The “National Fête at Camaret” is celebrated so earnestly by the Breton peasants that, in spite of the bright paper lamps on the tree, it has the effect of a church solemnity. In “The Old Breton Nag,” Cottet has translated from bronze into less severe painting one of the never-to-be-forgotten coal-mine horses of Constantin Meunier. “Mourning by the Sea” is one of his masterpieces. Grandmother, mother, and daughter are sitting together on a stone bench on the shore. They are all three wearing widow’s weeds. They are speechless and motionless, abandoned to their thoughts, which abide with their dead. The sea, which has swallowed their husbands, and to which they turn their backs, lurks behind them in insidious calm behind two storms that depopulate the coast, and leave behind the granite cliffs only old and young widows and children, who, in turn, also will be trained for the sea—the merciless sea, on which the poor devoted fishermen and sailors seek their living and find their death. The existence of a population, its truceless fight with hostile nature, is comprised in the black figures of these three modern Niobes. To-day, too, as in its beginnings, true art is myth-making. To this series of pictures from Breton peasant life belongs also an “Early Mass in Winter,” which at present hangs in the “Little Palace,” at Paris. In the early dawn, beneath heavy clouds, a few Breton peasant women, of whom we get a back view, are proceeding across the flat, damp heath to an insignificant village church. They wear the round mantle with a hood, which is usual in that country. On first glancing at these short, broad, black figures without human form, which look like wobbling, tightly-filled coal-sacks, I could not help laughing aloud. But I observed in the mien of other observers composedness, piety, and admiration. These evidently saw in the picture only the walk to church, not the clumsy sacks, always a proof how powerfully Cottet can conjure up a mood.