We have here a master who is peculiarly the Venetian of the eighteenth century, a genre-painter whose charm it is not easy to surpass, yet one who did not at the outset find his true vocation. Longhi's first undertakings, specimens of which exist in certain palaces in Venice, were elaborate frescoes, showing the baneful influence of the Bolognese School, in which he studied for a time under Giuseppe Crispi. He attempts to place the deities of Olympus on his ceilings in emulation of Tiepolo, but his Juno is heavy and common, and the Titans at her feet appear as a swarm of sprawling, ill-drawn nudities. He shows no faculty for this kind of work, but he was thirty-two before he began to paint those small easel-pictures which in his own dainty style illustrate the "Vanity Fair" of his period, and in which the eighteenth century lives for us again. His earliest training was in the goldsmith's art, and he has left many drawings of plate, exquisite in their sense of graceful curve and their unerring precision of line. It was a moment when such things acquired a flawless purity of outline, and Longhi recognised their beauty with all the sensitive perception of the artist and the practised workman. His studies of draperies, gestures, and hands are also extraordinarily careful, and he seems besides to have an intimate acquaintance with all the elegant dissipation and languid excesses of a dying order. We feel that he has himself been at home in the masquerade, has accompanied the lady to the fortune-teller, and, leaning over her graceful shoulder, has listened to the soothsayer's murmurs. He has attended balls and routs, danced minuets, and gossiped over tiny cups of China tea. He is the last chronicler of the Venetian feasts, and with him ends that long series that began with Giorgione's concert and which developed and passed through suppers at Cana and banquets at the houses of Levi and the Pharisee. We are no longer confronted with the sumptuosity of Bonifazio and Veronese; the immense tables covered with gold and silver plate, the long lines of guests robed in splendid brocades, the stream of servants bearing huge salvers, or the bands of musicians, nor are there any more alfresco concerts, with nymphs and bacchantes. Instead there are masques, the life of the Ridotto or gaming-house, routs and intrigues in dainty boudoirs, and surreptitious love-making in that city of eternal carnival where the _bauta_ was almost a national costume. Longhi holds that post which in French art is filled by Watteau, Fragonard, and Lancret, the painters of _fêtes galantes_, and though he cannot be placed on an equal footing with those masters, he is representative and significant enough. On his canvases are preserved for us the mysteries of the toilet, over which ladies and young men of fashion dawdled through the morning, the drinking of chocolate in _négligé_, the momentous instants spent in choosing headgear and fixing patches, the