Aman-Jean is a melancholy painter, whose palette has been tuned in a minor key. He is the guitarist of the falling leaf, twilight, tapestry-hung ancestral halls, sombre Gobelins. His pictures result from the mood in which a man catches himself humming the _King of Thule_. I do not say that this tone of colour does not possess its charm. He who does not live his life like a thoughtless, devouring, and digesting animal has, I suppose, on every blessed day of his existence, an hour in which he finds his own soul in the subdued and faded palette of Aman-Jean. It is, however, morbid to see the phenomena of the universe merely as old Gobelins in the hue of twilight hours. And morbid, too, is the way in which Aman-Jean transforms his impressions of poems into a painter’s view. I know, for instance, a “Beatrice” of his which affords the maximum of involuntary comicality. Before an artificial-looking orange-tree, which she overtowers in height, Dante’s beloved, with the upper part of her body thrown back, and her stomach pushed forward, performs a sort of _danse du ventre_. To her girdle she has a golden laurel garland hanging, which, as a note of illumination in the dull night-hues, has an excellent effect as _valeur_ (as the French say), but as an object or requisite is very comic. Aman-Jean himself, with that misappreciation of subordination in his pictures, which is so common among artists, lays far greater value on such ridiculous whims than on his portraits. And yet it is only in these that he shows with what sureness and intensity he is able to seize and lay bare the most inaccessible and most mysteriously elusive thing that reality has to exhibit, viz., living man. His “Jules Caze” and his “Dampt the Sculptor” belong to the most delicate portrayals of men, just as his “Paul Verlaine” and “Madame Henri Martin” must also remain unforgettable by every one who has beheld them. His portraits, to be sure, are not by any means of the same value. There is, for instance, a portrait by him of a “Cossack Colonel” that must fully mislead in regard to him. Materiality is entirely lacking in the full-length figure he has painted of the Russian officer; it is clapped flat on the canvas like a pancake. A laurel bush climbs from the bottom to the top of the picture—one cannot say in the background, as the picture has no depth, but, apparently, behind the man. The shrub seems painted on the wall to the height of the head. It suddenly grows plastic before our eyes, and shoots its leaves in front of the colonel’s nose and forehead. By this symbolism which scoffs at all the laws of perspective, the painter evidently wants to suggest relations between the warrior and fame. One can only shrug one’s shoulders at such puerility.