s a
young woman in a black gown of the type that Millais loved, leaning
forward with both hands on a table covered with an Indian drapery. On
the table stands the miniature figure of an elephant. The background is
of the strong green so often used by Manet and the varied pattern of the
table cover gives opportunity for assembling a number of rich and vivid
yet quiet hues in an intricate and interesting color composition.

_La Parisienne Japonaise_ is a subject of the kind that enlisted
Whistler's interest during the sixties--a handsome girl in a blue silk
kimono embroidered with white and yellow flowers, and a green sash,
looks into a mirror that reflects a yellow background and a vase of
flowers. The colors are said to have faded and changed, to the complete
demoralization of the color-scheme, but it is still a picture of winning
charm, less reserved and dignified than Whistler's _Lange Leizen_ of
1864, but with passages of subtle color and a just relation of values
that have survived the encroachments of time.

From a very early period Stevens adopted the camel's-hair shawl with its
multi-colored border as the model for his palette and the chief
decoration of his picture. It is easier, says one of his French critics,
to enumerate the paintings in which such a shawl does not appear than
those in which it does. It slips from the shoulders of the _Desesperee_
and forms a wonderful contrast to the smooth fair neck and arm relieved
against it; it is the magnificent background of the voluminous gauzy
robe in _Une Douloureuse Certitude_; it falls over the chair in which
the young mother sits nursing her baby in _Tous les Bonheurs_; it hangs
in the corners of studios, it is gracefully worn by fashionable visitors
in fashionable drawing-rooms; its foundation color is cream or red or a
deep and tender yellow as soft as that of a tea-rose; it determines the
harmony of the colored silks and bric-a-brac which are in its vicinity,
it rules its surroundings with a truly oriental splendor, and it gives
to the work in which it plays so prominent a part an individuality
supplementary to the artist's own. It is as important as the rugs in the
pictures of Vermeer of Delft or Gerard Terborch.

[Illustration: L'ATELIER

_From a painting by Alfred Stevens_]

The silks and muslins of gowns and scarves are also important
accessories in these pictures which have a modernity not unlike that of
the pictures of Velasquez, in which the ugline