at his epoch was
represented with fidelity and kindly feeling.

The panels attributed to Pietro Longhi are innumerable. They may be
found scattered through public galleries and private collections,
adorning the walls of patrician palaces, or thrust away in corners of
country-houses. He worked carefully, polished the surface of his
pictures to the finish of a miniature, set them in frames of a fixed
pattern, and covered them with glass. These genre-pictures, while
presenting notes of similarity, differ very considerably in their
technical handling and their scheme of colour. Our first inference,
after inspecting a miscellaneous selection, is that Longhi must have
started a school of imitators. Indeed this is probably the case; and it
is certain that some pieces ascribed to his brush are the production of
his son Alessandro, who was born in 1733. Yet closer study of authentic
paintings by Pietro's hand compels the critic to be cautious before he
rejects, on internal evidence of style, a single piece assigned by good
tradition to this artist. The Museo Civico at Venice, for example,
contains a large number of Longhis, some of which seem to fall below his
usual standard. I have, however, discovered elaborate drawings for these
doubtful pictures in the book of his original sketches, which is also
preserved there. Longhi must therefore have painted the pictures
himself, or must have left the execution of his designs to a pupil.
Again, the style of his two masterpieces (the _Sala del Ridotto_ and the
_Parlatorio d'un Convento_, both in the Museo Civico) differs in
important particulars from that of the elaborately finished little
panels by which he is most widely known. These fine compositions are
marked by a freer breadth of handling, a sketchy boldness, a combined
richness and subtlety of colouring, and an animation of figures in
movement, which are not common in the average of his genre-pieces. When
I come to speak of the family portrait of the Pisani, signed by his
name, I shall have to point out that the style of execution, the scheme
of colour, and the pictorial feeling of this large composition belong to
a manner dissimilar from either of those which I have already indicated
as belonging to authentic Longhis.

IV.

It has been well observed by a Venetian writer, whose meagre panegyric
is nearly all we have in print upon the subject of this painter's
biography, that "there is no scene or point of domestic life which