one can catch the chime of the distant church bells through the blissful stillness. But completeness of effect and pictorial harmony are not to be demanded: the illustrated paper is better suited to his style than the exhibition. [Illustration: VAUTIER. THE DANCING LESSON. (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the copyright._)] The third member of the alliance is _Franz Defregger_, a man of splendid talent; of all the masters of the great Munich school of Piloty, he is at once the simplest and the healthiest. True it is, no doubt, that when posterity sifts and weighs his works, much of him, also, will be found too light. Defregger's art has suffered from his fame and from the temptations of the picture market. Moreover, he had not Vautier's fine sense of the limitations of his ability, but often represented things which he did not understand. He was less of a painter than any of the artists of Piloty's school, and more completely tethered by the size of his picture. He could not go beyond a certain space of canvas without suffering for it; and he bound his talent on the bed of Procrustes when he attempted to paint Madonnas, or placed himself with his Hofer pictures in the rank of historical painters. But as a _genre_ painter he stands beside Vautier, in the first line; and by these little _genre_ pictures--the simpler and quieter the better--and some of his genially conceived and charming portrait studies, he will survive. Those are things which he understood and felt. He had himself lived amid the life he depicted, and so it was that what he depicted made such a powerful appeal to the heart. [Illustration: VAUTIER. NOVEMBER.]