That Millet is absent from this collection is much to be regretted; but by Theodore Rousseau there are several landscapes, small in point of size, but nevertheless exhibiting this artist at his best; as for example, _Le Crépuscule en Sologne_ and _Fermes en Normandie_. Ary Scheffer was the first artist to understand and befriend Rousseau when he started away on lines of his own, and it was through the kind offices of this painter that one of his first pictures was bought by the Duc d'Orléans. His landscapes in Auvergne are early works; and those painted at Barbizon--such as the pictures above named--are later and more finished achievements. Dupré, by whom there are three early works, _Port St. Nicholas_, _Paris_ and _Le Soleil Couchant_, accompanied Rousseau in 1841 to the neighbourhood of Monsoult, where they were frequently visited by Barye, Corot, and Daubigny. There is at Chantilly by this last artist a sketch of the _Château de St. Cloud_, a charming record of a spot full of memories, now no more. By Diaz de la Pena, the last of this group of painters, there is a wreath of flowers and birds painted in vivid colours upon the ceiling in the boudoir of the Petit Château once used by the Duchesse d'Aumale; and by Ziem (known as the "Painter of Venice") there is a landscape, _Les Eaux Douces d'Asie_, a subject magnificently treated by Diaz in a composition now in the Wallace Collection. Monticelli, Diaz's greatest pupil, the leading painter of the Second Empire and a great admirer of the Empress Eugenie, is unfortunately not represented here; nor are there any examples of the early French Impressionists. For here the Hand of Death intervened. [Illustration: PLATE LXXVIII. _Photo. Giraudon._ "Concert Champêtre." By Corot. Musée Condé.]