If Meissonier is beginning to find his proper level after having been grossly overrated, Louis Gustave Ricard (1824-1873), one of the most remarkable portrait painters of his century, has only just in recent years been rescued from almost complete oblivion. A pupil of L. Cogniet, Ricard spent several years in copying the works and analysing the technical methods of the old masters, and in travelling in Italy, Belgium, Holland, and England. It was not before his return to Paris in 1850 that he began to exhibit. Ricard was exclusively a portrait painter. Technically his early studies enabled him to arrive at a method of singular morbidezza and warm luminosity. There is a certain truth in a modern critic’s description of Ricard’s pigments as being composed of “crushed jewels, flower juice, and gold and silver powder.” The great merit of Ricard’s portraits is, however, his extraordinary insight into his sitters’ psychology. To him a portrait meant more than a correct record of the model’s superficial aspect: he endeavoured to paint the very soul in so far as it can be read from eyes and lips. In this respect he is the descendant of Giorgione and the forerunner of Watts and Carrière. The portraits of _The Painter Heilbuth_ (No. 778A), of _Mme. de Calonne_ (No. 778E), of _His Own Portrait_ (No. 778), and the badly cracked _Portrait of Paul de Musset_ (No. 778B), may be quoted as admirable instances of his art. MANET We must close this necessarily fragmentary survey of French art at the Louvre with the mention of Edouard Manet (1832-1883), whose _Olympia_ (No. 613A, Plate LIII.) is the first, and so far the only painting of the Impressionist school that has gained access to this gallery. It was formerly exhibited at the Luxembourg. Hung as it is now in Gallery VIII. amid the works of David, Gros, Ingres, Delacroix, Delaroche, and other early nineteenth-century painters, this _Olympia_ fully explains the sensation, but certainly not the indignation, caused by its first appearance at the Salon of 1865. It sings out with such brilliant purity of colour and is so emphatic in the patterning of its design, so daring in the placing side by side of almost unmodulated but infallibly accurate colour masses, that everything around appears more or less dingy and artificial. Manet’s _Olympia_ marks the dawn of a new era, not because it is based on a revolutionary rejection of tradition, but because it is true to the _spirit_ of the best tradition, which is not carried on by literal and mechanical imitation, but by evolution and adaptation to modern life and thought. [Illustration: PLATE LIII.—ÉDOUARD MANET (1832-1883) No. 613A.—OLYMPIA