The portrait of his grandfather, that marvellous work of a young man of five-and-twenty, is the first picture in which he was completely himself. The old man sits in a corner of the garden, just as usual, in a brown cap, his spectacles upon his nose, his arms crossed upon his lap, with a horn snuff-box and a check handkerchief lying upon his knees. How perfectly easy and natural is the pose, how thoughtful the physiognomy, what a personal note there is in the dress! Nor are there in that garden, bathed in light, any of those black shadows which only fall in the studio. Everything bore witness to a simplicity and sincerity which justified the greatest hopes. After that first work the world knew that Bastien-Lepage was a preeminent portrait painter, and he did not betray the promise of his youth. His succeeding pictures showed that he had not merely rusticity and nature to rely upon, but that he was a _charmeur_ in the best sense of the word. [Illustration: _Baschet._ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. MME. DROUET.] [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAY HARVEST.] This ingenuous artist, who knew nothing of the history of painting, and felt more at home in the open air than in museums, was not ignorant, at any rate, of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and had chosen for his likenesses a scale as small as that which Clouet and his school preferred. The representation here reaches a depth of characterisation which recalls Jan van Eyck's little pearls of portrait painting. In these works also he mostly confined himself to bright lights. Portraits of this type are those of his brother, of Madame Drouet, the aged friend of Victor Hugo, with her weary, gentle, benevolent face--a masterpiece of intimate feeling and refinement; of his friend and biographer André Theuriet, of Andrieux the prefect of the police, and, above all, the famous and signal work of inexorable truth and marvellous delicacy, Sarah Bernhardt in profile, with her tangled chestnut hair, sitting upon a white fur, arrayed in a white China-silk dress with yellowish lights in it, and carefully examining a Japanese bronze. The bizarre grace of the tragic actress, her slender figure, fashioned, as it were, for Donatello, the nervous intensity with which she sits there, her weird Chinese method of wearing the hair, and the profile of which she is so proud, have been rendered in none of her many likenesses with such an irresistible force of attraction as in this little masterpiece. In some of his other portraits Bastien-Lepage has not disdained the charm of obscure light; he has not done so, for example, in the little portrait of Albert Wolff, the art-critic, as he sits at his writing-desk amongst his artistic treasures, with a cigarette in his hand. Only Clouet and Holbein painted miniature portraits of such refinement. Amongst moderns, probably Ingres alone has reached such a depth of characterisation upon the smallest scale, and in general he is the most