(May, 1764), at which, writes Walpole, 'in general the pictures did not go high-as will be readily supposed when he bought for George Montague 'two sweet children,' by Sir Peter Lely, 'for two pounds ten shillings,' and for himself much the best picture in the auction, a fine Vandyck of the famous Lady Carlisle and her sister Leicester in one piece it cost me nine-and-twenty guineas,' and sold, we may add, at the Strawberry Hill sale for two hundred and twenty guineas.

In those good old times, when cotton lords, and railway kings, and merchant millionaires, and great capitalist picture-dealers, and directors and projectors, whether of limited or unlimited liability, had not spoiled the market, and given to the room in King Street something too much the aspect of one in Capel Court, Christie's was a pleasant place of meeting and easy intercourse for littérateurs and loiterers, artists and amateurs, statesmen and bishops, dilettanti lords and fashionable dames, as well as the resort of keen-eyed dealers, Hebrew bargain-hunters, and the lean and seedy pickers-up of unconsidered trifles. Fine gentlemen and gaily-dressed ladies made it their trysting place. Sturdy Samuel Johnson (at times with his faithful Bozzy) might be seen there, as well as finical and supercilious Walpole. There, too, came Burke and Goldsmith, Wilson and Fuseli, Gainsborough and Garrick, now giving utterance to a criticism, now to a jest. And there, oracle of every visitor, was Sir Joshua himself, eartrumpet and snuff-box in hand, paying courteous attention alike to modest scholar, simpering peer, and patronizing peeress:

To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering, When they judged without skill he was still hard of hearing;

When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,

He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.'

Gilray's caricature shows us that Christie's long continued to be a fashionable lounge, where ladies appeared in low dress and feathers, gentlemen as they might have come direct from the drawing-room, doc

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tors in big wigs, and young bucks in cut-away coats and top-boots. Later again, Nollekens Smith records how he has often seen Mr. Cosway at the elder Christie's picture-sales, full-dressed in his sword and bag, with a small three-cornered hat on the top of his toupée, and a mulberry silk coat profusely embroidered with scarlet strawberries.' Surely such a visitant must have made radiant the dingy room! Our grandsires, as we very well know, did not always wrap themselves in broad-cloth and dull colours, but a coat like this must have been a rarity, one would fancy, even then. Poor Goldie's famous peach-blossom Filby-at which so many a witling has cast his little joke—would have looked dim alongside Cosway's mulberry silk. Mr. Cosway was a noticeable person in his day; and his presence, apart from his coat, would have brought sunshine any day into this shady place, for he was a lavish purchaser of bric-abrac. Cosway was the fashionable 'macaroni miniature - painter the Regency, prime favourite of the court and courtiers and of the Regent himself. Doubtless the reader saw and admired, and still remembers, his dainty miniaturesmarvels of grace and delicate finish -of the first gentleman of Europe,' his fair left-handed bride, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and many others, fairer and better than either, which were in the rich and rare Loan Exhibition at South Kensington in 1862. Without setting up for a medium, Cosway, like his contemporary Blake, was wont to hold intercourse with the spirit-world, and was a good deal less startled when he saw, as he told his friends he often did, Pitt or Praxiteles, or it might be Michael Angelo or Charles I., walk into his painting-room, than an assembly at Christie's would now be at such an apparition as that of his dapper little monkey-faced figure' (for so the satirists described him) clad in that mulberry silk coat profusely powdered over with scarlet strawberries, sword by his side, and three-cornered hat on the top of his toupée.

But though no such sights, and

few such men, may now be looked for there, Christie's yet offers a phase of London society worth observing. In the thick of the season, on the day of a great picture-sale, or, better still, on the preceding days when the pictures are on view, there is a gathering of art notables of no common mark. You may not meet the young painter or sculptor who has made one of the small sensations of the season-they as yet generally know little and care less about those who have preceded them in the race-but you will most likely see some of their seniors who have come to examine some treasure often heard of, never till now beheld; to chat over some longhidden and half-forgotten Reynolds or Gainsborough; to see once again works they remember seeing when first exhibited years ago, or perchance to look through the sketches and unfinished works of one who, after long struggling with them in friendly rivalry, only a month or two back succumbed to the inevitable fate. There, too, are kindhearted though somewhat stately cognoscenti of the old school-a rapidly diminishing class-great in the traditional history of every cherished specimen of Sir Joshua's urbane pencil, and the more famous examples of Italy and the Netherlands; and by them are the brisker and more æsthetical, but not less positive, and much less civil, dictators who now rule supreme in the realms of taste. There, again, are men of patrician eminence and historic name, anxious to add some much-vaunted British or foreign masterwork as a new heirloom to their gallery: hardly less eager, if it be a sale of crockery that is coming on, to secure a pet piece of true old Sèvres, or Henri-deux ware, or choice majolica. There also are the directors and keepers of our national collections, and, watching them with envious eye, the agents of foreign monarchs and museums. And then there is also that new class of buyers-product of our own day, spawn of our wealth-the speculative dealers and print publishers, who, as caterers to the hurrying, money-making, picture-buying lords

