FINE ARTS SECTION OF THE PARIS EXHIBITION—NO. Iv.

Leaving France in order to get a glimpse at her artistic dependencies, we come first to Belgium as the most productive and vigorous. Her art on the whole is, indeed, but a pale and dwarfed reflex of that of France, and we may quietly pass by the doings of her academic celebrities; but three of her sons, Alfred and Joseph Stevens and Henry Leys, claim a first-class place in any gathering, not only of their own compatriots, but of universal art.

There is not in the Palais des Beaux Arts a more massive and intense colourist than either Alfred or Joseph Stevens. The two may be spoken of together ; for, although Joseph, as being almost exclusively an animal- painter, occupies an independent position, and although be may be dis- tinguished by some shade more of vigour in form, and Alfred of richness in colour, the two pursue the same end with means nearly identical. Both are sturdy realists, both born artists ; not attempting, on the one hand, to embellish or evade workaday nature, nor, on the other, failing to demonstrate, in every effect chosen and every point of realization, a consciousness that the painter's business is to express, together with the visible outward object, some predilection or insight of his own. In tone it cannot be said that either of the Stevenses is strictly true; we nowhere find clear diffused daylight or sunlight, but sunken sullen brilliancy glow- ing through overcast shadow, and broad firm masses instead of infinite detail. Alfred's two small pictures, " Reading " and "Meditation," are wonderful bits of rich colour in this way. The daring mapping-out of the general scheme of colour—as the snowy street opposed to the deep tones of the rent in Alfred's picture of " What People call Vagrancy "- shows the eye and hand of the true colourist ; and these are evidenced, less saliently but quite as decidedly, by the value given to small details as points of effect. Look, for instance, at the extreme darkness with which the hovering sparrows in the last-named picture tell against the snow—a point which any one may have noted in a London winter : they are al- most black spots upon the white. Look at the flowers and tapestry in "Meditation" ; the white and black cat, white jug, even the rude cot- tage print of Napoleon, which form the accessories to "The Siesta" ; the nail against the blank white-washed wall, the ball of red cotton, and the oleander, in Joseph Stevens's " Intrusion" ; and the oyster and lobster shells in his "Unconscious Philosopher." In all these we find the "two things needful "—instinct of what is right, and calculation of how to make it felt. We should add, that in "Intrusion" the expression of the mother-cat disturbed by a random dog is something marvellous : the mouth twitches, baring the lucent teeth, the profile flattens, the eyes con- tract, the fur begins to bristle, and you can as good as hear the snarling grr - - with which she rouses the hostile nature of a dog who seems well- intentioned enough if left alone. Though the cat is the great triumph here, it is in dogs that the specialty of Joseph Stevens consists. There are immense force and varied character in his life-sized "Episode of the Dog-Market at Paris "—where an old woman, presiding over a whole squad of her kennelled clients, is sedately engaged in relieving one of them from his too intimate bosom friends the fleas.

The Stevenses must be classed, but not condemned, as mannerists ; their executive indiviLuality, striking as it is, consisting in carrying to their acme certain Min peculiarities of the French school. They are also chargeable, and especially Alfred, with painting rather studies or bits of pictures than entire works ; although each production, so far as it goes, is integral and complete. Further, they have little, in an intellect- ual sense, of what the Germans include in the term culture, and their extreme force of style verges on violence redeemed, however, from coarseness by a grateful and harmonious feeling of repose. They are un- doubtedly leading men, whose work will count for something in our period.

A more individual artist than even the Stevenses is Henry Leys ; who seems to be at this moment absolutely sui generic, save for a feeble and obvious imitator named Joseph Lies. His peculiarity is the treatment of subjects of manners of the middle ages, with a perception of character much akin to Holbein's, Van Eyck's, or Cranach's, and a broad yet precise and defined style of modern execution. The result has something of the quaint and grotesque, but full of apirirand life-likeness. No other artist treating similar themes comes so near the look of actual probabilities ; we seem to see the productions of a contemporary. When one finds so in- teresting a line of subject so well done, it is with reluctance one admits that it ought hardly to have been attempted at all ; and that the nineteenth- century man, however deeply he may have imbued himself with sixteenth- century fact and feeling, cannot know enough of them to make his work valuable in the same sense as one commemorative of his own age, or as a veritable record of the past. In practice, we are glad to waive the severe theoretic objection, and find M. Leys one of the most picturesque, enjoyable, and admirable of artists. Of his three excellent pictures now in Paris, the least remarkable is "The New Year in Flanders." "The Walk Outside the City-walls" from Faust, with its richly varied types of mediaeval character each of whom is an individual as well as a type, is extraordinarily good ; and equally so a still more well-selected subject, " Bertal de Haze." This personage, as the catalogue explains, "chief of the order of the Ancient Arblast, dying in 1612, bequeathed to the Church of Notre Dame his war-gear, to wit, his best corslet, his morion, his gor- get, his arblast, his quiver with the arrows, and his hooked knife, to the end that the whole thereof might be hung up in the chapel of the order." Treated with Leys's peculiar mediaeval feeling, this very mediaeval subject is something unique. The members of the deceased Bertal's family are standing or kneeling before the altar and the war-gear,—the heart-wrung widow, the stalwart grave son, now bead of the house, the demure little child ; and the row of white-vested priests seated chanting is at once quaint and solemn.

