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and thus less painful. What he can do, or try to do, is to create for himself a perceptual area bounded by limited expectations. The work of the young American photographer Diane Arbus provides, perhaps, the most graphic modern example of this kind of attempt at reconstruction we can find. Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971; but during the years before her death she sought out with her camera circus freaks, mental defectives, grotesque human beings with every form of physical deformity. She wrote of her subjects

"Freaks were a thing I photographed a lot ... I just used to adore them ... suddenly you were a remarkable creature."

Trying to map out a world in which she might not after all, be an outcast, Diane Arbus shrugged off

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conventional ideals, and thus demonstrates a style that can be followed through the work of most writers who suffered from depressive illness.

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Eugène Fromentin - The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland - 1875

Dutch painting, it is quickly perceived, was and could only be the portrait of Holland, its exterior image, faithful, exact, complete, and like, with no embellishment. Portraits of men and places, citizen habitats, squares, streets, country places, the sea and the sky, - such was to be, reduced to its primitive elements, the programme followed by the Dutch School, and such it was from its first day to the day of its decline. In appearance nothing can be more simple than the discovery of this art of earthly aim; but until they tried to paint it, nothing had been imagined equally vast and more novel. p 131

Thence resulted a sort of universal humanity,