own performances. He sometimes says he bosoms-cottage Madonnas of a noble homely fears he will only be beginning to learn how type-and in all their varying circumstances to paint when it is time for him to die. No full of love and helpfulness, and whether in artist, he declares, can be in a more hopeless joy or in sorrow, always tender, patient, and way than when he sits down before a picture loyal. What a depth of pathos he can throw he has just finished, and in self-satisfaction into his pictures! with what a magic touch twirls his thumbs and murmurs, "Behold and insight he clothes with interest the most how good a thing I have made!" trivial incidents and the commonest people! There are many ways to excellence in art. Israels has chosen a way for himself, and his heart and the bent of his genius directing him, he has chosen wisely and well. Among his best pictures, according to Israels himself, are "The Shipwrecked Mariner;" "Old and Worn Out," and "Silent Conversation," both in the gallery of Mr. J. S. Forbes, London, who has perhaps the best collection in the world of Israels' work; and "The Frugal Meal," now in the possession of Mr. James Reid, Glasgow. A few of his other well-known pictures are "Past Mother's Grave," "The Cradle," "Domestic Sorrow," "The Eve of the Separation," ," "From Darkness to Light," "The Pancake," "The Poor of the Village," which one year gained the Heywood prize at Manchester, "Alone in the World," "The Children of the Sea," "The Shoemaker," "A Cottage Madonna," and "The Sewing Class in the Orphan Asylum." Israels, who writes poetry as well as paints it, is both a poet and a realist. His sympathies with humanity, in all its aspects and experiences, are intense and broad, but his heart turns with tenderest feeling to the life of the poor, the struggling and the sorrowful. He takes the facts of existence that lie closest to his observation and his knowledge, and he renders these not in a brutal, uncompromising, formal manner, but suffused with the light of his own poetic nature "The light that never was on sea or land, Verbal descriptions of pictures are generally unsatisfactory, and I prefer rather to speak of Israels' work as a whole than to enter into minute and chronological particulars regarding individual canvases. In his pictures will be found ample justification for all I have said of his merits as an artist. "The Frugal Meal," "The Pancake," and "The Silent Dialogue," show his kindly sympathy with the homely joys and unpretending life of the labouring poor; "The Children of the Sea," his appreciation of the time of youth when "Life goes a-maying With Nature, Hope, and Poesy;" and in "The Shipwrecked Mariner," "Past Mother's Grave," "The Eve of the Separation," "From Darkness to Light," and "Alone in the World," we have sentiment that touches the universal heart of humanity. Even in his saddest pictures, as I have already said, there is a ray of hope; beyond every darkened room in which the mourners sit, and from which the coffin is being borne, there lies the green of God's own earth, flecked with the light that comes from heaven. The consecration, and the poet's dream." He is not a realist of the Zola kind; he is sternly truthful, but his truth is to the inner Israels does not believe in prettiness at all, life of things, and not to the mere outside nor in technique pure and simple. He aims form. His children are veritable children, at suggestion rather than at definition. He whether they splash in merriment among is the master of technique, not its slave, and the shallow waves or sit gravely content uses it simply to carry out what he believes beside the cottage fire. He shows us men to be the purpose of all painting-namely, who have to fight hard for a subsistence to enable him to produce a picture that, wrung from a treacherous element, and expressing strongly and truly his own feelwhose lives stand in daily danger-strong, ings and sympathies, will touch a correrough men, uncouth in bearing, yet cherish-sponding note in the hearts and intellects of ing, "as they face the billows," tender all who look upon it. thoughts for the wives and bairns-"wives Israels is an admirable portrait painter, as and mithers maist despairin'"-who watch and pray for them at home, while the winds are howling, and the waves foaming on the long stretch of "the ribbed sea sands." He depicts for us women attending to their household duties, mourning their dear ones dead, with grief that lies too deep for tears, clasping with joy unutterable their babies to their he renders vividly the character of his sitter. Among his works of this nature may be mentioned portraits of Professor Goudsmidt, of Professor Modderman, and of Mr. Mesdag, sen., the father of the celebrated Hague painter of the sea, one of Israels' most cherished friends. A portrait of Israels himself recalls a visit he made many years ago to Scotland. He was in a pleasant and genial company. The portrait was begun by George Reid, (now) R.S.A., and was finished by the combined assistance of George Paul Chalmers, Hugh Cameron, (now) R.S.A., and Israels himself. This portrait is in the possession of Mr. Forbes White, of Aberdeen, whose guest Israels was at the time, and who was, I understand, the purchaser of the first picture, "The Departure," that Israels sold in this country. Israels paints water colours with grace and tenderness, and with a suggestiveness akin to, and even more delicate than, that which he shows in his oil work. As an etcher he has qualities of his own which Hamerton asserts no other artist possesses. The etching of "The Old Couple," for example, is, as Hamerton says, like a touching page from Victor Hugo, or, better still, reminds us of the song we in Scotland know so well, "I'm wearin' awa', Jean." All Israels' work has in it the air of distinction, the hall mark that separates it from common work. His colour, which is luminous and has beautiful passages running through it, is never brilliant and never in bad taste. The tone of his pictures is, in keeping with their feeling, quiet and impressive. His composition is almost invariably THERE easy and natural, and he gives splendid atmosphere and distance. In his effects of light and shade, void of exaggerations and blackness, and full of subtilty and mystery, he shows himself to be of the school of his great countryman, Rembrandt. Israels has a son, Isaac, now twenty-two years of age, who promises to take a high position as a painter. He too has chosen subjects that lie close to his daily life, but of an order entirely different from those that Josef Israels has made his own. He paints military life, and paints it with vigour, animation, and truthfulness. There is admirable ease in both his drawing and grouping, and