Pictures at the Exposition

THERE is no great abundance of military art in the Exposition. It is a very prominent production of these last years, and has been reduced to an almost photographic accuracy, very different from the pure romancing of the old school; but there is very little of it to be seen at the present time. The troops have been disbanded, or discreetly masked for the moment, not to mar the harmonies of the occasion. It is the same in the Salon, the annual exhibition of the year. There is no splendid triumph at Versailles, with the Thor-like emperor and his chancellor in the midst; none of the burly Germans of Sell bringing in their prisoners; none of the brilliant episodic victories with which Detaille and De Neuville, in fighting the contest over again, have endeavored, so far as lay in paint and bristle brushes, to retrieve the fortunes of the day. There are spirited things of Protais, a color-guard rallied with sternly-set faces around its standard, an outpost of Berne-Beltecour firing from a rifle-pit; but no enemy in sight, no'body worsted, nothing to say whether it may not be 1859 as well as 1870, or simply the practice ground at Vincennes.

Military art not strictly arekseological and decorative — like the funeral parade down the mountains, in the snow, of Charles XII., in the Swedish department, and Piloty’s passage of Wallenstein to Eger, in his red sedan - chair, surrounded by steel-lielmeted soldiers, in the German—confines itself to combats from which acrimony may be thought to have pretty well evaporated with age. Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt figure for considerable. Then there are Meissonier’s Cuirassiers of 1805. It was the year of Austerlitz, — a famous year for troops of all kinds. They are not engaged. The long front standing at rest, complicated above and stem-like below, as if it were some peculiar grain crop mowed up to an even line, is not different from what I saw it at the annual review at Longchamps, in June. The picture is of considerable size for this master, who has the habit of contriving his extraordinary detail, down to the smallest swelling vein on the neck of a high-spirited horse, in a very small compass.. I like it none the worse for that. The feat of writing the Declaration of independence on a postage-stamp is not entitled to more respect in itself, as a matter of art, than the ability to do it on the side of a house. •

One would imagine that Tnkermann would be an unpleasant reminiscence, with Russia as a fellow exhibitor. Notwithstanding, there it is in considerable force, perhaps with the idea of some wholesome bearing upon the present condition of affairs. Sir Francis Grant has painted the Duke of Cambridge riding up the hill, followed by the familiar British grenadiers in their bear-skin shakos; and Miss Thompson, the young lady made so suddenly famous by her Roll-Call four years ago, has a Return from Inkermann, which has not quite the strong character of the former picture in the faces, but still enough to make it an important work. The circling birds of prey, that relieve, with their sweep in the air, the formal straight line of the Roll-Call, follow on into this. John Paul Laurens, — French, I need not say,— whose fancy takes him by preference to the barbarous magnificence of the Merovingian kings, presents a dramatic, very real, military death-bed, Mareeau lying in state among a sympathetic group of Austrian officers, into whose hands he has fallen as prisoner. It is quite a new thing in composition. The figure, lying upon a couch in full uniform, is boldly foreshortened towards you, feet first.

The statue of his royal highness the Prince of Wales, raised aloft on horseback, is a most excellent piece of modeling and bronze casting, at the very entrance to the fine-art department. It is the most peaceful of statues. It commemorates nothing more illustrious than his holiday trip to India, being offered by Sir Albert Sassoon, native baronet to the loyal city of Bombay, for that purpose. There is nothing more stirring in the bas-reliefs than his gracious reception of delegations from the common schools, and of young rajahs laden down with costly gifts. This is what we have got to come to when our friends of llie universal peace congress have their way. You are inclined to quarrel with this statue. It ought not to be so splendid and so imposing. No blood has been spilled. None of the savage, fearless things have been done that entitle to such honors. It must be admitted, as a matter of reason, that this excursion, which il it did no good did no harm, was preferable to the exploits of the early governors-general engaged in (be conquest. It is prejudice and not logic that has to be overcome. But when finally, without recalling too much Malthus and John Stuart, Mill, war has disappeared, the only contingency, almost, in which there still remains a willingness to make sacrifices for a sentiment, we are going to have a very pretty carnival of selfishness, are we not V It is a matter that does not exactly press, perhaps. There are complications still in Herzegovina, and Italy does not make it a secret that Trieste is naturally Italian territory.

