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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The French Impressionists (1860-1900), by
+Camille Mauclair, Translated by P. G. Konady
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The French Impressionists (1860-1900)
+
+Author: Camille Mauclair
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2004  [eBook #14056]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
+(1860-1900)***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Linda Cantoni, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (1860-1900)
+
+by
+
+CAMILLE MAUCLAIR
+
+Author of _L'art en Silence_, _Les Mères Sociales_, etc.
+
+Translated from the French text of Camille Mauclair, by P. G. Konody
+
+London: Duckworth & Co.
+New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
+Turnbull and Spears, Printers, Edinburgh
+
+1903
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+AT THE PIANO]
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+AUGUSTE BRÉAL
+
+TO THE ARTIST AND TO THE FRIEND
+
+AS A MARK OF GRATEFUL AFFECTION
+
+C.M.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+It should be stated here that, with the exception of one reproduction
+after the Neo-Impressionist Van Rysselberghe, the other forty-nine
+engravings illustrating this volume I owe to the courtesy of M.
+Durand-Ruel, from the first the friend of the Impressionist painters,
+and later the most important collector of their works, a friend who has
+been good enough to place at our disposal the photographs from which our
+illustrations have been reproduced. Chosen from a considerable
+collection which has been formed for thirty years past, these
+photographs, none of which are for sale, form a veritable and unique
+museum of documents on Impressionist art, which is made even more
+valuable through the dispersal of the principal masterpieces of this art
+among the private collections of Europe and America. We render our
+thanks to M. Durand-Ruel no less in the name of the public interested in
+art, than in our own.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+  I. THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM--THE
+     BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT, THE
+     ORIGIN OF ITS NAME
+
+ II. THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS--THE
+     DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS,
+     THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE--THE IDEAS OF THE
+     IMPRESSIONISTS ON SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON
+     THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY,
+     AND ON STYLE
+
+III. EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+ IV. EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+  V. CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+ VI. AUGUSTE RENOIR: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+ VII. PISSARRO, SISLEY, CAILLEBOTTE,
+      CÉZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MARY CASSATT;
+      THE SECONDARY ARTISTS OF
+      IMPRESSIONISM--JONGKIND, BOUDIN
+
+VIII. THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH
+      IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAËLLI, TOULOUSE-LAUTREC,
+      FORAIN, CHÉRET, ETC.
+
+  IX. NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: GAUGUIN, DENIS,
+      THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE--THE THEORY OF
+      POINTILLISM--SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE
+      THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC CHROMATISM--FAULTS
+      AND QUALITIES OF THE
+      IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE OWE
+      TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE
+      FRENCH SCHOOL--SOME WORDS ON ITS
+      INFLUENCE ABROAD
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+
+RENOIR.  At the Piano (Frontispiece)
+
+MANET.   Rest
+
+MANET.   In the Square
+
+MANET.   Young Man in Costume of Majo
+
+MANET.   The Reader
+
+DEGAS.   The Dancer at the Photographer's
+
+DEGAS.   Carriages at the Races
+
+DEGAS.   The Greek Dance--Pastel
+
+DEGAS.   Waiting
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Pines
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   Church at Vernon
+
+RENOIR.   Portrait of Madame Maitre
+
+MANET.   The Dead Toreador
+
+MANET.   Olympia
+
+MANET.   The Woman with the Parrot
+
+MANET.   The Bar at the Folies Bergère
+
+MANET.   Déjeuner
+
+MANET.   Portrait of Madame M. L.
+
+MANET.   The Hothouse
+
+DEGAS.   The Beggar Woman
+
+DEGAS.   The Lesson in the Foyer
+
+DEGAS.   The Dancing Lesson--Pastel
+
+DEGAS.   The Dancers
+
+DEGAS.   Horses in the Meadows
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   An Interior after Dinner
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Harbour, Honfleur
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Church at Varengeville
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   Poplars on the Epte in Autumn
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Bridge at Argenteuil
+
+RENOIR.   Déjeuner
+
+RENOIR.   In the Box
+
+RENOIR.   Young Girl Promenading
+
+RENOIR.   Woman's Bust
+
+RENOIR.   Young Woman in Empire Costume
+
+RENOIR.   On the Terrace
+
+PISSARRO.   Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen
+
+PISSARRO.   Boulevard Montmartre
+
+PISSARRO.   The Boildieaux Bridge at Rouen
+
+PISSARRO.   The Avenue de l'Opéra
+
+SISLEY.   Snow Effect
+
+SISLEY.   Bougival, at the Water's Edge
+
+SISLEY.   Bridge at Moret
+
+CÉZANNE.   Dessert
+
+BERTHE MORISOT.   Melancholy
+
+BERTHE MORISOT.   Young Woman Seated
+
+MARY CASSATT.   Getting up Baby
+
+MARY CASSATT.   Women and Child
+
+JONGKIND.   In Holland
+
+JONGKIND.   View of the Hague
+
+THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE.   Portraits of Madame van Rysselberghe and her
+   Daughter
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+The illustrations contained in this volume have been taken from
+different epochs of the Impressionist movement. They will give but a
+feeble idea of the extreme abundance of its production.
+
+Banished from the salons, exhibited in private galleries and sold direct
+to art lovers, the Impressionist works have been but little seen. The
+series left by Caillebotte to the Luxembourg Gallery is very badly shown
+and is composed of interesting works which, however, date back to the
+early period, and are very inferior to the beautiful productions which
+followed later. Renoir is best represented. The private galleries in
+Paris, where the best Impressionist works are to be found, are those of
+MM. Durand-Ruel, Rouart, de Bellis, de Camondo, and Manzi, to which must
+be added the one sold by MM. Théodore Duret and Faure, and the one of
+Mme. Ernest Rouart, daughter of Mme. Morisot, the sister-in-law of
+Manet. The public galleries of M. Durand-Ruel's show-rooms are the place
+where it is easiest to find numerous Impressionist pictures.
+
+In spite of the firm opposition of the official juries, a place of
+honour was reserved at the Exposition of 1889 for Manet, and at that of
+1900 a fine collection of Impressionists occupied two rooms and caused a
+considerable stir.
+
+Amongst the critics who have most faithfully assisted this group of
+artists, I must mention, besides the early friends previously referred
+to, Castagnary, Burty, Edouard de Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geffroy, Arsène
+Alexandre, Octave Mirbeau, L. de Fourcaud, Clemenceau, Mallarmé,
+Huysmans, Jules Laforgue, and nearly all the critics of the Symbolist
+reviews. A book on "Impressionist Art" by M. Georges Lecomte has been
+published by the firm of Durand-Ruel as an _edition-de-luxe_. But the
+bibliography of this art consists as yet almost exclusively of articles
+in journals and reviews and of some isolated biographical pamphlets.
+Manet is, amongst many, the one who has excited most criticism of all
+kinds; the articles, caricatures and pamphlets relating to his work
+would form a considerable collection. It should be added that, with the
+exception of Manet two years before his death, and Renoir last year at
+the age of sixty-eight, no Impressionist has been decorated by the
+French government. In England such a distinction has even less
+importance in itself than elsewhere. But if I insist upon it, it is only
+to draw attention to the fact that, through the sheer force of their
+talent, men like Degas, Monet and Pissarro have achieved great fame and
+fortune, without gaining access to the Salons, without official
+encouragement, decoration, subvention or purchases for the national
+museums. This is a very significant instance and serves well to complete
+the physiognomy of this group of independents.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM--THE BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT AND THE
+ORIGIN OF ITS NAME
+
+
+It will be beyond the scope of this volume to give a complete history of
+French Impressionism, and to include all the attractive details to which
+it might lead, as regards the movement itself and the very curious epoch
+during which its evolution has taken place. The proportions of this book
+confine its aim to the clearest possible summing up for the British
+reader of the ideas, the personalities and the works of a considerable
+group of artists who, for various reasons, have remained but little
+known and who have only too frequently been gravely misjudged. These
+reasons are very obvious: first, the Impressionists have been unable to
+make a show at the Salons, partly because the jury refused them
+admission, partly because they held aloof of their own free will. They
+have, with very rare exceptions, exhibited at special minor galleries,
+where they become known to a very restricted public. Ever attacked, and
+poor until the last few years, they enjoyed none of the benefits of
+publicity and sham glory. It is only quite recently that the admission
+of the incomplete and badly arranged Caillebotte collection to the
+Luxembourg Gallery has enabled the public to form a summary idea of
+Impressionism. To conclude the enumeration of the obstacles, it must be
+added that there are hardly any photographs of Impressionist works in
+the market. As it is, photography is but a poor translation of these
+canvases devoted to the study of the play of light; but even this very
+feeble means of distribution has been withheld from them! Exhibited at
+some galleries, gathered principally by Durand-Ruel, sold directly to
+art-lovers--foreigners mostly--these large series of works have
+practically remained unknown to the French public. All the public heard
+was the reproaches and sarcastic comments of the opponents, and they
+never became aware that in the midst of modern life the greatest, the
+richest movement was in progress, which the French school had known
+since the days of Romanticism. Impressionism has been made known to them
+principally by the controversies and by the fruitful consequences of
+this movement for the illustration and study of contemporary life.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+REST]
+
+I do not profess to give here a detailed and complete history of
+Impressionism, for which several volumes like the present one would be
+required. I shall only try to compile an _ensemble_ of concise and very
+precise notions and statements bearing upon this vast subject. It will
+be my special object to try and prove that Impressionism is neither an
+isolated manifestation, nor a violent denial of the French traditions,
+but nothing more or less than a logical return to the very spirit of
+these traditions, contrary to the theories upheld by its detractors. It
+is for this reason that I have made use of the first chapter to say a
+few words on the precursors of this movement.
+
+No art manifestation is really isolated. However new it may seem, it is
+always based upon the previous epochs. The true masters do not give
+lessons, because art cannot be taught, but they set the example. To
+admire them does not mean to imitate them: it means the recognition in
+them of the principles of originality and the comprehension of their
+source, so that this eternal source may be called to life in oneself,
+this source which springs from a sincere and sympathetic vision of the
+aspects of life. The Impressionists have not escaped this beautiful law.
+I shall speak of them impartially, without excessive enthusiasm; and it
+will be my special endeavour to demonstrate in each of them the cult of
+a predecessor, for there have been few artistic movements where the love
+for, and one might say the hereditary link with, the preceding masters
+has been more tenacious.
+
+The Academy has struggled violently against Impressionism, accusing it
+of madness, of systematic negation of the "laws of beauty," which it
+pretended to defend and of which it claimed to be the official priest.
+The Academy has shown itself hostile to a degree in this quarrel. It has
+excluded the Impressionists from the Salons, from awards, from official
+purchases. Only quite recently the acceptance of the Caillebotte
+bequest to the Luxembourg Gallery gave rise to a storm of indignation
+among the official painters. I shall, in the course of this book, enter
+upon the value of these attacks. Meanwhile I can only say how
+regrettable this obstinacy appears to me and will appear to every free
+spirit. It is unworthy even of an ardent conviction to condemn a whole
+group of artists _en bloc_ as fools, enemies of beauty, or as tricksters
+anxious to degrade the art of their nation, when these artists worked
+during forty years towards the same goal, without getting any reward for
+their effort, but poverty and derision. It is now about ten years since
+Impressionism has taken root, since its followers can sell their
+canvases, and since they are admired and praised by a solid and
+ever-growing section of the public. The hour has therefore arrived,
+calmly to consider a movement which has imposed itself upon the history
+of French art from 1860 to 1900 with extreme energy, to leave
+dithyrambics as well as polemics, and to speak of it with a view to
+exactness. The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of
+beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art,
+and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon
+itself as the guardian of the national tradition, because it exercises
+an hierarchic authority over the _Ecole de Rome_, the _Salons_, and the
+_Ecole des Beaux Arts_. All the same, its ideals are of very mixed
+origin and very little French. Its principles are the same by which the
+academic art of nearly all the official schools of Europe is governed.
+This mythological and allegorical art, guided by dogmas and formulas
+which are imposed upon all pupils regardless of their temperament, is
+far more international than national. To an impartial critic this
+statement will show in an even more curious light the excommunication
+jealously issued by the academic painters against French artists, who,
+far from revolting in an absurd spirit of _parti-pris_ against the
+genius of their race, are perhaps more sincerely attached to it than
+their persecutors. Why should a group of men deliberately choose to
+paint mad, illogical, bad pictures, and reap a harvest of public
+derision, poverty and sterility? It would be uncritical to believe
+merely in a general mystification which makes its authors the worst
+sufferers. Simple common sense will find in these men a conviction, a
+sincerity, a sustained effort, and this alone should, in the name of the
+sacred solidarity of those who by various means try to express their
+love of the beautiful, suppress the annoying accusations hurled too
+light-heartedly against Manet and his friends.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+IN THE SQUARE]
+
+I shall define later on the ideas of the Impressionists on technique,
+composition and style in painting. Meanwhile it will be necessary to
+indicate their principal precursors.
+
+Their movement may be styled thus: a reaction against the Greco-Latin
+spirit and the scholastic organisation of painting after the second
+Renaissance and the Italo-French school of Fontainebleau, by the century
+of Louis XIV., the school of Rome, and the consular and imperial taste.
+In this sense Impressionism is a protest analogous to that of
+Romanticism, exclaiming, to quote the old verse: "_Qui nous délivrera
+des Grecs et des Romains?_"[1] From this point of view Impressionism has
+also great affinities with the ideas of the English Pre-Raphaelites,
+who stepped across the second and even the first Renaissance back to the
+Primitives.
+
+[Footnote 1: Who will deliver us from the Greeks and the Romans.]
+
+This reaction is superimposed by another: the reaction of Impressionism,
+not only against classic subjects, but against the black painting of the
+degenerate Romanticists. And these two reactions are counterbalanced by
+a return to the French ideal, to the realistic and characteristic
+tradition which commences with Jean Foucquet and Clouet, and is
+continued by Chardin, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, Watteau, La Tour,
+Fragonard, and the admirable engravers of the eighteenth century down to
+the final triumph of the allegorical taste of the Roman revolution. Here
+can be found a whole chain of truly national artists who have either
+been misjudged, like Chardin, or considered as "small masters" and
+excluded from the first rank for the benefit of the pompous Allegorists
+descended from the Italian school.
+
+Impressionism being beyond all a technical reaction, its predecessors
+should first be looked for from this material point of view. Watteau is
+the most striking of all. _L'Embarquement pour Cythère_ is, in its
+technique, an Impressionist canvas. It embodies the most significant
+of all the principles exposed by Claude Monet: the division of tones by
+juxtaposed touches of colour which, at a certain distance, produce upon
+the eye of the beholder the effect of the actual colouring of the things
+painted, with a variety, a freshness and a delicacy of analysis
+unobtainable by a single tone prepared and mixed upon the palette.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+YOUNG MAN IN COSTUME OF MAJO]
+
+Claude Lorrain, and after him Carle Vernet, are claimed by the
+Impressionists as precursors from the point of view of decorative
+landscape arrangement, and particularly of the predominance of light in
+which all objects are bathed. Ruysdael and Poussin are, in their eyes,
+for the same reasons precursors, especially Ruysdael, who observed so
+frankly the blue colouring of the horizon and the influence of blue upon
+the landscape. It is known that Turner worshipped Claude for the very
+same reasons. The Impressionists in their turn, consider Turner as one
+of their masters; they have the greatest admiration for this mighty
+genius, this sumptuous visionary. They have it equally for Bonington,
+whose technique is inspired by the same observations as their own. They
+find, finally, in Delacroix the frequent and very apparent application
+of their ideas. Notably in the famous _Entry of the Crusaders into
+Constantinople_, the fair woman kneeling in the foreground is painted in
+accordance with the principles of the division of tones: the nude back
+is furrowed with blue, green and yellow touches, the juxtaposition of
+which produces, at a certain distance, an admirable flesh-tone.
+
+And now I must speak at some length of a painter who, together with the
+luminous and sparkling landscapist Félix Ziem, was the most direct
+initiator of Impressionist technique. Monticelli is one of those
+singular men of genius who are not connected with any school, and whose
+work is an inexhaustible source of applications. He lived at Marseilles,
+where he was born, made a short appearance at the Salons, and then
+returned to his native town, where he died poor, ignored, paralysed and
+mad. In order to live he sold his small pictures at the cafés, where
+they fetched ten or twenty francs at the most. To-day they sell for
+considerable prices, although the government has not yet acquired any
+work by Monticelli for the public galleries. The mysterious power alone
+of these paintings secures him a fame which is, alas! posthumous. Many
+Monticellis have been sold by dealers as Diaz's; now they are more
+eagerly looked for than Diaz, and collectors have made fortunes with
+these small canvases bought formerly, to use a colloquial expression
+which is here only too literally true, "for a piece of bread."
+
+Monticelli painted landscapes, romantic scenes, "fêtes galantes" in the
+spirit of Watteau, and still-life pictures: one could not imagine a more
+inspired sense of colour than shown by these works which seem to be
+painted with crushed jewels, with powerful harmony, and beyond all with
+an unheard-of delicacy in the perception of fine shades. There are tones
+which nobody had ever invented yet, a richness, a profusion, a subtlety
+which almost vie with the resources of music. The fairyland atmosphere
+of these works surrounds a very firm design of charming style, but, to
+use the words of the artist himself, "in these canvases the objects are
+the decoration, the touches are the scales, and the light is the tenor."
+Monticelli has created for himself an entirely personal technique which
+can only be compared with that of Turner; he painted with a brush so
+full, fat and rich, that some of the details are often truly modelled in
+relief, in a substance as precious as enamels, jewels, ceramics--a
+substance which is a delight in itself. Every picture by Monticelli
+provokes astonishment; constructed upon one colour as upon a musical
+theme, it rises to intensities which one would have thought impossible.
+His pictures are magnificent bouquets, bursts of joy and colour, where
+nothing is ever crude, and where everything is ruled by a supreme sense
+of harmony.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE READER]
+
+Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the
+descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet. In all matters concerning
+technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism. As regards
+design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of
+beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the
+old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour,
+Largillière, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen. It
+has resolutely held aloof from mythology, academic allegory, historical
+painting, and from the neo-Greek elements of Classicism as well as from
+the German and Spanish elements of Romanticism. This reactionary
+movement is therefore entirely French, and surely if it deserves
+reproach, the one least deserved is that levelled upon it by the
+official painters: disobedience to the national spirit. Impressionism is
+an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose
+followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting
+philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the
+consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation,
+and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We
+shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters,
+that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French
+blood.
+
+Impressionism has, then, hitherto been very badly judged. It is
+contained in two chief points: search after a new technique, and
+expression of modern reality. Its birth has not been a spontaneous
+phenomenon. Manet, who, by his spirit and by the chance of his
+friendships, grouped around him the principal members, commenced by
+being classed in the ranks of the Realists of the second Romanticism by
+the side of Courbet; and during the whole first period of his work he
+only endeavoured to describe contemporary scenes, at a time when the
+laws of the new technique were already dawning upon Claude Monet.
+Gradually the grouping of the Impressionists took place. Claude Monet is
+really the first initiator: in a parallel line with his ideas and his
+works Manet passed into the second period of his artistic life, and with
+him Renoir, Degas and Pissarro. But Manet had already during his first
+period been the topic of far-echoing polemics, caused by his realism and
+by the marked influence of the Spaniards and of Hals upon his style; his
+temperament, too, was that of the head of a school; and for these
+reasons legend has attached to his name the title of head of the
+Impressionist school, but this legend is incorrect.
+
+To conclude, the very name "Impressionism" is due to Claude Monet. There
+has been much serious arguing upon this famous word which has given rise
+to all sorts of definitions and conclusions. In reality this is its
+curious origin which is little known, even in criticism. Ever since
+1860 the works of Manet and of his friends caused such a stir, that they
+were rejected _en bloc_ by the Salon jury of 1863. The emperor, inspired
+by a praiseworthy, liberal thought, demanded that these innovators
+should at least have the right to exhibit together in a special room
+which was called the _Salon des Refusés_. The public crowded there to
+have a good laugh. One of the pictures which caused most derision was a
+sunset by Claude Monet, entitled _Impressions_. From this moment the
+painters who adopted more or less the same manner were called
+_Impressionists_. The word remained in use, and Manet and his friends
+thought it a matter of indifference whether this label was attached to
+them, or another. At this despised Salon were to be found the names of
+Manet, Monet, Whistler, Bracquemont, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour, Renoir,
+Legros, and many others who have since risen to fame. Universal ridicule
+only fortified the friendships and resolutions of this group of men, and
+from that time dates the definite foundation of the Impressionist
+school. For thirty years it continued to produce without interruption
+an enormous quantity of works under an accidental and inexact
+denomination; to obey the creative instinct, without any other dogma
+than the passionate observation of nature, without any other assistance
+than individual sympathies, in the face of the disciplinary teaching of
+the official school.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE DANCER AT THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS--THE DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY
+COLOURS, THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE--THE IDEAS OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON
+SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY, AND ON STYLE
+
+
+It should be stated from the outset that there is nothing dogmatic about
+this explanation of the Impressionist theories, and that it is not the
+result of a preconceived plan. In art a system is not improvised. A
+theory is slowly evolved, nearly always unknown to the author, from the
+discoveries of his sincere instinct, and this theory can only be
+formulated after years by criticism facing the works. Monet and Manet
+have worked for a long time without ever thinking that theories would be
+built upon their paintings. Yet a certain number of considerations will
+strike the close observer, and I will put these considerations before
+the reader, after reminding him that spontaneity and feeling are the
+essentials of all art.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+CARRIAGES AT THE RACES]
+
+The Impressionist ideas may be summed up in the following manner:--
+
+In nature no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the objects is a
+pure illusion: the only creative source of colour is the sunlight which
+envelopes all things, and reveals them, according to the hours, with
+infinite modifications. The mystery of matter escapes us; we do not know
+the exact moment when reality separates itself from unreality. All we
+know is, that our vision has formed the habit of discerning in the
+universe two notions: form and colour; but these two notions are
+inseparable. Only artificially can we distinguish between outline and
+colour: in nature the distinction does not exist. Light reveals the
+forms, and, playing upon the different states of matter, the substance
+of leaves, the grain of stones, the fluidity of air in deep layers,
+gives them dissimilar colouring. If the light disappears, forms and
+colours vanish together. We only see colours; everything has a colour,
+and it is by the perception of the different colour surfaces striking
+our eyes, that we conceive the forms, _i.e._ the outlines of these
+colours.
+
+The idea of distance, of perspective, of volume is given us by darker or
+lighter colours: this idea is what is called in painting the sense of
+values. A value is the degree of dark or light intensity, which permits
+our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer than
+another. And as painting is not and cannot be the _imitation_ of nature,
+but merely her artificial interpretation, since it only has at its
+disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only means that
+remain for expressing depth on a flat surface.
+
+Colour is therefore the procreatrix of design. Or, colour being simply
+the irradiation of light, it follows that all colour is composed of the
+same elements as sunlight, namely the seven tones of the spectrum. It is
+known, that these seven tones appear different owing to the unequal
+speed of the waves of light. The tones of nature appear to us therefore
+different, like those of the spectrum, and for the same reason. The
+colours vary with the intensity of light. There is no colour peculiar
+to any object, but only more or less rapid vibration of light upon its
+surface. The speed depends, as is demonstrated by optics, on the degree
+of the inclination of the rays which, according to their vertical or
+oblique direction, give different light and colour.
+
+The colours of the spectrum are thus recomposed in everything we see. It
+is their relative proportion which makes new tones out of the seven
+spectral tones. This leads immediately to some practical conclusions,
+the first of which is, that what has formerly been called _local colour_
+is an error: a leaf is not green, a tree-trunk is not brown, and,
+according to the time of day, _i.e._ according to the greater or smaller
+inclination of the rays (scientifically called the angle of incidence),
+the green of the leaf and the brown of the tree are modified. What has
+to be studied therefore in these objects, if one wishes to recall their
+colour to the beholder of a picture, is the composition of the
+atmosphere which separates them from the eye. This atmosphere is the
+real subject of the picture, and whatever is represented upon it only
+exists through its medium.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE GREEK DANCE--PASTEL.]
+
+A second consequence of this analysis of light is, that shadow is not
+absence of light, but light of _a different quality_ and of different
+value. Shadow is not a part of the landscape, where light ceases, but
+where it is subordinated to a light which appears to us more intense. In
+the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with different speed.
+Painting should therefore try to discover here, as in the light parts,
+the play of the atoms of solar light, instead of representing shadows
+with ready-made tones composed of bitumen and black.
+
+The third conclusion resulting from this: the colours in the shadow are
+modified by _refraction_. That means, _f.i._ in a picture representing
+an interior, the source of light (window) may not be indicated: the
+light circling round the picture will then be composed of the
+_reflections_ of rays whose source is invisible, and all the objects,
+acting as mirrors for these reflections, will consequently influence
+each other. Their colours will affect each other, even if the surfaces
+be dull. A red vase placed upon a blue carpet will lead to a very
+subtle, but mathematically exact, interchange between this blue and this
+red, and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two
+colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite
+reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two
+principal colours. The science of optics can work out these
+complementary colours with mathematical exactness. If _f.i._ a head
+receives the orange rays of daylight from one side and the bluish light
+of an interior from the other, green reflections will necessarily appear
+on the nose and in the middle region of the face. The painter Besnard,
+who has specially devoted himself to this minute study of complementary
+colours, has given us some famous examples of it.
+
+The last consequence of these propositions is that the blending of the
+spectral tones is accomplished by a _parallel_ and _distinct_ projection
+of the colours. They are artificially reunited on the crystalline: a
+lens interposed between the light and the eye, and opposing the
+crystalline, which is a living lens, dissociates again these united
+rays, and shows us again the seven distinct colours of the atmosphere.
+It is no less artificial if a painter mixes upon his palette different
+colours to compose a tone; it is again artificial that paints have been
+invented which represent some of the combinations of the spectrum, just
+to save the artist the trouble of constantly mixing the seven solar
+tones. Such mixtures are false, and they have the disadvantage of
+creating heavy tonalities, since the coarse mixture of powders and oils
+cannot accomplish the action of light which reunites the luminous waves
+into an intense white of unimpaired transparency. The colours mixed on
+the palette compose a dirty grey. What, then, is the painter to do, who
+is anxious to approach, as near as our poor human means will allow, that
+divine fairyland of nature? Here we touch upon the very foundations of
+Impressionism. The painter will have to paint with only the seven
+colours of the spectrum, and discard all the others: that is what Claude
+Monet has done boldly, adding to them only white and black. He will,
+furthermore, instead of composing mixtures on his palette, place upon
+his canvas touches of none but the seven colours _juxtaposed_, and leave
+the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain
+distance, so as to act like sunlight itself upon the eye of the
+beholder.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+WAITING]
+
+This, then, is the theory of the _dissociation of tones_, which is the
+main point of Impressionist technique. It has the immense advantage of
+suppressing all mixtures, of leaving to each colour its proper strength,
+and consequently its freshness and brilliancy. At the same time the
+difficulties are extreme. The painter's eye must be admirably subtle.
+Light becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the
+object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes
+a purely optic art, a search for harmonies, a sort of natural poem,
+quite distinct from expression, style and design, which were the
+principal aims of former painting. It is almost necessary to invent
+another name for this special art which, clearly pictorial though it be,
+comes as near to music, as it gets far away from literature and
+psychology. It is only natural that, fascinated by this study, the
+Impressionists have almost remained strangers to the painting of
+expression, and altogether hostile to historical and symbolist painting.
+It is therefore principally in landscape painting that they have
+achieved the greatness that is theirs.
+
+Through the application of these principles which I have set forth very
+summarily, Claude Monet arrived at painting by means of the infinitely
+varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour spots which dissociate the
+tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the
+arabesque of their vibrations. A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind
+of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, _f.i._),
+and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This
+investigation is added to the habitual preoccupations of the landscapist
+study of the character peculiar to the scene, style of the trees or
+houses, accentuation of the decorative side--and to the habitual
+preoccupations of the figure painter in the portrait. The canvases of
+Monet, Renoir and Pissarro have, in consequence of this research, an
+absolutely original aspect: their shadows are striped with blue,
+rose-madder and green; nothing is opaque or sooty; a light vibration
+strikes the eye. Finally, blue and orange predominate, simply because in
+these studies--which are more often than not full sunlight
+effects--blue is the complementary colour of the orange light of the
+sun, and is profusely distributed in the shadows. In these canvases can
+be found a vast amount of exact grades of tone, which seem to have been
+entirely ignored by the older painters, whose principal concern was
+style, and who reduced a landscape to three or four broad tones,
+endeavouring only to explain the sentiment inspired by it.
+
+And now I shall have to pass on to the Impressionists' ideas on the
+style itself of painting, on Realism.
+
+From the outset it must not be forgotten that Impressionism has been
+propagated by men who had all been Realists; that means by a reactionary
+movement against classic and romantic painting. This movement, of which
+Courbet will always remain the most famous representative, has been
+_anti-intellectual_. It has protested against every literary,
+psychologic or symbolical element in painting. It has reacted at the
+same time against the historical painting of Delaroche and the
+mythological painting of the _Ecole de Rome_, with an extreme violence
+which appears to us excessive now, but which found its explanation in
+the intolerable tediousness or emphasis at which the official painters
+had arrived. Courbet was a magnificent worker, with rudimentary ideas,
+and he endeavoured to exclude even those which he possessed. This
+exaggeration which diminishes our admiration for his work and prevents
+us from finding in it any emotion but that which results from technical
+mastery, was salutary for the development of the art of his successors.
+It caused the young painters to turn resolutely towards the aspects of
+contemporary life, and to draw style and emotion from their own epoch;
+and this intention was right. An artistic tradition is not continued by
+imitating the style of the past, but by extracting the immediate
+impression of each epoch. That is what the really great masters have
+done, and it is the succession of their sincere and profound
+observations which constitutes the style of the races.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE PINES]
+
+Manet and his friends drew all their strength from this idea. Much finer
+and more learned than a man like Courbet, they saw an aspect of
+modernity far more complex, and less limited to immediate and grossly
+superficial realism. Nor must it be forgotten that they were
+contemporaries of the realistic, anti-romantic literary movement, a
+movement which gave them nothing but friends. Flaubert and the Goncourts
+proved that Realism is not the enemy of refined form and of delicate
+psychology. The influence of these ideas created first of all Manet and
+his friends: the technical evolution (of which we have traced the chief
+traits) came only much later to oppose itself to their conceptions.
+Impressionism can therefore be defined as a _revolution of pictorial
+technique together with an attempt at expressing modernity_. The
+reaction against Symbolism and Romanticism happened to coincide with the
+reaction against muddy technique.
+
+The Impressionists, whilst occupying themselves with cleansing the
+palette of the bitumen of which the Academy made exaggerated use, whilst
+also observing nature with a greater love of light, made it their object
+to escape in the representation of human beings the laws of _beauty_,
+such as were taught by the School. And on this point one might apply to
+them all that one knows of the ideas of the Goncourts and Flaubert, and
+later of Zola, in the domain of the novel. They were moved by the same
+ideas; to speak of the one group is to speak of the other. The longing
+for truth, the horror of emphasis and of false idealism which paralysed
+the novelist as well as the painter, led the Impressionists to
+substitute for _beauty_ a novel notion, that of _character_. To search
+for, and to express, the true character of a being or of a site, seemed
+to them more significant, more moving, than to search for an exclusive
+beauty, based upon rules, and inspired by the Greco-Latin ideal. Like
+the Flemings, the Germans, the Spaniards, and in opposition to the
+Italians whose influence had conquered all the European academies, the
+French Realist-Impressionists, relying upon the qualities of lightness,
+sincerity and expressive clearness which are the real merits of their
+race, detached themselves from the oppressive and narrow preoccupation
+with the beautiful and with all the metaphysics and abstractions
+following in its train.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+CHURCH AT VERNON]
+
+This fact of the substitution of _character_ for _beauty_ is the
+essential feature of the movement. What is called Impressionism is--let
+it not be forgotten--a technique which can be applied to any subject.
+Whether the subject be a virgin, or a labourer, it can be painted with
+divided tones, and certain living artists, like the symbolist Henri
+Martin, who has almost the ideas of a Pre-Raphaelite, have proved it by
+employing this technique for the rendering of religious or philosophic
+subjects. But one can only understand the effort and the faults of the
+painters grouped around Manet, by constantly recalling to one's mind
+their predeliction for _character_. Before Manet a distinction was made
+between _noble_ subjects, and others which were relegated to the domain
+of _genre_ in which no great artist was admitted to exist by the School,
+the familiarity of their subjects barring from them this rank. By the
+suppression of the _nobleness_ inherent to the treated subject, the
+painter's technical merit is one of the first things to be considered in
+giving him rank. The Realist-Impressionists painted scenes in the
+ball-room, on the river, in the field, the street, the foundry, modern
+interiors, and found in the life of the humble immense scope for
+studying the gestures, the costumes, the expressions of the nineteenth
+century.
+
+Their effort had its bearing upon the way of representing persons, upon
+what is called, in the studio language, the "_mise en cadre_." There,
+too, they overthrew the principles admitted by the School. Manet, and
+especially Degas, have created in this respect a new style from which
+the whole art of realistic contemporary illustration is derived. This
+style had been hitherto totally ignored, or the artists had shrunk from
+applying it. It is a style which is founded upon the small painters of
+the eighteenth century, upon Saint-Aubin, Debucourt, Moreau, and,
+further back, upon Pater and the Dutchmen. But this time, instead of
+confining this style to vignettes and very small dimensions, the
+Impressionists have boldly given it the dimensions and importance of big
+canvases. They have no longer based the laws of composition, and
+consequently of style, upon the ideas relative to the subjects, but upon
+values and harmonies. To take a summary example: if the School composed
+a picture representing the death of Agamemnon, it did not fail to
+subordinate the whole composition to Agamemnon, then to Clytemnestra,
+then to the witnesses of the murder, graduating the moral and literary
+interest according to the different persons, and sacrificing to this
+interest the colouring and the realistic qualities of the scene. The
+Realists composed by picking out first the strongest "value" of the
+picture, say a red dress, and then distributing the other values
+according to a harmonious progression of their tonalities. "The
+principal person in a picture," said Manet, "is the light." With Manet
+and his friends we find, then, that the concern for expression and for
+the sentiments evoked by the subject, was always subordinated to a
+purely pictorial and decorative preoccupation. This has frequently led
+the Impressionists to grave errors, which they have, however, generally
+avoided by confining themselves to very simple subjects, for which the
+daily life supplied the grouping.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+PORTRAIT OF MADAME MAITRE]
+
+One of the reforms due to their conception has been the suppression of
+the professional model, and the substitution for it of the natural
+model, seen in the exercise of his occupation. This is one of the most
+useful conquests for the benefit of modern painting. It marks a just
+return to nature and simplicity. Nearly all their figures are real
+portraits; and in everything that concerns the labourer and the
+peasant, they have found the proper style and character, because they
+have observed these beings in the true medium of their occupations,
+instead of forcing them into a sham pose and painting them in disguise.
+The basis of all their pictures has been first of all a series of
+landscape and figure studies made in the open air, far from the studio,
+and afterwards co-ordinated. One may wish pictorial art to have higher
+ambitions; and one may find in the Primitives an example of a curious
+mysticism, an expression of the abstract and of dreams. But one should
+not underrate the power of naïve and realistic observation, which the
+Primitives carried into the execution of their works, subordinating it,
+however, to religious expression, and it must also be admitted that the
+Realist-Impressionists served at least their conception of art logically
+and homogeneously. The criticism which may be levelled against them is
+that which Realism itself carries in its train, and we shall see that
+esthetics could never create classifications capable of defining and
+containing the infinite gradations of creative temperaments.
+
+In art, classifications have rarely any value, and are rather damaging.
+Realism and Idealism are abstract terms which cannot suffice to
+characterise beings who obey their sensibility. It is therefore
+necessary to invent as many words as there are remarkable men. If
+Leonardo was a great painter, are Turner and Monet not painters at all?
+There is no connection between them; their methods of thought and
+expression are antithetical. Perhaps it will be most simple, to admire
+them all, and to renounce any further definition of the painter,
+adopting this word to mark the man who uses the palette as his means of
+expression.
+
+Thus preoccupation with contemporary emotions, substitution of character
+for classic beauty (or of emotional beauty for formal beauty), admission
+of the _genre_-painter into the first rank, composition based upon the
+reciprocal reaction of values, subordination of the subject to the
+interest of execution, the effort to isolate the art of painting from
+the ideas inherent to that of literature, and particularly the
+instinctive move towards the "symphonisation" of colours, and
+consequently towards music,--these are the principal features of the
+aesthetic code of the Realist-Impressionists, if this term may be
+applied to a group of men hostile towards esthetics such as they are
+generally taught.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+
+As I have said, Edouard Manet has not been entirely the originator of
+the Impressionist technique. It is the work of Claude Monet which
+presents the most complete example of it, and which also came first as
+regards date. But it is very difficult to determine such cases of
+priority, and it is, after all, rather useless. A technique cannot be
+invented in a day. In this case it was the result of long
+investigations, in which Manet and Renoir participated, and it is
+necessary to unite under the collective name of Impressionists a group
+of men, tied by friendship, who made a simultaneous effort towards
+originality, all in about the same spirit, though frequently in very
+different ways. As in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, it was first of
+all friendship, then unjust derision, which created the solidarity of
+the Impressionists. But the Pre-Raphaelites, in aiming at an idealistic
+and symbolic art, were better agreed upon the intellectual principles
+which permitted them at once to define a programme. The Impressionists
+who were only united by their temperaments, and had made it their first
+aim to break away from all school programmes, tried simply to do
+something new, with frankness and freedom.
+
+Manet was, in their midst, the personality marked out at the same time
+by their admiration, and by the attacks of the critics for the post of
+standard-bearer. A little older than his friends, he had already, quite
+alone, raised heated discussions by the works in his first manner. He
+was considered an innovator, and it was by instinctive admiration that
+his first friends, Whistler, Legros, and Fantin-Latour, were gradually
+joined by Marcelin Desboutin, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro,
+Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, the young painter Bazille, who met his
+premature death in 1870, and by the writers Gautier, Banville,
+Baudelaire (who was a passionate admirer of Manet's); then later by
+Zola, the Goncourts, and Stéphane Mallarmé. This was the first nucleus
+of a public which was to increase year by year. Manet had the personal
+qualities of a chief; he was a man of spirit, an ardent worker, and an
+enthusiastic and generous character.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE DEAD TOREADOR]
+
+Manet commenced his first studies with Couture. After having travelled a
+good deal at sea to obey his parents, his vocation took hold of him
+irresistibly. About 1850 the young man entered the studio of the severe
+author of the _Romains de la Décadence_. His stay was short. He
+displeased the professor by his uncompromising energy. Couture said of
+him angrily: "He will become the Daumier of 1860." It is known that
+Daumier, lithographer, and painter of genius, was held in meagre esteem
+by the academicians. Manet travelled in Germany after the _coup d'etat_,
+copied Rembrandt in Munich, then went to Italy, copied Tintoretto in
+Venice, and conceived there the idea of several religious pictures. Then
+he became enthusiastic about the Spaniards, especially Velasquez and
+Goya. The sincere expression of things seen took root from this moment
+as the principal rule of art in the brain of this young Frenchman who
+was loyal, ardent, and hostile to all subtleties. He painted some fine
+works, like the _Buveur d'absinthe_ and the _Vieux musicien_. They show
+the influence of Courbet, but already the blacks and the greys have an
+original and superb quality; they announce a virtuoso of the first
+order.
