23 JUNE 1917, Page 3

Money-making is a faculty of its own, and &ems to

have very little relation to intellectual force. It depends upon a kind of flair. It is allied to that curious quality which we call c3nnoisseur. ship. A man may often be a wonderful judge of a picture without having either a knowledge of art or a true sense of the beautiful. Instinctively he can tell whether a picture is genuine or a Copy, who painted it, and so forth ; in short, whether it is a good or a bad picture from the auction-room point of view. And yet if you talk to him on the subject of Dutch seventeenth-century painters, in which he deals so successfully, he may prove an absolute ignoramus and make a hopeless confusion of dates and persons, failing, in fact, by every test except that of making money out of canvases.