speak.  She is as typical of the nineteenth century as Fragonard’s ladies are of the Court of Louis XV.  To the right you see a picture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands.  So accurately are the habitual movements of the heads and the hands observed that you at once realise the years of bonnet-showing and servile words that these women have lived through.  We have seen 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 the skies with yellow and the earth with blue shadow,—­is another piece of painting that will one day find a place in one of the public galleries; and the same can be said of the portrait of the woman on a background of chintz flowers.