[Illustration:  MARY CASSATT

GETTING UP BABY]

[Illustration:  MARY CASSATT

WOMEN AND CHILD]

Gustave Caillebotte was a friend of the Impressionists from the very first hour.  He was rich, fond of art, and himself a painter of great merit who modestly kept hidden behind his comrades.  His picture Les raboteurs de parquets made him formerly the butt of derision.  To-day his work, at the Luxembourg Gallery seems hardly a fit pretext for so much controversy, but at that time much was considered as madness, that to our eyes appears quite natural.  This picture is a study of oblique perspective and its curious ensemble of rising lines sufficed to provoke astonishment.  The work is, moreover, grey and discreet in colour and has some qualities of fine light, but is on the whole not very interesting.  Recently an exhibition of works by Caillebotte has made it apparent that this amateur was a misjudged painter.  The still-life pictures in this exhibition were specially remarkable.  But the name of Caillebotte was destined to reach the public only in connection with controversies and scandal.  When he died, he left to the State a magnificent collection of objets-d’art and of old pictures, and also a collection of Impressionist works, stipulating that these two bequests should be inseparable.  He wished by this means to impose the works of his friends upon the museums, and thus avenge their unjust neglect.  The State accepted the two legacies, since the Louvre absolutely wanted to benefit by the ancient portion, in spite of the efforts of the Academicians who revolted against the acceptance of the modern part.  On this occasion one could see how far the official artists were carried by their hatred of the Impressionists.  A group of Academicians, professors at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, threatened the minister that they would resign en masse.  “We cannot,” they wrote to the papers, “continue to teach an art of which we believe we know the laws, from the moment the State admits into the museums, where our pupils can see them, works which are the very negation of all we teach.”  A heated discussion followed in the press, and the minister boldly declared that Impressionism, good or bad, had attracted the attention of the public, and that it was the duty of the State to receive impartially the work of all the art movements; the public would know how to judge and choose; the Government’s duty was not to influence them by showing them only one style of painting, but to remain in historic neutrality.  Thanks to this clever reply, the Academicians, among whom M. Gerome was the most rabid, resigned themselves to keeping their posts.  A similar incident, less publicly violent, but equally strange, occurred on the occasion of the admission to the Luxembourg Gallery of the portrait of M. Whistler’s mother, a masterpiece of which the gallery is proud to-day, and for which a group of writers and art lovers had succeeded in opening the way.  It is difficult to imagine the degree of irritation and obstruction of the official painters against all the ideas of the new painting, and if it had only depended upon them, there can be no doubt that Manet and his friends would have died in total obscurity, not only banished from the Salons and museums, but also treated as madmen and robbed of the possibility of living by their work.