the reflection of fire upon gold and silver, upon silk and satin, upon red and yellow and blue, or enumerates the hundred tints in which the September sun pours into a room. The portrait group of his children is a harmony in red. A boy and two girls are standing, with the most delightful absence of all constraint, in a country room, which looks out upon a mountainous landscape. The wall of the background is red, and red the costume of the little ones, yet all these conflicting _nuances_ of red tones are brought into harmonious unity with inherent taste. Rubens would have rejoiced over a second landscape exhibited in the same year. A nude woman is seated upon a divan drinking tea, with her feet tucked under her and her back to the spectator. Upon her back are cast the warm and the more subdued reflections of a fire which lies out of sight and of the daylight quivering in yellowish stripes, like a glowing aureole upon her soft skin. [Illustration: _Studio._ AMAN-JEAN. SOUS LA GUERLANDA.] In a third picture, called "Vision de Femme," a young woman with the upper part of her form unclothed appears upon a terrace, surrounded by red blooming flowers and the glowing yellow light of the moon. Under this symbol Besnard imagined Lutetia, the eternally young, hovering over the rhododendrons of the Champs Elysées and looking down upon the blaze of lights in the Café des Ambassadeurs. In 1889 he produced "The Siren," a symphony in red. A _petite femme_ of Montmartre stands wearily in a half-antique morning toilette before a billowing lake, which glows beneath the rays of the setting sun in fiery red and dull mallow colour. In his "Autumn" of 1890 he made the same experiment in green. The moon casts its silvery light upon the changeful greenish mirror of a lake, and at the same time plays in a thousand reflections upon the green silk dress of a lady sitting upon the shore; while, in a picture of 1891, a young lady in an elegant _négligé_ is seated at the piano, with her husband beside her turning over the music. The light of the candles is shed over hands, faces, and clothes. Another picture, called "Clouds of Evening," represented a woman with delicate profile amid a violet landscape over which the clouds were lightly hovering, touched with orange-red by the setting sun. The double portrait, executed in 1892, of the "Mlles. D----," one of whom is leisurely placing a scarf over her shoulders with a movement almost recalling Leighton, while the other stoops to pick a blossom from a rhododendron bush, is exceedingly soft in its green, red, and blue harmony.