Having begun with British statuary, let me finish with it, and the statuary in general. You cannot but admire extremely numerous examples in which the closest study of life has resulted in a simple grace and dignity parallel to the classic; but it is, for the most part, a kind of bleached painting. It aims at the same effects. It imitates textures of wool, linen, hair, and flesh. The pupil of the eye is undercut, to give an expression of intelligence. Some of the smiling faces follow you around (he room with an almost disquieting reality. This is the reverse of the case as it was with David under the first empire. It was painting then that had become sculpture, as may be seen in many a stilted, frigid canvas at the Louvre.

It is the delight in pure lines, their infinitely subtle composition and transitions as the point of view is changed, that makes sculpture a coordinate branch. When it attempts to compete with painting, in textures and complete realization, it is not without its charm, if temperately managed; but it has to take a secondary rank. Lefeuvre’s Jean d’Arc, the peasant child in the woods, with a distaff, hearing her mysterious voices, might be borrowed from Jules Breton.

The slender figures of young boys may be noted as an especial preference for the moment. They are swimmers, fishers, — one in a straw hat with a brim, — Davids, Saint. Johns; Islnnael perishing in the desert; a young Aristotle, by I)egeorge; and a Julius Caesar in almost the same attitude, by Civiletti. in the Italian department, sitting in his classic chair, lost in mature thoughtfulness over some manuscript, making part of the education for his future greatness.

It is a rather formidable thing to enter this half mile of galleries. We are going to accost, what the world has esteemed the most beautiful, the worthiest of costly representation, for ten years. It is even better than this. There have been admitted not a few works of much more than that age, in which there was a peculiar national pride. Tims there come, under this condition. Frith’s celebrated Railway Station and The Derby Day. which could not have been painted far from 1850. They were looked upon in their time as a remarkable attempt to make something of modern out-of-door civilized life, which had up to that time been left aside as desperately hopeless. It was not much that they could make of it, you decide, with the bonnets and crinoline of the date. As to expression, in which the numerous small figures were thought to be especially “cute,” it is but caricature to what can be done now, in the movement of which the admirable work in the Londou Graphic is an index.

The word “ modernity ” has been coined for the professors of something tolerable in civilized life as it is, and they are rather looked askance at. T do not think they should be, for making a valorous effort to be of their time, inasmuch as it has not been determined in all the other departments as yet that it is not the greatest and most glorious of times. It was not archaeologically, as their large body of imitators, with costumed models, seem to think, that Van Ostade, Van der Heist, Terberg, and De Iloogb painted their cavaliers playing cards, with pages bringing wine on a tray, and their burgomasters in steeplecrowned hats. There were courtiers making sweeping reverences before Heroine, and ladies in satin in rich interiors before Willems; but they were contemporaneous people and their houses, and not studio tableaux.

For civilized masculine dress T see no one yet who does not hurl himself cruelly against an obdurate wall in attempting it. There are more rows deep of spectators at the Salon around Gander’s picture of The Liberator of the Soil than any other. It is an incident of the assembly at Versailles. The minister of the interior speaks from the tribune of certain members who had formed part of the body to which was due the settlement of the disastrous war. The left and centre arise thereupon in mass, and, with applaud'mements of the most vires and chahuren.r, point to M. Thiers, who sits modestly among them. “ It was lie! He is the Liberator of the Soil. ” they cry. This was really a warm and inspiring moment in the affairs of the state, hut oh how dreary, for an august effect, all these concentric rows of black, with white dots for the faces, and smaller white dots for the enthusiastic, pointing hands!

There are notable illustrators of modernity with feminine fashions, which, following more the contour of the human figure, lend themselves with much grace, for the moment, to art. The principal is De Nittis, exhibiting patriotically as an Italian, hut a thorough Frenchman of Paris and the Salon. he is followed by Dueq, Poirson, Ballavoine, Saulnier. They paint you lady-like figures, with a twist of blonde hair, bending over the platform to look for an expected train, or promenading, in ulsters, on a pier at the sea-side. The painting is solid and flat. Tlie sea is usually of a greenish tinge, and there are just those agreeable touches of white for the crest of a breaker that denote mastery. De Nittis has the faculty of painting very full street scenes — Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly, Paris at the Phut Royal— with something like their natural diversity of transactions and every-day colors, without becoming merely spotty and bizarre, and without having to secure breadth by reducing everything to a monotone. When you find one of the regulars trying his hand at a street, it is either this, or he must throw something Titianesque — high-colored garments of red and blue — into it. You could not deny that they might be found there, in the foreground, on some especial occasion, but it is not the every-day glimpse.

