If this group is weak, the “Gate” is a complete failure. He imagined a gateway with a depressed keel-arch top, divided by an intervening pillar into two gates. The pillars are covered with grotesque masks and mythical animals from top to bottom. The arch of the gate is formed by a dragon, in the gaping jaws of which stands a noble lady. The separate masks and monsters scintillate with spirit, fancy, and humour. In richness and variety of invention, and in depth of humour, I unhesitatingly place these heads far above Germain Pilon’s Pont Neuf masks. The contrast, too, between the fearless maiden standing in the animal’s jaws, full of quiet self-confidence, and the hideous beast, is of pregnant symbolism. The work is, nevertheless, an aberration, as a whole. The masks and monsters have no organic connection with the gate, either constructively, or in accordance with the meaning. They are simply stuck on. And the gateway itself is an insoluble riddle. Where should it lead to? To a lunatic asylum, a museum of caricatures, or a carnival ballroom? Or should it mean “the abstract door,” the door pure and simple, without the purpose of an entrance into a building? The poor, great artist consecrated years of his life to this prodigy, and never saw that he had wasted them. The decorator amused himself in devising unheard-of enamels. He modelled vessels of smooth, supple plant-forms—calabashes, melons, cucumbers, mamillaria-cactuses, bulging or fallen in, smoothly swelling, or warty and shrivelled, whimsically dinted like a thin copper-plate, wantonly hammered, or lumpy and swollen. And over these whimsicalities, which show an incredible mastery of the material, he poured glazes which look so fat and moist that they seem to flow still, viscous and languid. Many are purple, like half-curdled blood; others white and rich, like fresh cream; and others like coloured fruit juices; but many a time we think we see thick matter and brains in frightful discharges; and on some vases the enamel imitates the lichens which overrun the bark of trees in spots, grooves, and bands. And when Carriès has done enough with these glazes, which remind us of opalescent life-saps, he tries diversity in glazes of gold, silver, coral, and precious stones, which change his stoneware phials into splendid vessels from a treasury of the Thousand and One Nights.