painter of exotic life Gérôme remains an observer of the highest order. If he has not wholly revealed Italy to us in his Guardians of the Herd and his Pifferari (1855, 1857), he has at least done so in the case of Egypt, still deeply impregnated with an ancient and splendid civilization, naïve and at the same time venerable, Egypt before the advent of tourists, a luminous land where the Nile and the Desert reign supreme, a land of magnificence and of savagery. Landscapes of this Egypt of poetic mystery, and of Palestine as well, childish or perverse almas, rude Albanian Chiefs, Turbaned Turks,—one never wearies of these decorative effects, these clear visions, these scenes of animation, whether violent or delicate, the people, the vegetation, the fabrics, all resplendent under the marvellous sky of the Orient.

In the company of this intrepid, venturesome and observant traveller, we witness the passage of Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert, we are present at Prayers in the House of an Albanian Chief, we pause in the Plain of Thebes, not far from Memmon and Sesostris, and we watch the Camels at the Drinking Trough, so admirably realized. Gérôme, who had a gift for finding the right and pleasing phrase, gave this rather neat definition of a camel: "The Ship of the Sea of Sand."

Similarly, the Egyptian Straw-chopper (1861, again exhibited in 1867, and purchased by M. Werlé) symbolizes, simply yet forcefully, agricultural Egypt, and all the varied shadings of her pastoral poetry. Then again, there is The Prisoner (1863), in which a boat is making its way along the vast and pacific Nile. Two negro oarsmen, the master, a bashibazouk, are in the prow; and in the stern, beside a buffoon, who apparently derides him, while twanging the strings of a guitar, the prisoner lies cross-wise, fast bound, and abandons himself to his cruel destiny. There, in a setting of enchanted beauty, we have the chief actors in this original drama, in which dream and reality are blended.

What a horde of types, some of them bizarre, others simply comic! There are, taking them as they come, a Turkish Butcher in Jerusalem (1863), The Alma (Professional Singing Girl—1864), The Slaves in the Market Place, The Clothing Merchant at Cairo, The Albanians Playing Chess (1867), The Itinerant Merchant at Cairo (1869). Then there is the Promenade of the Harem, and still others, the Santon (Turkish Monk) at the Door of the Mosque and Women at the Bath (1876), the Arab and his Courser and The Return from the Hunt (1878).