without coming on something worth attention. The large works which occupy the axis of the hall are not the best this year. M. Bacqué has a colossal monument to Michaelangelo representing him on horseback, in a broad-brimmed hat, on the top of a rock-like eminence, from the sides of which grow blocked-out ébauches of some of his own works-Day and Night, and others. This is rather like making Michaelangelo supply his own monument. M. Laporte-Blairsy's monumental fountain to the memory of Clémence Isaure, "créatrice des jeux floraux (XVe siècle)," to be erected in a public place in Toulouse, is a work showing a good deal of piquant and original fancy in the details, but wants architectural coherence as a whole. Another great monument for the same city-Aux Gloires de Toulouse, by M. Ducuing, is on a triangular plan, with a lofty stele rising in the centre, at the base of which are three colossal seated figures, representing "Sculpture and Painting," "Architecture" (a portrait figure of Bachelier), and "A Troubadour"; the stele crowned by a figure of the same Clémence Isaure to whom the fountain is dedicated. The architectural portion of the monument is very well designed; the defect of the thing, as a whole, is that the figures at the base seem too accidentally placed and not sufficiently connected with the architectural centre. Across the top end of the hall extends M. Bouchard's immense group of six great oxen yoked in pairs and drawing a very rustic-looking plough, which appeared here in plaster some years ago under the same title, Le Défrichement, and is now translated into bronze. This is a work of great power in its way, a kind of sculptural glorification of French agricultural labor; but where is such a thing to be placed? It seems too large to deal with; nothing is said of its destination.

The honors of the Salon are more with some of the smaller works this year; notably, perhaps, with M. Alfred Boucher for two works of very different kind, each equally perfect in its way. One is a female figure, said to be a portrait, wearing a helmet and clad entirely in such close-fitting tights as to seem practically nude, buckling on a sword-belt, with the title S'il le faut. Nothing could exceed the mastery with which this fine figure is modelled, though the whole thing is somewhat of a puzzle. His other work is a beautiful seated and clothed figure, hands clasped round her knees, with the title La-Rêverie; as an example of the poetry of sculpture this is no doubt the finest thing in the collection. The figure is clothed not in what is usually called "drapery," but in a rather short skirt, not too realistically treated. But it loses nothing of its poetic character by this; and it may be observed that in a general way a seated figure is, in a sculptural sense, better clothed than nude at all events in the lower portion; it wants the clothing to give breadth of surface. M. Gustave Michel, one of the most able and thoughtful of French sculptors of the day, exhibits a model on a small scale of a monument to Beethoven, which ought to work out into something fine on a larger scale. It is a composition in a generally pyramidal form, the lower part occupied by symbolical figures, not representing individually any of Beethoven's compositions-the sculptor carefully avoided that as "discutable"-but symbolizing the passions, the griefs, the struggles, which lay at the basis of his works; the work culminating in a group, above the composer's figure (which appears at half-length in the upper portion of the composition), representing the joy of life. I should like to hear that the sculptor had a commission to carry this out on a large scale; it is a mon

ument with an idea in it, and there is a tumultuous character in its lines which suits its great subject.

M. Jean-Boucher (with a hyphen, please, to distinguish him from Alfred Boucher) has taken for his principal work a great historic subject, Réunion de la Bretagne à la France, which is symbolized by a collection of figures in a semicircular alcove under a semi-dome-figures "in their coats, their hosen, their hats, and their other garments," which are rather too realistic for the purposes of sculpture; he is just saved by the "great laps and folds of sculptor's work" in the sumptuous mantle of "La Bretagne." This is probably a State commission; the artist, who has produced some of the most poetic works in sculpture of the present day (notably Antique et Moderne), would hardly have chosen it of his own accord. The State is somewhat anxious to make use of sculpture to impress its own ideas upon the public. Family life is to be encouraged, so the State purchases M. Bigonet's group Premier Pas, a peasant mother encouraging her infant to walk: Millet in the round, one may say. With a similar aim it purchases M. Hugues's group, Le Poème de la Terre: l'enfant, le soldat, le vieillard récompensé de son labeur. Here is the whole theory of virtuous republican life in a nutshell; the mother and infant on one side of the base of a pyramidal composition; on the other side the young soldier, rifle and all, prepared to defend his country; at the apex of the pyramid the old man, to whom some nude agrarian nymphs offer up the fruits of the earth, the recompense of his toil. M. Hughes is a fine sculptor, who has done some notable works-no one who saw it will ever forget La Muse de la Source; but he has made a mistake here in mixing up realistic with nude allegorical figures in the same group. But the most portentous sign of the times in sculpture is

the huge relief composition, on a. curved plan, a commission from the State to M. Daillion, entitled Aux Morts! Aux Exilés! (2 Décembre 1851). On the face of the work are the figures of those killed or exiled in connection with the Coup d'état, a nude Victor Hugo standing out conspicuous on the right; on the top is the mailed figure of France, with a broken sword, trying to keep off the beak of the Imperial Eagle. So the memory of Badinguet has come to this! "The evil that men do lives after them"; but one might add the context "The good is oft interred with their bones." It seems rather ungrateful; France made much of him at one time, and would still consecrate his memory, if her own cry of "à Berlin" had led to a satisfactory result. A finer piece of political symbolism is to be seen in M. Marx's Le Joug de la Victoire, also a State commission; a figure of Victory, with one knee on a shield beneath which two men are crouched, bent double like the souls in the tenth book of the Purgatorio who bore heavy stones on their backs:

E qual più pazïenza avea negli atti Piangendo parea dicer: Più non posso.

