Admiring Manet, Morisot, and especially Degas, Lautrec produced handsome compositions similar to theirs. Again, under the influence of Japanese prints, light and shadow have disappeared, replaced by bold color patterns and strong lines. But Lautrec was far more concerned with characterization than were the other painters of his time and, like Daumier in an earlier generation, he gives a wonderfully vivid picture of his age. [Illustration: Gouache on cardboard. 31½ × 23¾ inches Painted 1892] Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) _La Mousmé_ _Chester Dale Collection_ Loving the delicacy of Japanese art and having read about Japan, van Gogh named this young girl a “mousmé.” The word was taken from a romantic novel by Pierre Loti, who used it in describing the charm of the young Japanese tea-house attendants. Actually this subject was a peasant of Provence, in southern France. Van Gogh went there in 1888 hoping to capture in its bright sunshine some of the beauty he imagined in Japan. With a very personal interpretation of Japanese style, he has shown this figure in a bold pattern of startling, bright colors. Earlier in Paris he had learned the color theories which Neo-Impressionists were applying to painting, and here his green, orange red, and intense blue are used with the purity that characterizes them in the spectrum. The Neo-Impressionists juxtaposed very small touches of such pure colors in order to suggest light even brighter than the Impressionists had achieved. But van Gogh was disinterested in effects of natural lighting. In this picture the girl is like a figure in an icon. Set against the plain, intense green background, she seems to be isolated from commonplace experience, and we are reminded of van Gogh’s stated aim, “I wish to paint men and women with that quality of the eternal which used to be suggested by the halo and which we attempt to give by the pure radiance and vibration of the colors.” [Illustration: Canvas. 28⅞ × 23¾ inches Painted 1888] Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) _Fatata te Miti_ _Chester Dale Collection_ _Fatata te Miti_ means simply “by the sea,” but what a curious vision Gauguin’s imagination has created from this scene of two Tahitian girls on the beach! The artist has found himself in a disquieting, primeval world where rich tropical colors and exotic forms of life, both human and vegetable, engender a haunting air of mystery. Gauguin painted this in 1892, during his second year in Tahiti. He had fled from Western civilization for he believed its materialistic culture rejected the artist as a useful citizen. He turned to the Pacific islands because he felt the need to become a primitive in both life and art. Only by returning to the primitive’s simple standards might man rediscover significant meaning in his life and work.