Fight (Salon, 1847), is vastly inferior to his later work. Neither can The Age of Augustus, a grand historic work purchased by the government in 1855, be called a full exhibition of his powers. It has been charged that he has a love for the horrible and repulsive; but it is rather true that he loves the horrible than the repulsive. Certainly in the famous Death of Julius Cæsar there is nothing repulsive. One of his best finished and expressive works is L'Eminence Grise, which we reproduce here. The title may be translated The Gray Cardinal, and represents a scene at the court of the famous Franciscan cardinal who ruled France so austerely. Note the obsequiousness of attitude of the courtiers. Other famous paintings are The Wife of Candaules, Gladiators bidding Farewell to Cæsar, The Bull-Fighter, The Call to Prayer, Arab at the Fountain, Frederic the Great, The Gladiators, and The Prisoner. Several of his finest paintings are owned in this country. Notwithstanding the very great number of his pictures there is no more painstaking artist. He deals with passion, with terror, with death, in a coldly polished manner; but his coldness has a strange fascination, and the polish is not a smooth prettiness, but the result of the highest technical skill. The Street Scene in Cairo, for instance (and this is equally true of L'Eminence Grise), is a precious example of delicate and elaborate workmanship, filled with figures, replete in incident, rich in color, A point in which he is wonderfully good is the painting of greyhounds, and several of his pictures contain beautiful illustrations. of this, brought in incidentally. Gérôme and Meissonier, though both chiefly genre painters, can hardly be compared or considered as rivals, so distinct and unlike are they in style, composition and choice of subjects.

Of a lower grade of genius than the four painters we have last mentioned, but still distinctly above the great crowd of French artists of talent is Alexandre Cabanel. He was born at Montpellier in 1823, and became a pupil of Picot. In 1844 he exhibited his Agony of Christ, and in the following year gained the second prize, and, a vacancy occurring at Rome, was granted the pension, and studied there some time. His Death of Moses (1851), now in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington, was one of his first really great works. Perhaps his greatest skill lies in his beautiful delineation of flesh tints;

some critics have charged him with being a trifle effeminate, but this is too strong a criticism; tender or sentimental would be the better word. His best works are The Glorification of St. Louis (1855), Portrait of Napoleon III. (1865), Death of Francisca da Rimini, Giacomina, The Salamite, Lucretia and Sextus Tarquin (1876), and Marguerite, sold at the Latham sale in New York for $2,700. He has painted many excellent portraits. An oddly expressed and not altogether true French criticism on certain of his portraits was that in executing them. he "had entered the sugar-house."

Jean Jacques Henner is almost exclusively a painter of religious subjects. He was a pupil of Drölling and of Picot. One of his earliest pictures to attract attention was The Chaste Susanna (1865). St. John the Baptist (1877), The Dead Christ (1878), and The Magdalene, exhibited also in 1878, are his best paintings. The last picture, especially, has gained enthusiastic praise from the critics, and has been called not unworthy of the brush of Correggio, M. Henner has also painted works on other than sacred subjects, which, though not equal to the former, are yet of very great merit. Such are An Idyll, A Naiad, and The Evening.

Léon J. F. Bonnat is emphatically a portrait and figure painter, and though a Frenchman by birth and residence, belongs rather to the Italian than to the modern French school. His portrait will be found in our group of living French Painters. M. Bonnat was born at Bayonne in 1833. He studied under Frederic Madrazo at Madrid, but when of age came to Paris and placed himself under the tuition of Léon Cogniet. He took the second prix de Rome, and though he had failed of the grand prize, was assisted by appreciative friends and by his native town in pursuing his art studies in Italy for five years. His first work to attract any attention was Adam and Eve finding the Body of Abel (1863). Two or three of his genre pictures received moderately favorable criticism, and in 1866 his St. Vincent de Paul Taking the Place of a Convict was enthusiastically praised, as was also the Assumption. This encouraged M. Bonnat to attempt the great subject of The Crucifixion, on which so many artists have ignominiously failed. The strongest criticism on this was that it represented, not God dying for the human race, but a tortured man writhing in his last agony. On the whole it would seem that M.Bonnat is more at home

in the treatment of lighter subjects, as is shown in the Tenerezza, which we introduce to the reader's notice. Other paintings in the same school are A Woman of Ustaritz (1872), Italian Dancers (1879), the Elder Sister, A Negro Barber, and A Fellah Woman and her Child. Among the best of the famous portraits by his hand are those of M. Thiers, and of Victor Hugo. His efforts in diverse directions have been characterized by René Ménard, who says that "the painter of the graceful little figures, so hotly disputed by amateurs, has never forgotten that he ought to be an historical painter." Carolus Duran has some resemblance in style to both the

Flemish and Spanish

schools. His powers as a colorist a re

very great, and his treatment is as original as it is charming. He was born at Lille in 1838, and is a pupil of Souchon. He began his studies in

Paris in 1853, and it is re

lated as an

possible to give them the expression of unconstrained merriment and childish fun.

