galleries; the skylight draping in the latter is overdone, and the effect of the pictures somewhat dulled in consequence.

Taking the sculpture as it stands, we have the rather unexpected result that the English collection shows a larger proportion of works of subjective interest, of intellectual suggestion beyond mere modelling, than the French, though the case would be certainly reversed if French sculpture were as well represented as English. There is perhaps nothing among the French sculpture exhibited so poetically suggestive as Mr. Colton's Crown of Love, nothing so full of historical point and individual character as Mr. Reynolds-Stephens's A Royal Game. Chapu's kneeling figure of Jeanne Darc is beautiful in pose and in the fine type of the head, but it has no special character; it might be any handsome woman in trouble. On the other hand there is an elevation of style in the nude figures, such as M. Sicard's Baigneuse and M. Marqueste's Hébé with the eagle, and M. Mercié's David après le Combat (in one of the picture galleries), which makes most of the English nudes look tame and commonplace. Among the most powerful works on the French side of the gallery is M. Alfred Boucher's À la Terre, the colossal nude figure of a labourer digging, which was in the Salon two or three years ago. The difference between the largeness of manner in French sculpture as compared with English may be noted in comparing M. Mathurin-Moreau's Sommeil with Mr. Walker's Sleep, both of them nude groups of mother and infant sleeping; the latter is a charming work, but it rather suggests the nursery; the French sculptor's group has the large abstract manner which suggests the ideal type of life. Among other works on the French side the Luxembourg lends us one of its most remarkable modern works, M. Sicard's Edipus and the Sphinx; and those who have not seen it before should not miss M. Puech's poetic fancy La Seine (also from the Luxembourg), where the river is symbolised by a recumbent nude figure in alto-relief, the decorative semblance of Paris in bas-relief forming the background. It was exhibited at the Salon a good many years ago, and bought by the Government."

But the glory of the Art collection lies in the galleries of English painting, of which one cannot speak without a certain enthusiasm. The two rooms devoted to deceased British artists contain, among other things, Gainsborough's incomparable portrait called The Blue Boy and his Lady Bate Dudley; some fine examples (though not quite equal to these) of Reynolds; Burne-Jones's Chant d'Amour, his best

The form Jeanne d'Arc,' which the modern French writers persist in, as if she were a lady of family, is of course absurd. Balzac writes Jeanne Darc' in the one reference to her I have noticed in his works.

2 Perhaps English artists might take the opportunity this exhibition affords of knowing a little more about contemporary French sculptors than they do at present. I sat opposite two Royal Academicians at a public dinner, one a sculptor and the other an architect, neither of whom had ever heard of the name or works of M. Puech, one of the most prominent and most gifted of modern French sculptors.

work; Albert Moore's The Quartette, the most perfect example of his peculiar type of decorative art; Romney's Lady Hamilton at the Spinning Wheel, and Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel, each among the painter's best works; Walker's The Plough, perhaps his finest picture; Lewis's In the Bey's Garden; and two or three very fine examples of Watts, though not one of his greatest works. Among the painters of the last generation perhaps none holds his place so well as Millais. His Over the Hills, which I had not seen for some years, seems finer than ever, and shows how a painting on which the highest pains have been bestowed will keep its place in virtue of that kind of genius which consists (in part at least) in the infinite capacity for taking pains. In the room devoted to the works of living artists we have an example of the modern Scottish school of landscape in The Storm, by Mr. W. McTaggart, R.S.A. (lent by Mr. Carnegie); a landscape splashed rather than painted, with a certain boldness and vigour ; but will this, like Over the Hills, hold its own and be returned to with admiration thirty or forty years after its date? I trow not. But Millais's Autumn Leaves is more than conscientious work; it is an inspiration in colour and poetic feeling, and it is as such and as a whole that it must be judged, not picked to pieces in detail. Those who wonder why the faces of the girls are so dark ('dirty' they were called when it was first painted) do not recognise that they are parts of the rich solemn harmony of the whole, including that deep purple distance; Millais was not going to have them making light spots in his composition. A picture that I met again with great interest is Falconer Poole's Seventh Day of the Decameron, exhibited many years ago at the Academy under the title The Song of Filomena on the Margin of the Beautiful Lake, and which I have never seen since. Coming to it again one recognises that the figures are open to criticism; but it is steeped in poetry, and I owe the author of it for a youthful daydream. Figures were not Poole's strong point; he painted landscapes with a meaning in them, not understanded of the people, and hence he was never a popular painter; he should have been represented by A Lion in the Path, a grand work in which the landscape itself seemed to threaten like the lion. It hung in the large room at the Academy many years ago, nor have I ever seen it since. What has become of it?

