quences, his ideas of composition in depth, with an increased force and precision. In the other group he seems to me to have been led away by some other aspect of nature which, by the fascination of some unexpected opposition, has made him mistake 1t for the object of his search. I will take instances: St Paul—One is standing on a terrace bounded on the left by a high wall; one looks over a wide, undulating country with a little hill town occupying the middle distance and a vast expanse of sky. Now here the choice of quantities, the recessions and the modelling have to me but little plastic significance. I find myself dwelling at once on the scenic qualities of the vision. I recall, no doubt, something of the surprise which I might have in travelling, on coming suddenly on this splendid expanse. And here I must guard against misapprehension: what I have said might give rise to the supposition that this was a vulgarly poetical picture. It is nothing of the kind. M Marchand is much too serious and too genuine a painter for that. There is no romantic emphasis, no underlining of the scenic effect; he does not make the hill town appear more isolated, more inaccessibly perched than it is. He does not dig round it more precipitous ravines—in fact, he is utterly innocent of any of the well known appeals to romantic feeling. Only since the motive contains in itself scenic rather than plastic values it fails, I think, of any particular conviction or intensity.
I put against this Jardins en Terrasses. One 1s looking down a sloping olive yard to a hill-side opposite terraced with stone walls from the bottom to the top, which is crowned by a row of houses with a tiny strip of sky above; all is seen in bright, flat, hard sunlight. In the foreground on either hand are the dark trunks and branches of olive trees, with a figure in shadow at the foot of one of them. It is what from a picturesque point of view one might call a thoroughly ungrateful subject. A description in paint of this succession of stone walls going perfectly straight across the field of vision would be intolerably dull; but this is no mere description. M Marchand's intimate feeling for his matière, his subtle perception of delicate variations of tone, his power to express recessions, to create the visual hollow, his vigorous workmanlike touch, the feeling for form which enables him to realize the thrust of the tree trunks, and his austere simplicity of colour which yet gives all the purity and brilliance of the effect: all these things taken with the fine architectural simplicity and solidity of the design make this a triumphant success.
