ANIMAL PAINTING 71 



version but of realisation. In 1876, at the time of 

 the address referred to above, even artists seem to 

 have thought that the impossible stuffed birds and 

 beasts in museums were lifelike presentations of 

 reality. Flower took the trouble to go round the 

 Royal Academy Exhibition to look at the animal 

 paintings there. Whether he took the idea from 

 Frank Buckland, or whether Buckland, who attended 

 and was much delighted with the address referred 

 to above, took the idea from him and made it 

 one of the annual features of Land and Water, 

 does not appear. But what Flower saw so sur- 

 prised him, that he took his audience into his 

 confidence, remarking that though he had seen many 

 beautiful landscapes and other paintings, they con- 

 tained representations of absolutely impossible birds 

 and beasts, which never could exist or have existed, 

 and that these were apparently copied from the 

 stuffed objects accepted as being representative of 

 nature. The indifference of the time to this very 

 obvious side of truth to nature is rather striking, 

 because Landseer was painting his best at that 

 period, and also Wolf and Herring, as well as Mr. 

 Briton Riviere, whose works Flower much admired. 

 But some other great artists seem to have been 

 blind to facts of the kind until their attention was 

 drawn to the defects. Readers who visited the first 

 and best collection of Millais' works ever brought 

 together may remember his very early pre-Raphaelite 

 pictures. In one of these, in which Ariel is 