Then there is Leighton's beautiful work Summer Moon, hanging just by Millais' landscape-as a poetic conception perhaps the most perfect thing he ever did, with an almost Greek reticence and completeness about it both in colour and design. (I remember hearing it referred to by a spectator, the year it was first exhibited, as 'that præ-Raphaelite thing.') No one, I suppose, would attempt to paint such a picture nowadays; it is not ugly enough. It is significant to notice that, with such a work as that hanging a few yards off, the critic of a certain influential paper could find nothing better to single

out for enthusiasm than Mr. Orpen's The Valuers, a study of two or three figures of the meanest and most repulsive types of humanity. Is that our progress during the last forty or fifty years, according to the contemporary 'art critic'? From Millais' landscape to Mr. McTaggart's splashes; from Leighton's Summer Moon to Mr. Orpen's Valuers? A pretty descent in the period! These amateurs of the ugly and repulsive remind one of Mephistopheles' contemptuous gibe at the habits of mankind, in the Prologue in Heaven

In jeden Quark begräbt er seine Nase.

However, thank goodness, there is not much of the New English Art Club element in this fine and representative collection of the work of living English painters. Not a few are represented each by almost his best work. Mr. Sargent certainly, by his two grand portrait groups -that with the pearl necklace in it, and that with the great yellow jar (though I do not see how the lady's face in the latter can show light against the sky); Sir E. Poynter by the finest of his large pictures, Atalanta's Race, and by that remarkable little work, The Sirens (or The Storm Nymphs, as it was originally called), a masterpiece of drawing which, as such, will always keep its place; Mr. Holman Hunt by The Pot of Basil (not forgetting also that beautiful little work, Morning Prayer); Mr. Tuke by his best work, The Diver. Then there is Mr. Orchardson's The Borgia; Mr. Somerscales's first exhibited seapainting, Corvette shortening Sail; two of the finest of Sir L. AlmaTadema's works; Mr. Leslie's In Time of War, the best example of his later style; and perhaps the very best of Mr. Adrian Stokes's landscapes, exhibited at the Academy a good many years ago under the title (I think) Changing Pasture; here called simply French Landscape. It is that in a double sense; it is a landscape of the French school, and the best French school; and those who would realise what style in landscape means should look at the treatment of nature in this painting; the broad and perfectly effective manner in which the long meadow grass (laetae segetes) and the blowing of the wind over it are indicated, without the slightest realism; the consentaneous movement of grass, trees, and cattle, all in one direction, giving such a unity of expression to the picture. It is one of the best landscapes ever exhibited at the Academy, and it is a satisfaction to meet it again.

Style in landscape is shown, too, with equal perfection in the largest of the works of M. Harpignies in the French picture-galleries, in which, as has been said, the selection is less typical and representative than in the English galleries. There are a good many things one does not care much for, and there are eminent painters who are not represented by their best works. Henner, however, appears to advantage in one of his earlier nudes, Jeune Fille endormie, painted before he lapsed into that exaggeration of Hennerism in which his figures look as if, like the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, they had

