official experience, I know to be a record that
the last memorandum had been carried out, and
that the papers might be put by.

PARIS PICTURE AUCTIONS.

THE number of pictures sold at the Hotel
Drouot in Paris, in the course of a season, is
about ten thousand. I have the printed
catalogues of eight thousand two hundred and
seventy-five, put up two years ago. But
these are not all the catalogues of that year,
and not all the canvases, panels and
millboards, by any means are catalogued; so that
the round estimate just given is, probably,
some hundreds under rather than a single daub
over the mark. Last year there went as many,
this year as many or more are going. The demand
since 1856 has been on the increase, and the
supply keeps pace with it as regularly as though
products of the soil or loom, and not of the
brush, were in question. This working of an
economic law in the department of the fine arts
is the more noteworthy, in that it applies to
the manufactures of dead as well as of living
geniuses. Not that all this merchandise in oils
and colours can be charged to the account of
genius. Of the whole stock many indeed are
admirable, many are abominable, and more are
neither very praiseworthy nor blameworthy.
There are specimens of all times, styles and
schools, from high historic to low Dutch, from
primary and ante-pre-Raphaelitic to 1863— not
to say later. For there are youths, like Post-
gamboge, who paint, as Herr Wagner composes
music, for the future— mostly in high distemper.
Their cutting contempt of the present and their
prospective pretensions, remind one of the
charlatan's razors, warranted to shave two days under
the skin.

What is best, as well as most abundantly
represented, however, at the Hotel, is contemporary
French art. It is not extravagant to say
that from the exhibitions there, of any one late
past or of the passing season, a selection could
be made, not only more extensive and more
completely illustrative of French living artists, but
on the whole more beautiful than the very fine
but imperfect gallery of the Luxembourg. At
a great interval, measured by numbers, but
worthily next on the modern side, come the
Belgians. The Germans— except the frequent
ones who have studied in Paris, or still live and
work here more or less in the French manner—
are not greatly called for. Scarcely ten in the
ten thousand are English— I mean, brought direct
from across the Channel. The explanation of this
would seem to lie rather in the high ruling prices
of islanders' oil works at home, than in French
dislike for English art; since English engravings,
both modern and elderly, whether after British
or foreign originals, are much sought for by
cismarine collectors. Twice, in the bundle of
catalogues above mentioned, I find the hard-pressed
editorial expert attributing an atrocious daub to
"Hogart." How the great satirist had smiled
at reading, and at seeing, the letter-press, and
its correspondent botch on canvas! French
of the last century and early part of this, occupy
large spaces on the Drouotian walls. The old
Italian and Spanish— mainly Italian— masters,
with their endless train of pupils, imitators and
copyists, mostly of the undoubtedly original
varieties, are plenty as beggars in Rome, or
ragamuffaroni in Naples. Likenesses of
Venetian signors and canals, landscapes unlike
anything in nature, sacred subjects treated
profanely, improper females mythologically and
martyrologically labelled, masculine saints ugly
as sinners— over all a general dispensation of
dirt, liquorice-juice, and varnish of different
schools; but every here and there true gold
amid the rusty mass of base metal, veritable
pearls among the oyster-shells. Along with
these in quantity, surpassing them, in their
kind and on the whole, by quality, come the
Hollanders and Flemings. These last, whether
they worked iu landscape, marines, figures or
still-life, are in great and growing vogue.

Monsieur Laneuville, one of the best
approved professional experts of old paintings in
Paris, whose father too was a Gamaliel expert,
a quite elderly gentleman now, who has lived
through almost as many revolutions of
dilletanteism as of political régimes— between which,
by the way, as intimate as curious relations are
discoverable, having again their common
relations in and with notable phenomena in the
literature of France of the last past fifty years—
Monsieur Laneuville, I say, tells me that the
favour of the day is much less inclined than
formerly to the large and classic Italian styles
of art. The prevalent modern tendency is to
realism, which though it is apt to degenerate to
love of excessive detail on one side, and to mere
vulgarity of subject and execution on the other,
is mainly good. There is an accompanying
tendency to exclusive specialities that are in a sort
mechanical or of detail. Thus, the mere colour-
seeker flouts drawing and expression. Another
pays twelve thousand francs for a Meissonier, not
because it is perfectly drawn and harmoniously
coloured, or because it does or does not convey a
thought or sentiment, but because of its
microscopic size. Were its square inches multiplied
into feet, I really believe that it might bring
(with such a man) but the square root of its
price. The changes of fashion in respect of art
are as marked, and apparently as capricious, as
in the matter of women's bonnets or men's
coats. They might be made the theme of an
instructive and even entertaining essay, for the
study of which the Hotel offers a mine of
documentary matter.

The sums paid for the ten thousand vary
extremely and meanly, all the way from two or
three or less francs for as many or more pieces
put up in a lot, to hundreds of thousands of
francs for one chef-d'Å“uvre. The last figure
and style are much rarer than the first.

The highest figures recorded in the annals of
our Institution, which was then situate on the
Place de la Bourse, and known as the Hotel