Whistler's The White Girl (Fig. 1) has an ambivalent place in the history of nineteenth-century painting, not least because the artist retitled it Symphony in White No. I in order to conform with his later belief that 'Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like." By retrospectively titling a sequence of syn- aesthetic 'Symphonies in White', Whistler encouraged the belief that his art had aspired to these criteria from the start. Critics and biographers following Theodore Duret and the Pennells, with whom Whistler colluded to rewrite his own art history, have continually repeated Paul Mantz's 1863 description of The White Girl as a 'symphonie du blanc', to correspond with the modernist self-image Whistler adopted; thus relationships which Mantz and other critics found between Whistler's picture and the art of the past have been minimised and the painting's subject matter has been neglected.

An 'apotheosis, with the chorus of cuckolds on their knees singing a hymn of praise to Venus', 'a rising sun shining in triumph over a bloody battlefield', 'a plant flourishing on a dung-heap': all of these could be somewhat metaphorical descriptions of Cezanne's L'Eternel feminin (Figs. 19 and 22).' In fact, they are taken from Emile Zola's notorious novel, Nana, and express the relationship between the Second Empire courtesan and the society she holds to ransom - a degenerate society heading inexorably towards the Franco- Prussian War, and ruin.2 The young Nana first appeared in Zola's L'Assommoir in 1876, where she inspired an illustration by Renoir and, probably, Manet's well-known painting.3 Nana the novel, on the other hand, was serialised in Le Voltaire during the later months of 1879.' When it finally emerged in book form, the following February, Zola followed his custom of sending a copy to Cezanne, who was then living in Melun. The painter's reply clearly indicates his enthusiasm for the novel, going beyond mere courtesy, and also suggests his profound interest in Nana's risque' theme.

Few images of the young Auguste Renoir are known: a handful of photographs, too stiff to reveal much of the artist's personality, and a small portrait painted by his friend Emile Laporte among fellow pupils in Charles Gleyre's studio (the Quarante-trois portraits de l'atelier Gleyre, in the Petit Palais, Paris). In the two earliest known photographs, of c. 1860 and 1861, the young man appears well- groomed and dressed with a somewhat affected elegance. The slight moustache he sports in 1861 has disappeared in Laporte's group of 1862-63, where Renoir's thinner face, disordered hair and anxious look seem closer to what we know of him at this period.

In the early summer of 1879 Edward, Prince of Wales, invited the thirty-two-year old Jules Bastien-Lepage to visit London in order to paint his portrait dressed in ceremonial robes (Royal Collection, Buckingham Palace).' During his brief stay in England, Bastien- Lepage also painted a vibrantly colourful 'plein-air' canvas, Girl with a sunshade, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Fig.34), of which the sitter has remained unidentified since the picture's bequest to the Museum in 1912.2 In the course of research for the recent exhibition of Renoir's portraits it has been possible to identify the painting as a portrait of the actress Jeanne Leontine Pauline Samary (1857-90)," one of the great celebrities of the French national theatre company, the Comedie Francaise.

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts has recently acquired a portrait by Andre Derain (Fig.37) that is unrecorded in the major literature on the artist.' Painted in London in 1906, on Derain's second visit to England, the picture depicts Bartolomeo Savona and remained in the collection of his family until last year. Given its London origins and the sitter's love of England, his heirs sought specifically to find it a permanent home in an English public collection. That desire has now been fulfilled thanks to generous financial assistance from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Art Collections Fund, which made it possible for the Institute to acquire this important new addition to Derain's Fauve years.2