of the City and the north, have become an almost dominant power in the auction-room as well as in the studio, and who, by dint of neverending newspaper canards of semifabulous prices given for pictures and copyrights, and ambulatory exhibitions with sensation placards and loquacious canvassers, have made their names as familiar in every country town, and almost every village, as in London itself, and who move about here, as elsewhere, under the ever-present consciousness that they are the observed of many observers. The lower strata of buyers and spectatorsthe Israelitish brokers (Hebrew of the Hebrews); knock-out conspirators (abhorred of amateurs, collectors, and executors); sharp-set agents and small dealers on the watch for speculative lots;' and those queer visaged, and more queerly costumed lookers-on of doubtful calling, and sometimes of doubtful nativity and domicile, who may be seen at every important, and almost every unimportant, artauction, yet never buy or bid for anything- these are likewise in their way a noteworthy race—as our artist has pretty plainly indicated.

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Our

And the things to be sold are even better worth looking at than those who come to buy or assist at the buying of them. Pictures somehow always show to especial advantage in the plain businesslike rooms in King Street. older English pictures seldom look as well elsewhere-as it may be worth remembering if you contemplate investing here an odd hundred or two. Several of the paintings which seemed almost commonplace in the huge galleries of the International Exhibition have since shone like bright particular stars at Christie's. I have heard some excellent judges declare that Christie's is the best art-exhibition of the

London season. And with some allowance--and without disparagement to Trafalgar Square-we may admit that it is so. At any rate, it is in many respects the most interesting and suggestive; and certainly it is the most varied, for during the four months you have

not one collection but a constant succession, and of every quality, good, bad, and tolerable, as well as sometimes better and best.

The Christie who built the rooms in King Street, and who, as a Frenchman might say, created the place, died just sixty years ago. It is recorded of him in the contemporary obituary that with an easy and gentlemanlike flow of eloquence, he possessed, in a great degree, the power of persuasion.' The visitor will feel that the power of persuasion' has been inherited in a great degree' by the great man's descendants and successors, but he will witness little flow of eloquence' from the King Street rostrum now. That seems to have departed from our high-class auction-rooms with the late George Robins. One of the things in our art-auctions most noticed by our more demonstrative neighbours across the Channel is the quiet, orderly way in which the sale is conducted. As M. René Gersaint, an avowed admirer of our system, writes in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts,' The affair proceeds without gesticulation or outcry (but then those English abominate all unnecessary noise), every article being put up and sold strictly in the order of the catalogue.' Very true, retorts M. Ph. Burty, an opponent of M. Gersaint and his Anglomania-very true, but this wouldn't suit the latitude of Paris. Your cold and sensible English auctioneer addresses a public as sensible and as cold. Between the Parisian sales, so animated, noisy, and picturesque, and those silent, regular, and economic London ones, there is, I grant, as much difference as there is between French humour and British temperament. But I confess I prefer our excited, variable, Parisian sales to those frigid, orderly London ones, which follow an arrangement as precise and preordained as a railway time-table. Instead of having a picture sacrificed like a mere piece of merchandise, I am content to see the Parisian expert studying the gradations of enthusiasm in his public, and interrupting the puerile order of the catalogue in order to bring forward

at the right moment a Raffaelle or a Prudhon. It is clear at any rate, M. Burty concludes, that this manner of procedure is most likely to have with us French a favourable influence upon the proceeds of the sale.

With us English also, it would seem, from stray allusions in old books and journals, that once upon a time some such management was almost as much the custom at London picture sales as it is now at those of the Hôtel Drouot. At the present day, however, we are content to leave to the auctioneers and their experts of the neighbourhood of St. Paul's or Leicester Square this study of the gradations of enthusiasm in their bidders, for whose behoof a Raffaelle or a Morland-a Prudhon, it is to be feared, would be a name unknown to them-is always available at the right moment. Elsewhere we are content as we are. However it may be in Paris, it is pretty clear, from the prices they fetch, that in London good pictures little need any expert jockeying.

