The Department of Fine Arts at first made difficulties; but finally, it resolved to accept the bequest. The Luxembourg Museum was enlarged by an additional building, and a small room in the new wing now accommodates the pictures left by Caillebotte, amongst which he also smuggled in two from his own brush. Thus the Revolutionaries attained the honours of a State museum. This triumph crowns an adventurous campaign which, after apparently fatal defeats at first, led from victory to victory, and from conquest to conquest. For a decade and a half the art of the Manets and Monets has dominated painting. Only in the works of a few obstinate old fogies is their spirit untraceable, at any rate on the Continent; for in England, to be sure, they have not succeeded in gaining the slightest influence on the Præ-Raphaelite movement. On the other hand, in countries without old and uninterrupted art traditions of their own, for which the history of painting begins at the moment in which they themselves first co-operate actively in it, therefore especially in North America and Scandinavia, there is, as a rule, no other art. When the painters in these countries awoke to art, that was the newest thing, _le dernier cri_ of realism, and they took to this latest fashion, just as, in new colonies, negro ladies, who yesterday knew no other aid to their dusky loveliness than an apron of plaited grass and a few glass beads, insist that their toilet, or, at any rate, portions of it, shall be quite up to date. But the victory in lands barbaric so far as art is concerned, and the apotheosis in the Luxembourg Museum, do not spell the end of the battle or the conclusion of peace. Realism had even recently to fight hard battles of persecution. Whilst the crowd pressed into the Caillebotte room, which was opened in 1897, and, it must be admitted, gave expression to very mixed feelings, certain masters of the Art School, the narrow Academician, Gérôme, at their head, sent to the Minister concerned a fiercely angry warning against the desecration of the Museum’s hallowed rooms by the admission of rubbish which they characterised as “scandalous daubs,” the “offspring of utter incompetency or lunacy.”