It was as though, suddenly, in a dream, some landscape beckoned him--an Italian evening or a moonlit dyke it might be summoned him; for with little warning he was in Paris to-day, in Tuscany to-morrow. Fortunately he had a family who not only understood his brusque departures, but who enjoyed the journeys [Illustration: A PICARDY VILLAGE] as well as did the master himself. He was in every land a student; in the Pays Bas he was an ardent painter, in Italy a constant visitor at the galleries and museums, in England a potter. The art of ceramics always strongly interested him, and he has proved himself a clever exponent of it. For a Frenchman he travelled widely, making many trips to Holland and Flanders, Italy and England. He was keenly appreciative of the art with which these countries teemed, and studied with benefit to his own methods the Flemish and Dutch masters as seen in the Pays Bas--his imagination impressed by the sober stretches of Netherland landscapes, by the velvet seductiveness of Italian hillsides and golden towns, and the misty loveliness of English country. Of Holland he has left us numerous admirable studies, etchings, pictures--the mills and the flat meadows, melancholy dyke lines, scenes on the Zuyder Zee and in Amsterdam. All these are familiar and delightful to his admirers. Possibly he has produced no more perfect piece of work than the picture called “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.” Holland, so long a school and educator and inspirer of landscape painters, has found no modern more quick to represent her country or more appreciative of its native art than Cazin. There is in his work a suggestion of the spirit of the masters of Holland and Flanders far away and removed as he is by his mysticism and the ephemeral handling of colour from the frank colourists of the Dutch School. There is the minute attention to detail, the clever value given to scheme, the massing of much in small compass, the master art of concentrating on the important point. When the painting is analysed the critic discovers that every detail is scrupulously studied. Italy inflamed him with a love for symbolic subjects. The spirituality of the old masters was an evident inspiration to him. But, in considering Cazin, while interested to trace the different elements he found sympathetic and appealing, one fails to discover anything to detract from Cazin’s own absolute originality. England, eminently _connoisseur_ of landscape painting, has seen fit to approve Cazin. His exhibition in London was received with the most flattering appreciation. England knew Cazin for one of those foreigners who had adopted London as a dwelling-place, and who was in sympathetic touch with the English people. [Illustration: THE DEATH CHAMBER OF GAMBETTA] There exists therefore for him a feeling of personal friendship.