_Ernest Slingeneyer_ is stronger and more masculine. Yet what an unrefreshing chaos of blue, red, saffron, and citron-yellow is that "Sea-fight at Lepanto"! Slingeneyer felt that the _chiaroscuro_ with which Wappers saturated his "Episode" was not in keeping with this action under open sky. But rightly as he felt this, he had not the strength to solve the problem of open-air painting. What a barbaric effect these red, brown, and yellow bodies make in their motley theatrical pomp! How the composition of the picture savours of apotheosis! As for his later work, his thirteen gigantic pictures, "_gloires de la Belgique_," in the great hall of the Brussels Academy, like De Keyzer's mural paintings above the staircase of the Antwerp Museum, they would never have been painted had they not had Delaroche's hemicycle as their forerunner. [Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._ LOUIS GALLAIT.] And _Gallait's_ "Abdication of Charles V"--one fails to understand how it was possible that so much able disquisition was suggested by this picture. How slight a smattering of the erudition of a stage manager is necessary for the representation of such a scene: the throne on one side; before it the lords and gentlemen in a semicircle, to the left front the ladies to make a fine effect for the eye, and in the background balconies with curious spectators, to widen out the spectacle. It is all pure theatre; an icy ceremony with prettily got up supernumeraries. All the heads have the discreditable appearance of family portraits painted after death, and then washed over with a faint conventional tinge of red. The whole thing is like a huge piece of still-life, which an adroit painter has put together out of a mixture of heads, gold, jewels, mantles, and perukes. Delaroche seems to have contributed the composition, Devéria the sumptuous costumery; and as for the colouring, Isabey, with his sunbeams shimmering in gold and silver, may not improbably have had something to do with that. What was spontaneous in Wappers is replaced in Gallait by cold calculation. Once and once only did this correct and frigid painter give evidence of a certain dramatic vein; it was when in 1851 he painted "The Brussels Guild of Marksmen paying the Last Honours to Egmont and Horn." With a brutal audacity the decapitated heads are set to their bodies. Bloodless and livid, with clotted and tangled beards, they both really look as if they had been studied direct from nature. But the rest of the picture, the surrounding of theatrical attractions, parade costumes, and false pathos, is all the less in keeping with this study of death. How Zurbaran or Caravaggio would have treated the theme! They would have veiled the unessential figures in darkness, and irradiated the heads only with a trenchant light. What Gallait has made of it is the final tableau of an opera of costume. The two sergeants of Alva who are on guard, and the men who are showing their reverence, tread the stage like