Their significance, both as decoration and allusion, is progressive, passing from the serene simplicity and tempered realism of the prophets, through the mingling of human tragedy and symbolism in the misery of the apostate Jews, up to the bewilderment of beauty and horror in the representation of the tangle of false faiths. Moreover, this graduation of motive bears a very skilfully adjusted relation to the architectural function of the several spaces embellished. Unfortunately the room itself has very little architectural reasonableness, and is unworthy of the decorations, which will not establish their full dignity of effect until the remaining spaces are filled. So it is scarcely fair to compare them with Puvis de Chavannes’s in the same building, which involve a completed scheme, for which, too, the architects made due provision. Further, the motives of the two artists are so radically different: Puvis, content to shadow forth a vague conception in abstract terms; Sargent, seeking to embody the facts of men’s mental and moral life in their direct and actual significance. It was a more daring problem, and one that perhaps is more closely knitted to the feeling of our times. The solution is a most notable attempt to bring the intellectual faculties into harmonious accord with the æsthetic. It is along the line of these decorations and of “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose” that one believes the true Sargent may be discerned. In them he is giving utterance to himself; in his portraits responding with a certain _hauteur_ to the allurements of his day. V WINSLOW HOMER In the American section at the recent Paris Exposition, no painter made a more distinct mark than Winslow Homer. The foreign critics seemed to be conscious of a fresh note in his pictures: one not traceable to European influences, still less suggestive of Parisian technique; a note of unmistakable force and independence. Could it be considered representatively American?