To go back in a word to Manet; the painter of whom M. Henri
Houssaye has remarked: "Manet sowed, M. Bastien-Lepage has reaped."
Manet was certainly one of the most noteworthy painters that France or
any other country has produced. His is the great, the very rare, merit
of having conceived a new point of view. That he did not illustrate this
in its completeness, that he was a sign-post, as Albert Wolff very aptly
said, rather an exemplar, is nothing. He was totally unheralded, and he
was in his way superb. No one before him had essayed--no one before him
had ever thought of--the immense project of breaking, not relatively but
absolutely, with the conventional. Looking for the first time at one of
his pictures, one says that customary notions, ordinary brushes,
traditional processes of even the highest authenticity, have been thrown
to the winds. Hence, indeed, the scandal which he caused from the first
and which went on increasing, until, owing to the acceptance, with
modifications, of his point of view by the most virile and vigorous
painters of the day, he became, as he has become, in a sense the head of
the corner.
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