+
+It was in 1861 that Manet first sent to the Salon the portraits of his
+parents and the _Guitarero_, which was hailed by Gautier, and rewarded
+by the jury, though it roused surprise and irritation. But after that he
+was rejected, whether it was a question of the _Fifre_ or of the
+_Déjeuner sur l'herbe._ This canvas, with an admirable feminine nude,
+created a scandal, because an undressed woman figured in it amidst
+clothed figures, a matter of frequent occurrence with the masters of the
+Renaissance. The landscape is not painted in the open air, but in the
+studio, and resembles a tapestry, but it shows already the most
+brilliant evidence of Manet's talent in the study of the nude and the
+still-life of the foreground, which is the work of a powerful master.
+From the time of this canvas the artist's personality appeared in all
+its maturity. He painted it before he was thirty, and it has the air of
+an old master's work; it is based upon Hals and the Spaniards together.
+
+The reputation of Manet became established after 1865. Furious critics
+were opposed by enthusiastic admirers. Baudelaire upheld Manet, as he
+had upheld Delacroix and Wagner, with his great clairvoyance,
+sympathetic to all real originality. The _Olympia_ brought the
+discussion to a head. This courtesan lying in bed undressed, with a
+negress carrying a bouquet, and a black cat, made a tremendous stir. It
+is a powerful work of strong colour, broad design and intense sentiment,
+astounding in its _parti-pris_ of reducing the values to the greatest
+simplicity. One can feel in it the artist's preoccupation with
+rediscovering the rude frankness of Hals and Goya, and his aversion
+against the prettiness and false nobility of the school. This famous
+_Olympia_ which occasioned so much fury, appears to us to-day as a
+transition work. It is neither a masterpiece, nor an emotional work, but
+a technical experiment, very significant for the epoch during which it
+appeared in French art, and this canvas, which is very inferior to
+Manet's fine works, may well be considered as a date of evolution. He
+was doubtful about exhibiting it, but Baudelaire decided him and wrote
+to him on this occasion these typical remarks: "You complain about
+attacks? But are you the first to endure them? Have you more genius than
+Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by derision. And, in
+order not to make you too proud, I must tell you, that they are models
+each in his own way and in a very rich world, whilst you are only the
+first in the decrepitude of your art."
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+OLYMPIA]
+
+Thus it must be firmly established that from this moment Manet passed as
+an innovator, years before Impressionism existed or was even thought of.
+This is an important point: it will help to clear up the twofold origin
+of the movement which followed. To his realism, to his return to
+composition in the modern spirit, and to the simplifying of planes and
+values, Manet owed these attacks, though at that time his colour was
+still sombre and entirely influenced by Hals, Goya and Courbet. From
+that time the artist became a chief. As his friends used to meet him at
+an obscure Batignolles café, the café Guerbois (still existing), public
+derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des
+Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the _Angels at the Tomb of Christ_, a
+souvenir of the Venetians; _Lola de Valence_, commented upon by
+Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the _Fleurs du Mal_; the
+_Episode d'un combat de taureaux_ (dissatisfied with this picture, he
+cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The
+_Acteur tragique_ (portrait of Rouvière in Hamlet) and the _Jésus
+insulté_ followed, and then came the _Gitanos_, _L'Enfant à l'Epée_, and
+the portrait of Mme. Manet. This series of works is admirable. It is
+here where he reveals himself as a splendid colourist, whose design is
+as vigorous as the technique is masterly. In these works one does not
+think of looking for anything but the witchery of technical strength;
+and the abundant wealth of his temperament is simply dazzling. Manet
+reveals himself as the direct heir of the great Spaniards, more
+interesting, more spontaneous, and freer than Courbet. The _Rouvière_ is
+as fine a symphony in grey and black as the noblest portraits by
+Bronzino, and there is probably no Goya more powerful than the _Toréador
+tué_. Manet's altogether classic descent appears here undeniably. There
+is no question yet of Impressionism, and yet Monet and Renoir are
+already painting, Monet has exhibited at the _Salon des Refusés_, but
+criticism sees and attacks nobody but Manet. This great individuality
+who overwhelmed the Academy with its weak allegories, was the butt of
+great insults and the object of great admiration. Banished from the
+Salons, he collected fifty pictures in a room in the Avenue de l'Alma
+and invited the public thither. In 1868 appeared the portrait of Emile
+Zola, in 1860 the _Déjeuner_, works which are so powerful, that they
+enforced admiration in spite of all hostility. In the Salon of 1870 was
+shown the portrait of Eva Gonzalès, the charming pastellist and pupil of
+Manet, and the impressive _Execution of Maximilian at Queretaro_. Manet
+was at the apogee of his talent, when the Franco-German war broke out.
+At the age of thirty-eight he had put forth a considerable amount of
+work, tried himself in all styles, severed his individuality from the
+slavish admiration of the old masters, and attained his own mastery. And
+now he wanted to expand, and, in joining Monet, Renoir and Degas,
+interpret in his own way the Impressionist theory.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE WOMAN WITH THE PARROT]
+
+The _Fight of the Kearsage and the Alabama_, a magnificent sea-piece,
+bathed in sunlight, announced this transformation in his work, as did
+also a study, a _Garden_, painted, I believe, in 1870, but exhibited
+only after the crisis of the terrible year. At that time the Durand-Ruel
+Gallery bought a considerable series by the innovator, and was imitated
+by some select art-lovers. The _Musique aux Tuileries_ and the _Bal de
+l'Opéra_ had, some years before, pointed towards the evolution of this
+great artist in the direction of _plein-air_ painting. The _Bon Bock_,
+in which the very soul of Hals is revived, and the grave _Liseur_, sold
+immediately at Vienne, were the two last pledges given by the artist to
+his old admirers; these two pictures had moreover a splendid success,
+and the _Bon Bock_, popularised by an engraving, was hailed by the very
+men who had most unjustly attacked the author of the portrait of Mme.
+Morisot, a French masterpiece. But already Manet was attracted
+irresistibly towards the study of light, and, faithful to his programme,
+he prepared to face once again outbursts of anger and further sarcasms;
+he was resolved once again to offer battle to the Salons. Followed by
+all the Impressionists he tried to make them understand the necessity
+of introducing the new ideas into this retrograde _Milieu_. But they
+would not. Having already received a rebuff by the attacks directed for
+some years against their works, they exhibited among themselves in some
+private galleries: they declined to force the gate of the Salons, and
+Manet remained alone. In 1875 he submitted, with his _Argenteuil_, the
+most perfect epitome of his atmospheric researches. The jury admitted it
+in spite of loud protests: they were afraid of Manet; they admired his
+power of transformation, and he revolted the prejudiced, attracting them
+at the same time by the charm of his force. But in 1876 the portrait of
+_Desboutin_ and the _Linge_ (an exquisite picture,--one of the best
+productions of open-air study) were rejected. Manet then recommenced the
+experience of 1867, and opened his studio to the public. A register at
+the door was soon covered with signatures protesting against the jury,
+as well as with hostile jokes, and even anonymous insults! In 1877 the
+defeated jury admitted the portrait of the famous singer Faure in the
+part of Hamlet, and rejected _Nana_, a picture which was found
+scandalising, but has charming freshness and an intensely modern
+character. In 1878, 1879 and 1880 they accepted _la Serre_, the
+surprising symphony in blue and white which shows Mr George Moore in
+boating costume, the portrait of Antonin Proust, and the scene at the
+_Père Lathuile_ restaurant, in which Manet's nervous and luminous
+realism has so curious a resemblance to the art of the Goncourts. In
+1881 the portrait of Rochefort and that of the lion-killer, Pertuiset,
+procured the artist a medal at the Salon, and Antonin Proust, the friend
+of Manet's childhood, who had become Minister of Fine Arts, honoured
+himself in decorating him with the legion of honour. In 1882 appeared a
+magnificent canvas, the _Bar des Folies-Bergère_, in which there is some
+sparkling still-life painting of most attractive beauty. It was
+accompanied by a lady's portrait, _Jeanne_. But on April 30, 1883, Manet
+died, exhausted by his work and struggles, of locomotor ataxy, after
+having vainly undergone the amputation of a foot to avoid gangrene.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE]
+
+It will be seen that Manet fought through all his life: few artists'
+lives have been nobler. His has been an example of untiring energy; he
+employed it as much in working, as in making a stand against prejudices.
+Rejected, accepted, rejected again, he delivered with enormous courage
+and faith his attack upon a jury which represented routine. As he fought
+in front of his easel, he still fought before the public, without ever
+relaxing, without changing, alone, apart even from those whom he loved,
+who had been shaped by his example. This great painter, one of those who
+did most honour to the French soul, had the genius to create by himself
+an Impressionism of his own which will always remain his own, after
+having given evidence of gifts of the first order in the tradition
+handed down by the masters of the real and the good. He cannot be
+confused either with Monet, or with Pissarro and Renoir. His
+comprehension of light is a special one, his technique is not in
+accordance with the system of colour-spots; it observes the theory of
+complementary colours and of the division of tones without departing
+from a grand style, from a classic stateliness, from a superb sureness.
+Manet has not been the inventor of Impressionism which co-existed with
+his work since 1865, but he has rendered it immense services, by taking
+upon himself all the outbursts of anger addressed to the innovators, by
+making a breach in public opinion, through which his friends have passed
+in behind him. Probably without him all these artists would have
+remained unknown, or at least without influence, because they all were
+bold characters in art, but timid or disdainful in life. Degas, Monet
+and Renoir were fine natures with a horror of polemics, who wished to
+hold aloof from the Salons, and were resigned from the outset to be
+misunderstood. They were, so to say, electrified by the magnificent
+example of Manet's fighting spirit, and Manet was generous enough to
+take upon himself the reproaches levelled, not only against his work,
+but against theirs. His twenty years of open war, sustained with an
+abnegation worthy of all esteem, must be considered as one of the most
+significant phenomena of the history of the artists of all ages.
+
+This work of Manet, so much discussed and produced under such tormenting
+conditions, owes its importance beyond all to its power and frankness.
+Ten years of developing the first manner, tragically limited by the war
+of 1870; thirteen years of developing the second evolution, parallel
+with the efforts of the Impressionists. The period from 1860 to 1870 is
+logically connected with Hals and Goya; from 1870 to 1883 the artist's
+modernity is complicated by the study of light. His personality appears
+there even more original, but one may well give the palm to those works
+of Manet which are painted in his classic and low-toned manner. He had
+all the pictorial gifts which make the glory of the masters: full, true,
+broad composition, colouring of irresistible power, blacks and greys
+which cannot be found elsewhere since Velasquez and Goya, and a profound
+knowledge of values. He has tried his hand at everything: portraits,
+landscapes, seascapes, scenes of modern life, still-life and nudes have
+each in their turn served his ardent desire of creation. His was a much
+finer comprehension of contemporary life than seems to be admitted by
+Realism: one has only to compare him with Courbet, to see how far more
+nervous and intelligent he was, without loss to the qualities of truth
+and robustness. His pictures will always remain documents of the
+greatest importance on the society, the manners and customs of the
+second Empire. He did not possess the gift of psychology. His _Christ
+aux Anges_ and _Jésus insulté_ are obviously only pieces of painting
+without idealism. He was, like the great Dutch virtuosos, and like
+certain Italians, more eye than soul. Yet his _Maximilian_, the drawings
+to Poe's _Raven_, and certain sketches show that he might have realised
+some curious, psychological works, had he not been so completely
+absorbed by the immediate reality and by the desire for beautiful paint.
+A beautiful painter--this is what he was before everything else, this is
+his fairest fame, and it is almost inconceivable that the juries of the
+Salons failed to understand him. They waxed indignant over his subjects
+which offer only a restricted interest, and they did not see the
+altogether classic quality of this technique without bitumen, without
+glazing, without tricks; of this vibrating colour; of this rich paint;
+of this passionate design so suitable for expressing movement and
+gestures true to life; of this simple composition where the whole
+picture is based upon two or three values with the straightforwardness
+one admires in Rubens, Jordaens and Hals.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+DÉJEUNER]
+
+Manet will occupy an important position in the French School. He is the
+most original painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, the
+one who has really created a great movement. His work, the fecundity of
+which is astonishing, is unequal. One has to remember that, besides the
+incessant strife which he kept up--a strife which would have killed many
+artists--he had to find strength for two grave crises in himself. He
+joined one movement, then freed himself of it, then invented another and
+recommenced to learn painting at a point where anybody else would have
+continued in his previous manner. "Each time I paint," he said to
+Mallarmé, "I throw myself into the water to learn swimming." It is not
+surprising that such a man should have been unequal, and that one can
+distinguish in his work between experiments, exaggerations due to
+research, and efforts made to reject the prejudices of which we feel the
+weight no longer. But it would be unjust to say that Manet has only had
+the merit of opening up new roads; that has been said to belittle him,
+after it had first been said that these roads led into absurdity. Works
+like the _Toréador_, _Rouvière_, _Mme. Manet_, the _Déjeuner_, the
+_Musique aux Tuileries_, the _Bon Bock_, _Argenteuil_, _Le Linge_, _En
+Bateau_ and the _Bar_, will always remain admirable masterpieces which
+will do credit to French painting, of which the spontaneous, living,
+clear and bold art of Manet is a direct and very representative product.
+
+There remains, then, a great personality who knew how to dominate the
+rather coarse conceptions of Realism, who influenced by his modernity
+all contemporary illustration, who re-established a sound and strong
+tradition in the face of the Academy, and who not only created a new
+transition, but marked his place on the new road which he had opened. To
+him Impressionism owes its existence; his tenacity enabled it to take
+root and to vanquish the opposition of the School; his work has enriched
+the world by some beautiful examples which demonstrate the union of the
+two principles of Realism and of that technical Impressionism which was
+to supply Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley with an object for their
+efforts. For the sum total of all that is evoked by his name, Edouard
+Manet certainly deserves the name of a man of genius--an incomplete
+genius, though, since the thought with him was not on the level of his
+technique, since he could never affect the emotions like a Leonardo or a
+Rembrandt, but genius all the same through the magnificent power of his
+gifts, the continuity of his style, and the importance of his part which
+infused blood into a school dying of the anaemia of conventional art.
+Whoever beholds a work of Manet's, even without knowing the conditions
+of his life, will feel that there is something great, the lion's claw
+which Delacroix had recognised as far back as 1861, and to which, it is
+said, even the great Ingres had paid homage on the jury which examined
+with disgust the _Guitarero_.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+PORTRAIT OF MADAME M.L.]
+
+To-day Manet is considered almost as a classic glory; and the progress
+for which he had given the impulse, has been so rapid, that many are
+astonished that he should ever have been considered audacious. Sight is
+transformed, strife is extinguished, and a large, select public,
+familiar with Monet and Renoir, judge Manet almost as a long defunct
+initiator. One has to know his admirable life, one has to know well the
+incredible inertia of the Salons where he appeared, to give him his full
+due. And when, after the acceptance of Impressionism, the unavoidable
+reaction will take place, Manet's qualities of solidity, truth and
+science will appear such, that he will survive many of those to whom he
+has opened the road and facilitated the success at the expense of his
+own. It will be seen that Degas and he have, more than the others, and
+with less apparent _éclat_, united the gifts which produce durable works
+in the midst of the fluctuations of fashion and the caprices of taste
+and views. Manet can, at the Louvre or any other gallery, hold his own
+in the most crushing surroundings, prove his personal qualities, and
+worthily represent a period which he loved.
+
+An enormous amount has been written on him, from Zola's bold and
+intelligent pamphlet in 1865, to the recent work by M. Théodore Duret.
+Few men have provoked more comments. In an admirable picture, _Hommage à
+Manet_, the delicate and perfect painter Fantin-Latour, a friend from
+the first hour, has grouped around the artist some of his admirers,
+Monet, Renoir, Duranty, Zola, Bazille, and Braquemond. The picture has
+to-day a place of honour at the Luxembourg, where Manet is
+insufficiently represented by _Olympia_, a study of a woman, and the
+_Balcony_. A collection is much to be desired of his lithographs, his
+etchings and his pastels, in which he has proved his diversified
+mastery, and also of his portraits of famous contemporaries, Zola,
+Rochefort, Desboutin, Proust, Mallarmé, Clemenceau, Guys, Faure,
+Baudelaire, Moore, and others, an admirable series by a visionary who
+possessed, in a period of unrest and artificiality, the quality of rude
+sincerity, and the love of truth of a Primitive.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE HOTHOUSE]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+
+I have said how vain it is to class artistic temperaments under a title
+imposed upon them generally by circumstances and dates, rather than by
+their own free will. The study of Degas will furnish additional proof
+for it. Classed with the Impressionists, this master participates in
+their ideas in the sphere of composition, rather than in that of colour.
+He belongs to them through his modernity and comprehension of character.
+Only when we come to his quite recent landscapes (1896), can we link him
+to Monet and Renoir as colourist, and he has been more their friend than
+their colleague.
+
+Degas is known by the select few, and almost ignored by the public. This
+is due to several reasons. Degas has never wished to exhibit at the
+Salons, except, I believe, once or twice at the beginning of his
+career. He has only shown his works at those special exhibitions
+arranged by the Impressionists in hired apartments (rue le Peletier, rue
+Laffitte, Boulevard des Capucines), and at some art-dealers. The art of
+Degas has never had occasion to shock the public by the exuberance of
+its colour, because he restricted himself to grey and quiet harmonies.
+Degas is a modest character, fond of silence and solitude, with a horror
+of the crowd and of controversies, and almost disinclined to show his
+works. He is a man of intelligence and ready wit, whose sallies are
+dreaded; he is almost a misanthrope. His pictures have been gradually
+sold to foreign countries and dispersed in rich galleries without having
+been seen by the public. His character is, in short, absolutely opposed
+to that of Manet, who, though he suffered from criticism, thought it his
+duty to bid it defiance. Degas's influence has, however, been
+considerable, though secretly so, and the young painters have been
+slowly inspired by his example.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE BEGGAR WOMAN]
+
+Degas is beyond all a draughtsman of the first order. His spirit is
+quite classical. He commenced by making admirable copies of the Italian
+Primitives, notably of Fra Angelico, and the whole first series of his
+works speaks of that influence: portraits, heads of deep, mat, amber
+colour, on a ground of black or grey tones, remarkable for a severity of
+intense style, and for the rare gift of psychological expression. To
+find the equal of these faces--after having stated their classic
+descent--one would have to turn to the beautiful things by Ingres, and
+certainly Degas is, with Ingres, the most learned, the most perfect
+French draughtsman of the nineteenth century. An affirmation of this
+nature is made to surprise those who judge Impressionism with
+preconceived ideas. It is none the less true that, if a series of
+Degas's first portraits were collected, the comparison would force
+itself upon one's mind irrefutably. In face of the idealist painting of
+Romanticism, Ingres represented quite clearly the cult of painting for
+its own sake. His ideas were mediocre, and went scarcely beyond the
+poor, conventional ideal of the Academy; but his genius was so great,
+that it made him paint, together with his tedious allegories, some
+incomparable portraits and nudes. He thought he was serving official
+Classicism, which still boasts of his name, but in reality he dominated
+it; and, whilst he was an imitator of Raphael, he was a powerful
+Realist. The Impressionists admire him as such, and agree with him in
+banishing from the art of painting all literary imagination, whether it
+be the tedious mythology of the School, or the historical anecdote of
+the Romanticists. Degas and Besnard admire Ingres as colossal
+draughtsman, and, beyond all, as man who, in spite of the limitations of
+his mind, preserved the clear vision of the mission of his art at a time
+when art was used for the expression of literary conceptions. Who would
+have believed it? Yet it is true, and Manet, too, held the same view of
+Ingres, little as our present academicians may think it! It happens that
+to-day Impressionism is more akin to Ingres than to Delacroix, just as
+the young poets are more akin to Racine than to Hugo. They reject the
+foreign elements, and search, before anything else, for the strict
+national tradition. Degas follows Ingres and resembles him. He is also
+reminiscent of the Primitives and of Holbein. There is, in his first
+period, the somewhat dry and geometrical perfection, the somewhat heavy
+colour which only serves to strengthen the correctness of the planes. At
+the Exposition of 1900, there was a Degas which surprised everybody. It
+was an _Interior of a cotton factory_ in an American town. This small
+picture was curiously clear: it would be impossible to paint better and
+with a more accomplished knowledge of the laws of painting. But it was
+the work of a soulless, emotionless Realist; it was a coloured
+photograph of unheard-of truth, the mathematical science of which left
+the beholder cold. This work, which is very old (it dates back to about
+1860), gave no idea of what Degas has grown into. It was the work of an
+unemotional master of technique; only just the infinitely delicate value
+of the greys and blacks revealed the future master of harmony. One
+almost might have wished to find a fault in this aggravating perfection.
+But Degas was not to remain there, and already, about that time, certain
+portraits of his are elevated by an expression of ardent melancholy, by
+warm, ivory-like, grave colouring which attracts one's eye. Before this
+series one feels the firm will of a very logical, serious, classic
+spirit who wants to know thoroughly the intimate resources of design,
+before risking to choose from among them the elements which respond best
+to his individual nature. If Degas was destined to invent, later on, so
+personal a style of design that he could be accused of "drawing badly,"
+this first period of his life is before us, to show the slow maturing of
+his boldness and how carefully he first proved to himself his knowledge,
+before venturing upon new things. In art the difficulty is, when one has
+learnt everything, to forget,--that is, to appear to forget, so as to
+create one's own style, and this apparent forgetting cloaks an
+amalgamation of science with mind. And Degas is one of those patient and
+reticent men who spend years in arriving at this; he has much in common
+with Hokusai, the old man "mad with painting," who at the close of his
+prodigious life invented arbitrary forms, after having given immortal
+examples of his interpretation of the real.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE LESSON IN THE FOYER]
+
+Degas is also clearly related to Corot, not only in the silvery
+harmonies of his suave landscapes, but also, and particularly, in his
+admirable faces whose inestimable power and moving sincerity we have
+hardly commenced to understand. Degas passed slowly from classicism to
+modernity. He never liked outbursts of colour; he is by no means an
+Impressionist from this point of view. As a draughtsman of genius he
+expresses all by the precision of the planes and values; a grey, a black
+and some notes of colour suffice for him. This might establish a link
+between him and Whistler, though he is much less mysterious and diffuse.
+Whenever Degas plays with colour, it is with the same restraint of his
+boldness; he never goes to excess in abandoning himself to its charm. He
+is neither lyrical, nor voluptuous; his energy is cold; his wise spirit
+affirms soberly the true character of a face or an object.
+
+Since a long time this spirit has moved Degas to revel in the
+observation of contemporary life. His nature has been that of a patient
+psychologist, a minute analyst, and also of a bitter ironist. The man is
+very little known. His friends say that he has an easily ruffled
+delicacy, a sensibility open to poetry, but jealous of showing its
+emotion. They say that Degas's satirical bitterness is the reverse side
+of a soul wounded by the spectacle of modern morality. One feels this
+sentiment in his work, where the sharp notation of truth is painful,
+where the realism is opposed by colouring of a sober distinction, where
+nothing, not even the portrait of a drab, could be vulgar. Degas has
+devoted himself to the profound study of certain classes of women, in
+the state of mind of a philosopher and physiologist, impartially
+inclined towards life.
+
+His work can be divided into several great series: the race-courses, the
+ballet-dancers, and the women bathing count among the most important.
+The race-courses have inspired Degas with numerous pictures. He shows in
+them a surprising knowledge of the horse. He is one of the most perfect
+painters of horses who have ever existed. He has caught the most curious
+and truest actions with infallible sureness of sight. His racecourse
+scenes are full of vitality and picturesqueness. Against clear skies,
+and light backgrounds of lawn, indicated with quiet harmony, Degas
+assembles original groups of horses which one can see moving,
+hesitating, intensely alive; and nothing could be fresher, gayer and
+more deliciously pictorial, than the green, red and yellow notes of the
+jockey's costumes strewn like flowers over these atmospheric, luminous
+landscapes, where colours do not clash, but are always gently
+shimmering, dissolved in uniform clearness. The admirable drawing of
+horses and men is so precise and seems so simple, that one can only
+slowly understand the extent of the difficulty overcome, the truth of
+these attitudes and the nervous delicacy of the execution.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE DANCING LESSON--PASTEL]
+
+The dancers go much further still in the expression of Degas's
+temperament. They have been studied at the _foyer_ of the Opera and at
+the rehearsal, sometimes in groups, sometimes isolated. Some pictures
+which will always count among the masterpieces of the nineteenth
+century, represent the whole _corps de ballet_ performing on the stage
+before a dark and empty house. By the feeble light of some lamps the
+black coats of the stage managers mix themselves with the gauze skirts.
+Here the draughtsman joins the great colourist: the petticoats of pink
+or white tulle, the graceful legs covered with flesh-coloured silk, the
+arms and the shoulders, and the hair crowned with flowers, offer
+motives of exquisite colour and of a tone of living flowers. But the
+psychologist does not lose his rights: not only does he amuse himself
+with noting the special movements of the dancers, but he also notes the
+anatomical defects. He shows with cruel frankness, with a strange love
+of modern character, the strong legs, the thin shoulders, and the
+provoking and vulgar heads of these frequently ugly girls of common
+origin. With the irony of an entomologist piercing the coloured insect
+he shows us the disenchanting reality in the sad shadow of the scenes,
+of these butterflies who dazzle us on the stage. He unveils the reverse
+side of a dream without, however, caricaturing; he raises even, under
+the imperfection of the bodies, the animal grace of the organisms; he
+has the severe beauty of the true. He gives to his groups of
+ballet-dancers the charming line of garlands and restores to them a
+harmony in the _ensemble_, so as to prove that he does not misjudge the
+charm conferred upon them by rhythm, however defective they may be
+individually. At other times he devotes himself to the study of their
+practice. In bare rooms with curtainless windows, in the cold and sad
+light of the boxes, he passionately draws the dancers learning their
+steps, reaching high bars with the tips of their toes, forcing
+themselves into quaint poses in order to make themselves more supple,
+manoeuvring to the sound of a fiddle scratched by an old teacher--and he
+leaves us stupefied at the knowledge, the observation, the talent
+profusely spent on these little pictures. Furthermore there are humorous
+scenes: ballet-dancers chatting in the dark with _habitués_ of the
+Opera, others looking at the house through the small opening of the
+curtain, others re-tying their shoe-laces, and they all are prodigious
+drawings of movement anatomically as correct as they are unexpected.
+Degas's old style of drawing undergoes modification: with the help of
+slight deformations, accentuations of the modelling and subtle
+falsifications of the proportions, managed with infinite tact and
+knowledge, the artist brings forth in relief the important gesture,
+subordinating to it all the others. He attempts _drawing by movement_ as
+it is caught by our eyes in life, where they do not state the
+proportions, but first of all the gesture which strikes them. In these
+drawings by Degas all the lines follow the impulsion of the thought.
+What one sees first, is the movement transmitted to the members by the
+will. The active part of the body is more carefully studied than the
+rest, which is indicated by bold foreshortenings, placed in the second
+plane, and apparently only serves to throw into relief the raised arm or
+leg. This is no longer merely _exact_, it is _true_; it is a superior
+degree of truth.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE DANCERS]
+
+These pictures of dancers are psychologic documents of great value. The
+physical and moral atmosphere of these surroundings is called forth by a
+master. Such and such a figure or attitude tells us more about Parisian
+life than a whole novel, and Degas has been lavish of his intellect and
+his philosophy of bitter scepticism. But they are also marvellous
+pictorial studies which, in spite of the special, anecdotal subjects,
+rise to the level of grand painting through sheer power of
+draughtsmanship and charm of tone. Degas has the special quality of
+giving the precise sensation of the third dimension. The atmosphere
+circulates round his figures; you walk round them; you see them in their
+real plane, and they present themselves in a thousand unexpected
+arrangements. Degas is undoubtedly the one man of his age who has most
+contributed towards infusing new life into the representation of human
+figures: in this respect his pictures resemble no one else's. The same
+qualities will be found in his series of women bathing. These interiors,
+where the actions of the bathers are caught amidst the stuffs, flowered
+cushions, linen, sponges and tubs, are sharp visions of modernity. Degas
+observes here, with the tenacious perfection of his talent, the
+slightest shiver of the flesh refreshed by cold water. His masterly
+drawing follows the most delicate inflexion of the muscles and suggests
+the nervous system under the skin. He observes with extraordinary
+subtlety the awkwardness of the nude being at a time when nudity is no
+longer accustomed to show itself, and this true nudity is in strong
+contrast to that of the academicians. One might say of Degas that he has
+the disease of truth, if the necessity of truth were not health itself!
+These bodies are still marked with the impressions of the garments; the
+movements remain those of a clothed being which is only nude as an
+exception. The painter notices beauty, but he looks for it particularly
+in the profound characterisation of the types which he studies, and his
+pastels have the massiveness and the sombre style of bronze. He has also
+painted café-scenes, prostitutes and supers, with a mocking and sad
+energy; he has even amused himself with painting washerwomen, to
+translate the movements of the women of the people. And his colour with
+its pearly whites, subdued blues and delicate greys, always elevates
+everything he does, and confers upon him a distinctive style.
+
+Finally, about 1896, Degas has revealed himself as a dreamy landscapist.
+His recent landscapes are symphonies in colours of strange harmony and
+hallucinations of rare tones, resembling music rather than painting. It
+is perhaps in these pictures that he has revealed certain dreams
+hitherto jealously hidden.
+
+And now I must speak of his technique. It is very singular and varied,
+and one of the most complicated in existence. In his first works, which
+are apparently as simple as Corot's, he does not employ the process of
+colour-spots. But many of the works in his second manner are a
+combination of drawing, painting and pastel. He has invented a kind of
+engraving mixed with wash-drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of
+special pattern. Here one can find again his meticulous spirit. He has
+many of the qualities of the scientist; he is as much chemist as
+painter. It has been said of him, that he was a great artist of the
+decadence. This is materially inexact, since his qualities of
+draughtsmanship are those of a superb Classicist, and his colouring of
+very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail,
+his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the signs of an
+extremely alert intellect who regards life prosaically and with a
+lassitude and disenchantment which are only consoled by the passion for
+truth. Certain water-colours of his heightened by pastel, and certain
+landscapes, are somewhat disconcerting through the preciousness of his
+method; others are surprisingly spontaneous. All his work has an
+undercurrent of thought. In short, this Realist is almost a mystic. He
+has observed a limited section of humanity, but what he has seen has not
+been seen so profoundly by anybody else.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+HORSES IN THE MEADOWS]
+
+Degas has exercised an occult, but very serious, influence. He has lived
+alone, without pupils and almost without friends; the only pupils one
+might speak of are the caricaturist Forain, who has painted many small
+pictures inspired by him, and the excellent American lady-artist Miss
+Mary Cassatt. But all modern draughtsmen have been taught a lesson by
+his painting: Renouard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen have been
+impressed by it, and the young generation considers Degas as a master.
+And that is also the unexpressed idea of the academicians, and
+especially of those who have sufficient talent to be able to appreciate
+all the science and power of such an art. The writer of this book
+happened one day to mention Degas's name before a member of the
+Institute. "What!" exclaimed he, "you know him? Why didn't you speak to
+me about him?" And when he received the reply, that I did not consider
+Degas to be an agreeable topic for him, the illustrious official
+answered vivaciously, "But do you think I am a fool, and that I do not
+know that Degas is one of the greatest draughtsmen who have ever
+lived?"--"Why, then, my dear sir, has he never been received at the
+Salons, and not even been decorated at the age of sixty-five?"--"Ah,"
+replied the Academician a little angrily, "that is another matter!"
+
+Degas despises glory. It is believed that he has by him a number of
+canvases which will have to be burnt after his death in accordance with
+his will. He is a man who has loved his art like a mistress, with
+jealous passion, and has sacrificed to it all that other
+artists--enthusiasts even--are accustomed to reserve for their personal
+interest. Degas, the incomparable pastellist, the faultless draughtsman,
+the bitter, satirical, pessimistic genius, is an isolated phenomenon in
+his period, a grand creator, unattached to his time. The painters and
+the select few among art-lovers know what considerable force there is in
+him. Though almost latent as yet, it will reveal itself brilliantly,
+when an opportunity arises for bringing together the vast quantity of
+his work. As is the case with Manet, though in a different sense, his
+powerful classic qualities will become most prominent in this ordeal,
+and this classicism has never abandoned him in his audacities. To Degas
+is due a new method of observation in drawing. He will have been the
+first to study the relation between the moving lines of a living being
+and the immovable lines of the scene which serves as its setting; the
+first, also, to define drawing, not as a graphic science, but as the
+valuation of the third dimension, and thus to apply to painting the
+principles hitherto reserved for sculpture. Finally, he will be counted
+among the great analysts. His vision, tenacious, intense, and sombre,
+stimulates thought: across what appears to be the most immediate and
+even the most vulgar reality it reaches a grand, artistic style; it
+states profoundly the facts of life, it condenses a little the human
+soul: and this will suffice to secure for Degas an important place in
+his epoch, a little apart from Impressionism. Without noise, and through
+the sheer charm of his originality, he has contributed his share towards
+undermining the false doctrines of academic art before the painters, as
+Manet has undermined them before the public.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+AN INTERIOR, AFTER DINNER]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+
+With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant
+technical expression, and touch upon the principal points referred to in
+the second chapter of this book.
+
+Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and
+Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road
+to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study
+of the laws of light. His work is a magnificent verification of the
+optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul. It is born
+spontaneously from the artist's vision, and happens to be a rigorous
+demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared
+to know. Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to
+join hands with the scientist. His work supplies not only the very
+basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed
+it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws. It
+will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds
+met by the artists hitherto, and it will also serve to endow decorative
+art and mural painting with a process, the applications of which are
+manyfold and splendid.
+
+I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet's
+painting more clearly even than from Manet's. Suppression of local
+colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and
+division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed
+colours--these are the essential principles of _chromatism_ (for this
+word should be used instead of the very vague term "Impressionism").
+Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape
+painting.
+
+There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an
+excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.
+One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined
+jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself
+be sufficient to save from oblivion the man who has painted it. But the
+study of light upon the figure has been the special preoccupation of
+Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and, after the Impressionists, of the great
+lyricist, Albert Besnard, who has concentrated the Impressionist
+qualities by placing them at the service of a very personal conception
+of symbolistic art. Monet commenced with trying to find his way by
+painting figures, then landscapes and principally sea pictures and boats
+in harbours, with a somewhat sombre robustness and very broad and solid
+draughtsmanship. His first luminous studies date back to about 1885.
+Obedient to the same ideas as Degas he had to avoid the Salons and only
+show his pictures gradually in private galleries. For years he remained
+unknown. It is only giving M. Durand-Ruel his due, to state that he was
+one of the first to anticipate the Impressionist school and to buy the
+first works of these painters, who were treated as madmen and
+charlatans. He has become great with them, and has made his fortune and
+theirs through having had confidence in them, and no fortune has been
+better deserved. Thirty years ago nobody would have bought pictures by
+Degas or Monet, which are sold to-day for a thousand pounds. This detail
+is only mentioned to show the evolution of Impressionism as regards
+public opinion.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR]
+
+So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis of the laws of light
+that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show
+clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series
+of pictures painted from nature at all hours of the day. This is the
+principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might
+be called "Investigation of the variations of sunlight." The most famous
+of these series are the _Hay-ricks_, the _Poplars_, the _Cliffs of
+Etretat_, the _Golfe Juan_, the _Coins de Rivière_, the _Cathedrals_,
+the _Water-lilies_, and finally the _Thames_ series which Monet is at
+present engaged upon. They are like great poems, and the splendour of
+the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the
+symphonic _parti-pris_ of the colours, make their realism, the minute
+contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.
+
+Monet paints these series from nature. He is said to take with him in a
+carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to
+hour, taking them up again the next day. He notes, for example, from
+nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick;
+at ten o'clock he passes on to another canvas and recommences the study
+until eleven o'clock. Thus he follows step by step the modifications of
+the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of
+the whole series. He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times
+over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different. He exhibits them
+together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history
+of light playing upon one and the same object. It is a dazzling display
+of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation. Light is certainly
+the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is
+thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see
+the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the
+arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with
+infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric
+vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights
+where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange,
+predominate, and it is the proportional quantity of the spots that
+differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights,
+just as it actually happens in optic science. There are some midday
+scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette--tree, hay-rick,
+or rock--is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust
+of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as
+he would in actual sunlight. Sometimes even there are no more shadows at
+all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create
+contrasts of colours. Everything is light, and the painter seems easily
+to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a
+gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE]
+
+Generally he finds a very simple _motif_ sufficient; a hay-rick, some
+slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also
+proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater
+complexity. Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst
+tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction
+of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a
+cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river,
+or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun. All
+this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or
+fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in
+the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped
+with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain
+distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented
+with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has
+dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the
+secret order which has presided over this accumulation of spots which
+seem projected in a furious shower. It is a veritable orchestral piece,
+where every colour is an instrument with a distinct part, and where the
+hours with their different tints represent the successive themes. Monet
+is the equal of the greatest landscape painters as regards the
+comprehension of the true character of every soil he has studied, which
+is the supreme quality of his art. Though absorbed beyond all by study
+of the sunlight, he has thought it useless to go to Morocco or Algeria.
+He has found Brittany, Holland, the _Ile de France_, the _Cote d'Azur_
+and England sufficient sources of inspiration for his symphonies, which
+cover from end to end the scale of perceptible colours. He has
+expressed, for instance, the mild and vaporous softness of the
+Mediterranean, the luxuriant vegetation of the gardens of Cannes and
+Antibes, with a truthfulness and knowledge of the psychology of land and
+water which can only be properly appreciated by those who live in this
+enchanted region. This has not prevented him from understanding better
+than anybody the wildness, the grand austereness of the rocks of
+_Belle-Isle en mer_, to express it in pictures in which one really feels
+the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking
+against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of
+_Water-lilies_ expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet
+basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has
+painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of
+bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at
+twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, tulip-fields in Holland,
+bouquets, effects of snow and hoar frost of exquisite softness, and
+sailing boats passing in the sun. He has painted some views of the banks
+of the Seine which are quite wonderful in their power of conjuring up
+these scenes, and over all this has roved his splendid vision of a
+great, amorous and radiant colourist. The _Cathedrals_ are even more of
+a _tour de force_ of his talent. They consist of seventeen studies of
+Rouen Cathedral, the towers of which fill the whole of the picture,
+leaving barely a little space, a little corner of the square, at the
+foot of the enormous stone-shafts which mount to the very top of the
+picture. Here he has no proper means to express the play of the
+reflections, no changeful waters or foliage: the grey stone, worn by
+time and blackened by centuries, is for seventeen times the monochrome,
+the thankless theme upon which the painter is about to exercise his
+vision. But Monet finds means of making the most dazzling atmospheric
+harmonies sparkle upon this stone. Pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at
+midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun,
+standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist,
+the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with
+its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without
+minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the
+composite, bold and rich tone of Oriental carpets.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+POPLARS ON THE EPTE IN AUTUMN]
+
+Monet excels also in suggesting the _drawing of light_, if I may venture
+to use this expression. He makes us understand the movement of the
+vibrations of heat, the movement of the luminous waves; he also
+understands how to paint the sensation of strong wind. "Before one of
+Manet's pictures," said Mme. Morisot, "I always know which way to
+incline my umbrella." Monet is also an incomparable painter of water.
+Pond, river, or sea--he knows how to differentiate their colouring,
+their consistency, and their currents, and he transfixes a moment of
+their fleeting life. He is intuitive to an exceptional degree in the
+intimate composition of matter, water, earth, stone or air, and this
+intuition serves him in place of intellectuality in his art. He is a
+painter _par excellence_, a man born for painting, and this power of
+penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a
+kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate
+truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is
+the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist,
+Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.
+
+His work is immense. He produces with astonishing rapidity, and he has
+yet another characteristic of the great painters: that of having put his
+hand to every kind of subject. His recent studies of the Thames are, at
+the decline of his energetic maturity, as beautiful and as spontaneous
+as the _Hay-ricks_ of seventeen years back. They are thrillingly
+truthful visions of fairy mists, where showers of silver and gold
+sparkle through rosy vapours; and at the same time Monet combines in
+this series the dream-landscapes of Turner with Monticelli's
+accumulation of precious stones. Thus interpreted by this intense
+faculty of synthesis, nature, simplified in detail and contemplated in
+its grand lines, becomes truly a living dream.
