For years he experimented endeavouring to produce a medium best suited to his temperament. In the solid paint crayons we have an addition to the working tools of the artist which is of notable importance. This is not his only gift to France, for it is he who practically resuscitated the beautiful but dying art of etching in colours. In this work he was ably seconded by Miss Mary Cassatt. He is not only an artist but an actor, a musician, an orator, a sculptor, an etcher, a pastellist, an illustrator, and a man of letters. He is a fine example of the pioneer temperament. No sooner is success achieved in one branch of energy than he is in chase of another idea. One day he is trying to invent a perfect oil-crayon; the next, and colour etching is his sole ambition. He draws the elegant “mondaine” of the Boulevards, and then sallies out to study the frowsy denizens of the “banlieue.” In this quarter he found congenial subjects for a series of little masterpieces. Amidst these wretched surroundings, warehouses, factories, wooden sheds ruinous and dilapidated, refuse heaps, brick-kilns, homes of the outcasts and cut-throats of the metropolis, Raffaëlli discovered a rich mine of material hitherto entirely unworked. The district is peculiar to Paris, and owes its existence to the clear half-mile of view required around the useless fortifications. This territory has, in mining phrase, been “jumped” by the penniless. Upon it squat the failures, the drunkards, the thieves, all the vicious under-life of the city. The artist revealed this world to the unsuspecting citizens. He lived in it, studied it day by day, and is a greater authority than the “sergots” upon the manners and customs of a neighbourhood which even the police shun. Such a blot upon the fair page of so magnificent a capital is rapidly being wiped away, but Raffaëlli has immortalised in his etchings and drawings some of the poetic atmosphere which enveloped these legions of the damned. [Illustration: _Photo by Braun, Clement & Co._ NOTRE DAME · J. F. RAFFAËLLI ] [Illustration: J. F. RAFFAËLLI ]