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 talent. The first, in an attitude
which suggests the kneeling Venus, washes her thighs in a tin bath. The
second, a back view, full of the malformations of forty years, of
children, of hard work, stands gripping her flanks with both hands. The
naked woman has become impossible in modern art; it required Degas'
genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. Cynicism was the
great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with cynicism Degas has
rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the
British matron would say it is difficult to guess. Perhaps the
hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten them more than the
sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this as
it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in
her humble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her lumpy
shoulders, is a triumph of art. Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is
terrible; Velasquez knew this when he painted his dwarfs.

Pissarro exhibited a group of girls gathering apples in a garden--sad
greys and violets beautifully harmonised. The figures seem to move as in
a dream: we are on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour
and happy aspiration. Those apples will never fall from the branches,
those baskets that the stooping girls are filling will never be filled:
that garden is the garden of the peace that life has not for giving, but
which the painter has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey.