on him in a Paris magazine. No artist of the nineteenth century was more thoroughly original than Félix Buhot. We may or we may not admire his pictures, but, such as they are, they are entirely his own and there is no trace of imitation in them.

ALPHONSE LEGROS

OME artists have attained to fame

SOME

or at

least to notoriety - at a single bound; but Alphonse Legros is not one of these. As painter, etcher, and sculptor, he has been before the public for more than fifty years, and yet it is only within a comparatively recent period that he has been accorded his rightful place as a great artist and a great etcher. As early as 1859 one of his paintings was bought by so discriminating a judge as Seymour Haden, and from the beginning of his career a few clear-sighted persons recognized him at his true worth; but the general recognition which he now enjoys came long after.

It is not difficult to see the reasons for this. Legros never flattered the public - any more than Millet did. The first quality to attract popularity is superficial prettiness, and to this Legros would never descend.

The French make a wide distinction between the pretty and the beautiful in art. A less enlightened nation would never have adopted their common phrase "beau comme un Rembrandt" -to express the highest praise they could bestow on a work of art; and we may so far compare Legros to the great Rembrandt as to say, that

From the dry-point by Alphonse Legros. only fifty proofs were printed.

THE CANAL

Size of the original print, 6 by 9 inches.

Probably the most beautiful of Legros' landscape plates. Unfortunately it is rare, as

while the works of both artists are beautiful in the higher sense, not one of them is "pretty."

Moreover, the innovator and originator must always expect a period of neglect; and later of detraction and opposition, before his work wins its due recognition. Happily for Legros, this recognition has come to him while he still has, we trust, many years before him wherein to enjoy his honors; while in the case of Meryon and of Millet it came too late, and the attitude of the public toward these great artists was like that of the Jews of old, who reverently built the sepulchers of the prophets whom their fathers had stoned.

In America the superiority of contemporary French art is conceded; but along with this admitted superiority there are certain other characteristics which are supposed to be inseparable from it. Besides great technical cleverness we expect to find sprightly Gallic vivacity, which often degenerates into the theatrical, the coquettish, or the insincere. What place then shall we assign to an artist who is so serious, so profound, and so devoid of all that is meretricious and flippant, that we almost wonder he was not born in the solemn times of Dante, or Luther, or Savonarola, instead of being a modern Frenchman?

Born at Dijon in 1837, Legros removed to Paris in 1857, but in 1863 established himself in England, where he has become naturalized, and where he long and honorably filled the dignified post of Slade Professor of Art at the University of London.