His biography explains a great deal in the character of the painter's art. His works are unequal. In his picture "Last Tears," which appeared in the World Exhibition of 1855, and which stands to his landscapes as a huge block of copper to little ingots of gold, he entered upon a course in which he wandered long without any particular artistic result. He wanted to be a figure-painter, and with this object he concocted a style of painting by a mixture of various traditions, seeking to unite Prudhon, Correggio, and Leonardo. From the master of Cluny he borrowed the feminine type with a snub nose and long almond-shaped eyes, treated the hair like da Vinci, and placed over it the _sfumato_ of Allegri. His drawing, usually so pictorial in its light sweep, became weak in his effort to be correct, and his colouring grew dull and monotonous by its imitation of the style of the Classicists. But during this period Diaz made a great deal of money, sold his pictures without intermission, and avenged himself, as he had determined to do, upon his former poverty. He, who had begged upon the boulevards, was able to buy weapons and costumes at the highest figure, and build himself a charming house in the Place Pigalle. In all that concerns his artistic position these works, which brought him an income of fifty thousand francs, and, for a long time, the fame of a new Prudhon, are nevertheless without importance. Faltering between the widely divergent influences of the old masters, he did not get beyond a wavering eclecticism, and was too weak in drawing to attain results worth mentioning. It is as a landscape painter that he will be known to posterity. He is said to have been the terror of all game as long as he was the house-mate of Rousseau and Millet in Fontainebleau, and wandered through the woods there with a gun on his arm to get a cheap supper. It is reported, too, that when his pictures were rejected by the Salon in those days he laughingly made a hole in the canvas with his wooden leg, saying: "What is the use of being rich? I can't have a diamond set in my _pilon_!" It was however in the years before 1855, when he had nothing to do with any picture-dealer, that the immortal works of Diaz were executed. [Illustration: _L'Art._ CONSTANT TROYON.]