Such are, more or less, the representative minds of contemporary France, the centres from which other minds issue like rays. _Alfred Agache_ devotes himself with great dexterity to an allegorical style after the fashion of Barroccio. Inspired by the pre-Raphaelites, _Aman-Jean_ has found the model for his allegorical compositions in Botticelli, and is a neurasthenic in colour, which is exceptionally striking, in his delicate portraits of women. _Maurice Denis_, who drew the illustrations to Verlaine's _Sagesse_ in a style full of archaic bloom, as a painter takes delight in the intoxicating fragrance of incense, the gliding steps and slow, quiet movements of nuns, in men and women kneeling before the altar in prayer, and priests crossing themselves before the golden statue of the Virgin. The Spaniard _Gandara_, who lives in Paris, displays in his grey and melting portraits much feeling for the decorative swing of lines. That spirited "pointillist" _Henri Martin_ seems for the present to have reached a climax in his "Cain and Abel," one of the most powerful creations of the younger generation in France. _Louis Picard's_ work has a tincture of literature, and he delights in Edgar Allan Poe, mysticism and psychology. _Ary Renan_, the son of Ernest Renan and the grandson of Ary Scheffer, has given the soft subdued tones of Puvis de Chavannes a tender Anglo-Saxon fragrance in the manner of Walter Crane. And that spirited artist in lithograph, _Odilon Redon_, has visions of distorted faces, flowers that no mortal eye has seen, and huge white sea-birds screaming as they fly across a black world. Forebodings like those we read of in the verse of Poe take shape in his works, ghosts roam in the broad daylight, and the sea-green eyes of Medusa-heads dripping with blood shine in the darkness of night with a mesmeric effect. _Carlos Schwabe_ drew the illustrations for the _Évangile de l'Enfance_ of Catulle Mendès with the charming naïveté of Hans Memlinc, and afterwards attracted attention by his delicate, archaic pictures.