The show finishes with portraits by Americans like John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Thomas Eakins in a gallery designated "The American Taste for Spanish Painting." It's thematically incoherent, like another exhibition entirely, since the Americans absorbed the Spanish influence mostly through the lens of French art; but the peculiar coda provides an illumination. The Americans often represent the full figure, from head to toe, but they cannot bring themselves to place it in empty space. There is always a piece of furniture, the base of a wall, or some familiar article positioned somewhere on the canvas. You wonder whether Manet could confidently dissolve physical environment into abstract space because, being French, he felt that civilization and culture were permanent. You wonder whether the American painters had insecurely to preserve the world around them because, in fast-changing, untraditional, hyperactive America, a steady environment is a lot harder to hold on to.