Blaise Desgoffes.—This painter, who died in 1902, was an incomparable copier of still life; for indeed there exists a still and secret life in the productions of the artist’s hand, as an eye lovingly steeped in form and beauty of colour sees them. Desgoffes was great in little pictures, which rendered splendid things of gold and enamel, of rock crystal, jasper and chalcedony, trinkets and precious stones, lace and embroidery on velvet and silk, carved and polished ebony in insurpassable perfection. There is a school which very contemptuously calls these pictures _bodegones_. That is the disdainful Spanish expression both for a cookshop and for daubed representations of vulgar eatables such as sausages, smoked herrings, and cheese made from whey. Copying the productions of human hands should be unworthy of an artist. Only what is living, nay, only human life, should be justifiable. But that is too narrow a conception. Certainly the highest mission of all human art is the portrayal of men and women; and what is not itself human becomes artistic in proportion as it gains relation to humanity by means of secret anthropomorphic animation and spiritualisation. But he who demands harshly and dogmatically that the human figure should be treated to the exclusion of everything else, relegates a Hondekoeter, a Landseer, a Rosa Bonheur to the second class, and denies a Desgoffes the title of artist, which is sheer nonsense. I do not know if there is a precedence in art, or any other precedence than that of the ability to express and transmit the life of emotion. Anyhow, a man stands very high who understood how to translate into painting the optical peculiarities of choice woods, metals, stones, and textures better than any painter before him. Léon Frédéric amazes like an anachronism; in him lives the soul of a primitive. Thus the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weydens, and Hans Memlings regarded the world and man. That is, however, not a sort of affected, antique skill, as in the English Præ-Raphaelites, and their Continental imitators, but genuine, unconscious atavism, the purity of which is evident from the fact that Frédéric paints no masquerades, but only nude, human limbs, or contemporary types of the people in the miserable working garb of our days. If they appear like figures out of mediæval ballads or folk-stories, it is because Frédéric feels them so. He is an out and out Fleming: mystical like his countrymen Ruysbroek, Suyskens, etc.; and, besides, delighting in form, like the builders of the Belgian cathedrals and guildhalls; in love with life, like the feasters and dancers of the Flemish kermesses; honest and conscientious in his work, like an old guild-master of the time of the Spanish Netherlands; brooding and earnest, like a Beguine or a Lollard.