reless of official honor (which came to him only when,
late in life, on the demand of the Academy, the government accorded
him the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1833), his life was
uneventful. But his little pictures pleased the people who saw
themselves so truthfully depicted, and to-day they are more highly
esteemed than are the works of many of his at-the-time esteemed
contemporaries. He painted for seventy-two years, produced more
than five thousand portraits, an incredible number of pictures and
drawings, and died, his brush in hand, on January 5, 1845. The
little picture of the Arrival of a Diligence presents, with exquisite
truthfulness, a Paris unlike the brilliant city of our day, the
Paris where Arthur Young in his travels in 1812 notes the absence of
sidewalks; a city inhabited by slim ladies dressed _a la Grecque_, and
by high-stocked gentlemen content to travel by post. It is a canvas of
more value than the pretentious and tiresome historical compositions
of the time, and suggests the reflection that many of the David pupils
might have been better employed in putting their scientific accuracy
of drawing to the service of rendering the life which they saw about
them, instead of producing the arid stretches of academy models posing
as Hector or Romulus.

Guillaume-Guillon Lethiere, a painter in whose veins there was an
admixture of negro blood, would hardly have echoed the sentiments
of this last paragraph, as he lived and worked in the factitious
companionship of the Greeks and Romans. So clearly, however, does the
temperament of a painter inspire the character of his work that we
may be glad that this was the case; for, of his school, Lethiere alone
infuses into his classicism something of the turbulent life which
marked his own character.

[Illustration: THE COUNTESS REGNAULT DE SAINT-JEAN-D'ANGELY. FROM A
PAINTING BY BARON GERARD, IN THE LOUVRE.]

Born in Guadeloupe January 10, 1760, coming to Paris when very young,
he took the second prize of Rome in 1784, with a picture of such merit
that the regulation was infringed and he was given leave to go to Rome
at the same time as the winner of the first prize. His first picture
was exhibited in the form of a sketch in the Salon of 1801; and not
until eleven years after was the great canvas of Brutus Condemning his
Sons to Death shown at the Salon of 1812. The other picture by which
he is best known, the Death of Virginia, is, like the preceding, in
the L