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deen Harbour ' : the stream in actual glistening' motion, the grey city melting into misty air. We do not, it is true, this year get anywhere far from land : certain characteristic and often beautiful cloud-phenomena soon warn us that Mr. Campbell Noble is in the neigh- bourhood ; he has fresh scenes, with colour full and rich ; a lack of unity is, however, seldom got over. Wingate's little ' Study of a Wave ' is subtly handled. M'Taggart's ' Wave,' however, stands above all others in its perfectly artistic seizure of the essential truth and beauty of at once the most momentar}', yet the most eternal of nature-pi-ocesses, the mighty pulse- throb of the sea. Yet for complete poetry we need humanity, and this time Mr. M'Taggart's seaside play- fellows are not at hand. Happily we have not far to go. Hugh Cameron has left his kindly cottage interior for the nonce, and has sent the lassie down to the water to bathe the bairns ; so the grave old ocean ripples into his sunniest smile. Such a simple idyllic purity both of scene and soul we do not find in many exhibitions.

Mr. Martin Hardie, too, is specially happy in his choice of subject ; and although exception may be taken both to the imperfectly unified composition, and the deficiently sympathetic characterisation of his little Maries, the landscape shows a real deepening of both truth and feeling, as well as an escape from his frequent mannerism of colour. Almost forming a class by itself, as certainly the only avowed poem-picture from an Edinburgh painter, is Mr. J. Thorburn Ross's ' Garland of Poppies—Moonlight in Daylight ' ; in conception and colour alike happy, brilliant, unique and untranslatable. As another idealist of more pensive mood, Mr. George Henry claims special notice: his little 'Mushroom-gatherer' is a child Proserpine, already shadowed by coming fate. Mr. Roche's 'Shepherdess,' one of the freshest pictures of the late Glasgow International Exhibition, must not be forgotten; this too is poem as well as paint. Returning to more everyday pictures, Mr. MacGeorge's oak forest may be noted for its effective grouping, its general manliness. Mr. Austen Brown's large picture of ’Scanty Pasture' is vigorous in the extreme, yet somewhat too clamantly so to be reckoned one of his best works. Mr. Lorimer, somewhat unsuccessful in the figures of his 'Lightsome Labour,' and in relating them to the background, becomes wholly so in his 'Christmas Eve.' Yet his small pictures are very different; the girl reading in the antique window-seat, the roofs of Chartres, are no less fresh than pleasant. It is no light matter, nor pleasant, to speak in unmixed dispraise of any man; yet we must hope that Mr. Payton Reid's large and ambitious scenes in Venice represent only a phase of training and of life which will not last. An ugly mistake like that of the two figures at the well could not readily happen save as the general outcome and index of a period of prosaic insensitiveness. Mr. Ken- nedy's pictures of soldiering, although ener- getic, are also spoiled by an element of coarse- ness. Mr. Kerr's 'Loupin' Stane,' Mr. G. O. Reid's 'Catechising' are full of character without vulgarity.

Mr. J. Michael Brown is still seeking for his place and work in art ; keenly observing and carefully delineating an unusual range of subject, from a drawing-room interior and a Gil Bias-like courtier to the uncompromising ugliness of a funeral in the slums, filled with types of degradation, which it is well our artists are becoming realists enough to observe. Mr. Burn-Murdoch shows active versatility, not only fresh and keen and varied in his portraits, but, in his ' Halcyon,' striking out into an imaginative vein which we too rarely see. George A. Sinclair's large picture of this year ('At the Fiddler's Cottage') is of real importance; in a modern gallery, in which half the pictures are shouting from their frames, it is no small pleasure to find a colour scheme so subdued and kept in such restraint. The