been dissolved in a nitric acid bath. Among pictures to be noticed is M. Albert Maignan's grand work Eve et le Serpent, not only as a remarkable conception, with its iridescent serpent with the human torso and head, but as a fine example of style. The nude figure of Eve, it will be observed, does not attempt realism either in finish or texture; the figure and the details are all harmonised down to a unity of effect, and the picture is a fine piece of colour, one of the best in that sense in the French galleries. Colour has been the difficulty with M. Emile Friant's large picture Douleur, which no one can miss, and in which all the figures are clad in deep mourning. M. Friant, who is always worth attention, seldom paints on so large a scale as this, and perhaps this would have done better on a smaller scale ; yet it seems to me now, as it did when I first saw it at the Salon, one of the most pathetic of modern pictures dealing with scenes in real life. It is now apparently in the Museum at Nancy, and must, therefore, have been a Government purchase. Among other pictures that should not be passed over are M. Humbert's portraits, especially Miles. Legrand and the singularly spirited and characteristic portrait of M. Jules Lemaître; Delaunay's La Peste, an allegorical picture of the old school, interesting on that account, and as representing a class of picture and a style of execution much esteemed in their day and entirely passé now; and Delacroix's Mirabeau et de Brézé, an historical picture of a past generation which still keeps its place, and always will, for its dramatic realisation of the situation and of the principal actor in the scene. Those who do not know the work of M. Joseph Bail, that masterly painter of interiors, should not pass over the pictures by him, though they do not represent the best that he has done; nor is M. Paul Chabas's Joyeux Ébats, from a recent Salon, quite one of his best works, but it gives an idea of the work of a painter who has made a style of his own, and whose picture in this year's Salon has already been mentioned in these pages as perhaps the most perfectly-balanced work of the year. M. Tattegrain, also, a painter of great and very versatile powers, is shown to advantage in his seashore scene L'Epave (a much better work than his larger shipwreck picture). M. Hébert's Le Matin et le Soir de la Vie was exhibited a great many years ago at the Royal Academy, I think under the title Youth and Age, when it made an impression on me which renewed acquaintance does not quite ratify. It is painted in a somewhat loaded manner, and is perhaps a little theatrical, though it is a powerful work in the style of a past generation. And if the visitor wishes to realise to what depths of vulgarity the vagaries of the 'New Salon' can descend, he can have an object lesson in the preposterous and impudent scrawl by M. Willette

3

'It was, perhaps, just this kind of dramatic element in his work which puzzled and alarmed the men of Delacroix's own generation. It seems odd now, but it is the fact, that Delacroix in his own day was considered as a dangerous innovator, who was breaking away from the old traditional classic formula of historical painting.

called Parce Domine; apparently a coarse satire on modern life. It is to be hoped that the Committee of the French Section are ashamed of it, as they have skied it. At the New Salon, a year or two ago, it hung on the line, and it is an instance of what journalistic art-criticism has come to with us, that this vulgar caricature (looking like a Punch picture magnified to the nth power) was praised in some of the leading English journals as a remarkable picture. Apparently nothing is too ugly and outré for the modern art-critic; that it should be ugly and outré seems, in fact, to be a positive recommendation.

A general retrospective glance over the whole comparative show of paintings leads to the conclusion that in the eighteenth century, and in the latter part of the nineteenth, the English painters were, and that on the whole they are now, better colourists than the French. There was a ghastly interval, no doubt, when the pictures of the elder Leslie, and Maclise, and Ward, and Landseer, passed for colour;1 and even the early works of the P.R.B. produced on Philip Hamerton's clever French wife, when she accompanied him to England, a feeling which she could only compare to 'setting one's teeth into unripe fruit.' But looking round the walls at the Franco-British Exhibition, and taking the average of the two collections, it seems to me that there is better colour, and more of the sense of colour harmony, on this side of the Channel than on the other.

It is worth while to give a glance at the architectural designs to be found in a narrow gallery in each suite. The two collections are characteristic of the two nations. The French architects can hardly be got to exhibit drawings of the current architecture of the day. They produce much finer and larger drawings than are usually produced in England, but these are chiefly of restorations of ancient buildings, or highly worked-up illustrations of them, many of the latter being made for the archives of the ' Commission des Monuments Historiques.' That is always the defect of the architectural gallery at the annual Salons; you get very little idea from it of the architecture in progress at the moment. On the other hand, at the Academy, hardly anything is supposed to be exhibited in the architectural room except drawings of buildings executed, or in contemplation; and at the Franco-British Exhibition there is quite a representative collection of drawings of the principal English buildings recently completed, or intended to be carried out. There are illustrations of a good deal of what is going on in London in the way of new street architecture, as well as of such public buildings as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the London County Hall, the Cardiff Town Hall, the new Wesleyan Methodist Hall at Westminster, and other large and important buildings. The collection

This with all deference to Landseer's great and incontestable powers as an animal painter. But his sense of colour was truly Early-Victorian. And after all, M. Aimé Morot's lion in the Franco-British Gallery would eat up any possible lion of Landseer's.