The modern inspiration is not lacking in any of the countries. Bockehnann uses it for a German bank failure, depicting excellently the varied expressions of the. groups gathered around the closed doors, and .Wenzel for forging a shaft like Weir’s; Savttzki for a common gang of laborers on a Russian railway; Boks, of the Dutch school, in a little comedy of the interior, in which the master and mistress, returning from a visit, have found a soldier’s fatigue cap on the drawing-room table, and all the servants are wondering, with varied astonishment, how it could possibly have got there. It does not seem that the best of these have by any means drawn out of the field all that it is capable of.

It is the English department that you enter first, and the large portrait figures, or portrait-like genre, that first call you to regard them. Sant’s typical family of young Englishwomen of the middle class, in white, pretty and homely', just as it happens; Millais’s more artificial trio from the haughtier circle at the top, and his retired mariner read to about the northwest passage by his daughter; Stone’s My Lady is a Widow and Childless, in which she is shown walking desolately in her park, in sight of the happiness of a common laborer in front, whose blooming wife and babies have brought him his lunch to the trench he is digging; Leslie’s visit of a young girl, in Gainsborough costume, to her old boarding-school, where site is surrounded with gentle envy by her former school-mates, have the trait in common of a generous scale. The subjects are of a minor character, by' the 'French standard, but the implicit local belief in their worthiness is testified to by the liberal masses and bold outlines. Add to these, by' all means, the graphic parterre of ancient heads in Herkomer’s view of the Pensioners of Chelsea Hospital.

This English art shows the most genial appreciation of domestic and perhaps of rural life, though not of pure poetic landscape, where the palm, T think, goes to the French. There, is a dash of foxhunting and gentlemen who like to get themselves tip in Scotch costumes to go to the moors and the trout streams in August; in general, a view of the national character not contradicting that presented in Punch and the best literature. The English think very highly of their art themselves. They put it under glass, and fix its value at such prices that our dealers can afford to bring over very little of it to show us. It has the general fault of over-ruddiness of color. Most of the complexions are spoiled by it. It is only one or two, like ITcrkomer and Mark Fisher (an American), who have eauglit the secret of the delicious silvery grayness which is the leading characteristic of the French. There is a fondness in the newest school for a sort of water-color “stipple” finish. Tt is not easy' to explain just what stipple is without a brush, but it is to cover the surface over as much as you can ivith small touches, crossed this way and that. It gives a loose and at the same time a woolly' texture, Bonnat does it in the backgrounds of his portraits. I have been inclined to take it for a modern variation, and should be so still, except that in sliding through over the smooth floors of tiie Louvre again, the other day, to see how the schools of the present correspond to the old distinctions, I found that David’s Madame Recamier is stippled all over, and is perhaps the model of the manner.

The two important side branches of Alma Tadema, for one, and the Burne Jones school for the other, are very different from the rest. Alma Tadema has an original vein of affection for clas* pic life and the Pharaohs. He recovers every detail of their manners by an exhaustive study; hut it pleases him, in calling the ancient figures to life with a charming color, to leave in them a suggestion of the friezes and the papyrus manuscripts. He is not of the English except by residence, and has nothing in common with them. He is not more of his birthplace, Belgium, however. He is one of the figures wholly original. Burne Jones, Stanhope, and W atts, on the other hand, are struggling with some serious idea which is not classic, and although more mediaeval than anything else is not that cither. Above all, it docs not care for decorative color. The bodies are attenuated, the flesh greenish; no rugs; no spangled tunic on this unseductive Vivian cajoling the enchanter Merlin; even no weird darks against light, — nothing but monotone. I know what it is. 1 have felt that way myself. It is a protest. You want things to be different. You want something to happen. Walt Whitman has felt that way. It is a “yawp over the roofs of men.”

