figured in “La Féerie intime.” The picture, as will be remembered, is the nude figure of a young woman ensconced in a great armchair. The garments she has just quitted softly surround her. The brilliant and dazzling effect of the painting is in the meshes of her spangled dress blazing with reflected light, and from the gold that gleams and glitters is the lacquer of the Chinese cabinet. The whole picture is a glow of gold and fire, and in this luscent envelope the woman muses and dreams. This picture is in Russia, as are many of Besnard’s canvases. Many critics and painters class this picture as the finest example of modern art. It would not be complete to close the study of Besnard without mention of his etchings. Here and there a dealer may have a complete set of the few produced, but they are few indeed, and difficult to obtain. The most celebrated is known as “La Femme.” In this series Besnard has drawn woman in every stage of her existence. We have the flirt, the mistress, the wife, the happy mother with her children, the miserable mother, who to cover the form of her freezing child denudes herself, and at length casts her body over her son; the woman of the ball-room, the woman of the streets, and, in short, he has seen fit to display every state and condition of femininity in this study of black and white. There also is a weird and eccentric suite, designated as “La Mort.” In these studies Besnard has indeed played with his conception, ringing its changes to endless and infinite variety. Death, the skeleton, pursues his prey in every imaginable state of society--in the streets, in the crowd, to the lonely individual, to the lovers’ embrace, to the man and wife before the altar, he lurks behind a pillar to seize the solitary passer-by, he appears in the ball-room, jogging elbows with the _débutante_, he rescues the beggar and menaces the rich man. Here in these drawings the painter displays his first and only hint of morbidness. The idea of death, he says, has always been with him an obsession. Whistler’s etchings are alone to be mentioned in class with these admirable _eaux-fortes_. Besnard himself explains the absence of the melancholy strain which is, as a rule, strongly underlying the work of all great genius. “I never work when I am unhappy. Unhappiness has a most depressing effect upon my execution and my conception. Never in times of anxiety have I said, ‘I will turn to my work, I will lose myself in my [Illustration: A WOMAN OF BIARRITZ] creations. When my child was ill I was utterly incapable of producing, and only when its recovery was certain could I undertake my work again. (And it is at the hospital for sick children at Berck, when he was there for the health of his child, that he painted his frescoes.)