The mention of his name conjures up before the mind the recesses of a wood, reddened by autumn, a wood where the sunbeams play, gilding the trunks of the trees; naked white forms repose amid mysterious lights, or on paths of golden sand appear gaily draped odalisques, their rich costume glittering in the rays of the sun. Few have won from the forest, as he did, its beauty of golden sunlight and verdant leaves. Others remained at the entrance of the forest; he was the first who really penetrated to its depths. The branches met over his head like the waves of the sea, the blue heaven vanished, and everything was shrouded. The sunbeams fell like the rain of Danaë through the green leaves, and the moss lay like a velvet mantle on the granite piles of rock. He settled down like a hermit in his verdant hollow. The leaves quivered green and red, and covered the ground, shining like gold in the furtive rays of the evening sun. Nothing was to be seen of the trees, nothing of the outline of their foliage, nothing of the majestic sweep of their boughs, but only the mossy stems touched by the radiance of the sun. The pictures of Diaz are not landscapes, for the land is wanting; they are "tree scapes," and their poetry lies in the sunbeams which dance playing round them. "Have you seen my last stem?" he would himself inquire of the visitors to his studio. [Illustration: _L'Art._ TROYON. IN NORMANDY: COWS GRAZING.] These woodland recesses were the peculiar specialty of Diaz, and he but seldom abandoned them to paint warm, dreamy pictures of summer. For, like a true child of the South, he only cared to see nature on beautiful days. He knows nothing of spring with its light mist, and still less of the frozen desolation of winter. The summer alone does he know, the summer and the autumn; and the summers of Diaz are an everlasting song, like the springs of Corot. Beautiful nymphs and other beings from the golden age give animation to his emerald meadows and his sheltered woods bathed in the sun: here are little, homely-looking nixies, and there are pretty Cupids and Venuses and Dianas of charming grace. And none of these divinities think about anything or do anything; they are not piquant, like those of Boucher and Fragonard, and they know neither coquetry nor smiles. They are merely goddesses of the palette; their wish is to be nothing but shining spots of colour, and they love nothing except the silvery sunbeams which fall caressingly on their naked skin. If the painter wishes for more vivid colour they throw around them shining red, blue, yellowish-green, or gold-embroidered clothes, and immediately are transformed from nymphs into Oriental women, as in a magic theatre. A fragment of soft silk, gleaming with gold, and a red turban were means sufficient for him to conjure up his charming and fanciful land of Turks. Sometimes even simple mortals--wood-cutters, peasant girls, and gipsies--come into his pictures, that the sunbeams