How much better off are painters and art-lovers nowadays than in earlier times! Formerly, if you wanted to enjoy a picture you had to own it; if you wished to know a picture you were obliged to make a journey to it. If you liked an artist sufficiently to wish to surround yourself with his chief creations, or the whole of them, you had to have unlimited wealth and set up a gallery of your own. Copies are a mere aid to remembrance, and not a good one either. Executed by a dauber, they are worse than nothing; by a gifted artist, they give the copyist’s, not the original creator’s, personality. The older methods of multiplication also either furnish clumsy attempts at transmitting them, or they are peculiar, independent, artistic creations of another order than painting, which have their special beauty, but are unable to seize the most inward and subtle of the charms the painting possessed. Since the latest developments of photography and the copying processes dependent on it, the case has been altered. If you would convince yourself of the almost marvellous perfection with which oil-paintings are transferred to paper nowadays, so that every stroke of the brush, however fine, every movement of the painter’s hand, every paste, every unevenness in the colour plane, every effect of the canvas, ground-coating, and varnish, is reproduced in a life-like way, and you have actually before your eyes the whole personal work of the artist, then look at the handsome folio entitled: _L’œuvre de E. Carrière, Texte de Gustave Geffroy_, that has been published in Paris by H. Piazza et Cie., and contains the copy of 150 paintings and sketches by Carrière, 75 of which have been printed on Bristol paper, and 75 incorporated in the text. They lack colour, I admit. Only when photography renders this too, will the last word of genuineness in copying be pronounced. Meanwhile, we must be contented that we find again in the photograph the tonality of the colours and the effects of light and shade in the original relatively graded in respect of each other. With Carrière, however, the absence of colour is really of little importance, for he painted chiefly from a grey and brown palette, which can be very accurately reproduced by means of photography.