Since that time another tendency highly characteristic of Henner has shown itself in his work. In his endeavour to render the tint and tender softness of flesh as delicately as possible, he sought at the same time for light which should intensify the clear tone of the nude body. These he found in that time of evening, which one might call Henner's hour, when the landscape, overshadowed by the twilight, gradually loses colour, and only a small blue space in the sky or a silent forest-lake still for a moment preserves the reflection of vanishing daylight. In this tranquil harmony of nature after sunset, the white pallor of the human body seems to have absorbed all the daylight and to be giving it forth again, while the surrounding landscape is already merging into colourless shadow. This is Henner's "second manner," and he raised it into a system. Every year since then there has appeared in the Salon one of those pale nymphs, standing out so mistily against the dark green of an evening landscape, or one of those Virgilian eclogues, in which the gloaming rests caressingly upon nude white bodies. And by this method of painting flesh and of throwing light upon it, Henner has won for himself an important place in modern art. _Paul Baudry_, the powerful decorator of the Grand Opera House at Paris, marks the close of this tendency. In his work the endeavours of all those talented artists who sought to found a new school of "ideal painting" upon the basis of the study of the Italian Classicists came to a crowning height; and at the same time Baudry took a further step onward, in that he vivified the classical scheme with a yet more marked cast of "modernity." His first picture, on the murder of Marat, was feeble. What David had executed smoothly and forcibly in his dead "Marat," Baudry spoiled in his "Charlotte Corday." The bath, the night-table with the inkstand on it, the map on the wall, and all the fittings of the room, are painted with the greatest finish, but the young heroine in her petrified idealism has no more life in her than there is in the furniture. His "Pearl and Wave," which is hung in the Luxembourg close to Cabanel's and Bouguereau's "Birth of Venus," gave proof of progress. A deep-blue wave, towering on high and crowned with foam, has washed a charming woman ashore like a costly pearl. She seems to have just awakened out of slumber, and her roguish, moistly gleaming eyes are smiling. Saucily she leans forward her fair-haired head under her bended arms, and stretches out in easy motion her youthfully slender yet fully proportioned body. Bouguereau's and even Cabanel's female beauties are waxen and spoiled by retouching, but Baudry's Cypris is a living being, and preserves some of the individual charm of the model. [Illustration: _Baschet._ BAUDRY. CHARLOTTE CORDAY.]