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He spent ten shillings on putting a corn-coloured paper in the room he was making his parlour; and he hung on the walls a sketch which Lawson had given him of the Quai des Grands Augustins, and the photograph of the Odalisque by Ingres and Manet's Olympia which in Paris had been the objects of his contemplation while he shaved.
If Manet's answer throws no light whatever on the new principle, it shows very clearly the direction, if not the goal, towards which his last style was moving. But perhaps I am speaking too cautiously, for surely broken brushwork and violet shadows lead only to one possible goal the prismatic colours.
They were, so to say, electrified by the magnificent example of Manet's fighting spirit, and Manet was generous enough to take upon himself the reproaches levelled, not only against his work, but against theirs. His twenty years of open war, sustained with an abnegation worthy of all esteem, must be considered as one of the most significant phenomena of the history of the artists of all ages.
The picture is remarkable not only for the excellence of the execution, but for a symbolic intention nowhere else to be found in Manet's works. The angels on either side of his dead Christ necessitated merely the addition of two pairs of wings a convention which troubled him no more than the convention of taking off his hat on entering a church.
And it is impossible to exaggerate the way in which the sense of reality has been intensified by Manet's insistence upon getting as near as possible to the individual values of objects as they are seen in nature in spite of his abandonment of the practice of painting on a parallel scale.
Applying Manet's method, his invention, his discovery, to the painting of out-of-doors, the plein air school immediately began to produce landscapes of astonishing reality by confining their effort to those values which it is in the power of pigments to imitate.
One picture is the black goddess of evil, whom he has painted as she lies on a couch with a white background, a colour inversion of Manet's Olympe. With the cosmology of the islanders the Frenchman was familiar. He has, in addition to portraying the natives, made an agreeable exposition of their ways and days, and their naïve blending of Christian and Maori beliefs.
Cézanne exhibited in 1874 with Manet and the rest at the impressionists' salon, held at the studio of Nadar the photographer. He had earlier submitted at once to Manet's magic method of painting, but in 1873, at Auvers-sur-Oise, he began painting in the plein air style and with certain modifications adhered to that manner until the time of his death.
But after this slight adventure into symbolism, Manet's eyes were closed to all but the visible world. The visible world of Paris he saw henceforth truly, frankly, and fearlessly, and more beautifully than any of his contemporaries. Never before was a great man's mind so strictly limited to the range of what his eyes saw.
But with the strong direct light, the masses are cut out as simply as possible, and their colour is little sullied by light and shade. The picture of Manet's reproduced is a typical example of his manner. The aggressive shape of the pattern made by the light mass against the dark background is typical of his revolutionary attitude towards all accepted canons of beauty.
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