GIFT-BOOKS.
AMERICAN ILLUSTRATORS.* NEW YORK, as Mr. Hopkinson Smith describes it, seems a veritable Happy Valley for American artists. We are intro- timed to the Century Club, and to other resorts of the artistic community, and are touched in the extreme by the picture of cordiality unbroken by a single suspicion of jealousy or dislike which they present. And then the criti- cism ! How different from that we are accustomed to here ! All is praise from first to last. Our author has a feeling that his readers may be conscious of a little surprise. "If I have erred," he writes, "upon the side of optimism, . . . . it is because I have a profound belief in the future of our national art." This is not exactly logical ; if one believes in a future greatness, there should be the less hesitation in speaking the truths which can help forward genuine ad- vance. Let that, however, pass. Mr. Hopkinson Smith does not commonly praise in the first person. He speaks through the mouth of a certain cosmopolitan Doctor, a man who has been everywhere and knows everything, at least as far as the unfailing readiness to give an opinion about everything proves such knowledge. The Doctor's first intervention is in a somewhat technical discourse on art-processes. The speakers, one and all, express dissatisfac- tion with all the methods in use,—a clarions thing, seeing what good results our American friends seem to got out of them. The newcomer puts aside the topic under discussion, and pro- ceeds to discourse of one of the artists whose name he has heard, and having finished with him, takes up another. Finally we leave him in possession of the field, in something
• Amerioan illustrfttors. Hy F. Hopkinson Smith. Now York : Clutries Sorilmor'8 Sons,
of the way in which Aristodemus leaves Socrates at the end of the Symposium. In Part II., the Doctor takes up the story at another New York institution, the " Tile Club ; " in Part III., he drinks "a mug of beer at Oscar's," still discoursing with unabated vigour. In Part 1V., we are taken to the " Divan ; " in Part V., the Doctor gives his audience his opinion about "Black-and-Whites at the Academy." It must be allowed that this said Doctor is a very convenient medium. A good deal more freedom can be used in his utterances than would otherwise be possible, and the result is certainly an interesting bit of art-writing. Of course, some of the names will be little more than names to an English render; but the illustrations are a good comment on the discourse, and when the reader comes across an artist with whose work he is acquainted, he will commonly be struck with the truth of what is said.
The illustrations are difficult to overpraise. The fall-page plates are fifteen in number, six of them being in colour. Perhaps the first on the list is as good as any. "Two Sisters" is the title. One is sitting at a spinnet, the other stands and looks as she plays. There is a delicately expressed tone of a youth that has passed without bringing all that was hoped from it in the two faces. An interesting and characteristic anecdote is told of the artist, Mr. E. Abbey. He must needs get a spinnet expressly for the picture. It is needless to say that not many observers would notice the difference (and any difference that there was could be easily introduced) between a spinnet and a piano; but his art-conscience could not be satisfied without a study from the verit- able thing. Mr. Reinhart's "Spanish Breton" and Mr. Remington's "Russian Cossack" are also excellent. Mr. Robert Blum's " Musm6e " is another excellent drawing. The charm of Japanese beauty, which, it must be allowed, does not look very attractive as it is sometimes represented by art, is here given with the utmost success. Of illustrations in the text there are between forty and fifty. That all are admirable— or, shall we say, attractive—we cannot assert. The " Cumtean Sybil," for instance, is somewhat of a shock to a reader fresh from the sixth book of the dEneid. But most are highly interest- ing. The portraits are uncommonly vigorous ; while the few humorous sketches—as "She was a very nice girl," wherein a tiger looks fondly at some empty academicals—are distinctly effective. On the whole, American Illustrators expresses, in a definite way, what most of us have been feeling for some time as to the illustrations that come to us from the other side of the Atlantic.
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