From the first moment, then, realism had the honours of the opposition press and the support of those politicians, the majority of whom, later on, were to play the principal parts in the revolt of the Commune. The artists, to be sure, despised it at first, as long as it gained no _Salon_ distinctions and had no market. For a long time—for some decades—it had none. The public regarded the works of the new movement only as expressions of unconscious or intentional artistic humour. It laughed at them as it did at the saucy caricatures in the comic papers. There was perhaps only one individual who, a generation ago, took the Manets and Monets, the Renoirs and Pissarros seriously, and was prepared to manifest his belief in them by ready money—the only genuine martyrdom in our days—and this seer, prophet, and confessor was Caillebotte. He bought their pictures; not at a big price, it is true, for we must not expect the superhuman from mere mortals, but he bought them; he poured out his red gold for them, and this sacrifice probably preserved the life of realism, or, at any rate, of its teachers. Caillebotte himself painted, but only for himself, and that was praiseworthy; but what was more important, he had acquired a handsome fortune by commerce, and spent the major portion of his fine income on open-air pictures. He did not exhaust his enthusiasm by that. When he died, he bequeathed the most striking pieces—“the pearls,” he called them—of his collection to the French State, on the condition that it left them together and accommodated them with a room in a Paris museum.