By preference _Édouard Dantan_ has painted the interiors of sculptors' studios--men turning pots, casting plaster, or working on marble, with grey blouses, contrasting delicately with the light grey walls of workrooms which are themselves flooded with bright and tender light. Very charming was "A Plaster Cast from Nature," painted in 1887: in the centre was a nude female figure most naturally posed, whilst a fine, even atmosphere, which lay softly upon the girl's form, streaming gently over it, was shed around. Having cultivated in the beginning the province of feminine nudity with little success, in such pictures as "The Bacchante" of the Luxembourg, "The Woman with the Mask," and "Rolla," _Henri Gervex_, the spoilt child of contemporary French painting, turned to the lecture-rooms of the universities, and by his picture of Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière gave the impulse to the many hospital pictures, surgical operations, and so forth which have since inundated the Salon. With the upper part of her body laid bare and her lips half opened, the patient lies under the influence of narcotics, whilst Péan's assistant is counting her pulse. His audience have gathered round. The light falls clear and peacefully into the room. Everything is rendered simply, without diffidence, and with confidence and quietude. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ GERVEX. DR. PÉAN AT LA SALPÉTRIÈRE. (_By permission of the Artist._)] _Duez_, when he had had his first success in 1879 with a large religious picture--the triptych of Saint Cuthbert in the Luxembourg--appeared with animal pictures, landscapes, portraits, or fashionable representations of life in the streets and cafés. In the hands of such mild and complacent spirits as _Friant_ and _Goeneutte_, Naturalism fell into a mincing, lachrymose condition; but in a series of quiet, unpretentious pictures _Dagnan-Bouveret_ was more successful in meeting the growing inclination of recent years for contemplative repose, just as in the province of literature Ohnet, Malot, and Claretie, with their spirit of compromise, came after those stern naturalists Flaubert and Zola. According to the drawing of Paul Renouard, Dagnan-Bouveret is a little, black-haired man with a dark complexion and deep-set eyes, a short blunt nose, and a black pointed beard. There is nothing in him which betrays spirit, caprice, and audacity, but everything which is an indication of patience and endurance; and, as a matter of fact, such are the qualities by which he has gained his high position. He is a man of poetic talent, though rather tame, and stands to Bastien-Lepage and Roll as Breton to Millet. One often fancies that it is possible to observe in him that German _Gemüth_, that genial temper, for the satisfaction of which Frau Marlitt provided in fiction. A pupil of Gérôme, he made his first great success in the Salon of 1879 with the picture "A Wedding at the Photographer's." This was succeeded in 1882 by "The Nuptial