Page:The illustrators of Montmartre.pdf/83



each a strong piece of work, full of character, and well placed on the page. Another series in colour consists of fancy portraits of potentates; here again Malteste has distinguished himself, as witness the Léopold, Roi des Belges, a harmony in white, yellow, and brown. Malteste shows himself as a tender colourist in the excellent drawing of a milking scene, entitled La Traite des Blanches; another farm scene, Le Fléau, is as excellent an example of black and white work, and only surpassed by the chalk drawing Psychologue, a superb delineation of two ragged, storm-beaten rag pickers toiling homewards with their baskets.

His little studies of queer bits of gnarled humanity are splendid; witness his Femmes Fidèles, La Femme qui prise, his droll lady who declares There is nothing hike good swig, his Woman with a Dog, his Woman with the Cats, or the group called Types of Electors in the Ville Lumière. We recognise all those electors at first sight; there is the heavy, obstinate man, who gets his way by force of sheer dead-weight, there the suave complaisant "good-sort," there the pugnacious, quixotic fellow, who adores a riotous meeting, there the pensive philosopher, and so on. There is no mistaking the true character of any one of them; to a companion page of Femmes Infidèles the same remarks apply.

A noteworthy quality in Malteste's work is the invariably excellent drawing of the hands. To any but the surest draughtsmen hands are