es of more
recent time, men like Frank Brangwyn and Colin Hunter, who have
yielded to the pressure of the change in taste, or of whom it would be
more just to say, have _set_ present taste, so that to-day not only
the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly
and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men of the
eighties and nineties.

What will follow this evolution of technic no man can predict. The
lessons of the past, however, are valuable, and to-day one touch of
Turner's brush is more sought for than acres of canvases so greatly
prized twenty years after his death.

And this is not alone confined to the old realistic English school. In
my own time I have seen Verbeckoeven eclipsed by Van Marcke,
Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gerome by Manet, and Sir Frederick Leighton
by John Sargent--a young David slaying the Goliath of English technic
with but a wave of his magic brush--and, last and by no means least,
the great French painter Meissonier by the equally great Spanish
master Sorolla.

I am tempted to continue, for the success of these men in the fulness
of the sunlight of their triumph, realists as well as impressionists,
was wholly due to their understanding of and adherence to the rules of
selection, composition, and mass which form the basis of these papers,
and which despite their differences in brush work they all adhered
to.

In the late half of the preceding century Meissonier received $66,000
for his "Friedland," a picture which cost him the best part of two
years to paint, and the expenditure of many thousands of francs,
notably the expense attendant upon the trampling down of a field of
growing wheat by a drove of horses that he might study the action and
the effect the better. Forty years later Sorolla received $20,000 for
two figures in blazing sunlight which took him but two days to paint,
the rest of his collection bringing $250,000, the whole exhibit of one
hundred and odd pictures having been visited by 150,000 persons in
thirty-two days. And he is still in the full tide of success,
pre-eminently the greatest master of the out-of-doors of modern times,
while to-day the work of Meissonier has fallen into such disrepute
that no owner dares offer one of his canvases at public auction except
under the keenest necessity. The first master expresses the refinement
of extreme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a pronounced
impressionist of the sanest of the open