+
+Since the _Hay-ricks_ one can say that the work of Claude Monet is
+glorious. It has been made sacred to the admiring love of the
+connoisseurs on the day when Monet joined Rodin in an exhibition which
+is famous in the annals of modern art. Yet no official distinction has
+intervened to recognise one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth
+century. The influence of Monet has been enormous all over Europe and
+America. The _process of colour spots_[1] (let us adhere to this
+rudimentary name which has become current) has been adopted by a whole
+crowd of painters. I shall have to say a few words about it at the end
+of this book. But it is befitting to terminate this all too short study
+by explaining that the most lyrical of the Impressionists has also been
+the theorist _par excellence_. His work connects easel painting with
+mural painting. No Minister of Fine Arts has been found, who would
+surmount the systematic opposition of the official painters, and give
+Manet a commission for grand mural compositions, for which his method is
+admirably suited. It has taken long years before such works were
+entrusted to Besnard, who, with Puvis de Chavannes, has given Paris
+her most beautiful modern decorations, but Besnard's work is the direct
+outcome of Claude Monet's harmonies. The principle of the division of
+tones and of the study of complementary colours has been full of
+revelations, and one of the most fruitful theories. It has probably been
+the principle which will designate most clearly the originality of the
+painting of the future. To have invented it, is enough to secure
+permanent glory for a man. And without wishing to put again the question
+of the antagonism of realism and idealism, one may well say that a
+painter who invents a method and shows such power, is highly
+intellectual and gifted with a pictorial intelligence. Whatever the
+subjects he treats, he creates an aesthetic emotion equivalent, if not
+similar, to those engendered by the most complex symbolism. In his
+ardent love of nature Monet has found his greatness; he suggests the
+secrets by stating the evident facts. That is the law common to all the
+arts.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Procédé de la tache._]
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK
+
+
+The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of
+forty years. It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist
+art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general
+destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art
+movement. It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy
+magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the
+technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite. Like
+Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has
+treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes
+and still-life, all with equal beauty.
+
+His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.
+His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses
+the same technique as Boucher: fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy,
+laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the principal
+values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those
+of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the
+opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious attitudes and an
+effort towards decorative convention. Nevertheless, his _Bathers_, of
+which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern
+and personal. Renoir's nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas,
+whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in
+the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally
+looked for in the features of the clothed being. Nor is Renoir's nude
+that of the academicians, that poetised nude arranged according to a
+pseudo-Greek ideal, which has nothing in common with contemporary women.
+What Renoir sees in the nude is less the line, than the brilliancy of
+the epidermis, the luminous, nacreous substance of the flesh: it is the
+"ideal clay"; and in this he shows the vision of a poet; he transfigures
+reality, but in a very different sense from that of the School.
+Renoir's woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless,
+wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub. He sets her in backgrounds of
+foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents. She is a luxuriant, firm,
+healthy and naïve woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes
+wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and
+her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti,
+born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where
+entire ingenuousness is a guarantee against all indecency. One cannot
+but be astonished at this mixture of "Japanism," savagism and eighteenth
+century taste, which constitutes inimitably the nude of Renoir.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+DÉJEUNER]
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+IN THE BOX]
+
+M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist
+methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits.
+Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet.
+These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the
+objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are
+frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in
+the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of
+depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as
+interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the
+interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the
+essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He
+knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time;
+how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate,
+behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches
+which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is
+now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the _Déjeûner des
+Canotiers_, the _Bal au Moulin de la Galette_, the _Box_, the _Terrace_,
+the _First Step_, the _Sleeping Woman with a Cat_, and his most
+beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied
+with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent
+of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the _Woman with the broken neck_ is related
+to Manet; the portrait of _Sisley_ invents pointillism fifteen years
+before the pointillists; _La Pensée_, this masterpiece, evokes
+Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the
+_Jeune Fille au panier_ is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the
+delightful _Jeune Fille à la promenade_ is connected with Fragonard; the
+_Box_, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole
+worldliness of 1875. The portrait of _Jeanne Samary_ is an evocation of
+the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white
+satin and golden hair.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+YOUNG GIRL PROMENADING]
+
+Renoir's realism bears in spite of all, the imprint of the lyric spirit
+and of sweetness. It has neither the nervous veracity of Manet, nor the
+bitterness of Degas, who both love their epoch and find it interesting
+without idealising it and who have the vision of psychologist novelists.
+Before everything else he is a painter. What he sees in the _Bal au
+Moulin de la Galette_, are not the stigmata of vice and impudence, the
+ridiculous and the sad sides of the doubtful types of this low resort.
+He sees the gaiety of Sundays, the flashes of the sun, the oddity of a
+crowd carried away by the rhythm of the valses, the laughter, the
+clinking of glasses, the vibrating and hot atmosphere; and he applies
+to this spectacle of joyous vulgarity his gifts as a sumptuous
+colourist, the arabesque of the lines, the gracefulness of his bathers,
+and the happy eurythmy of his soul. The straw hats are changed into
+gold, the blue jackets are sapphires, and out of a still exact realism
+is born a poem of light. The _Déjeûner des Canotiers_ is a subject which
+has been painted a hundred times, either for the purpose of studying
+popular types, or of painting white table-cloths amidst sunny foliage.
+Yet Renoir is the only painter who has raised this small subject to the
+proportions and the style of a large canvas, through the pictorial charm
+and the masterly richness of the arrangement. The _Box_, conceived in a
+low harmony, in a golden twilight, is a work worthy of Reynolds. The
+pale and attentive face of the lady makes one think of the great English
+master's best works; the necklace, the flesh, the flounce of lace and
+the hands are marvels of skill and of taste, which the greatest modern
+virtuosos, Sargent and Besnard, have not surpassed, and, as far as the
+man in the background is concerned, his white waistcoat, his
+dress-coat, his gloved hand would suffice to secure the fame of a
+painter. The _Sleeping Woman_, the _First Step_, the _Terrace_, and the
+decorative _Dance_ panels reveal Renoir as an _intimiste_ and as an
+admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of
+grasping nature and of ingenuity--strangers to all decadent
+complexity--have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have
+expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with
+over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of
+dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with
+inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+WOMAN'S BUST]
+
+His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It
+seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the
+palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches
+for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical
+dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to
+take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and
+conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in assembling those tones
+which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed
+strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded
+colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he
+can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One
+feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian
+shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one
+refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional
+virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It
+is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the
+most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his
+generation. The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques
+according to their own character: the gladioles and roses in pasty
+paint, the poor flowers of the field are defined by a cross-hatching of
+little touches. Influenced by the purple shadow of the large
+flower-decked hats, the heads of young girls are painted on coarse
+canvas, sketched in broad strokes, with the hair in one colour only.
+Some little study appears like wool, some other has the air of agate,
+or is marbled and veined according to his inexplicable whim. We have
+here an incessant confusion of methods, a complete emancipation of the
+virtuoso who listens only to his fancy. Now and then the harmonies are
+false and the drawing incorrect, but these weaknesses do at least no
+harm to the values, the character and the general movement of the work,
+which are rather accentuated by them.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+YOUNG WOMAN IN EMPIRE COSTUME]
+
+Surely, it would be false to exclude ideologist painting which has
+produced wonders, and not less iniquitous to reproach Impressionism with
+not having taken any interest in it! One has to avoid the kind of
+criticism which consists in reproaching one movement with not having had
+the qualities of the others whilst maintaining its own, and we have
+abandoned the idea of Beauty divided into a certain number of clauses
+and programmes, towards the sum total of which the efforts of the
+eclectic candidates are directed. M. Renoir is probably the most
+representative figure of a movement where he seems to have united all
+the qualities of his friends. To criticise him means to criticise
+Impressionism itself. Having spent half of its strength in proving to
+its adversaries that they were wrong, and the other half in inventing
+technical methods, it is not surprising to find that Impressionism has
+been wanting in intellectual depth and has left to its successors the
+care of realising works of great thought. But it has brought us a sunny
+smile, a breath of pure air. It is so fascinating, that one cannot but
+love its very mistakes which make it more human and more accessible.
+Renoir is the most lyrical, the most musical, the most subtle of the
+masters of this art. Some of his landscapes are as beautiful as those of
+Claude Monet. His nudes are as masterly in painting as Manet's, and more
+supple. Not having attained the scientific drawing which one finds in
+Degas's, they have a grace and a brilliancy which Degas's nudes have
+never known. If his rare portraits of men are inferior to those of his
+rivals, his women's portraits have a frequently superior distinction.
+His great modern compositions are equal to the most beautiful works by
+Manet and Degas. His inequalities are also more striking than theirs.
+Being a fantastic, nervous improvisator he is more exposed to radical
+mistakes. But he is a profoundly sincere and conscientious artist.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+ON THE TERRACE]
+
+The race speaks in him. It is inexplicable that he should not have met
+with startling success, since he is voluptuous, bright, happy and
+learned without heaviness. One has to attribute his relative isolation
+to the violence of the controversies, and particularly to the dignity of
+a poet gently disdainful of public opinion and paying attention solely
+to painting, his great and only love. Manet has been a fighter whose
+works have created scandal. Renoir has neither shown, nor hidden
+himself: he has painted according to his dream, spreading his works,
+without mixing up his name or his personality with the tumult that raged
+around his friends. And now, for that very reason, his work appears
+fresher and younger, more primitive and candid, more intoxicated with
+flowers, flesh and sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE SECONDARY PAINTERS OF IMPRESSIONISM--CAMILLE PISSARRO, ALFRED
+SISLEY, PAUL CÉZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MISS MARY CASSATT, EVA GONZALÈS,
+GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE, BAZILLE, ALBERT LEBOURG, EUGÈNE BOUDIN.
+
+
+Manet, Degas, Monet and Renoir will present themselves as a glorious
+quartet of masters, in the history of painting. We must now speak of
+some personalities who have grown up by their side and who, without
+being great, offer nevertheless a rich and beautiful series of works.
+
+Of these personalities the most considerable is certainly that of M.
+Camille Pissarro. He painted according to some wise and somewhat timid
+formulas, when Manet's example won him over to Impressionism to which he
+has remained faithful. M. Pissarro has been enormously productive. His
+work is composed of landscapes, rustic scenes, and studies of streets
+and markets. His first landscapes are in the manner of Corot, but bathed
+in blond colour: vast cornfields, sunny woods, skies with big, flocking
+clouds, effects of soft light--these are the motifs of some charming
+canvases which have a solid, classic quality. Later the artist adopted
+the method of the dissociation of tones, from which he obtained some
+happy effects. His harvest and market scenes are luminous and alive. The
+figures in these recall those of Millet. They bear witness to high
+qualities of sincere observation, and are the work of a man profoundly
+enamoured of rustic life. M. Pissarro excels in grouping the figures, in
+correctly catching their attitudes and in rendering the medley of a
+crowd in the sun. Certain fans in particular will always remain
+delightful caprices of fresh colour, but it would be vain to look in
+this attractive, animated and clear painting for the psychologic gifts,
+the profound feeling for grand silhouettes, and the intuition of the
+worn and gloomy soul of the men of the soil, which have made Millet's
+noble glory. At the time when, about 1885, the neo-Impressionists whom
+we shall study later on invented the Pointillist method, M. Pissarro
+tried it and applied it judiciously, with the patient, serious and
+slightly anxious talent, by which he is distinguished. Recently, in a
+series of pictures representing views of Paris (the boulevards and the
+Avenue de l'Opéra) M. Pissarro has shewn rare vision and skill and has
+perhaps signed his most beautiful and personal paintings. The
+perspective, the lighting, the tones of the houses and of the crowds,
+the reflections of rain or sunshine are intensely true; they make one
+feel the atmosphere, the charm and the soul of Paris. One can say of
+Pissarro that he lacks none of the gifts of his profession. He is a
+learned, fruitful and upright artist. But he has lacked originality; he
+always recalls those whom he admires and whose ideas he applies boldly
+and tastefully. It is probable that his conscientious nature has
+contributed not little towards keeping him in the second rank.
+Incapable, certainly, of voluntarily imitating, this excellent and
+diligent painter has not had the sparks of genius of his friends, but
+all that can be given to a man through conscientious study, striving
+after truth and love of art, has been acquired by M. Pissarro. The rest
+depended on destiny only. There is no character more worthy of respect
+and no effort more meritorious than his, and there can be no better
+proof of his disinterestedness and his modesty, than the fact that,
+although he has thirty years of work behind him, an honoured name and
+white hair, M. Pissarro did not hesitate to adopt, quite frankly, the
+technique of the young Pointillist painters, his juniors, because it
+appeared to him better than his own. He is, if not a great painter, at
+least one of the most interesting rustic landscape painters of our
+epoch. His visions of the country are quite his own, and are a
+harmonious mixture of Classicism and Impressionism which will secure one
+of the most honourable places to his work.
+
+[Illustration: PISSARRO
+
+RUE DE L'EPICERIE, ROUEN]
+
+[Illustration: PISSARRO
+
+BOULEVARDE MONTMARTRE]
+
+[Illustration: PISSARRO
+
+THE BOILDIEAUX BRIDGE AT ROUEN]
+
+[Illustration: PISSARO
+
+THE AVENUE DE L'OPÉRA]
+
+There has, perhaps, been more original individuality in the landscape
+painter Alfred Sisley. He possessed in the highest degree the feeling
+for light, and if he did not have the power, the masterly passion of
+Claude Monet, he will at least deserve to be frequently placed by his
+side as regards the expression of certain combinations of light. He did
+not have the decorative feeling which makes Monet's landscapes so
+imposing; one does not see in his work that surprising lyrical
+interpretation which knows how to express the drama of the raging waves,
+the heavy slumber of enormous masses of rock, the intense torpor of the
+sun on the sea. But in all that concerns the mild aspects of the _Ile de
+France_, the sweet and fresh landscapes, Sisley is not unworthy of being
+compared with Monet. He equals him in numerous pictures; he has a
+similar delicacy of perception, a similar fervour of execution. He is
+the painter of great, blue rivers curving towards the horizon; of
+blossoming orchards; of bright hills with red-roofed hamlets scattered
+about; he is, beyond all, the painter of French skies which he presents
+with admirable vivacity and facility. He has the feeling for the
+transparency of atmosphere, and if his technique allies him directly
+with Impressionism, one can well feel, that he painted spontaneously and
+that this technique happened to be adapted to his nature, without his
+having attempted to appropriate it for the sake of novelty. Sisley has
+painted a notable series of pictures in the quaint village of Moret on
+the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he died at a ripe
+age, and these canvases will figure among the most charming landscapes
+of our epoch. Sisley was a veteran of Impressionism. At the Exhibition
+of 1900, in the two rooms reserved for the works of this school, there
+were to be seen a dozen of Sisley's canvases. By the side of the finest
+Renoirs, Monets and Manets they kept their charm and their brilliancy
+with a singular flavour, and this was for many critics a revelation as
+to the real place of this artist, whom they had hitherto considered as a
+pretty colourist of only relative importance.
+
+[Illustration: SISLEY
+
+SNOW EFFECT]
+
+[Illustration: SISLEY
+
+BOUGIVAL, AT THE WATER'S EDGE]
+
+[Illustration: SISLEY
+
+BRIDGE AT MORET]
+
+Paul Cézanne, unknown to the public, is appreciated by a small group of
+art lovers. He is an artist who lives in Provence, away from the world;
+he is supposed to have served as model for the Impressionist painter
+Claude Lantier, described by Zola in his celebrated novel "L'Oeuvre."
+Cézanne has painted landscapes, rustic scenes and still-life pictures.
+His figures are clumsy and brutal and inharmonious in colour, but his
+landscapes have the merit of a robust simplicity of vision. These
+pictures are almost primitive, and they are loved by the young
+Impressionists because of their exclusion of all "cleverness." A charm
+of rude simplicity and sincerity can be found in these works in which
+Cézanne employs only just the means which are indispensable for his end.
+His still-life pictures are particularly interesting owing to the
+spotless brilliancy of their colours, the straightforwardness of the
+tones, and the originality of certain shades analogous to those of old
+faience. Cézanne is a conscientious painter without skill, intensely
+absorbed in rendering what he sees, and his strong and tenacious
+attention has sometimes succeeded in finding beauty. He reminds more of
+an ancient Gothic craftsman, than of a modern artist, and he is full of
+repose as a contrast to the dazzling virtuosity of so many painters.
+
+[Illustration: CÉZANNE
+
+DESSERT]
+
+Berthe Morisot will remain the most fascinating figure of
+Impressionism,--the one who has stated most precisely the femineity of
+this luminous and iridescent art. Having married Eugène Manet, the
+brother of the great painter, she exhibited at various private
+galleries, where the works of the first Impressionists were to be
+seen, and became as famous for her talent as for her beauty. When Manet
+died, she took charge of his memory and of his work, and she helped with
+all her energetic intelligence to procure them their just and final
+estimation. Mme. Eugène Manet has certainly been one of the most
+beautiful types of French women of the end of the nineteenth century.
+When she died prematurely at the age of fifty (in 1895), she left a
+considerable amount of work: gardens, young girls, water-colours of
+refined taste, of surprising energy, and of a colouring as
+distinguished, as it is unexpected. As great grand-daughter of
+Fragonard, Berthe Morisot (since we ought to leave her the name with
+which her respect for Manet's great name made her always sign her works)
+seemed to have inherited from her famous ancestor his French
+gracefulness, his spirited elegance, and all his other great qualities.
+She has also felt the influence of Corot, of Manet and of Renoir. All
+her work is bathed in brightness, in azure, in sunlight; it is a woman's
+work, but it has a strength, a freedom of touch and an originality,
+which one would hardly have expected. Her water-colours, particularly,
+belong to a superior art: some notes of colour suffice to indicate sky,
+sea, or a forest background, and everything shows a sure and masterly
+fancy, for which our time can offer no analogy. A series of Berthe
+Morisot's works looks like a veritable bouquet whose brilliancy is due
+less to the colour-schemes which are comparatively soft, grey and blue,
+than to the absolute correctness of the values. A hundred canvases, and
+perhaps three hundred water-colours attest this talent of the first
+rank. Normandy coast scenes with pearly skies and turquoise horizons,
+sparkling Nice gardens, fruit-laden orchards, girls in white dresses
+with big flower-decked hats, young women in ball-dress, and flowers are
+the favourite themes of this artist who was the friend of Renoir, of
+Degas and of Mallarmé.
+
+[Illustration: BERTHE MORISOT
+
+MELANCHOLY]
+
+[Illustration: BERTHE MORISOT
+
+YOUNG WOMAN SEATED]
+
+Miss Mary Cassatt will deserve a place by her side. American by birth,
+she became French through her assiduous participation in the exhibitions
+of the Impressionists. She is one of the very few painters whom Degas
+has advised, with Forain and M. Ernest Rouart. (This latter, a painter
+himself, a son of the painter and wealthy collector Henri Rouart, has
+married Mme. Manet's daughter who is also an artist.) Miss Cassatt has
+made a speciality of studying children, and she is, perhaps, the artist
+of this period who has understood and expressed them with the greatest
+originality. She is a pastellist of note, and some of her pastels are as
+good as Manet's and Degas's, so far as broad execution and brilliancy
+and delicacy of tones are concerned. Ten years ago Miss Cassatt
+exhibited a series of ten etchings in colour, representing scenes of
+mothers and children at their toilet. At that time this _genre_ was
+almost abandoned, and Miss Cassatt caused astonishment by her boldness
+which faced the most serious difficulties. One can relish in this
+artist's pictures, besides the great qualities of solid draughtsmanship,
+correct values, and skilful interpretation of flesh and stuffs, a
+profound sentiment of infantile life, childish gestures, clear and
+unconscious looks, and the loving expression of the mothers. Miss
+Cassatt is the painter and psychologist of babies and young mothers whom
+she likes to depict in the freshness of an orchard, or against
+backgrounds of the flowered hangings of dressing-rooms, amidst bright
+linen, tubs, and china, in smiling intimacy. To these two remarkable
+women another has to be added, Eva Gonzalès, the favourite pupil of
+Manet who has painted a fine portrait of her. Eva Gonzalès became the
+wife of the excellent engraver Henri Guérard, and died prematurely, not,
+however, before one was able to admire her talent as an exquisitely
+delicate pastellist. Having first been a pupil of Chaplin, she soon came
+to forget the tricks of technique in order to acquire under Manet's
+guidance the qualities of clearness and the strength of the great
+painter of _Argenteuil_; and she would certainly have taken one of the
+first places in modern art, had not her career been cut short by death.
+A small pastel at the Luxembourg Gallery proves her convincing qualities
+as a colourist.
+
+[Illustration: MARY CASSATT
+
+GETTING UP BABY]
+
+[Illustration: MARY CASSATT
+
+WOMEN AND CHILD]
+
+Gustave Caillebotte was a friend of the Impressionists from the very
+first hour. He was rich, fond of art, and himself a painter of great
+merit who modestly kept hidden behind his comrades. His picture _Les
+raboteurs de parquets_ made him formerly the butt of derision. To-day
+his work, at the Luxembourg Gallery seems hardly a fit pretext for so
+much controversy, but at that time much was considered as madness,
+that to our eyes appears quite natural. This picture is a study of
+oblique perspective and its curious _ensemble_ of rising lines sufficed
+to provoke astonishment. The work is, moreover, grey and discreet in
+colour and has some qualities of fine light, but is on the whole not
+very interesting. Recently an exhibition of works by Caillebotte has
+made it apparent that this amateur was a misjudged painter. The
+still-life pictures in this exhibition were specially remarkable. But
+the name of Caillebotte was destined to reach the public only in
+connection with controversies and scandal. When he died, he left to the
+State a magnificent collection of objets-d'art and of old pictures, and
+also a collection of Impressionist works, stipulating that these two
+bequests should be inseparable. He wished by this means to impose the
+works of his friends upon the museums, and thus avenge their unjust
+neglect. The State accepted the two legacies, since the Louvre
+absolutely wanted to benefit by the ancient portion, in spite of the
+efforts of the Academicians who revolted against the acceptance of the
+modern part. On this occasion one could see how far the official
+artists were carried by their hatred of the Impressionists. A group of
+Academicians, professors at the _Ecole des Beaux-Arts_, threatened the
+minister that they would resign _en masse_. "We cannot," they wrote to
+the papers, "continue to teach an art of which we believe we know the
+laws, from the moment the State admits into the museums, where our
+pupils can see them, works which are the very negation of all we teach."
+A heated discussion followed in the press, and the minister boldly
+declared that Impressionism, good or bad, had attracted the attention of
+the public, and that it was the duty of the State to receive impartially
+the work of all the art movements; the public would know how to judge
+and choose; the Government's duty was not to influence them by showing
+them only one style of painting, but to remain in historic neutrality.
+Thanks to this clever reply, the Academicians, among whom M. Gérôme was
+the most rabid, resigned themselves to keeping their posts. A similar
+incident, less publicly violent, but equally strange, occurred on the
+occasion of the admission to the Luxembourg Gallery of the portrait of
+M. Whistler's mother, a masterpiece of which the gallery is proud
+to-day, and for which a group of writers and art lovers had succeeded in
+opening the way. It is difficult to imagine the degree of irritation and
+obstruction of the official painters against all the ideas of the new
+painting, and if it had only depended upon them, there can be no doubt
+that Manet and his friends would have died in total obscurity, not only
+banished from the Salons and museums, but also treated as madmen and
+robbed of the possibility of living by their work.
+
+The Caillebotte collection was installed under conditions which the
+ill-will of the administrators made at least as deplorable as possible.
+The works were crowded into a small, badly lighted room, where it is
+absolutely impossible to see them from the distance required by the
+method of the division of tones, and the meanness of the opposition was
+such that, the pictures having been bequeathed without frames, the
+keeper was obliged to have recourse to the reserves of the Louvre,
+because he was refused the necessary credit for purchasing them. The
+collection is however beautiful and interesting. It does not represent
+Impressionism in all its brilliancy, since the works by which it is
+composed had been bought by Caillebotte at a time, when his friends were
+still far from having arrived at the full blossoming of their qualities.
+But some very fine things can at least be found there. Renoir is
+marvellously represented by the _Moulin de la Galette_, which is one of
+his masterpieces. Degas figures with seven beautiful pastels, Monet with
+some landscapes grand in style; Sisley and Pissarro appear scarcely to
+their advantage, and finally it is to be regretted, that Manet is only
+represented by a study in black in his first manner, the _Balcony_,
+which does not count among his best pictures, and the famous _Olympia_
+whose importance is more historical than intrinsic. The gallery has
+separately acquired a _Young Girl in Ball Dress_ by Berthe Morisot,
+which is a delicate marvel of grace and freshness. And in the place of
+honour of the gallery is to be seen Fantin-Latour's great picture
+_Hommage à Manet_, in which the painter, seated before his easel, is
+surrounded by his friends; and this canvas may well be considered the
+emblem of the slow triumph of Impressionism, and of the amends for a
+great injustice.
+
+It is in this picture that the young painter Bazille is represented, a
+friend and pupil of Manet's, who was killed during the war of 1870, and
+who should not be forgotten here. He has left a few canvases marked by
+great talent, and would no doubt have counted among the most original
+contemporary artists. We shall terminate this all too short enumeration
+with two remarkable landscapists; the one is Albert Lebourg who paints
+in suave and poetic colour schemes, with blues and greens of particular
+tenderness, a painter who will take his place in the history of
+Impressionism. The other is Eugène Boudin. He has not adopted Claude
+Monet's technique; but I have already said that the vague and inexact
+term "Impressionism" must be understood to comprise a group of painters
+showing originality in the study of light and getting away from the
+academic spirit. As to this, Eugène Boudin deserves to be placed in the
+first rank. His canvases will be the pride of the best arranged
+galleries. He is an admirable seascape painter. He has known how to
+render with unfailing mastery, the grey waters of the Channel, the
+stormy skies, the heavy clouds, the effects of sunlight feebly piercing
+the prevailing grey. His numerous pictures painted at the port of Havre
+are profoundly expressive. Nobody has excelled him in drawing
+sailing-boats, in giving the exact feeling of the keels plunged into the
+water, in grouping the masts, in rendering the activity of a port, in
+indicating the value of a sail against the sky, the fluidity of calm
+water, the melancholy of the distance, the shiver of short waves rippled
+by the breeze. Boudin is a learned colourist of grey tones. His
+Impressionism consists in the exclusion of useless details, his
+comprehension of reflections, his feeling for values, the boldness of
+his composition and his faculty of directly perceiving nature and the
+transparency of atmosphere: he reminds sometimes of Constable and of
+Corot. Boudin's production has been enormous, and nothing that he has
+done is indifferent. He is one of those artists who have not a brilliant
+career, but who will last, and whose name, faithfully retained by the
+elect, is sure of immortality. He may be considered an isolated
+artist, on the border line between Classicism and Impressionism, and
+this is unquestionably the cause of the comparative obscurity of his
+fame. The same might be said of the ingenuous and fine landscapist
+Hervier, who has left such interesting canvases; and of the Lyons
+water-colour painter Ravier who, almost absolutely unknown, came very
+close to Monticelli and showed admirable gifts. It must, however, be
+recognised that Boudin is nearer to Impressionism than to any other
+grouping of artists, and he must be considered as a small master of pure
+French lineage. Finally, if a question of nationality prevents me from
+enlarging upon the subject of the rank of precursor which must be
+accorded to the great Dutch landscapist Jongkind, I must at least
+mention his name. His water-colour sketches have been veritable
+revelations for several Impressionists. Eugène Boudin and Berthe Morisot
+have derived special benefit from them, and they are valuable lessons
+for many young painters of the present day.
+
+[Illustration: JONGKIND
+
+IN HOLLAND]
+
+[Illustration: JONGKIND
+
+VIEW OF THE HAGUE]
+
+We do not pretend to have mentioned in this chapter all the painters
+directly connected with the first Impressionist movement. We have
+confined ourselves to enumerating the most important only, and each of
+them would deserve a complete essay. But our object will have been
+achieved, if we have inspired art-lovers with just esteem for this brave
+phalanx of artists who have proved better than any aesthetic
+commentaries the vitality, the originality, and the logic of Manet's
+theories, the great importance of the notions introduced by him into
+painting, and who have, on the other hand, clearly demonstrated the
+uselessness of official teaching. Far from the traditions and methods of
+the School, the best of their knowledge and of their talent is due to
+their profound and sincere contemplation of nature and to their freedom
+of spirit. And for that reason they will have a permanent place in the
+evolution of their art.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAËLLI,
+TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, FORAIN, CHÉRET, ETC.
+
+
+Not the least important result of Impressionism has been the veritable
+revolution effected by it in the art of illustration. It was only
+natural that its principles should have led to it. The substitution of
+the beauty of character for the beauty of proportion was bound to move
+the artists to regard illustration in a new light; and as pictorial
+Impressionism was born of the same movement of ideas which created the
+naturalist novel and the impressionist literature of Flaubert, Zola and
+the Goncourts, and moreover as these men were united by close relations
+and a common defence, Edouard Manet's modern ideas soon took up the
+commentary of the books dealing with modern life and the description of
+actual spectacles.
+
+The Impressionists themselves have not contributed towards illustration.
+Their work has consisted in raising to the style of grand painting
+subjects, that seemed at the best only worthy of the proportion of
+vignettes, in opposition to the subjects qualified as "noble" by the
+School. The series of works by Manet and Degas may be considered as
+admirable illustrations to the novels by Zola and the Goncourts. It is a
+parallel research in modern psychologic truth. But this research has
+remained confined to pictures. It may be presumed that, had they wished
+to do so, Manet and Degas could have admirably illustrated certain
+contemporary novels, and Renoir could have produced a masterpiece in
+commenting, say, upon Verlaine's _Fêtes Galantes_. The only things that
+can be mentioned here are a few drawings composed by Manet for Edgar A.
+Poe's _The Raven_ and Mallarmé's _L'Après-Midi d'un Faune_, in addition
+to a few music covers without any great interest.
+
+But if the Impressionists themselves have neglected actively to assist
+the interesting school of modern illustration, a whole legion of
+draughtsmen have immediately been inspired by their principles. One of
+their most original characteristics was the realistic representation of
+the scenes, the _mise en cadre_, and it afforded these draughtsmen an
+opportunity for revolutionising book illustration. There had already
+been some excellent artists who occupied themselves with vignette
+drawings, like Tony Johannot and Célestin Nanteuil, whose pretty and
+smart frontispieces are to be found in the old editions of Balzac. The
+genius of Honoré Daumier and the high fancy of Gavarni and of Grévin had
+already announced a serious protest of modern sentiment against academic
+taste, in returning on many points to the free tradition of Eisen, of
+the two Moreaus and of Debucourt. Since 1845 the draughtsman Constantin
+Guys, Baudelaire's friend, gave evidence, in his most animated
+water-colour drawings, of a curious vision of nervous elegance and of
+expressive skill quite in accord with the ideas of the day.
+Impressionism, and also the revelation of the Japanese colour prints,
+gave an incredible vigour to these intuitive glimpses. Certain
+characteristics will date from the days of Impressionism. It is due to
+Impressionism that artists have ventured to show in illustration, for
+instance, figures in the foreground cut through by the margin, rising
+perspectives, figures in the background that seem to stand on a higher
+plane than the others, people seen from a second story; in a word, all
+that life presents to our eyes, without the annoying consideration for
+"style" and for arrangement, which the academic spirit obstinately
+insisted to apply to the illustration of modern life. Degas in
+particular has given many examples of this novelty in composition. One
+of his pastels has remained typical, owing to the scandal caused by it:
+he represents a dance-scene at the Opera, seen from the orchestra. The
+neck of a double bass rises in the middle of the picture and cuts into
+it, a large black silhouette, behind which sparkle the gauze-dresses and
+the lights. That can be observed any evening, and yet it would be
+difficult to recapitulate all the railleries and all the anger caused by
+so natural an audacity. Modern illustration was to be the pretext of a
+good many more outbursts!
+
+We must now consider four artists of great importance who are remarkable
+painters and have greatly raised the art of illustration. This title
+illustrator, despised by the official painters, should be given them as
+the one which has secured them the best claim to fame. They have
+restored to this title all its merit and all its brilliancy and have
+introduced into illustration the most serious qualities of painting. Of
+these four men the first in date is M.J.F. Raffaëlli, who introduced
+himself about 1875 with some remarkable and intensely picturesque
+illustrations in colours in various magazines. He gave an admirable
+series of _Parisian Types_, in album form, and a series of etchings to
+accompany the text of M. Huysmans, describing the curious river "la
+Bièvre" which penetrates Paris in a thousand curves, sometimes
+subterranean, sometimes above ground, and serves the tanners for washing
+the leather. This series is a model of modern illustration. But, apart
+from the book, the entire pictorial work of M. Raffaëlli is a humorous
+and psychological illustration of the present time. He has painted with
+unique truth and spirit the working men's types and the small
+_bourgeois_, the poor, the hospital patients and the roamers of the
+outskirts of Paris. He has succeeded in being the poet of the sickly and
+dirty landscapes by which the capitals are surrounded; he has rendered
+their anaemic charm, the confused perspectives of houses, fences, walls
+and little gardens, and their smoke, under the melancholy of rainy
+skies. With an irony free from bitterness he has noted the clumsy
+gestures of the labourer in his Sunday garb and the grotesque
+silhouettes of the small townsmen, and has compiled a gallery of very
+real sociologic interest. M. Raffaëlli has also exhibited Parisian
+landscapes in which appear great qualities of light. He excels in
+rendering the mornings in the spring, with their pearly skies, their
+pale lights, their transparency and their slight shadows, and finally he
+has proved his mastery by some large portraits, fresh harmonies,
+generally devoted to the study of different qualities of white. If the
+name "Impressionist" meant, as has been wrongly believed, an artist who
+confines himself to giving the impression of what he sees, then M.
+Raffaëlli would be the real Impressionist. He suggests more than he
+paints. He employs a curious technique: he often leaves a sky completely
+bare, throwing on to the white of the canvas a few colour notes which
+suffice to give the illusion. He has a decided preference for white and
+black, and paints very slightly in small touches. His very correct
+feeling for values makes him an excellent painter; but what interests
+him beyond all, is psychologic expression. He notes it with so hasty a
+pencil, that one might almost say that he writes with colour. He is also
+an etcher of great merit, and an original sculptor. He has invented
+small bas-reliefs in bronze which can be attached to the wall, like
+sketches or nick-nacks; and he has applied his talent even to renewing
+the material for painting. He is an ingenious artist and a prolific
+producer, a roguish, but sympathetic, observer of the life of the small
+people, which has not prevented him from painting very seriously when he
+wanted to, as is witnessed among other works by his very fine portrait
+of M. Clemenceau speaking at a public meeting, in the presence of a
+vociferous audience from which rise some hundred of heads whose
+expressions are noted with really splendid energy and fervour.
+
+Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died recently, insane, leaves a great
+work behind him. He had a kind of cruel genius. Descended from one of
+the greatest families of France, badly treated by nature who made him a
+kind of ailing dwarf, he seemed to take a bitter pleasure in the study
+of modern vice. He painted scenes at café-concerts and the rooms of
+wantons with intense truth. Nobody has revealed better than he the
+lowness and suffering of the creatures "of pleasure," as they have been
+dubbed by the heartrending irony of life. Lautrec has shown the
+artificiality of the painted faces; the vulgarity of the types of the
+prostitutes of low origin; the infamous gestures, the disorder, the
+slovenliness of the dwellings of these women; all the shady side of
+their existence. It has been said that he loved ugliness. As a matter of
+fact, he did not exaggerate, he raised a powerful accusation against
+everything he saw. But his terrible clairvoyance passed for caricature.
+This sad psychologist was a great painter; he pleased himself with
+dressing in rose-coloured costumes the coarsest and most vulgar
+creatures he painted, such as one can find at the cabarets and concerts,
+and he enjoyed the contrast of fresh tones with the faces marked by vice
+and poverty; Lautrec's two great influences have been the Japanese and
+Degas. Of the former he retained the love for decorative arabesques and
+the unconventional grouping; of the other the learned draughtsmanship,
+expressive in its broad simplification, and one might say that the pupil
+has often been worthy of the masters. One can only regret that Lautrec
+should have confined his vision and his high faculties to the study of a
+small and very Parisian world; but, seeing his works, one cannot deny
+the science, the spirit and the grand bearing of his art. He has also
+signed some fine posters, notably a _Bruant_ which is a masterpiece of
+its kind.
+
+Degas's deep influence can be found again in J.L. Forain, who has made
+himself known by an immense series of drawings for the illustrated
+papers, drawings as remarkable in themselves as they are, through their
+legends, bitterly sarcastic in spirit. These drawings form a synthesis
+of the defects of the _bourgeoisie_, which is at the same time amusing
+and grave. They also concern, though less happily, the political world,
+in which the artist, a little intoxicated with his success, has thought
+himself able to exercise an influence by scoffing at the parliamentary
+régime. Forain's drawing has a nervous character which does, however,
+not weaken its science: every stroke reveals something and has an
+astonishing power. In his less known painting can be traced still more
+clearly the style and influence of his master Degas. They are generally
+incidents behind the scenes and at night restaurants, where caricatured
+types are painted with great force. But they are insistently
+exaggerated, they have not the restraint, the ironical and discreet
+plausibility, which give so much flavour, so much value to Degas's
+studies. Nevertheless, Forain's pictures are very significant and are of
+real interest. He is decidedly the most interesting newspaper
+illustrator of his whole generation, the one whose ephemeral art most
+closely approaches grand painting, and one of those who have most
+contributed towards the transformation of illustration for the
+contemporary press.
+
+Jules Chéret has made for himself an important and splendid position in
+contemporary art. He commenced as a lithographic workman and lived for a
+long time in London. About 1870 Chéret designed his first posters in
+black, white and red; these were at the time the only colours used. By
+and by he perfected this art and found the means of adding other tones
+and of drawing them on the lithographic stone. He returned to France,
+started a small studio, and gradually carried poster art to the
+admirable point at which it has arrived. At the same time Chéret drew
+and painted and composed himself his models. About 1885 his name became
+famous, and it has not ceased growing since. Some writers, notably the
+eminent critic Roger Marx and the novelist Huysmans, hailed in Chéret an
+original artist as well as a learned technician. He then exhibited
+decorative pictures, pastels and drawings, which placed him in the first
+rank. Chéret is universally known. The type of the Parisian woman
+created by him, and the multi-coloured harmony of his works will not be
+forgotten. His will be the honour of having invented the artistic
+poster, this feast for the eyes, this fascinating art of the street,
+which formerly languished in a tedious and dull display of commercial
+advertisements. He has been the promoter of an immense movement; he has
+been imitated, copied, parodied, but he will always remain inimitable.
+He has succeeded in realising on paper by means of lithography, the
+pastels and gouache drawings in which his admirable colourist's fancy
+mixed the most difficult shades. In Chéret can be found all the
+principles of Impressionism: opposing lights, coloured shadows,
+complementary reflections, all employed with masterly sureness and
+delightful charm. It is decorative Impressionism, conceived in a
+superior way; and this simple poster-man, despised by the painters, has
+proved himself equal to most. He has transformed the street, in the open
+light, into a veritable Salon, where his works have become famous. When
+this too modest artist decided to show his pictures and drawings, they
+were a revelation. The most remarkable pastellists of the period were
+astonished and admired his skill, his profound knowledge of technique,
+his continual _tours-de-force_ which he disguised under a shimmering
+gracefulness. The State had the good sense to entrust him with some
+large mural decorations, in which he unfolded the scale of his sparkling
+colours, and affirmed his spirit, his fancy and his dreamy art. Chéret's
+harmonies remain secrets; he uses them for the representation of
+characters from the Italian comedy, thrown with fiendish _verve_ upon a
+background of a sky, fiery with the Bengal lights of a fairy-like
+carnival, and he strangely intermingles the reality of the movements
+with the most arbitrary fancy. Chéret has also succeeded in proving his
+artistic descent by a beautiful series of drawings in sanguine: he
+descends from Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard; he is a Frenchman of pure
+blood; and when one has done admiring the grace and the happy animation
+of his imagination, one can only be surprised to see on what serious and
+sure a technique are based these decorations which appear improvised.
