This sense of having lived too much expressed itself also in the haughty contempt with which he withdrew himself from exhibitions, the public, and criticism. Any one who is not a constant visitor at Durand-Ruel’s has little opportunity of seeing the pictures of Degas. The conception of fame is something which he does not seem to possess. Being a man of cool self-reliance, he paints to please himself, without caring how his pictures may suit the notions of the world or the usages of the schools. For years he has kept aloof from the Salon, and some people say that he has never exhibited at all. And he keeps at as great a distance from Parisian society. In earlier days, when Manet, Pissarro, and Duranty met at the Café Nouvelle Athènes, he sometimes appeared after ten o’clock—a little man with round shoulders and a shuffling walk, who only took part in the conversation by now and then breaking in with brief, sarcastic observations. After Manet’s death he made the Café de la Rochefoucauld his place of resort. And young painters went on his account also to the Café de la Rochefoucauld and pointed him out to each other, saying, “That is Degas.” When artists assemble together the conversation usually turns upon him, and he is accorded the highest honours by the younger generation. He is revered as the haughty Independant who stands unapproachably above the profanum vulgus, the great unknown who never passed through the ordeal of a hanging committee, but whose spirit hovers invisibly over every exhibition.

SISLEY.OUTSKIRTS OF A WOOD.

A refined charmeur, Auguste Renoir, has made important discoveries, in portrait painting especially. He is peculiarly the painter of women, whose elegance, delicate skin, and velvet flesh he interprets with extraordinary deftness. Léon Bonnat’s portraits were great pieces of still-life. The persons sit as if they were nailed to their seats. Their flesh looks like zinc and their clothes like steel. In Carolus Duran’s hands portrait painting degenerated into a painting of draperies. Most of his portraits merely betray the amount which the toilettes have cost; they are inspired by their rich array of silk and heavy curtains; often they are crude symphonies in velvet and satin. The rustle of robes, the dazzling—or loud—fulness of colour in glistening materials, gave him greater pleasure than the lustre of flesh-tints and any glance of inquiry into the moral temperament of his models. Renoir endeavours to arrest the scarcely perceptible and transitory movements of the features and the figure. Placing his persons boldly in the real light of day which streams around, he paints atmospheric influences in all their results, like a landscapist. Light is the sole and absolute thing. The fallen trunk of a tree upon which the broken sunlight plays in yellow and light green reflections, and the body or head of a girl, are subject to the same laws. Stippled with yellowish-green spots of light, the latter loses its contours and becomes a part of nature. With this study of the effects of light and reflection there is united an astonishing sureness in the analysis of sudden phases of expression. The way in which laughter begins and ends, the moment between laughter and weeping, the passing flash of an eye, a fleeting motion of the lips, all that comes like lightning and vanishes as swiftly, shades of expression which had hitherto seemed indefinable, are seized by Renoir in all their suddenness. In the portraits of Bonnat and Duran there are people who have “sat,” but here are people from whom the painter has had the power of stealing and holding fast the secret of their being at a moment when they were not “sitting.” Here are dreamy blond girls gazing out of their great blue eyes, ethereal fragrant flowers, like lilies leaning against a rose-bush through which the rays of the setting sun are shining. Here are coquettish young girls, now laughing, now pouting, now blithe and gay, now angry once more, and now betwixt both moods in a charming passion. And there are women of the world of consummate elegance, slender and slight-built figures, with small hands and feet, an even pallor, almond-shaped eyes catching every light, moist shining lips of a tender grace, bearing witness to a love of pleasure refined by artifice. And children especially there are, children of the sensitive and flexuous type: some as yet unconscious, dreamy, and free from thought; others already animated, correct in pose, graceful, and wise. The three girls, in his “Portrait of Mesdemoiselles M——,” grouped around the piano, the eldest playing, the second accompanying upon the violin, and the youngest quietly attentive, with both hands resting upon the piano, are exquisite, painted with an entirely naïve and novel truth. All the poses are natural, all the colours bright and subtle—the furniture, the yellow bunches of flowers, the fresh spring dresses, the silk stockings. But such tender poems of childhood and blossoming girlhood form merely a part of Renoir’s work. In his “Dinner at Chaton” a company of ladies and gentlemen are seated at table, laughing, talking, and listening; the champagne sparkles in the glasses, and the cheerful, easy mood which comes with dessert is in the ascendant. In his “Moulin de la Galette” he painted the excitement of the dance—whirling pairs, animated faces, languid poses, and everything enveloped in sunlight and dust. Renoir’s peculiar field is the study of the various delicate emotions which colour the human countenance.

