In the _salons_ of late years, Albert Besnard pursues a curious policy. Near one or more aggressively stupid works, he exhibits a portrait or painting which is amazingly rational. In this there is method, unmistakably. It is a sort of self-defence. Besnard seems, from his canvasses, to address the visitors to the “Salon” in these words: “You see that I am in private life quite a sane individual and correct painter, who is as much the master of his art as anybody in the world. The other rubbish is for the fools of modernism. For those I am bound at times to play the Jack Pudding, but you need not, however, worry yourself about that.” Once, for instance, this painted plea was the life-sized portrait of Denys Cochin, the nationalist deputy for Paris—an excellent work, laborious, powerfully drawn, and irreproachable in colour, which reminds one of Herkomer’s best style. His clownery, on the other hand, was a huge picture which Besnard calls “The Isle of the Blessed.” A bushy shore in the foreground, then a wide expanse of water which looks partly like sand, partly like wine-soup, and only in the remotest degree like natural water. Finally, in the background, a flat shore with the outlines of a white town that stick, as if cut out of paper, on the blue horizon. Across the level sea where it is reddest, glides a skiff in which stands, in the attitude of the Saviour calming the tempest, an enigmatical figure in red, flowing garments, and with the countenance of an Indian chief, surrounded by a grass-green and wine-dreg-coloured woman and a monkey-like rower of sulphur-yellow hue. On the bank young maidens tarry for the new arrivals, their light raiment, blown bell-shaped by the breeze, reproducing a _motif_ of Botticelli. Between the trees groups of bright-coloured figures are camped, and on the steps of a hill sit or lounge flute-playing fauns, one of whom has the typical head of a retired French colonel. The women in the skiff are distinguished by distorted, acrobatic attitudes, which no model could sustain for ten minutes without supports and props. On principle, no two figures are placed side by side without being clad in the most opposite colours in the spectrum. This arrangement of colours suggests the thought that none of the figures must move away from the side of the others, and none could step into another group, as otherwise the harmonies intended by Besnard would be destroyed. That seems boldly and freely fanciful, but is soberly and painfully subtilised. It is a mechanical game with contrasts of colours, devoid of purpose and even of the charm of any sense of colour. Albert Besnard has, in his later days, evidently discovered Böcklin, or even has only heard him extolled and wants now to make his own Böcklin. The fauns—up to their heads—the maidens on the shore, the blue sea, the white town in the distance, are descended in the direct line from the pictures of the Bâle master. But Besnard