rival portrait to Besnard’s faun-like Rejane—­and a lot of Renoir’s later experimentings, as fugitive as music; exploding bouquets of iridescence; swirling panels, depicting scenes from Tannhaeuser; a flower garden composed of buds and blossoms in colour scales that begin at a bass-emerald and ascend to an altitudinous green where green is no longer green but an opaline reverberation.  We know how exquisitely Renoir moulds his female heads, building up, cell by cell, the entire mask.  The simple gestures of daily life have been recorded by Renoir for the past forty years with a fidelity and a vitality that shames the anaemic imaginings and puling pessimisms of his younger contemporaries.  What versatility, what undaunted desire to conquer new problems!  He has in turn painted landscapes as full of distinction as Monet’s.  The nervous vivacity of his brush, his love of rendered surfaces, of melting Boucher-like heads, and of a dazzling Watteau colour synthesis have endeared him to the discriminating.”  He may be deficient in spiritual elevation—­as were Manet, Monet, and the other Impressionists; but as they were primarily interested in problems of lighting, in painting the sun and driving the old mud gods of academic art from their thrones, it is not strange that the new men became so enamoured of the coloured appearances of life that they left out the ghosts of the ideal (that dusty, battered phrase) and proclaimed themselves rank sun-worshippers.  The generation that succeeded them is endeavouring to restore the balance between unblushing pantheism and the earlier mysticism.  But wherever a Renoir hangs there will be eyes to feast upon his opulent and sonorous colour music.

III — MANET

In the autumn of 1865 Theodore Duret, the Parisian critic, found himself in the city of Madrid after a tour of Portugal on horseback.  A new hotel on the Puerta del Sol was, he wrote in his life of Manet, a veritable haven after roughing it in the adjacent kingdom.  At the mid-day breakfast he ate as if he had never encountered good cooking in his life.  Presently his attention was attracted by the behaviour of a stranger who sat next to him.  The unknown was a Frenchman who abused the food, the service, and the country.  He was so irritable when he noticed Duret enjoying the very plats he had passed that he turned on him and demanded if insult was meant.  The horrible cuisine, he explained, made him sick, and he could not understand the appetite of Duret.  Good-naturedly Duret explained he had just arrived from Portugal and that the breakfast was a veritable feast.  “And I have just arrived from Paris,” he answered, and gave his name, Edouard Manet.  He added that he had been so persecuted that he suspected his neighbour of some evil pleasantry.  The pair became friends, and went to look at the pictures of Velasquez at the Prado.  Fresh from Paris, Manet was still smarting from the attacks made on him after the hanging of his Olympia in the Salon of 1865.  Little wonder his nerves were on edge.  A dozen days later, after he had studied Velasquez, Goya, and El Greco, Manet, in company with Duret, returned to Paris.  It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.