely akin to deep-welling spiritual emotion. Imagination is the common name for it, and to an excess of imagination Turner's later eccentricities are reasonably enough attributed; but what strikes us in works of the period to which these belong is their marvellous moderation. The painter's touch is as measured as the beat of a musical phrase, and indeed to find a proper analogy for this rare exhibition of sustained and, as we may say, retained power, we must resort to a sister-art and recall the impression of a great singer holding a fine-drawn note and dealing it out with measurable exactness. If Turner is grave, Bonington is emphatically gay, and among elegant painters there is perhaps none save Watteau (here admirably represented) who is so rarely trivial. Bonington had hitherto been hardly more than a name to us, but we feel that he has been amply introduced by his delightful series of water-colors (some thirty in number) at Bethnal Green.

Bonington died young; these charming works and many more he executed before his twenty-eighth year. They are full of talent and full of the brightness and vigor of youth; but we doubt whether they contain the germs of a materially larger performance. The question, however, is almost unkind; it is enough that while Bonington lived he was happy, and that his signature is the pledge of something exquisite. His works, we believe, have an enormous market value, and this generous array of them gives much of its lordly air to the present collection. He was a colorist, and of the French sort rather than the English. His use of water-color is turbid and heavy, as it is apt to be in France, where he spent most of his life; but he draws from it the richest and most surprising effects. He packs these into small and often sombre vignettes, where they assert

themselves with delicious breadth and variety. "Inattention,” — an ancient duenna droning aloud from some heavy tome to a lady lounging, not fancyfree, in a marvellous satin petticoat of silver-gray, among the mellow shadows of an ancient room; the "Old Man and Child,” . a venerable senator in a crimson cap, bending over a little girl whose radiant head and tender profile are incisively picked out against his dusky beard and velvet dress: these are typical Boningtons, — bits of color and costume lovingly depicted for their own picturesque sake, and that of that gently fanciful shade of romantic suggestion which so much that has come and gone in the same line, during these forty years, has crowded out of our active conception. The painter strikes this note with an art that draws true melody; his taste, his eye, as the French say, are unsurpassable. wonder your æsthetic voluptuary will have his Bonington at any price!

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Bonington brings us to the French School, which contributes largely, both in its earlier and its later stages. As we see it here, its most salient modern representative is unquestionably Decamps, of whom there are more than thirty specimens. We have already had occasion to speak of Decamps in these pages; if not with qualified praise, at least with a certain qualified enjoyment. But it is the critic's own fault if he does n't enjoy Decamps at Bethnal Green; such skill, such invention, such force, such apprehension of color, such immeasurable vivacity, are their own justification; and if the critic finds the sense of protest uppermost, he need only let out a reef in his creed. His protest, in so far as he makes it, will rest on his impression of what for want of a polite word he will call the painter's insincerity. The term is worse than impolite it is illogical. There are things, and there is the intellectual reflex of things. This was the field of Decamps, and he reaped a richer harvest there than any of his rivals. He painted, not the thing regarded, but the thing remembered,

imagined, desired, — in some degree or other intellectualized. His prime warrant was his fancy, and he flatteredinordinately, perhaps that varying degree of the same faculty which exists in most of us, and which, we should never forget, helps us to enjoy as well as to judge.

Decamps made a specialty of Eastern subjects, which he treated with admirable inventiveness and warmth of fancy, with how much, you may estimate by comparing his manner, as you have here two or three opportunities of doing, with the cold literalness of Jérome. Decamps paints movement to perfection; the animated gorgeousness of his famous "Arabs fording a Stream" (a most powerful piece of water-color) is a capital proof. Jérome, like Meissonier, paints at best a sort of elaborate immobility. The picturesqueness we might almost say the grotesqueness of the East no one has rendered like Decamps; it is impossible to impart to a subject more forcibly that fanciful turn which makes it a picture, even at the cost of a certain happy compromise with reality. In color, Decamps practised this compromise largely, but seldom other wise than happily; generally, indeed, with delightful success. We speak here more especially of his oil pictures. His water-colors, though full of ingenious manipulation, are comparatively thick and dull in tone. Several of these (notably the "Court of Justice" in Turkey and the "Turkish Boys let out of School") are masterpieces of humorous vivacity; and one, at least, the "Fording of the Stream," with its splendid dusky harmonies of silver and blue, its glittering sunset, and the splash and swing and clatter of its stately cavaliers, has a delicate brilliancy which possibly could not have been attained in oils. A noticeable point in Decamps, and the sign surely of a vigorous artistic temperament, is that he treats quite indifferently the simplest and the most complex subjects. Indeed he imparted to the simplest themes a curious complexity of

interest. Here is a piece of minute dimensions, entitled, for want of a betname, "The Astronomer,” a little ancient man in a skull-cap and slippers, sitting in profile at a table, beyond which an almost blank white wall receives a bar of sleeping sunlight. This meagre spectacle borrows from the artist's touch the most fascinating, the most puzzling interest. Decamps preserves his full value in the neighborhood of Delaroche and Horace Vernet, who contribute a number of small performances, most of them early works. "Touch" had small magic with either of these painters; pitifully small with the former, we may almost say, in view of his respectable and generous aims. He was the idol of our youth, and we wonder we can judge him so coldly. But, in truth, Delaroche is fatally cold himself. His "Last Illness of Mazarin" and his "Richelieu and Cinq Mars" (small pieces and meant to be exquisite) exhibit a singular union of vigorous pictorial arrangement and flatness and vulgarity of execution. His clever sunset - bathed Repose in Egypt" (a much later picture) shows that he eventually only seemed, on the whole, to have materially enriched his touch. Various other contemporary French painters figure in the Museum; none at all considerably save Meissonier, whose diminutive masterpieces form a brilliant group. They have, as usual, infinite finish, taste, and research, and that inexorable certainty of hand and eye which probably has never been surpassed. The great marvel in them is the way in which, in the midst of this perfect revel of execution, human expression keenly holds its own. It is the manliest finish conceivable. Meissonier's figures often sacrifice the look of action, but never a certain concentrated dramatic distinctiveness.

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We hardly know why we have lingered so long on these clear, but, after all, relatively charmless moderns, while the various Dutch and Spanish treasures of the collection are awaiting hon

And

He had pleaded my cause,

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