very little perception of the value of a picture beyond that; and it is much to be regretted that it is so: the French public appear to be a good deal more enlightened in this respect. But the school of critics and artists who would condemn all interest in the subject of a picture, and ask us to regard it only as a symphony of line and colour, are narrow in their own way also. They are ignoring or underrating the function of painting as an interpreter and illustrator, which, however it be a secondary function, is not to be despised, and is one which the world will not learn to do without in deference to an exaggerated preciosité.

There seems to be rather a lull in the creative spirit in painting and sculpture this year, both in France and England. The Academy has no one work of predominating interest to show; and at the Salon some of the most eminent men are not up to their usual level. There is a flux and reflux of this kind in various years, for which no obvious cause can be assigned; the spirit of art, like the wind, bloweth where it listeth, and we cannot tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. The author of Le Jugement de Paris and Les Grâces Florentines, for instance, is not equal to himself in La Fontaine de Jouvence; there is the usual fine colour and composition, but the element of poetry seems wanting; his Fontaine de Jouvence is rather too Parisian. Nevertheless, the picture (which has been bought by the Government) would make most things in the Academy look weak, and it may serve as an occasion for pointing out that M. Gervais, whose name and works seem curiously unknown in England, is a perfectly different person from M. Gervex, with whom he seems generally to be confounded, and who is but a clever painter of sensationalities, with no sense of colour, while M. Gervais is a great colorist with a monumental style. At the Academy, on the other hand, there is a certain interest in the fact of finding one or two able artists breaking new ground. Mr. Ralph Peacock, for instance, painter of children's portraits, surprises us with a fine Alpine landscape. I heard it objected that it does not show its scale; to which the reply is, Neither do the mountains themselves'; nothing is more deceptive in regard to scale than mountain scenery in a clear atmosphere. Then Mr. Bacon has been suddenly inspired by the memory of Mr. Furse to paint an equestrian group life size, in which the action of the horse seems almost too palpably borrowed from his gifted predecessor; but it is a fine work filled with a fine large atmosphere, and testifies at least to the artist's versatility.'

Were one asked to name the most perfect picture of the year, in an artistic sense, I think I should say M. Paul Chabas' Sur la Rivière at

In connexion with this picture an interesting example of the futilities of art critics is worth citing; a critic in a weekly paper having remarked that 'a bay horse would have done better in front of that sky than a chestnut.' Any one (with eyes) who looks at the picture will appreciate the joke.

the Salon; a group of three girls in a boat. The subject is of the slightest in fact, it hardly has a subject; but it is perfect in style, in balance, in that reality without realism which knows just where to stop. Of the very large decorative pictures for which the wall space of the Salon affords at once the opportunity and the temptation, the prominent one, facing the entry to the large room at the top of the staircase, is M. Detaille's Chant du Départ; an array of soldiers in the background flourishing swords; three field-pieces in the foreground, painfully pushed forward muzzle first by men straining at the wheels, a business which certainly would not carry them far on their départ ; and a genius on a flying horse in the air. M. Detaille is a splendid painter of actual warfare. He paints like a soldier, one may say; but he is no use when he gets into the field of fancy, neither here nor in his blaring Chevauchée à la Gloire, which hung in the same place two or three years ago, and now profanes the Sanctuary of the church once dedicated to St. Geneviève. And he has no sense of colour either, which does not matter so much in realistic war pictures, but cannot be dispensed with in decorative allegory. After all, Rude has symbolised the Chant du Départ once for all in his sublime sculpture on the Arc de l'Etoile, and it had better have been left at that; certainly Detaille will not make us forget Rude. Opposite to him M. Béroud has an extraordinary tour de force on an immense scale, entitled La Ruée, a coined word which may be translated The Scramble ; a motley crowd pushing and jostling through a gateway into the temple of Fame or Fortune, whichever it is. Is it a symbol of the Salon exhibition? It is a violent and obstreperous piece of work. Happily there are decorative paintings of another type to be seen; M. Henri Martin's calm and umbrageous L'Etude, a decorative panel for the Sorbonne-groups of men, in garb just sufficiently removed from realism, studying or conversing beneath the trees; and M. Raphael Collin's two ceilings intended for the Prefecture of Haute-Vienne. Like the late M. Marioton (a specialist in ceiling paintings), M. Collin knows that figures in a ceiling painting should float, not stand or sit. M. Courtois' large painting for the walls of the Salle des Mariages at Neuilly, in the new Salon, is also a good work, though Le Paradis Perdu seems a sinister title to choose for a Salle des Mariages; but the moral is taken care of, the point is the contrast between the blessed idleness of the Garden of Eden on one side of the picture, and the man who has to work for wife and child on the other side. Two rather remarkable efforts in symbolic decoration have been made by a lady, Mlle. Dufau, in two pictures for the Salle des Autorités at the Sorbonne, symbolising astronomy, mathematics, &c. The symbolism, through human figures, is oddly conceived, but kept quite out of the plane of realism, and the paintings are really decorative. It is this sense of decorative effect in a picture (whether actually intended as decoration or not) which seems more

