Has Puvis laid himself open to the reproach that all his figures are awkwardly typical because he cannot draw? We might almost think so. It is only as a reply to such a reproach that we can understand his exhibiting in 1896 several hundred drawings, preliminary studies for all his chief works. After a minute inspection of these smaller and greater sheets of sketches scarcely indicated or industriously executed, of figures scarcely outlined or carefully shaded in lead-pencil, Indian ink, red and other coloured chalks, we are bound to feel every respect for his industry and conscientiousness. For the originality of his talent, too? That to me is questionable. If I gaze on the studies of Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer, I am, in a very short time, over-mastered by an inexpressible emotion. A holy of holies is revealed: the most secret feelings of an artist’s soul which would fain become conscious of itself whilst seeking to give shape to the emotion that is urging it. You can see the struggle with the resistance of the material, the mustering of all his forces, in the majority of cases the artist’s victory, ofttimes his despairing confession of impotence. A feature of the phenomenon—a fugitive yet expressive movement has made its impression on the artist. He hastens to fix his conception. At first in a few hasty strokes, which are then strengthened, deepened, emphasised, and developed. Five times, ten times, till the artist desists disheartened, or till the vision is overcome and fixed by a spell in its whole force and verity, in its distinctive character that is never to be repeated. In Puvis I observed with astonishment the contrary process. The first sketch has always the greatest individuality, every later state of the figure shows it less differentiated, and more reduced to an average type lacking expression. He never ascends, he goes down. The artist’s emotion in face of the phenomenon—the impulse to produce in the rapture of an intuition is never traceable in him. None of the sheets is the arena of that awful fight waged by talent against the hostile demon of the material, which reminds me of the night-long struggle of Jacob with the spectre at the ford Jabbok. The starting-point of the work is correct, ice-cold _métier_. It progresses to simplifications that are just so many evasions of difficulties, and it finally arrives at insignificant puppets. “That was intentional,” cry the painter’s eulogists. So much the worse if it was intentional. But was it really intentional? That is the question. Often enough, as an afterthought, a person imagines he is exercising volition, whilst, as a matter of fact, he is constrained. For him who has learnt to see in all works documents bearing on their creator’s psychology, the drawings of Puvis are proof positive that this highly famous man never glanced at the world with an artist’s eye, but that he was originally a cold, academical technician, who, later