with which those _chefs d'oeuvre_, "Yachting at Argenteuil" and "Le
Linge", were received. They were in his last style--that bright, clear
painting in which violet shadows were beginning to take the place of
the conventional brown shadows, and the brush-work, too, was looser
and more broken up; in a word, these pictures were the germ from which
has sprung a dozen different schools, all the impressionism and other
isms of modern French art. Before these works, in which the real Manet
appeared for the first time, no one had a good word to say. To kill
them more effectually, certain merits were even conceded to the "Bon
Bock" and the Luxembourg picture.

The "Bon Bock", as we have seen, at once challenges comparison with
Hals. But in "Le Linge" no challenge is sent forth to any one; it is
Manet, all Manet, and nothing but Manet. In this picture he expresses
his love of the gaiety and pleasure of Parisian life. And this
bright-faced, simple-minded woman, who stands in a garden crowded with
the tallest sunflowers, the great flower-crowns drooping above her,
her blue cotton dress rolled up to the elbows, her hands plunged in a
small wash-tub in which she is washing some small linen, habit-shirts,
pocket-handkerchiefs, collars, expresses the joy of homely life in the
French suburb. Her home is one of good wine, excellent omelettes, soft
beds; and the sheets, if they are a little coarse, are spotless, and
retain an odour of lavender-sweetened cupboards. Her little child,
about four years old, is with his mother in the garden; he has strayed
into the foreground of the picture, just in front of the wash-tub, and
he holds a great sunflower in his tiny hand. Beside this picture of
such bright and happy aspect, the most perfect example of that _genre_
known as _la peinture claire_, invented by Manet, and so infamously
and absurdly practised by subsequent imitators--beside this picture so
limpid, so fresh, so unaffected in its handling, a Courbet would seem