Daumier was known to me and, I suppose, most people, only as a draughtsman. We learnt now to prize him as a painter of high rank. His numerous paintings are illustrations to “Don Quixote,” romantic merry-Andrews, street-singers, Molière’s _Malade Imaginaire_, and a crowded group of lawyers in cap and gown. His manner is the same in oil as in lead-pencil and crayon-drawing: his lines of movement broad and firm, the outlines blunted, and now and again rubbed; all his figures mysteriously surrounded in mist, yet all so clearly and faultlessly represented that one is never led to suspect that their mysteriousness is a trick to hide carelessness or lack of skill. Even his oil-painting is really caricature, but discreet caricature. The nobler method instils into him self-respect, and preserves him from caricature; he just marks roguishly the burlesque features, but does not diverge from reality. Thus his lawyers are portraits, but they look so maliciously intelligent, so inexorably penetrating, that we can doubt of this or that head whether it is a likeness or a caricature. Let us say this: the model will take it for a caricature, but his friends will regard it as a portrait. Daumier is a solitary; he is akin to none of his contemporaries, yet an example of the migration of souls; for in him Hogarth comes to life again, but a Hogarth who for his part would be animated by a spark of Rembrandt’s spirit. Suddenly another solitary appears in the ranks of the allied men of school and tradition, viz., Millet. Precipitation would infer: the romantic is overcome; a new generation with new modes of feeling arises; the nerves of the century begin to vibrate according to a new rhythm. That is sheer nonsense; nothing has been overcome. The romantic masters still form romantic pupils, the crowd still feels in the traditional way; the range of themes and the fashion of treating them remain what they have been for a generation, but amidst the dependent, the docile ones, the imitator forms for himself, by the law of elective affinity, a divergent group—the group of the forest-folk of Barbizon—and amidst this group steps forth an individual man who forgets the master’s _atelier_, who, in painting, thinks of neither the _salon_ nor the art-dealers, who looks not into books and newspapers nor on prototypes, but out into the world, and on that account falls completely out of the century.