Impressionism, and also the revelation of the Japanese colour prints, gave an incredible vigour to these intuitive glimpses.  Certain characteristics will date from the days of Impressionism.  It is due to Impressionism that artists have ventured to show in illustration, for instance, figures in the foreground cut through by the margin, rising perspectives, figures in the background that seem to stand on a higher plane than the others, people seen from a second story; in a word, all that life presents to our eyes, without the annoying consideration for “style” and for arrangement, which the academic spirit obstinately insisted to apply to the illustration of modern life.  Degas in particular has given many examples of this novelty in composition.  One of his pastels has remained typical, owing to the scandal caused by it:  he represents a dance-scene at the Opera, seen from the orchestra.  The neck of a double bass rises in the middle of the picture and cuts into it, a large black silhouette, behind which sparkle the gauze-dresses and the lights.  That can be observed any evening, and yet it would be difficult to recapitulate all the railleries and all the anger caused by so natural an audacity.  Modern illustration was to be the pretext of a good many more outbursts!

We must now consider four artists of great importance who are remarkable painters and have greatly raised the art of illustration.  This title illustrator, despised by the official painters, should be given them as the one which has secured them the best claim to fame.  They have restored to this title all its merit and all its brilliancy and have introduced into illustration the most serious qualities of painting.  Of these four men the first in date is M.J.F.  Raffaelli, who introduced himself about 1875 with some remarkable and intensely picturesque illustrations in colours in various magazines.  He gave an admirable series of Parisian Types, in album form, and a series of etchings to accompany the text of M. Huysmans, describing the curious river “la Bievre” which penetrates Paris in a thousand curves, sometimes subterranean, sometimes above ground, and serves the tanners for washing the leather.  This series is a model of modern illustration.  But, apart from the book, the entire pictorial work of M. Raffaelli is a humorous and psychological illustration of the present time.  He has painted with unique truth and spirit the working men’s types and the small bourgeois, the poor, the hospital patients and the roamers of the outskirts of Paris.  He has succeeded in being the poet of the sickly and dirty landscapes by which the capitals are surrounded; he has rendered their anaemic charm, the confused perspectives of houses, fences, walls and little gardens, and their smoke, under the melancholy of rainy skies.  With an irony free from bitterness he has noted the clumsy gestures of the labourer in his Sunday garb and the grotesque silhouettes of the small townsmen, and has