til twelve, though shadows had shortened and the sun risen high in the heavens? Did he think the afternoon light the same as at five? No; I don't understand the modern school. When I was in Paris such masters as Rousseau, Corot, Ziem were respected, not triflers like Manet. And what their methods? They studied nature, they communed with her, they watched her every change, they saturated themselves with her. And then, with all this knowledge, all these memories, they went into the studio and composed a great picture; they were not content to make a painted photograph." We had almost reached the Gâcherel by this time. Far out beyond the two lights of

tion seizes me. I must paint. I shut myself in my studio. I wrestle with color! That is art; not to cover so many inches of canvas every day, to use brushes for so many hours by the clock, as if I were but a weaver at his loom. Allons au café!"

The next day at noon we were drinking coffee with our friends at the Cascade. "And your big picture?" we asked of one. "It marches. Two weeks more, working every morning, and I shall have finished it. I begin another this afternoon at the Gâcherel; I must give it all my afternoons. It is my Salon picture. Every year I have had my Salon pictures on the line, every year I have sold one to

Port de Banc the afterglow was just beginning to fade, the dusky grays were gradually creeping westward, a great rift of pale faint green showed beneath a ridge of still-flaming clouds. "Look at that!" he cried, standing still and pointing with arm extended to the west, while chattering girls from the washingplace, and children singing "Sur le pont d'Avignon," and laborers starting homeward after their day's work, and priests out for their evening walk, passed down the road. But no one noticed him; he and the sunset were everyday occurrences at Martigues. "Look at that! Can I bring my canvas and paint here an effect which is gone in five minutes? No; but I come evening after evening at this hour. I look, I regard, I study, I learn. The inspiraVOL. XLII.-95.

the state. I have always had a medal wherever I have exhibited. Albert Wolf has written about me. Reproductions of my paintings you will find in the Salon catalogues."

One from the Commerce sauntered by, his big white umbrella up, a fan in one hand, his tiny sketch-book, as usual, in his pocket.

"They never work, these men," the helmet said with a shrug; "and what can they expect? They stay in Martigues, they do not come to Paris, they do nothing. You never see them with paint or canvas. They never work out of doors; they are not fin de siècle. And then they do not like it when others get the good places and the medals. They think no one to-day does good work, no one after Corot, and Daubigny, and their eternal M. Ziem!

"IT IS AS GOOD AS VENICE."

They abuse everybody else. They loaf and talk only of themselves. Mon Dieu, it is two o'clock! We must be off. Black! Brosse!" And down the wide street marched the procession of brave workmen, while over at the Commerce the idlers sat for a couple of hours playing with their dogs and talking about the greatness of art before the coming of the modern artist.

We heard much of this talk. Many an evening poor Désirée, carrying the soup from the kitchen to the dining-room, would have to force his way through the group listening to an impromptu lecture on true artistic methods; many a morning a little crowd assembled under the sycamores of the walk for a lesson in true artistic perspective without the aid of camera. And daily we watched the progress of the big canvases, and learned of the strifes and struggles of the artist in Paris, where the spoils of the art world must be intrigued for as are political spoils at home, and where a good coat and a swell studio are the artist's highest recommendations, even as in London or New York.

Art for art's sake was the creed held at the Commerce; art for a medal's sake at the Cascade.

I was glad that we were allowed to hold a neutral position, to be neither tricolorist nor romanticist, but independent, like the young painter who gave lessons to all the pretty girls in Martigues, and the old professor of drawing who sang such gay songs over his wine after dinner. I liked the methods of the communers with nature; to spend morning and evening studying her among the olives and from canal-banks, to do nothing and call it work, what could be pleasanter? And yet success is sweet, and successful artists do not always do the worst work. Was not Velasquez a courtier? and did not Titian live in a palace? However, if all the ways of Martigues were

not peace, at both cafés it was agreed that the town was a real painter's paradise.

"It is as good as Venice," they would say at the Commerce. "We have the boats, the canals, the fishermen, and the sunlight; in the morning even Port de Banc in the distance is as fine as the Venetian islands. And yet it is so much more simple. The effects at a certain hour are the same every dayevery day. It composes itself; it is not too architectural. And it is small; you get to know it all. You must not always be studying new motifs, new subjects, as in Venice. That is why M. Ziem likes it better than all the other places where he has painted."

