Phillips's Well-Drawn Tale of Two Cities

So, too, did ideas. The notion of the dandy flourished in both capitals. While the swift Parisian brush was gaining ground in London, savage British satire, traveling the other way, was beginning to affect the advanced art of France. Both Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec learned quite a bit from Punch.

Paris-London commerce was made smoother by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. For though the English and the French had been enemies for centuries, they got on a whole lot better once Bismarck's Prussian armies began marching across France. To Parisians who had seen Germans shell their city, the dreadful Brits across the water no longer seemed so bad.

Before World War I the two cities seemed a match. London was where the money was. Paris had finer food, of course, and a lower cost of living, and more available females, or so it was thought. Finding models there was easy. So was ogling the dancing girls, and not only ogling. One sees this in the faces of the lecherous "milords" soliciting easy women in the posters of Lautrec.

The show has many highlights. Among these is the conjunction, and the unexpected rhyming, of Whistler's "Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander" (1872-74) and Degas' famous bronze "Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen" (1880-81). The self-confident banker's daughter and the monkeylike standing dancer strike precisely the same pose.

Degas' "L'Absinthe" (1875-76), which shows a woman stoned on that green beverage, is similarly striking displayed all by itself. The canvas was a scandal once. When it sold at Christie's in 1892, the audience in the salesroom hissed its disreputable theme.

These objects are familiar. But many shown are not. Few viewers will have previously seen "Dancers at the Moulin Rouge," a sketch by Arthur Melville that is abstract as a Rorschach blot. At first I thought it showed a Skye terrier on a couch.

It didn't happen all at once, but Sickert won his art campaign. French painting, partly thanks to him, gradually became respectable in Britain. Soon he would be championing such English avant-gardists as Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. Still, even as he did so, he kept his eye on France. And he soon stopped aping Degas. Later, as a member of London's Camden Town Group, he would choose to bow instead to such free-brushing French painters as Vuillard and Bonnard.

This visiting show from London is just right for the Phillips, for it casts a useful light on that gallery's collection. This is its one stop in America. It closes May 14.

Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910 is a truncated version of the exhibition seen last year at Tate Britain. Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson are its curators. Admission to the Phillips, 1600 21st NW, is $12, and $10 for students and people older than 62. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., until 8:30 Thursday evenings, and from noon until 7 p.m. on Sundays. It is closed Mondays. The show's Washington display is funded by ING Direct. For more information see http://www.phillipscollection.org/ .