Gustave GEFFROY (1855-1926). Autograph manuscript signed, Le Salon de 1900; 17 and a half pages in-8. This text, which includes erasures and corrections, was published in La Vie artistique. Geffroy reports on the exhibition that took place at Place Breteuil, poorly housed in a camp of wood and canvas, and which brought together 2,872 works. He cites among the "painters of life" Emile Wéry and his painting The Fishermen, Amsterdam, Jules Adler showing working class life in his painting of Le Creusot and Schumacher the earthworkers in Building a City. Many of his paintings are about life in the fields and at sea, and many others are about anecdotes; but there are also "painters who are painters": Charles Sims (Childhood), Hugues de Beaumont (Taste). In history, nothing enthuses him; he points out L'Enlèvement de Paul Jamin, the Salome of Georges Rouault in which he sees "nothing at all, but literally nothing"...In the chapter of allegories, he is sensitive to the Allegory of the City of Paris by Louis Béroud, "but the agreement was not found between the figures and the landscape", and he sees in Les Sirène vaincues par les Muses of Adolphe Lalyre only "models, and nothing but models, or rather the same model multiplied"... etc., etc. Geoffroy appreciated the nudes of J.J. Henner (Dream), Henri Martin (Beauty), Jules Pagès (The Toilet of the Model), Paul Chabas (The Last Rays) etc. In the portraits, he notices those by Ferdinand Humbert, Lauth, Fougerat, that of Stephen Liégeard by Benjamin-Constant, etc. He also sees many interior scenes, landscapes by already known painters such as Harpignies (Oliviers et chênes à Beaulieu), and new ones such as Louis Cabié (Le Soir à Tursac, Dordogne), Dambeza, etc., but the landscapes are too numerous for him to stop at them all. He appreciates Les Bords fleuris de la Loire and the still lifes of Achille Cesbron, others with heaps of oysters and fruits and "L'aiguière d'argent de M. Blaise Desgoffe est toujours infiniment reluisante". He ends with drawings, engravings and lithographs and sculpture...