sitter, trying one thing after another, until he sees
a suggestive arrangement, from the impression of which he makes his
design. It is true that the extremes of fashion do not always lend
themselves so readily as more reasonable modes to the making of a good
pictorial pattern. But this is not always so, some extreme fashions
giving opportunities of very piquant and interesting portrait designs.
So that, however extreme the fashion, if the artist is able to select
some aspect of it that will result in a good arrangement for his
portrait, the work will never have the offensive old-fashioned look. The
principles governing good designs are the same in all times; and if
material for such arrangement has been discovered in the most modish of
fashions, it has been lifted into a sphere where nothing is ever out of
date.

It is only when the painter is concerned with the trivial details of
fashion for their own sake, for the making his picture look like the
real thing, and has not been concerned with transmuting the appearance
of fashionable clothes by selection into the permanent realms of form
and colour design, that his work will justify one in saying that it will
look stale in a few years.

The fashion of dressing sitters in meaningless, so-called classical
draperies is a feeble one, and usually argues a lack of capacity for
selecting a good arrangement from the clothes of the period in the
artist who adopts it. Modern women's clothes are full of suggestions for
new arrangements and designs quite as good as anything that has been
done in the past. The range of subtle colours and varieties of texture
in materials is amazing, and the subtlety of invention displayed in some
of the designs for costumes leads one to wonder whether there is not
something in the remark attributed to an eminent sculptor that
"designing ladies' fashions is one of the few arts that is thoroughly
vital to-day."

XVIII

THE VISUAL MEMORY

The memory is the great storehouse of artistic material, the treasures
of which the artist may know little about until a chance association
lights up some of its dark recesses. From early years the mind of the
young artist has been storing up impressions in these mysterious
chambers, collected from nature's aspects, works of art, and anything
that comes within the field of vision. It is from this store that the
imagination draws its material, however fantastic and remote from
natural appearances the for