Throughout, the drawing is true, and good, and graceful. The hands of the figures demand especial mention. The hand of one of the women, near the central group, grasped by her lover at the wrist as he kisses her shoulder, is particularly exquisite in form and color; the more remarkable, perhaps, because the position of it is so trying in nature and so difficult to draw.

The type of feature chosen for the women, the dancing girls excepted, is essentially Gallic. As remarked before, the face of the Prodigal, also, is French; but the musicians and the poet have faces of their own which seem to belong to the university of genius. The mere revelers, curiously enough, have a likeness to the figures in some old Italian pictures; one of them looks like a copy of Judas Iscariot, made younger.

A distant city and mountains fill up the background, and, on the extreme right of the near middle distance, flights of marble steps ascend to a grand doorway, where servants are seen loitering within easy call of their masters.

It was by a sublime inspiration that Dubufe painted the accessory panels in monotone. In that on the right, a dismal sky, filled with rolling clouds and sad presaging ravens flying, over-shadows the outcast, seated on a rock in an attitude of listless dejection, with the swine feeding at his feet. In the panel on the left he is seen in the close embrace of his merciful parent. His head is bowed in humility, and, in an agony of remorse and shame, while the old house-dog sniffs at him for an obtrusive mendicant who has no business with such affectionate welcome.

Let us congratulate ourselves that this picture has come to our country, as yet so barren of great works, and pray that the noble school of art of which this is so admirable an exponent, may find favor, not only with our painters, but with those who call themselves connoisseurs, in preference to unmeaning works of microscopic finish, or slick examples of boudoir and millinery painting.

"THE ALDINE PRESS."—JAMES SUTTON & CO., Printers and Publishers, 23 Liberty St., N.Y

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