The celebrated "Olympia" of 1865, now to be found in the Luxembourg, was painted during this stage in his development: it represents a neurotic, anæmic creature, who stretches out, pale and sickly, her meagre nudity upon white linen, with a purring cat at her feet; whilst a negress in a red dress draws back the curtain, offering her a bouquet. With this picture--no one can tell why--the definite battles over Impressionism began. The critics who talked about obscenity were not consistent, because Titian's pictures of Venus with her female attendant, the little dog, and the youth sitting upon the edge of the bed, are not usually held to be obscene. But it is nevertheless difficult to find in this flatly modelled body, with its hard black outlines, those artistic qualities which Zola discovered in it. The picture has nothing whatever of Titian in it, but it may almost be said to have something of Cranach. "The Picnic" and "Olympia" have both only an historical interest as the first works in which the artist trusted his own eyes, refusing to look through any one's spectacles. Feeling that he would come to nothing if he continued to study nature through the medium of an old master, he had to render some real thing just as it appeared to him when he was not looking into the mirror of old pictures. He tried to forget what he had studied in galleries, the tricks of art which he had learnt with Couture, and the famous pictures he had seen. In his earlier works there had been a far-fetched refinement and a delicacy taken from the old masters, but "The Picnic" and "Olympia" are simpler and more independent. In both he was already an "Impressionist," true to his personal vision, though he could not entirely express the new language that hovered upon his lips. He had tried both to rid himself of Courbet's brown sauce and of the ivory tone of Bouguereau, and to be just to local tones through simple and independent observation; in his "Picnic" he had painted the trees green, the earth yellow, and the sky grey, and in "Olympia" the bed white and the body of the woman flesh-colour. But he was as little successful as the pre-Raphaelites in bringing the local tones into full harmony. This is the step which Manet made in advance of the pre-Raphaelites: after he had emancipated himself from the conventional brown and ivory scheme of tone, and had been for a time, like the pre-Raphaelites, true although hard, he attained that harmony which hitherto had been either not reached by artistic means or not reached at all, by strict observation of the medium by which nature produces her harmonies--light. As the air, the pervasive atmosphere, renders nature everywhere harmonious and refined in colour, so it forthwith became for the artist the means of reaching that great harmony which is the object of all pictorial endeavour, and which had never previously been reached except through some mannerism. [Illustration: _Baschet._ MANET. BOATING.]