Once or twice Cottet has in some measure proved faithless to his usual dark style of painting, and allowed himself to revel in colour. Thus in his portrayal of a family of Breton fisherfolk, when the corpse of a baby is laid on its bier. The dead child lies in its little open coffin, around which four tapers are burning. On both sides of the bier the seven or eight relatives stand grouped: the parents, aunts, little brothers and sisters express, each in his or her way, their grief, which, in the case of the still unconscious children only, sinks to the level of mere curiosity. From the coffin proceed two vividly red ribbons which stream across the bier down to the ground. Flowers of a similar furious red are strewn over the bier. These shrill values do not produce exactly a fine and harmonious effect in the dark-toned general atmosphere with the opposite warm yellow spots of the taper-flames. Moreover, the composition here is also not a happy one. It is an error to make the pale little corpse of the child the centre of a large picture. Death does not attract the eyes, but repels them. It does not endure the rivalry of life unless it can compel attention perhaps by means of special melodramatic circumstances or symbolical value. The glance turns naturally to the living, feeling, acting human beings, and thus the centre of the picture, which should be the keystone of the arch that holds the composition together, seems to be a gap. Christ’s dead body may be made the centre of a picture. This dead Saviour will always be, in the beholder’s imagination, the most living, the only living thing in the picture. So, too, the dead Lazarus and Jairus’s little daughter are suitable for the main figures in a composition, because these dead persons are virtually living, and what makes them interesting is not death, but returning life. But the innumerable “Lessons in Anatomy,” which were a favourite subject with the Dutch painters (Aart Pietersen, M. van Mirevelt, Rembrandt, Adrian Backer, Van Neck, Cornelis Troost, etc.) show how unsuitable a corpse, to which no suggestions beyond its visible condition are united, is for arresting the attention. Even a master such as Rembrandt is unable, in what is, I suppose, the most famous of all “Lessons in Anatomy,” to direct attention to the dead body. In spite of the large space occupied by the corpse, we do not see it, but only Dr Tulp and his audience. Cottet’s picture is the most convincing proof of the impossibility, in a composition containing living persons also, of laying the chief stress on a dead one. The psychic element, _i.e._, the mourners’ pain, Cottet has, however, expressed with gripping force and truth. It is his strength and glory that the inward, emotional life preponderates with him so far beyond all externals.