His life had ended artistically. Carriès disappeared ere his locks grew scanty or grey. Beautifully and noiselessly, like another Euphorion, he soared away from the admiration of his contemporaries in the full lustre of his fame; and his works, through his early death, experienced the enhanced value of the Sibylline books. We may call him happy, for in this room we feel that he had given his best when he died. With a longer life he might have gone astray, for there is no lack of short openings to false paths. Very likely he would have repeated himself many times, and that would have detracted from the dainty charm of rarity which, besides their noble beauty, is peculiar to his works. He unites in himself two different and equally perfect artists: the sculptor and the art-potter. Each tilled a tiny field; but with what intensity! And what harvests they conjured out of it! As sculptor, curiously enough, the whole human figure in its Olympian nudity failed to interest him. He has not on a single occasion sought to represent the body’s Paradisaic beauty. He confines himself, apparently on principle, to head and hands; but these are surpassed by nothing, and equalled only by little, that all the centuries since the Renaissance have produced. I pass respectfully, yet without deeper feeling, by his busts of Velasquez and Franz Hals. They are merely exercises of his hand, perhaps only pastimes. They seem theatrical by reason of the accentuation of the costume. In their countenances the absence of the model is too evident. But beside them the busts of Gustave Courbet, of Jules Breton, especially of Carriès himself, operate with unequalled authority. They live before us; they think, and they reveal themselves. In looking at them we involuntarily call to mind the old stories of the earthen statues which a magician filled with the breath of life in order that they might serve him.