The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-03-12

with distant hills seen against sun rise sky, is also full of significance. The designs of more pretension, like some of those with angelic and demon ic figures, and designs of grotesque character, like some of the dragons and other imaginary monsters are marked by the insincere art of the time when MT. Linton was young-an art which meant nothing very particular and yet aspired to mean much. The little cuts designed and engraved by him are known to have been made frequently in very short spaces of time, off-hand, as it were, real artists sketches with the graver.
 It is as an original and powerful wood engraver that Linton is most inn portant to us and to posterity. He was a master of his art. Given the picture which he had to reproduce, he was ca pablo of reproducing it with more of that fidelity which is genius and by more simple and direct methods than any man of his time. This of course, carried with it the drawback--if it may be so called-that the painter or draughtsman whose work was to be I6pIOuuCct WOulu SOliltliiilCo tOlhpiSeiAA that his meaning was not perfectly rendered; but, then. that might well be akin to the complaint which the young poet makes that no one but himself can rightly read his verses. Linton insist ed upon interpretation as opposed to exact reproduction, as, indeed, he was bound to do, being master of the 'white line" in wood-engraving, and, therefore, producing in his work upon the block kind of rendering which no
 other art admits. When drawing in black lines on light-colored paper or a painting in impasto was to be rendered into Linton's wood-engraVing, and
 when the draughtsman or painter saw | a translation of his work into what | was really on examination a drawing | in white lines on black ground, he
 required freshness of perception to un- | derstand that really artistic transla- | tion of his work had here been made;
 artistic because rendered by a true ar tistic method out of one art into anoth-
 CT. Linton's use of the white line is
 seen everywhere In the prints on the
 walls of the Century club. In some eases 1t is used in connection with the | black line most cleverly and intelli | gently. A notable instance of this i:
 the portrait of Walt Whitman, tht
 frontispiece to Linton's own Poetry
 of America" ds7S).
 | Another print, also on the wall
 shows the difference between the twt
 methods still more clearly, for thu | whole nude body of the young woman
 seated on a bank, covered with tai
 rushes, and looking behind her witl l startled action, is engraved in whit | line in the most obvious way, while tht
 drapery thrown across her lap is en
 tirely engraved with the whites GU l away so as to leave the shading il black line just as it might have beer
 done by pen. The use of the tw' methods together to show the radica difference of texture and surface be tween the skin and the linen is excep
 tional, perhaps, but the more noticea
 ble on that account. With this shoult
 be compared that print of mud youth which is marked as having beel presented to MT. A. V. s. Anthony. As there is no system of numbering and no catalogue or printed list, no } even, in most cases. titles of the work given, it is not easy to specify exam pies. The reader can easily obtain ad mission to the gallery, which is opel from twelve till four, until the 27th | and should study the collection wit a view to seeing what n1asterly wood engraving is, comparing for himsel