To the “Musée de la rue” his immortal works were dedicated, said a malicious Frenchman; but after all, was this really so degrading at a time when excellent artists did not hesitate to exhibit their work in the open street? Monsieur Georges Cain, the director of the Carnavalet Museum, who knows all the “Coins de Paris” so well and with whom it is so entertaining to promenade “à travers Paris,” tells us that in the days before the Revolution the young artists who were not yet members of the official academies used to show their paintings on the Place Dauphine, once situated behind the Palais de Justice. If Jupiter Pluvius did not interfere, the exhibition was arranged on the day of the “petite Fête-Dieu.” Great linen sheets were pinned over the shop-windows and formed the background for paintings of such eminent artists as Oudry, Boucher, Nattier, or Chardin, works of art which to-day are considered treasures of the Louvre, as “La Raie,” exhibited by Chardin for the first time in 1728 in this museum of the street. “Quel joli spectacle,” says Cain in his “Coins de Paris,” “devaient offrir la place Dauphine, les façades roses des deux maisons d’angle et le vieux Pont-Neuf--décor exquis, pittoresque et charmeur--encombrés d’amateurs, de badauds, de critiques, de belles dames, d’artistes, d’aimables modèles en claire toilette, se pressant affairés, babillards, enthousiastes, joyeux, par une douce matinée de mai, devant les toiles fraîches écloses des Petits Exposants de la Place Dauphine!” Our respect for the “artistes en plein vent” can but increase, when we hear that three famous painters have begun their career with the composition of a sign: Holbein, Prud’hon, and Chardin. All kinds of tavern anecdotes are in circulation regarding Holbein, who was rather a gay bird in his youth. According to one of them he once got so tired of painting the decoration of a tavern room that he concluded to deceive the landlord, watching eagerly his work, by counterfeiting himself standing on a scaffold before the wall busily engaged in his work. Thus he was able to skip out and have a good time in another tavern, while the good landlord, every time he looked through the door, was pleased to see him ever diligently working. One of Holbein’s earliest works was a sign for a pedagogue representing a schoolroom; this is still preserved in the Museum at Basle. Who would have thought that Prud’hon--the artist who dwelled in romantic dreams, and whose wonderful creation of Psyche, borne away by loving wind-gods, lives on, a pleasant fancy in our minds--had begun his artistic career by painting a sign for a hatter in his native town? This, we suppose, was the first and last time that he painted such an unpoetical thing as a hat. Like Holbein he was just fourteen years old at the time when he produced this picture, which likewise has come down to us; at least it still existed when the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris arranged a Prud’hon Exhibition in 1874.