+Chéret's art is the smile of Impressionism and the best demonstration
+of the decorative logic of this art.
+
+These are the four artists of great merit who have created the
+transition between Impressionist painting and illustration. It would be
+fit to put aside Toulouse-Lautrec, who was much younger, but his work is
+too directly connected with that of Degas for one to take into account
+the difference of age. He produced between 1887 and 1900 works which
+might well have been ante-dated by fifteen years. We shall study in the
+next chapter his Neo-Impressionist comrades, and we shall now speak of
+some illustrators more advanced in years than he. The oldest in date is
+the engraver Henri Guérard, who died three years ago. He had married Eva
+Gonzalès and was a friend of Manet's, many of whose works have been
+engraved by him. He was an artist of decided and original talent, who
+also occupied himself successfully with pyrogravure, and who was happily
+inspired by the Japanese colour-prints. His etchings deserve a place of
+honour in the folios of expert collectors; they are strong and broad. As
+to the engraver Félix Buhot, he was a rather delicate colourist in
+black and white; his Paris scenes will always be considered charming
+works. In spite of his Spanish origin, the painter, _aquarelliste_, and
+draughtsman Daniel Vierge, should be added to the list of the men
+connected with Impressionism. His illustrations are those of a great
+artist--admirable in colour, movement and observation; all the great
+principles of Impressionism are embodied in them. But there are four
+more illustrators of the first rank: Steinlen, Louis Legrand, Paul
+Renouard and Auguste Lepère.
+
+Steinlen has been enormously productive: he is specially remarkable for
+his illustrations. Those which he has designed for Aristide Bruant's
+volume of songs, _Dans la rue_, are masterpieces of their kind. They
+contain treasures of bitter observation, quaintness and knowledge. The
+soul of the lower classes is shown in them with intense truth, bitter
+revolt and comprehensive philosophy. Steinlen has also designed some
+beautiful posters, pleasing pastels, lithographs of incontestable
+technical merit, and beautifully eloquent political drawings. It cannot
+be said that he is an Impressionist in the strict sense of the word; he
+applied his colour in flat tints, more like an engraver than a painter;
+but in him too can be felt the stamp of Degas, and he is one of those
+who best demonstrate that, without Impressionism, they could not have
+been what they are.
+
+The same may be said of Louis Legrand, a pupil of Félicien Rops, an
+admirably skilful etcher, a draughtsman of keen vision, and a painter of
+curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the artists of
+to-day. Louis Legrand also shows to what extent the example of Manet and
+Degas has revolutionised the art of illustration, in freeing the
+painters from obsolete laws, and guiding them towards truth and frank
+psychological study. Legrand is full of them, without resembling them.
+We must not forget that, besides the technical innovation (division of
+tones, study of complementary colours), Impressionism has brought us
+novelty of composition, realism of character and great liberty in the
+choice of subjects. From this point of view Rops himself, in spite of
+his symbolist tendencies, could not be classed with any other group, if
+it were not that any kind of classification in art is useless and
+inaccurate. However that may be, Louis Legrand has signed some volumes
+resplendent with the most seductive qualities.
+
+Paul Renouard has devoted himself to newspaper illustration, but with
+what surprising prodigality of spirit and knowledge! The readers of the
+"Graphic" will know. This masterly virtuoso of the pencil might give
+drawing-lessons to many members of the Institute! The feeling for the
+life of crowds, psychology of types, spirited and rapid notation,
+astonishing ease in overcoming difficulties--these are his undeniable
+gifts. And again we must recognise in Renouard the example of Degas and
+Manet. His exceptional fecundity only helps to give more authority to
+his pencil. Renouard's drawings at the Exhibition of 1900 were, perhaps,
+more beautiful than the rest of his work. There was notably a series of
+studies made from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, an
+accumulation of wonders of perspectives framing scenes of such animation
+and caprice as to take away one's breath.
+
+Finally, Auguste Lepère appears as the Debucourt of our time. As
+painter, pastellist and wood-engraver he has produced since 1870, and
+has won for himself the first place among French engravers. It would be
+difficult to recount the volumes, albums and covers on which the fancy
+of his burin has played; but it is particularly in wood-engraving that
+he stands without rival. Not only has he produced masterpieces of it,
+but he has passionately devoted himself to raising this admirable art,
+the glory of the beautiful books of olden days, and to give back to it
+the lustre which had been eclipsed by mechanical processes. Lepère has
+started some publications for this purpose; he has had pupils of great
+merit, and he must be considered the master of the whole generation of
+modern wood-engravers, just as Chéret is the undisputed master of the
+poster. Lepère's ruling quality is strength. He seems to have
+rediscovered the mediaeval limners' secrets of cutting the wood, giving
+the necessary richness to the ink, creating a whole scale of half-tones,
+and specially of adapting the design to typographic printing, and making
+of it, so to say, an ornament and a decorative extension for the type.
+Lepère is a wood-engraver with whom none of his contemporaries can be
+compared; as regards his imagination, it is that of an altogether
+curious artist. He excels in composing and expressing the life, the
+animation, the soul of the streets and the picturesque side of the
+populace. Herein he is much inspired by Manet and, if we go back to the
+real tradition, by Guys, Debucourt, the younger Moreau and by Gabriel de
+Saint-Aubin. He is decidedly a Realist of French lineage, who owes
+nothing to the Academy and its formulas.
+
+It would be evidently unreasonable to attach to Impressionism all that
+is ante-academical, and between the two extremes there is room for a
+crowd of interesting artists. We shall not succumb to the prejudice of
+the School by declaring, in our turn, that there is no salvation outside
+Impressionism, and we have been careful to state repeatedly that, if
+Impressionism has a certain number of principles as kernel, its
+applications and its influence have a radiation which it is difficult to
+limit. What can be absolutely demonstrated is, that this movement has
+had the greatest influence on modern illustration, sometimes through its
+colouring, sometimes simply through the great freedom of its ideas. Some
+have found in it a direct lesson, others an example to be followed.
+Some have met in it technical methods which pleased them, others have
+only taken some suggestions from it. That is the case, for instance,
+with Legrand, with Steinlen, and with Renouard; and it is also the case
+with the lithographer Odilon Redon, who applies the values of Manet and,
+in his strange pastels, the harmonies of Degas and Renoir, placing them
+at the service of dreams and hallucinations and of a symbolism which is
+absolutely removed from the realism of these painters. It is, finally,
+the case with the water-colour painter Henri Rivière, who is misjudged
+as to his merit, and who is one of the most perfect of those who have
+applied Impressionist ideas to decorative engraving. He has realised
+images in colours destined to decorate inexpensively the rooms of the
+people and recalling the grand aspects of landscapes with a broad
+simplification which is derived, curiously enough, from Puvis de
+Chavannes's large decorative landscapes and from the small and precise
+colour prints of Japan. Rivière, who is a skilful and personal poetic
+landscapist, is not exactly an Impressionist, in so far as he does not
+divide the tones, but rather blends them in subtle mixtures in the
+manner of the Japanese. Yet, seeing his work, one cannot help thinking
+of all the surprise and freedom introduced into modern art by
+Impressionism.
+
+Everybody, even the ignorant, can perceive, on looking through an
+illustrated paper or a modern volume, that thirty years ago this manner
+of placing the figures, of noting familiar gestures, and of seizing
+fugitive life with spirit and clearness was unknown. This mass of
+engravings and of sketches resembles in no way what had been seen
+formerly. They no longer have the solemn air of classic composition, by
+which the drawings had been affected. A current of bold spontaneity has
+passed through here. In modern English illustration, it can be stated
+indisputably that nothing would be such as it can now be seen, if
+Morris, Rossetti and Crane had not imposed their vision, and yet many
+talented Englishmen resemble these initiators only very remotely. It is
+exactly in this sense that we shall have credited Impressionism with the
+talents who have drawn their inspiration less from its principles, than
+from its vigorous protest against mechanical formulas, and who have
+been able to find the energy, necessary for their success, in the
+example it set by fighting during twenty years against the ideas of
+routine which seemed indestructible. Even with the painters who are far
+removed from the vision and the colouring of Manet and Degas, of Monet
+and Renoir, one can find a very precise tendency: that of returning to
+the subjects and the style of the real national tradition; and herein
+lies one of the most serious benefits bestowed by Impressionism upon an
+art which had stopped at the notion of a canonical beauty, until it had
+almost become sterile in its timidity.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+NEO-IMPRESSIONISM--GAUGUIN, DENIS, THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE--THE THEORY OF
+POINTILLISM--SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC
+CHROMATISM--FAULTS AND QUALITIES OF THE IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE
+OWE TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL--SOME WORDS ON
+ITS INFLUENCE ABROAD
+
+
+The beginnings of the movement designated under the name of
+Neo-Impressionism can be traced back to about 1880. The movement is a
+direct offshoot of the first Impressionism, originated by a group of
+young painters who admired it and thought of pushing further still its
+chromatic principles. The flourishing of Impressionism coincided, as a
+matter of fact, with certain scientific labours concerning optics.
+Helmholtz had just published his works on the perception of colours and
+sounds by means of waves. Chevreul had continued on this path by
+establishing his beautiful theories on the analysis of the solar
+spectrum. M. Charles Henry, an original and remarkable spirit, occupied
+himself in his turn with these delicate problems by applying them
+directly to aesthetics, which Helmholtz and Chevreul had not thought of
+doing. M. Charles Henry had the idea of creating relations between this
+branch of science and the laws of painting. As a friend of several young
+painters he had a real influence over them, showing them that the new
+vision due to the instinct of Monet and of Manet might perhaps be
+scientifically verified, and might establish fixed principles in a
+sphere where hitherto the laws of colouring had been the effects of
+individual conception. At that moment the criticism which resulted from
+Taine's theories tried to effect a _rapprochement_ of the artistic and
+scientific domains in criticism and in the psychologic novel. The
+painters, too, gave way to this longing for precision which seems to
+have been the great preoccupation of intellects from 1880 to about 1889.
+
+Their researches had a special bearing on the theory of complementary
+colours and on the means of establishing some laws concerning the
+reaction of tones in such manner as to draw up a kind of tabula. Georges
+Seurat and Paul Signac were the promoters of this research. Seurat died
+very young, and one cannot but regret this death of an artist who would
+have been very interesting and capable of beautiful works. Those which
+he has left us bear witness to a spirit very receptive to theories, and
+leaving nothing to chance. The silhouettes are reduced to almost
+rigorously geometrical principles, the tones are decomposed
+systematically. These canvases are more reasoned examples than works of
+intuition and spontaneous vision. They show Seurat's curious desire to
+give a scientific and classic basis to Impressionism. The same idea
+rules in all the work of Paul Signac, who has painted some portraits and
+numerous landscapes. To these two painters is due the method of
+_Pointillism_, _i.e._ the division of tones, not only by touches, as in
+Monet's pictures, but by very small touches of equal size, causing the
+spheric shape to act equally upon the retina. The accumulation of these
+luminous points is carried out over the entire surface of the canvas
+without thick daubs of paint, and with regularity, whilst with Manet the
+paint is more or less dense. The theory of complementary colours is
+systematically applied. On a sketch, made from nature, the painter notes
+the principal relations of tones, then systematises them on his picture
+and connects them by different shades which should be their logical
+result. Neo-Impressionism believes in obtaining thus a greater exactness
+than that which results from the individual temperament of the painter
+who simply relies on his own perception. And it is true, in theory, that
+such a conception is more exact. But it reduces the picture to a kind of
+theorem, which excludes all that constitutes the value and charm of an
+art, that is to say: caprice, fancy, and the spontaneity of personal
+inspiration. The works of Seurat, Signac, and of the few men who have
+strictly followed the rules of Pointillism are lacking in life, in
+surprise, and make a somewhat tiring impression upon one's eyes. The
+uniformity of the points does not succeed in giving an impression of
+cohesion, and even less a suggestion of different textures, even if the
+values are correct. Manet seems to have attained perfection in using the
+method which consists in directing the touches in accordance with each
+of the planes, and this is evidently the most natural method. Scientific
+Chromatism constitutes an _ensemble_ of propositions, of which art will
+be able to make use, though indirectly, as information useful for a
+better understanding of the laws of light in presence of nature. What
+Pointillism has been able to give us, is a method which would be very
+appreciable for decorative paintings seen from a great distance--friezes
+or ceilings in spacious buildings. It would in this case return to the
+principle of mosaic, which is the principle _par excellence_ of mural
+art.
+
+The Pointillists have to-day almost abandoned this transitional theory
+which, in spite of the undeniable talent of its adepts, has only
+produced indifferent results as regards easel pictures. Besides Seurat
+and Signac, mention should be made of Maurice Denis, Henri-Edmond Cross,
+Angrand, and Théo Van Rysselberghe. But this last-named and Maurice
+Denis have arrived at great talent by very different merits. M. Maurice
+Denis has abandoned Pointillism a few years ago, in favour of returning
+to a very strange conception which dates back to the Primitives, and
+even to Giotto. He simplifies his drawing archaically, suppresses all
+but the indispensable detail, and draws inspiration from Gothic stained
+glass and carvings, in order to create decorative figures with clearly
+marked outlines which are filled with broad, flat tints. He generally
+treats mystic subjects, for which this special manner is suitable. One
+cannot love the _parti pris_ of these works, but one cannot deny M.
+Denis a great charm of naivete, an intense feeling for decorative
+arrangements and colouring of a certain originality. He is almost a
+French pre-Raphaelite, and his profound catholic faith inspires him
+nobly.
+
+[Illustration: THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE
+
+PORTRAITS OF MADAME VAN RYSSELBERGHE AND HER DAUGHTER]
+
+M. Théo Van Rysselberghe continues to employ the Pointillist method. But
+he is so strongly gifted, that one might almost say he succeeds in
+revealing himself as a painter of great merit in spite of this dry and
+charmless method. All his works are supported by broad and learned
+drawing and his colour is naturally brilliant. M. Van Rysselberghe, a
+prolific and varied worker, has painted nudes, large portraits,
+landscapes with figures, seascapes, interiors and still-life, and in all
+this he evinces faculties of the first order. He is a lover of light and
+understands how to make it vibrate over flesh and fabrics. He is an
+artist who has the sense of style. He has signed a certain number of
+portraits, whose beautiful carriage and serious psychology would suffice
+to make him be considered as the most significant of the
+Neo-Impressionists. It is really in him that one has to see the young
+and worthy heir of Monet, of Sisley, and of Degas, and that is why we
+have insisted on adding here to the works of these masters the
+reproduction of one of his. M. Van Rysselberghe is also a very delicate
+etcher who has signed some fine works in this method, and his seascapes,
+whether they revel in the pale greys of the German Ocean or in the warm
+sapphire and gold harmonies of the Mediterranean, count among the finest
+of the time; they are windows opened upon joyous brightness.
+
+To these painters who have never taken part at the Salons, and are only
+to be seen at the exhibitions of the _Indépendants_ (except M. Denis),
+must be added M. Pierre Bonnard, who has given proof to his charm and
+fervour in numerous small canvases of Japanese taste; and M. Edouard
+Vuillard, who is a painter of intimate scenes of rare delicacy. This
+artist, who stands apart and produces very little, has signed some
+interiors of melancholic distinction and of a colouring which revels in
+low tones. He has the precision and skill of a master. There is in him,
+one might say, a reflection of Chardin's soul. Unfortunately his works
+are confined to a few collections and have not become known to the
+public. To the same group belong M. Ranson, who has devoted himself to
+purely decorative art, tapestry, wall papers and embroideries; M.
+Georges de Feure, a strange, symbolist water-colour painter, who has
+become one of the best designers of the New Art in France; M. Félix
+Vallotton, painter and lithographer, who is somewhat heavy, but gifted
+with serious qualities. It is true that M. de Feure is Dutch, M.
+Vallotton Swiss, and M. Van Rysselberghe Belgian; but they have settled
+down in France, and are sufficiently closely allied to the
+Neo-Impressionist movement so that the question of nationality need not
+prevent us from mentioning them here. Finally it is impossible not to
+say a few words about two pupils of Gustave Moreau's, who have both
+become noteworthy followers of Impressionism of very personal
+individuality. M. Eugène Martel bids fair to be one of the best painters
+of interiors of his generation. He has the feeling of mystical life and
+paints the peasantry with astonishing psychologic power. His vigorous
+colouring links him to Monticelli, and his drawing to Degas. As to M.
+Simon Bussy who, following Alphonse Legros's example, is about to make
+an enviable position for himself in England, he is an artist of pure
+blood. His landscapes and his figures have the distinction and rare tone
+of M. Whistler, besides the characteristic acuteness of Degas. His
+harmonies are subtle, his vision novel, and he will certainly develop
+into an important painter. Together with Henri le Sidaner and Jacques
+Blanche, Simon Bussy is decidedly the most personal of that young
+generation of "Intimists" who seem to have retained the best principles
+of the Impressionist masters to employ them for the expression of a
+psychologic ideal which is very different from Realism.
+
+Outside this group there are still a few isolated painters who are
+difficult to classify. The very young artists Laprade and Charles Guérin
+have shown for the last three years, at the exhibition of the
+_Indépendants_, some works which are the worthy result of Manet's and
+Renoir's influence. They, too, justify great expectations. The
+landscapists Paul Vogler and Maxime Maufra, more advanced in years, have
+made themselves known by some solid series of vigorously presented
+landscapes. To them must be added M. Henry Moret, M. Albert André and M.
+Georges d'Espagnet, who equally deserve the success which has commenced
+to be their share. But there are some older ones. It is only his due,
+that place should be given to a painter who committed suicide after an
+unhappy life, and who evinced splendid gifts. Vincent Van Gogh, a
+Dutchman, who, however, had always worked in France, has left to the
+world some violent and strange works, in which Impressionism appears to
+have reached the limits of its audacity. Their value lies in their naïve
+frankness and in the undauntable determination which tried to fix
+without trickery the sincerest feelings. Amidst many faulty and clumsy
+works, Van Gogh has also left some really beautiful canvases. There is a
+deep affinity between him and Cézanne. A very real affinity exists, too,
+between Paul Gauguin, who was a friend and to a certain extent the
+master of Van Gogh, and Cézanne and Renoir. Paul Gauguin's robust talent
+found its first motives in Breton landscapes, in which the method of
+colour-spots can be found employed with delicacy and placed at the
+service of a rather heavy, but very interesting harmony. Then the artist
+spent a long time in Tahiti, whence he returned with a completely
+transformed manner. He has brought back from these regions some
+landscapes with figures treated in intentionally clumsy and almost wild
+fashion. The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad,
+flat tints on canvas which has the texture almost of tapestry. Many of
+these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multi-coloured, crude
+and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental
+qualities, the beautiful values, the ornamental taste, and the
+impression of primitive animalism. On the whole, Paul Gauguin has a
+beautiful, artistic temperament which, in its aversion to virtuosoship,
+has perhaps not sufficiently understood that the fear of formulas, if
+exaggerated, may lead to other formulas, to a false ignorance which is
+as dangerous as false knowledge. Gauguin's symbolical intentions, like
+those of his pupil Emile Bernard, are sincere, but are badly served by
+minds which do not agree with their technical qualities, and both
+Gauguin and Emile Bernard are most happily inspired when they are
+painters pure and simple.
+
+Next to Gauguin, among the seniors of the present generation and the
+successors of Impressionism, should be placed the landscapist Armand
+Guillaumin who, without possessing Sisley's delicate qualities, has
+painted some canvases worthy of notice; and we must, finally, terminate
+this far too summary enumeration by referring to one of the most gifted
+painters of the French School of the day, M. Louis Anquetin. His is a
+most varied talent whose power is unquestionable. He made his _début_
+among the Neo-Impressionists and revealed the influence upon him of the
+Japanese and of Degas. It may be seen that these two influences
+predominate in the whole group. Then M. Anquetin became fascinated by
+the breadth and superb freedom of Manet's works, and signed a series of
+portraits and sketches, some of which are not far below so great a
+master's. They are works which will surprise the critics, when our
+contemporary painting will be examined with calm impartiality. After
+these works, M. Anquetin gave way to his impetuous nature which led him
+to decorative painting, and he became influenced by Rubens, Jordaens,
+and the Fontainebleau School. He painted theatre curtains and
+mythological scenes, in which he gave free rein to his sensual
+imagination. In spite of some admirable qualities, it seems as though
+the artist had strayed from his true path in painting these brilliant,
+but somewhat declamatory works, and he has since returned to a more
+modern and more direct painting. In all his changed conditions Anquetin
+has shown a considerable talent, pleasing in its fine vigour,
+impetuosity, brilliancy and sincerity. His inequality is perhaps the
+cause of his relative want of success; it has put the public off, but
+nevertheless in certain of this brave and serious painter's canvases can
+be seen the happy influence of Manet.
+
+It seems to us only right to sum up our impartial opinion of
+Neo-Impressionism by saying that it has lacked cohesion, that
+Pointillism in particular has led painting into an aimless path. It has
+been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical
+researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day,
+after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate
+attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the
+"Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious
+painter, Besnard, imposes upon the Salons, where the elect draw
+inspiration from him. We can here only indicate with a few words the
+considerable part played by Besnard: his clever work has proved that the
+scientific colour principles of Impressionism may be applied, not to
+realism, but to the highest thoughts, to ideologic painting most nobly
+inspired by the modern intellectual preoccupations. He is the
+transition between Impressionism and the art of to-morrow. Of pure
+French lineage by his portraits and his nudes, which descend directly
+from Largillière and Ingres, he might have restricted himself to being
+placed among the most learned Impressionists. His studies of reflections
+and of complementary colours speak for this. But he has passed this
+phase and has, with his decorations, returned to the psychical domain of
+his strangely beautiful art. The "Intimists," C. Cottet, Simon, Blanche,
+Ménard, Bussy, Lobre, Le Sidaner, Wéry, Prinet, and Ernest Laurent, have
+proved that they have profited by Impressionism, but have proceeded in
+quite a different direction in trying to translate their real
+perceptions. Some isolated artists, like the decorative painter Henri
+Martin, who has enormous talent, have applied the Impressionist
+technique to the expression of grand allegories, rather in the manner of
+Puvis de Chavannes. The effort at getting away from mere cleverness and
+escaping a too exclusive preoccupation with technique, and at the same
+time acquiring serious knowledge, betrays itself in the whole position
+of the young French School; and this will furnish us with a perfectly
+natural conclusion, of which the following are the principal points:--
+
+What we shall have to thank Impressionism for, will be moral and
+material advantages of considerable importance. Morally it has rendered
+an immense service to all art, because it has boldly attacked routine
+and proved by the whole of its work that a combination of independent
+producers could renew the aesthetic code of a country, without owing
+anything to official encouragement. It has succeeded where important but
+isolated creators have succumbed, because it has had the good fortune of
+uniting a group of gifted men, four of whom will count among the
+greatest French artists since the origin of national art. It has had the
+qualities which overcome the hardest resistance: fecundity, courage and
+sure originality. It has known how to find its strength by referring to
+the true traditions of the national genius, which have happily
+enlightened it and saved it from fundamental errors. It has, last, but
+not least, inflicted an irremediable blow on academic convention and has
+wrested from it the prestige of teaching which ruled tyrannically for
+centuries past over the young artists. It has laid a violent hand upon a
+tenacious and dangerous prejudice, upon a series of conventional notions
+which were transmitted without consideration for the evolution of modern
+life and intelligence. It has dared freely to protest against a
+degenerated ideal which vainly parodied the old masters, pretending to
+honour them. It has removed from the artistic soul of France a whole
+order of pseudo-classic elements which worked against its blossoming,
+and the School will never recover from this bold contradiction which has
+rallied to it all the youthful. The moral principle of Impressionism has
+been absolutely logical and sane, and that is why nothing has been able
+to prevent its triumph.
+
+Technically Impressionism has brought a complete renewal of pictorial
+vision, substituting the beauty of character for the beauty of
+proportions and finding adequate expression for the ideas and feelings
+of its time, which constitutes the secret of all beautiful works. It has
+taken up again a tradition and added to it a contemporary page. It will
+have to be thanked for an important series of observations as regards
+the analysis of light, and for an absolutely original conception of
+drawing. Some years have been wasted by painters of little worth in
+imitating it, and the Salons, formerly encumbered with academic
+_pastiches_, have been encumbered with Impressionist _pastiches_. It
+would be unfair to blame the Impressionists for it. They have shown by
+their very career that they hated teaching and would never pretend to
+teach. Impressionism is based upon irrefutable optic laws, but it is
+neither a style, nor a method, likely ever to become a formula in its
+turn. One may call upon this art for examples, but not for receipts. On
+the contrary, its best teaching has been to encourage artists to become
+absolutely independent and to search ardently for their own
+individuality. It marks the decline of the School, and will not create a
+new one which would soon become as fastidious as the other. It will only
+appear, to those who will thoroughly understand it, as a precious
+repertory of notes, and the young generation honours it intelligently by
+not imitating it with servility.
+
+Not that it is without its faults! It has been said, to belittle it,
+that it only had the value of an interesting attempt, having only been
+able to indicate some excellent intentions, without creating anything
+perfect. This is inexact. It is absolutely evident, that Manet, Monet,
+Renoir and Degas have signed some masterpieces which did not lose by
+comparison with those in the Louvre, and the same might even be said of
+their less illustrious friends. But it is also evident that the time
+spent on research as well as on agitation and enervating controversies
+pursued during twenty-five years, has been taken from men who could
+otherwise have done better still. There has been a disparity between
+Realism and the technique of Impressionism. Its realistic origin has
+sometimes made it vulgar. It has often treated indifferent subjects in a
+grand style, and it has too easily beheld life from the anecdotal side.
+It has lacked psychologic synthesis (if we except Degas). It has too
+willingly denied all that exists hidden under the apparent reality of
+the universe and has affected to separate painting from the ideologic
+faculties which rule over all art. Hatred of academic allegory,
+defiance of symbolism, abstraction and romantic scenes, has led it to
+refuse to occupy itself with a whole order of ideas, and it has had the
+tendency of making the painter beyond all a workman. It was necessary at
+the moment of its arrival, but it is no longer necessary now, and the
+painters understand this themselves. Finally it has too often been
+superficial even in obtaining effects; it has given way to the wish to
+surprise the eyes, of playing with tones merely for love of cleverness.
+It often causes one regret to see symphonies of magnificent colour
+wasted here in pictures of boating men; and there, in pictures of café
+corners; and we have arrived at a degree of complex intellectuality
+which is no longer satisfied with these rudimentary themes. It has
+indulged in useless exaggerations, faults of composition and of harmony,
+and all this cannot be denied.
+
+But it still remains fascinating and splendid for its gifts which will
+always rouse enthusiasm: freedom, impetuousness, youth, brilliancy,
+fervour, the joy of painting and the passion for beautiful light. It is,
+on the whole, the greatest pictorial movement that France has beheld
+since Delacroix, and it brings to a finish gloriously the nineteenth
+century, inaugurating the present. It has accomplished the great deed of
+having brought us again into the presence of our true national lineage,
+far more so than Romanticism, which was mixed with foreign elements. We
+have here painting of a kind which could only have been conceived in
+France, and we have to go right back to Watteau in order to receive
+again the same impression. Impressionism has brought us an almost
+unhoped-for renaissance, and this constitutes its most undeniable claim
+upon the gratitude of the race.
+
+It has exercised a very appreciable influence upon foreign painting.
+Among the principal painters attracted by its ideas and research, we
+must mention, in Germany, Max Liebermann and Kuehl; in Norway, Thaulow;
+in Denmark, Kroyer; in Belgium, Théo Van Rysselberghe, Emile Claus,
+Verheyden, Heymans, Verstraete, and Baertson; in Italy, Boldini,
+Segantini, and Michetti; in Spain, Zuloaga, Sorolla y Bastida, Dario de
+Regoyos and Rusiñol; in America, Alexander, Harrison, Sargent; and in
+England, the painters of the Glasgow School, Lavery, Guthrie and the
+late John Lewis Brown. All these men come within the active extension of
+the French movement, and one may say that the honour of having first
+recognised the truly national movement of this art must be given to
+those foreign countries which have enriched their collections and
+museums with works that were despised in the land which had witnessed
+their birth. At the present moment the effects of this new vision are
+felt all over the world, down to the very bosom of the academies; and at
+the Salons, from which the Impressionists are still excluded, can be
+witnessed an invasion of pictures inspired by them, which the most
+retrograde juries dare not reject. In whatever measure the recent
+painters accept Impressionism, they remain preoccupied with it, and even
+those who love it not are forced to take it into account.
+
+The Impressionist movement can therefore now be considered, apart from
+all controversies, without vain attacks or exaggerated praise, as an
+artistic manifestation which has entered the domain of history, and it
+can be studied with the impartial application of the methods of
+critical analysis which is usually employed in the study of the former
+art movements. We shall not pretend to have given in these pages a
+complete and faultless history; but we shall consider ourselves well
+rewarded for this work, which is intended to reach the great public, if
+we have roused their curiosity and sympathy with a group of artists whom
+we consider admirable; and if we have rectified, in the eyes of the
+readers of a foreign nation, the errors, the slanders, the undeserved
+reproaches, with which Frenchmen have been pleased to overwhelm sincere
+creators who thought with faith and love of the pure tradition of the
+national genius, and who have for that reason been vilified as much as
+if they had in an access of anarchical folly risen against the very
+common sense, taste, reason and clearness, which will remain the eternal
+merits of their soil. This small, imperfect volume will perhaps find its
+best excuse in its intention of repairing an old injustice and of
+affirming a useful and permanent truth: that of the authenticity of the
+classicism of Impressionism, in the face of the false classicism of the
+academic world which official honours have made the guardian of a French
+heritage, whose soul it denied and whose spirit it deceived with its
+narrow and cold formulas.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The French Impressionists (1860-1900), by Camille Mauclair</title>
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The French Impressionists (1860-1900), by
+Camille Mauclair, Translated by P. G. Konady</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The French Impressionists (1860-1900)</p>
+<p>Author: Camille Mauclair</p>
+<p>Release Date: November 15, 2004  [eBook #14056]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (1860-1900)***</p>
+<br><br><h3>E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Linda Cantoni,<br>
+            and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h3><br><br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h1>
+    THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
+</h1>
+<center>
+    <h2>(1860-1900) </h2>
+</center><br>
+<center><b>
+    BY
+</b></center>
+<center>
+<h2><b>
+    CAMILLE MAUCLAIR
+</b></h2>
+</center>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+    AUTHOR OF <i>L'ART EN SILENCE</i>, <i>LES MÈRES SOCIALES</i>, ETC.
+</p>
+<h3><i>Translated from the French text of Camille Mauclair, by P. G. Konody</i>.</h3>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<center><small>
+    LONDON: DUCKWORTH &amp; CO.<br>
+    NEW YORK: E.P. DUTTON &amp; CO.
+</small></center>
+<center>
+    1903
+</center>
+<center><small>
+    TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.</small>
+    <p>&nbsp;</p>
+</center>
+<a name="image-0001"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/01renoir.jpg" width="222" height="300"
+alt="Renoir - At the Piano">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR</b><br><br>AT THE PIANO
+    <p style="text-align: center">&nbsp;</p>
+</center>
+<hr>
+<h3>To</h3><br>
+<h3>
+    AUGUSTE BRÉAL
+</h3>
+<center>
+    TO THE ARTIST AND TO THE FRIEND
+</center>
+<center>
+    AS A MARK OF GRATEFUL AFFECTION
+</center>
+<center>
+    <b>C.M. </b>
+</center>
+<p align="center">
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p align="center">
+
+</p>
+
+    <p><br>
+
+    </p>
+
+<h2>
+    CONTENTS
+</h2>
+<br>
+
+                                               <a href="#2H_4_0002">AUTHOR'S NOTE
+</a>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_LIST">LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0004">NOTE TO LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0005"><b>I.</b> THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM&mdash;THE&nbsp;
+     BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT, THE ORIGIN OF ITS NAME</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em">
+ <a href="#2H_4_0006">
+ <b>II.</b> THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS&mdash;THE
+     DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS,
+     THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE&mdash;THE IDEAS OF THE
+     IMPRESSIONISTS ON SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON
+     THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY, AND ON STYLE</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0007"><b>III.</b> EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0008"><b>IV.</b> EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0009"><b>V.</b> CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0010"><b>VI.</b> AUGUSTE RENOIR: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0011"><b>VII.</b> PISSARRO, SISLEY, CAILLEBOTTE,
+      CÉZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MARY CASSATT;
+      THE SECONDARY ARTISTS OF
+      IMPRESSIONISM&mdash;JONGKIND, BOUDIN</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0012"><b>VIII.</b> THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH
+      IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAËLLI, TOULOUSE-LAUTREC,
+      FORAIN, CHÉRET, ETC.</a></p>
+<p style="text-indent: 0em"><a href="#2H_4_0013"><b>IX.</b> NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: GAUGUIN, DENIS, THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE&mdash;THE THEORY OF
+      POINTILLISM&mdash;SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE
+      THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC CHROMATISM&mdash;FAULTS
+      AND QUALITIES OF THE
+      IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE OWE
+      TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE
+      FRENCH SCHOOL&mdash;SOME WORDS ON ITS INFLUENCE ABROAD</a><br>
+
+
+</p>
+
+<br><br><a name="2H_4_0002"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+    <hr>
+<h2>
+    AUTHOR'S NOTE
+</h2>
+<p>
+    It should be stated here that, with the exception of one reproduction
+    after the Neo-Impressionist Van Rysselberghe, the other forty-nine
+    engravings illustrating this volume I owe to the courtesy of M.
+    Durand-Ruel, from the first the friend of the Impressionist painters,
+    and later the most important collector of their works, a friend who has
+    been good enough to place at our disposal the photographs from which our
+    illustrations have been reproduced. Chosen from a considerable
+    collection which has been formed for thirty years past, these
+    photographs, none of which are for sale, form a veritable and unique
+    museum of documents on Impressionist art, which is made even more
+    valuable through the dispersal of the principal masterpieces of this art
+    among the private collections of Europe and America. We render our
+    thanks to M. Durand-Ruel no less in the name of the public interested in
+    art, than in our own.
+</p>
+<br><hr>
+    <p><br>
+    </p>
+<a name="2H_LIST"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<h2>
+    LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</h2>
+
+<h2>
+    &nbsp;</h2>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0001">RENOIR.  At the Piano</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0002">MANET. Rest</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0003">MANET. In the Square</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0004">MANET.   Young Man in Costume of Majo</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0005">MANET. The Reader</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0006">DEGAS. The Dancer at the Photographer's</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0007">DEGAS. Carriages at the Races</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0008">DEGAS. The Greek Dance&mdash;Pastel</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0009">DEGAS. Waiting</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0010">CLAUDE MONET. The Pines</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0011">CLAUDE MONET. Church at Vernon</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0012">RENOIR. Portrait of Madame Maitre</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0013">MANET. The Dead Toreador</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0014">MANET. Olympia</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0015">MANET. The Woman with the Parrot</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0016">MANET.   The Bar at the Folies-Bergère</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0017">MANET.   Déjeuner</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0018">MANET.   Portrait of Madame M.L.</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0019">MANET. The Hothouse</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0020">DEGAS. The Beggar Woman</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0021">DEGAS. The Lesson in the Foyer</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0022">DEGAS. The Dancing Lesson&mdash;Pastel</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0023">DEGAS. The Dancers</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0024">DEGAS. Horses in the Meadows</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0025">CLAUDE MONET. An Interior after Dinner</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0026">CLAUDE MONET.   The Harbour, Honfleur</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0027">CLAUDE MONET.   The Church at Varengeville</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0028">CLAUDE MONET.   Poplars on the Epte in Autumn</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0029">CLAUDE MONET.   The Bridge at Argenteuil</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0030">RENOIR.   Déjeuner</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0031">RENOIR. In the Box</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0032">RENOIR. Young Girl Promenading</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0033">RENOIR. Woman's Bust</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0034">RENOIR. Young Woman in Empire Costume</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0035">RENOIR. On the Terrace</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0036">PISSARRO.   Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0037">PISSARRO.   Boulevard Montmartre</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0038">PISSARRO.   The Boildieaux Bridge at Rouen</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0039">PISSARRO.   The Avenue de l'Opéra</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0040">SISLEY. Snow Effect</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0041">SISLEY.   Bougival, at the Water's Edge</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0042">SISLEY.   Bridge at Moret</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0043">CÉZANNE. Dessert</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0044">BERTHE MORISOT. Melancholy</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0045">BERTHE MORISOT. Young Woman Seated</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0046">MARY CASSATT. Getting up Baby</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0047">MARY CASSATT. Women and Child</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0048">JONGKIND. In Holland</a></p>
+<p>
+    <a href="#image-0049">JONGKIND. View of the Hague</a></p>
+<p><a href="#image-0050">THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE.   Portraits of
+   Madame van Rysselberghe and her Daughter</a></p>
+
+<br><br>
+<a name="2H_4_0004"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<h2>
+    NOTE TO LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</h2>
+<p>
+    The illustrations contained in this volume have been taken from
+    different epochs of the Impressionist movement. They will give but a
+    feeble idea of the extreme abundance of its production.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Banished from the salons, exhibited in private galleries and sold direct
+    to art lovers, the Impressionist works have been but little seen. The
+    series left by Caillebotte to the Luxembourg Gallery is very badly shown
+    and is composed of interesting works which, however, date back to the
+    early period, and are very inferior to the beautiful productions which
+    followed later. Renoir is best represented. The private galleries in
+    Paris, where the best Impressionist works are to be found, are those of
+    MM. Durand-Ruel, Rouart, de Bellis, de Camondo, and Manzi, to which must
+    be added the one sold by MM. Théodore Duret and Faure, and the one of
+    Mme. Ernest Rouart, daughter of Mme. Morisot, the sister-in-law of
+    Manet. The public galleries of M. Durand-Ruel's show-rooms are the place
+    where it is easiest to find numerous Impressionist pictures.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In spite of the firm opposition of the official juries, a place of
+    honour was reserved at the Exposition of 1889 for Manet, and at that of
+    1900 a fine collection of Impressionists occupied two rooms and caused a
+    considerable stir.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amongst the critics who have most faithfully assisted this group of
+    artists, I must mention, besides the early friends previously referred
+    to, Castagnary, Burty, Edouard de Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geffroy, Arsène
+    Alexandre, Octave Mirbeau, L. de Fourcaud, Clemenceau, Mallarmé,
+    Huysmans, Jules Laforgue, and nearly all the critics of the Symbolist
+    reviews. A book on "Impressionist Art" by M. Georges Lecomte has been
+    published by the firm of Durand-Ruel as an <i>edition-de-luxe</i>. But the
+    bibliography of this art consists as yet almost exclusively of articles
+    in journals and reviews and of some isolated biographical pamphlets.
+    Manet is, amongst many, the one who has excited most criticism of all
+    kinds; the articles, caricatures and pamphlets relating to his work
+    would form a considerable collection. It should be added that, with the
+    exception of Manet two years before his death, and Renoir last year at
+    the age of sixty-eight, no Impressionist has been decorated by the
+    French government. In England such a distinction has even less
+    importance in itself than elsewhere. But if I insist upon it, it is only
+    to draw attention to the fact that, through the sheer force of their
+    talent, men like Degas, Monet and Pissarro have achieved great fame and
+    fortune, without gaining access to the Salons, without official
+    encouragement, decoration, subvention or purchases for the national
+    museums. This is a very significant instance and serves well to complete
+    the physiognomy of this group of independents.