MONET.A STUDY.
By permission of M. Durand-Ruel.

CLAUDE MONET.   The Century.

The merit of Camille Pissarro is to have once more set the painting of peasants, weakened by Breton, upon the virile lines of Millet, and to have supplemented them in those places where Millet was technically inadequate. When the Impressionist movement began Camille Pissarro had already a past: he was the recognised landscape painter of the Norman plains; the straightforward observer of peasants, the plain and simple painter of the vegetable gardens stretching round peasant dwellings. Since Millet, no artist had placed himself in closer relationship to the life of the earth and of cultivated nature. Though a delicate analyst, Pissarro had not the epic feeling nor the religious mysticism of Millet; but like Millet he was a rustic in spirit, like him a Norman, from the land of vineyards, of large farmyards, green meadows, soft avenues of poplars, and wide horizons reddened by the sun. He was healthy, tender, and intimate in feeling, rejoiced in the richness of the land and the voluptuous undulation of fields, and he could give a striking impression of a region in its work-a-day character. Celebrated in the press as the legitimate descendant of Millet, he might have contented himself with his regular successes. He had, indeed, arrived at an age when men usually leave off making experiments, and reap what they have sown in their youth, at an age when many conquerors occupy themselves with the mechanical reproduction of their own works. Nevertheless the Impressionistic movement became for Pissarro the starting-point of a new way.

He aimed at fresher, intenser, and more transparent light, at a more cogent observation of phenomena, at a more exact analysis of the encompassing atmosphere. He celebrated the eternal, immutable light in which the world is bathed. He loved it specially during clear afternoons, when it plays over bright green meadows fringed by soft trees, or at the foot of low hills. He has sought it on the slopes across which it ripples deliciously, on the plains from which it rises like a light veil of gauze. He studied the play of light upon the bronzed skin of labourers, on the coats of animals, on the foliage and fruit of trees. He characterised the seasons, the hour of day, the moment, with the conscientiousness of a peasant intent upon noting the direction of the wind and the position of the sun. The cold, chilly humour of autumn afternoons, the vivid clarity of sparkling wintry skies, the bloom and lightness of spring mornings, the oppressive brooding of summer, the luxuriance or the aridity of the earth, the young vigour of foliage or the fading of nature robbed of her adornment,—all these Pissarro has painted with largeness, plainness, and simplicity. He strays over the fields, watching the shepherd driving out his flock, the wains rumbling along the uneven roads, the quiet, rhythmical movement of the gleaners, the graceful gait of the women who have been reaping and now return home in the evening with a rake across their shoulders; he stations himself at the entrance of villages where the apple-pickers are at work, and the women minding geese stand by their drove; he notes the whole life of peasants, and gives truer and more direct intelligence of it than Millet did in his broad, synthetic manner. Where there is a classic quietude and an oily heaviness in Millet, there is in Pissarro palpitating life, transparence, and freshness. He sees the country in bright, laughing tones; and the pure white of the kerchiefs, the pale rose-colour or tender blue bodices of his peasant women, lend his pictures a blithe delicacy of colour. His girls are like fresh flowers of the field which the sun of June brings forth upon the meadows. There is something intense and yet soft, strong and delicate, true and rhythmical in Pissarro’s tender poems of country life.