pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make
permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which
there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of
revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken
first and last as genuine works of art in their own way, which is the
only way that true works of art can be taken seriously.

The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of
Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of
struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for
the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really
serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs.
Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration,
barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature
of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these
years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has
called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so
convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its
insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience.

Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive
delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the
young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian
standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and
refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those
still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her
pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these
groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the
touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces
and cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and
streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to
their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of
harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be
quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the
quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk
in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities
as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon
seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to
us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling