In technique this picture belongs to the painter's earlier phase. Even in the colouring of the naked figures it has still the dirty heaviness of the Bolognese. This bond which united him to the school of Courbet was broken when--probably under the influence of Zola's _Germinal_--he painted "The Strike," in 1880. The stern reality which goes through Zola's accounts of the life of pit-men is likewise to be found in these ragged and starving figures, clotted with coal dust, assembling in savage desperation before the manufactory walls, prepared for a rising. The dull grey of a rainy November morning spreads above. In 1887 he painted war, war in the new age, in which one man is not pitted against another, but great masses of men, who kill without seeing one another, are made to manoeuvre with scientific accuracy--war in which the balloon, distant signalling, and all the discoveries of science are turned to account. "Work" was the last picture of the series. There are men toiling in the hot, dusty air of Paris with sandstones of all sizes. Life-size, upon life-size figures, the drops of sweat were seen upon the apathetic faces, and the patches upon the blouses and breeches. Any one who only reckons as art what is fine and delicate will necessarily find these pictures brutal; but whoever delights in seeing art in close connection with the age, as it really is, cannot deny to Alfred Roll's great epics of labour the value of artistic documents of the first rank. [Illustration: _Studio._ RAFFAELLI. THE CARRIER'S CART. (_By permission of the Artist._)] He devoted himself to the more delicate problems of light, especially in certain idyllic summer scenes, in which he delighted in painting life-size bulls and cows upon the meadow, and beside them a girl, sometimes intended as a milkmaid and sometimes as a nymph. Of this type was the picture of 1888, A Woman returning from Milking, "Manda Lamétrie, Fermière." With a full pail she is going home across the sunny meadow. Around there is a gentle play of light, a soft atmosphere transmitting faint reflections, lightly resting upon all forms, and mildly shed around them. A yet more subtle study of light in 1889 was named "The Woman with a Bull." Pale sunbeams are rippling through the fluttering leaves, causing a delicious play of fine tones upon the nude body of the young woman and the shining hide of the bull. [Illustration: _Baschet._ RAFFAELLI. PARIS 4K. 1. (_By permission of the Artist._)]