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WILLIAM STOTT OF OLDHAM.

FEW personalities in the contemporary art world have been and still are so discussed as is that of Mr. William Stott of Oldham (an appellation taken by the painter to distinguish himself from another painter, Mr. Edward Stott, with whose name his own had been often confused). By some critics he is put into a sort of pillory ; his pictures have been declared ' too screamingly funny ' ; others largely recognise the artist's power, but lament his eccenti-icities ; while a few amateurs of pictures, and some most eminent painters of pictures, admire his works passionate!)', gaining from them a sense as of a new understanding of nature, a fuller possession of its secrets and its enchantments. It seems to us that a personality so strong as to affect so differently a number of individuals is worthy of being studied, and perhaps explained. Mr. Stott is the son of a well-to-do mill-owner of Oldham. The father had planned that his sons after him should own the mill, and carry on the prosperous business in partnership. The village of Oldham is situated in a grim manufacturing district, where the making of money is the aim of every man's life. The sturdy persistence of his race was the substratum of the lad's character ; to it was allied a temperament, eager, mobile, delicately impressionable. Such a tem- perament unfitted him for a business career, and made him peculiarly sensitive to the surrounding ugliness, and depressing, idealess routine. In his heart he longed to be a painter. The father, far from opposing his son's inclination, decided that if the lad wished to be a painter, it was doubtless he was gifted that way, and to the Manchester School of Art the artist in embryo was sent. For a career of art, the point of attraction is Paris, and to Paris after a while Mr. Stott went. He car- ried an introduction to Gerome, who looked over his sketches, and at once admitted him as an ' Aspirant,' to enter his class in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After a short period of probation, he passed from the great common hall, where all the ' Aspirants ' work from the antique, and was enrolled a full-fledged student of the school in the atelier supervised by Gerome. Then began a period of stress and strain, of great