French painters have often been blamed for neglecting the material around them, and for trespassing upon the domain of foreign artists by representing Russian peasants and Italian beggars or selecting subjects from Spain or Japan; but I have looked in vain through the various galleries for any evidence that other countries are a whit less obnoxious to this reproach than our own. Each nation forages in its neighbor's field. Is it too much to hope that modern art may free itself from the bondage of a senseless fashion, and may take to the study of the living types close at hand? Russia and America, for instance, have shown themselves capable of producing a literature distinctively national and characteristic: must they ever remain without a school of art as indigenous to the soil, and shall their painting never have its Tourgueneff and its Bret Harte? The law of development may require that the birth of a nation's art shall succeed that of its letters--though the history of the Renaissance would seem to contradict this theory--but whether this be so or not, it is certain that one does not imagine one's self in Moscow while perambulating the Russian _salon_ in the Champ de Mars, where the best representative of the national art, M. Siemiradski, has chosen for the two paintings which have deservedly won a medal of honor subjects from ancient Rome--the one an amateur hesitating in his choice between two articles of equal value--namely, a chased cup and a female slave--and the other representing a soirée of Nero. The subject of this last is horrible. The tyrant, crowned with flowers and surrounded by women and freedmen, descends from his palace. Attached to long poles and besmeared with pitch, ready for the fatal flame, are the living bodies of wretched Christians which will illumine to-night the gardens of Cæsar. _Living Torches_ is the title of the picture, which is one of the most successful paintings of the Exposition, and has given its author a high rank among contemporary artists.