He does not rely on his capability or right to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential. He does not dominate his subject with sovereignly subjective perception, but makes himself the humble slave of the phenomena and all their most capricious and lowest details. He does not span the world with the eye of a creative artist, but glances at it as though he were a photographic apparatus for taking authentic negatives. To this intellectual dependence is joined an insufficient development of the sense of what is picturesque. Leempoels is dry in his accuracy and sober in his colouring. He does not seem to think it is his vocation to harmonise tones and to please the eye by a well-arranged palette. And in spite of all this I can never forget his chief pictures. He revealed his nature in _naïve_ little features. For instance, on the wall of the room where the father and mother, old and worn out by life, are sitting together, hang faded photographs representing them, as a young married couple, in a strikingly comic dress according to the latest fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, yet young and full of joyous hope. This discreet contrast, which must be sought for to be noticed, contains the whole melancholy poetry of their life from blooming youth to withered age. And the pictures of his sisters. The good girls are not particularly favoured by nature; they are true daughters of the homely Flemish race, in whom beauty is rare. When Leempoels painted them, there was a struggle in him between the conscientiousness of a sworn witness to reality and brotherly love; but the former gained the victory, and the latter was allowed to reveal itself only in the delicate, almost caressing, perfection of their hands, necks, hair, and clothes. His picture “Friendship”—an old and somewhat younger man are sitting boldly before us, hand in hand, with their honest, ugly faces turned full towards us. They are figures from the people, the one wearing a green, the other a dark red knitted waistcoat. They are evidently neither rich nor educated, and no particularly developed intellectual life speaks from their clear, reposeful eyes, or their heavy, vulgar features. And yet they are noble creatures. It is their feeling which ennobles them. Only lofty souls are capable of such loyalty and attachment as these two workmen, who so affectionately clasp each other’s hands and lean shoulder to shoulder—let come what come may!—and he who comprehends character without declamation says to himself involuntarily before this picture: “It is well for him who in his path through life meets with such friendship.” Here Leempoels has performed the highest mission of the artist—he has recognised and indicated convincingly what is grand and beautiful in the insignificant and commonplace. That is healthy idealism, for which it is my pride to fight—a consoling and uplifting moral purport in an exact and true form.