THIS article, the third and last of a series,* takes up some formal and affective themes in Degas's work which emerge particularly in the ballet classrooms: they include some of the artist's characteristic ways of heightening picture and picture-space, and his obsessive manipulations of the female figure, which will be discussed in relation to his recurrent imagery of defeat and demoralisation.

APART from a handful of celebrated and suggestive legends, mostly culled from the painter's own exiguous recollections and passed down in all subsequent accounts like bible stories, little is known for sure about Henri Matisse's early years, and next to nothing of the visual influences that fed and shaped his imagination in its formative stages.* Towards the end of his life, Matisse's thoughts turned increasingly to his beginnings, his schooling, the sternly utilitarian society into which he was born and from which he escaped, by his own account, thanks to a moment of blinding revelation when he received his first box of coloured paints at the age of nineteen or twenty in 1889, and knew at once that he held his future in his hands. This article attempts to cast light on some of the circumstances surrounding that dramatic turning point.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH's venture into questions of cinemato- graphy dates from the mid-1920s, and was prompted both by events in his own life and by the expansion of Suprematism into other art forms at the end of the previous decade. The decisive event was Malevich's first meeting with the great Russian film director, Sergei Eisenstein in 1925. Since the early 1910s Malevich had spent the summer months at the village of Nemchinovka, just outside Moscow, which he considered to be the finest place on earth, even specifying in his Will that he wished to be buried there. In the summer of 1925, Eisenstein was working with Nina Agadjanava at her dacha in Nemchinovka on the script for the film The Year 1905. Later, in the biographical essay 'Nuney' (as Nina was called by her friends in Georgian), he recalled: 'It is enough to remember, that it was here, at Nuney's . . . that I first met (and grew very fond of) Kazimir Malevich, such an indefatigable, stubborn, and principled fighter, at the time of his aggressively conducted battle for the direction of the Institute [GINKhUK]'.

. Later, in the biographical essay 'Nuney' (as Nina was called by her friends in Georgian), he recalled: 'It is enough to remember, that it was here, at Nuney's . . . that I first met (and grew very fond of) Kazimir Malevich, such an indefatigable, stubborn, and principled fighter, at the time of his aggressively conducted battle for the direction of the Institute [GINKhUK]'.

'ILS sontfoux - les Anglais!' was Matisse's reaction to the success of his first one-man exhibition in London in 1919. The many sales and unusually favourable critical reaction surprised him in a country that had been notoriously resistant to his work at the time of the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. Although Matisse's influence was apparent on several English painters from that time, it was not until the 1919 exhibition that his reputation became more secure in England. His first visit to London in 1919 was connected with his commission to design Stravinsky's ballet Le Chant du Rossignol, which necessitated constant consultations with Diaghilev and his company who were having a highly successful season in London. His second visit was primarily to supervise his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries.

, which necessitated constant consultations with Diaghilev and his company who were having a highly successful season in London. His second visit was primarily to supervise his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries.

FROM Assisi in the fourteenth century to Suffolk in the nineteenth, from the brushwork of Allan Ramsay to the art of cricket: this is not merely to enumerate the range of Alastair Smart's interests, it is to list subjects to the study of which his research, teaching, and publications have made important contributions over the past four decades. Alastair Smart was born in Cambridge on 30th April 1922. His father was an astronomer and his mother was a poet. Smart began his academic career at Glasgow Univer- sity where his father was Regius professor; he took a wartime degree in English before enlisting in 1942. Invalided out of the army, he entered Coates Hall, Edinburgh, the theological college of the Scottish Episcopal Church, where he spent three years preparing for ordination, before deciding, in 1946, to turn to painting instead. For a further three years he trained under William Gillies at the Edinburgh College of Art. By 1949 the components of his somewhat unorthodox education were as- sembled, and although he was destined to be neither priest nor painter, he was to apply throughout his subsequent career as an art historian the lessons he learned in his practical pursuit of both vocations.