It is not a state peculiar to the spiritual English, this. Something corresponding to it, though more imitative and not satisfied to eliminate the sentiment of beauty, is found in other nations. Gcbhardt, of the Germans, paints a crucifixion as meagre as Cranach’s, and Kaulbaeh fils and Scliraundolph small portrait-figure groups, on an antique, large-grained canvas, that recall Holbein. The French do it with the verv sweet modern religious art of Humbert, Perrault, and Bouguereau. It is not perhaps strictly religious. It has the air rather of being glad of an opportunity to deal with beautiful myths for a sentimental effect, and Bouguereau does not hesitate to have all sorts of classical nudities along-side of his Holy Families. They revive the mediaeval paraphernalia, and add the perfect modern technique. Humbert’s Madonna is vomposed in a chair, against a banker, with a gold circle around her head, like John Bellini and Cirna Conegliano. There is the innovation of a scarlet robe tif the richest hue instead of the usual blue. She is not a Madonna, but a splendid princess, with a grave, intellectual beauty.

There are persons who pass Bouguereau with a grimace, as if he were something painful to look it, — as if he were assafeetida, or a Gorgon with snaky lock11. When you learn what is the matter, it is that he is waxy; he is simply pretty instead of impressive. It is true that there is an ideal delicacy in the complexions, which will be improved when the mellowing of fifty years has passed over it; but I do not see how any one, though, captivated by subtler masters, he tnav not want it for himself, can fail to recognize the merit of this splendid and costly article. It is honest, straightforward drawing and painting, — the artificiality apart, — and particularly useful for us as students, I should think, since we have not had near enough of this very thing, and are not ready for subtleties on an extensive scale.

You find yourself very vacillating in tins long promenade, so full of charms. How often are you forsworn the very instant after having pledged unchangeable fidelity! You will have no portraits but those of Millais and Leighton until you come to Emile Levy and Thirion. You join Canon and Angelo in Austria only to desert to Lcubach and Ivaulbaeh in Germany, and again to Bischof in the Low Countries. The grounds shall invariably be Vandyke brown, or Indian red, or drab, or sea-green, or a tapestry in large figures, and cold while the fig ure is warm, — or at least vice versa. You will be pensive forever in the late autumns of MeEntee, or by the leaden waves of Mesdag, until you breathe the fragrance of the (lowering almond-tree with Defaulx, or gather the glowing harvests with SegeThere shall be no time of day but sunset, and no country lmt tlie Orient. You will believe in nothing you cannot see with Billerary, finishing every dock-leaf in Ills foreground to take kohl of; or you will deliver yourself to the mysterious gleams of sentiment and color of the Corots, Burne Joneses, Fortunys. It is only the hard lot of the honest peasants of Jules Breton and Israels that is deserving of real sympathy, and again your fancy goes dancing with Bacchantes, or prances gallantly in the triumphal entry of an emperor.

M ha-t is to bo done about this? Cosmopolitanism, good friends. There were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in Horatio’s philosophy, as Hamlet said to him, and it is the case still. Moonlight is nice, hut early dawn is not bad, and noonday has its advantages. One can like consomme de volatile a la royale, and cotelcttes d’agneau regence. If the maker in most art and literature is bound to go around always in the excellent little circle he has created, to repeat the same charming face, the same trick of light, the same nefarious rascal always coming to a magnanimous end, it is not so for the spectator. He has no such limitations.

It is a sybaritic education, all the same, — this promenade. When you have finished it, and returned from the large saloon of Germany at the further end, it is with a colder and more judicial glance the eye catches along the glowing walls. You are ready to quarrel about a secondary color in a shadow, and as likely as not to join the sedition against Bouguereau now with alacrity. But what is really the right of it? Is there no better, no best; no decision to be come to among the numerous schools which there must be, displaying their merits side by side? I should say this: that the nation would have the greatest art which had the most facilities anil the habit of the most rigid study of the human figure. 1 should prove it from the vast quantities of powerful work exhibited by tlic French. They have both the condition and its result. It is to this that you have always to return, —■ the straightforward study of the human figure. There are no lines, no gradations of light and shade and color, so subtle and difficult. There is but little that can escape whoever is thorough master of them. It is from this that ttylcs ought to germinate according to the individuality of the artist. None of the pleasing, continually recurring side variations is capable of founding a school. Their charm is in their strangeness. Repetition is ruin.

