ge portraits, fresh harmonies,
generally devoted to the study of different qualities of white. If the
name "Impressionist" meant, as has been wrongly believed, an artist who
confines himself to giving the impression of what he sees, then M.
Raffaelli would be the real Impressionist. He suggests more than he
paints. He employs a curious technique: he often leaves a sky completely
bare, throwing on to the white of the canvas a few colour notes which
suffice to give the illusion. He has a decided preference for white and
black, and paints very slightly in small touches. His very correct
feeling for values makes him an excellent painter; but what interests
him beyond all, is psychologic expression. He notes it with so hasty a
pencil, that one might almost say that he writes with colour. He is also
an etcher of great merit, and an original sculptor. He has invented
small bas-reliefs in bronze which can be attached to the wall, like
sketches or nick-nacks; and he has applied his talent even to renewing
the material for painting. He is an ingenious artist and a prolific
producer, a roguish, but sympathetic, observer of the life of the small
people, which has not prevented him from painting very seriously when he
wanted to, as is witnessed among other works by his very fine portrait
of M. Clemenceau speaking at a public meeting, in the presence of a
vociferous audience from which rise some hundred of heads whose
expressions are noted with really splendid energy and fervour.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died recently, insane, leaves a great
work behind him. He had a kind of cruel genius. Descended from one of
the greatest families of France, badly treated by nature who made him a
kind of ailing dwarf, he seemed to take a bitter pleasure in the study
of modern vice. He painted scenes at cafe-concerts and the rooms of
wantons with intense truth. Nobody has revealed better than he the
lowness and suffering of the creatures "of pleasure," as they have been
dubbed by the heartrending irony of life. Lautrec has shown the
artificiality of the painted faces; the vulgarity of the types of the
prostitutes of low origin; the infamous gestures, the disorder, the
slovenliness of the dwellings of these women; all the shady side of
their existence. It has been said that he loved ugliness. As a matter of
fact, he did not exaggerate, he raised a powerful accusation against
everything he saw. But his terrible clairvoyance passed for caricature.