ROSA BONHEUR'S STUDIO

A visitor describes the studio of this world-renowned artist. At the southern end of a retired street, half made up of extensive gardens, the tops of trees alone visible above the high stone walls, just where it widens into an irregular little square, surrounded by sleepy-looking, old-fashioned houses, and looked down upon by the shining gray roofs and belfry of an ancient Carmelite convent, is a green garden door, surmounted by the number "32." A ring will be answered by the barkings of one or two dogs; and when the door is opened by the serving man, the visitor finds himself in a garden full of embowering trees.

The house, a long, cozy, irregular building, standing at right angles with the street, is covered with vines, honeysuckles, and clematis. A part of the garden is laid out in flower-beds; but the larger portion - fenced off with a green paling, graveled, and containing several sheds — is given up to the animals kept by the artist as her models. There may be seen a horse, a donkey, four or five goats, sheep of different breeds, ducks, cochinchinas, and other denizens of the barnyard, all living together in perfect amity and good will.

On fine days the artist may be found seated on a rustic chair inside the paling, busily sketching one of

these animals, a wide-awake or sunbonnet on her head. If the visitor comes on a Friday afternoon, the time set apart for Rosa's reception, he is ushered through glass doors into a hall, where the walls are covered with paintings, orange trees and oleanders standing in green tubs in the corners, and the floor (since the artist crossed the Channel!) covered with English oilcloth. From this hall a few stairs, covered with thick gray drugget, lead to the atelier, on Fridays turned into the reception room.

The beautiful studio, one of the largest and most finely proportioned in Paris, with its greenish-gray walls, and plain green curtains to lofty windows that never let in daylight the room being lighted entirely from the ceiling - has all its woodwork of dark oak, as are the bookcases, tables, chairs, and other articles of furniture richly carved, but otherwise of severe simplicity distributed about the room. The walls are covered with paintings, sketches, casts, old armor, fishing-nets, rude baskets, and pouches, poles, gnarled and twisted vinebranches, picturesque hats, cloaks, and sandals, collected by the artist in her wanderings among the peasants of various regions; nondescript draperies, bones and skins of animals, antlers and horns.

The fine old bookcase contains as many casts, skeletons, and curiosities as books, and is surrounded with as many busts, groups in plaster, and other

artistic booty, as its top can accommodate; and the great Gothic-looking stove at the upper end of the room is covered in the same way with little casts and bronzes. Paintings of all sizes and in every stage of progress, are seen on easels at the lower end of the room, the artist always working at several at a time.

Stands of portfolios and stacks of canvas line the sides of the studio; birds are chirping in cages, and a magnificent parrot eyes you suspiciously from the top of a lofty perch. Scattered over a floor as bright as waxing can make it are skins of tigers, oxen, leopards, and foxes- the only species of floor covering admitted by the artist into her workroom. "They give me ideas," she says of these favorite appurtenances; "whereas the most costly and luxurious carpet is suggestive of nothing."

But the suggestion of picturesque associations is not the only service rendered by these spoils of the animal kingdom. One sultry Friday afternoon, one of her admirers, going earlier than her usual reception hour, found her lying fast asleep under the long table at the upper end of the studio, on her favorite skin, that of a magnificent ox, with stuffed head and spreading horns; her head resting lovingly on that of the animal. She had come in very tired from her weekly review of the classes at the School of Design, and had thrown herself down on the skin, under the shade of the table,