that the journals of culture are pleased to term an artistic education. And
then the boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as much
pain as possible.

The history of Impressionist art is simple. In the beginning of this
century the tradition of French art--the tradition of Boucher, Fragonard,
and Watteau--had been completely lost; having produced genius, their art
died. Ingres is the sublime flower of the classic art which succeeded the
art of the palace and the boudoir: further than Ingres it was impossible to
go, and his art died. Then the Turners and Constables came to France, and
they begot Troyon, and Troyon begot Millet, Courbet, Corot, and Rousseau,
and these in turn begot Degas, Pissarro, Madame Morizot, and Guillaumin.
Degas is a pupil of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acuteness of
drawing he learned from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of
modern life. Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character;--his
subjects are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the qualities
that endow them with immortality are precisely those which eternalise the
virgins and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the
fat, vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the
pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and
rendered that you can tell exactly what her position in life is; you know
what the furniture of her rooms is like; you know what she would say to you
if she were to speak. She is as typical of the nineteenth century as
Fragonard's ladies are of the Court of Louis XV. To the right you see a
picture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands. So accurately are
the habitual movements of the heads and the hands observed that you at once
realise the years of bonnet-showing and servile words that these women have
lived through. We have seen Degas do this before--it is a welcome
repetition of a familiar note, but it is not until we turn to the set of
nude figures that we find the great artist revealing any new phase of his