So long as the acquisition of sunlight was the point in question, representations from the life of artisans in town and country stood at the centre itself of artistic efforts, because the conception and technical methods of the new art could be tested upon them with peculiar success. And through these pictures painting came into closer sympathy with the heart-beat of the age. At an epoch when the labouring man as such, and the political and social movement in civilisation, had become matters of absorbing interest, the picture of artisans necessarily claimed an important place in art; and one of the best sides of the moral value of modern painting lies in its no longer holding itself in indifference aloof from these themes. When the century began, Hector and Agamemnon alone were qualified for artistic treatment, but in the natural course of development the disinherited, the weary and heavy-laden likewise acquired rights of citizenship. In the passage where Vasari speaks of the Madonnas of Cimabue, comparing them with the older Byzantine Virgins, he says finely that the Florentine master brought more "goodness of heart" into painting. And perhaps the historians of the future will say the same about the art of the present. The predilection for the disinherited was in the beginning to such an extent identified with the plain, straightforward painting of the proletariat that Naturalism could not be conceived at all except in so far as it dealt with poverty: in making its first great successes it had sought after the miserable and the outcast, and serious critics recognised its chief importance in the discovery of the fourth estate. Of course, the painting of paupers, as a sole field of activity for the new art, would have been an exceedingly one-sided acquisition. It is not merely the working-man who should be painted, because the age must strive to compass in a large and full spirit the purport of its own complicated conditions of life. So there began, in general, the representation, so long needed, of the man of to-day and of society agitated, as it is, by the stream of existence. As Zola wrote in the very beginning of the movement: "Naturalism does not depend upon the choice of subject. The whole of society is its domain, from the drawing-room to the drinking-booth. It is only idiots who would make Naturalism the rhetoric of the gutter. We claim for ourselves the whole world." Everything is to be painted,--forges, railway-stations, machine-rooms, the workrooms of manual labourers, the glowing ovens of smelting-works, official fêtes, drawing-rooms, scenes of domestic life, _cafés_, storehouses and markets, the races and the Exchange, the clubs and the watering-places, the expensive restaurants and the dismal eating-houses for the people, the _cabinets particuliers_ and _chic des premières_, the return from the Bois and the promenades on the seashore, the banks and the gambling-halls, casinos, boudoirs, studios, and