Sisley sold eleven for 1,387 francs, or $25 each. These prices meant disaster and the painter was in great distress. In 1878 he wrote Theodore Duret a pathetic letter asking if Duret could not find some friend who would have enough confidence in his, Sisley’s, future to pay $100 per month for six months and receive in return thirty pictures. “At the expiration of six months, if he is not disposed to keep the thirty pictures, he can take the chances on a sale of twenty, get back the money he paid me, and have ten pictures left for nothing.” * * * * * During the New York Exhibition the Metropolitan Museum bought a Cézanne for something like $8,000. The price of a more important was $46,000. In the seventies in Paris there was a dealer in artists’ materials called Père Tanguy who had a little shop in rue de Navarin. In 1879 when Cézanne left Paris for the country he left his pictures for Père Tanguy to sell. Duret went there to buy some. He found them stacked against the wall, piled according to their dimensions, the small ones $8 each, the large ones $20. * * * * * This is an old, old story--the story of nearly every great artist of whom we have any knowledge. The world seems to need perspective to appreciate a great man. * * * * * We are prone to think the great men have just passed away; we do not realize that men just as great in one way or another are being born every day. The great man usually differs from the ordinary man only in his _one_ greatness. On many sides he may be a very commonplace man, a petty man, but on his great side he is so far [Illustration: CEZANNE Portrait of Self] [Illustration: CÉZANNE Village Street] out of the ordinary that it is almost impossible to understand him close to. The fact that he is doing things in an _extra_-ordinary way causes us instinctively to distrust and condemn him. * * * * * One of the early buyers of Impressionist pictures was a distinguished Chicago woman, and her collection today contains some of the finest Monets, Renoirs, and Degases in existence. When her friends heard she had bought some forty or fifty Monets they shook their heads in dismay at such folly. This was not many years ago, less than thirty, and now the pictures are in demand the world over and worth ten, fifteen, twenty times what they cost. The same ladies and gentlemen who shook their heads at the Monets in 1890 shook their heads at the Cubists in 1913. If they live another quarter of a century they will once more shake their heads at the new art of that day--for such is life. * * * * *