heads of hair with the light falling upon them, of laughing faces, of blue waters, of women at the theatre; he is gifted with a sprightly and exquisite grace. Degas is an intense realist, almost a caricaturist, with superb power as a draughtsman; superior above all in the rendering of the modern character. His "danseuses," his women at the bath, are marvels of truth. He comes very near to Ingres in the masterly sureness of his drawing. He gives expression at once to the grace and the defects of modern nudity, to the brilliancy and the absurdity of the scenes of the theatre. He is a pastellist of the first rank, a master in technique and in analytical power, a marvelous delineator of true movements, of emotions, and of attitudes. His color is far from having the brilliancy of that of Renoir and of Monet, the boldness of that of Manet; it is rather subdued and obtained by refined processes. Monet is a poet, Renoir a dreamer, Degas a psychologist. Near these three superior artists must be placed Sisley and Pissarro, who have painted numerous landscapes of a beautiful and original coloring. Berthe Morisot, who was a rare artist and a woman of superior intelligence, Miss Mary Cassatt, the sole pupil of Degas, the author of vigorous and knowing paintings, Lebourg, a landscapist whose work is characterized by subtle harmonies, Fantin-Latour, author of superb portraits and of symbolic scenes in which dwells a dreamy grace, an artist of great elevation of spirit,-finally, Alphonse Legros, a draughtsman and painter of considerable merit, who has established himself in England, and has won there a high position.

This impressionist school was considered as a sacrilege. In reality, it was much more traditional and more French than the academic art. That was the product of degenerate Italianism, introduced into France by the school of Fontainebleau, and reduced to system by Louis XIV., by the creation of the school of Rome, by the propagation of a false ideal, neo-Greek and neoRoman, which is quite opposite to the true direction of the French genius. Realism, as Manet and his friends conceived it, is infinitely more natural to France than is mythologic art. Degas joins on directly to Clouet, to Debucourt, to the "petits-maîtres

of the eighteenth century; Renoir to Watteau, to Boucher, to Lancret, to Fragonard; Monet joins on to Claude Lorrain and to Carle Vernet, while the principal representatives of classicism since 1850, Delaroche, Cabanel, Bouguereau, Robert Fleury, Gérôme, and others like them, join on to nothing but the bad Roman school of Bernini, of Primatice, and their successors. In that school there is no life, no spontaneity, no feeling, but only a cold and often factitious science of correct drawing,-poor color, absence of sensibility, a pursuit of the beautiful in a proportion modeled on the Greeks, as if the Greeks themselves had not been first of all realists in truth of movement. In this school but few men of genuine talent may be counted, like Henner and Hébert, like Jean-Paul Laurens, the only original and remarkable historical painter who has come out of the official instruction. The French academics have neither the qualities of color and of drawing of men like Manet, Degas, Monet, or Renoir, nor the qualities of style and of ideality of men like Burne-Jones, Watts, Rossetti, or Böcklin. They are mediocre artists, and their enmity is as much towards painters like Gustave Moreau, Millet, Corot, or Puvis de Chavannes as against the impressionists, because these masters have given proof of an independent originality. Corot was a harmonist who took pleasure in two or three color

Puvis de Chavannes, likewise, reduced his fresco decorations to a few color-combinations, but he was a very near neighbor to the impressionists, whom he admired, as shown in his care for transparent shadows and simplifications of design. In certain canvases of Millet (the "Rainbow" at the Louvre) are found anticipations of Claude Monet, and even in Gustave Moreau there are frequent traces of an analytical decomposition of color-tones.

Impressionism, then, may be considered, on account of the high merit of certain of its adepts, and on account of the originality of its technique, as well as its conception of the modern spirit, as the last great movement of the French school in the nineteenth century, and as a return to the tradition of the eighteenth and of the sixteenth centuries, in opposition to the degenerate Italian spirit, which was the product of the seventeenth century and the first

Empire, consular and Roman. Manet is dead; Monet, Degas, and Renoir have shown the full measure of their powers. From this time forward one may study the influence of this school.

