aid of the old masters, and the sureness and energy with which he followed, from the very beginning, the realistic tendency initiated by Courbet. "The Nymph Surprised," in 1862, was a medley of reminiscences from Jordaens, Tintoretto, and Delacroix. His "Old Musician," executed with diligence but trivial in its realism, had the appearance of being a tolerable Courbet. Then he made--not at first in Madrid, which he only knew later, but in the Louvre--the eventful discovery of another old master, not yet known in all his individuality to the master of Ornans. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ MANET. THE FIFER. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ MANET. THE GUITARERO. (_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)] At the great Manchester Exhibition of 1857 Velasquez had been revealed to the English; in the beginning of the sixties he was discovered by the French. William Stirling's biography of Velasquez was translated into French by G. Brunet, and provided with a _Catalogue raisonné_ by W. Bürger. The works of Charles Blanc, Théophile Gautier, and Paul Lefort appeared, and in a short time Velasquez, of whom the world outside Madrid had hitherto known little, was in artistic circles in Paris a familiar and frequently cited personality, who began not only to occupy the attention of the historians of art, but of artists also. Couture was in the habit of saying to his pupils that Velasquez had not understood the orchestration of tones, that he had an inclination to monochrome, and that he had never comprehended the nature of colour. From the beginning of the sixties France came under the sway of that serious feeling for colour known to the great Spaniard, and Manet was his first enthusiastic pupil. Certain of his single figures against a pearl-grey background--"The Fifer," "The Guitarero," "The Bull-fighter wounded to Death"--were the decisive works in which, with astonishing talent, he declared himself as the pupil of Velasquez. W. Bürger praised Velasquez as _le peintre le plus peintre qui fût jamais_. As regards the nineteenth century, the same may be said of Manet. Only Frans Hals and Velasquez had these eminent pictorial qualities. In the way in which the black velvet dress, the white silk band, and the red flag were painted in the toreador picture, there was a feeling for beauty which bore witness to the finest understanding of the great Spaniard. In his "Angels at the Tomb of Christ" he has sought, as little as did Velasquez in his picture of the Epiphany, to introduce any trace of heavenly expression into the faces, but as a piece of painting it takes its place amongst the best religious pictures of the century. His "Bon Bock"--a portrait of the engraver Belot, a stout jovial man smoking a pipe as he sits over a glass of beer--is one of those likenesses which stamp themselves upon the memory like the "Hille Bobbe" of Frans Hals. "Faure