Raphael Mengs was a born genius spoiled by the coldness, the
pseudo-classicism, the artificiality and eclecticism of the eighteenth
century. A companion portrait is Hans Makart, ruined by the
amateurishness, the rhapsodizing, the theorizing, the morbid
self-consciousness of the nineteenth.

The so-called Spanish school of to-day is as yet too new for us to see
exactly whither it tends. Its passion for glaring, metallic, aniline
compound tints--tints that "scream," to use a French phrase--its horror
of all shade and depth and of pure and simple colors, are, however, most
certainly unhealthy. It is a diseased eye that in the desire for violent
color loses all memory of chiaroscuro.

I have left till now unnoticed the contemporary Netherland artists,
though their works are perhaps more entirely satisfactory than those of
either of the three schools we have discussed. But their characteristics
are less markedly distinct, less available for comparison, and can be
best noted and appraised by a previously-gained knowledge of the
peculiarities of English, French and German painting. The Belgian school
is most closely allied to the French, and in technique is often its
equal. In landscape and cattle-painting the types are similar, while
Belgian figure-painting gains by the lack of the element which a French
critic notes when he says modern art has become _mondain--surtout
demi-mondain_. Nowhere does contemporary art seem so healthy and sane,
so sure of itself, so consonant with the best nature and gifts of the
people, as in the Netherlands: nowhere are its ideals so free from
morbidness, affectation or sentimentality. Is it perhaps that in the
studios of Amsterdam, in the great school of Antwerp, even in the
galleries of Brussels, one is somewhat out of the wildest stream of
modern life--less driven to analysis and theorizing and
self-consciousness than in London, Paris or Munich? Whatever is cause,
whatever effect, the Netherland school shows two things side by
side--the least measure of self-consciousness, and the soundest
contemporary painting: if not the most effective, it is, I think, the
most full of promise. There seems to be forming the most healthy
national soil for the development of future genius.

In conclusion, it may be noted that we in America, whose art is just
beginning even to strive, are subjected to a somewhat strange cross-fire
of influences. Lineally the children of England, we are spiritually and
by te