He is swarthy in complexion, with dark curly hair, and nude save only for a crimson loin-cloth, his purple drapery being cast aside upon the grey rocks.

[7] The Fisherman and the Syren, which was painted for Signor Mario, the famous singer, initially received little friendly criticism, and the reception was generally lukewarm.

The story is of the mystic Undine tinge, and with a shadowy semblance  in it to that strange legend, current among the peasants of Southern Russia, of the "white Lady" with the long hair, who, with loving and languishing gestures, decoys the unwary into her fantastic skiff, then, pressing her baleful lips to theirs, folds them to her fell embrace, and drags them shrieking beneath the engulphing waves.

But there is evidence here even more pleasing that the painter, in the gift of a glowing imagination, and a refined ideality, in his mastery of the nobler parts of pictorial manipulation, is worthy to be reckoned among the glorious brotherhood of disciples of the Italian masters—of the Grand Old Men whose pictures, faded and time-worn as they are, in the National Gallery hard by, laugh to scorn the futile fripperies that depend for half their sheen on gilt frames and copal varnish.

He has plainly drunk long and eagerly at the Painter's Castaly: the fount of  beauty and of grace that assuaged the thirst of those who painted the "Monna Lisa" and the "Belle Gardinière;" who modelled the "Horned Moses" and the "Slave;" who designed Peter's great Basilica, and the Ghiberti Gates at Florence.