The prices obtained for works of art in the auction-room during the last few years, have, indeed, been very remarkable and suggestive, whether regarded as tests of an actual advance in their value, or as an indication of the fluctuations of taste and the influence of fashion. Look, for example, at the Bicknell sale of the last season, where a hundred English pictures sold for 55,000l., their cost to Mr. Bicknell having been less than half that sum: and it was not less remarkable as a sign of the times that the principal purchaser was a Manchester picture-dealer, who bought to the extent of upwards of 30,000l., and that in the very height of the cotton famine!

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Take another illustration. morning-it was the 8th of June, 1774-whilst Sir Joshua Reynolds was painting the portrait of a young bride, Lady Carysfort, the husband, in sauntering round the paintingroom, took a liking to a couple of pictures. They were both portraits: but then they were 'fancy portraits --one being the likeness of a merry

little girl, in semi-rustic costume, holding in her hands a pottle of strawberries; the other, a portrait of Mrs. Hartley and her child, represented as a Bacchante carrying the infant Bacchus on her shoulder. They were painted in the president's best manner, graceful in style, charming in expression, and resplendent in colour, and so my lord thought they would make a very pretty present for his young wife. The painter asked fifty guineas apiece for them-which sum is duly entered as received in his cash-book of that day. Some people cried out that it was an extravagant price for mere portraits-but both painter and purchaser, let us hope, were satisfied. Both we may be sure would have been incredulous if some seer had told them that one of these days these pictures would be eagerly competed for at Mr. Christie's, till, amid ringing cheers which would have astonished our Parisian critics, the hammer fell consigning them to new owners at some forty times their original cost. So it has been, however. The 'Strawberry Girl' was purchased by the Marquis of Hertford at Samuel Rogers' sale in 1856 for 2,100 guineas; whilst Mr. Armstrong bought the Mrs. Hartley and Child,' at the sale of Mr. Tunno's pictures in June 1863, for 1,850 guineas.

It is not, however, always in one way that the current runs. My older readers will remember a line engraving that had some popularity in its day: the subject' Calandrino and his Companions'-the unlucky wight of Boccaccio's story, who, fancying he has found the Eliotropia and become invisible, is receiving with rueful satisfaction the buffets of his wicked companions, who pretend they cannot see him: the painter, H. P. Briggs, R.A. The picture was a large one, almost gallery size, and when exhibited was thought very fine. What was paid for it I don't know. But it was engraved: it found a purchaser; and a prominent place in the drawing-room of a serjeant learned in the law. Well, the years rolled on. In the spring of 1859 it was submitted to Christie's

half the cost of the frame. Will there be for it any Resurgam? But pictures are not the only things in which there are these mutations. A few years ago the chief engraver to the Mint was Benedetto Pistrucci, the same who engraved the St. George on the old crown-piece-an Italian by birth, a gem-engraver by profession. He was a great fa

vourite with the old Hamilton school of classic dilettanti, many of whom in good faith declared him to be the prince of modern gem-engravers, and attested their faith by the prices they paid for his works. His masterpiece in this line was a cameo of blue chalcedony of the heads of Augustus and Livia. It was a commission, and he received for it 800l., being the largest sum ever given for such a work. This was about 1819 in 1859 it was sold at Sotheby's on the thirteenth day of the great Hertz sale for 30l.

As

If one could follow the fortunes or trace back the history of half the pictures, prints, gems, vases, whatnots, of which Mr. Christie determines the fate with that cold, impassive, matter-of-fact_indifference which so offends M. Burty's sensitiveness, doubtless we should have an infinity of equally noteworthy sermons in stones and canvas. it is, and lying ready on the surface, recent art-auction prices are SO curious and suggestive in many ways that it is surprising no one has thought of bringing together the more remarkable of them. No one, however, having done so, suppose we jot down a few. An exhaustive list-even a moderately full listis of course out of the question in a paper of this kind. But we may pick out here and there an example, say of the highest prices, in each of the several classes -sufficient for comparison and fairly comprehensive and thus furnish as suitable, perhaps as agreeable, a conclusion, or at the least one that will be as little tedious, as any other to this desultory paper. But it must be in a second part: the last line of this is run out.