l produced; but if this great painter had been asked what
beauty was, he would probably have replied that he could not say, that he
knew it by heart, and that he thought he had reproduced it whenever he
had seen it, but that he did not know in what it consisted.

"That face pleases me," he would say, "it is therefore beautiful!"

He ought to have thanked God for having given him such an exquisite eye
for the beautiful; but 'omne pulchrum difficile'.

The painters of high renown, all those whose works proclaim genius, have
excelled in the delineation of the beautiful; but how small is their
number compared to the vast craved who have strained every nerve to
depict beauty and have only left us mediocrity!

If a painter could be dispensed from making his works beautiful, every
man might be an artist; for nothing is easier than to fashion ugliness,
and brush and canvas would be as easy to handle as mortar and trowel.

Although portrait-painting is the most important branch of the art, it is
to be noted that those who have succeeded in this line are very few.
There are three kinds of portraits: ugly likenesses, perfect likenesses,
and those which to a perfect likeness add an almost imperceptible
character of beauty. The first class is worthy only of contempt and their
authors of stoning, for to want of taste and talent they add
impertinence, and yet never seem to see their failings. The second class
cannot be denied to possess real merit; but the palm belongs to the
third, which, unfortunately, are seldom found, and whose authors deserve
the large fortunes they amass. Such was the famous Notier, whom I knew in
Paris in the year 1750. This great artist was then eighty, and in spite
of his great age his talents seemed in all their freshness. He painted a
plain woman; it was a speaking likeness, and in spite of that those who
only saw the portrait pronounced her to be a handsome woman.
Nevertheless, the most minute examination would not have revealed any
faithlessness to the original, but some imperceptible touches gave a real
but indefinite air of beauty to the whole. Whence does that magic art
take its source? One day, when he had been painting the plain-looking
"Mesdames de France," who on the canvas looked like two Aspasias, I asked
him the above question. He answered:--

"It is a magic which the god of taste distils from my brains through my
brushes. It is the divinity of Beauty whom all the world adores, and
which n