-scene at the Opera, seen from the orchestra. The
neck of a double bass rises in the middle of the picture and cuts into
it, a large black silhouette, behind which sparkle the gauze-dresses and
the lights. That can be observed any evening, and yet it would be
difficult to recapitulate all the railleries and all the anger caused by
so natural an audacity. Modern illustration was to be the pretext of a
good many more outbursts!

We must now consider four artists of great importance who are remarkable
painters and have greatly raised the art of illustration. This title
illustrator, despised by the official painters, should be given them as
the one which has secured them the best claim to fame. They have
restored to this title all its merit and all its brilliancy and have
introduced into illustration the most serious qualities of painting. Of
these four men the first in date is M.J.F. Raffaelli, who introduced
himself about 1875 with some remarkable and intensely picturesque
illustrations in colours in various magazines. He gave an admirable
series of _Parisian Types_, in album form, and a series of etchings to
accompany the text of M. Huysmans, describing the curious river "la
Bievre" which penetrates Paris in a thousand curves, sometimes
subterranean, sometimes above ground, and serves the tanners for washing
the leather. This series is a model of modern illustration. But, apart
from the book, the entire pictorial work of M. Raffaelli is a humorous
and psychological illustration of the present time. He has painted with
unique truth and spirit the working men's types and the small
_bourgeois_, the poor, the hospital patients and the roamers of the
outskirts of Paris. He has succeeded in being the poet of the sickly and
dirty landscapes by which the capitals are surrounded; he has rendered
their anaemic charm, the confused perspectives of houses, fences, walls
and little gardens, and their smoke, under the melancholy of rainy
skies. With an irony free from bitterness he has noted the clumsy
gestures of the labourer in his Sunday garb and the grotesque
silhouettes of the small townsmen, and has compiled a gallery of very
real sociologic interest. M. Raffaelli has also exhibited Parisian
landscapes in which appear great qualities of light. He excels in
rendering the mornings in the spring, with their pearly skies, their
pale lights, their transparency and their slight shadows, and finally he
has proved his mastery by some lar