+</p>
+
+<br>&nbsp;<hr>
+    <p><br>
+<a name="2H_4_0005"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+    </p>
+
+<h2>
+    I
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM&mdash;THE BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT AND THE
+    ORIGIN OF ITS NAME
+</h3>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<p>
+    It will be beyond the scope of this volume to give a complete history of
+    French Impressionism, and to include all the attractive details to which
+    it might lead, as regards the movement itself and the very curious epoch
+    during which its evolution has taken place. The proportions of this book
+    confine its aim to the clearest possible summing up for the British
+    reader of the ideas, the personalities and the works of a considerable
+    group of artists who, for various reasons, have remained but little
+    known and who have only too frequently been gravely misjudged. These
+    reasons are very obvious: first, the Impressionists have been unable to
+    make a show at the Salons, partly because the jury refused them
+    admission, partly because they held aloof of their own free will. They
+    have, with very rare exceptions, exhibited at special minor galleries,
+    where they become known to a very restricted public. Ever attacked, and
+    poor until the last few years, they enjoyed none of the benefits of
+    publicity and sham glory. It is only quite recently that the admission
+    of the incomplete and badly arranged Caillebotte collection to the
+    Luxembourg Gallery has enabled the public to form a summary idea of
+    Impressionism. To conclude the enumeration of the obstacles, it must be
+    added that there are hardly any photographs of Impressionist works in
+    the market. As it is, photography is but a poor translation of these
+    canvases devoted to the study of the play of light; but even this very
+    feeble means of distribution has been withheld from them! Exhibited at
+    some galleries, gathered principally by Durand-Ruel, sold directly to
+    art-lovers&mdash;foreigners mostly&mdash;these large series of works have
+    practically remained unknown to the French public. All the public heard
+    was the reproaches and sarcastic comments of the opponents, and they
+    never became aware that in the midst of modern life the greatest, the
+    richest movement was in progress, which the French school had known
+    since the days of Romanticism. Impressionism has been made known to them
+    principally by the controversies and by the fruitful consequences of
+    this movement for the illustration and study of contemporary life.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0002"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/02manet.jpg" width="224" height="300"
+alt="Manet - Rest">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>REST
+</center>
+<p>
+    I do not profess to give here a detailed and complete history of
+    Impressionism, for which several volumes like the present one would be
+    required. I shall only try to compile an <i>ensemble</i> of concise and very
+    precise notions and statements bearing upon this vast subject. It will
+    be my special object to try and prove that Impressionism is neither an
+    isolated manifestation, nor a violent denial of the French traditions,
+    but nothing more or less than a logical return to the very spirit of
+    these traditions, contrary to the theories upheld by its detractors. It
+    is for this reason that I have made use of the first chapter to say a
+    few words on the precursors of this movement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No art manifestation is really isolated. However new it may seem, it is
+    always based upon the previous epochs. The true masters do not give
+    lessons, because art cannot be taught, but they set the example. To
+    admire them does not mean to imitate them: it means the recognition in
+    them of the principles of originality and the comprehension of their
+    source, so that this eternal source may be called to life in oneself,
+    this source which springs from a sincere and sympathetic vision of the
+    aspects of life. The Impressionists have not escaped this beautiful law.
+    I shall speak of them impartially, without excessive enthusiasm; and it
+    will be my special endeavour to demonstrate in each of them the cult of
+    a predecessor, for there have been few artistic movements where the love
+    for, and one might say the hereditary link with, the preceding masters
+    has been more tenacious.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Academy has struggled violently against Impressionism, accusing it
+    of madness, of systematic negation of the "laws of beauty," which it
+    pretended to defend and of which it claimed to be the official priest.
+    The Academy has shown itself hostile to a degree in this quarrel. It has
+    excluded the Impressionists from the Salons, from awards, from official
+    purchases. Only quite recently the acceptance of the Caillebotte
+    bequest to the Luxembourg Gallery gave rise to a storm of indignation
+    among the official painters. I shall, in the course of this book, enter
+    upon the value of these attacks. Meanwhile I can only say how
+    regrettable this obstinacy appears to me and will appear to every free
+    spirit. It is unworthy even of an ardent conviction to condemn a whole
+    group of artists <i>en bloc</i> as fools, enemies of beauty, or as tricksters
+    anxious to degrade the art of their nation, when these artists worked
+    during forty years towards the same goal, without getting any reward for
+    their effort, but poverty and derision. It is now about ten years since
+    Impressionism has taken root, since its followers can sell their
+    canvases, and since they are admired and praised by a solid and
+    ever-growing section of the public. The hour has therefore arrived,
+    calmly to consider a movement which has imposed itself upon the history
+    of French art from 1860 to 1900 with extreme energy, to leave
+    dithyrambics as well as polemics, and to speak of it with a view to
+    exactness. The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of
+    beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art,
+    and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon
+    itself as the guardian of the national tradition, because it exercises
+    an hierarchic authority over the <i>Ecole de Rome</i>, the <i>Salons</i>, and the
+    <i>Ecole des Beaux Arts</i>. All the same, its ideals are of very mixed
+    origin and very little French. Its principles are the same by which the
+    academic art of nearly all the official schools of Europe is governed.
+    This mythological and allegorical art, guided by dogmas and formulas
+    which are imposed upon all pupils regardless of their temperament, is
+    far more international than national. To an impartial critic this
+    statement will show in an even more curious light the excommunication
+    jealously issued by the academic painters against French artists, who,
+    far from revolting in an absurd spirit of <i>parti-pris</i> against the
+    genius of their race, are perhaps more sincerely attached to it than
+    their persecutors. Why should a group of men deliberately choose to
+    paint mad, illogical, bad pictures, and reap a harvest of public
+    derision, poverty and sterility? It would be uncritical to believe
+    merely in a general mystification which makes its authors the worst
+    sufferers. Simple common sense will find in these men a conviction, a
+    sincerity, a sustained effort, and this alone should, in the name of the
+    sacred solidarity of those who by various means try to express their
+    love of the beautiful, suppress the annoying accusations hurled too
+    light-heartedly against Manet and his friends.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0003"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/03manet.jpg" width="293" height="235"
+alt="Manet - In the Square">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>IN THE SQUARE
+</center>
+<p>
+    I shall define later on the ideas of the Impressionists on technique,
+    composition and style in painting. Meanwhile it will be necessary to
+    indicate their principal precursors.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their movement may be styled thus: a reaction against the Greco-Latin
+    spirit and the scholastic organisation of painting after the second
+    Renaissance and the Italo-French school of Fontainebleau, by the century
+    of Louis XIV., the school of Rome, and the consular and imperial taste.
+    In this sense Impressionism is a protest analogous to that of
+    Romanticism, exclaiming, to quote the old verse: "<i>Qui nous délivrera
+    des Grecs et des Romains?</i>"<a href="#note-1"><small>1</small></a> From this point of view Impressionism has
+    also great affinities with the ideas of the English Pre-Raphaelites,
+    who stepped across the second and even the first Renaissance back to the
+    Primitives.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This reaction is superimposed by another: the reaction of Impressionism,
+    not only against classic subjects, but against the black painting of the
+    degenerate Romanticists. And these two reactions are counterbalanced by
+    a return to the French ideal, to the realistic and characteristic
+    tradition which commences with Jean Foucquet and Clouet, and is
+    continued by Chardin, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, Watteau, La Tour,
+    Fragonard, and the admirable engravers of the eighteenth century down to
+    the final triumph of the allegorical taste of the Roman revolution. Here
+    can be found a whole chain of truly national artists who have either
+    been misjudged, like Chardin, or considered as "small masters" and
+    excluded from the first rank for the benefit of the pompous Allegorists
+    descended from the Italian school.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Impressionism being beyond all a technical reaction, its predecessors
+    should first be looked for from this material point of view. Watteau is
+    the most striking of all. <i>L'Embarquement pour Cythère</i> is, in its
+    technique, an Impressionist canvas. It embodies the most significant
+    of all the principles exposed by Claude Monet: the division of tones by
+    juxtaposed touches of colour which, at a certain distance, produce upon
+    the eye of the beholder the effect of the actual colouring of the things
+    painted, with a variety, a freshness and a delicacy of analysis
+    unobtainable by a single tone prepared and mixed upon the palette.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0004"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/04manet.jpg" width="195" height="300"
+alt="Manet - Young Man in Costume of Majo">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>YOUNG MAN IN COSTUME OF MAJO
+</center>
+<p>
+    Claude Lorrain, and after him Carle Vernet, are claimed by the
+    Impressionists as precursors from the point of view of decorative
+    landscape arrangement, and particularly of the predominance of light in
+    which all objects are bathed. Ruysdael and Poussin are, in their eyes,
+    for the same reasons precursors, especially Ruysdael, who observed so
+    frankly the blue colouring of the horizon and the influence of blue upon
+    the landscape. It is known that Turner worshipped Claude for the very
+    same reasons. The Impressionists in their turn, consider Turner as one
+    of their masters; they have the greatest admiration for this mighty
+    genius, this sumptuous visionary. They have it equally for Bonington,
+    whose technique is inspired by the same observations as their own. They
+    find, finally, in Delacroix the frequent and very apparent application
+    of their ideas. Notably in the famous <i>Entry of the Crusaders into
+    Constantinople</i>, the fair woman kneeling in the foreground is painted in
+    accordance with the principles of the division of tones: the nude back
+    is furrowed with blue, green and yellow touches, the juxtaposition of
+    which produces, at a certain distance, an admirable flesh-tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And now I must speak at some length of a painter who, together with the
+    luminous and sparkling landscapist Félix Ziem, was the most direct
+    initiator of Impressionist technique. Monticelli is one of those
+    singular men of genius who are not connected with any school, and whose
+    work is an inexhaustible source of applications. He lived at Marseilles,
+    where he was born, made a short appearance at the Salons, and then
+    returned to his native town, where he died poor, ignored, paralysed and
+    mad. In order to live he sold his small pictures at the cafés, where
+    they fetched ten or twenty francs at the most. To-day they sell for
+    considerable prices, although the government has not yet acquired any
+    work by Monticelli for the public galleries. The mysterious power alone
+    of these paintings secures him a fame which is, alas! posthumous. Many
+    Monticellis have been sold by dealers as Diaz's; now they are more
+    eagerly looked for than Diaz, and collectors have made fortunes with
+    these small canvases bought formerly, to use a colloquial expression
+    which is here only too literally true, "for a piece of bread."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Monticelli painted landscapes, romantic scenes, "fêtes galantes" in the
+    spirit of Watteau, and still-life pictures: one could not imagine a more
+    inspired sense of colour than shown by these works which seem to be
+    painted with crushed jewels, with powerful harmony, and beyond all with
+    an unheard-of delicacy in the perception of fine shades. There are tones
+    which nobody had ever invented yet, a richness, a profusion, a subtlety
+    which almost vie with the resources of music. The fairyland atmosphere
+    of these works surrounds a very firm design of charming style, but, to
+    use the words of the artist himself, "in these canvases the objects are
+    the decoration, the touches are the scales, and the light is the tenor."
+    Monticelli has created for himself an entirely personal technique which
+    can only be compared with that of Turner; he painted with a brush so
+    full, fat and rich, that some of the details are often truly modelled in
+    relief, in a substance as precious as enamels, jewels, ceramics&mdash;a
+    substance which is a delight in itself. Every picture by Monticelli
+    provokes astonishment; constructed upon one colour as upon a musical
+    theme, it rises to intensities which one would have thought impossible.
+    His pictures are magnificent bouquets, bursts of joy and colour, where
+    nothing is ever crude, and where everything is ruled by a supreme sense
+    of harmony.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0005"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/05manet.jpg" width="243" height="300"
+alt="Manet - The Reader">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>THE READER
+</center>
+<p>
+    Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the
+    descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet. In all matters concerning
+    technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism. As regards
+    design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of
+    beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the
+    old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour,
+    Largillière, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen. It
+    has resolutely held aloof from mythology, academic allegory, historical
+    painting, and from the neo-Greek elements of Classicism as well as from
+    the German and Spanish elements of Romanticism. This reactionary
+    movement is therefore entirely French, and surely if it deserves
+    reproach, the one least deserved is that levelled upon it by the
+    official painters: disobedience to the national spirit. Impressionism is
+    an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose
+    followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting
+    philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the
+    consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation,
+    and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We
+    shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters,
+    that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French
+    blood.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Impressionism has, then, hitherto been very badly judged. It is
+    contained in two chief points: search after a new technique, and
+    expression of modern reality. Its birth has not been a spontaneous
+    phenomenon. Manet, who, by his spirit and by the chance of his
+    friendships, grouped around him the principal members, commenced by
+    being classed in the ranks of the Realists of the second Romanticism by
+    the side of Courbet; and during the whole first period of his work he
+    only endeavoured to describe contemporary scenes, at a time when the
+    laws of the new technique were already dawning upon Claude Monet.
+    Gradually the grouping of the Impressionists took place. Claude Monet is
+    really the first initiator: in a parallel line with his ideas and his
+    works Manet passed into the second period of his artistic life, and with
+    him Renoir, Degas and Pissarro. But Manet had already during his first
+    period been the topic of far-echoing polemics, caused by his realism and
+    by the marked influence of the Spaniards and of Hals upon his style; his
+    temperament, too, was that of the head of a school; and for these
+    reasons legend has attached to his name the title of head of the
+    Impressionist school, but this legend is incorrect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To conclude, the very name "Impressionism" is due to Claude Monet. There
+    has been much serious arguing upon this famous word which has given rise
+    to all sorts of definitions and conclusions. In reality this is its
+    curious origin which is little known, even in criticism. Ever since
+    1860 the works of Manet and of his friends caused such a stir, that they
+    were rejected <i>en bloc</i> by the Salon jury of 1863. The emperor, inspired
+    by a praiseworthy, liberal thought, demanded that these innovators
+    should at least have the right to exhibit together in a special room
+    which was called the <i>Salon des Refusés</i>. The public crowded there to
+    have a good laugh. One of the pictures which caused most derision was a
+    sunset by Claude Monet, entitled <i>Impressions</i>. From this moment the
+    painters who adopted more or less the same manner were called
+    <i>Impressionists</i>. The word remained in use, and Manet and his friends
+    thought it a matter of indifference whether this label was attached to
+    them, or another. At this despised Salon were to be found the names of
+    Manet, Monet, Whistler, Bracquemont, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour, Renoir,
+    Legros, and many others who have since risen to fame. Universal ridicule
+    only fortified the friendships and resolutions of this group of men, and
+    from that time dates the definite foundation of the Impressionist
+    school. For thirty years it continued to produce without interruption
+    an enormous quantity of works under an accidental and inexact
+    denomination; to obey the creative instinct, without any other dogma
+    than the passionate observation of nature, without any other assistance
+    than individual sympathies, in the face of the disciplinary teaching of
+    the official school.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0006"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/06degasr.jpg" width="225" height="300"
+alt="Degas - The Dancer at the Photographer's">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>THE DANCER AT THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+<a name="2H_4_0006"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+
+<h2>
+    II
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS&mdash;THE DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY
+    COLOURS, THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE&mdash;THE IDEAS OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON
+    SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY, AND ON STYLE
+</h3>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+    It should be stated from the outset that there is nothing dogmatic about
+    this explanation of the Impressionist theories, and that it is not the
+    result of a preconceived plan. In art a system is not improvised. A
+    theory is slowly evolved, nearly always unknown to the author, from the
+    discoveries of his sincere instinct, and this theory can only be
+    formulated after years by criticism facing the works. Monet and Manet
+    have worked for a long time without ever thinking that theories would be
+    built upon their paintings. Yet a certain number of considerations will
+    strike the close observer, and I will put these considerations before
+    the reader, after reminding him that spontaneity and feeling are the
+    essentials of all art.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0007"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/07degas.jpg" width="400" height="248"
+alt="Degas - Carriages at the Races">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>CARRIAGES AT THE RACES
+</center>
+<p>
+    The Impressionist ideas may be summed up in the following manner:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    In nature no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the objects is a
+    pure illusion: the only creative source of colour is the sunlight which
+    envelopes all things, and reveals them, according to the hours, with
+    infinite modifications. The mystery of matter escapes us; we do not know
+    the exact moment when reality separates itself from unreality. All we
+    know is, that our vision has formed the habit of discerning in the
+    universe two notions: form and colour; but these two notions are
+    inseparable. Only artificially can we distinguish between outline and
+    colour: in nature the distinction does not exist. Light reveals the
+    forms, and, playing upon the different states of matter, the substance
+    of leaves, the grain of stones, the fluidity of air in deep layers,
+    gives them dissimilar colouring. If the light disappears, forms and
+    colours vanish together. We only see colours; everything has a colour,
+    and it is by the perception of the different colour surfaces striking
+    our eyes, that we conceive the forms, <i>i.e.</i> the outlines of these
+    colours.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The idea of distance, of perspective, of volume is given us by darker or
+    lighter colours: this idea is what is called in painting the sense of
+    values. A value is the degree of dark or light intensity, which permits
+    our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer than
+    another. And as painting is not and cannot be the <i>imitation</i> of nature,
+    but merely her artificial interpretation, since it only has at its
+    disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only means that
+    remain for expressing depth on a flat surface.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Colour is therefore the procreatrix of design. Or, colour being simply
+    the irradiation of light, it follows that all colour is composed of the
+    same elements as sunlight, namely the seven tones of the spectrum. It is
+    known, that these seven tones appear different owing to the unequal
+    speed of the waves of light. The tones of nature appear to us therefore
+    different, like those of the spectrum, and for the same reason. The
+    colours vary with the intensity of light. There is no colour peculiar
+    to any object, but only more or less rapid vibration of light upon its
+    surface. The speed depends, as is demonstrated by optics, on the degree
+    of the inclination of the rays which, according to their vertical or
+    oblique direction, give different light and colour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The colours of the spectrum are thus recomposed in everything we see. It
+    is their relative proportion which makes new tones out of the seven
+    spectral tones. This leads immediately to some practical conclusions,
+    the first of which is, that what has formerly been called <i>local colour</i>
+    is an error: a leaf is not green, a tree-trunk is not brown, and,
+    according to the time of day, <i>i.e.</i> according to the greater or smaller
+    inclination of the rays (scientifically called the angle of incidence),
+    the green of the leaf and the brown of the tree are modified. What has
+    to be studied therefore in these objects, if one wishes to recall their
+    colour to the beholder of a picture, is the composition of the
+    atmosphere which separates them from the eye. This atmosphere is the
+    real subject of the picture, and whatever is represented upon it only
+    exists through its medium.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0008"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/08degas.jpg" width="239" height="300"
+alt="Degas - The Greek Dance - Pastel">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>THE GREEK DANCE&mdash;PASTEL
+</center>
+<p>
+    A second consequence of this analysis of light is, that shadow is not
+    absence of light, but light of <i>a different quality</i> and of different
+    value. Shadow is not a part of the landscape, where light ceases, but
+    where it is subordinated to a light which appears to us more intense. In
+    the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with different speed.
+    Painting should therefore try to discover here, as in the light parts,
+    the play of the atoms of solar light, instead of representing shadows
+    with ready-made tones composed of bitumen and black.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The third conclusion resulting from this: the colours in the shadow are
+    modified by <i>refraction</i>. That means, <i>f.i.</i> in a picture representing
+    an interior, the source of light (window) may not be indicated: the
+    light circling round the picture will then be composed of the
+    <i>reflections</i> of rays whose source is invisible, and all the objects,
+    acting as mirrors for these reflections, will consequently influence
+    each other. Their colours will affect each other, even if the surfaces
+    be dull. A red vase placed upon a blue carpet will lead to a very
+    subtle, but mathematically exact, interchange between this blue and this
+    red, and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two
+    colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite
+    reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two
+    principal colours. The science of optics can work out these
+    complementary colours with mathematical exactness. If <i>f.i.</i> a head
+    receives the orange rays of daylight from one side and the bluish light
+    of an interior from the other, green reflections will necessarily appear
+    on the nose and in the middle region of the face. The painter Besnard,
+    who has specially devoted himself to this minute study of complementary
+    colours, has given us some famous examples of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The last consequence of these propositions is that the blending of the
+    spectral tones is accomplished by a <i>parallel</i> and <i>distinct</i> projection
+    of the colours. They are artificially reunited on the crystalline: a
+    lens interposed between the light and the eye, and opposing the
+    crystalline, which is a living lens, dissociates again these united
+    rays, and shows us again the seven distinct colours of the atmosphere.
+    It is no less artificial if a painter mixes upon his palette different
+    colours to compose a tone; it is again artificial that paints have been
+    invented which represent some of the combinations of the spectrum, just
+    to save the artist the trouble of constantly mixing the seven solar
+    tones. Such mixtures are false, and they have the disadvantage of
+    creating heavy tonalities, since the coarse mixture of powders and oils
+    cannot accomplish the action of light which reunites the luminous waves
+    into an intense white of unimpaired transparency. The colours mixed on
+    the palette compose a dirty grey. What, then, is the painter to do, who
+    is anxious to approach, as near as our poor human means will allow, that
+    divine fairyland of nature? Here we touch upon the very foundations of
+    Impressionism. The painter will have to paint with only the seven
+    colours of the spectrum, and discard all the others: that is what Claude
+    Monet has done boldly, adding to them only white and black. He will,
+    furthermore, instead of composing mixtures on his palette, place upon
+    his canvas touches of none but the seven colours <i>juxtaposed</i>, and leave
+    the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain
+    distance, so as to act like sunlight itself upon the eye of the
+    beholder.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0009"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/09degas.jpg" width="300" height="238"
+alt="Degas - Waiting">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>WAITING
+</center>
+<p>
+    This, then, is the theory of the <i>dissociation of tones</i>, which is the
+    main point of Impressionist technique. It has the immense advantage of
+    suppressing all mixtures, of leaving to each colour its proper strength,
+    and consequently its freshness and brilliancy. At the same time the
+    difficulties are extreme. The painter's eye must be admirably subtle.
+    Light becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the
+    object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes
+    a purely optic art, a search for harmonies, a sort of natural poem,
+    quite distinct from expression, style and design, which were the
+    principal aims of former painting. It is almost necessary to invent
+    another name for this special art which, clearly pictorial though it be,
+    comes as near to music, as it gets far away from literature and
+    psychology. It is only natural that, fascinated by this study, the
+    Impressionists have almost remained strangers to the painting of
+    expression, and altogether hostile to historical and symbolist painting.
+    It is therefore principally in landscape painting that they have
+    achieved the greatness that is theirs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Through the application of these principles which I have set forth very
+    summarily, Claude Monet arrived at painting by means of the infinitely
+    varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour spots which dissociate the
+    tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the
+    arabesque of their vibrations. A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind
+    of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, <i>f.i.</i>),
+    and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This
+    investigation is added to the habitual preoccupations of the landscapist
+    study of the character peculiar to the scene, style of the trees or
+    houses, accentuation of the decorative side&mdash;and to the habitual
+    preoccupations of the figure painter in the portrait. The canvases of
+    Monet, Renoir and Pissarro have, in consequence of this research, an
+    absolutely original aspect: their shadows are striped with blue,
+    rose-madder and green; nothing is opaque or sooty; a light vibration
+    strikes the eye. Finally, blue and orange predominate, simply because in
+    these studies&mdash;which are more often than not full sunlight
+    effects&mdash;blue is the complementary colour of the orange light of the
+    sun, and is profusely distributed in the shadows. In these canvases can
+    be found a vast amount of exact grades of tone, which seem to have been
+    entirely ignored by the older painters, whose principal concern was
+    style, and who reduced a landscape to three or four broad tones,
+    endeavouring only to explain the sentiment inspired by it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And now I shall have to pass on to the Impressionists' ideas on the
+    style itself of painting, on Realism.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From the outset it must not be forgotten that Impressionism has been
+    propagated by men who had all been Realists; that means by a reactionary
+    movement against classic and romantic painting. This movement, of which
+    Courbet will always remain the most famous representative, has been
+    <i>anti-intellectual</i>. It has protested against every literary,
+    psychologic or symbolical element in painting. It has reacted at the
+    same time against the historical painting of Delaroche and the
+    mythological painting of the <i>Ecole de Rome</i>, with an extreme violence
+    which appears to us excessive now, but which found its explanation in
+    the intolerable tediousness or emphasis at which the official painters
+    had arrived. Courbet was a magnificent worker, with rudimentary ideas,
+    and he endeavoured to exclude even those which he possessed. This
+    exaggeration which diminishes our admiration for his work and prevents
+    us from finding in it any emotion but that which results from technical
+    mastery, was salutary for the development of the art of his successors.
+    It caused the young painters to turn resolutely towards the aspects of
+    contemporary life, and to draw style and emotion from their own epoch;
+    and this intention was right. An artistic tradition is not continued by
+    imitating the style of the past, but by extracting the immediate
+    impression of each epoch. That is what the really great masters have
+    done, and it is the succession of their sincere and profound
+    observations which constitutes the style of the races.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0010"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/10monet.jpg" width="300" height="240"
+alt="Monet - The Pines">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>CLAUDE MONET</b><br><br>THE PINES
+</center>
+<p>
+    Manet and his friends drew all their strength from this idea. Much finer
+    and more learned than a man like Courbet, they saw an aspect of
+    modernity far more complex, and less limited to immediate and grossly
+    superficial realism. Nor must it be forgotten that they were
+    contemporaries of the realistic, anti-romantic literary movement, a
+    movement which gave them nothing but friends. Flaubert and the Goncourts
+    proved that Realism is not the enemy of refined form and of delicate
+    psychology. The influence of these ideas created first of all Manet and
+    his friends: the technical evolution (of which we have traced the chief
+    traits) came only much later to oppose itself to their conceptions.
+    Impressionism can therefore be defined as a <i>revolution of pictorial
+    technique together with an attempt at expressing modernity</i>. The
+    reaction against Symbolism and Romanticism happened to coincide with the
+    reaction against muddy technique.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Impressionists, whilst occupying themselves with cleansing the
+    palette of the bitumen of which the Academy made exaggerated use, whilst
+    also observing nature with a greater love of light, made it their object
+    to escape in the representation of human beings the laws of <i>beauty</i>,
+    such as were taught by the School. And on this point one might apply to
+    them all that one knows of the ideas of the Goncourts and Flaubert, and
+    later of Zola, in the domain of the novel. They were moved by the same
+    ideas; to speak of the one group is to speak of the other. The longing
+    for truth, the horror of emphasis and of false idealism which paralysed
+    the novelist as well as the painter, led the Impressionists to
+    substitute for <i>beauty</i> a novel notion, that of <i>character</i>. To search
+    for, and to express, the true character of a being or of a site, seemed
+    to them more significant, more moving, than to search for an exclusive
+    beauty, based upon rules, and inspired by the Greco-Latin ideal. Like
+    the Flemings, the Germans, the Spaniards, and in opposition to the
+    Italians whose influence had conquered all the European academies, the
+    French Realist-Impressionists, relying upon the qualities of lightness,
+    sincerity and expressive clearness which are the real merits of their
+    race, detached themselves from the oppressive and narrow preoccupation
+    with the beautiful and with all the metaphysics and abstractions
+    following in its train.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0011"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/11monet.jpg" width="300" height="235"
+alt="Claude Monet - Church at Vernon">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>CLAUDE MONET</b><br><br>CHURCH AT VERNON
+    </center>
+<p>
+    This fact of the substitution of <i>character</i> for <i>beauty</i> is the
+    essential feature of the movement. What is called Impressionism is&mdash;let
+    it not be forgotten&mdash;a technique which can be applied to any subject.
+    Whether the subject be a virgin, or a labourer, it can be painted with
+    divided tones, and certain living artists, like the symbolist Henri
+    Martin, who has almost the ideas of a Pre-Raphaelite, have proved it by
+    employing this technique for the rendering of religious or philosophic
+    subjects. But one can only understand the effort and the faults of the
+    painters grouped around Manet, by constantly recalling to one's mind
+    their predeliction for <i>character</i>. Before Manet a distinction was made
+    between <i>noble</i> subjects, and others which were relegated to the domain
+    of <i>genre</i> in which no great artist was admitted to exist by the School,
+    the familiarity of their subjects barring from them this rank. By the
+    suppression of the <i>nobleness</i> inherent to the treated subject, the
+    painter's technical merit is one of the first things to be considered in
+    giving him rank. The Realist-Impressionists painted scenes in the
+    ball-room, on the river, in the field, the street, the foundry, modern
+    interiors, and found in the life of the humble immense scope for
+    studying the gestures, the costumes, the expressions of the nineteenth
+    century.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their effort had its bearing upon the way of representing persons, upon
+    what is called, in the studio language, the "<i>mise en cadre</i>." There,
+    too, they overthrew the principles admitted by the School. Manet, and
+    especially Degas, have created in this respect a new style from which
+    the whole art of realistic contemporary illustration is derived. This
+    style had been hitherto totally ignored, or the artists had shrunk from
+    applying it. It is a style which is founded upon the small painters of
+    the eighteenth century, upon Saint-Aubin, Debucourt, Moreau, and,
+    further back, upon Pater and the Dutchmen. But this time, instead of
+    confining this style to vignettes and very small dimensions, the
+    Impressionists have boldly given it the dimensions and importance of big
+    canvases. They have no longer based the laws of composition, and
+    consequently of style, upon the ideas relative to the subjects, but upon
+    values and harmonies. To take a summary example: if the School composed
+    a picture representing the death of Agamemnon, it did not fail to
+    subordinate the whole composition to Agamemnon, then to Clytemnestra,
+    then to the witnesses of the murder, graduating the moral and literary
+    interest according to the different persons, and sacrificing to this
+    interest the colouring and the realistic qualities of the scene. The
+    Realists composed by picking out first the strongest "value" of the
+    picture, say a red dress, and then distributing the other values
+    according to a harmonious progression of their tonalities. "The
+    principal person in a picture," said Manet, "is the light." With Manet
+    and his friends we find, then, that the concern for expression and for
+    the sentiments evoked by the subject, was always subordinated to a
+    purely pictorial and decorative preoccupation. This has frequently led
+    the Impressionists to grave errors, which they have, however, generally
+    avoided by confining themselves to very simple subjects, for which the
+    daily life supplied the grouping.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0012"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/12renoir.jpg" width="189" height="300"
+alt="Renoir - Madame Maitre">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR<br></b><br>PORTRAIT OF MADAME MAITRE</center>
+<p>
+    One of the reforms due to their conception has been the suppression of
+    the professional model, and the substitution for it of the natural
+    model, seen in the exercise of his occupation. This is one of the most
+    useful conquests for the benefit of modern painting. It marks a just
+    return to nature and simplicity. Nearly all their figures are real
+    portraits; and in everything that concerns the labourer and the
+    peasant, they have found the proper style and character, because they
+    have observed these beings in the true medium of their occupations,
+    instead of forcing them into a sham pose and painting them in disguise.
+    The basis of all their pictures has been first of all a series of
+    landscape and figure studies made in the open air, far from the studio,
+    and afterwards co-ordinated. One may wish pictorial art to have higher
+    ambitions; and one may find in the Primitives an example of a curious
+    mysticism, an expression of the abstract and of dreams. But one should
+    not underrate the power of naïve and realistic observation, which the
+    Primitives carried into the execution of their works, subordinating it,
+    however, to religious expression, and it must also be admitted that the
+    Realist-Impressionists served at least their conception of art logically
+    and homogeneously. The criticism which may be levelled against them is
+    that which Realism itself carries in its train, and we shall see that
+    esthetics could never create classifications capable of defining and
+    containing the infinite gradations of creative temperaments.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In art, classifications have rarely any value, and are rather damaging.
+    Realism and Idealism are abstract terms which cannot suffice to
+    characterise beings who obey their sensibility. It is therefore
+    necessary to invent as many words as there are remarkable men. If
+    Leonardo was a great painter, are Turner and Monet not painters at all?
+    There is no connection between them; their methods of thought and
+    expression are antithetical. Perhaps it will be most simple, to admire
+    them all, and to renounce any further definition of the painter,
+    adopting this word to mark the man who uses the palette as his means of
+    expression.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Thus preoccupation with contemporary emotions, substitution of character
+    for classic beauty (or of emotional beauty for formal beauty), admission
+    of the <i>genre</i>-painter into the first rank, composition based upon the
+    reciprocal reaction of values, subordination of the subject to the
+    interest of execution, the effort to isolate the art of painting from
+    the ideas inherent to that of literature, and particularly the
+    instinctive move towards the "symphonisation" of colours, and
+    consequently towards music,&mdash;these are the principal features of the
+    aesthetic code of the Realist-Impressionists, if this term may be
+    applied to a group of men hostile towards esthetics such as they are
+    generally taught.
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0007"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h2>
+    III
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+</h3>
+<p>
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<p>
+    As I have said, Edouard Manet has not been entirely the originator of
+    the Impressionist technique. It is the work of Claude Monet which
+    presents the most complete example of it, and which also came first as
+    regards date. But it is very difficult to determine such cases of
+    priority, and it is, after all, rather useless. A technique cannot be
+    invented in a day. In this case it was the result of long
+    investigations, in which Manet and Renoir participated, and it is
+    necessary to unite under the collective name of Impressionists a group
+    of men, tied by friendship, who made a simultaneous effort towards
+    originality, all in about the same spirit, though frequently in very
+    different ways. As in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, it was first of
+    all friendship, then unjust derision, which created the solidarity of
+    the Impressionists. But the Pre-Raphaelites, in aiming at an idealistic
+    and symbolic art, were better agreed upon the intellectual principles
+    which permitted them at once to define a programme. The Impressionists
+    who were only united by their temperaments, and had made it their first
+    aim to break away from all school programmes, tried simply to do
+    something new, with frankness and freedom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Manet was, in their midst, the personality marked out at the same time
+    by their admiration, and by the attacks of the critics for the post of
+    standard-bearer. A little older than his friends, he had already, quite
+    alone, raised heated discussions by the works in his first manner. He
+    was considered an innovator, and it was by instinctive admiration that
+    his first friends, Whistler, Legros, and Fantin-Latour, were gradually
+    joined by Marcelin Desboutin, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro,
+    Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, the young painter Bazille, who met his
+    premature death in 1870, and by the writers Gautier, Banville,
+    Baudelaire (who was a passionate admirer of Manet's); then later by
+    Zola, the Goncourts, and Stéphane Mallarmé. This was the first nucleus
+    of a public which was to increase year by year. Manet had the personal
+    qualities of a chief; he was a man of spirit, an ardent worker, and an
+    enthusiastic and generous character.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0013"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/13manet.jpg" width="400" height="193"
+alt="Manet - The Dead Toreador">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>THE DEAD TOREADOR</center>
+<p>
+    Manet commenced his first studies with Couture. After having travelled a
+    good deal at sea to obey his parents, his vocation took hold of him
+    irresistibly. About 1850 the young man entered the studio of the severe
+    author of the <i>Romains de la Décadence</i>. His stay was short. He
+    displeased the professor by his uncompromising energy. Couture said of
+    him angrily: "He will become the Daumier of 1860." It is known that
+    Daumier, lithographer, and painter of genius, was held in meagre esteem
+    by the academicians. Manet travelled in Germany after the <i>coup d'etat</i>,
+    copied Rembrandt in Munich, then went to Italy, copied Tintoretto in
+    Venice, and conceived there the idea of several religious pictures. Then
+    he became enthusiastic about the Spaniards, especially Velasquez and
+    Goya. The sincere expression of things seen took root from this moment
+    as the principal rule of art in the brain of this young Frenchman who
+    was loyal, ardent, and hostile to all subtleties. He painted some fine
+    works, like the <i>Buveur d'absinthe</i> and the <i>Vieux musicien</i>. They show
+    the influence of Courbet, but already the blacks and the greys have an
+    original and superb quality; they announce a virtuoso of the first
+    order.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was in 1861 that Manet first sent to the Salon the portraits of his
+    parents and the <i>Guitarero</i>, which was hailed by Gautier, and rewarded
+    by the jury, though it roused surprise and irritation. But after that he
+    was rejected, whether it was a question of the <i>Fifre</i> or of the
+    <i>Déjeuner sur l'herbe.</i> This canvas, with an admirable feminine nude,
+    created a scandal, because an undressed woman figured in it amidst
+    clothed figures, a matter of frequent occurrence with the masters of the
+    Renaissance. The landscape is not painted in the open air, but in the
+    studio, and resembles a tapestry, but it shows already the most
+    brilliant evidence of Manet's talent in the study of the nude and the
+    still-life of the foreground, which is the work of a powerful master.
+    From the time of this canvas the artist's personality appeared in all
+    its maturity. He painted it before he was thirty, and it has the air of
+    an old master's work; it is based upon Hals and the Spaniards together.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The reputation of Manet became established after 1865. Furious critics
+    were opposed by enthusiastic admirers. Baudelaire upheld Manet, as he
+    had upheld Delacroix and Wagner, with his great clairvoyance,
+    sympathetic to all real originality. The <i>Olympia</i> brought the
+    discussion to a head. This courtesan lying in bed undressed, with a
+    negress carrying a bouquet, and a black cat, made a tremendous stir. It
+    is a powerful work of strong colour, broad design and intense sentiment,
+    astounding in its <i>parti-pris</i> of reducing the values to the greatest
+    simplicity. One can feel in it the artist's preoccupation with
+    rediscovering the rude frankness of Hals and Goya, and his aversion
+    against the prettiness and false nobility of the school. This famous
+    <i>Olympia</i> which occasioned so much fury, appears to us to-day as a
+    transition work. It is neither a masterpiece, nor an emotional work, but
+    a technical experiment, very significant for the epoch during which it
+    appeared in French art, and this canvas, which is very inferior to
+    Manet's fine works, may well be considered as a date of evolution. He
+    was doubtful about exhibiting it, but Baudelaire decided him and wrote
+    to him on this occasion these typical remarks: "You complain about
+    attacks? But are you the first to endure them? Have you more genius than
+    Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by derision. And, in
+    order not to make you too proud, I must tell you, that they are models
+    each in his own way and in a very rich world, whilst you are only the
+    first in the decrepitude of your art."
+</p>
+<a name="image-0014"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/14manet.jpg" width="400" height="268"
+alt="Manet - Olympia">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>OLYMPIA</center>
+<p>
+    Thus it must be firmly established that from this moment Manet passed as
+    an innovator, years before Impressionism existed or was even thought of.
+    This is an important point: it will help to clear up the twofold origin
+    of the movement which followed. To his realism, to his return to
+    composition in the modern spirit, and to the simplifying of planes and
+    values, Manet owed these attacks, though at that time his colour was
+    still sombre and entirely influenced by Hals, Goya and Courbet. From
+    that time the artist became a chief. As his friends used to meet him at
+    an obscure Batignolles café, the café Guerbois (still existing), public
+    derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des
+    Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the <i>Angels at the Tomb of Christ</i>, a
+    souvenir of the Venetians; <i>Lola de Valence</i>, commented upon by
+    Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the <i>Fleurs du Mal</i>; the
+    <i>Episode d'un combat de taureaux</i> (dissatisfied with this picture, he
+    cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The
+    <i>Acteur tragique</i> (portrait of Rouvière in Hamlet) and the <i>Jésus
+    insulté</i> followed, and then came the <i>Gitanos</i>, <i>L'Enfant à l'Epée</i>, and
+    the portrait of Mme. Manet. This series of works is admirable. It is
+    here where he reveals himself as a splendid colourist, whose design is
+    as vigorous as the technique is masterly. In these works one does not
+    think of looking for anything but the witchery of technical strength;
+    and the abundant wealth of his temperament is simply dazzling. Manet
+    reveals himself as the direct heir of the great Spaniards, more
+    interesting, more spontaneous, and freer than Courbet. The <i>Rouvière</i> is
+    as fine a symphony in grey and black as the noblest portraits by
+    Bronzino, and there is probably no Goya more powerful than the <i>Toréador
+    tué</i>. Manet's altogether classic descent appears here undeniably. There
+    is no question yet of Impressionism, and yet Monet and Renoir are
+    already painting, Monet has exhibited at the <i>Salon des Refusés</i>, but
+    criticism sees and attacks nobody but Manet. This great individuality
+    who overwhelmed the Academy with its weak allegories, was the butt of
+    great insults and the object of great admiration. Banished from the
+    Salons, he collected fifty pictures in a room in the Avenue de l'Alma
+    and invited the public thither. In 1868 appeared the portrait of Emile
+    Zola, in 1860 the <i>Déjeuner</i>, works which are so powerful, that they
+    enforced admiration in spite of all hostility. In the Salon of 1870 was
+    shown the portrait of Eva Gonzalès, the charming pastellist and pupil of
+    Manet, and the impressive <i>Execution of Maximilian at Queretaro</i>. Manet
+    was at the apogee of his talent, when the Franco-German war broke out.
