blouse and wooden shoes, leads his grandchild by the hand amid the first shyly budding verdure. Old men sit quietly in the grounds of the alms-house, with the sun shining upon them. People no longer stand in the mist of November evenings with their teeth chattering from the frost, but breathe with delight the soft air of bright spring mornings. [Illustration: RAFFAELLI. THE HIGHROAD TO ARGENTEUIL.] [Illustration: _Studio._ RAFFAELLI. LE CHIFFONIER. (_By permission of the Artist._)] Raffaelli, for fifteen years the master of this narrowly circumscribed region, has recorded his impressions of it in an entirely personal manner, in a style which in one of his _brochures_ he has himself designated "caractérisme." And by comparing the costumed models in the pictures of the previous generation with the figures of Raffaelli, the happiness of this phrase is at once understood. In fact, Raffaelli is a great master of characterisation, and perhaps nowhere more trenchant than in the illustrations which he drew for the _Revue Illustrée_. Spirited caricatures of theatrical representations alternate with the grotesque figures of the Salvation Army. Yet he feels most in his element when he dives into the horrors of Paris by night. The types which he has created live; they meet you at every step, wander about the boulevards in the cafés and outside the barriers, and they haunt you with their looks of misery, vice, and menace. _Giuseppe de Nittis_, an Italian turned a Parisian, a bold, searching, nervously excitable spirit, was the first _gentilhomme_ of Impressionism, the first who made a transition from the rugged painting of the proletariat to coquettish pictures from the fashionable quarters of the city, and reconciled even the wider public to the principles of Impressionism by the delicate flavouring of his works. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DE NITTIS. PARIS RACES.]