ROMAN EDIFICES IN RUINS

Size of the original print, 233 by 183 inches.

The upper picture is from the etching by William Woollett, after the painting by Claude Lorraine. The lower picture is from the plate after it was finished in line-engraving in 1772. It is interesting to note how far forward Woollett carried his plates in etching. This gave to his work a freedom and richness which ranks him foremost of all engravers of landscape. There is a monument to Woollett in Westminster Abbey.

FRUIT

necessity very few in number-and, to the educated eye, worn impressions are worthless.

Even the masterpieces of the great engravers, which for centuries had been cherished as veritable works of art, have suffered a temporary eclipse owing to the sudden (and deserved) popularity of the best contemporary painter-etching; but intelligent connoisseurs are now beginning to realize that our forefathers were in no respect mistaken in the high estimate which they put upon the best line engravings, and to-day these works have an added claim on us because of their increasing rarity through the lapse of long years and because no new reproductive process can ever compete with them.

It is strange how hard a wide-spread error dies - if it ever dies at all. Thus, both here and in England, thousands of educated people still use the term "a steel engraving." This term is nearly always a misnomer, for it is a fact that hardly a single one of the engravings which rank as works of art was done on a steel plate; copper is obviously a far mellower metal for the engraver to work upon. Indeed, almost the only veritable "steel engravings" which enjoy a universal and unchanging popularity are the greenbacks issued by the Treasury at Washington!

WITH regard to the delightful hobby of

collecting works of art, or even the faculty of admiring them if one cannot possess them, I confess that my own first choice would be the collecting of painters' drawings.

Even the finest and most elaborate painting is often no better than a compromise between the artist's own feeling and his thought of what would please the public — and the buyer; but in these drawings we have the artist himself, pure and simple. Such drawings were personal memoranda, never destined for sale or for exhibition, and in consequence they are the most personal of all pictures. For this reason they are seldom signed, any more than a man would sign a memorandum written for his own use.

At the present day, unless an art-lover has a very long purse, he cannot possess a painting by an artist of the first rank. Most of such pictures — like a nun entering a convent-have "taken the veil." They have gone into galleries whence they can never come out. We may look at them, perhaps, but we never can possess them. But an intimate and well authenticated drawing, the work of some great artist, is still available occasionally.

STUDY OF A BOY'S HEAD

Size of the original drawing, 53 by 4 inches.

Drawn by Cornelis Visscher, who was born in Holland about the year 1620, and died about the year 1670.

"If I had the means to be a collector of fine prints and drawings I would commence by collecting the works of Cornelis Visscher." F. K.