“L’Automne,” again, is a study low in tone, and Besnard has left his type (distinctly the blonde woman) to paint a dark creature through whose loosened hair fall a shower of autumn leaves. This picture is a veritable phantom of a season past. There is an Algerienne in this collection, interesting because it is yet another treatment of Besnard’s famous “Deux Rayons.” The Eastern woman is seated in the window of the booth, and blending with the room’s light is that light from the long Eastern street which seems actually to enter her room at the threshold of her booth. In 1893, Mr. James Sutton, of New York, ordered from Martignac forty Besnards to be sent to America. His name was then scarcely known in the United States. Many of the canvases found instant appreciation. One beautiful portrait called “La Pensive,” in the possession of Monsieur Martignac, is especially worthy of mention. Here Besnard is faithful to his type--a blonde woman with brilliant head of copper-coloured hair. She leans a little forward with her chin on her clasped hands. Her dress is of yellow satin and old lace, in her hands two great pink roses. The scheme of the picture is yellow with a single delicate pink note. The hair, the flesh, and the texture of the satin and the lace are all repetitions and repetitions, all insistences of the yellow tone. “La Femme de Biarritz”--Martignac--one of Besnard’s late paintings, is very beautiful indeed. The model is a woman of warm, voluptuous type, revealing the characteristics of the Basque. This picture was painted when Besnard was in Biarritz, where he had gone for the health of one of his children. Monsieur Martignac has several examples of Besnard’s pastels, and curiously enough the more delicate treatment that his canvases in oil display is absent in these pastels, whose colours are so vivid as to be almost blatant; but they are splendid achievements, and Besnard is the first pastellist in France. Some of his most successful works in this medium are in the possession of Dr. Delbet, of Paris. [Illustration: LOVE]