on, by pure reason and without attaining the slightest fervour, has subtilised a peculiarity: the imitation of faded frescoes in colour, archaic indifferentiation in drawing, abstract literary symbolism in his subjects. In fact, what is unreal and dream-like about his vision is not only determinative in regard to his archaically simple, almost poor drawing and his pallid colour, but also the choice of his subject. He likes best to portray allegories, in which the figures are reduced to the _rôle_ of symbols. When he cannot be allegorical, in his famous wall-paintings at the Pantheon, for instance, which tell the legend of St Géneviève, he satisfies his craving for spectre painting by spiritualising the given historical figures into fleshless, bloodless denizens of the ballad of the land of Thule. In individual and very rare instances, he finds a material organically suitable for his moon-struck style of painting. In such cases, of course, he strives after extraordinary effects; for instance, with his “Poor Fisherman” in the Luxembourg Museum. This dreadfully poor, emaciated man—more a shadow than a human being—who, sorrowfully but resigned, stands in his old patched boat, drops his wretched net into the sluggish, greyish-yellow water, and is surrounded and, as it were, fixed by the dead lines of a flat melancholy landscape, breathes a disconsolateness and abandonment that, at the sight of him, “humanity’s whole sorrow” seizes the beholder. Once again, in his last period, Puvis lighted on one of those rare subjects which not only bear, but demand his peculiar methods of execution, and out of this lucky encounter came forth a masterpiece, viz., the fresco which concludes his Géneviève cycle.