From the dry-point by Alphonse Legros. In this portrait again, "style" is evident in every line. The means are so simple, the result so satisfactory!

to the already too great number of bad ones. Better, by good and patient work and prolonged study, to get a power which will enable you to come well armed for the fray.

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You need not fear the loss of your individuality, which, after all, will be worth nothing unless you have the knowledge and observation to bring it out.

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The man who can draw may undertake anything in art. . . . To long to do really good work, to delight in attacking and triumphing over difficulties, is one of the greatest secrets of success.

"The more you study the great masters, the more you will see that with them there was no hurry; there was but the patient and steady aim at good work the earnest striving after perfection."

THE

PAINTER-ETCHER

HE sincere artist soon discovers the medium through which he can best express himself. If his feeling for form predominates he will be a sculptor; if his sense of color is strongest he will be a painter, and if a general and rapid realization of the ensemble of a scene or object is what impresses itself upon him most vividly he will best express this predominant impression through etching.

It is an unusual thing to find a painter-etcher of genuine talent who is almost unknown to the art-loving public of the United States. Americans cannot justly be accused of neglect toward this very interesting and essentially artistic branch of the graphic arts.

The genius of our national character and the genius of painter-etching have this in common

that both are practical, rapid, and direct, disliking and avoiding all that is tedious and superfluous, and desiring above all to arrive at the essential core of things.

This being so it is not surprising that in no city in the world are there so many really good private collections of etchings as in New York, and this is proportionately true of several other cities in the United States.

The renowned French painter Meissonier used to say that when he sold a painting to an American he considered his picture to be as totally lost as if it had been sunk in the sea. The great man took our money in enormous sums, but right or wrong he had a very poor opinion of our knowledge and taste.

On the other hand the English artist Sir Seymour Haden frankly declares that he would rather see his works go to the United States than to any other country in the world; his reason being that here they are better understood and appreciated than anywhere else. Sir Seymour Haden has recently made the interesting remark that among the great numbers of letters which he has received on the subject of etching, both in his private capacity and as president of the British Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, the most intelligent of all have come to him from distant Oregon.

When we remember that of all the different forms of the graphic art, painter-etching is the least showy and ostentatious, it is gratifying to receive such testimony as Sir Seymour Haden's on the genuine taste and knowledge that exist in America; and it is all the more remarkable that a painter-etcher of Van Muyden's ability should hitherto be almost unknown here, notwithstanding the fact that his etchings won a medal at the Paris Exposition of 1899 and that he has also won distinction at the Paris Salon.

If he were called upon to account for this lack of popularity in America he could only urge in

extenuation what William Pitt once urged on a famous occasion: "The atrocious crime of being a young man." But his work is so genuinely good that notwithstanding his modesty regarding it, he must soon become well known just as surely as that Time will silently and gradually remove from us all the drawback of being "young."

Van Muyden's nationality is a somewhat complicated matter. Born near Rome of Swiss parentage, he is legally a citizen of Geneva; in appearance he is quite Italian, and yet both his Christian name and surname are pure Holland Dutch; but he resides in Paris and speaks French like a Parisian.

Notwithstanding this rather intricate extraction, there is nothing indefinite or scattered in his art. Although his portrait, etched by himself, is evidence of his power in that direction, and although the accessory landscapes in several of his plates show that he understands landscape thoroughly, yet he has devoted himself definitely to the career of "Un Animalier” — as he calls himself, and among the animals his preference is for the savage wild carnivora.

His immediate predecessor in this particular line of art was the late August Lançon, who, like Van Muyden, found that he could best express himself through etching.

Lançon was an able man, but there is a certain mannerism in all his wild animals which makes them resemble each other unduly, although in nature this resemblance does not exist.