again, it is true, he has turned aside to do work of more universally recognized and more pretentious a character, and the very fact that he has touched scarcely anything which he has not adorned, emphasises his fidelity to a branch of art until quite recently despised and held of little moment. It is, indeed, mainly owing to this devotion, to this lavish expense of talent, that the poster is not even now considered beneath the dignity of the collector. The judicious, as soon as their eyes fell upon Cheret's vast lithographs, decided that he was no mere colour-printer's hack, but an artist whose work would have to be reckoned with. There was something positively alluring in the spectacle of a man who calmly placed his gift at the disposal of the tradesman, who accepted without murmur the limitations which the tradesman imposed upon him. It is possible that, had it not been for the circumstances of his life, the streets of Paris would have remained undecorated, so far as Cheret was concerned, to this day. Commencing as the humblest of lithographers, Cheret did not take up art of set intention, but passed irresistibly, though it may be unconsciously, into it. After long years of patient and tedious work as an ordinary lithographer, at the dawn of the year 1866, he commenced what was destined to be the most notable series of pictorial posters in existence, a series containing over a thousand items, and one which happily has yet to close. It is doubtless the conditions of his early life, the lessons learned while under the yoke of trade, that have enabled Cheret to appreciate to the full that the first business of an advertisement is to advertise. Avoiding, therefore, all subtle harmonies, he goes in for contrasts of colour, violent, it is true, but victorious in their very violence. Blazing reds, hard blues, glowing yellows, uncompromising greens, are flung together, apparently haphazard, but in reality after the nicest calculation, with the result that the great pictures, when on the hoardings, insist positively on recognition. One might as well attempt to ignore a fall of golden rain, as to avoid stopping to look at them; they are so many riots of colour, triumphant in their certainty of fascinating and bewildering the passerby. As may be imagined, Cheret's skill has fullest scope when dealing with the lightest and gayest subjects: a _cascade de clowns_--to borrow a phrase of Huysman--an entrance of ballet girls; a joyous troupe of children, contented because toy-laden; these, and the like, are subjects most congenial to him. His style is essentially the outcome of the day. It possesses no decorative forerunners; it is not a thing derived; its parents are the gaieties of modern Paris. It is intensely actual, and in its actuality lies, it [Illustration: 0052]