The real originator of the new tendency was Eduard Manet. Of his three pictures in the Caillebotte room, one, the “Olympia,” is a masterpiece. It had already long been the property of the Luxembourg collection, and amongst the academic works of that Museum it seemed so strange that it forced expressions of repugnance from most visitors. After this comes an insipid brown lady in a mantilla, and the important “Balcony.” “Olympia” is a faded, decayed lady of the class which people in Paris are accustomed to describe as “the old guard.” The person, whose hair is dressed for a _soirée_, but who is entirely without clothing, lies outstretched on a bed, displaying her charms, which might convert Don Juan himself to the monastic rule of chastity. By the couch stands a pretty negress, busied with her mistress. The “Balcony” shows two ladies with a gentleman friend, and a man-servant in the background. The two pictures display Manet’s purpose and method. There is nothing of impressionism and open air to be remarked in the “Olympia.” The scene is a closed room filled with diffused rays of chamber-light. The figures of the two women are accurately painted, indeed in a painfully and curiously dry style. In vain would one look for the smartness and bold dashing on of colour that are now held to be the characteristics of impressionism. It is all painfully and laboriously measured, without swing or freedom, without mastery over the model or the tone. The picture is revolutionary only in its straightforwardness. When it appeared, the academic masters painted prettily. When they had to represent nudity, they painted a sort of conventional rose-coloured jelly, without bones or physiognomy, smooth, ordinary, and superficially pleasing as a china doll, inartistic, and unspeakably tedious. In his “Olympia,” Manet rebelled against this prettiness in painting that so falsifies nature. He chose the most repulsive model he could find, and reproduced it with literal exactness in all its repulsive truth. He showed that there is female flesh not altogether too old that is not composed of snow and rose leaves. He taught his truth brutally and unwisely, with churlish violation of good taste and gallantry, but with ardour and conviction. The “Balcony” already announces the joyous tidings of open air. The two women are bathed in full daylight, which cruelly misuses their faces. Here, too, Manet wears the blinkers that narrow his artistic horizon. He wishes to oppose sunny brightness to the brown broth which was given out in the masters’ studios as the only colour whereby one could find salvation. He therefore lavishes his light, which overcomes and disperses the darkness; but he forgets that sunshine influences local colours; that it gives them various effects, according to their illuminative power; that it envelops and blends them, however opposite they may be, in one single underlying harmony of silver or gold tone, and with no more