After these men, the most noticeable Belgian painters are Verlat, De Oren; and Willems. The first has a " Cat and Dog " subject, similar to Joseph Stevens's, and scarcely less perfect. The cat is giving the un- bidden dog an admonitory dab on the head with an indignant flat paw, and the play of her glassy green eyes looks suspicious. De Groux's "Last Farewell"—a burial in a foreign cemetery ankle-deep in snow—is an instance of extreme realism, whose painful impressiveness is only en- hanced by the grotesqueness of its literality. Willems's " Interior of a Silk-mercer's Shop in 1660," though trifling matter comparatively, lacks no essential or apt embellishment.

Of the other dependencies of artistic France little is to be said. There are some respectable, no eminent productions from Spain and the Low Countries ; from non-Austrian Italy still leas. Inganni and Dominic and Jerome Induno, from Austrian Italy, are clever at common life; the first well up in effects, the other two slight, and with a proclivity to the squalid. The United States show exceedingly ill, but excite nevertheless an Englishman's curiosity and interest. The best brace of exhibitors are Healy and W. M. Hunt—both competent executive artists of the down- right French style. Healy's large picture of " Franklin pleading the cause of the American Colonies to Louis the Sixteenth," the only subject of much importance from the States, has little to recommend it. His colour possesses something broad and soft, but is neutral, and tends to murkiness and a scene-painting tone. His feeling for beauty is of the faintest. The suffused heat of Babcock, and the utter vulgarity and meanness of B.ossiter's " Wise and Foolish Virgins," &c., are what catch the eye most in the residue. We take it that the exhibiting half-score of Americans is no fair sample of Transatlantic art-powers ; otherwise we should pronounce that no nation is less firmly grounded or less in earnest, and that the aspirations vented in that quarter are but breath lost. In the Germanic art we find nothing better than the domestic subjects of Knaus of Wiesbaden, a Dusseldorf student and a Paris resident; which are well invented in a humorous and a dramatic point of view, replete with observation and character, and executed with all cleverness and ease. In " The Morrow of the Village Feast," the expression in the good German face of the young girl seated by her sweetheart, who, having been induced to drink too much, is now sleeping overcome amid the debris of the revel, human and inanimate, is touching and exquisite in its naive truth ; an expression of wounded feeling and wordless appeal, abashed yet firm. To her the matter is no joke at all. We remember no living "domestic painter" of higher excellence and promise than Herr Kamm : he needs, notwithstanding, to be on his guard against the tendency to caricature.

For the school represented by Cornelius we profess little or no sympa- thy, and a respect that stops considerably short of veneration. He is a

thinker, a purist, a reformer—anything but an artist. Nothing comes to him impulsively, nothing is done unconsciously and gloriously ; he is never better than he knows himself, or than every cultivated man can discover him to be. He sends a "Selection of Cartoons for the Frescoes to the Porticoes of the Campo Santo in course of construction at Berlin." The seven angels of the Apocalyptic phials are fluttering, flying, and at- titudinizing; so are the four horsemen—Plague, Famine, War, and Death : Satan Chained is worse in the same way. In the series of the Works of Christian Charity, the subject of pointing the road to those who have lost it is not adequately expressed as a charitable deed, but rather as a mere casual incident; and in the illustration of "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness," it can hardly be said

that anything is expressed. In the Descent of the New Jerusalem there is a fine symbolic thought : the heavenly vision is seen by only two of the group of earth-dwellers, a youth and a mother.

Kaulbach also sends some of his cartoons ; among them " The Tower of Babel," known to Englishmen as well by the enthusiastic exposition in Miss Howitt's book as by an engraving. No one would deny the

power and bold invention of liendbach • but he too loads his comp:ninon with system and abstruse intentioo. Ile keeps his eyes wider open than

Cornelius or Overbeek to what real men and evotlihn look like, and his

first notion of character and action is generally vivid; but he determines to be truer than truth, stronger then strength, and livelier than life, and

ends by giving you a chmeoteriatico.acadeniic abstract when you had Untamed for a bunion being. Unenounibered by German traditions and the incubus of the. grandeur of the old masters, Kaulbach might have con,. tipued to this day the genius which Nature made him, and which he showed himself ip such woks as " The Mad.houae" : as it is, belabours with huge thoughts, and secures the acclamation of Europe, and chiefly

of Germany, for every step be strays further from true achievement in art. At least his steps are the strides of a lusty man, not themincing of a coxcomb nor the shuffling of a monk. 4 pretty German domesticism, hushed and homely, is Moyer's "Little Brother Aeleep "—the last contribution we need specify from Prussia.

