There were cases in which the employment of Carrière’s plan of the delicate grey veil of enveloping mist was not successful. I have, for instance, been obliged to make reservations in respect of his “Theatre in Belleville.” In the “Christ on the Cross” it is organically developed from the subject. The veil of mist shrouds the incident in the weird twilight which is the prescribed atmosphere of miracle and the mysteries of faith. Beyond the figures in the foreground of the Crucified and the Blessed Virgin we divine, in the semi-dark distance, a great city, at the back of which, on the horizon, a twinkling white light, like the still uncertain brightness of a young dawning day, arises. Our powers of imagination may fill with life the whole of this profound space wherein dawn is at odds with night—with the life of a whole townsfolk enjoying their revenge or weeping for woe, oppressed with foreboding or hopefully confident. Here is symbolism in that high sense in which every true work of art is symbolic. The picture is at the same time intellectual and transcendental; the rationalistic beholder, who neither seeks nor wishes to find a mystery, has before him the humanly affecting drama of the mother who bewails her son who has died unmistakably in a noble task. He sees sights he can understand—the peace of death and a mother’s deepest pain—presented with unsurpassable truth. He enjoys the charm of perfect form, marvellous warmth of colour, produced with the simple means of _gouache_ toning and a very faint heightening by touches of red, and an extremely interesting distribution of soft light glimmering from the dark background. The mystically minded beholder sees all this, and he sees, besides, the divine element in the Crucifixion and the sorrow-stricken Mother, the terribly threatening subversion of the natural order in the darkness brooding over the city and fields, and the promise in the light arising in the distance. What the rationalist sees in the work of art is sufficient to arouse his feeling and admiration. The mystic’s wonder and feeling will be powerfully strengthened by religious emotion. “Portrait of my Wife.”—He who is guilty of the error of confounding gaudiness with coloration might find a guide in this work. A few bright tones in the spiritualised, almost transparent face; a fur collar of a warm, rich brown; a gay, red flower in the girdle, comprise all that Carrière employs as colour media, in order to conjure up a harmony of lulling melody and, at the same time, of all but hypnotising intensity. That is precisely the whole mystery; it is not a question of the noise, but of the harmony. Three colour values, chosen with exquisite taste, placed on the right spot in the floating white and pearl-grey cloud which constitutes Carrière’s manner, and the impression of the colour mystery is produced with greater success and depth than by a palette on which all the seven colours of the rainbow are keeping a witch’s festival.