in a low-cut dress between two greybeards paying their dreadful court at an exquisitely appointed supper-table; a physician at the foot of the bed gazing with devotion at the tongue, put out quite a yard, of a rich, fat lady-patient; a short, stout woman in a fashionable tailor’s _salon_, whom the slenderest of the show-room girls is trying, with “cake-walk” movements, to fit with a dress like an umbrella-cover, are amusing in their stupidity and ugliness. On the other hand, I cannot follow Jean Veber further when, in “Family Joys,” he tries to make the newborn child ridiculous—a shapeless bit of sprawling flesh, red as a crab, which the midwife has brought from the bed of the exhausted mother at the back of the room, and is exhibiting in triumph to the gaping family. He should keep his sacrilegious hand off the sanctity of this event. The happy combination of a faultless dexterity with an arrogant, creative humour, in which I would only like to see a trifle less admixture of gall, renders Jean Veber’s an artistic physiognomy that is far more interesting than many an idol to whom altars are raised. Emile Wéry, a young and fortunate man of talent, began his career with a great success. His view of an Amsterdam canal made a sensation, and gained the great prize at the “Salon.” Perhaps a little stupefied by this triumph, he kept for a while to the style of his prize picture, so that there was reason to fear he would early stiffen into a manner. He painted, for instance, an attractive triptych, which presents Venice to us in her three characteristic decorations: the narrow _Calle_, the slender _Rio_, and the splendid _Canal_. But what we cannot anyhow fancy absent from a view of Venice—the southern sky, the gleaming sun, and the warm tints of her old stones and tiles: these are here altogether lacking. It is all grey, northern grey. It is the same tone as in the prize picture of Amsterdam. As Faust found Helen in every woman, so Wéry then found apparently Dutch water-towns in every town, and Amsterdam herself in Venice. People think they are flattering the city on the Amstel, when they call it the Venice of the North. Wéry reversed the compliment: to him Venice was the Amsterdam of the South. How true it is that we see not with the eyes but with the soul!