The vividly realized nude is a large element in French art, and in the others but moderate. There are some who, having acquired the power, have no imagination with which to put it to use. These regard the realization of the model as a sufficient object in itself. But for the most part it is touched with genuine poetry. Henner paints milk-wlute Dianas seen as if through a mist, with a single gleam of light upon the silken hair. Nothing could be less objectionable. It keeps alive the classic myths, and creates a grandiose art. The dead Orpheus, head downwards; the Adam and Eve chased from Paradise; the twisting groups from Milton struggling in the air. have their sentiment, but who can doubt that they are done most for the luxury of the foreshortenings, the astonishing daring of the poses?

The French public, educated by so long a course of arclueology, must have a very tolerable idea of the subjects bv this time. They are educated, too, by good art criticism in their daily papers, down to the Petit Journal. They make intelligent remarks, even those of quite a humble order. “ Tons clairs, ” says, for the usual monosyllable, a middleaged rough blouse, passing on, not particularly interested, from the Danaides of Leroux. But “ Wot rubbish!” cry the next comers, a couple of small London tradesmen, hurrying through in a pleasant state of excitement on an excursion ticket. -t Why, they ’re a-pourin’ water /tin ! ” So they are, the poor Danaides!—an interminable procession of them, advancing in white through an arid plain, to the task that-is never finished and never will be, with a most pathetic melancholy. One has fallen completely, in front, broken by the heavy jar. Another is weeping, as they go, on the shoulder of an elder sister, who can have but scant reassurance to give her.

If the troops are withdrawn and there is little slaughter in the open field, it is perhaps that, the havoc in detail is ell the fiercer. The department of horrors is recruited from all history with impartiality, and is satisfied with nothin" less than Titanic dimensions. Orestes hides his shuddering head from the pursuing furies; Ixion is racked upon his wheel; Nero tries, on a writhing slave, the poison which he intends for a destination of much greater importance. Monsieur Becker erects here again — where in the world does the man expect to get a purchaser for it? —the hideous scaffold of the sons of Rizpah, with the mother keeping off the vultures. I am somewhat horror-proof myself, having been kept awake at Brussels by the dreadful fancies of Wiertz, but these are tolerably searching. Wiertz has, among the rest, if you remember, in the museum constituted of his worts, the thoughts and visions of a head cut off by the guillotine. He represents that it still feels and is conscious. There is the first moment, the second moment, the third moment. The third moment, there is nothing but sinister flashes, circles, spots, and a reddish mist, to represent the last vestiges of sense.

It is easy to he impressive by terror. Hecatombs of Ixions could not offset the sweet impressiveness which is drawn by Jules Breton from the incidents of the commonest, rural life. It is a couple of peasant, maids at a spring; a gleaner with a bundle of grain on her head, dark against the sky; a family resting at noon under a tree, while the sun shines on the hay-field outside, where their work is awaiting them. He draws as well as Bougucreau, but without making the least parade of it. The figures are large; the lines of the simple clothing run like those of a statuary. The tone is low. Gray, blue, brown, and white are nearly all the colors he wants. He is fond of this dark against the sky, or objects within the circle of a shadow. There is a great mystery then. There is light, this part is brighter than that, a gleam on a cheek or a hand, but yon are unable to tell where it comes from. It is local and reflected. It takes a master o seize it.