"It is as good as Venice," they would say at the Cascade, " and so much nearer for us. We lose less time in coming. And people who buy paintings and go to exhibitions are not fatigued with looking at pictures of Martigues, as they are with those of Venice. Every painter has not worked here."

And they might have added that it has not. been exploited and ruined like the village on the borders of the northern forest, or the fishing town on the Cornish coast. It is not filled with aggressive studios, it gives no public exhibitions, it has no old men and women falling into position as the artist passes, no inn parlor with picture-covered walls. The only signs of the painter's summer passage is an occasional unfinished sketch stuck up on a shelf in a fisherman's kitchen, or a smudge of paint on a bedroom wall.

Those were very pleasant days, the last we spent at Martigues. We were no longer alone when we strolled by the canals where the brown

nets hung in long lines and the boats lay finely grouped, and where young girls in Rembrandtesque interiors and old men out in the sunshine chanting about "pauvre Zozéphine" made or mended nets and sails. We were no longer alone when we walked towards the sunset, no longer alone when we drank our midday coffee at the Cascade, or J-smoked his evening pipe in front of the hotel. A space was found for his stool at the Gâcherel in the afternoons; Black followed Madame and me over the hills and under the pines. And we had made many other friends in the town: the builder of the mosque, who often consulted us about his dome and minarets" what was the true Turkish form"; the shopkeepers, who would lean over their counters and call me "Ma Bella" when they asked what I wanted; the women who offered J—a chair when he worked at their doors; the fishermen who invited us on their boats and into their kitchens. A little longer and we

should have been on intimate terms with all Martigues, even though we could not understand its language.

But the summer painting season came to an end with September. One by one the helmets deserted the Gâcherel and the Cascade; one by one the white umbrellas and fans disappeared from the shores of the lake. Gradually the studio litter was cleared from the hall of our hotel.

"These gentlemen, the painters, go now," M. Bernard said, when he would have induced us to stay on," but others soon arrive for the winter. The house will be gay again."

Only over at the Commerce one or two remained faithful, waiting for the coming of their master, M. Ziem.

But we could not wait to see the great man nor to share the winter gaiety. We had had our summer in Paradise; the time had come to turn our faces northward from the sunshine of Martigues to the fog of London.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell.

HE name by which this painter was and is still generally known is not well accounted for, but is supposed to be simply the abbreviation of his christened name, Francesco, assumed afterward in all probability as a surname to distinguish him from some other Francesco, the recognition of the family name, except in noble families, not being customary in Italy till a late period, and in some regions not being habitual even now. His pictures are signed F. Francia Aurifex, or simply Francia Aurifex, and some times with the addition of Bon or Bononiensis (of Bologna), showing that he did not himself recognize the family name, and that in his own day he was better known as a goldsmith than as a painter. He is indeed the most remarkable instance of that versatility in the practice of the arts which arose from the broad and thorough method of education in general principles on which the art of the Renaissance is based. He was one of the most successful medalists of the time, and head of the mint of Bologna under the Bentivoglio family, the tyrants of that city; the medals and coins issued from its mint under his direction of it are amongst the most admirable that we possess. The art of the goldsmith was generally considered as extending to all branches of design, and the passage of the

pupil from the goldsmith's bottega to that of a painter was common at all times in the best period of the arts in Italy, as is shown by the example of Botticelli, Verocchio, and the Pollainoli. Vasari says that Francia, having known Mantegna and other painters, determined at a mature age to try his hand at painting. His training as a gold-worker, and the continual demand for the small figures which formed a great part of the more important works in gold and silver in an age when devotion combined with luxury to make the goldsmith the most important artisan of the epoch, made every apprentice of talent practically a sculptor, while the rules which directed the painter in all the stages of his work were so well settled, and the processes so systematic and direct, that they were acquired without the slightest difficulty by any good draftsman. What was most important was that he should draw with certainty, and the habit of working in metal with the graver is certainly the best of all trainings for this. With this general knowledge of all that art had to do, he was thrown into contact with Mantegna, who, being of all men of his time in the highest rank amongst painters, united with the gifts of the painter the feeling for form of the sculptor and the fertility of decorative design of the goldsmith, and was therefore probably the most sympathetic with the tenden