It is very considerable in France and in Europe. First of all a revolution in technique, impressionism has succeeded in stamping its principles deeply upon the whole contemporary French school. After the first impressionists came men who thought of applying its theories, while freeing themselves from the realism which had been coupled with it by circumstances; and there resulted from this some beautiful works. The most significant of these men, certainly, is Albert Besnard, the greatest living French painter, if one thinks of him as the junior of Renoir, of Monet, and of Degas. Besnard began as a realistimpressionist, gifted with an exceptional virtuosity. He pushed to its furthest limits the study of reflections upon the human physiognomy. He is fond of conflicting lights, painting objects illuminated by the moon and by a lamp, or by two opposing lights, and in this direction he has accomplished wonders. He is a painter in love with color, he revels in it with incredible audacity. But he is also an astonishing draughtsman, nervous and thoughtful. Little by little he has expressed his soul and his dreams, and has now attained to the creation of easel pictures in which lives simply his love of light, and at the same time of decorative works, wherein very lofty thoughts find expression without impairing his qualities as a painter. Aquarellist and pastellist of the first order, unrivalled painter of horses, orientalist, marine painter, portraitist, Besnard has given evidence, in his immense production, of a genius as versatile as it is attractive. He is a poet whose visions are luminous and impassioned. Paris possesses several of his decorative pieces of a style absolutely modern, at the Ecole de Pharmacie, at the Sorbonne, at the Hôtel de Ville; and recently he has decorated the chapel of the village of Berck with a series of evangelical scenes in which the Christ appears modernized with singular power. Besnard marks

plainly the transition from realism to subjective art. He has all the accomplishments of the impressionists, but he bestows them upon works of lofty thought. He was able to understand the precious discoveries in technique, while completely freeing his imagination and soul from the narrow bounds of realism. This assemblage of qualities has made him the complete painter, the most respected master of the new generation. In the Salons he along with Mr. Whistler is the most copied. It is extremely striking to note the revolution which impressionism has made in the Salons. Monet, Renoir, Degas, have never exhibited there, in spite of the conviction of Manet, who desired that impressionism should appear as a legitimate experiment in art, entitled to the same distinctions as others. They have always exhibited by themselves. Although celebrated, they have never received honors, and the official painters pretend to ignore them. But though they are absent from the Salons, they are still present there in the crowd of canvases in which one recognizes their technique; and it must surely end in their being admitted. One sees there only landscapes in blue and orange, silhouettes caught from the life, bright color harmonies, portraits boldly composed. Sombre paintings are in the minority. It may be surmised that all of the younger generation are partial to these excommunicated artists. Mythology is of the past, models are no longer seen, because the painters have taken to making the peasants, the workmen, pose out of doors and in their ordinary clothes. Claude Monet has a legion of copyists, and Degas also and Besnard, so that the school is humiliated in its own sanctuary. Maurice Eliot, Gaston La Touche, Henri Le Sidaner, Henri Martin, may be considered as strict impressionists. Quite recently, a group of artists, the most important of whom are René Ménard, Lucien Simon, Charles Cottet, Edmond AmanJean, Lévy-Dhurmer, have exhibited some beautiful works, wherein the feeling for the inward life, for the soul, is quite opposed to realism. But from the point of view of technique, impressionism has influenced them profoundly. "It has cleaned up the palette," said Puvis de Chavannes. And, indeed, it has

given all the young people a horror of the formulas of the studio, love of the open air, love of truth and of beauty freed from conventionalities, and from this point of view its services have been immense. Its applications are very considerable. The most

curious of them was made to the poster by Jules Chéret, who was a printer by trade, lived a long time in London, at the period when the poster was made in black and white, invented a way of adding red to it, then the other colors successively, made himself a painter, and became one of the first pastellists and decorators of his time. Chéret seems to have been influenced by Fragonard; he is a ravishing colorist. He has created a type of the Parisienne, the daring grace of which is inimitable, and has made a series of red chalk drawings which recall the finest work of the eighteenth century. But the poster will remain his title to renown. This "moving decoration of the street" has been for twenty years a feast for the eyes: it has been universally admired and copied. Chéret is a pure impressionist, in his juxtaposition of bright colors, and in his constant application of the principle of complementary combinations. But all modern illustration likewise bears the stamp of these principles; the sketches in the journals of Steinlen, of Forain, of Toulouse-Lautrec, proceed from them, not only in the modernized and caricaturist way of looking at things, but still more in the manner of disposing the personages and of coloring the prints.

Lastly, a group of artists has taken up the theories of Manet from a point of view purely scientific, and has given curious examples of the effects of the juxtaposition of color-tones. They have tried painting by the massing together of minute round touches, which has brought them the name "les pointillistes." They have gone to excess in their principle by giving it a vexatious scientific character which does not at all accord with the spontaneity of art, but certain of them are interesting, notably the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe, who has a good deal of talent. Impressionism has also contributed enormously to the development of printing in colors and of lithography. Finally, it may be said that if realism is a theory insufficient to create a style, precisely