that very greatly irritates me; it seems to pretend to so much and yet ac-
complishes so little actually. I try to be as catholic in my art tastes as may
be, but this sort of work is to me just the reverse of what we should be try-
ing for in the difficult stage pictorial photography is now in. I see no real
grappling with the problems of light, but a cheerful shirking of them, an easy
indifference to artistic truth, and apparently an easy acceptance of whatever a
first chance-exposure may give. Some of us must really remember that
nothing that the camera produces has necessarily a value simply because we
happened to get it. It must have its own inherent right to exist; be of
itself of such value, apart from any producer's name attached to it, as to be
irresistible to any selecting committee. Mr. Keiley’s best thing here is
No. 10, a tender little woodland study, though of no special inspiration in
either selection or lighting. It is disfigured for me by the affectation of a
torn edge showing the white paper of the base of the print wherever torn.
Why is this complete distraction to the eye suffered or desired? Why, also,
in any sense of quiet tonality destroyed by an over-large signature in a vivid
red? If the print had been in colors instead of a low-toned monochrome, a
spot of vivid color at the bottom might have been of some meaning; but
here it seems to me an obvious distraction.
No. 139, A Bacchante. Mr. Keiley here adopts a title that helps not
at all; it is merely a very ill-defined and darkly printed head and bust of a
girl with a painful, fixed grin. The teeth alone are fully visible, the eyes
being so dim as to carry no meaning. The gesture of the hands has nothing
to do with the title; they have nothing of the maenad (?) about them. And
why should a dreadful magenta be used as a margin with the greatest width
at the top, where it should not be? No. 191, The Orchard, I should like
much if I had some suggestion of a sky where no cloud-forms are present,
and to add any afterward would be an intrusion into the scheme; a definite
sense of tone is demanded and at least a hint at gradation. The sky here is
not exactly white paper, but one feels nothing in it; it is merely empty of
suggestion. No. 212, A Garden of Dreams, is a soft and rich piece of black
and white, but lacks distinction enough to call for public exhibition. I
would like the water to be a good deal wetter and truer in surface. No. 217,
Spring, would have been a quite delightful study of trees and softly lit sky,
only it seems to me to need another inch of foreground, and there is a
technical imperfection that has been so crudely repaired as to make it the
more obvious and insistent of examination. Why should prints in this in-
complete condition be sent for public exhibition ?
No. 103, Mr. Dyer’s Navajo — what does it mean? — is as poor a nude
study as I wish to see; the gesture has no explainable meaning, and the
straddle of the legs, and the ugly angle they make, is most unpleasant and
inartistic. No. 128, Touth. Miss Rives’s name is new to us, but such sound-
ness of vision and treatment are most promising. I find myself returning to
it with renewed pleasure, and though I have hung it near the great Chase
portrait, it holds its own well, and is an acquisition indeed to our walls.
No. 186, Landscape, is an ineffectual title, but I like Mr. Bullock's

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