note of colour, and nothing besides: a note of ivory, telling, in some picture of evening, against that olive green of the embrowned woodland which rises, massed and darkening, against the last turquoise of the sky. Yes, it is a purely painter-like quality, the poetry of colours in that more than blameless juxtaposition which is a rare achievement of Art--the poetry of gleaming form, of discreet light, of restful and mysterious shadow--that Henner will live by. The story he illustrates gains nothing in dramatic interest by his treatment of it. His business, even when he paints an ‘Hérodiade,’ is to solace and charm rather than to excite; and the refinement and suavity of his vision may accomplish for us of the Nineteenth Century what David’s music did for the troubled soul of King Saul. Like Puvis de Chavannes--in work more grandly decorative, in conception vast and suave--he administers to men the refreshment of a pure and high beauty. In such a subject as his ‘Prayer,’ it is his function but to vary things delicately: to escape the commonplace, nothing more. But, as regards his figure painting, in the refinement of his models we are never suffered to lose sight of what is familiar, homely, intimate, personal. Nature has been suggested with reticence, but nature has been constantly referred to. Of his landscape, the materials are simple and few; breadth and simplicity are of the very essence of his treatment. His selection is arbitrary; a certain noble conventionality reigns in his canvases. Give him a tranquil sky, a pool, a square stone fountain, a nymph, a solemn cypress, a tangle of woodland--what more! Petty imitation, fussy realisation of a hundred objects, he will hold to be valueless. But his work must have Unity: it must have Style. An artist with these preoccupations is not, one may say with safety, likely to be a very popular portrait painter. Yet Henner has painted a fair share of portraits. And no ‘hard and fast’ line can divide such portraiture as he produces from his ideal work. When the touches on his canvas are no longer dictated by what is obviously imagination, it is not likely that a striking realism succeeds to the control, that _modernité_ speaks from every corner of the picture, that the poet has become the fashionable portrait painter. Reticence is still remembered. Henner can perceive character, but it must be conveyed without emphasis. With the palette set as of old, and the schemes of colour such as the ideal work has already accustomed us to, Henner must pursue his task. Perhaps it is the pallor of a thoughtful face of middle age, to be framed in black hair, with an olive background. Perhaps, as in the ‘Créole,’ it is the old Venetian tresses that are to fall richly on the bust that is shining marble, that is gleaming ivory. A likeness, no doubt; but before all things, a picture. (_Magazine of Art_, May 1888.) FRANCIS JAMES