elegant toilette; but now real human beings are represented, men and women whose carriage, gestures, and countenances tell at once what they are. Even in portrait painting people whom the painter has surprised before they have had time to put themselves in order, at the moment when they are still entirely natural, have taken the place of lay-figures fixed in position. The effort to seize the most unconstrained air and the most natural position, and to arrest the most transitory shade of expression, produces, in this field of art also, a directness and vivacity divided by a great gulf from the pose and the grand airs of the earlier drawing-room picture. [Illustration: RENOIR. A PRIVATE BOX. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] From his very first appearance there gathered round Manet a number of young men who met twice a week at a café in Batignolles, formerly a suburb at the entrance of the Avenue de Clichy. After this trysting-place the society called itself _L'École des Batignolles_. Burty, Antonin Proust, Henner, and Stevens put in an occasional appearance, but Legros, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Duranty, and Zola were constant visitors. Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, Gauguin, and Zandomeneghi were the leading spirits of the impressionistic staff, and, being excluded from the official Salon, they generally set up their tent at Nadar's, Reichshofen's, or some other dealer's. These are the names of the men who, following Manet, were the earliest to make the new problem the object of their studies. _Degas_, the subtle colourist and miraculous draughtsman, who celebrates dancers, gauze skirts, and the _foyers_ of the Opera, is the boldest and the most original of those who banded together from the very outset of the movement--the worst enemy of everything pretty and banal, the greatest dandy of modern France, the man whose works are caviare to the general and so refreshing to the _gourmet_, the painter who can find a joy in the sublime beauty of ugliness. [Illustration: RENOIR. THE TERRACE. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]