Landscape painting is, then, also a continuous illustration of the literature of its time. It is anti-classical in the Renaissance and Late Renaissance up to Poussin; Ossianic and Rousseauesque in the eighteenth century, and, in Corot, is Lamartinish. It would, of course, be going too far to point out here what the relations are between each individual great landscape painter and the writings of his contemporaries; and how certain notable exceptions from the rule of parallelism between landscape painting and the fashion of the day in literature—Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, and Turner (just to mention only three)—are to be explained. It is, meanwhile, not to be disputed that the landscape painter approaches nature with a soul filled with the literary spirit of his time, and puts into her what he has retained from his reading. A painting, then, awakens also in the mind of the spectator an echo of all the poetic melodies that have enthralled him, and it is the soft echo of these thousands of poetic voices in our soul, to which we listen when we enjoy a landscape painting. We listen, however, in vain before a picture of Sisley’s; all is still in our soul. This is because the painter has regarded nature from a wholly unliterary standpoint. She awakens in him no associations of ideas, therefore his pictures awaken none in us. He has seen the play of colour, found his delight in it, and has taken no further thought, but has merely striven to reproduce it accurately. We follow his efforts with curiosity, and approve the results if they are successful. But in this appraisement, humour and imaginative power have no part. Is such landscape painting art, or a clever trick? The question is worth careful consideration. CAMILLE PISSARRO One of the most interesting artists in our times was this Pissarro, born at St Thomas in the Danish Antilles, though of a Dutch Jewish family of Spanish extraction settled in Curaçoa, who died in Paris in 1903 at the age of seventy-three. He was a born painter, of the class whose sense of form hardly exceeds the average, whose remarkably fine perception of colour, however, reacting very strongly on every optical irritation, makes the excitement of the retina the source for them of profound feelings of pleasure or the contrary, and fixes their idea and thought, to a certain extent polarises it according to colour.