PRIVATE PICTURE COLLECTIONS IN GLASGOW AND WEST OF SCOTLAND

 While many of his canvases looked slight in their results, he was in truth a laborious worker. The inspiration might come suddenly, but the patient embodying of it was another matter. He was never satisfied with what he had himself accomplished. Israels says that the painter is in a perilous state indeed who sits comfortably down before his canvas, and twirling his thumbs, murmurs, "Behold, how good a thing I have done!" But it would have been better for art and for Chalmers's self had he possessed less fastidiousness, less self-distrust. His mysterious and sudden death in 1878 came as a shock to all who knew the charm of his companionship. It is pleasant to remember that almost the last words he spoke were in the Edinburgh Artists' Club, in praise of Corot, and if I mistake not, in praise of the particular picture, the "Souvenir d'Italie," which appeared in THE MAGAZINE OF ART for March, p. 154. The exhibition of his collected works in the Glasgow Institute Galleries, in 1880, showed the variety, the breadth, the quality, the quick-seeing, artistic instinct of this true painter. At his death, at the age of forty-four, his powers seemed to be ripening to maturity, but the harvest was not to be! Chalmers exercised no small influence over Mr. McGavin in art-matters; hence we in the west have reason to be thankful to him. One of Chalmers's finest portraits is that of Mr. McGavin, which now hangs in the Corporation Galleries, Glasgow. For this portrait the artist is said to have had over ninety sittings! Chalmers's pictures were seldom seen during his lifetime in the Royal Academy exhibitions. He loved not exhibitions at the best, and contributed mainly, although not profusely, to the Royal Scottish Academy. There was a fine work by him, "The End of the Harvest," in the recent "Old Masters" Exhibition at Burlington House.

In "L'Enfant couchee" (p. 225) Mr. Maxwell is fortunate in possessing a beautiful example of Matthew Maris. The three brothers Maris are all artists in the best sense of the word, each with his own outlook and distinctive style, but Matthew is surely the greatest of the three. He may be, as one most accomplished critic terms him, "a painter of dreams," but when the same authority declares that there is a tinge of morbidity in his work, we are not required to agree with the critic. His tone and colour are generally superb-not, be it understood, in any way gorgeous - and his self-restraint admirable. His every touch tells, frequently from its very simplicity. He never puts on paint for the mere sake of display: he is absolutely without affectation. We see this in his small landscapes, in such a picture as "He is coming!" and in this “Enfant couchee." If he does take us into a world that is not like the real world of to-day, all compact of hard and strong facts; if he gives us glimpses of a beautiful land where the conditions of existence are gentler and more gracious than they are here, are our thanks not due to the poet-painter? He is one of the most unworldly of men and artists: he lives only for his art, and unwearied in her service. For art he counts no sacrifice too great, and all his own attainments as nothing.