on one occasion he set out to construct a masterpiece in the higher manner. The picture is entitled Mars and Venus and should be viewed by all who think Brangwyn descended from the old masters. The figures are sprawling and unrelated; the deities are swarthy Orientals, so conceived to rouse an adventitious interest, and the drawing is flat and academic. His painting of the nude is thing like Zorn and more like Zuloaga, but not so forceful as either; and to look at Mars and Venus and then to turn to Rubens' Perseus and Andromeda (1615) is almost as reasonable as to compare Daniel Chester French with Michael Angelo.
When he began to etch, Brangwyn, with a predilection for the grandiose, was dissatisfied with the smallness of the conventional plates and caused metal sheets to be made several times larger than the ordinary size. This is typical—too often has he mistaken size for strength, productivity for creative energy. As an etcher he has remarkable gifts (his biographer tells us that he scratches his plates directly from nature), and for sheer ability to render the sordid phases of penury, or the aspect of old and crumbling towns, he is unequalled. But he cannot simplify like Millet; while Rembrandt, on a small plate by means of a few perfectly apportioned patches of black and white and a minimum of lines summarizing his great knowledge of the human figure, made etchings that take all the life out of Brangwyn's pretentious studies and relegate them to their proper environment, the walls of the Academy and the fashionable shops in Fifth Avenue.
Brangwyn is at his best in his lithographs, wood-cuts, and small drawings in black and white. British art has always been rich in book-plates and illustrations for ballads and fairy tales: Rowlandson, Blake, Millais, Rossetti, and Beardsley have raised this form of decoration to a dignity and distinction not found on the Continent or elsewhere, and Brangwyn carries on the tradition with some of the skill and artistry of his predecessors. There is a trace of Morris in his designs, but they are in no respect imitative, and are executed with surpassing cleverness, both in the disposition of the blacks and whites and in the delicate feeling for form in outline. In no other branch of this work has he managed his lines with sensitivity, and though there is not, technically speaking, organization, there is a certain structure and stability. Most of these wood-cuts are done at times when he has no inclination to be monumental and impres-
