Even those who made their chief success as historical painters became new beings when they came forward with such piquant "little paintings." _Francisco Domingo_ in Valencia is the Spanish Meissonier, who has painted little horsemen before an inn, mercenary soldiers, newspaper readers, and philosophers of the time of Louis XV, with all the daintiness in colour associated with the French patriarch--although a huge canvas, "The Last Day of Sagunt," has the reputation of being his chief performance. In the year in which he exhibited his "Vision in the Colosseum," _Benliure y Gil_ made a success with two little pictures stippled in varied colours, the "Month of Mary" and the "Distribution of Prizes in Valencia," in which children, smartened and dressed in white frocks, are moving in the ante-chambers of a church, decorated for the occasion. _Casado_, painter of the sanguinary tragedy of Huesca, showed himself an admirable little master full of elegance and grace in "The Bull-Fighter's Reward," a small eighteenth-century picture. The master of the great hospital picture, _Jimenez_, took the world by surprise at the very same time by a "Capuchin Friar's Sermon before the Cathedral of Seville," which flashed with colour. _Emilio Sala y Francés_, whose historical masterpiece was the "Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1493," delights elsewhere in spring, Southern gardens with luxuriant vegetation, and delicate _rococo_ ladies, holding up their skirts filled with blooming roses, or gathering wild flowers among the grass. _Antonio Fabrés_ was led to the East by the influence of Regnault, and excited attention by his aquarelles and studies in pen and ink, in which he represented Oriental and Roman street figures with astonishing adroitness. But the _ne plus ultra_ is attained by the bold and winning art of _Pradilla_, which is like a thing shot out of a pistol. He is the greatest product of contemporary Spain, a man with a talent for improvisation as ingenious as it was free, who treated with equal facility the most varied subjects. In the bold and spirited decorations with which he embellished Spanish palaces he sported with nymphs and Loves and floating genii _à la_ Tiepolo. All the grace of the _rococo_ period is cast over his works in the Palais Murga in Madrid. The figures join each other with ease--coquettish nymphs swaying upon boughs, and audacious "Putti" tumbling over backwards in quaint games. Nowhere is there academic sobriety, and everywhere life, pictorial inspiration, the intoxicating joyousness of a fancy creating without effort and revelling in the festal delight of the senses. In the accompanying wall pictures he revived the age of the troubadours, of languishing love-song and knightly romance free from the burden of thought, in tenderly graceful and fluent figures. And this same painter, who filled these huge spaces of wall, lightly dallying with subjects from the world of fable, seems another man when he grasps fragments from