The Century Exhibition also gave the opportunity for a discovery, not only to me, but also to all who brought to it an open mind. There is a painter, Trutat, of whom no one had ever heard anything. Seekers who investigated the provincial newspaper of 1840-60 succeeded in discovering one or two articles about him. That is all. He once or twice exhibited in the “Salon,” but the “Salon” reports of the time make no mention of him. He lived in the first half of the last century, and died at the age of twenty-four. Before his picture—one single picture—men were amazed, and women stood with moist eyes. It is a double picture; in the foreground, a fair young man, pale with sickness, with deep blue eyes and a proud, wild mane; his firm forehead full of impatient dreams of joyous creations, fame, and happiness, yet, in his hollow cheeks, faint shadows of death. Behind him, half obscured in dusk, a woman’s profile, his mother’s head; a good Samaritan with tender gaze, and lips closed in sadness, which once sang cradle-songs, but have learnt silence in the sick-room. In its composition there is a reminiscence of Ary Scheffer’s “St Augustin and St Monica,” in the Louvre. But it is incomparably more profound, for Trutat depicts himself, not saints whom the power of imagination has first to bring before him. The painting is wonderful, firm and full as that of Franz Hals—I deliberately utter this strong statement—so surely and organically matured that one traces beneath the skin all the most delicate muscles and bones. And add to this technique, of which one does not discern how he could have acquired it in a fleeting morning of life, the intensity of feeling which has raised the work to the rank of those high creations in which a soul is revealed. The picture is full as a swan’s song, of foreboding and love. The great youth does not understand himself alone, without his mother—the dear mother must be with him, if he goes out to the market among people. Shall she nurse him? Shall she protect him? Can he dispense with her for a moment as he must be taken away from her so soon? All this is in that mysterious picture, and it was in it when Trutat, though he did not know it, painted his own requiem. Only nobody then understood the riddle; Trutat as little as the rest. He is another Regnault, only a still more genuine one. And no one has made lamentation about him, although his tragedy is more painful than Regnault’s. For the latter attained immortality in the apotheosis of death in battle, whilst miserable consumption slew Trutat ingloriously.