Cottet’s execution is somewhat brutal. He works in the style of Ribot, who was himself a curious mixture of reminiscences of Franz Hals, Ribera, and Velasquez, with an admixture of personal self-will. He lays great, dark, almost dirty spots on the canvas, and treats human skin with boorish coarseness—I might almost say, with the curry-comb. But what truth and energy in all the movements! How economically and yet how exhaustively he can reveal the thoughts and feelings of his subject. There is little in the whole of modern painting so pathetic as his three-panelled picture, “Sea Folk,” that now adorns the Luxembourg Museum. In the middle, the parting meal of the Jack Tars before starting, round the village table fifteen people, strapping young men with their womenfolk—mothers, wives, and sweethearts. Through the open window dark-green night looks in; from the petroleum lamp there gleams a sharp streak of yellow light; the men sit close to each other in silence; forebodings and the sadness of leave-taking exalt them and raise the souls of these horny-handed toilers to the regions of poetic thought and dreams. On the right, the boat that is conveying the sailors to their ship; some are rowing or steering, the rest are in a reverie. All go carelessly to meet their fate, which perhaps will mean merely prosaic seaman’s work on a voyage without any adventures, but perhaps even heroic tragedies of struggle and destruction. On the left, the women remaining behind, who watch from the shore the departing men, their lovers, their bread-winners, with sorrowful love and prayer in their looks, their mien, their hands, and their attitudes. Possibly this profound picture moves me so much only because it illustrates completely what I meant when I described the social mission of art in the future in these words: “In a work of art which is to attract the people, the people must find themselves again, but just as formerly the priest and king did: magnified and ennobled. The work of art must show them their own likeness, though a beautified one. It must raise the people in their own eyes, teach them to respect themselves.... Works which can show the dignity and beauty of the occupations of the multitude, which are a sanctification of labour, an apotheosis of the tragedies and idyls, of all the sweet and bitter stirrings of emotion in the common life—these works, I believe, constitute the type of the art work of the future.” Cottet’s triptych is one of these works. It renders my abstract deductions concrete. He is a great painter who can extract with so sure a hand from the stone of everyday life all the gold of beauty it contains.