as a portrait-painter, he became the depicter of society, and society ruined him. In order to please his distinguished customers, he devoted himself far more than is good for portrait-painting to smooth rosy flesh, large glassy eyes, and dainty fine hands, and over-idealised his sitters till they lost every appearance of life. [Illustration: LEFÉBURE. TRUTH. (_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)] _William Bouguereau_, who industriously learnt all that can be assimilated by a man destitute of artistic feeling but possessing a cultured taste, reveals even more clearly, in his feeble mawkishness, the fatal decline of the old schools of convention. He has been compared to Octave Feuillet, who also never extricated himself from the scented atmosphere of distinguished society; but the comparison is unjust to Feuillet. Bouguereau is in his Madonna-painting a perfumed Ary Scheffer, in his Venus-pictures a greater Hamon; and in his perfectly finished and faultless stencilling style of beauty he became from year to year more and more insupportable. His art is a kind of painting on porcelain on a large scale, and he gives to his Madonnas and his nymphs the same smooth rosy tints, the same unreal universalised forms, until at last they become a _juste-milieu_ between Raphael's "Galatea" and the wax models one sees in hairdressers' shops. Only in one sense can his religious painting be called modern; it is an elegant lie, like the whole of the Second Empire. [Illustration: _L'Art._ HENNER. SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS.] Close by Bouguereau's "Venus" in the Luxembourg hangs the well-known colossal figure of a beautiful nude woman with unnaturally over-developed thighs, which by the shining mirror in its uplifted right hand proclaims itself to be "Truth." _Jules Lefébure_, the painter of this picture, is also completely a slave to tradition; he came from Cogniet's studio, and won the Prix de Rome in 1861. But he at least possesses more taste, elegance, and character; his painting of the nude is more distinguished, truer, and more powerful. He is in the broader sense of the word a worshipper of nature, and was so in his youth especially. His "Sleeping Girl" of 1865 and his "Femme couchée" of 1868 are smooth and honest studies from the nude, of delicate, sure draughtsmanship, and have therefore not become antiquated even to-day. Unfortunately he did not find this masculine accent again, when at a later time he grouped ideal figures together to make pictures of them. His "Diana surprised" of 1879 was a very clever composition of well-ordered lines, possessing even fine details, especially one or two charming heads, but as a whole it is lifeless and uninteresting. Like Bouguereau, he lacks power, and, notwithstanding his distinction and his capacity for arrangement, he is not painter enough to be truthfully entitled a "painter of the nude." [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ HENNER. THE SLEEPER.]