striking lessons is that while the Dutch farmer endeavours to increase the fertility of the soil which he cultivates by using all his waste products of dairy manufacturing, such as separated milk, skim milk, buttermilk, and whey, in rearing and feeding additional stock, the Englishman in similar circumstances attaches, alas! little importance to the serious loss entailed by the depreciation of his farm in sending all products away.

This latter constantly treats it as a hardship, should he deal with a cheese or butter factory, to be asked to take back separated milk, whey, or any other dairy waste, so sought after and reckoned valuable in Holland. In consequence his calves are sold within the first week or two of their birth-to be, perhaps, purchased back in an adult stage. Few or no pigs are fed, or, if so, often on artificial feeding stuffs of an inferior quality. An insufficient amount of manure is made, and that only from his milch cows, and as a natural result his pastures become impoverished.

It is then that the tenant comes to his landlord to complain that the farm is not what it used to be, and will not carry the same amount of stock. This complaint is the basis for a further demand for assistance from the landlord; and so year by year we see in certain districts the English dairy farmer drifting into a dependent system, which means ruin to himself and loss of interest to his landlord on his original outlay, instead of, after the manner of the Hollander and the Dane, laying himself out with all his energies to produce economically a larger and better supply of those commodities for which there is a demand actually at his own door.

The system of milk-selling has largely contributed to the present state of affairs. The dairy farmers have not been in the past forced to prevent the intrusion of foreign competition, which has practically taken their entire trade in milk products. It is now acknowledged that milk-selling under its present conditions and organisation is largely overdone, in consequence of so many arable farmers having taken to this industry, and is subject to many hindrances and vexations. On the other hand 34d. to 4d. appears to be the ruling price for milk in Continental countries which compete with us in butter and cheese. English factories cannot, therefore, afford to pay much more and succeed. If, therefore, the English farmer is dissatisfied with 6d. a gallon, which he gets by selling his milk in towns, how can he be expected to be satisfied with the prices offered by factories?

We do not say that it is impossible for pasture farmers to sell off all their milk and yet keep their land in good heart, for this can be done by heavy expenditure in purchased feeding stuffs and, what is now sadly uncommon, thorough and conscientious manuring; nor would our strictures apply to this type of farmer.2 The energetic,

2 An instance has come before the notice of the writers of a dairy farm taken in hand seven years ago by a wealthy and energetic landowner. The farm was in an

liberal-minded business man is, however, still handicapped by the want of a more complete and scientific knowledge in the art of production and combination, such as we see outside this country, and which during the last few years has enabled the Dutchman, Dane, and Swede to openly take our trade away from us, though the cost of production has been much the same.

It is now, however, a matter of necessity for the pasture farmers to endeavour to make up lost ground. In the fierce competition of the present day they have got behindhand and are lagging in the race. Indiscriminate reductions of rent by large and rich landlords have rather tended to pauperise them than help them. They must have patience, and endeavour to educate themselves and their children into better business habits and methods, and take lessons from some of our foreign neighbours, many of which are afforded by the practical inhabitants of the little country which has mainly been the subject of this paper.

H. HERBERT SMITH.

ERNEST C. TREPPLIN.

impoverished condition, and carried a herd of thirty-five cows. It has been highly manured and subjected to the very best treatment. It now carries seventy cows and cuts large crops of hay. It claims to show that during the seven years it has paid the old rent fixed in 1870, interest at 5 per cent. on capital, and has made in addition a very considerable profit. The whole of the milk has been sold off the farm since it was taken in hand.

1896

LORD LEIGHTON'S DRAWINGS

THE late Lord Leighton's work has been for more than forty years before the world. Since his first great picture of Cimabue's Madonna was exhibited in the Royal Academy he was almost every year a contributor to the great show at Burlington House. His position as an artist has been so freely discussed, admirers and detractors have so long been ranged in opposite camps, that one might suppose that there was nothing new to be said about him; yet, strange as it may seem, except for a few reproductions in Mr. Ernest Rhys's book and elsewhere, the most characteristic part of his work, and, as many will think, the best, remains quite unknown to the general public.

He left behind him a vast number of drawings of exquisite beauty, which will be exhibited in the course of the coming winter, and which will, one may venture to think, attract considerable attention and admiration. They amount to a record of his life and a statement of his artistic creed.

Painters may be divided into two classes, viz. those who seek pre-eminently for pictorial effect of light or colour and those who look first for beauty of form and composition-in other words, those who seek to make a beautiful representation of an object and those who seek to make a representation of a beautiful object. The divergence of the two may not appear great at first sight, but it leads to astonishingly different results. Correggio, the Venetians, and Rembrandt are typical representatives of the first (Sir Joshua was contented with any sitter so long as he had a high light on his nose'), the Florentines, the Romans, and Mantegna of the second. Leighton's sympathies were with the latter. That he could see effect and loved colour is made sufficiently clear in his pictures and still more in his sketches, but his real affections were given to form.