+    At the age of thirty-eight he had put forth a considerable amount of
+    work, tried himself in all styles, severed his individuality from the
+    slavish admiration of the old masters, and attained his own mastery. And
+    now he wanted to expand, and, in joining Monet, Renoir and Degas,
+    interpret in his own way the Impressionist theory.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0015"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/15manet.jpg" width="210" height="300"
+alt="Manet - The Woman with the Parrot">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>THE WOMAN WITH THE PARROT</center>
+<p>
+    The <i>Fight of the Kearsage and the Alabama</i>, a magnificent sea-piece,
+    bathed in sunlight, announced this transformation in his work, as did
+    also a study, a <i>Garden</i>, painted, I believe, in 1870, but exhibited
+    only after the crisis of the terrible year. At that time the Durand-Ruel
+    Gallery bought a considerable series by the innovator, and was imitated
+    by some select art-lovers. The <i>Musique aux Tuileries</i> and the <i>Bal de
+    l'Opéra</i> had, some years before, pointed towards the evolution of this
+    great artist in the direction of <i>plein-air</i> painting. The <i>Bon Bock</i>,
+    in which the very soul of Hals is revived, and the grave <i>Liseur</i>, sold
+    immediately at Vienne, were the two last pledges given by the artist to
+    his old admirers; these two pictures had moreover a splendid success,
+    and the <i>Bon Bock</i>, popularised by an engraving, was hailed by the very
+    men who had most unjustly attacked the author of the portrait of Mme.
+    Morisot, a French masterpiece. But already Manet was attracted
+    irresistibly towards the study of light, and, faithful to his programme,
+    he prepared to face once again outbursts of anger and further sarcasms;
+    he was resolved once again to offer battle to the Salons. Followed by
+    all the Impressionists he tried to make them understand the necessity
+    of introducing the new ideas into this retrograde <i>Milieu</i>. But they
+    would not. Having already received a rebuff by the attacks directed for
+    some years against their works, they exhibited among themselves in some
+    private galleries: they declined to force the gate of the Salons, and
+    Manet remained alone. In 1875 he submitted, with his <i>Argenteuil</i>, the
+    most perfect epitome of his atmospheric researches. The jury admitted it
+    in spite of loud protests: they were afraid of Manet; they admired his
+    power of transformation, and he revolted the prejudiced, attracting them
+    at the same time by the charm of his force. But in 1876 the portrait of
+    <i>Desboutin</i> and the <i>Linge</i> (an exquisite picture,&mdash;one of the best
+    productions of open-air study) were rejected. Manet then recommenced the
+    experience of 1867, and opened his studio to the public. A register at
+    the door was soon covered with signatures protesting against the jury,
+    as well as with hostile jokes, and even anonymous insults! In 1877 the
+    defeated jury admitted the portrait of the famous singer Faure in the
+    part of Hamlet, and rejected <i>Nana</i>, a picture which was found
+    scandalising, but has charming freshness and an intensely modern
+    character. In 1878, 1879 and 1880 they accepted <i>la Serre</i>, the
+    surprising symphony in blue and white which shows Mr George Moore in
+    boating costume, the portrait of Antonin Proust, and the scene at the
+    <i>Père Lathuile</i> restaurant, in which Manet's nervous and luminous
+    realism has so curious a resemblance to the art of the Goncourts. In
+    1881 the portrait of Rochefort and that of the lion-killer, Pertuiset,
+    procured the artist a medal at the Salon, and Antonin Proust, the friend
+    of Manet's childhood, who had become Minister of Fine Arts, honoured
+    himself in decorating him with the legion of honour. In 1882 appeared a
+    magnificent canvas, the <i>Bar des Folies-Bergère</i>, in which there is some
+    sparkling still-life painting of most attractive beauty. It was
+    accompanied by a lady's portrait, <i>Jeanne</i>. But on April 30, 1883, Manet
+    died, exhausted by his work and struggles, of locomotor ataxy, after
+    having vainly undergone the amputation of a foot to avoid gangrene.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0016"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/16manet.jpg" width="300" height="231"
+alt="Manet - The Bar at the Folies-Bergere">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>THE BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE</center>
+<p>
+    It will be seen that Manet fought through all his life: few artists'
+    lives have been nobler. His has been an example of untiring energy; he
+    employed it as much in working, as in making a stand against prejudices.
+    Rejected, accepted, rejected again, he delivered with enormous courage
+    and faith his attack upon a jury which represented routine. As he fought
+    in front of his easel, he still fought before the public, without ever
+    relaxing, without changing, alone, apart even from those whom he loved,
+    who had been shaped by his example. This great painter, one of those who
+    did most honour to the French soul, had the genius to create by himself
+    an Impressionism of his own which will always remain his own, after
+    having given evidence of gifts of the first order in the tradition
+    handed down by the masters of the real and the good. He cannot be
+    confused either with Monet, or with Pissarro and Renoir. His
+    comprehension of light is a special one, his technique is not in
+    accordance with the system of colour-spots; it observes the theory of
+    complementary colours and of the division of tones without departing
+    from a grand style, from a classic stateliness, from a superb sureness.
+    Manet has not been the inventor of Impressionism which co-existed with
+    his work since 1865, but he has rendered it immense services, by taking
+    upon himself all the outbursts of anger addressed to the innovators, by
+    making a breach in public opinion, through which his friends have passed
+    in behind him. Probably without him all these artists would have
+    remained unknown, or at least without influence, because they all were
+    bold characters in art, but timid or disdainful in life. Degas, Monet
+    and Renoir were fine natures with a horror of polemics, who wished to
+    hold aloof from the Salons, and were resigned from the outset to be
+    misunderstood. They were, so to say, electrified by the magnificent
+    example of Manet's fighting spirit, and Manet was generous enough to
+    take upon himself the reproaches levelled, not only against his work,
+    but against theirs. His twenty years of open war, sustained with an
+    abnegation worthy of all esteem, must be considered as one of the most
+    significant phenomena of the history of the artists of all ages.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This work of Manet, so much discussed and produced under such tormenting
+    conditions, owes its importance beyond all to its power and frankness.
+    Ten years of developing the first manner, tragically limited by the war
+    of 1870; thirteen years of developing the second evolution, parallel
+    with the efforts of the Impressionists. The period from 1860 to 1870 is
+    logically connected with Hals and Goya; from 1870 to 1883 the artist's
+    modernity is complicated by the study of light. His personality appears
+    there even more original, but one may well give the palm to those works
+    of Manet which are painted in his classic and low-toned manner. He had
+    all the pictorial gifts which make the glory of the masters: full, true,
+    broad composition, colouring of irresistible power, blacks and greys
+    which cannot be found elsewhere since Velasquez and Goya, and a profound
+    knowledge of values. He has tried his hand at everything: portraits,
+    landscapes, seascapes, scenes of modern life, still-life and nudes have
+    each in their turn served his ardent desire of creation. His was a much
+    finer comprehension of contemporary life than seems to be admitted by
+    Realism: one has only to compare him with Courbet, to see how far more
+    nervous and intelligent he was, without loss to the qualities of truth
+    and robustness. His pictures will always remain documents of the
+    greatest importance on the society, the manners and customs of the
+    second Empire. He did not possess the gift of psychology. His <i>Christ
+    aux Anges</i> and <i>Jésus insulté</i> are obviously only pieces of painting
+    without idealism. He was, like the great Dutch virtuosos, and like
+    certain Italians, more eye than soul. Yet his <i>Maximilian</i>, the drawings
+    to Poe's <i>Raven</i>, and certain sketches show that he might have realised
+    some curious, psychological works, had he not been so completely
+    absorbed by the immediate reality and by the desire for beautiful paint.
+    A beautiful painter&mdash;this is what he was before everything else, this is
+    his fairest fame, and it is almost inconceivable that the juries of the
+    Salons failed to understand him. They waxed indignant over his subjects
+    which offer only a restricted interest, and they did not see the
+    altogether classic quality of this technique without bitumen, without
+    glazing, without tricks; of this vibrating colour; of this rich paint;
+    of this passionate design so suitable for expressing movement and
+    gestures true to life; of this simple composition where the whole
+    picture is based upon two or three values with the straightforwardness
+    one admires in Rubens, Jordaens and Hals.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0017"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/17manet.jpg" width="350" height="276"
+alt="Manet - Dejeuner">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>DÉJEUNER</center>
+<p>
+    Manet will occupy an important position in the French School. He is the
+    most original painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, the
+    one who has really created a great movement. His work, the fecundity of
+    which is astonishing, is unequal. One has to remember that, besides the
+    incessant strife which he kept up&mdash;a strife which would have killed many
+    artists&mdash;he had to find strength for two grave crises in himself. He
+    joined one movement, then freed himself of it, then invented another and
+    recommenced to learn painting at a point where anybody else would have
+    continued in his previous manner. "Each time I paint," he said to
+    Mallarmé, "I throw myself into the water to learn swimming." It is not
+    surprising that such a man should have been unequal, and that one can
+    distinguish in his work between experiments, exaggerations due to
+    research, and efforts made to reject the prejudices of which we feel the
+    weight no longer. But it would be unjust to say that Manet has only had
+    the merit of opening up new roads; that has been said to belittle him,
+    after it had first been said that these roads led into absurdity. Works
+    like the <i>Toréador</i>, <i>Rouvière</i>, <i>Mme. Manet</i>, the <i>Déjeuner</i>, the
+    <i>Musique aux Tuileries</i>, the <i>Bon Bock</i>, <i>Argenteuil</i>, <i>Le Linge</i>, <i>En
+    Bateau</i> and the <i>Bar</i>, will always remain admirable masterpieces which
+    will do credit to French painting, of which the spontaneous, living,
+    clear and bold art of Manet is a direct and very representative product.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There remains, then, a great personality who knew how to dominate the
+    rather coarse conceptions of Realism, who influenced by his modernity
+    all contemporary illustration, who re-established a sound and strong
+    tradition in the face of the Academy, and who not only created a new
+    transition, but marked his place on the new road which he had opened. To
+    him Impressionism owes its existence; his tenacity enabled it to take
+    root and to vanquish the opposition of the School; his work has enriched
+    the world by some beautiful examples which demonstrate the union of the
+    two principles of Realism and of that technical Impressionism which was
+    to supply Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley with an object for their
+    efforts. For the sum total of all that is evoked by his name, Edouard
+    Manet certainly deserves the name of a man of genius&mdash;an incomplete
+    genius, though, since the thought with him was not on the level of his
+    technique, since he could never affect the emotions like a Leonardo or a
+    Rembrandt, but genius all the same through the magnificent power of his
+    gifts, the continuity of his style, and the importance of his part which
+    infused blood into a school dying of the anaemia of conventional art.
+    Whoever beholds a work of Manet's, even without knowing the conditions
+    of his life, will feel that there is something great, the lion's claw
+    which Delacroix had recognised as far back as 1861, and to which, it is
+    said, even the great Ingres had paid homage on the jury which examined
+    with disgust the <i>Guitarero</i>.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0018"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/18manet.jpg" width="209" height="300"
+alt="Manet - Portrait of Madame M.L.">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>PORTRAIT OF MADAME M.L.
+</center>
+<p>
+    To-day Manet is considered almost as a classic glory; and the progress
+    for which he had given the impulse, has been so rapid, that many are
+    astonished that he should ever have been considered audacious. Sight is
+    transformed, strife is extinguished, and a large, select public,
+    familiar with Monet and Renoir, judge Manet almost as a long defunct
+    initiator. One has to know his admirable life, one has to know well the
+    incredible inertia of the Salons where he appeared, to give him his full
+    due. And when, after the acceptance of Impressionism, the unavoidable
+    reaction will take place, Manet's qualities of solidity, truth and
+    science will appear such, that he will survive many of those to whom he
+    has opened the road and facilitated the success at the expense of his
+    own. It will be seen that Degas and he have, more than the others, and
+    with less apparent <i>éclat</i>, united the gifts which produce durable works
+    in the midst of the fluctuations of fashion and the caprices of taste
+    and views. Manet can, at the Louvre or any other gallery, hold his own
+    in the most crushing surroundings, prove his personal qualities, and
+    worthily represent a period which he loved.
+</p>
+<p>
+    An enormous amount has been written on him, from Zola's bold and
+    intelligent pamphlet in 1865, to the recent work by M. Théodore Duret.
+    Few men have provoked more comments. In an admirable picture, <i>Hommage à
+    Manet</i>, the delicate and perfect painter Fantin-Latour, a friend from
+    the first hour, has grouped around the artist some of his admirers,
+    Monet, Renoir, Duranty, Zola, Bazille, and Braquemond. The picture has
+    to-day a place of honour at the Luxembourg, where Manet is
+    insufficiently represented by <i>Olympia</i>, a study of a woman, and the
+    <i>Balcony</i>. A collection is much to be desired of his lithographs, his
+    etchings and his pastels, in which he has proved his diversified
+    mastery, and also of his portraits of famous contemporaries, Zola,
+    Rochefort, Desboutin, Proust, Mallarmé, Clemenceau, Guys, Faure,
+    Baudelaire, Moore, and others, an admirable series by a visionary who
+    possessed, in a period of unrest and artificiality, the quality of rude
+    sincerity, and the love of truth of a Primitive.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0019"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/19manet.jpg" width="300" height="235"
+alt="Manet - The Hothouse">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MANET</b><br><br>THE HOTHOUSE
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<a name="2H_4_0008"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<h2>
+    IV
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+</h3>
+<p>
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<p>
+    I have said how vain it is to class artistic temperaments under a title
+    imposed upon them generally by circumstances and dates, rather than by
+    their own free will. The study of Degas will furnish additional proof
+    for it. Classed with the Impressionists, this master participates in
+    their ideas in the sphere of composition, rather than in that of colour.
+    He belongs to them through his modernity and comprehension of character.
+    Only when we come to his quite recent landscapes (1896), can we link him
+    to Monet and Renoir as colourist, and he has been more their friend than
+    their colleague.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Degas is known by the select few, and almost ignored by the public. This
+    is due to several reasons. Degas has never wished to exhibit at the
+    Salons, except, I believe, once or twice at the beginning of his
+    career. He has only shown his works at those special exhibitions
+    arranged by the Impressionists in hired apartments (rue le Peletier, rue
+    Laffitte, Boulevard des Capucines), and at some art-dealers. The art of
+    Degas has never had occasion to shock the public by the exuberance of
+    its colour, because he restricted himself to grey and quiet harmonies.
+    Degas is a modest character, fond of silence and solitude, with a horror
+    of the crowd and of controversies, and almost disinclined to show his
+    works. He is a man of intelligence and ready wit, whose sallies are
+    dreaded; he is almost a misanthrope. His pictures have been gradually
+    sold to foreign countries and dispersed in rich galleries without having
+    been seen by the public. His character is, in short, absolutely opposed
+    to that of Manet, who, though he suffered from criticism, thought it his
+    duty to bid it defiance. Degas's influence has, however, been
+    considerable, though secretly so, and the young painters have been
+    slowly inspired by his example.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0020"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/20degas.jpg" width="229" height="300"
+alt="Degas - The Beggar Woman">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>THE BEGGAR WOMAN
+</center>
+<p>
+    Degas is beyond all a draughtsman of the first order. His spirit is
+    quite classical. He commenced by making admirable copies of the Italian
+    Primitives, notably of Fra Angelico, and the whole first series of his
+    works speaks of that influence: portraits, heads of deep, mat, amber
+    colour, on a ground of black or grey tones, remarkable for a severity of
+    intense style, and for the rare gift of psychological expression. To
+    find the equal of these faces&mdash;after having stated their classic
+    descent&mdash;one would have to turn to the beautiful things by Ingres, and
+    certainly Degas is, with Ingres, the most learned, the most perfect
+    French draughtsman of the nineteenth century. An affirmation of this
+    nature is made to surprise those who judge Impressionism with
+    preconceived ideas. It is none the less true that, if a series of
+    Degas's first portraits were collected, the comparison would force
+    itself upon one's mind irrefutably. In face of the idealist painting of
+    Romanticism, Ingres represented quite clearly the cult of painting for
+    its own sake. His ideas were mediocre, and went scarcely beyond the
+    poor, conventional ideal of the Academy; but his genius was so great,
+    that it made him paint, together with his tedious allegories, some
+    incomparable portraits and nudes. He thought he was serving official
+    Classicism, which still boasts of his name, but in reality he dominated
+    it; and, whilst he was an imitator of Raphael, he was a powerful
+    Realist. The Impressionists admire him as such, and agree with him in
+    banishing from the art of painting all literary imagination, whether it
+    be the tedious mythology of the School, or the historical anecdote of
+    the Romanticists. Degas and Besnard admire Ingres as colossal
+    draughtsman, and, beyond all, as man who, in spite of the limitations of
+    his mind, preserved the clear vision of the mission of his art at a time
+    when art was used for the expression of literary conceptions. Who would
+    have believed it? Yet it is true, and Manet, too, held the same view of
+    Ingres, little as our present academicians may think it! It happens that
+    to-day Impressionism is more akin to Ingres than to Delacroix, just as
+    the young poets are more akin to Racine than to Hugo. They reject the
+    foreign elements, and search, before anything else, for the strict
+    national tradition. Degas follows Ingres and resembles him. He is also
+    reminiscent of the Primitives and of Holbein. There is, in his first
+    period, the somewhat dry and geometrical perfection, the somewhat heavy
+    colour which only serves to strengthen the correctness of the planes. At
+    the Exposition of 1900, there was a Degas which surprised everybody. It
+    was an <i>Interior of a cotton factory</i> in an American town. This small
+    picture was curiously clear: it would be impossible to paint better and
+    with a more accomplished knowledge of the laws of painting. But it was
+    the work of a soulless, emotionless Realist; it was a coloured
+    photograph of unheard-of truth, the mathematical science of which left
+    the beholder cold. This work, which is very old (it dates back to about
+    1860), gave no idea of what Degas has grown into. It was the work of an
+    unemotional master of technique; only just the infinitely delicate value
+    of the greys and blacks revealed the future master of harmony. One
+    almost might have wished to find a fault in this aggravating perfection.
+    But Degas was not to remain there, and already, about that time, certain
+    portraits of his are elevated by an expression of ardent melancholy, by
+    warm, ivory-like, grave colouring which attracts one's eye. Before this
+    series one feels the firm will of a very logical, serious, classic
+    spirit who wants to know thoroughly the intimate resources of design,
+    before risking to choose from among them the elements which respond best
+    to his individual nature. If Degas was destined to invent, later on, so
+    personal a style of design that he could be accused of "drawing badly,"
+    this first period of his life is before us, to show the slow maturing of
+    his boldness and how carefully he first proved to himself his knowledge,
+    before venturing upon new things. In art the difficulty is, when one has
+    learnt everything, to forget,&mdash;that is, to appear to forget, so as to
+    create one's own style, and this apparent forgetting cloaks an
+    amalgamation of science with mind. And Degas is one of those patient and
+    reticent men who spend years in arriving at this; he has much in common
+    with Hokusai, the old man "mad with painting," who at the close of his
+    prodigious life invented arbitrary forms, after having given immortal
+    examples of his interpretation of the real.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0021"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/21degas.jpg" width="300" height="224"
+alt="Degas - The Lesson in the Foyer">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>THE LESSON IN THE FOYER
+</center>
+<p>
+    Degas is also clearly related to Corot, not only in the silvery
+    harmonies of his suave landscapes, but also, and particularly, in his
+    admirable faces whose inestimable power and moving sincerity we have
+    hardly commenced to understand. Degas passed slowly from classicism to
+    modernity. He never liked outbursts of colour; he is by no means an
+    Impressionist from this point of view. As a draughtsman of genius he
+    expresses all by the precision of the planes and values; a grey, a black
+    and some notes of colour suffice for him. This might establish a link
+    between him and Whistler, though he is much less mysterious and diffuse.
+    Whenever Degas plays with colour, it is with the same restraint of his
+    boldness; he never goes to excess in abandoning himself to its charm. He
+    is neither lyrical, nor voluptuous; his energy is cold; his wise spirit
+    affirms soberly the true character of a face or an object.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Since a long time this spirit has moved Degas to revel in the
+    observation of contemporary life. His nature has been that of a patient
+    psychologist, a minute analyst, and also of a bitter ironist. The man is
+    very little known. His friends say that he has an easily ruffled
+    delicacy, a sensibility open to poetry, but jealous of showing its
+    emotion. They say that Degas's satirical bitterness is the reverse side
+    of a soul wounded by the spectacle of modern morality. One feels this
+    sentiment in his work, where the sharp notation of truth is painful,
+    where the realism is opposed by colouring of a sober distinction, where
+    nothing, not even the portrait of a drab, could be vulgar. Degas has
+    devoted himself to the profound study of certain classes of women, in
+    the state of mind of a philosopher and physiologist, impartially
+    inclined towards life.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His work can be divided into several great series: the race-courses, the
+    ballet-dancers, and the women bathing count among the most important.
+    The race-courses have inspired Degas with numerous pictures. He shows in
+    them a surprising knowledge of the horse. He is one of the most perfect
+    painters of horses who have ever existed. He has caught the most curious
+    and truest actions with infallible sureness of sight. His racecourse
+    scenes are full of vitality and picturesqueness. Against clear skies,
+    and light backgrounds of lawn, indicated with quiet harmony, Degas
+    assembles original groups of horses which one can see moving,
+    hesitating, intensely alive; and nothing could be fresher, gayer and
+    more deliciously pictorial, than the green, red and yellow notes of the
+    jockey's costumes strewn like flowers over these atmospheric, luminous
+    landscapes, where colours do not clash, but are always gently
+    shimmering, dissolved in uniform clearness. The admirable drawing of
+    horses and men is so precise and seems so simple, that one can only
+    slowly understand the extent of the difficulty overcome, the truth of
+    these attitudes and the nervous delicacy of the execution.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0022"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/22degas.jpg" width="300" height="165"
+alt="Degas - The Dancing Lesson - Pastel">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>THE DANCING LESSON&mdash;PASTEL
+</center>
+<p>
+    The dancers go much further still in the expression of Degas's
+    temperament. They have been studied at the <i>foyer</i> of the Opera and at
+    the rehearsal, sometimes in groups, sometimes isolated. Some pictures
+    which will always count among the masterpieces of the nineteenth
+    century, represent the whole <i>corps de ballet</i> performing on the stage
+    before a dark and empty house. By the feeble light of some lamps the
+    black coats of the stage managers mix themselves with the gauze skirts.
+    Here the draughtsman joins the great colourist: the petticoats of pink
+    or white tulle, the graceful legs covered with flesh-coloured silk, the
+    arms and the shoulders, and the hair crowned with flowers, offer
+    motives of exquisite colour and of a tone of living flowers. But the
+    psychologist does not lose his rights: not only does he amuse himself
+    with noting the special movements of the dancers, but he also notes the
+    anatomical defects. He shows with cruel frankness, with a strange love
+    of modern character, the strong legs, the thin shoulders, and the
+    provoking and vulgar heads of these frequently ugly girls of common
+    origin. With the irony of an entomologist piercing the coloured insect
+    he shows us the disenchanting reality in the sad shadow of the scenes,
+    of these butterflies who dazzle us on the stage. He unveils the reverse
+    side of a dream without, however, caricaturing; he raises even, under
+    the imperfection of the bodies, the animal grace of the organisms; he
+    has the severe beauty of the true. He gives to his groups of
+    ballet-dancers the charming line of garlands and restores to them a
+    harmony in the <i>ensemble</i>, so as to prove that he does not misjudge the
+    charm conferred upon them by rhythm, however defective they may be
+    individually. At other times he devotes himself to the study of their
+    practice. In bare rooms with curtainless windows, in the cold and sad
+    light of the boxes, he passionately draws the dancers learning their
+    steps, reaching high bars with the tips of their toes, forcing
+    themselves into quaint poses in order to make themselves more supple,
+    manoeuvring to the sound of a fiddle scratched by an old teacher&mdash;and he
+    leaves us stupefied at the knowledge, the observation, the talent
+    profusely spent on these little pictures. Furthermore there are humorous
+    scenes: ballet-dancers chatting in the dark with <i>habitués</i> of the
+    Opera, others looking at the house through the small opening of the
+    curtain, others re-tying their shoe-laces, and they all are prodigious
+    drawings of movement anatomically as correct as they are unexpected.
+    Degas's old style of drawing undergoes modification: with the help of
+    slight deformations, accentuations of the modelling and subtle
+    falsifications of the proportions, managed with infinite tact and
+    knowledge, the artist brings forth in relief the important gesture,
+    subordinating to it all the others. He attempts <i>drawing by movement</i> as
+    it is caught by our eyes in life, where they do not state the
+    proportions, but first of all the gesture which strikes them. In these
+    drawings by Degas all the lines follow the impulsion of the thought.
+    What one sees first, is the movement transmitted to the members by the
+    will. The active part of the body is more carefully studied than the
+    rest, which is indicated by bold foreshortenings, placed in the second
+    plane, and apparently only serves to throw into relief the raised arm or
+    leg. This is no longer merely <i>exact</i>, it is <i>true</i>; it is a superior
+    degree of truth.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0023"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/23degas.jpg" width="163" height="300"
+alt="Degas - The Dancers">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>THE DANCERS
+</center>
+<p>
+    These pictures of dancers are psychologic documents of great value. The
+    physical and moral atmosphere of these surroundings is called forth by a
+    master. Such and such a figure or attitude tells us more about Parisian
+    life than a whole novel, and Degas has been lavish of his intellect and
+    his philosophy of bitter scepticism. But they are also marvellous
+    pictorial studies which, in spite of the special, anecdotal subjects,
+    rise to the level of grand painting through sheer power of
+    draughtsmanship and charm of tone. Degas has the special quality of
+    giving the precise sensation of the third dimension. The atmosphere
+    circulates round his figures; you walk round them; you see them in their
+    real plane, and they present themselves in a thousand unexpected
+    arrangements. Degas is undoubtedly the one man of his age who has most
+    contributed towards infusing new life into the representation of human
+    figures: in this respect his pictures resemble no one else's. The same
+    qualities will be found in his series of women bathing. These interiors,
+    where the actions of the bathers are caught amidst the stuffs, flowered
+    cushions, linen, sponges and tubs, are sharp visions of modernity. Degas
+    observes here, with the tenacious perfection of his talent, the
+    slightest shiver of the flesh refreshed by cold water. His masterly
+    drawing follows the most delicate inflexion of the muscles and suggests
+    the nervous system under the skin. He observes with extraordinary
+    subtlety the awkwardness of the nude being at a time when nudity is no
+    longer accustomed to show itself, and this true nudity is in strong
+    contrast to that of the academicians. One might say of Degas that he has
+    the disease of truth, if the necessity of truth were not health itself!
+    These bodies are still marked with the impressions of the garments; the
+    movements remain those of a clothed being which is only nude as an
+    exception. The painter notices beauty, but he looks for it particularly
+    in the profound characterisation of the types which he studies, and his
+    pastels have the massiveness and the sombre style of bronze. He has also
+    painted café-scenes, prostitutes and supers, with a mocking and sad
+    energy; he has even amused himself with painting washerwomen, to
+    translate the movements of the women of the people. And his colour with
+    its pearly whites, subdued blues and delicate greys, always elevates
+    everything he does, and confers upon him a distinctive style.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Finally, about 1896, Degas has revealed himself as a dreamy landscapist.
+    His recent landscapes are symphonies in colours of strange harmony and
+    hallucinations of rare tones, resembling music rather than painting. It
+    is perhaps in these pictures that he has revealed certain dreams
+    hitherto jealously hidden.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And now I must speak of his technique. It is very singular and varied,
+    and one of the most complicated in existence. In his first works, which
+    are apparently as simple as Corot's, he does not employ the process of
+    colour-spots. But many of the works in his second manner are a
+    combination of drawing, painting and pastel. He has invented a kind of
+    engraving mixed with wash-drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of
+    special pattern. Here one can find again his meticulous spirit. He has
+    many of the qualities of the scientist; he is as much chemist as
+    painter. It has been said of him, that he was a great artist of the
+    decadence. This is materially inexact, since his qualities of
+    draughtsmanship are those of a superb Classicist, and his colouring of
+    very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail,
+    his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the signs of an
+    extremely alert intellect who regards life prosaically and with a
+    lassitude and disenchantment which are only consoled by the passion for
+    truth. Certain water-colours of his heightened by pastel, and certain
+    landscapes, are somewhat disconcerting through the preciousness of his
+    method; others are surprisingly spontaneous. All his work has an
+    undercurrent of thought. In short, this Realist is almost a mystic. He
+    has observed a limited section of humanity, but what he has seen has not
+    been seen so profoundly by anybody else.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0024"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/24degas.jpg" width="300" height="239"
+alt="Degas - Horses in the Meadows">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>DEGAS</b><br><br>HORSES IN THE MEADOWS
+</center>
+<p>
+    Degas has exercised an occult, but very serious, influence. He has lived
+    alone, without pupils and almost without friends; the only pupils one
+    might speak of are the caricaturist Forain, who has painted many small
+    pictures inspired by him, and the excellent American lady-artist Miss
+    Mary Cassatt. But all modern draughtsmen have been taught a lesson by
+    his painting: Renouard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen have been
+    impressed by it, and the young generation considers Degas as a master.
+    And that is also the unexpressed idea of the academicians, and
+    especially of those who have sufficient talent to be able to appreciate
+    all the science and power of such an art. The writer of this book
+    happened one day to mention Degas's name before a member of the
+    Institute. "What!" exclaimed he, "you know him? Why didn't you speak to
+    me about him?" And when he received the reply, that I did not consider
+    Degas to be an agreeable topic for him, the illustrious official
+    answered vivaciously, "But do you think I am a fool, and that I do not
+    know that Degas is one of the greatest draughtsmen who have ever
+    lived?"&mdash;"Why, then, my dear sir, has he never been received at the
+    Salons, and not even been decorated at the age of sixty-five?"&mdash;"Ah,"
+    replied the Academician a little angrily, "that is another matter!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Degas despises glory. It is believed that he has by him a number of
+    canvases which will have to be burnt after his death in accordance with
+    his will. He is a man who has loved his art like a mistress, with
+    jealous passion, and has sacrificed to it all that other
+    artists&mdash;enthusiasts even&mdash;are accustomed to reserve for their personal
+    interest. Degas, the incomparable pastellist, the faultless draughtsman,
+    the bitter, satirical, pessimistic genius, is an isolated phenomenon in
+    his period, a grand creator, unattached to his time. The painters and
+    the select few among art-lovers know what considerable force there is in
+    him. Though almost latent as yet, it will reveal itself brilliantly,
+    when an opportunity arises for bringing together the vast quantity of
+    his work. As is the case with Manet, though in a different sense, his
+    powerful classic qualities will become most prominent in this ordeal,
+    and this classicism has never abandoned him in his audacities. To Degas
+    is due a new method of observation in drawing. He will have been the
+    first to study the relation between the moving lines of a living being
+    and the immovable lines of the scene which serves as its setting; the
+    first, also, to define drawing, not as a graphic science, but as the
+    valuation of the third dimension, and thus to apply to painting the
+    principles hitherto reserved for sculpture. Finally, he will be counted
+    among the great analysts. His vision, tenacious, intense, and sombre,
+    stimulates thought: across what appears to be the most immediate and
+    even the most vulgar reality it reaches a grand, artistic style; it
+    states profoundly the facts of life, it condenses a little the human
+    soul: and this will suffice to secure for Degas an important place in
+    his epoch, a little apart from Impressionism. Without noise, and through
+    the sheer charm of his originality, he has contributed his share towards
+    undermining the false doctrines of academic art before the painters, as
+    Manet has undermined them before the public.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0025"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/25monet.jpg" width="300" height="229"
+alt="Claude Monet - An Interior After Dinner">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>CLAUDE MONET</b><br><br>AN INTERIOR, AFTER DINNER
+</center>
+<a name="2H_4_0009"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h2>
+    V
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+</h3>
+<p>
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<p>
+    With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant
+    technical expression, and touch upon the principal points referred to in
+    the second chapter of this book.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and
+    Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road
+    to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study
+    of the laws of light. His work is a magnificent verification of the
+    optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul. It is born
+    spontaneously from the artist's vision, and happens to be a rigorous
+    demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared
+    to know. Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to
+    join hands with the scientist. His work supplies not only the very
+    basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed
+    it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws. It
+    will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds
+    met by the artists hitherto, and it will also serve to endow decorative
+    art and mural painting with a process, the applications of which are
+    manyfold and splendid.
+</p>
+<p>
+    I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet's
+    painting more clearly even than from Manet's. Suppression of local
+    colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and
+    division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed
+    colours&mdash;these are the essential principles of <i>chromatism</i> (for this
+    word should be used instead of the very vague term "Impressionism").
+    Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape
+    painting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an
+    excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.
+    One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined
+    jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself
+    be sufficient to save from oblivion the man who has painted it. But the
+    study of light upon the figure has been the special preoccupation of
+    Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and, after the Impressionists, of the great
+    lyricist, Albert Besnard, who has concentrated the Impressionist
+    qualities by placing them at the service of a very personal conception
+    of symbolistic art. Monet commenced with trying to find his way by
+    painting figures, then landscapes and principally sea pictures and boats
+    in harbours, with a somewhat sombre robustness and very broad and solid
+    draughtsmanship. His first luminous studies date back to about 1885.
+    Obedient to the same ideas as Degas he had to avoid the Salons and only
+    show his pictures gradually in private galleries. For years he remained
+    unknown. It is only giving M. Durand-Ruel his due, to state that he was
+    one of the first to anticipate the Impressionist school and to buy the
+    first works of these painters, who were treated as madmen and
+    charlatans. He has become great with them, and has made his fortune and
+    theirs through having had confidence in them, and no fortune has been
+    better deserved. Thirty years ago nobody would have bought pictures by
+    Degas or Monet, which are sold to-day for a thousand pounds. This detail
+    is only mentioned to show the evolution of Impressionism as regards
+    public opinion.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0026"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/26monet.jpg" width="300" height="198"
+alt="Claude Monet - The Harbour, Honfleur">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>CLAUDE MONET</b><br><br>THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR
+</center>
+<p>
+    So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis of the laws of light
+    that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show
+    clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series
+    of pictures painted from nature at all hours of the day. This is the
+    principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might
+    be called "Investigation of the variations of sunlight." The most famous
+    of these series are the <i>Hay-ricks</i>, the <i>Poplars</i>, the <i>Cliffs of
+    Etretat</i>, the <i>Golfe Juan</i>, the <i>Coins de Rivière</i>, the <i>Cathedrals</i>,
+    the <i>Water-lilies</i>, and finally the <i>Thames</i> series which Monet is at
+    present engaged upon. They are like great poems, and the splendour of
+    the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the
+    symphonic <i>parti-pris</i> of the colours, make their realism, the minute
+    contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Monet paints these series from nature. He is said to take with him in a
+    carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to
+    hour, taking them up again the next day. He notes, for example, from
+    nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick;
+    at ten o'clock he passes on to another canvas and recommences the study
+    until eleven o'clock. Thus he follows step by step the modifications of
+    the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of
+    the whole series. He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times
+    over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different. He exhibits them
+    together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history
+    of light playing upon one and the same object. It is a dazzling display
+    of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation. Light is certainly
+    the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is
+    thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see
+    the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the
+    arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with
+    infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric
+    vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights
+    where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange,
+    predominate, and it is the proportional quantity of the spots that
+    differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights,
+    just as it actually happens in optic science. There are some midday
+    scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette&mdash;tree, hay-rick,
+    or rock&mdash;is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust
+    of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as
+    he would in actual sunlight. Sometimes even there are no more shadows at
+    all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create
+    contrasts of colours. Everything is light, and the painter seems easily
+    to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a
+    gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0027"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/27monet.jpg" width="300" height="240"
+alt="Claude Monet - The Church at Varengeville">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>CLAUDE MONET</b><br><br>THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE
+</center>
+<p>
+    Generally he finds a very simple <i>motif</i> sufficient; a hay-rick, some
+    slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also
+    proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater
+    complexity. Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst
+    tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction
+    of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a
+    cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river,
+    or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun. All
+    this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or
+    fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in
+    the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped
+    with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain
+    distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented
+    with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has
+    dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the
+    secret order which has presided over this accumulation of spots which
+    seem projected in a furious shower. It is a veritable orchestral piece,
+    where every colour is an instrument with a distinct part, and where the
+    hours with their different tints represent the successive themes. Monet
+    is the equal of the greatest landscape painters as regards the
+    comprehension of the true character of every soil he has studied, which
+    is the supreme quality of his art. Though absorbed beyond all by study
+    of the sunlight, he has thought it useless to go to Morocco or Algeria.
+    He has found Brittany, Holland, the <i>Ile de France</i>, the <i>Cote d'Azur</i>
+    and England sufficient sources of inspiration for his symphonies, which
+    cover from end to end the scale of perceptible colours. He has
+    expressed, for instance, the mild and vaporous softness of the
+    Mediterranean, the luxuriant vegetation of the gardens of Cannes and
+    Antibes, with a truthfulness and knowledge of the psychology of land and
+    water which can only be properly appreciated by those who live in this
+    enchanted region. This has not prevented him from understanding better
+    than anybody the wildness, the grand austereness of the rocks of
+    <i>Belle-Isle en mer</i>, to express it in pictures in which one really feels
+    the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking
+    against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of
+    <i>Water-lilies</i> expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet
+    basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has
+    painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of
+    bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at
+    twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, tulip-fields in Holland,
+    bouquets, effects of snow and hoar frost of exquisite softness, and
+    sailing boats passing in the sun. He has painted some views of the banks
+    of the Seine which are quite wonderful in their power of conjuring up
+    these scenes, and over all this has roved his splendid vision of a
+    great, amorous and radiant colourist. The <i>Cathedrals</i> are even more of
+    a <i>tour de force</i> of his talent. They consist of seventeen studies of
+    Rouen Cathedral, the towers of which fill the whole of the picture,
+    leaving barely a little space, a little corner of the square, at the
+    foot of the enormous stone-shafts which mount to the very top of the
+    picture. Here he has no proper means to express the play of the
+    reflections, no changeful waters or foliage: the grey stone, worn by
+    time and blackened by centuries, is for seventeen times the monochrome,
+    the thankless theme upon which the painter is about to exercise his
+    vision. But Monet finds means of making the most dazzling atmospheric
+    harmonies sparkle upon this stone. Pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at
+    midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun,
+    standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist,
+    the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with
+    its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without
+    minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the
+    composite, bold and rich tone of Oriental carpets.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0028"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/28monet.jpg" width="192" height="300"
+alt="Claude Monet - Poplars on the Epte in Autumn">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>CLAUDE MONET</b><br><br>POPLARS ON THE EPTE IN AUTUMN
+</center>
+<p>
+    Monet excels also in suggesting the <i>drawing of light</i>, if I may venture
+    to use this expression. He makes us understand the movement of the
+    vibrations of heat, the movement of the luminous waves; he also
+    understands how to paint the sensation of strong wind. "Before one of
+    Manet's pictures," said Mme. Morisot, "I always know which way to
+    incline my umbrella." Monet is also an incomparable painter of water.
