“For now the mid-day quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass; The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead; The purple flower droops: the golden bee Is lily-cradled....” In the last canvas night is shown falling gently upon the land, obscuring, with a veil of rich and sombre colour, trees, foliage, stream. The landscape is lost in sleep. From the photographs, reproduced by the courtesy of M. Claude Monet, M. Durand-Ruel, M. Paul Chevallier, and M. Georges Petit, little idea can be gathered of the extreme beauty of the originals. The colour and technique of Impressionist pictures seem unfortunately to be insuperable barriers to their reproduction in monochrome. Upon this account it has been thought inadvisable to publish reproductions of any of the Haystack or Cathedral series. Monet’s marine pictures are marvellous. In them he depicts throbbing, swelling, sighing sea, the trickling rills of water that follow a retreating wave, the glass-like hues of the deep ocean, and the violet transparencies of the shallow inlets over sand. Monet is the greatest living painter of water. Witness the _Matins sur la Seine_, views painted from the river bank, from the artist’s houseboat, anchored in mid-stream, and on the various islands of the backwaters between Vétheuil and Vernon. The handling is free, loose, and masterly. Never has art expressed, through the hands of a craftsman, anything finer or more virile; never were ideas more frankly expressed, more freshly and more brilliantly executed. Of the last exhibited group of “effects,” the series known as _Les Cathédrales_ of Rouen, exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in the spring of 1895, Monet writes in a personal note to the author: “I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the Cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.” Despite the immense difficulties involved in their production, Monet considers them to be his finest works. On the other hand, they are the works least understood by the public. The series consists of twenty-five huge canvases, a feat requiring considerable physical endurance and indomitable perseverance. Each canvas demonstrates the fact that the painter possesses eyes marvellously sensitive to the most subtle modulations of light, and capable of the acutest analysis of luminous phenomena. The façade of the ancient Norman fane is depicted rather by the varying atmospheric effects dissolved in their relative values, than by any actual draughtsmanship of correct architectural lines. It is very regrettable that the series was not purchased “en bloc” for the French nation. The opportunity has been lost. The canvases realised enormous prices, and are now scattered over two continents.