Young Bouguereau had no money, and therefore he went to live with an uncle at Saintonge, a priest, who had much sympathy with the boy's wish to paint, and he left him free to do the best he could for himself in art. He got a chance to paint some portraits, and when he and his uncle talked the matter over It was decided that he should take the money got for them, and go to Paris. It was there that he sought Picot, his first truly helpful teacher; and there, for the first time he learned more than he already knew about art. All Bouguereau's opportunities in life were made by himself, by his own genius. No one gave him anything; he earned all. He longed to go to Italy, and in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts he won the Prix de Rome, which made possible a journey to the land of great artists. The French Government began to buy his work, and he began to receive commissions to decorate walls in great buildings; thus, gradually, he made for himself fame and fortune. When this artist undertook to paint sacred subjects, of great dignity, he was not at his best; but when he chose children and mothers and everyday folk engaged about their everyday business, he painted beautifully. Americans have bought many of his pictures and he has had more popularity in this country than anywhere outside of France. Some authorities give the birthplace of Bouguereau as La Rochelle; at any rate he died there at midnight, on the nineteenth of August, 1905. PLATE--THE VIRGIN AS CONSOLER The main distinction about this artist's pictured faces is the peculiarly earnest expression he has given to the eyes. In this picture of the Virgin there is great genius in the pose and death-look of the little child whose mother has flung herself across the lap of Mary, abandoned to her agony. This painting is hung in the Luxembourg. Others by the same master are called "Psyche and Cupid" "Birth of Venus," "Innocence," and "At the Well." VII SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES _English (Pre-Raphaelite) School_ 1833-1898 _Pupil of Rossetti_ This artist has been called the most original of all contemporaneous artists. He has also been called the "lyric painter"; meaning that he is to painting what the lyric poet is to literature. His work once known can almost always be recognised wherever seen afterward. He did not slavishly follow the Pre-Raphaelite school, yet he drew most of his ideas from its methods. He was, in the use of stiff lines, a follower of Botticelli, and not original in that detail, as some have seemed to think. PLATE--CHANT D'AMOUR _(The Love-Song)_