Like Millet, Jules Adolphe Bréton finds his subjects in the life of the peasant, but he sees rather more clearly the poetic side of that life. There is no painter in regard to whom the voices of the critics are more unanimous; and the value of his paintings is constantly rising. His choice of colors is always a most happy one; and Edmond About has represented him as "having his hands full of light."

M. Bréton was born at Courrières in 1827. Drölling and Devigne were his masters. His landscapes

illustration of the thoroughness of his method, that at the Louvre he copied La Jaconde more than a score of times. In 1861 he went to Rome, and there painted his first picture to be exhibited in the Salon, the Evening Prayer (1863). The Victim of Assassination (1866), was his first great success. He soon discovered that his greatest genius lay in the direction of portrait painting, and since ten years ago has done little else, though in 1878 he exhibited a Gloria Maria Medicis, a ceiling painted for a hall in the Luxembourg Museum. He has painted a very fine portrait of Émile Girardin, and many readers will remember that of Mlle. Croisette, the actress, sent to the Philadelphia Centennial. His portraits of children are especially happy, particularly when it is

are acknowledged to be the best of contemporary art. One of those first produced by him, Bénédiction des Blés (The Blessing of the Hay), has never been surpassed by any modern artist. Historical and genre painting has rather crowded landscape art to the side

in France, and it is gratifying that the honor of that branch is so well sustained by Bréton and Millet. The subject of this sketch knows how to soften the harshness of rustic life, to infuse sentiment without falling into sentimentality, to make his figures and his landscape react upon each other and produce a harmonious whole. The Weed Gatherers (1861), The Recall of the Gleaners (1859), Evening (1861), A Gleaner (1867) are all of great beauty and of singularly equal and even execution. It is inevitable that Bréton's choice of landscape painting should render him less popular with the great mass of picture buyers than his more showy contemporaries; but he is, as Hamerton remarks, a true poet and true painter, with an infusion of

delicate humor which reaches our sympathies at

once.

It is in the last few years only that the works of Jules Bastien Lepage have attracted discussion and controversy. Various adjectives of curious import have been attached to his name. He has been called versatile, perplexing, paradoxical, unconventional, eccentric. Perhaps he has secured a higher appreciation in England than in France, and in a degree he may be said to belong to the school of which Rossetti and Burne-Jones are exponents rather than to that of Millet and Cabanel, though he is a pupil of the latter. But perhaps the word psychologist expresses the peculiar purpose and theory of his art better than any other. Add to this that his technique is unapproachable, and one gets a fair idea of the man's peculiar genius.

the Song of Spring. Unlike most French artists, he has never studied in Italy. Of his later and more successful pictures, Les Foins is a splendid landscape; Saison d'Octobre and Pauvre Fauvette are scarcely inferior; Père Jacques and the Beggar are good figure pieces; and as a portrait his Sarah Bernhardt is very fine. Some have classed Bastien Lepage with the Pre-Raphaelites, but such an arbitrary classification is only partly true. A striking realism, an absolute fidelity to nature, is carried far beyond the pretensions of the English Pre-Raphaelite school.

We must not omit to mention the Jeanne d'Arc, which is, all in all, Bastien Lepage's greatest work, and has almost every quality except that of simplicity. In Painting, this artist has been compared to Zola in Fiction, but, be it understood, without reference to Zola's love of the indecent. He has painted many water - color sketches which are rapidly increasing in value.

Theodore Rousseau is another landscape painter of some prominence (born at Paris, 1812; died, 1867). A general criticism on his art is that he is better in conception than in execution; and that his pictures are very uneven in quality. His admirers claim that he was one of the very first to break down the mannerisms of the old artificial school of landscape painters, exemplified by Poussin; to have "emancipated the landscapepainters as Moses formerly liberated the Hebrews." Rousseau was a pupil of GuillouLethière. If the price obtained be regarded as a criterion, Hoar-Frost in his best work. His Water course at Sologne, Sunset, Forest of Fontainebleau and A Pool beneath some Oaks are good specimens of his talent. Some of his paintings.

have been sold for upward of $10,000. Speaking of his early struggles with the Conventional School, Edmond About remarks: "In that line Rousseau occupied the first rank in landscape, above all as a colorist; but neither the Institute nor the public wished to confess it. His incontestable talent was contested by all the world. It is only to-day that his reputation is made." It can scarcely be doubted that in the case of Rousseau success was productive of carelessness.

The school in which Jules Dupré gained his first