+    Pond, river, or sea&mdash;he knows how to differentiate their colouring,
+    their consistency, and their currents, and he transfixes a moment of
+    their fleeting life. He is intuitive to an exceptional degree in the
+    intimate composition of matter, water, earth, stone or air, and this
+    intuition serves him in place of intellectuality in his art. He is a
+    painter <i>par excellence</i>, a man born for painting, and this power of
+    penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a
+    kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate
+    truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is
+    the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist,
+    Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His work is immense. He produces with astonishing rapidity, and he has
+    yet another characteristic of the great painters: that of having put his
+    hand to every kind of subject. His recent studies of the Thames are, at
+    the decline of his energetic maturity, as beautiful and as spontaneous
+    as the <i>Hay-ricks</i> of seventeen years back. They are thrillingly
+    truthful visions of fairy mists, where showers of silver and gold
+    sparkle through rosy vapours; and at the same time Monet combines in
+    this series the dream-landscapes of Turner with Monticelli's
+    accumulation of precious stones. Thus interpreted by this intense
+    faculty of synthesis, nature, simplified in detail and contemplated in
+    its grand lines, becomes truly a living dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Since the <i>Hay-ricks</i> one can say that the work of Claude Monet is
+    glorious. It has been made sacred to the admiring love of the
+    connoisseurs on the day when Monet joined Rodin in an exhibition which
+    is famous in the annals of modern art. Yet no official distinction has
+    intervened to recognise one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth
+    century. The influence of Monet has been enormous all over Europe and
+    America. The <i>process of colour spots</i><a href="#note-2"><small>2</small></a> (let us adhere to this
+    rudimentary name which has become current) has been adopted by a whole
+    crowd of painters. I shall have to say a few words about it at the end
+    of this book. But it is befitting to terminate this all too short study
+    by explaining that the most lyrical of the Impressionists has also been
+    the theorist <i>par excellence</i>. His work connects easel painting with
+    mural painting. No Minister of Fine Arts has been found, who would
+    surmount the systematic opposition of the official painters, and give
+    Manet a commission for grand mural compositions, for which his method is
+    admirably suited. It has taken long years before such works were
+    entrusted to Besnard, who, with Puvis de Chavannes, has given Paris
+    her most beautiful modern decorations, but Besnard's work is the direct
+    outcome of Claude Monet's harmonies. The principle of the division of
+    tones and of the study of complementary colours has been full of
+    revelations, and one of the most fruitful theories. It has probably been
+    the principle which will designate most clearly the originality of the
+    painting of the future. To have invented it, is enough to secure
+    permanent glory for a man. And without wishing to put again the question
+    of the antagonism of realism and idealism, one may well say that a
+    painter who invents a method and shows such power, is highly
+    intellectual and gifted with a pictorial intelligence. Whatever the
+    subjects he treats, he creates an aesthetic emotion equivalent, if not
+    similar, to those engendered by the most complex symbolism. In his
+    ardent love of nature Monet has found his greatness; he suggests the
+    secrets by stating the evident facts. That is the law common to all the
+    arts.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0029"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/29monet.jpg" width="300" height="221"
+alt="Claude Monet - The Bridge at Argenteuil">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>CLAUDE MONET</b><br><br>THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL
+</center>
+<a name="2H_4_0010"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h2>
+    VI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK
+</h3>
+<p>
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<p>
+    The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of
+    forty years. It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist
+    art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general
+    destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art
+    movement. It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy
+    magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the
+    technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite. Like
+    Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has
+    treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes
+    and still-life, all with equal beauty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.
+    His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses
+    the same technique as Boucher: fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy,
+    laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the principal
+    values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those
+    of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the
+    opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious attitudes and an
+    effort towards decorative convention. Nevertheless, his <i>Bathers</i>, of
+    which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern
+    and personal. Renoir's nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas,
+    whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in
+    the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally
+    looked for in the features of the clothed being. Nor is Renoir's nude
+    that of the academicians, that poetised nude arranged according to a
+    pseudo-Greek ideal, which has nothing in common with contemporary women.
+    What Renoir sees in the nude is less the line, than the brilliancy of
+    the epidermis, the luminous, nacreous substance of the flesh: it is the
+    "ideal clay"; and in this he shows the vision of a poet; he transfigures
+    reality, but in a very different sense from that of the School.
+    Renoir's woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless,
+    wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub. He sets her in backgrounds of
+    foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents. She is a luxuriant, firm,
+    healthy and naïve woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes
+    wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and
+    her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti,
+    born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where
+    entire ingenuousness is a guarantee against all indecency. One cannot
+    but be astonished at this mixture of "Japanism," savagism and eighteenth
+    century taste, which constitutes inimitably the nude of Renoir.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0030"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/30renoir.jpg" width="234" height="300"
+alt="Renoir - Dejeuner">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR</b><br><br>DÉJEUNER
+</center><br><br>
+<a name="image-0031"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/31renoir.jpg" width="239" height="300"
+alt="Renoir - In the Box">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR</b><br><br>IN THE BOX
+</center>
+<p>
+    M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist
+    methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits.
+    Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet.
+    These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the
+    objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are
+    frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in
+    the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of
+    depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as
+    interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the
+    interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the
+    essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He
+    knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time;
+    how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate,
+    behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches
+    which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is
+    now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the <i>Déjeûner des
+    Canotiers</i>, the <i>Bal au Moulin de la Galette</i>, the <i>Box</i>, the <i>Terrace</i>,
+    the <i>First Step</i>, the <i>Sleeping Woman with a Cat</i>, and his most
+    beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied
+    with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent
+    of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the <i>Woman with the broken neck</i> is related
+    to Manet; the portrait of <i>Sisley</i> invents pointillism fifteen years
+    before the pointillists; <i>La Pensée</i>, this masterpiece, evokes
+    Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the
+    <i>Jeune Fille au panier</i> is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the
+    delightful <i>Jeune Fille à la promenade</i> is connected with Fragonard; the
+    <i>Box</i>, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole
+    worldliness of 1875. The portrait of <i>Jeanne Samary</i> is an evocation of
+    the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white
+    satin and golden hair.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0032"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/32renoir.jpg" width="183" height="300"
+alt="Renoir - Young Girl Promenading">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR</b><br><br>YOUNG GIRL PROMENADING
+</center>
+<p>
+    Renoir's realism bears in spite of all, the imprint of the lyric spirit
+    and of sweetness. It has neither the nervous veracity of Manet, nor the
+    bitterness of Degas, who both love their epoch and find it interesting
+    without idealising it and who have the vision of psychologist novelists.
+    Before everything else he is a painter. What he sees in the <i>Bal au
+    Moulin de la Galette</i>, are not the stigmata of vice and impudence, the
+    ridiculous and the sad sides of the doubtful types of this low resort.
+    He sees the gaiety of Sundays, the flashes of the sun, the oddity of a
+    crowd carried away by the rhythm of the valses, the laughter, the
+    clinking of glasses, the vibrating and hot atmosphere; and he applies
+    to this spectacle of joyous vulgarity his gifts as a sumptuous
+    colourist, the arabesque of the lines, the gracefulness of his bathers,
+    and the happy eurythmy of his soul. The straw hats are changed into
+    gold, the blue jackets are sapphires, and out of a still exact realism
+    is born a poem of light. The <i>Déjeûner des Canotiers</i> is a subject which
+    has been painted a hundred times, either for the purpose of studying
+    popular types, or of painting white table-cloths amidst sunny foliage.
+    Yet Renoir is the only painter who has raised this small subject to the
+    proportions and the style of a large canvas, through the pictorial charm
+    and the masterly richness of the arrangement. The <i>Box</i>, conceived in a
+    low harmony, in a golden twilight, is a work worthy of Reynolds. The
+    pale and attentive face of the lady makes one think of the great English
+    master's best works; the necklace, the flesh, the flounce of lace and
+    the hands are marvels of skill and of taste, which the greatest modern
+    virtuosos, Sargent and Besnard, have not surpassed, and, as far as the
+    man in the background is concerned, his white waistcoat, his
+    dress-coat, his gloved hand would suffice to secure the fame of a
+    painter. The <i>Sleeping Woman</i>, the <i>First Step</i>, the <i>Terrace</i>, and the
+    decorative <i>Dance</i> panels reveal Renoir as an <i>intimiste</i> and as an
+    admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of
+    grasping nature and of ingenuity&mdash;strangers to all decadent
+    complexity&mdash;have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have
+    expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with
+    over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of
+    dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with
+    inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0033"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/33renoir.jpg" width="242" height="300"
+alt="Renoir - Woman's Bust">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR</b><br><br>WOMAN'S BUST
+</center>
+<p>
+    His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It
+    seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the
+    palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches
+    for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical
+    dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to
+    take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and
+    conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in assembling those tones
+    which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed
+    strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded
+    colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he
+    can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One
+    feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian
+    shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one
+    refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional
+    virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It
+    is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the
+    most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his
+    generation. The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques
+    according to their own character: the gladioles and roses in pasty
+    paint, the poor flowers of the field are defined by a cross-hatching of
+    little touches. Influenced by the purple shadow of the large
+    flower-decked hats, the heads of young girls are painted on coarse
+    canvas, sketched in broad strokes, with the hair in one colour only.
+    Some little study appears like wool, some other has the air of agate,
+    or is marbled and veined according to his inexplicable whim. We have
+    here an incessant confusion of methods, a complete emancipation of the
+    virtuoso who listens only to his fancy. Now and then the harmonies are
+    false and the drawing incorrect, but these weaknesses do at least no
+    harm to the values, the character and the general movement of the work,
+    which are rather accentuated by them.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0034"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/34renoir.jpg" width="247" height="289"
+alt="Renoir - Young Woman in Empire Costume">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR</b><br><br>YOUNG WOMAN IN EMPIRE COSTUME
+</center>
+<p>
+    Surely, it would be false to exclude ideologist painting which has
+    produced wonders, and not less iniquitous to reproach Impressionism with
+    not having taken any interest in it! One has to avoid the kind of
+    criticism which consists in reproaching one movement with not having had
+    the qualities of the others whilst maintaining its own, and we have
+    abandoned the idea of Beauty divided into a certain number of clauses
+    and programmes, towards the sum total of which the efforts of the
+    eclectic candidates are directed. M. Renoir is probably the most
+    representative figure of a movement where he seems to have united all
+    the qualities of his friends. To criticise him means to criticise
+    Impressionism itself. Having spent half of its strength in proving to
+    its adversaries that they were wrong, and the other half in inventing
+    technical methods, it is not surprising to find that Impressionism has
+    been wanting in intellectual depth and has left to its successors the
+    care of realising works of great thought. But it has brought us a sunny
+    smile, a breath of pure air. It is so fascinating, that one cannot but
+    love its very mistakes which make it more human and more accessible.
+    Renoir is the most lyrical, the most musical, the most subtle of the
+    masters of this art. Some of his landscapes are as beautiful as those of
+    Claude Monet. His nudes are as masterly in painting as Manet's, and more
+    supple. Not having attained the scientific drawing which one finds in
+    Degas's, they have a grace and a brilliancy which Degas's nudes have
+    never known. If his rare portraits of men are inferior to those of his
+    rivals, his women's portraits have a frequently superior distinction.
+    His great modern compositions are equal to the most beautiful works by
+    Manet and Degas. His inequalities are also more striking than theirs.
+    Being a fantastic, nervous improvisator he is more exposed to radical
+    mistakes. But he is a profoundly sincere and conscientious artist.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0035"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/35renoir.jpg" width="239" height="300"
+alt="Renoir - On the Terrace">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>RENOIR</b><br><br>ON THE TERRACE
+</center>
+<p>
+    The race speaks in him. It is inexplicable that he should not have met
+    with startling success, since he is voluptuous, bright, happy and
+    learned without heaviness. One has to attribute his relative isolation
+    to the violence of the controversies, and particularly to the dignity of
+    a poet gently disdainful of public opinion and paying attention solely
+    to painting, his great and only love. Manet has been a fighter whose
+    works have created scandal. Renoir has neither shown, nor hidden
+    himself: he has painted according to his dream, spreading his works,
+    without mixing up his name or his personality with the tumult that raged
+    around his friends. And now, for that very reason, his work appears
+    fresher and younger, more primitive and candid, more intoxicated with
+    flowers, flesh and sunlight.
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0011"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h2>
+    VII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE SECONDARY PAINTERS OF IMPRESSIONISM&mdash;CAMILLE PISSARRO, ALFRED
+    SISLEY, PAUL CÉZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MISS MARY CASSATT, EVA GONZALÈS,
+    GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE, BAZILLE, ALBERT LEBOURG, EUGÈNE BOUDIN</h3>
+<p>
+    .
+</p>
+<p>
+    Manet, Degas, Monet and Renoir will present themselves as a glorious
+    quartet of masters, in the history of painting. We must now speak of
+    some personalities who have grown up by their side and who, without
+    being great, offer nevertheless a rich and beautiful series of works.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Of these personalities the most considerable is certainly that of M.
+    Camille Pissarro. He painted according to some wise and somewhat timid
+    formulas, when Manet's example won him over to Impressionism to which he
+    has remained faithful. M. Pissarro has been enormously productive. His
+    work is composed of landscapes, rustic scenes, and studies of streets
+    and markets. His first landscapes are in the manner of Corot, but bathed
+    in blond colour: vast cornfields, sunny woods, skies with big, flocking
+    clouds, effects of soft light&mdash;these are the motifs of some charming
+    canvases which have a solid, classic quality. Later the artist adopted
+    the method of the dissociation of tones, from which he obtained some
+    happy effects. His harvest and market scenes are luminous and alive. The
+    figures in these recall those of Millet. They bear witness to high
+    qualities of sincere observation, and are the work of a man profoundly
+    enamoured of rustic life. M. Pissarro excels in grouping the figures, in
+    correctly catching their attitudes and in rendering the medley of a
+    crowd in the sun. Certain fans in particular will always remain
+    delightful caprices of fresh colour, but it would be vain to look in
+    this attractive, animated and clear painting for the psychologic gifts,
+    the profound feeling for grand silhouettes, and the intuition of the
+    worn and gloomy soul of the men of the soil, which have made Millet's
+    noble glory. At the time when, about 1885, the neo-Impressionists whom
+    we shall study later on invented the Pointillist method, M. Pissarro
+    tried it and applied it judiciously, with the patient, serious and
+    slightly anxious talent, by which he is distinguished. Recently, in a
+    series of pictures representing views of Paris (the boulevards and the
+    Avenue de l'Opéra) M. Pissarro has shewn rare vision and skill and has
+    perhaps signed his most beautiful and personal paintings. The
+    perspective, the lighting, the tones of the houses and of the crowds,
+    the reflections of rain or sunshine are intensely true; they make one
+    feel the atmosphere, the charm and the soul of Paris. One can say of
+    Pissarro that he lacks none of the gifts of his profession. He is a
+    learned, fruitful and upright artist. But he has lacked originality; he
+    always recalls those whom he admires and whose ideas he applies boldly
+    and tastefully. It is probable that his conscientious nature has
+    contributed not little towards keeping him in the second rank.
+    Incapable, certainly, of voluntarily imitating, this excellent and
+    diligent painter has not had the sparks of genius of his friends, but
+    all that can be given to a man through conscientious study, striving
+    after truth and love of art, has been acquired by M. Pissarro. The rest
+    depended on destiny only. There is no character more worthy of respect
+    and no effort more meritorious than his, and there can be no better
+    proof of his disinterestedness and his modesty, than the fact that,
+    although he has thirty years of work behind him, an honoured name and
+    white hair, M. Pissarro did not hesitate to adopt, quite frankly, the
+    technique of the young Pointillist painters, his juniors, because it
+    appeared to him better than his own. He is, if not a great painter, at
+    least one of the most interesting rustic landscape painters of our
+    epoch. His visions of the country are quite his own, and are a
+    harmonious mixture of Classicism and Impressionism which will secure one
+    of the most honourable places to his work.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0036"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/36pissarro.jpg" width="240" height="300"
+alt="Pissarro - Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>PISSARRO</b><br><br>RUE DE L'EPICERIE, ROUEN
+</center>
+<a name="image-0037"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/37pissarro.jpg" width="300" height="247"
+alt="Pissarro - Boulevard Montmartre">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>PISSARRO</b><br><br>BOULEVARDE MONTMARTRE
+</center>
+<a name="image-0038"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/38pissarro.jpg" width="300" height="225"
+alt="Pissarro - The Boildieaux Bridge at Rouen">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>PISSARRO<br></b><br>THE BOILDIEAUX BRIDGE AT ROUEN
+</center>
+<a name="image-0039"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/39pissarro.jpg" width="300" height="247"
+alt="Pissarro - The Avenue de l'Opera">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>PISSARRO<br></b><br>THE AVENUE DE L'OPÉRA
+</center>
+<p>
+    There has, perhaps, been more original individuality in the landscape
+    painter Alfred Sisley. He possessed in the highest degree the feeling
+    for light, and if he did not have the power, the masterly passion of
+    Claude Monet, he will at least deserve to be frequently placed by his
+    side as regards the expression of certain combinations of light. He did
+    not have the decorative feeling which makes Monet's landscapes so
+    imposing; one does not see in his work that surprising lyrical
+    interpretation which knows how to express the drama of the raging waves,
+    the heavy slumber of enormous masses of rock, the intense torpor of the
+    sun on the sea. But in all that concerns the mild aspects of the <i>Ile de
+    France</i>, the sweet and fresh landscapes, Sisley is not unworthy of being
+    compared with Monet. He equals him in numerous pictures; he has a
+    similar delicacy of perception, a similar fervour of execution. He is
+    the painter of great, blue rivers curving towards the horizon; of
+    blossoming orchards; of bright hills with red-roofed hamlets scattered
+    about; he is, beyond all, the painter of French skies which he presents
+    with admirable vivacity and facility. He has the feeling for the
+    transparency of atmosphere, and if his technique allies him directly
+    with Impressionism, one can well feel, that he painted spontaneously and
+    that this technique happened to be adapted to his nature, without his
+    having attempted to appropriate it for the sake of novelty. Sisley has
+    painted a notable series of pictures in the quaint village of Moret on
+    the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he died at a ripe
+    age, and these canvases will figure among the most charming landscapes
+    of our epoch. Sisley was a veteran of Impressionism. At the Exhibition
+    of 1900, in the two rooms reserved for the works of this school, there
+    were to be seen a dozen of Sisley's canvases. By the side of the finest
+    Renoirs, Monets and Manets they kept their charm and their brilliancy
+    with a singular flavour, and this was for many critics a revelation as
+    to the real place of this artist, whom they had hitherto considered as a
+    pretty colourist of only relative importance.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0040"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/40sisley.jpg" width="300" height="220"
+alt="Sisley - Snow Effect">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>SISLEY<br></b><br>SNOW EFFECT
+</center>
+<a name="image-0041"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/41sisley.jpg" width="300" height="228"
+alt="Sisley - Bougival, at the Water's Edge">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>SISLEY<br></b><br>BOUGIVAL, AT THE WATER'S EDGE
+</center>
+<a name="image-0042"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/42sisley.jpg" width="300" height="230"
+alt="Sisley - Bridge at Moret">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>SISLEY<br></b><br>BRIDGE AT MORET
+</center>
+<p>
+    Paul Cézanne, unknown to the public, is appreciated by a small group of
+    art lovers. He is an artist who lives in Provence, away from the world;
+    he is supposed to have served as model for the Impressionist painter
+    Claude Lantier, described by Zola in his celebrated novel "L'Oeuvre."
+    Cézanne has painted landscapes, rustic scenes and still-life pictures.
+    His figures are clumsy and brutal and inharmonious in colour, but his
+    landscapes have the merit of a robust simplicity of vision. These
+    pictures are almost primitive, and they are loved by the young
+    Impressionists because of their exclusion of all "cleverness." A charm
+    of rude simplicity and sincerity can be found in these works in which
+    Cézanne employs only just the means which are indispensable for his end.
+    His still-life pictures are particularly interesting owing to the
+    spotless brilliancy of their colours, the straightforwardness of the
+    tones, and the originality of certain shades analogous to those of old
+    faience. Cézanne is a conscientious painter without skill, intensely
+    absorbed in rendering what he sees, and his strong and tenacious
+    attention has sometimes succeeded in finding beauty. He reminds more of
+    an ancient Gothic craftsman, than of a modern artist, and he is full of
+    repose as a contrast to the dazzling virtuosity of so many painters.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0043"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/43cezanne.jpg" width="300" height="240"
+alt="CÉzanne - Dessert">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>C<font face="Times New Roman">É</font>ZANNE<br></b><br>DESSERT
+</center>
+<p>
+    Berthe Morisot will remain the most fascinating figure of
+    Impressionism,&mdash;the one who has stated most precisely the femineity of
+    this luminous and iridescent art. Having married Eugène Manet, the
+    brother of the great painter, she exhibited at various private
+    galleries, where the works of the first Impressionists were to be
+    seen, and became as famous for her talent as for her beauty. When Manet
+    died, she took charge of his memory and of his work, and she helped with
+    all her energetic intelligence to procure them their just and final
+    estimation. Mme. Eugène Manet has certainly been one of the most
+    beautiful types of French women of the end of the nineteenth century.
+    When she died prematurely at the age of fifty (in 1895), she left a
+    considerable amount of work: gardens, young girls, water-colours of
+    refined taste, of surprising energy, and of a colouring as
+    distinguished, as it is unexpected. As great grand-daughter of
+    Fragonard, Berthe Morisot (since we ought to leave her the name with
+    which her respect for Manet's great name made her always sign her works)
+    seemed to have inherited from her famous ancestor his French
+    gracefulness, his spirited elegance, and all his other great qualities.
+    She has also felt the influence of Corot, of Manet and of Renoir. All
+    her work is bathed in brightness, in azure, in sunlight; it is a woman's
+    work, but it has a strength, a freedom of touch and an originality,
+    which one would hardly have expected. Her water-colours, particularly,
+    belong to a superior art: some notes of colour suffice to indicate sky,
+    sea, or a forest background, and everything shows a sure and masterly
+    fancy, for which our time can offer no analogy. A series of Berthe
+    Morisot's works looks like a veritable bouquet whose brilliancy is due
+    less to the colour-schemes which are comparatively soft, grey and blue,
+    than to the absolute correctness of the values. A hundred canvases, and
+    perhaps three hundred water-colours attest this talent of the first
+    rank. Normandy coast scenes with pearly skies and turquoise horizons,
+    sparkling Nice gardens, fruit-laden orchards, girls in white dresses
+    with big flower-decked hats, young women in ball-dress, and flowers are
+    the favourite themes of this artist who was the friend of Renoir, of
+    Degas and of Mallarmé.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0044"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/44morisot.jpg" width="300" height="245"
+alt="Berthe Morisot - Melancholy">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>BERTHE MORISOT<br></b><br>MELANCHOLY
+</center>
+<a name="image-0045"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/45morisot.jpg" width="300" height="267"
+alt="Berthe Morisot - Young Woman Seated">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>BERTHE MORISOT<br></b><br>YOUNG WOMAN SEATED
+</center>
+<p>
+    Miss Mary Cassatt will deserve a place by her side. American by birth,
+    she became French through her assiduous participation in the exhibitions
+    of the Impressionists. She is one of the very few painters whom Degas
+    has advised, with Forain and M. Ernest Rouart. (This latter, a painter
+    himself, a son of the painter and wealthy collector Henri Rouart, has
+    married Mme. Manet's daughter who is also an artist.) Miss Cassatt has
+    made a speciality of studying children, and she is, perhaps, the artist
+    of this period who has understood and expressed them with the greatest
+    originality. She is a pastellist of note, and some of her pastels are as
+    good as Manet's and Degas's, so far as broad execution and brilliancy
+    and delicacy of tones are concerned. Ten years ago Miss Cassatt
+    exhibited a series of ten etchings in colour, representing scenes of
+    mothers and children at their toilet. At that time this <i>genre</i> was
+    almost abandoned, and Miss Cassatt caused astonishment by her boldness
+    which faced the most serious difficulties. One can relish in this
+    artist's pictures, besides the great qualities of solid draughtsmanship,
+    correct values, and skilful interpretation of flesh and stuffs, a
+    profound sentiment of infantile life, childish gestures, clear and
+    unconscious looks, and the loving expression of the mothers. Miss
+    Cassatt is the painter and psychologist of babies and young mothers whom
+    she likes to depict in the freshness of an orchard, or against
+    backgrounds of the flowered hangings of dressing-rooms, amidst bright
+    linen, tubs, and china, in smiling intimacy. To these two remarkable
+    women another has to be added, Eva Gonzalès, the favourite pupil of
+    Manet who has painted a fine portrait of her. Eva Gonzalès became the
+    wife of the excellent engraver Henri Guérard, and died prematurely, not,
+    however, before one was able to admire her talent as an exquisitely
+    delicate pastellist. Having first been a pupil of Chaplin, she soon came
+    to forget the tricks of technique in order to acquire under Manet's
+    guidance the qualities of clearness and the strength of the great
+    painter of <i>Argenteuil</i>; and she would certainly have taken one of the
+    first places in modern art, had not her career been cut short by death.
+    A small pastel at the Luxembourg Gallery proves her convincing qualities
+    as a colourist.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0046"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/46cassatt.jpg" width="130" height="180"
+alt="Mary Cassatt - Getting Up Baby">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MARY CASSATT<br></b><br>GETTING UP BABY
+</center>
+<a name="image-0047"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/47cassatt.jpg" width="300" height="228"
+alt="Mary Cassatt - Women and Child">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>MARY CASSATT<br></b><br>WOMEN AND CHILD
+</center>
+<p>
+    Gustave Caillebotte was a friend of the Impressionists from the very
+    first hour. He was rich, fond of art, and himself a painter of great
+    merit who modestly kept hidden behind his comrades. His picture <i>Les
+    raboteurs de parquets</i> made him formerly the butt of derision. To-day
+    his work, at the Luxembourg Gallery seems hardly a fit pretext for so
+    much controversy, but at that time much was considered as madness,
+    that to our eyes appears quite natural. This picture is a study of
+    oblique perspective and its curious <i>ensemble</i> of rising lines sufficed
+    to provoke astonishment. The work is, moreover, grey and discreet in
+    colour and has some qualities of fine light, but is on the whole not
+    very interesting. Recently an exhibition of works by Caillebotte has
+    made it apparent that this amateur was a misjudged painter. The
+    still-life pictures in this exhibition were specially remarkable. But
+    the name of Caillebotte was destined to reach the public only in
+    connection with controversies and scandal. When he died, he left to the
+    State a magnificent collection of objets-d'art and of old pictures, and
+    also a collection of Impressionist works, stipulating that these two
+    bequests should be inseparable. He wished by this means to impose the
+    works of his friends upon the museums, and thus avenge their unjust
+    neglect. The State accepted the two legacies, since the Louvre
+    absolutely wanted to benefit by the ancient portion, in spite of the
+    efforts of the Academicians who revolted against the acceptance of the
+    modern part. On this occasion one could see how far the official
+    artists were carried by their hatred of the Impressionists. A group of
+    Academicians, professors at the <i>Ecole des Beaux-Arts</i>, threatened the
+    minister that they would resign <i>en masse</i>. "We cannot," they wrote to
+    the papers, "continue to teach an art of which we believe we know the
+    laws, from the moment the State admits into the museums, where our
+    pupils can see them, works which are the very negation of all we teach."
+    A heated discussion followed in the press, and the minister boldly
+    declared that Impressionism, good or bad, had attracted the attention of
+    the public, and that it was the duty of the State to receive impartially
+    the work of all the art movements; the public would know how to judge
+    and choose; the Government's duty was not to influence them by showing
+    them only one style of painting, but to remain in historic neutrality.
+    Thanks to this clever reply, the Academicians, among whom M. Gérôme was
+    the most rabid, resigned themselves to keeping their posts. A similar
+    incident, less publicly violent, but equally strange, occurred on the
+    occasion of the admission to the Luxembourg Gallery of the portrait of
+    M. Whistler's mother, a masterpiece of which the gallery is proud
+    to-day, and for which a group of writers and art lovers had succeeded in
+    opening the way. It is difficult to imagine the degree of irritation and
+    obstruction of the official painters against all the ideas of the new
+    painting, and if it had only depended upon them, there can be no doubt
+    that Manet and his friends would have died in total obscurity, not only
+    banished from the Salons and museums, but also treated as madmen and
+    robbed of the possibility of living by their work.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Caillebotte collection was installed under conditions which the
+    ill-will of the administrators made at least as deplorable as possible.
+    The works were crowded into a small, badly lighted room, where it is
+    absolutely impossible to see them from the distance required by the
+    method of the division of tones, and the meanness of the opposition was
+    such that, the pictures having been bequeathed without frames, the
+    keeper was obliged to have recourse to the reserves of the Louvre,
+    because he was refused the necessary credit for purchasing them. The
+    collection is however beautiful and interesting. It does not represent
+    Impressionism in all its brilliancy, since the works by which it is
+    composed had been bought by Caillebotte at a time, when his friends were
+    still far from having arrived at the full blossoming of their qualities.
+    But some very fine things can at least be found there. Renoir is
+    marvellously represented by the <i>Moulin de la Galette</i>, which is one of
+    his masterpieces. Degas figures with seven beautiful pastels, Monet with
+    some landscapes grand in style; Sisley and Pissarro appear scarcely to
+    their advantage, and finally it is to be regretted, that Manet is only
+    represented by a study in black in his first manner, the <i>Balcony</i>,
+    which does not count among his best pictures, and the famous <i>Olympia</i>
+    whose importance is more historical than intrinsic. The gallery has
+    separately acquired a <i>Young Girl in Ball Dress</i> by Berthe Morisot,
+    which is a delicate marvel of grace and freshness. And in the place of
+    honour of the gallery is to be seen Fantin-Latour's great picture
+    <i>Hommage à Manet</i>, in which the painter, seated before his easel, is
+    surrounded by his friends; and this canvas may well be considered the
+    emblem of the slow triumph of Impressionism, and of the amends for a
+    great injustice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It is in this picture that the young painter Bazille is represented, a
+    friend and pupil of Manet's, who was killed during the war of 1870, and
+    who should not be forgotten here. He has left a few canvases marked by
+    great talent, and would no doubt have counted among the most original
+    contemporary artists. We shall terminate this all too short enumeration
+    with two remarkable landscapists; the one is Albert Lebourg who paints
+    in suave and poetic colour schemes, with blues and greens of particular
+    tenderness, a painter who will take his place in the history of
+    Impressionism. The other is Eugène Boudin. He has not adopted Claude
+    Monet's technique; but I have already said that the vague and inexact
+    term "Impressionism" must be understood to comprise a group of painters
+    showing originality in the study of light and getting away from the
+    academic spirit. As to this, Eugène Boudin deserves to be placed in the
+    first rank. His canvases will be the pride of the best arranged
+    galleries. He is an admirable seascape painter. He has known how to
+    render with unfailing mastery, the grey waters of the Channel, the
+    stormy skies, the heavy clouds, the effects of sunlight feebly piercing
+    the prevailing grey. His numerous pictures painted at the port of Havre
+    are profoundly expressive. Nobody has excelled him in drawing
+    sailing-boats, in giving the exact feeling of the keels plunged into the
+    water, in grouping the masts, in rendering the activity of a port, in
+    indicating the value of a sail against the sky, the fluidity of calm
+    water, the melancholy of the distance, the shiver of short waves rippled
+    by the breeze. Boudin is a learned colourist of grey tones. His
+    Impressionism consists in the exclusion of useless details, his
+    comprehension of reflections, his feeling for values, the boldness of
+    his composition and his faculty of directly perceiving nature and the
+    transparency of atmosphere: he reminds sometimes of Constable and of
+    Corot. Boudin's production has been enormous, and nothing that he has
+    done is indifferent. He is one of those artists who have not a brilliant
+    career, but who will last, and whose name, faithfully retained by the
+    elect, is sure of immortality. He may be considered an isolated
+    artist, on the border line between Classicism and Impressionism, and
+    this is unquestionably the cause of the comparative obscurity of his
+    fame. The same might be said of the ingenuous and fine landscapist
+    Hervier, who has left such interesting canvases; and of the Lyons
+    water-colour painter Ravier who, almost absolutely unknown, came very
+    close to Monticelli and showed admirable gifts. It must, however, be
+    recognised that Boudin is nearer to Impressionism than to any other
+    grouping of artists, and he must be considered as a small master of pure
+    French lineage. Finally, if a question of nationality prevents me from
+    enlarging upon the subject of the rank of precursor which must be
+    accorded to the great Dutch landscapist Jongkind, I must at least
+    mention his name. His water-colour sketches have been veritable
+    revelations for several Impressionists. Eugène Boudin and Berthe Morisot
+    have derived special benefit from them, and they are valuable lessons
+    for many young painters of the present day.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0048"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/48jongkind.jpg" width="300" height="232"
+alt="Jongkind - In Holland">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>JONGKIND<br></b><br>IN HOLLAND
+</center>
+<a name="image-0049"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/49jongkind.jpg" width="300" height="220"
+alt="Jongkind - View of the Hague">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>JONGKIND<br></b><br>VIEW OF THE HAGUE
+</center>
+<p>
+    We do not pretend to have mentioned in this chapter all the painters
+    directly connected with the first Impressionist movement. We have
+    confined ourselves to enumerating the most important only, and each of
+    them would deserve a complete essay. But our object will have been
+    achieved, if we have inspired art-lovers with just esteem for this brave
+    phalanx of artists who have proved better than any aesthetic
+    commentaries the vitality, the originality, and the logic of Manet's
+    theories, the great importance of the notions introduced by him into
+    painting, and who have, on the other hand, clearly demonstrated the
+    uselessness of official teaching. Far from the traditions and methods of
+    the School, the best of their knowledge and of their talent is due to
+    their profound and sincere contemplation of nature and to their freedom
+    of spirit. And for that reason they will have a permanent place in the
+    evolution of their art.
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0012"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h2>
+    VIII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAËLLI,
+    TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, FORAIN, CHÉRET, ETC.
+</h3>
+<p>
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<p>
+    Not the least important result of Impressionism has been the veritable
+    revolution effected by it in the art of illustration. It was only
+    natural that its principles should have led to it. The substitution of
+    the beauty of character for the beauty of proportion was bound to move
+    the artists to regard illustration in a new light; and as pictorial
+    Impressionism was born of the same movement of ideas which created the
+    naturalist novel and the impressionist literature of Flaubert, Zola and
+    the Goncourts, and moreover as these men were united by close relations
+    and a common defence, Edouard Manet's modern ideas soon took up the
+    commentary of the books dealing with modern life and the description of
+    actual spectacles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Impressionists themselves have not contributed towards illustration.
+    Their work has consisted in raising to the style of grand painting
+    subjects, that seemed at the best only worthy of the proportion of
+    vignettes, in opposition to the subjects qualified as "noble" by the
+    School. The series of works by Manet and Degas may be considered as
+    admirable illustrations to the novels by Zola and the Goncourts. It is a
+    parallel research in modern psychologic truth. But this research has
+    remained confined to pictures. It may be presumed that, had they wished
+    to do so, Manet and Degas could have admirably illustrated certain
+    contemporary novels, and Renoir could have produced a masterpiece in
+    commenting, say, upon Verlaine's <i>Fêtes Galantes</i>. The only things that
+    can be mentioned here are a few drawings composed by Manet for Edgar A.
+    Poe's <i>The Raven</i> and Mallarmé's <i>L'Après-Midi d'un Faune</i>, in addition
+    to a few music covers without any great interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if the Impressionists themselves have neglected actively to assist
+    the interesting school of modern illustration, a whole legion of
+    draughtsmen have immediately been inspired by their principles. One of
+    their most original characteristics was the realistic representation of
+    the scenes, the <i>mise en cadre</i>, and it afforded these draughtsmen an
+    opportunity for revolutionising book illustration. There had already
+    been some excellent artists who occupied themselves with vignette
+    drawings, like Tony Johannot and Célestin Nanteuil, whose pretty and
+    smart frontispieces are to be found in the old editions of Balzac. The
+    genius of Honoré Daumier and the high fancy of Gavarni and of Grévin had
+    already announced a serious protest of modern sentiment against academic
+    taste, in returning on many points to the free tradition of Eisen, of
+    the two Moreaus and of Debucourt. Since 1845 the draughtsman Constantin
+    Guys, Baudelaire's friend, gave evidence, in his most animated
+    water-colour drawings, of a curious vision of nervous elegance and of
+    expressive skill quite in accord with the ideas of the day.
+    Impressionism, and also the revelation of the Japanese colour prints,
+    gave an incredible vigour to these intuitive glimpses. Certain
+    characteristics will date from the days of Impressionism. It is due to
+    Impressionism that artists have ventured to show in illustration, for
+    instance, figures in the foreground cut through by the margin, rising
+    perspectives, figures in the background that seem to stand on a higher
+    plane than the others, people seen from a second story; in a word, all
+    that life presents to our eyes, without the annoying consideration for
+    "style" and for arrangement, which the academic spirit obstinately
+    insisted to apply to the illustration of modern life. Degas in
+    particular has given many examples of this novelty in composition. One
+    of his pastels has remained typical, owing to the scandal caused by it:
+    he represents a dance-scene at the Opera, seen from the orchestra. The
+    neck of a double bass rises in the middle of the picture and cuts into
+    it, a large black silhouette, behind which sparkle the gauze-dresses and
+    the lights. That can be observed any evening, and yet it would be
+    difficult to recapitulate all the railleries and all the anger caused by
+    so natural an audacity. Modern illustration was to be the pretext of a
+    good many more outbursts!
+</p>
+<p>
+    We must now consider four artists of great importance who are remarkable
+    painters and have greatly raised the art of illustration. This title
+    illustrator, despised by the official painters, should be given them as
+    the one which has secured them the best claim to fame. They have
+    restored to this title all its merit and all its brilliancy and have
+    introduced into illustration the most serious qualities of painting. Of
+    these four men the first in date is M.J.F. Raffaëlli, who introduced
+    himself about 1875 with some remarkable and intensely picturesque
+    illustrations in colours in various magazines. He gave an admirable
+    series of <i>Parisian Types</i>, in album form, and a series of etchings to
+    accompany the text of M. Huysmans, describing the curious river "la
+    Bièvre" which penetrates Paris in a thousand curves, sometimes
+    subterranean, sometimes above ground, and serves the tanners for washing
+    the leather. This series is a model of modern illustration. But, apart
+    from the book, the entire pictorial work of M. Raffaëlli is a humorous
+    and psychological illustration of the present time. He has painted with
+    unique truth and spirit the working men's types and the small
+    <i>bourgeois</i>, the poor, the hospital patients and the roamers of the
+    outskirts of Paris. He has succeeded in being the poet of the sickly and
+    dirty landscapes by which the capitals are surrounded; he has rendered
+    their anaemic charm, the confused perspectives of houses, fences, walls
+    and little gardens, and their smoke, under the melancholy of rainy
+    skies. With an irony free from bitterness he has noted the clumsy
+    gestures of the labourer in his Sunday garb and the grotesque
+    silhouettes of the small townsmen, and has compiled a gallery of very
+    real sociologic interest. M. Raffaëlli has also exhibited Parisian
+    landscapes in which appear great qualities of light. He excels in
+    rendering the mornings in the spring, with their pearly skies, their
+    pale lights, their transparency and their slight shadows, and finally he
+    has proved his mastery by some large portraits, fresh harmonies,
+    generally devoted to the study of different qualities of white. If the
+    name "Impressionist" meant, as has been wrongly believed, an artist who
+    confines himself to giving the impression of what he sees, then M.
