Still, if the sitter has not got an
amiable expression naturally the artist is not bound to give him one, nor
'if he is essentially ungraceful' should the artist ever 'put him in a
graceful attitude.' As regards landscape painting, Mr. Collier tells us
that 'a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the impossibility of
reproducing nature,' but that there is nothing really to prevent a
picture giving to the eye exactly the same impression that an actual
scene gives, for that when he visited 'the celebrated panorama of the
Siege of Paris' he could hardly distinguish the painted from the real
cannons! The whole passage is extremely interesting, and is really one
out of many examples we might give of the swift and simple manner in
which the common-sense method solves the great problems of art. The book
concludes with a detailed exposition of the undulatory theory of light
according to the most ancient scientific discoveries. Mr. Collier points
out how important it is for an artist to hold sound views on the subject
of ether waves, and his own thorough appreciation of Science may be
estimated by the definition he gives of it as being 'neither more nor
less than knowledge.'

Mr. Collier has done his work with much industry and earnestness. Indeed,
nothing but the most conscientious seriousness, combined with real
labour, could have produced such a book, and the exact value of common-
sense in art has never before been so clearly demonstrated.

A Manual of Oil Painting. By the Hon. John Collier. (Cassell and Co.)

MINER AND MINOR POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1887.)

The conditions that precede artistic production are so constantly treated
as qualities of the work of art itself that one sometimes is tempted to
wish that all art were anonymous. Yet there are certain forms of art so
individual in their utterance, so purely personal in their expression,
that for a full appreciation of their style and manner some knowledge of
the artist's life is necessary. To this class belongs Mr. Skipsey's
Carols from the Coal-Fields, a volume of intense human interest and high
literary merit, and we are consequently glad to see that Dr. Spence
Watson has added a short biography of his friend to his friend's poems,
for the life and the literature are too indissolubly wedded ever really
to be separated. Joseph Skipsey, Dr. Watson tells us, was sent into the
coal pits at Percy Main, near North Shields, when he was seven years of
age. Young as he was he had to work from twelve to sixteen hours in the
day, generally in the pitch dark, and in the dreary winter months he saw
the sun only upon Sundays. When he went to work he had learned the
alphabet and to put words of two letters together, but he was really his
own schoolmaster, and 'taught himself to write, for example, by copying
the letters from printed bills or notices, when he could get a candle
end,--his paper being the trapdoor, which it was his duty to open and
shut as the wagons passed through, and his pen a piece of chalk.' The
first book he really read was the Bible, and not content with reading it,
he learned by heart the chapters which specially pleased him.