It is a tribute to the genuine inspiration of picturesque habiliments that it is not strangers alone who appreciate them. Italy makes a liberal use of its opportunities in this direction. Moradei’s extremely real pair of peasant gossips set all the world laughing in sympathy. There is a grave Last Moments of Marcus Brutus, at twilight, iii a thistle-grown garden, in the modern classic manner. Everything about Italy is particularly modern, for the rest. She does not stay at home entirely for her subjects, however. There is none of the Orientalists more pleasing than Pasini. He gives variety and the richest color to complicated groups of small figures, like the bands of two Arab chieftains meeting in the mountains for a parley, while keeping all the time a delightful simplicity. In the chamber with I)e Nittis is Miehetti. If she had nothing else he would suffice to leave a charming memory of Italy. One of his pieces, an idyl of a stripling and maid minding turkeys, is almost as cheerful as you would suppose it possible to go in that direction. It is a veritable rainy day to that, next to it. Imagine humming-birds, scarlet coral, lapis lazuli, — the brightest of everything. On a tender green hill-top of spring, against the bluest of blue skies and seas, a multitude of small, flat, nude figures are dancing to tambourines; lying with bluish vine shadows cast upon them; climbing in a blossoming tree, like blossoms themselves, and with circlets of the white flowers around their necks. It is a veritable chant, an uncontrollable shout of joy.

This is affiliated to the work of Fortuny and his friends, which goes to make up the Spanish-Roman school. Merino’s quaint Don Quixote, in the memorable and never-to-be-forgotten adventure with the strolling players, is of almost the same brightness. The unfortunate knight sits, lance in rest, on his drooping Rozinante, in the distance, while the players hurt ribaldry and defiances at him from their cart on the hill, in the foreground. The strange apparel and the tinsel crowns of the king and princess furnish one of the best of bases that his fast-recurring illusions ever enjoyed.

You are sensible of a new milieu the moment you enter the Spanish department from any of the others, though it is by no means so apparent when exchanging them for one another. It has the characteristic of a prismatic, entirely modern brightness and purity of color. It does not take black grounds, it appears, to force figures vividly out. Madrazo paints them upon pink, sea-green, or pearl-gray. The light is a real daylight. It is a question of only the smallest differences between the counterfeit presentments and the persons standing in the neighborhood, with whom yon compare them. The Spaniards have a serious side, too. It is perhaps more or less an effect of their political fermentations that they hang up great canvases of Virginius, and the deaths of Lucretia and Seneca, in the ancient academic style. In this style the accessories were of but, little account; it was the action. When done with sueli earnestness tlie subjects are probably intended as warnings to tyrants in general, down to date. There are savage ideas afloat, and it would be well to take heed on their own account.

The modern classical schoof, on the contrary,, is archaeological and decorative. The mode of buckling a cothurnus must be shown, and Caesar must wear the very signet-ring he would have worn, and no other. I see nobody who does it more completely and magnificently than the Russian Siemaradski. He is an Alma Tadema magnified. Nero sits in the midst of a splendid court to witness the firing of his “ human torches.” They are martyrs, one an old man, another a lovely young girl, wrapped in straw, and fixed to tall posts to serve this purpose. IL is not of the dreadful kind ; the fires are only just, being lighted by slaves going from post to post with ladders, and tlie suffering has not commenced. It is an imposing composition, the piled-up white marble terraces swarming with graceful figures, and it is colored with tlie French temperate richness.

This is not what you looked for so much in Russia. What we trace with the greatest interest in the less known countries is the delineation of national manners and local scenes. These are not lacking. There are harvesters in the country of ICoursk; peasants bringing berries to the voyagers in a railway train; a dash of moonlight on the white walls of a lonely farm-house in Ukraine, with a great river winding through the unbroken forest, in the dark, below. There is not a national style. The artists learn at Paris, for the most part, but they inspire themselves with subjects of the country, which is the most auspicious of signs. Here comes a ragged, shaggy crew, harnessed like galley-slaves, hauling a trading-boat down tlie Volga. They are cheaper than steam, it, seems, for this small traffic. This is their trade, when the wind does not blow, —breasthigh through tlie shallows, and over the sand-bars, from village to village. One of them wears a red blouse, like the fiarpon in the Russian restaurant. The prevailing color is bright, without forcing. There is a Southern gayety in the scenes. It might almost be Naples.

