(_By permission of the Artist._)] On 14th December his body was brought up to the Eastern railway station. The coffin was covered with roses, white elder blossoms, and immortelles. And now he lies buried in Lorraine, in the little churchyard of Damvillers, where his father and grandfather rest beneath an old apple-tree. Red apple-blossoms he too loved so dearly. His importance Marie Baskirtscheff has summarised simply and gracefully in the words: "_C'est un artiste puissant, originel, c'est un poète, c'est un philosophe; les autres ne sont que des fabricants de n'importe quoi à côté de lui.... On ne peut plus rien regarder quand on voit sa peinture, parce que c'est beau comme la nature, comme la vie...._" [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ ROLL. MANDA LAMÉTRIE, FERMIÈRE.] This tender poetic trait which runs through his works is what principally distinguishes him from _L'hermitte_, the most sterling representative of the picture of peasant life at the present time. L'hermitte, also, like most of these painters of peasants, was himself the son of a peasant. He came from Mont-Saint-Père, near Château-Thierry, a quiet old town, where from the great "Hill of Calvary" one sees a dilapidated Gothic church and the moss-grown roofs of thatched houses. His grandfather was a vine-grower and his father a schoolmaster. He worked in the field himself, and, like Millet, he painted afterwards the things which he had done himself in youth. His principal works were pictures of reapers in the field, peasant women in church, young wives nursing their children, rustics at work, here and there masterly water-colours, pastels and charcoal drawings, in 1888 the pretty illustrations to André Theuriet's _Vie Rustique_, the decoration of a hall at the Sorbonne with representations of rustic life, in his later period occasionally pictures from other circles of life, such as "The Fish-market of St. Malo," "The Lecture in the Sorbonne," "The Musical Soirée," and finally, as a concession to the religious tendency of recent years, a "Christ visiting the House of a Peasant." He has his studio in the Rue Vaquelin in Paris, though he spends most of his time in the village where he was born, and where he now lives quietly and simply with the peasants. Most of his works, which are to be ranked throughout amongst the most robust productions of modern Naturalism, are painted in the great glass studio which he built in the garden of his father's house. Whilst Bastien-Lepage, through a certain softness of temperament, was moved to paint the weak rather than the strong, and less often men in the prime of life than patriarchs, women, and children, L'hermitte displays the peasant in all his rusticity. He knows the country and the labours of the field which make the hands horny and the face brown, and he has rendered them in a strictly objective manner, in a great sculptural style. Bastien-Lepage is inclined to refinement