The French Government recognised the eminent decorative talent displayed in these pictures, and gave Besnard the opportunity of achieving further triumphs as a mural painter. Here, too, he is modern to his fingertips, knowing nothing of stately gestures, nothing of old-world naïveté; but merely through his appetising and sparkling play of colour he has the art of converting great blank spaces into a marvellous storied realm. In 1890 he had to represent "Astronomy" as a ceiling-piece for the Salon des Sciences in the Hôtel de Ville. Ten years before there would have been no artist who would not have executed this task by the introduction of nude figures provided with instructive attributes. One would have held a globe, the second a pair of compasses, and the third a telescope in one hand, and in the other branches of laurel wherewith to crown Galileo, Columbus, or Kepler. Besnard made a clean sweep of all this. He did not forget that a ceiling is a kind of sky, and accordingly he painted the planets themselves, the stars which run their course through the firmament of blue. The figures of the constellations are arranged in a gracious interplay of light bodies floating softly past. Amongst the pictures of the École de Pharmacie a like effect is produced by Besnard's great composition "Evening," a work treated with august simplicity. The atmosphere is of a grey-bluish white: stars are glittering here and there, and two very ancient beings, a man and a woman, sit upon the threshold of their house, grave, weather-beaten forms of quiet grandeur, executed with expressive lines. The old man casts a searching glance at the stars, as if yearning after immortality, while the woman leans weary and yet contented upon his shoulder. In the room behind a kettle hangs bubbling over the fire, and a young woman with a child upon her arm steps through the door: man and the starry world, the finite and the infinite, presented under plain symbols. [Illustration: CARRIÈRE. SCHOOLWORK.]