his tone of colour, subdued and harmonious, yet not in any way dingy, shows that he has not neglected the lessons taught by his father's work. "The Struggle for Life," which, by the kind permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon, and Co., illustrates this article, is a reproduction of a painting that the artist himself holds in high estimation. The picture was first shown at Amsterdam, and was exhibited at the Glasgow Institute in 1885. It is a characteristic scene in the life of those "toilers of the sea," whom Israels knows so well and whom he depicts with insight and tenderness begotten of his knowledge. OLD BLAZER'S HERO. By D. CHRISTIE MURRAY, AUTHOR OF "JOSEPH'S COAT," "RAINBOW GOLD," "AUNT RACHEL," ETC. CHAPTER XVII. HERE was a horrible, frowsy portion of the town into which people of the respectable classes rarely ventured. Probably the doctor and the rent collector were the only men who, with any approach to frequency, carried a decent coat into that squalid quarter. The amateur investigation of the houses of the poor, which has lately grown to be so fashionable, was less in vogue at that time; and the clerics of the parish were of the old-fashioned sleepy sort who were content to take things pretty much as they found them. The spot was vile enough to scare away anybody untoughened by custom for the endurance of its horrors. Festering pools of weedy water lay at the very doors of the ramshackle, age-blackened houses. The buildings themselves had sunk bodily into the slime of their foundations, until the ground without was a foot higher than the floor within, and in sinking they had canted helplessly over to this side or that in such wise that they had to be propped up on either side by slanting beams of timber. The supporting baulks were rotten with age and moisture, and might be carved with the thumb-nail. Vile as the place was, it was highly prized by Mr. Horatio Lowther and by Mr. John Howarth, who between them owned the whole abominable plot of land and all the tumbledown bricks and mortar on it. Both were keen hands at a bargain, and both were dearly fond of a good investment. Holly (probably Bell's Hollow originally) had proved a noble investment for each of them. The wretched tenements were let out in rooms and brought in a far higher rent than wholesome houses of the same class, let in the ordinary fashion, would have done. There was a Board of Commissioners in the parish whose obvious duty it was to see that this rookery was cleared; but it was not held fair or neighbourly for the Board to go poking its nose too closely into people's private business. Mr. Lowther was not only a private citizen of repute, but a personage renowned in religious circles, and so good a man was safely to be left to his own way of business. Howarth was known to be warm, and was naturally respected on that account. Nobody knew much about the Board, except that it was elected at stated intervals and without excitement of any kind, and Mr. Lowther, who was active in good works, was a member of it, year in and year out a fact which in itself was enough to dignify the body, if any one had ever been disposed to think of it. Now it befell whilst Will Hackett was away in America, and his deserted wife was patiently teaching her infant scholars and nursing her own heartbreak, that a clerk of John Howarth's who had been wont, in the pursuance of his regular weekly round of duties, to collect his employer's rents in Bell's Holly, fell ill, and for awhile the task lay upon the builder's shoulders. It chanced further that one of Howarth's tenants, who of course could never have dwelt in Bell's Holly at all unless he had been in a state of abject poverty, sickened at the beginning of the hot weather, and discovered that even he that is down may have a fall to fear. He had been slack in payment always, being of a feeble and sickly constitution and too much given to beer, and now the payments stopped altogether. Howarth was not the man to stand this sort of nonsense, and having never been slothful in business, went in person to superintend the non-paying tenant's eviction. The non-paying tenant lay on a dirty mattress on the floor, and though the day was sweltering hot, and hotter in the damp and breathless shelter of Bell's Holly than in most places, he was shivering under a foul and ragged blanket. Mr. Howarth disgustedly remarked within himself that there was no stick of furniture about the place which could have realised a sixpence. He fingered his seals and stroked his chin between his thumb and forefinger and looked extremely large and important. "About that there rent, Millard? Eh? Come now. About that there rent?" "I ain't got so much as a single farden, gaffer," said the defaulting tenant. "Oh!" said Howarth. "That bein' the case, thee'st have to get out o' this." "Gaffer," returned the defaulting creditor shivering, and staring at him with unin terested eyes, "I can't move a foot, nor yet hardly a finger." "Thee'st have to move foot and finger," said the landlord magisterially. "Out thee goest." He had no idea that he was brutal. It never entered into his mind to ask himself whether he were acting well in the matter or not. The room in which the defaulting tenant lay was John Howarth's property, and was worth eighteenpence a week to him. If the tenant could not find the weekly eighteenpence he had no right to stay there. Nothing could be more obvious, and the advancement of any consideration outside the plain facts of the case would have looked like an absurdity. "I ought to ha' gone to the workus, gaffer," said the shivering creature on the floor; "but the new Bastille ain't finished building yet, and the old un's full." "Come along!" "Gaffer," said the tenant, shivering rather more violently than before, "I can't set one foot afore another." The landlord rolled up the blanket into an untidy bundle and threw it down-stairs. "Come along!" he said again. He was not violent or harsh in manner, but simply and purely business-like. He was looking after his own interests, and that is a thing which every man has an undoubted right to do. He got his arms round the man, and being himself stiffly built and sturdy, lifted the skeleton frame easily enough to its feet. Then he helped him, neither kindly nor unkindly, but as if he were deporting a crate or an arm-chair, out of the room and down the stairs and set him outside the house, where he sat on the ground with his back against the wall shivering in the hot sunlight. "Now," said Howarth, mopping at his forehead, "I'll speak a word to the relieving officer, as I chance to be passin' his gate this afternoon. I've got two applications for that room o' thine, and one on 'em 'll be in this afternoon." |