Neither must I leave his “St Simon Stylites” unnoticed. The saint is sitting, with his back resting against a pole, on the platform of his lofty pillar. On the other edge of the platform, ascending by a ladder, appears a priest in mass vestments, accompanied by a deacon, in order to administer Holy Communion to the Stylite, who is apparently dying. The story, however, is a matter of indifference. It is the wonderful harmony of colours that makes this picture so expressive. It is late in the day; twilight is approaching; the last ray of sunlight is finely sprinkled through the air around the figures above the roofs of the Syrian town, from which arises a transparent cloud, so thin that it is rather a breath, an exhalation, than a vapour, and is more surmised than seen. A flight of swallows glides past the saint, and the birds, with their arrow-swift and pleasing motions, observed in the precise Japanese way, greatly help to produce an impression of height and airiness, which Brangwyn attains chiefly by his art of distributing light, and his eerie perspective. Brangwyn fixes in his pictures all the magic of noon and midnight. He shows his figures either flushed by the quivering heat of the full burning sun, or covered with a veil of half-transparent darkness. Both illuminations have the peculiarity of suppressing all subsidiary work and letting only what is essential remain. The face or body of a man steeped in sun rays becomes almost transparent. Behind the skin and the connecting tissues which we perceive only as a covering, the muscles and bones come forth. The intense brightness prepares a body almost as the dissecting knife of anatomy. Darkness has a similar effect; it blots out the connections and transitions, and only accentuates the strong lines of construction. Only diffused light gives an equal value to all the parts of a surface; it shows all and explains nothing. Direct light, on the other hand, just like darkness, graduates phenomena, makes us recognise at the first glance what is external ornamentation and what are the supports and timber.