The limits of space render it difficult to make even a summary enumeration of certain tendencies in figure painting which marked the years of the growth of this great landscape school. Gustave Courbet (born at Ornans in 1819, died in Switzerland, 1877), who might be classed both as a figure and a landscape painter, would demand by right a longer consideration than can be here given. Of his career as a champion of realism, as a past master in the peculiarly modern art of keeping one's self before the public, culminating in his connection with the Commune in Paris in 1871, and the destruction of the column in the Place Vendôme, there could be much to say. Courbet was, as a painter, a powerful individuality; of more force, however, as a painter of the superficial envelope than of the deeper qualities which nature makes pictorial at the bidding of one of finer fibre. His claim to be considered modern can be contested, inasmuch as it was only in subject that his work was novel. In manner of painting he was of a time long past, of a school of greater masters than he showed himself to be. With this reserve, however, as a vigorous painter, both of the figure and landscape, he is interesting; and as one of the first to look about him and find his subjects in our daily life, his work will live. Curiously enough, the revival of the art of another epoch in the case of Saint Bonvin remained absolutely modern. By nature or by choice this painter (born at Vaugirard, near Paris, in 1817, and dying at St. Germain-en-Laye in 1887) is a modern Pieter de Hooghe; and as the Dutch masters addressed themselves to a painstaking and sincere representation of the life about them, in like manner Bonvin, bringing to his work much the same qualities, choosing as his subjects quiet interiors, with the life of the family pursuing its even tenor (or the still more placid progress of conventual life, like the "Ave Maria in the Convent of Aramont," in the Luxembourg), remains himself while resembling his prototypes. It is instructive to look at his "Servant at the Fountain," reproduced here, compare it with many of the pictures of familiar life like those of Wilkie, Webster, or Mulready, published last month, and note the unconsciousness of the work before us. The work of a painter equally able, though suffering somewhat as representing an art with which we moderns have little sympathy, falls into comparison here, and undoubtedly loses by it. The unfortunate painter, Octave Tassaert, who was born in Paris in 1800, and lived there, undergoing constant privation, until he voluntarily ended his life in 1874, possibly found consolation for his hard lot in depicting scenes like that entitled "An Unhappy Family."