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 For some reason, never sufficiently explained, Parisians found in these canvases a source of infinite diversion. They went to the exhibition in a mood of obvious hilarity. They began to laugh while they were still in the street, they laughed as they climbed the stairs, they were convulsed with laughter when they looked at the pictures, they laughed every time they talked them over with their friends.

Now what were these mirth-provoking works of art? Not cubist diagrams, not geometrical charts of human anatomy, not reversible landscapes, not rainbow-tinted pigs. Such exhilarants lay in wait for another century and another generation. The pictures which so abundantly amused Paris in 1877 were painted by Claude Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir,—men of genius, who, having devised a new and brilliant technique, abandoned themselves with too little reserve to the veracities of 88