THE work of Emile Claus is a manifestation in quite another direction of the Impressionist idea. Born in Western Flanders in 1849, he was the sixteenth child of parents in very humble circumstances. Their business in life was to supply with provisions the boatmen who passed along on the river Lys. By various means the boy, who had very early displayed a yearning for the painter’s career, managed to evade all attempts to harness him in the drudgery of the home life. A pastrycook, a railway watchman, a linendraper’s assistant, these were a few of the vocations he was condemned to try, yet from which he escaped. At last he set out for Antwerp, with £7 in his pocket, and the warning that he need not expect a penny more. In the city of Rubens he became a free pupil of Professor de Keyser. All day long he studied in the Academy. When night came he earned a livelihood by giving drawing-lessons, acting as a sculptor’s “devil,” and colouring pictures of the Stations of the Cross. At last, after many struggles, he became a popular portrait-painter in the city, particularly of children in fancy costume. In 1879 he travelled through Spain and Morocco, painting the conventional compositions of an Iberian tour, and much influenced by the style of Charles Verlat. Despite his great success in Antwerp, in 1883 Emile Claus changed his manner entirely. He shook off the dust of the city for ever, renounced portrait-painting, and became “paysagiste.” Impelled by an intense love of nature he returned to his native village on the banks of the Lys, and recommenced his life as a landscape painter “en plein air.” He has never returned to the distracting turmoil of town, and, in his quaint white and green shuttered house at Astene between Ghent and Courtrai, has buried himself in the heart of the country. Although some distance from the larger cities of Belgium, Emile Claus does not vegetate in his obscurity. On wheel or a-foot he is equally active, visiting his friends and working on his canvases, of which he has always some six or eight in progress. It may be noted that he works entirely in the open air, and finishes in front of nature. One might judge of this from the strength and completeness of his pictures.