Benjamin Constant’-s entry of Mohammed IT. into Constantinople is so large a work that the bodies of the dead and wounded in the immediate foreground, over which the conqueror’s gray charger is coming to trample, must be more than twice the size of life. But there is reserved, in the department of Austria, the surprise of a work that quite reduces this to mediocrity. It is Makart’s, the artist who displays a genius for the most colossal art of all. His Entry of Charles V. into Antwerp is thirty feet long arid eighteen high. Everybody sits down a long time before it. There is no point of view from which it can be seen as a whole. It is one of the splendid pageants on which the pen of Motley loved so well to linger. There is the cloth of gold, the pages and esquires, the lieralds-at-arms in blazoned sure oats, the beauties in the balconies. The emperor, in silver armor embossed with gold, advances, with maidens strewing flowers before him. Tlie air behind is dark with spear-points. It is all coming directly at you. There is a real excitement in sitting in front of such a procession. It is like looking up stream at Niagara from the bridges at Goat Island. You feel as if you were going to be an Arnold Winkelried, resisting the onset, and struggling desperately against being trampled down. The coloring of the Austrians has a golden tinge, ’which for the moment makes the grajs^of the French seem chilly' and the Spanish unreservedly frigid. There is something too much of it with the emperor. I find Mohammed preferable. It is better to leave a little to time. Veronese had not, we may be sure, to begin with, the mellowness of the year 18G8.

There is no sharp line between Austria and Germany. The influence of Munich spreads out in many directions. The golden hue of the color continues, but with a greater delicacy. There is nothing florid and cloying about it. In the best examples, only a faint trace of amber is fused with the desirable, refreshing gray, and makes of it absolute perfection. The north of Germany', the studios of Berlin and Dusseldorf, is better represented here than Munich, but Dusseldorf is not the old-fashioned Dusseluorf of harsh and trivial finish. The later art of both has been propagated from the new movement, and docs it no discredit. There must be many Frenchman who, having imagined in the great arch-enemy boorish instincts and a provincial inferiority in matters of taste, go through this department with misgivings and new lights. France is met fairly, upon her own ground. I confess to having been surprised at a certain trait. It is not the knowledge and vigor of delineation. It is a feeling for tender, refined loveliness. If the French instinctively attain to grace, tlie Germans strive for genuine beauty. There is nowhere else such calm, clear-eyed portraiture looking out at you with subtilized, fleeting expressions. The beauty that is preferred in the women is notably modest and pervaded by' intelligence. In the great tableau of Makart — fori include the southern Germans — all of the faces arc lovely, the knights, the young archers, the populace. he has not been able to force himself to put in the usual touches of deformity to give it point.

Knaus and Meyerheim have an excellent humorous talent. Riefstahl draws you with him to a simple funeral in the snowy heights of the real Alps, and Brandt to a riehly'-eolored cavalcade of Cossacks crossing an enameled prairie in the spring - time. There is peculiar ability in textures. It delights to display itself — more charmingly perhaps in Biigel than any other — in the painting of sheep, of the ragged, unwashed kind, with full coats.

Belgian art is nourished by great traditions and by a generous school at Antwerp. It has not the advantage here, to give it the credit to which it is entitled as a whole, of the grand decorative works to which it is liberally' called at home, as in the palaces of Brussels. I find Verlat, who is most prominent as to size, somewhat harsh, and overstrained in his mammoth views of Barabbas, and animals fighting. The charming large, rich-colored fishing boats of Clays, painted in a thick, smoothed paste, belong to the Dutch school, along-side, in spirit. One chamber is devoted, in great part, to Alfred Stevens. He does interiors, with figures having the true “ society ” air. He has a peculiar taste in quiet colors. They' might be called 11 symphonies,” what he does with plushes and satins of brown, drab, and gray, with a little pale red and blue. This is one of the new directions still widely open. Moore has, in the English department, some small specimens in pale blue and pearl. I have passed till now, in the French department, a Jacquet, which belongs particularly to this group. It is a sitting figure in a dreamy attitude. It is a symphony' in the hues of wines, ruby and amber gleams and depths; the whole softened, melting, — exquisite!

But if it be only a matter of symphonies and tones that we are arrived at, in what are we better off than when dealing with the sulphur-yellow drawingrooms of the English upholsterers? In little, except that human nature is comminuted, as it were, and mingled with this. Its intelligence, however frivolous, looks out of the midst, and gives the splendor an unending mystery.

