een Degas do this before--it is a welcome
repetition of a familiar note, but it is not until we turn to the set of
nude figures that we find the great artist revealing any new phase of his
talent. The first, in an attitude which suggests the kneeling Venus, washes
her thighs in a tin bath. The second, a back view, full of the
malformations of forty years, of children, of hard work, stands gripping
her flanks with both hands. The naked woman has become impossible in modern
art; it required Degas' genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme.
Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with
cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What
Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difficult to guess.
Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten them more than
the sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this
as it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in
her humble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her lumpy shoulders,
is a triumph of art. Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible;
Velasquez knew this when he painted his dwarfs.

Pissarro exhibited a group of girls gathering apples in a garden--sad greys
and violets beautifully harmonised. The figures seem to move as in a dream:
we are on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour and happy
aspiration. Those apples will never fall from the branches, those baskets
that the stooping girls are filling will never be filled: that garden is
the garden of the peace that life has not for giving, but which the painter
has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey.

Madame Morizot exhibited a series of delicate fancies. Here are two young
girls; the sweet atmosphere folds them as with a veil; they are all summer;
their dreams are limitless, their days are fading, and their ideas follow
the flight of the white butterflies through the standard roses. Take note,
too, of the stand of fans; what delicious fancies are there--willows,
balconies, gardens, and terraces.

Then, contrasting with these distant tendernesses, there was the vigorous
painting of Guillaumin. There life is rendered in violent and colourful
brutality. The ladies fishing in the park, with the violet of the skies and
the green of the trees descending upon them, is a _chef d'oeuvre_.
Nature seems to be closing about them like a tomb; and that
hillside,--sunset flooding