I should like beforehand to exclude Raffaelli from the painters that appear in this collection. He is not a labourer from the first hour. Even later on, when he joined the movement, he was no orthodox believer. People, from their superficial knowledge, jumbled him up with the realists, because he was at first always, as the latter were often, a pessimistic confessor of the truth. His peculiar temperament decided his choice of sad subjects. In his outlook on life he was wont to dwell, with self-torturing choice, on depressing sights: on the sick in lazar-houses; on the homeless tramps in the moats about the Paris forts; on poor, human wrecks that float through the street-current of the great city. He told the story of these men with heart-breaking accuracy. He depicted them in mean, miserable, mud-tints; in the dust-grey of unswept, suburban streets; the sickly lime-white and dung-brown of neglected house-walls; the washed-out greenish-blue of worn-out cotton blouses. In this mood was painted his “Convalescents in the Hospital Yard,” with its livid faces beneath the white skull-caps, and emaciated bodies in blue dressing-gowns, on the dank, moss-covered stone benches, in front of the sullen lazar-house. This picture, like all of Raffaelli’s, makes up for the unpleasantness of its story by the severe honesty of its drawing; and in the street picture, “Behind Notre Dame,” the astonishingly effective employment of the gay red kerchief of a workwoman in the foreground, amidst the subdued tones of a murky Paris day in uncertain weather, shows what a clever and faithful colourist this painter is, who so long painted obstinately from a degraded palette. Nowadays, he has, in the main, overcome his depression of spirits, and in his soul a bright sunshine laughs, the rays of which are discernible in all his later works.