common with an immediate impression of the senses, such as must, first and foremost, proceed from an optical work of art. Carrière, then, found even the impressionist rule too learned. He preferred simply to exaggerate, and, as it were, to make palpable, the properties of air, which is neither absolutely colourless nor absolutely transparent. Thus arose the thin grey air in which his figures are bathed, ranging from the most delicate mist to the thickest smoke, but always transparent. Directly he found his method or manner, it became alive in his hands. In that his peculiarity consists, and in that he shows himself a great artist by the grace of God. Smoke is to him a medium of expression of amazing range. He employs it almost as the engraver on copper of mezzotint does the “burr.” It is a layer of veils which he diminishes or increases as the effect proposed demands. Here he withdraws the covering. There he suffers it partly or entirely to remain, and by such means obtains, by the most natural and, apparently, the least troublesome way, a recession of the non-essential, an amazing relief of the essential, a clearness in the expression of his thought, such as not one of his contemporary painters possesses. At the first glance at a picture of Carrière, one is very forcibly directed to what was important to the painter. One positively cannot wander into what is unimportant, or be diverted from the main thing. It sounds paradoxical, but is literally true: Carrière understood how to make vapour the medium of the highest clearness, to make mystery the gate of an unreserved revelation. That, I admit, his imitators cannot discern in him. It is easy to daub smoke in a picture, but that is not all. Vapour must not be an excuse for bungling draughtsmanship; it must not mercifully cover defects in form. In order not to favour any fraud, it makes a masterly accuracy in modelling a primary condition. To permit oneself such noble economies and condensations one must be as accurate a draughtsman as Carrière. The veiling of the greater part is only, then, admissible, when the lesser left unveiled is perfect.