riders, instead of completing the composition, he left it fragmentary, to create an impression of the wild gallop. [Illustration: C. PISSARRO. SITTING UP. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: C. PISSARRO. ROUEN. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] A special group amongst the artist's ballet pictures is that in which he represents the training of novices, the severe course through which the grub must pass before taking wing as a butterfly. Here is displayed a strange fantastic anatomy, only comparable to the acrobatic distortions to which the Japanese are so much addicted in their art. But it is precisely these pictures which were of determining importance for the development of Degas. In the quest of unstable lines and expressions, instead of feeling reality in all its charming grace, he came to behold it only in its degeneration. He was impelled to render the large outline of the modern woman--the female figure which has grown to be a product of art beneath the array of toilette--even in the most ungraceful moments. He painted the woman who does not suspect that she is being observed; he painted her seen, as it were, through the key-hole or the slit of a curtain, and making, to some extent, the most atrociously ugly movements. He was the merciless observer of creatures whom society turns into machines for its pleasure--dancing, racing, and erotic machines. He has depicted cruelly the sort of woman Zola has drawn in Nana--the woman who has no expression, no play in her eyes, the woman who is merely animal, motionless as a Hindu idol. His pictures of this class are a natural history of prostitution of terrible veracity, a great poem on the flesh, like the works of Titian and Rubens, except that in the latter blooming beauty is the substance of the brilliant strophes, while in Degas it is wrinkled skin, decaying youth, and the artificial brightness of enamelled faces. "_A vous autres il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice._" [Illustration: _L'Art française._ C. PISSARRO. SYDENHAM CHURCH.]