THE “FINE ARTS.” Prang’s Cliromo-l.lt&ographa. / ‘ The last “chromo" received by us from Messrs' Prang & Co., (of No. 159 Wash lngton Sb. Boston, neither much better nor much worse than most J ' of Us predecessors which represented the human 4 '* figure, is from a picture of Eastman Johnson’s, j i It is entitled'‘Whittier’s Barefooted Boy,” (Bare 4, ’ foot Boy?) and Is" probably very nearly as good as the original painting, which wo do not rothem her to have seen. It completely represents the merits and defects of that popular palntor, whom . ,1- wo are compelled to put forth as one of our prin* cipal figure artists. The merits of Mr. Johnson wo take to be decency, propriety, a vein of pleas antry, which will never bring the blush to tho cheek of tho young person, a j taste for little Idylls worthy of Mrs. Sigourney) and a good heart. -Without stopping for the un gracious task of reckoning up his dofects, we will elmply mention 6omo of the qualities of this pic ture. I A path winding round the base of a little knoll leads plnmp into a piece of water, an eccentricity which is not explained by the rock which emerges, for there are no Indications of other stepping-stones, and the water seems to get deopor towards the foreground. A cascade, a remarkablo natural phenomenon, leaps from the heart of the little hill and falls Into the water os if from a hydrant. A fat boy who has leaped from tho bank to the rock Is standing proudly upon it, his hands in his pockets, apparently wondering what ho had hotter do next His face is circular, like, that of a doll, with chorryllps, peach cheeks, and 1 huckleberry eyes. He is strictly bare' /ot. Tho hands are hidden. The two feet, which are the heroes of Mr. Johnson’s picture, have no bones in them, and resemble uncooked sausages. But we do not •care to go very far into tho technical manage ment of so very humble a work of art, or we might ask some explanation about tho shade on . this figure, is distinct on the face, Vague andiconfnscd oh'itke pn the panta* Ibons, weak on the lege, land again black and •opaque on the rock. ./Whoever has seen the real barefoot boy of American country life ; lithoand wiry and thin as a young savage, the down on his little kiln-dried legs bnrnt perfectly white, his ' absurd little dark lace dressed with dry, white, lustreless eyebrows and hair, his large, bony’ ■tough feet ready to leap upon the sharpest stones of tho brook as if thoy were feathers, a creature ; never in his life erect like Mr. Johnson’s model, - ,J. ll ,'bnt”rercver "crawling, dodging under willow-" y ' • ' brunches or peering in the holes of the bank for and watersnakes; large-jointed and r slim-bodied as a colt, yet not ungraceful in his “ : # place j whoever has this ideal in his eye w.ill not ■ jL 6co much life or nature in Mr. Johnson’s pretty •FVcherub, planted on his rock like a French doll ■Jj. /with pegs in its heels. Jf Mr. Prang was, however, judicious in selecting 4 this picture for the efforts of his lithographers, for it is clearly a picture: that will sell. The var. cherry lip and the circular rouged cheek will find a hundred admirers, where the unkempt, ' unlieked animal of the roadside would secure one. Giving the publisher our tribute of admira tion for his sagacity, we may examino tho quali ties of the work as a lithograph. Though not so * '"i large and ambitions as many of Mr. Prang’s pro > ■ •dnctipUß, we find it about ad good as any, and h' t v?e may safely tako it for a text In onr little ser /J "‘mon on the art of chromo-lithograghy. '! The rampant popularity ofjhis newish style of i i picture 1b shameful because it Is empirical. Tho . ■' “chromo” sells because jn it economical buyers > secure at a trifling price what thoy hope will de v celve their friends. They wißh to figure as pa-’ trons of painting by tho connivance of the print ing press. We will just instance a few of the poor tricks which the publishers use to aid them r , in this pitiful ambition, reminding the reader 3r\ • that true art is at the utmost possible distance from deception, and that the moment she lends ,’ herself to the actual endeavor to bo taken for what she is not,' (as in waxwork) she covers her self with vulgarity. A principle so obvious, so well known and so often eloquently explained, is not worth any argument here, but only the bare statement. The tricks used to mako Mr. Prang’s litho graph of the Barefoot Boy deceive, the spectator and be taken by him for Mr. JoL*'‘on’s original . picture, arc as lollows: The lithograph, after I ’ being printed in colors upon n“ sheet of paper, '.:i gives place to the following arts of charlatanism. . An embossed stamp of some kind is pressed upon the paper to give it the surface of threads in ; _ relief, like the surface of canvas; it is on the same principle that the look of linen 1b given to ;* the ordinary paper collar. Then, in the places I**" where the painting had been exeented with :J loaded touches, so as to plaster the canvas with if' color In relief, these dabß or blisters are rather skilfully imitated in the embossing, the shape of '•' a dragging load of solid color, as it fringes off ?; at the edge by the clinging of indi vidual bristles, being applied with some care to emaUmats of flat color in the print. This is the modeler’s best trick, the one of which ho is vainest, and which he always sets in some bright and gaudy passage of his work, where the most ignorant starer will declare that he can see “the very touches of the brush.” Two other little bits -of deception may bo noticed as hating been in. troduced by the connivance of the draughtsman •himself. A rapid landscape painter, wishing to represent the sky shining through his