It was at the house now occupied by Sir Alma Tadema that at one time I used to dine with the French painter, James Tissot, a man whose varied moods of changing ambition and alternating ideals leave him almost without a parallel among the painters of the time. Tissot was one of the first contributors to the exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, his talent at the time being almost entirely preoccupied by a modish type of modern feminine beauty. In those earlier exhibitions he found such lighter essays of his hung in close juxtaposition with the widely different work of Burne-Jones, and dining with him at about this time I could see that his mind was deeply exercised by the impression the English painter had made upon him. “Mon ami,” he confided to me, “je vois qu’il y a quelque chose à faire, là.” And accordingly, before the next year’s exhibition had come round he had ventured his experiment in the region of what he thought to be ideal art. But the leap was too long for so brief a period of preparation, and I remember that his friend Heilbuth, who was present at the dinner of that second year, made sad havoc with the painter’s schemes by ridiculing the little card upon which Tissot had set forth his symbolical intentions. He treated the written description of the pictures as though it were a menu of the feast that awaited us, crying out each course from the beginning: “Potage une dame avec un serpent, qui signifie----” But at this point the incensed Tissot snatched the paper from his hand, and amid a roar of laughter, in which perhaps the painter did not very heartily join, we went in to dinner. But that sudden ambition, though it was not capable of immediate fulfilment, implied a deeper strain in Tissot’s nature which was destined to find expression at a later day. Shortly afterwards he left England, and it was many years before I saw him again, hard at work in his studio in Paris upon the completion of a series of designs in illustration of the Life of Christ. Those designs exhibited an extraordinary persistence in the interpretation of local truth, for he had made a long sojourn in the Holy Land in order to fit himself for the task, and they showed besides an occasional intensity of feeling that lay dormant and unsuspected in the man as I knew him first. What was the real kernel of such a nature it is hard to say. The man himself, although in those earlier days he displayed little but the evident ambition to make his art remunerative, nevertheless, by occasional glimpses, betrayed the elements of a deeper purpose underlying the life that was preoccupying him at the moment. A strange figure, a strange individuality, yielding by turns to impulses the lightest and the most devout, but always, however he might be engaged, proving himself the possessor of an extraordinary industry and a remarkable talent!