coat, a big-rimmed hat slouched over his eyes, he patrolled the quays, singing, joking, an artless creature, so good-hearted and irresponsible that he was called “Fada,” more in affection than contempt.  He painted rapidly, a picture daily, sold it on the terrasses of the cafes for a hundred francs, and when he couldn’t get a hundred he would take sixty.  Now one must pay thousands for a canvas.  His most loving critic, Camille Mauclair, who, above any one, has battled valiantly for his art, tells us that Monticelli once took eighteen francs for a small canvas because the purchaser had no more in his pocket!  In this manner he disposed of a gallery.  He smoked happy pipes and sipped his absinthe—­in his case as desperate an enemy as it had proved to De Musset.  He would always doff his hat at the mention of Watteau or Rubens.  They were his gods.

When Monticelli arrived in Marseilles after his tramp down from Paris he was literally in rags.  M. Chave, a good Samaritan, took him to a shop and togged him out in royal raiment.  They left for a promenade, and then the painter begged his friend to let him walk alone so as not to attenuate the effect he was bound to produce on the passersby, such a childish, harmless vanity had he.  His delight was to gather a few chosen ones over a bottle of old vintage, and thus with spasmodic attempts at work his days rolled by.  He was feeble, semi-paralysed.  With the advent of bad health vanished the cunning of his hand.  His paint coarsened, his colours became crazier.  His pictures at this period were caricatures of his former art.  Many of the early ones were sold as the productions of Diaz, just as to-day some Diazs are palmed off as Monticellis.  After four years of decadence he died, repeating for months before his taking off:  “Je viens de la lune.”  He was one whose brain a lunar ray had penetrated; but this ray was transposed to a spectrum of gorgeous hues.  Capable of depicting the rainbow, he died of the opalescence that clouded his glass of absinthe. Pauvre Fada!

II

It is only a coincidence, yet a curious one, that two such dissimilar spirits as Stendhal and Monticelli should have predicted their future popularity.  Stendhal said:  “About 1880 I shall be understood.”  Monticelli said in 1870:  “I paint for thirty years hence.”  Both prophecies have been realised.  After the exhibition at Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1890 Monticelli was placed by a few discerning critics above Diaz in quality of paint.  In 1892 Mr. Brownell said of Monticelli in his French Art—­a book that every student and amateur of painting should possess—­that the touch of Diaz, patrician as it was, lacked the exquisiteness of Monticelli’s; though he admits the “exaggeration of the decorative impulse” in that master.  For Henley Monticelli’s art was purely sensuous; “his fairy meadows and enchanted gardens are that sweet word ‘Mesopotamia’ in two dimensions.”  Henley speaks of his