Charles Cottet is developing into the undisputed leader of the young race of painters. He deserves the recognition accorded to him, yet it is a serious matter that he provokes to imitation; for what in him is uncouth, though justifiable, independence, will become with the imitators a manner that may rapidly pass into intolerable aberration. Cottet loves dark harmonies of colour. He paints night, closed rooms illumined by artificial light, candle and fire effects; unlike Rembrandt, whose glooms are delicate and transparent, whose men and things are particularly self-luminous in sunless space; and unlike his pupil, Schalcken, who treats flames and their reflections roughly after the manner of a blacksmith, without mystery or harmony. Cottet paints it apparently more from joy in darkness than joy in light, for with him darkness is generally the principal thing, and the sources of light are there chiefly to call attention to the sinister stir and movement in the unillumined dusk. His imitators do not see the intense life of his shadows. They only see his black, brown, and dark-green palette, and dimly brush away at it again as in the worst days before the dawn of “free light.” Painting goes out into the night, and will remain there a while. Then once more a cheerful and free artist will come, and discover light for an astonished and enraptured world, and he will be deified or damned as a revolutionist just as Monet was thirty-five years ago when he did the same, and as Cottet was five years ago when he did the reverse. And thus it will ever be so long as in the human apparatus of thought a change of impression will relax conscious feeling, and art creation will have to serve, not only the utterance of strong impulses of emotion and the relaxation of the nervous system, but also the ambition or vanity of the artist, which means, I suppose, to the end of time.