As draughtsman to a German baron making a scientific tour in the East, _Prosper Marilhat_, the third of the painters of Oriental life, was early in following this career. He visited Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and returned to Paris in 1833 intoxicated with the beauties of these lands. Especially dear to him was Egypt, and in his pictures he called himself, "Marilhat the Egyptian." Decamps had been blinded by the sharp contrast between light and shadow in Oriental nature, by the vivid blaze of colour in its vegetation, and by the tropical glow of the Southern sky. Marilhat took novelties with a more quiet eye, and kept close to pure reality. He has not so much virtuosity as Decamps, and in colour he is less daring, but he is perhaps more poetic, and on that account, in the years 1833-44, he was prized almost more. The exhibition of 1844, in which eight of his pictures appeared, closed his career. He had expected the Cross of the Legion of Honour, but did not get it, and this disappointment affected him so deeply that he became first hypochondriacal and then mad. His early death at thirty-six set Decamps free from a powerful rival. _Eugène Fromentin_ went further in the same direction as Marilhat. He knew nothing of the preference for the glowing hues of the tropics nor of the fantastic colouring of the Romanticists. He painted in the spirit of a refined social period in which no loud voice is tolerated, but only light and familiar talk. The East gave him his grace; the proud and fiery nature of the Arab horse was revealed to him. In his portraits Fromentin looks like a cavalry officer. In his youth he had studied law, but that was before his acquaintance with the landscape painter Cabat brought him to his true calling, and a sojourn made on three different occasions--in 1845, 1848, and 1852--on the borders of Morocco decided for him his specialty. By his descriptions of travels, _A Year in Sahel_, which appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, he became known as a writer: it was only after 1857, however, that he became famous as a painter. Fromentin's East is Algiers. While Marilhat tried to render the marvellous clearness of the Southern light, and Decamps depicted the glowing heat of the East, its dark brooding sky in the sultry hours of summer and the grand outlines of its landscape, Fromentin has tried--and perhaps with too much system--to express the grace and brilliant spirit of the East. Taste, refinement, ductility, distinction of colouring, and grace of line are his special qualities. His Arabs galloping on their beautiful white horses have an inimitable chivalry; they are true princes in every pose and movement. The execution of his pictures is always spirited, easy, and in keeping with their high-bred tone. Whatever he does has the nervous vigour of a sketch, with that degree of finish which satisfies the connoisseur. There is always a coquetry in his arrangement of colour, and his tones are light and delicate if they