position, and the girl stands between them with her hands similarly raised, only as she holds the necklace she looks up, instead of down to the table as in the other picture. She wears a canary-colored jacket edged with ermine, that appears again in Mrs. Collis P. Huntington’s _Lady with Lute_. In the Berlin picture it sounds a note of liveliness that is exquisitely sustained in the silvery resonance of the lighted room; the effect of which is induced by the tones of olive in her skirt and the table-cloth, by a deep almost colorless blue drapery over the latter, and a shaft of dull yellow, formed by the velour of the window-curtain. The ensemble, in fact, is one of piquant decision and indescribable delicacy, illustrating Vermeer’s faculty of sight imagination, so that he not only renders what he sees, but actually creates. Between Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s _Lady Writing_ and _The Lace-Maker_ of the Louvre there is a remarkable companionship of arrangement and feeling. In each case the figure is seated, bending over a table; the jacket is canary-colored, and blue is introduced in the table-cloth of the former picture and in a cushion in the other, while in both the sensitive expression of the head and hands is echoed in the delicate precision of the objects on the table. In both cases the luminosity of the scene is enhanced by a shadowed mass on the left of the foreground. Mr. Morgan’s picture in loveliness of color, exquisiteness of handling, and inexpressibly subtle feeling rivals its sister piece of the Louvre. It is in this element of feeling alone that these two pictures possibly excel the _Girl with Water-Jug_ of the Metropolitan Museum. For the latter’s beauty of color, with its deep bell-like note of blue and the resonance of blue, more or less faintly hovering over the cap and kerchief and permeating the atmosphere, is unsurpassable. Perfect also is the handling of this picture, both as to its suggestion of the plastic reality of everything represented and its consummate delicacy of manipulation; while in one particular it surpasses both the others and is in Vermeer’s finest possible manner. This is the extraordinary propriety with which each detail of the composition is introduced. Everything has been selected and placed with the choicest discretion; nothing is confused or unexplained, everything is a triumph of incomparable simplicity and exquisite adjustment. Only, I repeat, in feeling; in the expression of the head, arms, and hands is there lacking something of the exquisite _finesse_ of the above two pictures and of certain other examples.