Bateau_ and the _Bar_, will always remain admirable masterpieces which
will do credit to French painting, of which the spontaneous, living,
clear and bold art of Manet is a direct and very representative product.

There remains, then, a great personality who knew how to dominate the
rather coarse conceptions of Realism, who influenced by his modernity
all contemporary illustration, who re-established a sound and strong
tradition in the face of the Academy, and who not only created a new
transition, but marked his place on the new road which he had opened. To
him Impressionism owes its existence; his tenacity enabled it to take
root and to vanquish the opposition of the School; his work has enriched
the world by some beautiful examples which demonstrate the union of the
two principles of Realism and of that technical Impressionism which was
to supply Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley with an object for their
efforts. For the sum total of all that is evoked by his name, Edouard
Manet certainly deserves the name of a man of genius--an incomplete
genius, though, since the thought with him was not on the level of his
technique, since he could never affect the emotions like a Leonardo or a
Rembrandt, but genius all the same through the magnificent power of his
gifts, the continuity of his style, and the importance of his part which
infused blood into a school dying of the anaemia of conventional art.
Whoever beholds a work of Manet's, even without knowing the conditions
of his life, will feel that there is something great, the lion's claw
which Delacroix had recognised as far back as 1861, and to which, it is
said, even the great Ingres had paid homage on the jury which examined
with disgust the _Guitarero_.

[Illustration: MANET

PORTRAIT OF MADAME M.L.]