misgiving than a saucy child, he lays on the canvas the true colours of things unaltered and unbalanced. I do not doubt that the grey-green of the window-shutters and the arsenical green of the obliquely crossed iron bars of the balcony are painted with the very trade colours which the house-painters actually use for these objects. Of course, this truth in detail produces the greatest artistic untruth in the whole, and the picture that was to be the Whitsun sermon of holy “Open Air,” becomes, through Manet’s inadequacy, a speech for the prosecution of the sun. Claude Monet, the classic of impressionism, is not to be reproached with any incapacity. His execution never betrays him. He says what he wants to say to the last dot on the “i,” and if what he has said fails to satisfy, it is not because he lacked words, but solely because he had no more to say. Monet is a tippler, a drunkard so far as light is concerned. He cannot pass by any lively brilliant illumination without turning in for a painting-bout. Form, however, is to him a matter of indifference; it has no physiognomy for him, nor does it arouse in him any association of ideas. He neglects it absolutely. He does not draw or compose. In his pictures everything is without form, as in nature herself, unless we regard her with pre-existing thoughts of arrangement and meaning—in short, under the optical and logical categories. But he has not his peer in arresting the fugitive magic of sportive rays, their motes, their refractions on surfaces of every kind, on fixed bodies, liquids, and gases. His “Railway Station,” with its wide opening towards the railway line, the bluish clouds of smoke and steam from the puffing locomotive transfused with light, the shimmering vapour under the framework of the iron roof, is unsurpassable as a rendering of absolutely meaningless effects of light. Pictures of this sort will become expressive only when the photography of natural colours is so perfected as to admit of instantaneous copies. Equally remarkable as painting, and more valuable as higher art, is his “Interior of a Room,” with a shadowy boy and plants in the foreground, and a shining floor flooded with blue from daylight pouring in like a cataract through the window in the background. More valuable artistically, because this interior of great elegance, this outline of a child, and this blue, fairy-tale tone of the flood of light, are capable of awakening mood, _i.e._, will have an effect not only on the senses but also on the soul; will stimulate not only the optic centres of perception, but also the higher centres of conception and judgment. “Breakfast in the Open Air,” and two landscapes and marine pieces, are painted after the same rule as the two panels I have described.