That is a moral we may all take to heart; and it is expressed in fine sculptural form.

Leaving these moralities and turning to works that are purely artistic in their intent, one may note that M. Mercié's chief contribution is an heroic-size bronze figure of Columbia for some monument in America; he has done better things, but the head and the action are fine, as they could hardly fail to be in his hands. Inspiration and Harmonie, by M. Convers, are two fine half-recumbent figures forming part of a decoration for the courtyard of the National Conservatoire of Music: they take opposite sides of the base of a decorative column. "Inspiration," gazing straight before her,

is a noble figure answering to the title; "Harmonie" he has endeavored to symbolize by making her half turn her head to listen to some birds, which, as a musician once complained, “sing so horribly out of tune," and certainly "the music of nature" is an idea rather passé now; it might have done for Herbert Spencer, but we know that music no more arose out of natural sounds than Gothic vaulting out of the imitation of trees. M. Hippolyte Lefebvre, usually the patron of realistic sculpture, exhibits a spirited fronton for the theatre of Lille, symbolizing Apollo; it will look better when it has the boundary lines of the pediments to control it. M. Charpentier's Fleurs qu'il aimait is a very graceful relief figure of a nude girl reaching up to kiss a cluster of roses. M. Villeneuve exhibits a halfsize model of a monument to Rabelais for the town of Montpellier, a semiarchitectural erection, with heads of Pantagruel and Gargantua worked into it, and a gowned figure in front representing the Faculté de Médecine studying Rabelais' translation of the aphorisms of Hippocrates; and M. Corneille Theunissen exhibits the base of a monumental stele to Jules Breton, with one of Breton's own peasant figures seated by it. M. Desca's full-length figure of Berlioz is too quiet and contemplative for Berlioz, who was nothing if not a fighter; this hardly gives one an idea of the composer who stamped his feet at the Conservatoire orchestra"Faster! faster! This is a Saltarello!" to the scandal of the respectable Habeneck. As to the number of single figures that are simply charming, any one of which would arrest attention at the Academy, it would be impossible to name half of them. One little incident may be quoted as characteristic; Mlle. Bois exhibits a pretty nude child figure, Petite Baigneuse, supposed to be standing before the sea, but she is not content to leave it at that; a new sig

nificance is given to it by the couplet engraved beneath it:

Et devant l'océan l'enfant tremble et frémit,

Et devant l'Infini l'humanité recule.

One example among many of the wish of French sculptors to attach some poetic meaning to what might otherwise be regarded as a mere piece of modelling.

It is not worth while to pass the wicket to look at the sculpture in the New Salon: "that way madness lies"; it is a sort of sculptural Golgotha, where one may see legs, arms, and heads as separate exhibits. Let us go up the stairs to No. 1 Gallery, and see what the painters have to show us. There are two large decorative paintings in this room; one is M. J. P. Laurens's Première Séance solennelle des Jeux floraux (3 Mai 1324), a subject which seems rather prominent this year; we have already seen the great fountain downstairs in commemoration of the event (which, by the way is there noted as "XV century"). M. Laurens's picture shows rows of spectators seated beneath a mass of trees outside the city walls, listening to some declamation from a personage on a platform in the foreground; it is painted with a dry facture which suggests the idea that it is intended for tapestry, though not quite decorative enough in composition for that method. The other work referred to is M. Gorguet's huge ceiling for a Salle des Mariages, of which neither the title ("Prairial") nor the treatment is very intelligible, but which is totally unsuited for a ceiling, in that it is a vertical or pyramidal composition, as if designed for an upright position; a ceiling painting should always be an all-round composition, not one with a base and an apex. Some French painters understand this very well, and have given fine examples of it; this one, quâ ceiling painting, is a

mistake. The only two other things

of much interest in the large room are M. Didier-Pouget's two landscapes; rather too scenic, but with his usual extraordinary power of effect in the foregrounds. The English public are very fond of realism in landscape; one would like to see one of Didier-Pouget's landscapes at the Academy-it would create a sensation, at all events, in that respect.

