One of them is his own portrait, now in the Tate Gallery, which is masterly in its brushwork, with a Rubens-like quality in its rich impasto of brilliant colour, its fine amber tones, and its translucent carnations. Another of his finest portraits is that of Sir Charles Wyndham, in his character of David Garrick at the moment of recognizing Ada—"If I had but known." It is not only a brilliant portrait, but a magnificent piece of characterization, summing up and seizing all the intensity of the actor's emotion at the most dramatic moment of the play. It required a great actor so to express, almost in silence, by the look of a moment, that world of sorrow and regret. It was a great painter who could catch and throw upon his canvas the poignant emotion of an "instant made eternity."

The greatness of Pettie's art owes much to his strong personality. His art was the immediate response to his own vigorous nature, and rarely has an artist's temperament been more absolutely reflected in subject as well as style. A painting of action was to Pettie, vigorous and robust, as natural a fulfilment of his own spirit as was an exquisite dreamy nocturne to Whistler, the fragile man of nerves and sentiment. Nature and inclination led Pettie to the dramatic motive, the treatment of anecdote, the representation of the "brute incident." He loved romance; he delighted in costly stuffs, in frills and ruffles, silks and satins, the glitter of a sword, the sheen of military accoutrements. His work shows the possession of that quality which the formal critics of literature call vision. He actually saw the things that he painted, as they really were, in their own atmosphere, whether of the seventeenth century or of fifty years ago, whether they were things of State, plots and deep-laid treachery, or things of romance—the tragedies and humours of life, whether in palace, camp, or country lane. His pictures are quick and alive—une tranche de la vie. It is no mean art that can give on one canvas the whole spirit and circumstance of a period in history.

Though Pettie's subjects make a universal appeal, his claim to greatness must rest on something higher than this. The great picture depends for its greatness not on its subject, but on a combination of inherent qualities of line, form, colour, and chiaroscuro. The greatest of these, the very language of the painter, is colour; and in colour Pettie excelled. As a young student in Edinburgh he used to visit George Paul Chalmers at his lodgings, and stay talking with him till he had to remain all night. So they would retire to bed, still talking, till they fell asleep; and, says Chalmers' biographer, "their talk was all of colour." Whether in shadow or light, Pettie's colour has, in a high degree, those qualities of resonance and vibration which distinguish the masters of this essential of the painter's craft. He loved colour not only for its full brilliance, its magnificent contrasts, its satisfying opulence, but also for its suave delicacy, its possibilities of subtle orchestration. It is as a great colourist that he will live.

In a brief note like this, intended mainly as an introduction to an admirable series of reproductions of Pettie's work, it is impossible to picture the man, or to analyze adequately his work and his methods. I should like, however, to add here two extracts from unpublished letters by him, which have recently come into my hands and throw some light on the man and his attitude towards his work. To a question about the number of versions of his picture "The Laird," he writes as follows: