Then, contrasting with these distant tendernesses, there was the vigorous
painting of Guillaumin. There life is rendered in violent and colourful
brutality. The ladies fishing in the park, with the violet of the skies and
the green of the trees descending upon them, is a _chef d'oeuvre_.
Nature seems to be closing about them like a tomb; and that
hillside,--sunset flooding the skies with yellow and the earth with blue
shadow,--is another piece of painting that will one day find a place in one
of the public galleries; and the same can be said of the portrait of the
woman on a background of chintz flowers.

We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, "What could have induced him
to paint such things? surely he must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder
if the Impressionists are in earnest or if it is only _une blague qu'on
nous fait?_" Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that most exquisite
painter of blonde light. We stood before the "Turkeys," and seriously we
wondered if "it was serious work,"--that _chef d'oeuvre!_ the high
grass that the turkeys are gobbling is flooded with sunlight so swift and
intense that for a moment the illusion is complete. "Just look at the
house! why, the turkeys couldn't walk in at the door. The perspective is
all wrong." Then followed other remarks of an educational kind; and when we
came to those piercingly personal visions of railway stations by the same
painter,--those rapid sensations of steel and vapour,--our laughter knew no
bounds. "I say, Marshall, just look at this wheel; he dipped his brush into
cadmium yellow and whisked it round, that's all." Nor did we understand any
more Renoir's rich sensualities of tone; nor did the mastery with which he
achieves an absence of shadow appeal to us. You see colour and light in his
pictures as you do in nature, and the child's criticism of a portrait--"Why
is one side of the face black?" is answered. There was a half length nude
figure of a girl. How the round fresh breasts palpitate in the light! such
a glorious glow of whiteness was attained never before. But we saw nothing