_ZOLA_ JONGKIND and Boudin are the links which connect the Barbizon men of 1830 to the Impressionist group of 1870. Although little public fame came to them during their lifetime, they had considerable influence upon the younger landscape-painters of their generation. Both were artists of great ability as well as of enormous industry; both suffered from continued misfortune and neglect. Yet no collection illustrating the history of Impressionism can exclude examples of the Dutch Jongkind, or of Boudin, a follower of Corot and master of Monet. Jongkind’s pictures are doubling, nay trebling, in value, and the records of the public sale-rooms are astounding evidences of the increasing appreciation of Boudin by modern collectors. The biographies of Jongkind and Boudin form excellent texts over which one may moralise upon the uncertainties of art as a career. It is not often that the Fates compel two men to struggle for so long against such hopeless and wretched surroundings. The life of Jongkind was a life of continued misery. Towards its end he utterly gave way, and died a dipsomaniac. Boudin possessed a little more grit, although his surroundings were not more propitious. He lived almost unnoticed until a beneficent Minister awarded him the greatest prize a Frenchman can receive on this earth, the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Johann Barthold Jongkind was born at Lathrop, near Rotterdam, in 1819. Dutch by birth, many years’ residence in France, together with a strong sympathy with Gallic ways, made him almost a citizen of his adopted country, and certainly a member of the French School of Painting. At first he was a pupil of Scheffont, and afterwards he worked under Isabey. At the Salon of 1852 he obtained a medal of the first class, and then for years in succession was rejected by the juries. Almost at the end of his life he was offered the long-coveted decoration, but he was never a popular artist, nor even well known amongst the art public. A few amateurs bought his works, his water-colours were lost in old portfolios, and the exhibition of his pictures previous to the sale after his death was a revelation alike to painters and critics. His life was a sad history of neglect, terrible privation, and want. All that we know of him is that he gave way to alcoholism, dying in Isère in 1891, alone, friendless, and forgotten. Jongkind was one of the very first men in France to occupy himself with the enormous difficulties surrounding the study of atmospheric effects, the decomposition of luminous rays, the play of reflections, and the unceasing change crossing over the same natural form during the different hours of the day. His influence over several of the more prominent men of the Impressionist group was great. Edouard Manet was strongly impressed by his methods, and Claude Monet refers to him as a man of profound genius and originality of character, “le grand peintre.”