Such a man has painted the gayest, gladdest, most delicate and exquisite pictures imaginable. He entered Paris as a young man, without friends, without money or connections of any kind, and after wandering forlornly, about the great city, he found employment with a dealer who made hundreds of saints for out-of-town churches. It is said that for this first employer Watteau made dozens and dozens of pictures of St. Nicholas; and when we think of the beautiful figures he was going to make, pictures that should delight all the world, there seems something tragic in the monotony and common-placeness of that first work he was forced by poverty to do. Certainly St. Nicholas brought one man bread and butter, even if he forgot him at Christmas time. After that hard apprenticeship, Watteau's condition became slightly better. He had been employed near the Pont Notre Dame, at three francs a week, but now in the studio of a scene painter, Gillot, he did work of coarse effect, very different from that exquisite school of art which he was to bring into being. After Gillot's came the studio of Claude Audran, the conservator of the Luxembourg, and with him Watteau did decorative work. In reality he had no master, learned from nobody, grovelled in poverty, and at first, forced a living from the meanest sources. With this in mind, it remains a wonder that he should paint as no other ever could, scenes of exquisite beauty and grace; scenes of high life, courtiers and great ladies assembled in lovely landscapes, doing elegant and charming things, dressed in unrivalled gowns and costumes. Until Watteau went to the Luxembourg he had seen absolutely nothing of refined or gracious living. He had come from country scenes, and in Paris had lived among workmen and bird-fanciers, flower sellers, hucksters and the like. This is very likely the secret of his peculiar art. Watteau would have been a wonderful artist under any circumstances, no matter what sort of pictures he had painted; but circumstances gave his imagination a turn toward the exquisite in colourand composition. Doubtless when he first looked down from the palace windows of the Luxembourg and saw gorgeous women and handsome men languishing and coquetting and revelling in a life of ease and beauty, he was transported. He must have thought himself in fairyland, and the impulse to paint, to idealise the loveliness that he saw, must have been greater in him than it would have been in one who had lived so long among such scenes that they had become familiar with them.