"The

Barbizon

School."
"Corot."
D. C.
Thomson.

Similarly Claude Monet painted more than

thirty pic
tures of the

Thames,
with the
Houses of
Parliament

in the dis

tance, and

each one is

different

in the treat

Corot in a very interesting and well-known passage tells how for him the early morning and late evening, the mysterious parts of day, are the only times in which he cares to paint. When the sun is fully up, all poetical effect is gone. But William Maris selects this very time of day as for him specially desirable, and he sees mystery and poetry in the wonderful effect of the sun pouring its bright rays down on animals and pasture land. For this he is called the silvery Maris, and very remarkable are the effects he gets. It is true, as it is sometimes remarked, that he is always painting cattle and ducks. But it does not matter how many times he paints them, the pictures are always different, and no two are alike in subject and treatment. We never find him repeating himself, and there is indeed no occasion for him to do so. For the sky, the atmosphere, and the light are always changing, and as they change and nature's

hues shift subtly from the mystery of dawn. ment of the through noonday to the quiet of the evening, and vary with each gleam of sunshine, each shadow of darkening storm, new pictures are

light and

the atmosphere.

formed in countless number. It is these fleeting effects that William Maris seeks, and so his subjects are endless. Though he really shows us the very meadows of Holland that he sees, yet is he an imaginative painter, and they come from his brush tinged with his own poetical sentiment. He is sometimes taken for a rigid realist, but they misunderstand him who do this. For no one could paint cattle and their grazing grounds, and the skies that overarch them, so simply, apparently, yet so suggestively, unless he were gifted with a very sympathetic imagination.

The work of William Maris has a certain family likeness, as it were, to that of his brother James. It has similar power, vigour, freshness, boldness, and fine colour, but each is individual. He does not paint the stormy skies, with tumultuous masses of clouds, that his brother delights in. His favourites are those of clear bright summer blue, and he uses in painting them innumerable shades of blue flecked over with a misty haze of almost invisible white. We learn from him that the clearest of blue Northern skies can only be

also in Weissenbruch's pictures.

We see this rendered in this way, if the artist would give the true impression of the wondrous depths of the azure vault above us. A typical William Maris sky is a creation of his own, with its airy clouds floating lightly as down in the blue expanse, phantom fleecy forms that look as if a breath would blow them away out of sight.

It must always be remembered that William Maris is a landscape painter. The soft oozy meadows into which the hoofs of the cows sink, the shallow waters near by shining white in the rays of the sun, the trees in their robes of summer green, all these are not intended as a background for the cattle merely, but are painted for their own intrinsic loveliness and importance. And very beautiful indeed are the landscapes he gives us, sparkling in colour and radiant with light and air.

He shows in his paintings something of the reticence of James Maris, but his is a less complex character than that of his more varied brother, and his nature is gentler and more sympathetic. His life seems to have little of the stress and fever of modern times. He