THE STUDIO THE LATE J. W. WATERHOUSE, R.A. T HERE is a certain polite convention which prescribes that only kindly things should be said of a dead man. Death is supposed to silence criticism and to impose a gentle reticence concerning the defects of the friend, or the enemy, who has joined the majority. When an artist who has been prominent or popular dies this convention demands that his disappearance from the ranks of art should be lamented as a loss to the world, and that he should be said to have left a gap which no one else is qualified to fill. Yet in many cases this form of testimony to the one who is gone is only a perversion of fact, and a perversion which overvalues him and depreciates the other workers with whom, while he was alive, he had to compete. Not many men are indispensable, not many stand so far apart from their fellows that they cannot be replaced or that the work they have laid down. cannot be taken up and carried forward by some one else. Art never dies, and it is only rarely that an exponent of one of its many branches achieves a position in which he finds no other man able to contest his supremacy. But it happens occasionally that a particular artist through some special tendencies of temperament, or by an unusual development of his powers of expression, makes a reputation that is entirely his own, and gathers round him a body of sympathizers to whom his art makes an irresistible appeal. Such a one has certainly a place to himself, and his death does leave a gap into which no other man can step. It is his personality that earns him the appreciation he enjoys, his exposition of his own mind and his own sentiment, not his fidelity to the dogmas of some recognized and popular school. He stands alone and he succeeds-or sometimes fails-because he is entirely himself. Naturally THE LATE MR. J. W. WATERHOUSE, R.A., IN HIS STUDIO (Photograph by Messrs. Elliot and Fry) it is unlikely that there should be another worker in art with just the same habit of thought and range of capacities, and it is natural that when death takes an artist so individual his disappearance should be felt as a blow for which there is no consolation. That is why the recent death of Mr. J. W. Waterhouse is so sincerely to be grieved over. It is no yielding to convention to say of him that he leaves no successor or that there is no other artist who can fit into his place. Nor is it necessary to pay insincere tributes to his memory and to write exaggerated compliments on his position in the art world so as to keep up the customary obituary tradition. It would be difficult to rank him too high as painter, with a mission which he had indisputably the power to fulfil, and as a man with a temperament which gave a very marked character and quality to the whole of his production; and it would be just as difficult to suggest where we can look for another who a STUDY IN OILS could reproduce the charm and the distinction of Mr. Waterhouse's work. Men more masterly in their management of the materials of the painter's craft, men with a more robust and assertive outlook on life, and men with a more forcible manner of stating their convictions there undoubtedly are, but to find one with the subtle sympathy of Mr. Waterhouse, or with his sensitiveness and tender appeal, would be a task to tax the powers of the best-informed student of modern art. For emphatically we had in him a personality which was as attractive as it was exceptional, a personality which quite possibly many people were unable to understand but which to many others had a particular fascination. Artistically he belonged to a world of his own creation, and he peopled this world with a type of humanity that was very rightly related to its surroundings. These beings, the product of his fancy, lived in an atmosphere of romance and kept strictly aloof from the materialism of modern existence; they were invested with an air of dainty melancholy, which, however, was not allowed to degenerate into morbidity, and they roamed languorously through shady groves or in fields starred with flowers. No hint of stress or struggle, no jarring note of violent emotion, broke the quiet of this world; it was a place apart in which life moved placidly and followed a peaceful course and in which dreampeople played their appointed parts with no thought for the strenuous realities which seethed beyond its boundaries. BY J. W. WATERHOUSE, R.A. Yet this gentle, restful art was never wanting in dramatic significance. One of the best characteristics of Mr. Waterhouse's work was its power to carry conviction and to tell its story persuasively, and one of its finest qualities was the subtlety with which the dramatic point of the subject chosen was brought out. Nor was there any lack of force in the manner of his pictorial statement. As a craftsman in art he was admirably accomplished, and his direct, |