There is a much larger proportion of comparatively uninteresting work among the pictures than among the sculpture; still, one can hunt up plenty of fine things out of the acreage of canvas. M. Paul Chabas repeats a motive he has used once or twice before, a young girl standing in shallow water, the centre incident in a large canvas; in this one, Matinée de septembre, he has aimed at a bright effect in the whole; the girl with her blonde head must nevertheless show darker than the background, so the lake and the mountains are all kept in a shimmering silver light. With the various nudes of which "après le bain" is the common denominator we need not trouble ourselves; but there are nude paintings which rise above the level of "ces machines-là," either by sheer splendor of execution, as in M. Guay's Nu, or by their decorative effect, as in M. Moulin's long low picture Plein air: femme nue, where the figure lies at length on a purple mantle, with a background of foliage and the gleam of an evening sky through the leaves. M. Aimé Morot is rather below himself in his small picture Ephémère printemps, where a nude lady with her back to the spectator studies her figure in the looking glass: a piece of trickery unworthy of so fine a painter. M. Saintpierre brings the nude into the region of allegory with his figure of Fortune tiptoe on her wheel among the clouds, showering coinage from a cornucopia, while a lappet of wind

blown drapery covers her eyes; there is a fine energy and "go" about it. Mlle. Rondenay brings us to the other extreme, the anti-poetical, of nude painting, in her Baigneuses, somewhat similar to that which was bought by the Government last year; she is no doubt a very powerful plein-air painter of the figure, but she tends to get coarse, not only in execution but in another sense; in London the picture would hardly be thought decent, and it is certainly not beautiful. Quite above all these is M. Lavergne's Le Paradis perdu; Adam and Eve, life-sized and painted in a very broad style of execution, seated in the foreground of a melancholy twilight landscape. The remarkable quality in this is the fine sense of unity of composition in the lines of the figures and the landscape, all of which fall together as one whole: it is in the true sense a picture, not a mere representation.

Among what may be called the subject pictures of the year M. DebatPonsan, who last year symbolized France as a white horse throwing over Napoléon, is again dealing with horses, but this time they are two material cavalry horses held by an orderly dragoon in the foreground while the officer uses his fieldglass; Ceux qui veillent is the title. M. Debat-Ponsan is always either patriotic or moral in his pictures, but it is always good painting. M. Tattegrain, too, is a versatile incident painter who seems able to han. dle every kind of subject with effect; this time it is a powerfully painted rocky coast scene, which gets its title Sauveteurs d'épaves (in other words, "wreckers") from the two unkempt wolfish figures who nearly tumble over each other down the foreground path in their hurry to hook in flotsam and jetsam on the beach. He has done more interesting pictures, but these two figures are unpleasantly real. Mme. Demont-Breton, who disap

pointed us last year, is more like herself again with the figure of the old peasant woman, L'Aïeule, looking lovingly on her sleeping grandson; but I like her better at the seaside than inland. M. Henri Martin has what may be called a decorative painting in his pointilliste style, Dévideuses, two girls sitting on opposite ends of a rail, with a landscape behind them: a rather trivial subject to come from M. Martin. M. Roganeau has come rather near making a great picture in his large evening landscape Le Soir à la Rivière, with figures of women filling their waterpots out of the stream (a most unhygienic proceeding) and moving away with them; the figures are not quite interesting enough, but there is a large, calm serenity about the whole which is impressive. Bail, in La Lectrice, has forsaken that characterless type of his figures which Lady Bilderby approved of, and paints a young and old lady of strongly differentiated type; the accessories are painted with his usual power of execution, but the work is more frankly genre than has been usual with him.

M. Joseph

Among pictures which have some special point of interest is M. Martens's experiment, in Rayon de Soleil, in producing an interior effect of light and color, with a seated nude figure, in an ultra-pointilliste method of execution; one would not like to see all pictures painted that way, but this one is very clever and effective. M. Montchablon has painted a ghastly picture of the rowing-deck of a galley, La Chiourme, that terrible tragedy of human beings reduced to machines which so stained the naval history of Rome and of Renaissance Italy. This, one may say, is one of the pictures painted to point a moral, or to make us realize something that once happened; which is not the real business of art, of course, nor of novel-writing, nor of drama. Nevertheless moral lessons have been power

fully driven home both in novel and drama, and one does not see why painting may not be occasionally pressed into the same service. Though the French are so essentially artists, there are always some moral pictures in the Salon, some very good ones; M. Geoffroy's, for instance, A l'hospice des enfants assistés: l'abandon d'un enfant: a tragedy in humble life powerfully told; and another rather amusing example is M. Steck's Le soir au bord du Legué, a decorative picture for the Salle des Mariages at Saint-Brieuc. Here we

have the happy result of marriage: the family group of the artisan, the artisan's wife, and their child, all enjoying a holiday on the heights above the river. Thus does a paternal Republic encourage its citizens with the spectacle of the joys of family life. Among other points in the Salon are M. Georges Leroux's painting of an evening dinner under the loggia of the Villa Medici, with the heavy masses of trees dark against the twilight sky (the figures are rather commonplace); the odd idea of Mlle. Bonnier of a triptych of vêtements feminins: matin; après-midi; soir-garments et praeterea nihil (a lady to whom I mentioned this seemed exceedingly interested in the idea); and M. Mercié's portrait of a pretty child under the title La Puce, with a flea delicately painted on the frill of her dress-a rather unpleasing joke for a great artist to indulge in.