present in French art than in English. Is not that the real want in Sir H. von Herkomer's remarkable collection of portraits of the Council of the Royal Academy? As a set of portraits, both as to likeness and character, it is admirable, but how very unattractive in a pictorial sense! One cannot fancy a French artist of anything like equal talent painting a picture so devoid of the decorative element.

Of paintings which commemorate historic scenes there is an unusual dearth in this year's Salon; indeed, there are only two worth mention: M. Faivre's rather powerful and dramatic painting of the death of Madame de Lamballe, which is like a page out of Carlyle, and M. Jacquier's of the burning of the captured standards in the courtyard of the Invalides before the entrance of the conquering armies into Paris in 1814, of which, to say truth, more might have been made. M. J. P. Laurens exhibits a large and somewhat bewildering picture entitled La Musique, with a colossal figure of Beethoven (in boots) seated on a kind of altar in the middle of the composition, dream figures floating in the air around him, and at the foot a vision of a realistic concert room with a conductor flourishing his baton-a weird kind of jumble, which will not add to the artist's reputation. But there are some very interesting smaller works dealing with episodes in real life: the Diabolo of M. Kowalsky (who, in spite of his name, is a born Parisian), a beautiful girl playing with the fashionable toy in a sunlit meadow, a picture full of grace and brightness; M. Jules Lefebvre's pathetic little work Abandonnée; and a very fine work by M. Hirschfield (a Russian by birth but the pupil of three great French painters), L'Aveu-figures of an old and a young lady seated in twilight beneath some trees, the action of the two expressing a moment of strong emotion; no realism of detail; the whole is kept in a subdued tone in which nothing obtrudes to interfere with the main interest of the picture. Pathetic too is a work by a Budapest artist, M. Szenes, Mea Culpa, a girl seated alone in a wood with a tragic expression of remorse on her face. A very small interior by M. Lecomte, Seule, is one of the finest things of this class in the exhibition. It represents a dimly lighted room with a huge state bed and a lady alone in it; it might have been suggested by Marcel Prévost's Mariage de Juliette and 'le grand lit Louis Quinze,' only it is rather too serious for that. It is a fine little picture, reminding one of some of the small interiors by Fantin-Latour.

The Salon is of course full of what the student in The Wrecker called 'conscientious nudes,' many of them commonplace but harmless. M. Lalire's hashes of nudes have gradually dwindled from thirty feet square to six or eight feet; and of four nude pictures that might be called distinctly coarse and vulgar three are by foreigners; one by a Spaniard (perfectly detestable); two by American artists, one of them a lady, whose picture (in the New Salon), Femme Nue, gives one to

reflect. For this is a most able work as to execution; but then surely the object of the nude figure-for an exhibition, at all events-is beauty. A fat vulgar woman seated naked in a chair, with a broad grin on her face, may have been a capital study for the painter, but is not a sight any of us want to see; nor do I believe any English artist of the kind we should call 'lady' would exhibit such a picture in London under her own name. It is quite certain the Academy would not hang it; it would have to go to the New English Art Club, where they do not mind ugly things. Nor would the Academy hang M. Comerre's Le Triomphe du Cygne, in other words Leda, with a voluptuous quotation from Ponthier's poems appended; the Lord Chamberlain or the Society for the Suppression of Vice would be down on them (not without excuse). But it cannot be denied that this is a fine picture, and so far more tolerable than Mrs. Lee-Robbins's woman in the chair, which is sheer vulgar ugliness. Beautiful things there are, though: a lovely little sleeping Diana by M. Mercié, the great sculptor; M. Jacob's Baigneuse, a lady seated for a moment on the rocks with her face seen in profile gazing towards the sea; and a fine little genre picture, an interior with a nude figure of very noble cast, by a Belgian artist, Herr Dolf van Roy. The fourth nude that I call vulgar, though clever enough, a big woman sitting up on her bed and yawning, by M. Martens, is bought by the State, which, in its purchases of pictures, seems to select either nudes (to encourage drawing presumably) or pictures, however ugly, with a moral of life, like M. Pierre's hideous group of paupers, L'Euvre de la Bouchée du Pain. In the Academy the one nude worth anything is Mr. Solomon's Eve, which, though the picture rather looks as if it were trying to be Watts, without Watts's colour, is really a beautiful and finely designed figure, and a picture which places its author higher than he has stood before.

