to the least initiated in the art of painting, and is not the
conclusion forced upon us that however Manet may be judged inferior to
Millet as a poet, as a painter he is easily his superior? And as
Millet's and Chavannes' brush-work is deficient in beauty so is their
drawing. Preferring decorative unity to completeness of drawing,
Chavannes does not attempt more than some rudimentary indications.
Millet seems even to have desired to omit technical beauty, so that he
might concentrate all thought on the poetic synthesis he was gathering
from the earth. Degas, on the contrary, draws for the sake of the
drawing-The Ballet Girl, The Washerwoman, The Fat Housewife bathing
herself, is only a pretext for drawing; and Degas chose these
extraordinary themes because the drawing of the ballet girl and the
fat housewife is less known than that of the nymph and the Spartan
youth. Painters will understand what I mean by the drawing being "less
known",--that knowledge of form which sustains the artist like a
crutch in his examination of the model, and which as it were dictates
to the eye what it must see. So the ballet girl was Degas' escapement
from the thraldom of common knowledge. The ballet girl was virgin
soil. In her meagre thwarted forms application could freely be made of
the supple incisive drawing which bends to and flows with the
character--that drawing of which Ingres was the supreme patron, and of
which Degas is the sole inheritor.

Until a few years ago Chavannes never sold a picture. Millet lived his
life in penury and obscurity, but thirty years of persistent ridicule
having failed to destroy Degas' genius, some recognition has been
extended to it. The fate of all great artists in the nineteenth
century is a score years of neglect and obloquy. They may hardly hope
for recognition before they are fifty; some few cases point the other
way, but very few--the rule is thirty years of neglect and obloquy.