Degas is not a countryman, and cannot be classed amongst sportsmen, or lovers of horseflesh. His jockeys and racehorses are highly extolled, but with animals he has not always succeeded. It is not sufficient to be a great artist in order to convey convincing impressions of sporting scenes. An artist must have the whole spirit of sport thoroughly engrained in his nature before he can properly represent it. Apart from the city, Degas is out of his element, and this is very apparent in the landscapes he has painted during the last eight years. The glamour of the fields and hedges does not touch his soul. Rural life he finds dull, and naturally his essays in landscape painting are somewhat painful. He has not the temperament which can faithfully interpret the poetry of the countryside, and is more at home in the purlieus of the opera or upon the asphalte of the boulevards. Degas is a realist, and his subjects are for the most part exceedingly trivial in selection. After racehorses and ballet-dancers, he loves to depict buxom ladies of the lower classes engaged in personal ablution. It is extraordinary that the pupil of Ingres, the painter of _La source_, should create such appalling creatures. The most plausible apology comes from Mr. George Moore. The nude, he writes, has become well-nigh incapable of artistic treatment. Even the more naïve are beginning to see that the well-known nymph exhibiting her beauty by the borders of a stream can be endured no longer. Let the artist strive as he will, he will not escape the conventional; he is running an impossible race. Broad harmonies of colour are hardly to be thought of; the gracious mystery of human emotion is out of all question—he must rely on whatever measure of elegant drawing he can include in his delineation of arms, neck, and thigh; and who in sheer beauty has a new word to say? Since Gainsborough and Ingres, all have failed to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. But cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the Middle Ages; and with cynicism Degas has again rendered the nude an artistic possibility. The critic then describes these works in most sympathetic phrases. Three coarse women, middle-aged and deformed by toil, are perhaps the most wonderful. One sponges herself in a tin bath; another passes a rough nightdress over her lumpy shoulders, and the touching ugliness of this poor human creature goes straight to the heart. Then follows a long series conceived in the same spirit. “Hitherto,” says Degas, “the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition.” In another phrase he gives you his point of view, “it is as if you looked through a keyhole.”