In portraiture, on the whole, the Academy ranks higher than the Salon; there is more effort, with English artists, to make pictorial effect out of a portrait, as in Mr. Shannon's fine group of Mrs. Geoffrey Lubbock and her children, in which fine composition and colour do not preclude the maintenance of distinct character in the heads. Then there is Mr. Mouat Loudan's open-air portrait of Mrs. Hugh Norris, a composition fashioned on the Gainsborough model, and with a fine grace and dignity pervading it. The only important portrait in the Salon which has the same kind of charm is M. Humbert's of Mlle. Hatto (bought by the State, I know not why), a full-length in the open air, in which all the lines of landscape and sky harmonise with the design of the figure; in this instance perhaps the French artist is even superior to the Englishman. The typical French portrait is that by M. Bonnat of a lady in a red dress with a fur boa-brilliant, realistic, and hard; no doubt a capital likeness, but not attractive as a picture. One of the most captivating portraits in the Salon is by an English artist, Mr. Harris Brown; a lady seated dressed in

pearl-grey, with her arms outstretched each way on the back of the seat; he owes something to his sitter, who has a very interesting and expressive countenance. M. Bordes, in his portrait of Mlle. M. de S- gives something of the same quasi-dramatic interest, representing his sitter as if caught in a moment of interest in a conversation, leaning forward with a book in her hand, not as if formally sitting for her portrait; but this kind of lifelike treatment is exceptional in the Salon portraits. M. Cormon makes a pretty picture, however, of a young girl with a large bunch of wild flowers in her arms. Then there is M. Aman-Jean in the New Salon (one of the lights of the ultramodern school), who paints a life-size portrait with a texture that rather makes the whole look as if it were painted on a carpet, so that you think of it not as a portrait but as a study in texture and colour; the method overpowers the subject. The same might be said, with more emphasis, of Mr. Brangwyn's curious performance, The Return, at the Academy, which looks like a piece of tapestry, and would in fact make an admirable cartoon for tapestry. It is the function of tapestry to show a blend of colours and leave something for the eye to find out as to its design and intent; it is not a picture but a hanging; but in a picture we really do want to see what the subject is, and cannot be put off with a colour pattern.

Of pictures which are representations of incident rather than compositions with an artistic aim solely, the value depends to some extent on the interest of the incident as well as on the truth and vivacity of the representation, a view of the matter which is of course heresy to the L'Art pour l'Art order of critic. But life is life, humanum nihil a nobis alienum; and art is justified in portraying life for its own sake, as at once a record and a kind of commentary on human affairs. The Salon generally shows a good many pictures depicting different phases of French life; there are fewer than usual this year, however. Mlle. Rondenay paints M. Humbert's atelier at the Ecole des BeauxArts, with a number of girls drawing from a nude model, and the master correcting a drawing; this the State has purchased, perhaps partly as a celebration of the fact of the recent admission of female students to the Ecole. M. Marec paints a characteristic scene in a cabaret, La Chanson Sentimentale, a clever and observant picture on a small scale. The mistake of French painters, too often, is to paint things of this kind the size of life; an expenditure of canvas disproportionate to the value of the subject. That seems to me the mistake too in Mr. Stanhope Forbes's A Village Industry in the Academy; it is a mere record of incident, not pictorially effective, and not worth painting on so large a scale. Mr. Collier's A Sentence of Death is not very pictorial in effect either, but it portrays with considerable power a tragic incident in life, and therefore justifies its existence. And M. Lejeune's single figure in the Salon, Un Rentier, taken in connexion with its title, is a piece of real and very pungent satire