Troyon is perhaps not so correct as Potter, nor so lucid as Albert Cuyp, but he is more forcible and impressive than either. No one has ever seized the poetry of these heavy masses of flesh, with their strong colour and largeness of outline, as he has done. What places him far above the old painters is his fundamental power as a landscapist, a power unequalled except in Rousseau. His landscapes have always the smell of the earth, and they smack of rusticity. At one time he paints the atmosphere, veiling the contours of objects with a light mist recalling Corot, and yet saturated with clear sunshine; at another he sends his heavy, fattened droves in the afternoon across field-paths bright in the sunlight and dark green meadows, or places them beneath a sky where dense thunderclouds are swiftly rolling up. Troyon is no poet, but a born painter, belonging to the irrepressibly forceful family of Jordaens and Courbet, a _maître peintre_ of strength and plastic genius, as healthy as he is splendid in colour. His "Cow scratching Herself" and his "Return to the Farm" will always be counted amongst the most forcible animal pictures of all ages. When he died in 1865, after passing twelve years with a clouded intellect, _Rosa Bonheur_ sought to fill the place which he had left vacant. She had already won the sympathies of the great public, as she united in her pictures all the qualities which were missed in Troyon, and had the art of pleasing where he was repellent. For a long time Troyon's works were held by _amateurs_ to be wanting in finish. They did not acknowledge to themselves that "finish" in artistic creations is, after all, only a work of patience, rather industrial than artistic, and at bottom invented for the purpose of enticing half-trained connoisseurs. Rosa Bonheur had this diligence, and is indebted to it for the spread of her fame through all Europe, when Troyon was only known as yet to the few. The position has now been altered. Without doubt it is a pleasure to look at her fresh and sunny maiden picture of 1840, "Ploughing in Nivernois," with its yoke of six oxen, its rich red-brown soil turned up into furrows, and its wide, bright, simple, and laughing landscape beneath the clear blue sky. She had all the qualities which may be appreciated without one's being an epicure of art--great anatomical knowledge, dexterous technique, charming and seductive colouring. And it is an isolated fact in the history of art that a woman has painted pictures so good as the "Hay Harvest in Auvergne" of 1853, with its brutes which are almost life-size, or the "Horse Fair" of 1855, which is perhaps her most brilliant work, and for which she made studies, going in man's clothes for eighteen months, at all the Parisian _manèges_, amongst stable-boys and horse-dealers. Until her death, from the Château By, between Thomery and Fontainebleau, she carried on an extensive transpontine export, and her pictures are by no means the