giving him rank. The Realist-Impressionists painted scenes in the
ball-room, on the river, in the field, the street, the foundry, modern
interiors, and found in the life of the humble immense scope for
studying the gestures, the costumes, the expressions of the nineteenth
century.

Their effort had its bearing upon the way of representing persons, upon
what is called, in the studio language, the "_mise en cadre_." There,
too, they overthrew the principles admitted by the School. Manet, and
especially Degas, have created in this respect a new style from which
the whole art of realistic contemporary illustration is derived. This
style had been hitherto totally ignored, or the artists had shrunk from
applying it. It is a style which is founded upon the small painters of
the eighteenth century, upon Saint-Aubin, Debucourt, Moreau, and,
further back, upon Pater and the Dutchmen. But this time, instead of
confining this style to vignettes and very small dimensions, the
Impressionists have boldly given it the dimensions and importance of big
canvases. They have no longer based the laws of composition, and
consequently of style, upon the ideas relative to the subjects, but upon
values and harmonies. To take a summary example: if the School composed
a picture representing the death of Agamemnon, it did not fail to
subordinate the whole composition to Agamemnon, then to Clytemnestra,
then to the witnesses of the murder, graduating the moral and literary
interest according to the different persons, and sacrificing to this
interest the colouring and the realistic qualities of the scene. The
Realists composed by picking out first the strongest "value" of the
picture, say a red dress, and then distributing the other values
according to a harmonious progression of their tonalities. "The
principal person in a picture," said Manet, "is the light." With Manet
and his friends we find, then, that the concern for expression and for