In the forenoon he is an important ministerial official, in the evening the polished man of society in dress-clothes and white tie whom Carolus Duran painted. Of an afternoon, in the hours of dusk and moonrise, he roams as a landscape painter in the suburbs of Paris; he is an exceedingly accomplished man of the world, who only speaks in a low tone, and what he specially loves in nature, too, is the hour when moonlight lies gently and delicately over all forms. The scenes he usually chooses are a quarry with light mist settling over it, a light-coloured cornfield in a bluish dusk, a meadow bathed in pale light, or a strip of the seashore where the delicate air is impregnated with moisture. [Illustration: LUCIEN PISSARRO. RUTH (WOODCUT). (_By permission of Messrs. Hacon & Ricketts, the owners of the copyright._)] To be at once refined and true is the goal which portrait painting in recent years has also specially set itself to reach. In the years of _chic_ it started with the endeavour to win from every personality its beauties, to paint men and women "to advantage"; but later, when the Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage stood at its zenith, it strove at all costs to seize the actual human being, to catch, as it were, the work-a-day character of the personality as it is in involuntary moments when people believe themselves to be unobserved and give up posing. The place of those pompous arrangements of the painters of material was taken by a soul, and temperament interpreted by an intelligence. And corresponding with the universal principle of conceiving man and nature as an indivisible whole, it became imperative in portrait painting no longer to place persons before an arbitrary background, but in their real surroundings--to paint the man of science in his laboratory, the painter in his studio, the author at his work-table--and to observe with accuracy the atmospheric influences of this environment. [Illustration: BOUDIN. THE PORT OF TROUVILLE. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] The ready master-worker of this plain and sincere naturalism in portrait painting was peculiarly _Fantin-Latour_, who ought not merely to be judged by his latest paintings, which have something petrified, rigid, gloomy, and professorial. In his younger days he was a solid and powerful artist, one of the soundest and simplest of whom France could boast. His pictures were dark in tone and harmonious, and had a puritanic charm. The portrait of Manet, and that of the engraver Edwin Edwards and his wife, in particular, will always preserve their historical value.