Gueuneutte’s “Morning Porridge” draws its inspiration from Raffaelli, Degas’s “Dancers and their Mothers” from Manet. I put Degas, however, above Manet, for he draws more lightly and smoothly than the latter, and when he has to depose to ugly reality under the witness’s oath of his naturalistic conscience, he does it, not in an angry and provoking way like Manet, but with the divine gift of humour. Monet’s joy in light becomes with P. M. Renoir an affectation. He has not the simple love of truth of his comrade. He falls into exaggeration which betrays conscious purpose and straining after originality. His two “Young Girls” at a piano of the colour of cranberry syrup; his nude figure of a woman, on whose skin lights and shadows play so unfortunately that she looks as if beaten black and blue, in places even as if studded with the corpse-stains of putrescence in the second degree; the “Girl in the Swing,” and particularly the “Ball at the Moulin de la Galette,” seek rather to disconcert than to convince us by their unwonted tones. These pictures have historical importance as ancestors. From their jests of colour are descended the jokes of Besnard, from their rain of sunlight through shadowing foliage comes the piebaldness of a Zorn and particularly of a Max Lieberman, who make an eruption of yellow and reddish spots fall on their bodies. Renoir’s “Girl Reading” finally is a simple aberration. He who tolerates such stumps of hands in a picture that is not meant for a mere sketch is either without capacity or without conscience—the one as bad as the other. Pissarro is the triumph of seeing without thought. He seizes all the marvels of transformation which the light of various periods of the year and hours of the day accomplishes on objects over which it skims, with the same certainty as Monet, but he imagines even less over it than does the latter. With him the impressions which he feels from the outer world do not generally pierce beyond the back of his eyes. He is a remarkable instance of the sharpest sight with the retina in conjunction with absolute soul-blindness. The panegyrists of impressionism assert that it was not well represented in the Caillebotte collection. That is a pretext of perplexed swaggerers who can now be nailed fast, and who should in shame and confusion crowd here, where it is easy to test their wild exaggerations. Impressionism has never produced confessed more characteristic works than those gathered in the Caillebotte room. It has never been more straightforward than in Manet’s “Olympia” and Degas’s “Theatre Mothers,” never more bright than in Monet’s “Breakfast in the Open Air” and Pissarro’s landscape, never was it in a higher degree lightening-sight and instantaneous painting than in Monet’s “Railway Station.” Every verdict on impressionism based on this room is an adequately grounded verdict, against which the attempted higher appeal to I know not what unknown works must be rejected.