He tries to square the circle, which, as may be proved to him, is not feasible, and he aimlessly dissipates his energies in this futile effort. He is bent on arresting the most fugitive vanishing, the gentlest swaying of a ray of light, and, as it were, the fourth decimal place of a fraction of colour, and on fixing it on the canvas. And as he cannot conjure forth this feat from his colour-tubes, in spite of the most learned and complicated mixing, he tries to reach his goal by newly invented tricks of the brush. Thus he gets to dotting and spotting. Innumerable minute touches with the brush are to leave behind a chaos of colour-dots, from which the eye may come to discern, or, at any rate, get an inkling of, the play of colour in the actual object. This method is extremely laborious and risky. It postulates great patience and ability to emphasise in the minute work the firm lines of the drawing. For if one loses sight of these lines, or cannot make them ring out clearly from the colour gamut disseminated equally over the whole canvas, the picture dissolves into a shapeless daub. Sisley himself is often wrecked on this rock. By his method, however, in a few happy moments, he obtains, to be sure, effects which would scarcely be deemed possible. Then we may enjoy in his pictures a real dance of sun-motes in transfulgent air. A single picture of Sisley’s even the connoisseur easily passes by. It is insignificant. Even a whole row of pictures which represent different themes will hardly make a great impression. At most, certain delicacies of tone, a certain far-sighted clearness of atmosphere, make an impression. If, on the other hand, you see near one another panels which depict the same subjects at different hours of the day or seasons of the year, under different lights and conditions of weather, you grasp in astonishment the meaning of this artist. The subject is the same, but so altered as to be hardly recognisable. People marvel at the power with which Sisley can arrest strangely changing aspects, and gain some faint idea of the difficulty which the exposition of observations calls for, observations which are generally out of reach of any but the most acute feeling and the most painful attention. Sisley has openly admitted that his skill is unintelligible without the key afforded by comparison. That was why he exhibited, as a rule, at least two—usually many more—treatments of the same subject. Thus in the _Salon_ in the Champs de Mars in 1898, he showed a beach, “Lady’s Cove,” in two lights; and, in 1896, Moret Church, in transparent pale lilac just before sunset, and also in softly-veiled slate-grey in rainy weather. I remember a row of studies of the same village church, which ran through all the divisions of the spectrum, one after another, and, on each succeeding panel, was a revelation the more dazzling in proportion as one already knew its form in all its details. Sisley has