The Scandinavian nations have their students at Rome, at Paris, and Munich. They paint the nude, the fantastic legends of the gods of Asgard. the savage fiords wanned by the glow of the short summer, with a thoroughness of execution and a sober charm of their own. Sabnson, of Sweden, makes a pleasing large picture — I prefer to mention that at the Salon as displaying best his qualities— of four laborers hoeing. They are in a row, and all in the front plane. It is of an almost indolent simplicity; the lines are mainly horizontal, and there is scarcely an attempt at composition. Denmark shows, in the landscapes, a great deal of a metallic green finished in much detail, not unlike some of the work of W. T. Richards.

1 he Swiss republic, with its peculiar conditions, has produced no indigenous art, but, only, as in literature, a nice general culture. Among the rest are shown two not at all'complimentary portraits of Generals Sherman and Lee, purchased by the federal council with curious impartiality.

The Greeks keep alive the memory of Lord Byron, and their gallant, naval combats with the Turks early in the century. They do not go farther hack. If you wish to find the exact manner of the Pyrrhic dances, it is not here, but in the No. 0 of Alma Tadema.

The Dutch school is one to which the word can be applied with some confidence. There is assembled, principally at llie Hague, a collection of artists who have both a spirit and a manner of their own. It is a modern spirit, having nothing to do with tins classics, and little with the Middle Ages, It finds its satisfaction almost entirely in the exterior aspects of the country. It is the blackand-white cattle feeding on the levels, fringed with windmills, tlm moist, heavy atmosphere that forms clouds close down to the earth. We get transient gleams through it upon a patch of verdure, a red roof, a white window, with a delicious effect. The sea and the fishing boats, in the hands of Maris, Apol, Mosilag, are an important department. The Coats are very bold, and colored as Clays does them for Belgium, hut more sombre. The sea is strange, leaden, greenish, and thick; the sea of the Channel turbid, and never crystalline. Ribarz paints the same gleams and the red roofs exquisitely for Austria, and Masure is not the only one at Paris who approaches — as Daubigny did — the same kind of sea; but there eau be little doubt of the origin of the manner in the country itself. Your sympathy is demanded for the life depicted, yet not disturbingly. The people are unhappy, but not in anguish. They walk by the sea, or sit with folded hands, with an air of reverie in their melancholy.

The art of the United States, — behold us arrived, at last, in the department which constitutes to the patriotic American his foreground, lingered over with an affectionate interest touched with sympathy. It has not suffered a sea change in crossing the ocean. There is the old element, — very quiet and not in force here,—fin perfectly educated, and developed in provincial conditions. There is the new element, in train to be exceedingly well educated, reveling deeply in foreign pieturesqueness, painting from a common stock of archaeological and Oriental ideas, and nut yet having gone in search, as it undoubtedly will, of national subjects. You would not know, from the walls, where you were. The painting is extremely good. If it were not for the overwhelming richness in the vicinity, it must he thought well of by everybody. A critic, who has deservedly compared our facade to a railway station in the Western wilds, finds here that 41 this is a people which Isas not vet arrived at the sentiment of art.*' But no, M. Hippolvte Gautier! It is a people of the quickest and most impressible, of an eager zest in art. But it has been so starved, it lias had so few opportunities, — no government patronage ; no great churches and municipal halls to decorate; no education, in so far as it is educated, except in small, domestic works. Something very radical and wholesale has got to be done wilh it before we can have a great body of strong painters, for at the present they are produced, as our Western railroads were built, in advance instead of after the demand; but let nobody believe that it is not. of excellent material.

One is ready to assert at the end that there are no national but only individual peculiarities, —no schools. It is not as in the great epochs of the past, when communications were difficult. The old master, shut up in his hill city, developed an art with sharp edges, which passed but slowly out of the territory. Everybody now has access to everybody rise’s picture, to borrow what he pleases from it. A Paris Salon is an epitome of what is done the continent over, iE not the world over.

There is but one school. The way fo judge of national standing is numerically. How many of these admirable artists has the nation in proportion to its population? But no, not yet. This is coming rapidly, but not quite come. You bear away still, though faintly, the domestic and moral tone of England; the raw, glowing colors of Spain; the expression of intellectual feminine beauty of Germany; the furtive sunshine and the thick, weird glance at the sea and its fishing boats of Holland ; the mosaic view of life of the (Spanish) Italians; the scholarship and a certain grandiose seriousness of the French, as distinctive characteristics.