Paris, which for a hundred years had given the signal for all novel tactics in European art, still remained at the head of the movement; the artistic temperament of the French people themselves, and the superlatively excellent training which the painter enjoys in Paris, enable him at once to follow every change of taste with confidence and ease. In 1883 Manet died, on the varnishing day of the Salon, and in the preface which Zola wrote to the catalogue of the exhibition held after the death of the master he was well able to say: "His influence is an accomplished fact, undeniable, and making itself more deeply felt with every fresh Salon. Look back for twenty years, recall those black Salons, in which even studies from the nude seemed as dark as if they had been covered with mouldering dust. In huge frames history and mythology were smothered in layers of bitumen; never was there an excursion into the province of the real world, into life and into perfect light; scarcely here or there a tiny landscape, where a patch of blue sky ventured bashfully to shine down. But little by little the Salons were seen to brighten, and the Romans and Greeks of mahogany to vanish in company with the nymphs of porcelain, whilst the stream of modern representations taken from ordinary life increased year by year, and flooded the walls, bathing them with vivid tones in the fullest sunlight. It was not merely a new period; it was a new painting bent upon reaching the perfect light, respecting the law of colour values, setting every figure in full light and in its proper place, instead of adapting it in an ideal fashion according to established tradition."