One saw it in his method of designing. He began not, as most painters do nowadays, with a sketch of an effect of light or colour, but with an outline. Of late years he used generally to talk to, or, as he was pleased to say, consult, a friend before beginning a picture, and what he would show was a small outline, two or three inches high at the utmost, enclosed in bounding lines as a frame. Whole pages of small designs such as these, in which the germs of his best known 809

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pictures are to be recognised, will be found. The sketch had to be considered according to the salient and retreating parts, as one might consider a relief. Raphael's pictures, which are always planned like coloured bas-reliefs, were probably begun in the same way.

The first sketch being settled, he proceeded to make drawings from the model. First he drew from the nude. In many cases there are evidences of his having tried several models before satisfying himself. Then, when this was accomplished, the study from the nude was transferred in outline to another paper. The same model, draped, was carefully brought into the same pose, and the draperies having been, after repeated failures, cast in a form which pleased him, were drawn in over the outlined figure. These drawings of drapery are most elaborate and beautiful, done generally in black and white chalk on blue or brown paper, to save time, as no model can sit for ever.

The next stage was to square off the first small design on to the full-sized canvas, to draw in the figure from the studies in monochrome, and put the draperies on to it.

You had now an entire picture in monochrome, and the designs. in this state were generally most beautiful and complete. A friend of his, himself an artist as well as an art patron, once besought him to sell him a picture, 'The Idyll,' in this condition. Unhappily Leighton took it as a reflection upon his powers of colouring and refused.

This businesslike method of working flowed directly from the nature of the man. His mind was extraordinarily, even disconcertingly clear. It stripped everything it approached of all fog of prepossession or mistiness of thought. He detested the indefinite either

in speech or in Art. A singular light towards the understanding of his mind is that he never painted a haze in his life. Mist is the differentiating characteristic of our climate, and he delighted in English landscape, as is proved by the following incident. When George Mason first returned to England from Italy, where he had painted his first pictures, and looked at the English landscape in his own beautiful county of Derbyshire, he said there was nothing in it to paint. It was Leighton who showed him what to do. He went down to Derbyshire, and in his presence and that of Signor Costa, who was with Mason, he drew in a book, which is now in the possession of Lord Carlisle, numerous small sketches for pictures. The visit decided Mason's career. The best pictures of one of the most delightful artists England has yet brought forth would never have been painted but for Leighton's appreciation of his native scenery.. Yet he himself, intensely English and aggressively patriotic as he was, never cared to paint that cardinal fact of our climate in virtue of which English landscape is the loveliest in the world. In his

mind and in his eye everything is clear, defined, and as it were in three dimensions. He looks all round it. His landscape backgrounds are so modelled that you may pick your way from point to point to the extremest distance. The minds of most of us are a more or less clear space fading off into a misty region peopled with vague longings, unfinished thoughts, and indefinite shapes: Not so Leighton's. He could sympathise with others who grope to their thoughts through a poetic haze, but he never allowed his own work to be infected by it. His astonishingly active intelligence followed the thought to the horizon, and so far as that horizon extended he saw with a startling clearness. In his drawings a character so marked could not fail to assert itself.

His hand had been exercised from an early age upon all manner of subjects-horses, cows, cats, and poultry, architecture, caricature, and, above all, on the human figure. His industry was almost incredible. Already before his departure for Italy he had acquired in German artistic circles a wide reputation as being able to draw anything. The earlier studies from the nude show a conscientious adherence to clumsy German models, and are interesting chiefly for their faithfulness. But he grew rapidly more and more distinguished in his style.

As for draperies in that school, they were but little considered. A student was expected to be able to invent them, and Leighton with his perfectly clear head was a great adept at it. There are several elaborate drawings of that time with complicated draperies, done entirely de chic, as he told me himself, which if rather stiff look astonishingly well. The most remarkable one is the water colour of the 'Plague of Florence,' in which he assured me that all the draperies again were done out of his head.

When he left Germany to continue his studies in Rome he learnt the error of evolving draperies out of his moral consciousness, and never again trusted himself to put in anything without warrant from nature. It is true that the folds were not such as would naturally fall about the figure. They were carefully and even elaborately arranged. He would spend hours in arranging folds which he would copy in half an hour; but he never drew again out of his head. Experience had taught him the danger of trusting to intuition, as leading surely to mannerism, and it took shape in a remark of his late in life on being shown a student's drawing with the recommendation that the student had done it all out of his head. 'How lucky,' he said, 'to be able to get it out!'

Careful lead-pencil drawing, so much practised by Ingres, Delaroche, and the French school generally in the first half of this century, was still the fashion when Leighton was a student. It is a material which lends itself to, and indeed demands, a perfectly definite outline, and in all the Academy studies done in pencil and the