vapour hovers over the meadows and the waters, before it is dissolved into shining dew. They love the bloom of fruit-trees and the first smile of spring, or revel in the gradations of the dusk, rich as they are in shades of tint, mistily wan and grey, pale lilac, delicate green, and milky blue. The perspective is broad and fine; objects are entirely absorbed by the harmony of colour, and the older and coarser treatment of free light heightened to the most refined play by the most delicate shades of hue. And these colourists deriving from Corot, with their soft grey enveloping all, are opposed by others who strike novel and higher chords upon the keyboard of Manet--landscape painters whom such simple and intimate things do not satisfy, but who search after unexpected, fleeting, and extraordinary impressions, analysing fantastically combined effects of light. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DAGNAN-BOUVERET. CONSECRATED BREAD.] A group of New-Impressionists, who might be called prismatic painters, stand in this respect at the extreme left. Starting from the conviction that the traditional mixing of colours upon the palette results after all only in palette tones, and can never fully express the intensity and pulsating vividness of tone-values, they founded the theory of the resolution of tones,--in other words, they break up all compound colours into their primary hues, set these directly upon the canvas, and leave it to the eye of the spectator to undertake the mixture for itself. In particular _George Seurat_ was an energetic disseminator of this painting in points which excited new discussions amongst artists and new polemics in the newspapers. His pictures were entirely composed of flaming, glowing, and shining patches. Close to these pictures nothing was to be seen but a confusion of blotches, but at the proper distance they took shape as wild sea-studies in the brilliant hues of noon, with rocks and stones standing out in relief, orgies of blue, red, and violet. Such was Seurat's manner of seeing nature. That such a course brings with it a good deal of monotony, that it will hardly ever be possible to quicken art to this extent with science, is incontestable. But it is just as certain that Seurat was a painter of distinction who shows in many of his pictures a fine sense for delicate, pale atmosphere. Many of his landscapes, which at close quarters look like mosaics of small, smooth, variously coloured stones, acquire a vibrating light, such as Monet himself did not attain, when looked at from a proper distance. _Signac_, _Anquetin_, _Angrand_, _Lucien Pissarro_, _Coss_, _Luèc_, _Rysselberghe_, and _Valtat_ are the names of the other representatives of this scientific painting, and their method has not seldom enabled them to give expression in an overpowering manner to the quiet of water and sky, the green of the meadows, and the softness of tender light shifting over the sea. [Illustration: _L'Art._