an artist. Carrière’s proud independence does not admit that they have any meaning at all, or deserve the most casual mention. The book enumerates all his works, even rough drawings, unfinished sketches, attempts at lithography. These are the deeds and events of his life. There is no room in the book for official certificates of industry and his elevation in the _Tchin_.[3] Moreover, Carrière was one of the co-founders of the Salon of the Champ de Mars in 1890, which on principle repudiated the system of rewarding meritorious youths by testing and directing superior officers, and rebelled against turning artists into an hierarchy by means of conventional marks of rank. Carrière has formed a manner of his own, which he discovered by himself, and asserted it victoriously despite of all kinds of opposition. Every layman sees at the first glance that his pictures are full of grey vapour. A sometimes transparent, at other times thick mist envelops his figures, and makes their different parts stand out with unequal distinctness. “A whim,” exclaims superficiality; “a dodge to astonish,” grumbles the _blasé_ man-of-the-world, who thinks himself cunning. It is neither the one nor the other. The origin of the curious exhalation hovering about his figures is to be sought in his own need for representing the æther in which all planetary life is displayed. His sense of truth took umbrage at the painting in vogue, even that of the masters, which sets beings and objects in space, without giving any suggestion that it is not empty, but filled with a gas possessing optical and kinetic qualities. It is all very well trying, by established toning of the local colours, and blurring of the contour lines, to make the fact perceptible that the figures are surrounded by air; but these customary means of expression failed to satisfy Carrière, and he is not the only one they left dissatisfied. A whole generation of painters, about 1870, had the annoying feeling that air did not get its rights in art, and made obstinate efforts to find a formula for announcing the presence of air with an emphasis that could not be neglected. Sisley, Monet, Pissarro, thought to solve the problem by refraction and iridescent radiation which would render apparent in the painting the visible motion of the air, its vibration under definite relations of illumination and heat. The object is only very imperfectly attained. The attempt is justified, and deserves respect. Carrière sets about the matter differently, in a more direct and _naïve_ way. The decomposition of white light into its spectrum, as the dotters and stipplers practise it, proves, I admit, that the rays of light move in a material medium, as they would otherwise have no reason for resolving themselves into their component parts; but, in order to infer air from the prismatic colours, a man must be a physicist, and it requires a labour of thought that has nothing in