trees, often paints his tree broadly, and then with hasty spots of solid blue or gray color introduces the heavens beyond; his work is for effect and inaccurate, because the spaces formed by intersecting branches are sharply angular, while his own touches tend to bo round. Now a litho grapher, working with the point, has not the same temptation to brood brushing, and it is no convenience to him to introduce his sky su perficially in this way; but our chromo-artist, sold to deceit, goes to work and imitates the painted effect at great disadvantage, saving out ■, the roundish.holes through his trees, and work ing around them with the shading which repro '® sents the foliage. Again, one of the recognized ' • * effects of oil painting is to cover the parts in ’ A tended for high-lights with a dark tone, and then ‘jp, to drag a dry brush loaded with light body-color i roughly across it: some little holes will remain ' 1 where the body-color has not caught, and where the dark ground will show through, giving a valuable effect of transparency to the plastered high-light Now these little dark holes or specks in a light ground, peculiar to oi] painting nnd dear to the oil-painter’s eye, we see here neatly imitated by means of fine pencil touches irregularly stippled over the white. The • lithographer, of course, works by the converse method; it is imitating lace by painting holes on white paper with bfacking. Again, in a painting, the face and other flesh-parts are often manipu lated and scraped until they are smoother than the other surfaces; this Se a peculiarity of bad and childish art, for a great painter will execute bis flesh with the same happy dash as his drapery, and his drapery with the same ' living intelligence as his face. Mr. lithographer, however, has apparently never seen any good art - nnd hoisglad to leave out all his embossing - ovor ■ 'the flesh-surfaces, thus getting a smooth oasis £Uke : the rice-paper face glued on to a Chinese r screen), on which he may work up, to the ut >anosl fincsße of a worrying pencil, the dimples, the little greasy light on the end of the nose, the ~ajmfko'ln : Ui e- ®y es r^ n °“the-hlaek pits with which such artists always finish the comers of the mouth. We will not gc Into more of these •%ffa-.u more; We’will only state that the publisher, after his servant, thh lithographer, has dose his.best to fool the public by Imitating the broad, plastery touches of painters, comes to. the work with half a dozen neat tricks of his own; if ho deems the plctnre an important one, ho prepares a strotchor, strains canvas across it, pastes his emboksod paper-collar snrfaced drawing on the canvas/ until it Is only by tho dog’s-oaring of the paper that the differ ence can bo'readily told; then vanishes the drawing like a canvas, prohibits the glass cover which the tenderness of a paper picture demands, prohibits the white margin which. Is the privilege of all cartoon-art; frequently signs the pointer’s name m the coiner In letters painted or apuarently painted; refuses the copyist the rightful prlvl ; ege of signing, and frames, his work in tho deep-hovelled frames usually assigned to oil paintings. : Ono boon he denios himself. Every Ameri can manufacturer longs to embellish his product with his name in fnll and the date of his patent But the sham Of tho “chromo" publisher would be exposed by tho luxury: you cannot fancy an oil-picture with “Prang’s Registered" on the forehead of the principal beauty. The publisher, true to art and to his pocket, remains nameless, in sublimeabnegatlon, We do not see tho journal issued by Mr. Prangi out we seem to have heard that he audaciously presents j his false-collar /pictures as, “Art,” talks big about “reduplicating the chef d'auvres of great artists for economical buyers,” and so on. ’ Mr. Prang will hardly expect us to answer his own puffs gravely 'We do hot believe him to be a very ignorant man Hoknowßthat every material ip Which a work of aTt can he executed Is noble until it begins to be a deception. He knows that a wooden column is noble until It is fluted and painted or Banded to imitate stone. A sketch with a burned match is noble. A .sketch with mud is noble; there is a fine bust made of mud. in tho Louvre, called the Benivieni Bust, So magni Scent that the whole art-world of Europe is qnarelllng about its origin. A painting is noble, and the black and white en graving after it is noble. A lithograph is as ar tistic as anything, for a certain class of effects- And it might be even colored to. improve lt,»if the color were managed by an artist. Bat when a publisher Causes his draughtsmen to imitate,with great pains, the peculiar methods of painting, executing with painful roundabouts oi the point the sweeping charm of tho brash, and then plaster ing, backing, and stagily dressing up his swindle till it appears io bo.Bomething it is not, he is no fnrlhorer of tho ends of art, but of the ends of waxworks. His lithographers gain less than nothing by the embossing we havo mentioned, and they know it if he does not. Their pictures are among the most creditable of Ameri can lithographs. Present them, with the deep dull black of bnrnt grape-skins for their shadows, on good paper, with broad white margins, and have the glimmer of glass between them and the spectator, and he knows, and we know, andhU ar tists know, that they would look infinitely better, sb pictures. Bat then—they would no longer be taken by Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Brown for auction, bargains in oil-painting secured by the line tact of Mrs. Smith. Hctrospcctlon, We were interested in examining a large and epdnking plctnre jnst issued in lithograph < by McKinney