[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._ DEGAS. THE BALLET SCENE IN ROBERT THE DEVIL.] [Illustration: DEGAS. THE BALLET IN _DON JUAN_. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: DEGAS. A BALLET DANCER. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] Up to this time it was only the landscape painters who had emancipated themselves from imitation of the gallery tone, and what was done by Corot in landscape had, logically enough, to be carried out in figure-painting likewise; for men and women are encompassed by the air as much as trees. After the landscape painters of Barbizon had made evident the vast difference between the light of day and that of a closed room in their pictures painted in the open air, the figure-painters, if they made any claim to truth of effect, could no longer venture to content themselves with the illumination falling upon their models in the studio, when they were painting incidents taking place out of doors. Yet even the boldest of the new artists did not set themselves free from tradition. Even after they had become independent in subject and composition they had remained the slaves of the old masters in their intuition of colour. Some imitated the Spaniards, without reflecting that Ribera painted his pictures in a small, dark studio, and that the cellar-light with which they were illuminated was therefore correct, whereas applied, in the present age, to the bright interiors of the nineteenth century it was utterly false. Others treated open-air scenes as if they were taking place in a ground-floor parlour, and endeavoured by curtains and shutters to create a light similar to that which may be found in old masters and pictures dimmed with age. Or the artist painted according to a general recipe and in complete defiance of what he saw with his eyes. For instance, an exceedingly characteristic episode is told of the student days of Puvis de Chavannes. Upon a grey, misty day the young artist had painted a nude figure. The model appeared enveloped in tender light as by a bright, silvery halo. "That's the way you see your model?" grumbled Couture indignantly when he came to correct the picture. Then he mixed together white, cobalt blue, Naples yellow, and vermilion, and turned Puvis de Chavannes' nude grey figure by a universal recipe into one that was highly coloured and warmly luminous--such a figure as an old master might perhaps have painted under different conditions of light. With his "Fiat Lux" Manet uttered a word of redemption that had hovered upon many lips. The jurisdiction of galleries was broken now also in regard to colour; the last remnant of servile dependence upon the mighty dead was cast aside; the aims attained by the landscape painters thirty years before were reached in figure-painting likewise. [Illustration: DEGAS. HORSES IN A MEADOW. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]