PREFACE. IN the present development of interest in Art, the want has been widely felt of books to aid to a conception of its proper aims and objects. Many artists of high reputation, and very cultivated art critics, have written, as is well known, valuable works explaining the motives, such as grace, beauty, and dignity of expression, besides completeness of composition and effect, with other qualities which enter into the construction of great pictures. These books are generally costly and voluminous, and contain often much reading which is not now relevant. To put their thoughts within easy reach, I have been induced to make a collection of what seemed to me to be the best ideas of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Charles Bell, William Hazlitt, and Benjamin R. Haydon. These authors, from a very lofty stand-point, give their impressions of the way in which nature should be regarded by an artist impressions very different from the crude thought of the tyro, who fancies that copying the external semblance of nature is doing all that is necessary. I have omitted, from Sir Charles Bells Anatomy of Expression, most of the technical measurements and history of the muscles, for these can be found in any hand-book of anatomy, and I have confined myself to his observations on expression and the more subtle and difficult analyses of people and animals which could only come from long study and observation. There are many authors besides those from whom I have made up this volume, who could as well have been chosen, and that I did not select such men as Lessing, Charles Blanc, Leonardo da Vinci, or a multitude of others, is from no want of appreciation of their excellence. The group of writers I have here included were nearly contemporary, and they gave attention to many of the same qualities in pictures and sculpture, though often from different stand-points. Should this little book prove useful, I may be glad, at a later date, to bring the treasure of thought of other original and suggestive writers, in a condensed form, to those for whom, at present, their world of ideas is a terra incopzita....