From Austria, Steinle sends a grand piece of form in "Eve," and a very

clever water-colour in " The Jew of Venice." The domestic again ap- pears in several works by Waldmiiller, full of fine qualities of observe. tion, feeling, and representation, which are impeded in their full effect by some of the hardness and. anti-geniality of German execution, Sweden makes a creditable appearance, with Heckert and Lundgren, for a coma.

try so remote from the centres of art; Norway with Tidemand; Den. mark with Eimer and Larsen,—whose " Coast of Marseilles," with a

black tinged bluish-green sea, dark and rolling in stern ridges, is remark- able. Switzerland's muster is indifferent enough ; but it includes one thing nice and simple—" Refectory of Capuchins at Albano," by Van 3iluyden. The holy men must have a passionate partiality for cats, of which a numerous rank and file is scattered about the apartment, At individual contributions from England we need barely glance, as there is hardly au important one among them that had not been pre- viously made public at home. To English Prteraphaelitism—after ad- miring foreign excellence with no stinted or up-catholic homage—we return in the deliberate conviction that it embodies the highest, truest, and most vitally essential movement of the airs. Its missionaries, Hunt

and Millais,' exhibit—the former "The Light of the World," "Strayed Sheep," and "Claudio and Isabella" ; the latter, "The Order of Re-

lease," " Ophelia," and "The Return of the Dove to the Ark." We may also rely with proud confidence upon Anthony's "Beech-trees and Fern," Brown's "Chaucer," Cross's "Death of Coeur de Lion," Dyce's "King Joas" and. " Jacob and Rachel," Leslie's " Senoho Panes and the Duchess," Linuellei " Barley-Harvest," Poole's "Job and the Mee. sengers," and Mulready's copious "display. The last-named artist and Webster share with the Prearaphaelites and our water-colour school the chief part of the attention, not unmixed with surprise, which England has excited in France; and we need only recall the names of Lewis, Cox, William Hunt, and Ilaghe, among the water-colourists, and Ross and

Thorburn among the miniature-painters,. as representatives. of a class of art in which England stands utterly unrivalled and almost without com-

petition of any sort. On 44 other band, the class of which Stanfield is a champion looks flimsy and artificial; Maelise, theatrical and tawdry.; mid Landseer, whose sole first-rate specimen is "The Sanctuaty," finds

so many foreign antagonists formidable in energetic power and stern atudy, that the balance is not righted in fairness to him until we call to mind his supremacy in inventiou and human sympathy with the phases and emotions of animal life.

The two most remarkable English pictures not yet seen here are by Mulreatly and Leighton. hl ulready's is " The Bathers "—often promised and still withheld at the Academy exhibitions ; a charming, delicate, and original treatment of the worn subject, pure without prudery. The agile form of the girl in the background tripping. up the bank is no studio stock personage, but a genuine acquisition from nature. Leighton's picture of

the "Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets over the dead bodies of their children," (which the officials have coolly assigned not to Eng-

land but to the Pontifical States,) amply coafirins the hopes based on his Academy painting. The colour is grand and digoified; and the broken compunctious expression of Capulet reaches higher than anything in the former work. In the remaining figures, however, thereie little character. In sculpture, France, England, Belgium, Austria, chiefly from North- ern Italy, Prussia, and Saxony, are the conspicuous contributors, There is little to be said of this department ip a rapid review which stops only at the first-rate and the strikingly individual. Seulpture in our day is-an entranced art welloligle fatuous. It dreams of effete Greciams, and with half-shut maundering eyes makes clumsy copies of its dreams. For the volt, the general characteristics of the various schools hold regarding sculpture as well as painting ; Franco taking the lead.foc'terse complete- ness, and a feeling for which we can find nacloser word. than "-picturesque." Our preference may bo pitifully " uuideal," but we discover nothiug else so admirable, so firsterate, as Fremiet's " Cat and Kittens" ; a perfect piece of life is marble. With this we- would. name Bonnassieux's very beautiful " Meditation," Clavelier's effective " Truth.," Debby's famous- and lovely " Filet Cradle," Jacquot's soft and alluring " Nymph Sur-

prised," Jaley's " Modesty,"—which is French modesty, however,— jouffroy's delicate- " qirl conading her first secret to Venus," from the Luxembourg ; and the animal subjects of Barye Hebert, and Rude • ' the British Macdoweins "Girl preparing for the Bath," and the BelgianVan- hove's somewhat repulsive naturalism, "A Negro Slave after the. Baste, nado." Kiss's colossal equestrian " St, George and the Dragon," in plaster, has more of the. German externals than the substance of the he- roic and fantastic.

Lithography and the higher branches of engraving again bear testi- mony to the preeminence of France: England and Germany, among -whose constituent states we especially note Sammy, hold their own at

any- rate in wood-cutting. Architecture, which has engaged no countries much except France and England, counts even among their contributions- few original designs, but only drawings and proposed reatorationaof ex. isnag, buildings in ;Jae great majority of cases. France is terribly fertile in this line ; and indeed the chief feature of the architectural display is the zeatlesa tenacity with which she at present clings to the Gothic air sttact, undoing and redoing on allhanda.the Gothie.concrete in its glorious. monuments of the-Taste Hero we come to a full stop.; and the:Palais des. Beaux Arts, with its vein collection, its, dross skimmed and its treasures roughly appraised, lies behind use