73- "Near the Boulevard," Le Monde Comique, 1879-80. - If you need a glove maker, here's mine, whom I can recommend. - And does she do glove cleaning? — And how! she even cleans out wallets! become, in appearance at least, laundresses, linen maids, designers, florists, journal sales- women. The police survey all these fraudulent shops. The police try in vain to close them down; they reappear elsewhere; they are all equipped with a room at the back of the shop which serves 26 as a rendezvous spot." Artists of the Impressionist avant-garde painted modistes over roughly a ten-year period: the subject was taken up once in pastel and watercolor by Gonzales circa 1877, painted in oil once by Renoir between 1876 and 1878 and once by Manet in 1881, and depicted repeatedly in oil and pastel by Degas between 1882 and 1885. The reserve and storytelling indefiniteness of the pictures (as well as their compositions and bright palettes) un- derpin their family resemblance. Their deadpan quality sets them apart from other more inter- pretively definite and often sexualizing images of milliners in circulation at the same time, some of which we have already discussed (figs. 49 and 72, for example). Renoir's only treatment of this subject, At the Milliner (fig. 74), is a small painting (only 12 3/4" X g 5/8") that has a complex color scheme, soft focus, and painterly handling that also appear in better-known works by Renoir painted at about the same time, such as the Bal du Moulin de la Galette or Balan^oire, both painted in 1876, now in the Musee d'Orsay.27 In view of Renoir's pronounced interest in the theme of chance flirtations between men and women, the principal idiosyncracy of his representation of a millinery shop is his conception of it as an ex- clusively female enclave — not as a place for men to admire sexy milliners. Rut neither does he show it as a place for women to buy and sell hats. The face of the central figure, a seated woman, is more clearly rendered than anything else in the painting. The less distinct faces are composed of separate parallel strokes of thick paint. The legibility of the face of the woman at the left edge of the picture is barely secured by the use of black linear eyes and brows, but the extreme blur of the head of the standing figure at the right is unrelieved. And her blurriness makes the subject of the painting especially difficult to sort out. The standing figure's head is summary almost to the point of its obliteration. The crown of her head is defined by overlapping and distinct curved segments of brown. The much looser and greyer strokes covering the plane of her face must describe a veil that attaches to the 121