+    Raffaëlli would be the real Impressionist. He suggests more than he
+    paints. He employs a curious technique: he often leaves a sky completely
+    bare, throwing on to the white of the canvas a few colour notes which
+    suffice to give the illusion. He has a decided preference for white and
+    black, and paints very slightly in small touches. His very correct
+    feeling for values makes him an excellent painter; but what interests
+    him beyond all, is psychologic expression. He notes it with so hasty a
+    pencil, that one might almost say that he writes with colour. He is also
+    an etcher of great merit, and an original sculptor. He has invented
+    small bas-reliefs in bronze which can be attached to the wall, like
+    sketches or nick-nacks; and he has applied his talent even to renewing
+    the material for painting. He is an ingenious artist and a prolific
+    producer, a roguish, but sympathetic, observer of the life of the small
+    people, which has not prevented him from painting very seriously when he
+    wanted to, as is witnessed among other works by his very fine portrait
+    of M. Clemenceau speaking at a public meeting, in the presence of a
+    vociferous audience from which rise some hundred of heads whose
+    expressions are noted with really splendid energy and fervour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died recently, insane, leaves a great
+    work behind him. He had a kind of cruel genius. Descended from one of
+    the greatest families of France, badly treated by nature who made him a
+    kind of ailing dwarf, he seemed to take a bitter pleasure in the study
+    of modern vice. He painted scenes at café-concerts and the rooms of
+    wantons with intense truth. Nobody has revealed better than he the
+    lowness and suffering of the creatures "of pleasure," as they have been
+    dubbed by the heartrending irony of life. Lautrec has shown the
+    artificiality of the painted faces; the vulgarity of the types of the
+    prostitutes of low origin; the infamous gestures, the disorder, the
+    slovenliness of the dwellings of these women; all the shady side of
+    their existence. It has been said that he loved ugliness. As a matter of
+    fact, he did not exaggerate, he raised a powerful accusation against
+    everything he saw. But his terrible clairvoyance passed for caricature.
+    This sad psychologist was a great painter; he pleased himself with
+    dressing in rose-coloured costumes the coarsest and most vulgar
+    creatures he painted, such as one can find at the cabarets and concerts,
+    and he enjoyed the contrast of fresh tones with the faces marked by vice
+    and poverty; Lautrec's two great influences have been the Japanese and
+    Degas. Of the former he retained the love for decorative arabesques and
+    the unconventional grouping; of the other the learned draughtsmanship,
+    expressive in its broad simplification, and one might say that the pupil
+    has often been worthy of the masters. One can only regret that Lautrec
+    should have confined his vision and his high faculties to the study of a
+    small and very Parisian world; but, seeing his works, one cannot deny
+    the science, the spirit and the grand bearing of his art. He has also
+    signed some fine posters, notably a <i>Bruant</i> which is a masterpiece of
+    its kind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Degas's deep influence can be found again in J.L. Forain, who has made
+    himself known by an immense series of drawings for the illustrated
+    papers, drawings as remarkable in themselves as they are, through their
+    legends, bitterly sarcastic in spirit. These drawings form a synthesis
+    of the defects of the <i>bourgeoisie</i>, which is at the same time amusing
+    and grave. They also concern, though less happily, the political world,
+    in which the artist, a little intoxicated with his success, has thought
+    himself able to exercise an influence by scoffing at the parliamentary
+    régime. Forain's drawing has a nervous character which does, however,
+    not weaken its science: every stroke reveals something and has an
+    astonishing power. In his less known painting can be traced still more
+    clearly the style and influence of his master Degas. They are generally
+    incidents behind the scenes and at night restaurants, where caricatured
+    types are painted with great force. But they are insistently
+    exaggerated, they have not the restraint, the ironical and discreet
+    plausibility, which give so much flavour, so much value to Degas's
+    studies. Nevertheless, Forain's pictures are very significant and are of
+    real interest. He is decidedly the most interesting newspaper
+    illustrator of his whole generation, the one whose ephemeral art most
+    closely approaches grand painting, and one of those who have most
+    contributed towards the transformation of illustration for the
+    contemporary press.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jules Chéret has made for himself an important and splendid position in
+    contemporary art. He commenced as a lithographic workman and lived for a
+    long time in London. About 1870 Chéret designed his first posters in
+    black, white and red; these were at the time the only colours used. By
+    and by he perfected this art and found the means of adding other tones
+    and of drawing them on the lithographic stone. He returned to France,
+    started a small studio, and gradually carried poster art to the
+    admirable point at which it has arrived. At the same time Chéret drew
+    and painted and composed himself his models. About 1885 his name became
+    famous, and it has not ceased growing since. Some writers, notably the
+    eminent critic Roger Marx and the novelist Huysmans, hailed in Chéret an
+    original artist as well as a learned technician. He then exhibited
+    decorative pictures, pastels and drawings, which placed him in the first
+    rank. Chéret is universally known. The type of the Parisian woman
+    created by him, and the multi-coloured harmony of his works will not be
+    forgotten. His will be the honour of having invented the artistic
+    poster, this feast for the eyes, this fascinating art of the street,
+    which formerly languished in a tedious and dull display of commercial
+    advertisements. He has been the promoter of an immense movement; he has
+    been imitated, copied, parodied, but he will always remain inimitable.
+    He has succeeded in realising on paper by means of lithography, the
+    pastels and gouache drawings in which his admirable colourist's fancy
+    mixed the most difficult shades. In Chéret can be found all the
+    principles of Impressionism: opposing lights, coloured shadows,
+    complementary reflections, all employed with masterly sureness and
+    delightful charm. It is decorative Impressionism, conceived in a
+    superior way; and this simple poster-man, despised by the painters, has
+    proved himself equal to most. He has transformed the street, in the open
+    light, into a veritable Salon, where his works have become famous. When
+    this too modest artist decided to show his pictures and drawings, they
+    were a revelation. The most remarkable pastellists of the period were
+    astonished and admired his skill, his profound knowledge of technique,
+    his continual <i>tours-de-force</i> which he disguised under a shimmering
+    gracefulness. The State had the good sense to entrust him with some
+    large mural decorations, in which he unfolded the scale of his sparkling
+    colours, and affirmed his spirit, his fancy and his dreamy art. Chéret's
+    harmonies remain secrets; he uses them for the representation of
+    characters from the Italian comedy, thrown with fiendish <i>verve</i> upon a
+    background of a sky, fiery with the Bengal lights of a fairy-like
+    carnival, and he strangely intermingles the reality of the movements
+    with the most arbitrary fancy. Chéret has also succeeded in proving his
+    artistic descent by a beautiful series of drawings in sanguine: he
+    descends from Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard; he is a Frenchman of pure
+    blood; and when one has done admiring the grace and the happy animation
+    of his imagination, one can only be surprised to see on what serious and
+    sure a technique are based these decorations which appear improvised.
+    Chéret's art is the smile of Impressionism and the best demonstration
+    of the decorative logic of this art.
+</p>
+<p>
+    These are the four artists of great merit who have created the
+    transition between Impressionist painting and illustration. It would be
+    fit to put aside Toulouse-Lautrec, who was much younger, but his work is
+    too directly connected with that of Degas for one to take into account
+    the difference of age. He produced between 1887 and 1900 works which
+    might well have been ante-dated by fifteen years. We shall study in the
+    next chapter his Neo-Impressionist comrades, and we shall now speak of
+    some illustrators more advanced in years than he. The oldest in date is
+    the engraver Henri Guérard, who died three years ago. He had married Eva
+    Gonzalès and was a friend of Manet's, many of whose works have been
+    engraved by him. He was an artist of decided and original talent, who
+    also occupied himself successfully with pyrogravure, and who was happily
+    inspired by the Japanese colour-prints. His etchings deserve a place of
+    honour in the folios of expert collectors; they are strong and broad. As
+    to the engraver Félix Buhot, he was a rather delicate colourist in
+    black and white; his Paris scenes will always be considered charming
+    works. In spite of his Spanish origin, the painter, <i>aquarelliste</i>, and
+    draughtsman Daniel Vierge, should be added to the list of the men
+    connected with Impressionism. His illustrations are those of a great
+    artist&mdash;admirable in colour, movement and observation; all the great
+    principles of Impressionism are embodied in them. But there are four
+    more illustrators of the first rank: Steinlen, Louis Legrand, Paul
+    Renouard and Auguste Lepère.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Steinlen has been enormously productive: he is specially remarkable for
+    his illustrations. Those which he has designed for Aristide Bruant's
+    volume of songs, <i>Dans la rue</i>, are masterpieces of their kind. They
+    contain treasures of bitter observation, quaintness and knowledge. The
+    soul of the lower classes is shown in them with intense truth, bitter
+    revolt and comprehensive philosophy. Steinlen has also designed some
+    beautiful posters, pleasing pastels, lithographs of incontestable
+    technical merit, and beautifully eloquent political drawings. It cannot
+    be said that he is an Impressionist in the strict sense of the word; he
+    applied his colour in flat tints, more like an engraver than a painter;
+    but in him too can be felt the stamp of Degas, and he is one of those
+    who best demonstrate that, without Impressionism, they could not have
+    been what they are.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The same may be said of Louis Legrand, a pupil of Félicien Rops, an
+    admirably skilful etcher, a draughtsman of keen vision, and a painter of
+    curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the artists of
+    to-day. Louis Legrand also shows to what extent the example of Manet and
+    Degas has revolutionised the art of illustration, in freeing the
+    painters from obsolete laws, and guiding them towards truth and frank
+    psychological study. Legrand is full of them, without resembling them.
+    We must not forget that, besides the technical innovation (division of
+    tones, study of complementary colours), Impressionism has brought us
+    novelty of composition, realism of character and great liberty in the
+    choice of subjects. From this point of view Rops himself, in spite of
+    his symbolist tendencies, could not be classed with any other group, if
+    it were not that any kind of classification in art is useless and
+    inaccurate. However that may be, Louis Legrand has signed some volumes
+    resplendent with the most seductive qualities.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Paul Renouard has devoted himself to newspaper illustration, but with
+    what surprising prodigality of spirit and knowledge! The readers of the
+    "Graphic" will know. This masterly virtuoso of the pencil might give
+    drawing-lessons to many members of the Institute! The feeling for the
+    life of crowds, psychology of types, spirited and rapid notation,
+    astonishing ease in overcoming difficulties&mdash;these are his undeniable
+    gifts. And again we must recognise in Renouard the example of Degas and
+    Manet. His exceptional fecundity only helps to give more authority to
+    his pencil. Renouard's drawings at the Exhibition of 1900 were, perhaps,
+    more beautiful than the rest of his work. There was notably a series of
+    studies made from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, an
+    accumulation of wonders of perspectives framing scenes of such animation
+    and caprice as to take away one's breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Finally, Auguste Lepère appears as the Debucourt of our time. As
+    painter, pastellist and wood-engraver he has produced since 1870, and
+    has won for himself the first place among French engravers. It would be
+    difficult to recount the volumes, albums and covers on which the fancy
+    of his burin has played; but it is particularly in wood-engraving that
+    he stands without rival. Not only has he produced masterpieces of it,
+    but he has passionately devoted himself to raising this admirable art,
+    the glory of the beautiful books of olden days, and to give back to it
+    the lustre which had been eclipsed by mechanical processes. Lepère has
+    started some publications for this purpose; he has had pupils of great
+    merit, and he must be considered the master of the whole generation of
+    modern wood-engravers, just as Chéret is the undisputed master of the
+    poster. Lepère's ruling quality is strength. He seems to have
+    rediscovered the mediaeval limners' secrets of cutting the wood, giving
+    the necessary richness to the ink, creating a whole scale of half-tones,
+    and specially of adapting the design to typographic printing, and making
+    of it, so to say, an ornament and a decorative extension for the type.
+    Lepère is a wood-engraver with whom none of his contemporaries can be
+    compared; as regards his imagination, it is that of an altogether
+    curious artist. He excels in composing and expressing the life, the
+    animation, the soul of the streets and the picturesque side of the
+    populace. Herein he is much inspired by Manet and, if we go back to the
+    real tradition, by Guys, Debucourt, the younger Moreau and by Gabriel de
+    Saint-Aubin. He is decidedly a Realist of French lineage, who owes
+    nothing to the Academy and its formulas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It would be evidently unreasonable to attach to Impressionism all that
+    is ante-academical, and between the two extremes there is room for a
+    crowd of interesting artists. We shall not succumb to the prejudice of
+    the School by declaring, in our turn, that there is no salvation outside
+    Impressionism, and we have been careful to state repeatedly that, if
+    Impressionism has a certain number of principles as kernel, its
+    applications and its influence have a radiation which it is difficult to
+    limit. What can be absolutely demonstrated is, that this movement has
+    had the greatest influence on modern illustration, sometimes through its
+    colouring, sometimes simply through the great freedom of its ideas. Some
+    have found in it a direct lesson, others an example to be followed.
+    Some have met in it technical methods which pleased them, others have
+    only taken some suggestions from it. That is the case, for instance,
+    with Legrand, with Steinlen, and with Renouard; and it is also the case
+    with the lithographer Odilon Redon, who applies the values of Manet and,
+    in his strange pastels, the harmonies of Degas and Renoir, placing them
+    at the service of dreams and hallucinations and of a symbolism which is
+    absolutely removed from the realism of these painters. It is, finally,
+    the case with the water-colour painter Henri Rivière, who is misjudged
+    as to his merit, and who is one of the most perfect of those who have
+    applied Impressionist ideas to decorative engraving. He has realised
+    images in colours destined to decorate inexpensively the rooms of the
+    people and recalling the grand aspects of landscapes with a broad
+    simplification which is derived, curiously enough, from Puvis de
+    Chavannes's large decorative landscapes and from the small and precise
+    colour prints of Japan. Rivière, who is a skilful and personal poetic
+    landscapist, is not exactly an Impressionist, in so far as he does not
+    divide the tones, but rather blends them in subtle mixtures in the
+    manner of the Japanese. Yet, seeing his work, one cannot help thinking
+    of all the surprise and freedom introduced into modern art by
+    Impressionism.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody, even the ignorant, can perceive, on looking through an
+    illustrated paper or a modern volume, that thirty years ago this manner
+    of placing the figures, of noting familiar gestures, and of seizing
+    fugitive life with spirit and clearness was unknown. This mass of
+    engravings and of sketches resembles in no way what had been seen
+    formerly. They no longer have the solemn air of classic composition, by
+    which the drawings had been affected. A current of bold spontaneity has
+    passed through here. In modern English illustration, it can be stated
+    indisputably that nothing would be such as it can now be seen, if
+    Morris, Rossetti and Crane had not imposed their vision, and yet many
+    talented Englishmen resemble these initiators only very remotely. It is
+    exactly in this sense that we shall have credited Impressionism with the
+    talents who have drawn their inspiration less from its principles, than
+    from its vigorous protest against mechanical formulas, and who have
+    been able to find the energy, necessary for their success, in the
+    example it set by fighting during twenty years against the ideas of
+    routine which seemed indestructible. Even with the painters who are far
+    removed from the vision and the colouring of Manet and Degas, of Monet
+    and Renoir, one can find a very precise tendency: that of returning to
+    the subjects and the style of the real national tradition; and herein
+    lies one of the most serious benefits bestowed by Impressionism upon an
+    art which had stopped at the notion of a canonical beauty, until it had
+    almost become sterile in its timidity.
+</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<a name="2H_4_0013"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+
+<h2>
+    IX
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    NEO-IMPRESSIONISM&mdash;GAUGUIN, DENIS, THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE&mdash;THE THEORY OF
+    POINTILLISM&mdash;SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC
+    CHROMATISM&mdash;FAULTS AND QUALITIES OF THE IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE
+    OWE TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL&mdash;SOME WORDS ON
+    ITS INFLUENCE ABROAD
+</h3>
+<p style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0em">
+    &nbsp;</p>
+<p>
+    The beginnings of the movement designated under the name of
+    Neo-Impressionism can be traced back to about 1880. The movement is a
+    direct offshoot of the first Impressionism, originated by a group of
+    young painters who admired it and thought of pushing further still its
+    chromatic principles. The flourishing of Impressionism coincided, as a
+    matter of fact, with certain scientific labours concerning optics.
+    Helmholtz had just published his works on the perception of colours and
+    sounds by means of waves. Chevreul had continued on this path by
+    establishing his beautiful theories on the analysis of the solar
+    spectrum. M. Charles Henry, an original and remarkable spirit, occupied
+    himself in his turn with these delicate problems by applying them
+    directly to aesthetics, which Helmholtz and Chevreul had not thought of
+    doing. M. Charles Henry had the idea of creating relations between this
+    branch of science and the laws of painting. As a friend of several young
+    painters he had a real influence over them, showing them that the new
+    vision due to the instinct of Monet and of Manet might perhaps be
+    scientifically verified, and might establish fixed principles in a
+    sphere where hitherto the laws of colouring had been the effects of
+    individual conception. At that moment the criticism which resulted from
+    Taine's theories tried to effect a <i>rapprochement</i> of the artistic and
+    scientific domains in criticism and in the psychologic novel. The
+    painters, too, gave way to this longing for precision which seems to
+    have been the great preoccupation of intellects from 1880 to about 1889.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their researches had a special bearing on the theory of complementary
+    colours and on the means of establishing some laws concerning the
+    reaction of tones in such manner as to draw up a kind of tabula. Georges
+    Seurat and Paul Signac were the promoters of this research. Seurat died
+    very young, and one cannot but regret this death of an artist who would
+    have been very interesting and capable of beautiful works. Those which
+    he has left us bear witness to a spirit very receptive to theories, and
+    leaving nothing to chance. The silhouettes are reduced to almost
+    rigorously geometrical principles, the tones are decomposed
+    systematically. These canvases are more reasoned examples than works of
+    intuition and spontaneous vision. They show Seurat's curious desire to
+    give a scientific and classic basis to Impressionism. The same idea
+    rules in all the work of Paul Signac, who has painted some portraits and
+    numerous landscapes. To these two painters is due the method of
+    <i>Pointillism</i>, <i>i.e.</i> the division of tones, not only by touches, as in
+    Monet's pictures, but by very small touches of equal size, causing the
+    spheric shape to act equally upon the retina. The accumulation of these
+    luminous points is carried out over the entire surface of the canvas
+    without thick daubs of paint, and with regularity, whilst with Manet the
+    paint is more or less dense. The theory of complementary colours is
+    systematically applied. On a sketch, made from nature, the painter notes
+    the principal relations of tones, then systematises them on his picture
+    and connects them by different shades which should be their logical
+    result. Neo-Impressionism believes in obtaining thus a greater exactness
+    than that which results from the individual temperament of the painter
+    who simply relies on his own perception. And it is true, in theory, that
+    such a conception is more exact. But it reduces the picture to a kind of
+    theorem, which excludes all that constitutes the value and charm of an
+    art, that is to say: caprice, fancy, and the spontaneity of personal
+    inspiration. The works of Seurat, Signac, and of the few men who have
+    strictly followed the rules of Pointillism are lacking in life, in
+    surprise, and make a somewhat tiring impression upon one's eyes. The
+    uniformity of the points does not succeed in giving an impression of
+    cohesion, and even less a suggestion of different textures, even if the
+    values are correct. Manet seems to have attained perfection in using the
+    method which consists in directing the touches in accordance with each
+    of the planes, and this is evidently the most natural method. Scientific
+    Chromatism constitutes an <i>ensemble</i> of propositions, of which art will
+    be able to make use, though indirectly, as information useful for a
+    better understanding of the laws of light in presence of nature. What
+    Pointillism has been able to give us, is a method which would be very
+    appreciable for decorative paintings seen from a great distance&mdash;friezes
+    or ceilings in spacious buildings. It would in this case return to the
+    principle of mosaic, which is the principle <i>par excellence</i> of mural
+    art.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Pointillists have to-day almost abandoned this transitional theory
+    which, in spite of the undeniable talent of its adepts, has only
+    produced indifferent results as regards easel pictures. Besides Seurat
+    and Signac, mention should be made of Maurice Denis, Henri-Edmond Cross,
+    Angrand, and Théo Van Rysselberghe. But this last-named and Maurice
+    Denis have arrived at great talent by very different merits. M. Maurice
+    Denis has abandoned Pointillism a few years ago, in favour of returning
+    to a very strange conception which dates back to the Primitives, and
+    even to Giotto. He simplifies his drawing archaically, suppresses all
+    but the indispensable detail, and draws inspiration from Gothic stained
+    glass and carvings, in order to create decorative figures with clearly
+    marked outlines which are filled with broad, flat tints. He generally
+    treats mystic subjects, for which this special manner is suitable. One
+    cannot love the <i>parti pris</i> of these works, but one cannot deny M.
+    Denis a great charm of naivete, an intense feeling for decorative
+    arrangements and colouring of a certain originality. He is almost a
+    French pre-Raphaelite, and his profound catholic faith inspires him
+    nobly.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0050"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/50vanrysselberghe.jpg" width="300" height="220"
+alt="ThÉo Van Rysselberghe - Mme. Van Rysselberghe &amp; Daughter">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<center>
+    <b>THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE</b><br><br>PORTRAITS OF MADAME VAN RYSSELBERGHE
+    AND HER DAUGHTER
+</center>
+<p>
+    M. Théo Van Rysselberghe continues to employ the Pointillist method. But
+    he is so strongly gifted, that one might almost say he succeeds in
+    revealing himself as a painter of great merit in spite of this dry and
+    charmless method. All his works are supported by broad and learned
+    drawing and his colour is naturally brilliant. M. Van Rysselberghe, a
+    prolific and varied worker, has painted nudes, large portraits,
+    landscapes with figures, seascapes, interiors and still-life, and in all
+    this he evinces faculties of the first order. He is a lover of light and
+    understands how to make it vibrate over flesh and fabrics. He is an
+    artist who has the sense of style. He has signed a certain number of
+    portraits, whose beautiful carriage and serious psychology would suffice
+    to make him be considered as the most significant of the
+    Neo-Impressionists. It is really in him that one has to see the young
+    and worthy heir of Monet, of Sisley, and of Degas, and that is why we
+    have insisted on adding here to the works of these masters the
+    reproduction of one of his. M. Van Rysselberghe is also a very delicate
+    etcher who has signed some fine works in this method, and his seascapes,
+    whether they revel in the pale greys of the German Ocean or in the warm
+    sapphire and gold harmonies of the Mediterranean, count among the finest
+    of the time; they are windows opened upon joyous brightness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To these painters who have never taken part at the Salons, and are only
+    to be seen at the exhibitions of the <i>Indépendants</i> (except M. Denis),
+    must be added M. Pierre Bonnard, who has given proof to his charm and
+    fervour in numerous small canvases of Japanese taste; and M. Edouard
+    Vuillard, who is a painter of intimate scenes of rare delicacy. This
+    artist, who stands apart and produces very little, has signed some
+    interiors of melancholic distinction and of a colouring which revels in
+    low tones. He has the precision and skill of a master. There is in him,
+    one might say, a reflection of Chardin's soul. Unfortunately his works
+    are confined to a few collections and have not become known to the
+    public. To the same group belong M. Ranson, who has devoted himself to
+    purely decorative art, tapestry, wall papers and embroideries; M.
+    Georges de Feure, a strange, symbolist water-colour painter, who has
+    become one of the best designers of the New Art in France; M. Félix
+    Vallotton, painter and lithographer, who is somewhat heavy, but gifted
+    with serious qualities. It is true that M. de Feure is Dutch, M.
+    Vallotton Swiss, and M. Van Rysselberghe Belgian; but they have settled
+    down in France, and are sufficiently closely allied to the
+    Neo-Impressionist movement so that the question of nationality need not
+    prevent us from mentioning them here. Finally it is impossible not to
+    say a few words about two pupils of Gustave Moreau's, who have both
+    become noteworthy followers of Impressionism of very personal
+    individuality. M. Eugène Martel bids fair to be one of the best painters
+    of interiors of his generation. He has the feeling of mystical life and
+    paints the peasantry with astonishing psychologic power. His vigorous
+    colouring links him to Monticelli, and his drawing to Degas. As to M.
+    Simon Bussy who, following Alphonse Legros's example, is about to make
+    an enviable position for himself in England, he is an artist of pure
+    blood. His landscapes and his figures have the distinction and rare tone
+    of M. Whistler, besides the characteristic acuteness of Degas. His
+    harmonies are subtle, his vision novel, and he will certainly develop
+    into an important painter. Together with Henri le Sidaner and Jacques
+    Blanche, Simon Bussy is decidedly the most personal of that young
+    generation of "Intimists" who seem to have retained the best principles
+    of the Impressionist masters to employ them for the expression of a
+    psychologic ideal which is very different from Realism.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Outside this group there are still a few isolated painters who are
+    difficult to classify. The very young artists Laprade and Charles Guérin
+    have shown for the last three years, at the exhibition of the
+    <i>Indépendants</i>, some works which are the worthy result of Manet's and
+    Renoir's influence. They, too, justify great expectations. The
+    landscapists Paul Vogler and Maxime Maufra, more advanced in years, have
+    made themselves known by some solid series of vigorously presented
+    landscapes. To them must be added M. Henry Moret, M. Albert André and M.
+    Georges d'Espagnet, who equally deserve the success which has commenced
+    to be their share. But there are some older ones. It is only his due,
+    that place should be given to a painter who committed suicide after an
+    unhappy life, and who evinced splendid gifts. Vincent Van Gogh, a
+    Dutchman, who, however, had always worked in France, has left to the
+    world some violent and strange works, in which Impressionism appears to
+    have reached the limits of its audacity. Their value lies in their naïve
+    frankness and in the undauntable determination which tried to fix
+    without trickery the sincerest feelings. Amidst many faulty and clumsy
+    works, Van Gogh has also left some really beautiful canvases. There is a
+    deep affinity between him and Cézanne. A very real affinity exists, too,
+    between Paul Gauguin, who was a friend and to a certain extent the
+    master of Van Gogh, and Cézanne and Renoir. Paul Gauguin's robust talent
+    found its first motives in Breton landscapes, in which the method of
+    colour-spots can be found employed with delicacy and placed at the
+    service of a rather heavy, but very interesting harmony. Then the artist
+    spent a long time in Tahiti, whence he returned with a completely
+    transformed manner. He has brought back from these regions some
+    landscapes with figures treated in intentionally clumsy and almost wild
+    fashion. The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad,
+    flat tints on canvas which has the texture almost of tapestry. Many of
+    these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multi-coloured, crude
+    and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental
+    qualities, the beautiful values, the ornamental taste, and the
+    impression of primitive animalism. On the whole, Paul Gauguin has a
+    beautiful, artistic temperament which, in its aversion to virtuosoship,
+    has perhaps not sufficiently understood that the fear of formulas, if
+    exaggerated, may lead to other formulas, to a false ignorance which is
+    as dangerous as false knowledge. Gauguin's symbolical intentions, like
+    those of his pupil Emile Bernard, are sincere, but are badly served by
+    minds which do not agree with their technical qualities, and both
+    Gauguin and Emile Bernard are most happily inspired when they are
+    painters pure and simple.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Next to Gauguin, among the seniors of the present generation and the
+    successors of Impressionism, should be placed the landscapist Armand
+    Guillaumin who, without possessing Sisley's delicate qualities, has
+    painted some canvases worthy of notice; and we must, finally, terminate
+    this far too summary enumeration by referring to one of the most gifted
+    painters of the French School of the day, M. Louis Anquetin. His is a
+    most varied talent whose power is unquestionable. He made his <i>début</i>
+    among the Neo-Impressionists and revealed the influence upon him of the
+    Japanese and of Degas. It may be seen that these two influences
+    predominate in the whole group. Then M. Anquetin became fascinated by
+    the breadth and superb freedom of Manet's works, and signed a series of
+    portraits and sketches, some of which are not far below so great a
+    master's. They are works which will surprise the critics, when our
+    contemporary painting will be examined with calm impartiality. After
+    these works, M. Anquetin gave way to his impetuous nature which led him
+    to decorative painting, and he became influenced by Rubens, Jordaens,
+    and the Fontainebleau School. He painted theatre curtains and
+    mythological scenes, in which he gave free rein to his sensual
+    imagination. In spite of some admirable qualities, it seems as though
+    the artist had strayed from his true path in painting these brilliant,
+    but somewhat declamatory works, and he has since returned to a more
+    modern and more direct painting. In all his changed conditions Anquetin
+    has shown a considerable talent, pleasing in its fine vigour,
+    impetuosity, brilliancy and sincerity. His inequality is perhaps the
+    cause of his relative want of success; it has put the public off, but
+    nevertheless in certain of this brave and serious painter's canvases can
+    be seen the happy influence of Manet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It seems to us only right to sum up our impartial opinion of
+    Neo-Impressionism by saying that it has lacked cohesion, that
+    Pointillism in particular has led painting into an aimless path. It has
+    been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical
+    researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day,
+    after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate
+    attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the
+    "Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious
+    painter, Besnard, imposes upon the Salons, where the elect draw
+    inspiration from him. We can here only indicate with a few words the
+    considerable part played by Besnard: his clever work has proved that the
+    scientific colour principles of Impressionism may be applied, not to
+    realism, but to the highest thoughts, to ideologic painting most nobly
+    inspired by the modern intellectual preoccupations. He is the
+    transition between Impressionism and the art of to-morrow. Of pure
+    French lineage by his portraits and his nudes, which descend directly
+    from Largillière and Ingres, he might have restricted himself to being
+    placed among the most learned Impressionists. His studies of reflections
+    and of complementary colours speak for this. But he has passed this
+    phase and has, with his decorations, returned to the psychical domain of
+    his strangely beautiful art. The "Intimists," C. Cottet, Simon, Blanche,
+    Ménard, Bussy, Lobre, Le Sidaner, Wéry, Prinet, and Ernest Laurent, have
+    proved that they have profited by Impressionism, but have proceeded in
+    quite a different direction in trying to translate their real
+    perceptions. Some isolated artists, like the decorative painter Henri
+    Martin, who has enormous talent, have applied the Impressionist
+    technique to the expression of grand allegories, rather in the manner of
+    Puvis de Chavannes. The effort at getting away from mere cleverness and
+    escaping a too exclusive preoccupation with technique, and at the same
+    time acquiring serious knowledge, betrays itself in the whole position
+    of the young French School; and this will furnish us with a perfectly
+    natural conclusion, of which the following are the principal points:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    What we shall have to thank Impressionism for, will be moral and
+    material advantages of considerable importance. Morally it has rendered
+    an immense service to all art, because it has boldly attacked routine
+    and proved by the whole of its work that a combination of independent
+    producers could renew the aesthetic code of a country, without owing
+    anything to official encouragement. It has succeeded where important but
+    isolated creators have succumbed, because it has had the good fortune of
+    uniting a group of gifted men, four of whom will count among the
+    greatest French artists since the origin of national art. It has had the
+    qualities which overcome the hardest resistance: fecundity, courage and
+    sure originality. It has known how to find its strength by referring to
+    the true traditions of the national genius, which have happily
+    enlightened it and saved it from fundamental errors. It has, last, but
+    not least, inflicted an irremediable blow on academic convention and has
+    wrested from it the prestige of teaching which ruled tyrannically for
+    centuries past over the young artists. It has laid a violent hand upon a
+    tenacious and dangerous prejudice, upon a series of conventional notions
+    which were transmitted without consideration for the evolution of modern
+    life and intelligence. It has dared freely to protest against a
+    degenerated ideal which vainly parodied the old masters, pretending to
+    honour them. It has removed from the artistic soul of France a whole
+    order of pseudo-classic elements which worked against its blossoming,
+    and the School will never recover from this bold contradiction which has
+    rallied to it all the youthful. The moral principle of Impressionism has
+    been absolutely logical and sane, and that is why nothing has been able
+    to prevent its triumph.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Technically Impressionism has brought a complete renewal of pictorial
+    vision, substituting the beauty of character for the beauty of
+    proportions and finding adequate expression for the ideas and feelings
+    of its time, which constitutes the secret of all beautiful works. It has
+    taken up again a tradition and added to it a contemporary page. It will
+    have to be thanked for an important series of observations as regards
+    the analysis of light, and for an absolutely original conception of
+    drawing. Some years have been wasted by painters of little worth in
+    imitating it, and the Salons, formerly encumbered with academic
+    <i>pastiches</i>, have been encumbered with Impressionist <i>pastiches</i>. It
+    would be unfair to blame the Impressionists for it. They have shown by
+    their very career that they hated teaching and would never pretend to
+    teach. Impressionism is based upon irrefutable optic laws, but it is
+    neither a style, nor a method, likely ever to become a formula in its
+    turn. One may call upon this art for examples, but not for receipts. On
+    the contrary, its best teaching has been to encourage artists to become
+    absolutely independent and to search ardently for their own
+    individuality. It marks the decline of the School, and will not create a
+    new one which would soon become as fastidious as the other. It will only
+    appear, to those who will thoroughly understand it, as a precious
+    repertory of notes, and the young generation honours it intelligently by
+    not imitating it with servility.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not that it is without its faults! It has been said, to belittle it,
+    that it only had the value of an interesting attempt, having only been
+    able to indicate some excellent intentions, without creating anything
+    perfect. This is inexact. It is absolutely evident, that Manet, Monet,
+    Renoir and Degas have signed some masterpieces which did not lose by
+    comparison with those in the Louvre, and the same might even be said of
+    their less illustrious friends. But it is also evident that the time
+    spent on research as well as on agitation and enervating controversies
+    pursued during twenty-five years, has been taken from men who could
+    otherwise have done better still. There has been a disparity between
+    Realism and the technique of Impressionism. Its realistic origin has
+    sometimes made it vulgar. It has often treated indifferent subjects in a
+    grand style, and it has too easily beheld life from the anecdotal side.
+    It has lacked psychologic synthesis (if we except Degas). It has too
+    willingly denied all that exists hidden under the apparent reality of
+    the universe and has affected to separate painting from the ideologic
+    faculties which rule over all art. Hatred of academic allegory,
+    defiance of symbolism, abstraction and romantic scenes, has led it to
+    refuse to occupy itself with a whole order of ideas, and it has had the
+    tendency of making the painter beyond all a workman. It was necessary at
+    the moment of its arrival, but it is no longer necessary now, and the
+    painters understand this themselves. Finally it has too often been
+    superficial even in obtaining effects; it has given way to the wish to
+    surprise the eyes, of playing with tones merely for love of cleverness.
+    It often causes one regret to see symphonies of magnificent colour
+    wasted here in pictures of boating men; and there, in pictures of café
+    corners; and we have arrived at a degree of complex intellectuality
+    which is no longer satisfied with these rudimentary themes. It has
+    indulged in useless exaggerations, faults of composition and of harmony,
+    and all this cannot be denied.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it still remains fascinating and splendid for its gifts which will
+    always rouse enthusiasm: freedom, impetuousness, youth, brilliancy,
+    fervour, the joy of painting and the passion for beautiful light. It is,
+    on the whole, the greatest pictorial movement that France has beheld
+    since Delacroix, and it brings to a finish gloriously the nineteenth
+    century, inaugurating the present. It has accomplished the great deed of
+    having brought us again into the presence of our true national lineage,
+    far more so than Romanticism, which was mixed with foreign elements. We
+    have here painting of a kind which could only have been conceived in
+    France, and we have to go right back to Watteau in order to receive
+    again the same impression. Impressionism has brought us an almost
+    unhoped-for renaissance, and this constitutes its most undeniable claim
+    upon the gratitude of the race.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It has exercised a very appreciable influence upon foreign painting.
+    Among the principal painters attracted by its ideas and research, we
+    must mention, in Germany, Max Liebermann and Kuehl; in Norway, Thaulow;
+    in Denmark, Kroyer; in Belgium, Théo Van Rysselberghe, Emile Claus,
+    Verheyden, Heymans, Verstraete, and Baertson; in Italy, Boldini,
+    Segantini, and Michetti; in Spain, Zuloaga, Sorolla y Bastida, Dario de
+    Regoyos and Rusiñol; in America, Alexander, Harrison, Sargent; and in
+    England, the painters of the Glasgow School, Lavery, Guthrie and the
+    late John Lewis Brown. All these men come within the active extension of
+    the French movement, and one may say that the honour of having first
+    recognised the truly national movement of this art must be given to
+    those foreign countries which have enriched their collections and
+    museums with works that were despised in the land which had witnessed
+    their birth. At the present moment the effects of this new vision are
+    felt all over the world, down to the very bosom of the academies; and at
+    the Salons, from which the Impressionists are still excluded, can be
+    witnessed an invasion of pictures inspired by them, which the most
+    retrograde juries dare not reject. In whatever measure the recent
+    painters accept Impressionism, they remain preoccupied with it, and even
+    those who love it not are forced to take it into account.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Impressionist movement can therefore now be considered, apart from
+    all controversies, without vain attacks or exaggerated praise, as an
+    artistic manifestation which has entered the domain of history, and it
+    can be studied with the impartial application of the methods of
+    critical analysis which is usually employed in the study of the former
+    art movements. We shall not pretend to have given in these pages a
+    complete and faultless history; but we shall consider ourselves well
+    rewarded for this work, which is intended to reach the great public, if
+    we have roused their curiosity and sympathy with a group of artists whom
+    we consider admirable; and if we have rectified, in the eyes of the
+    readers of a foreign nation, the errors, the slanders, the undeserved
+    reproaches, with which Frenchmen have been pleased to overwhelm sincere
+    creators who thought with faith and love of the pure tradition of the
+    national genius, and who have for that reason been vilified as much as
+    if they had in an access of anarchical folly risen against the very
+    common sense, taste, reason and clearness, which will remain the eternal
+    merits of their soil. This small, imperfect volume will perhaps find its
+    best excuse in its intention of repairing an old injustice and of
+    affirming a useful and permanent truth: that of the authenticity of the
+    classicism of Impressionism, in the face of the false classicism of the
+    academic world which official honours have made the guardian of a French
+    heritage, whose soul it denied and whose spirit it deceived with its
+    narrow and cold formulas.
+</p>
+
+
+    <h3>
+
+
+<br><br><b>FOOTNOTES</b><br>&nbsp;</h3>
+<a name="note-1"><!--Note--></a>
+
+<p class="foot">
+<u>1</u> Who will deliver us from the Greeks and the Romans.</p>
+<br>
+<a name="note-2"><!--Note--></a>
+<p class="foot">
+<u>2</u>    <i>Procédé de la tache.</i>
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The French Impressionists (1860-1900), by
+Camille Mauclair, Translated by P. G. Konady
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The French Impressionists (1860-1900)
+
+Author: Camille Mauclair
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2004  [eBook #14056]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
+(1860-1900)***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Linda Cantoni, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the lovely original illustrations.
+      See 14056-h.htm or 14056-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/0/5/14056/14056-h/14056-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/0/5/14056/14056-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (1860-1900)
+
+by
+
+CAMILLE MAUCLAIR
+
+Author of _L'art en Silence_, _Les Meres Sociales_, etc.
+
+Translated from the French text of Camille Mauclair, by P. G. Konody
+
+London: Duckworth & Co.
+New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
+Turnbull and Spears, Printers, Edinburgh
+
+1903
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+AT THE PIANO]
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+AUGUSTE BREAL
+
+TO THE ARTIST AND TO THE FRIEND
+
+AS A MARK OF GRATEFUL AFFECTION
+
+C.M.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+It should be stated here that, with the exception of one reproduction
+after the Neo-Impressionist Van Rysselberghe, the other forty-nine
+engravings illustrating this volume I owe to the courtesy of M.
+Durand-Ruel, from the first the friend of the Impressionist painters,
+and later the most important collector of their works, a friend who has
+been good enough to place at our disposal the photographs from which our
+illustrations have been reproduced. Chosen from a considerable
+collection which has been formed for thirty years past, these
+photographs, none of which are for sale, form a veritable and unique
+museum of documents on Impressionist art, which is made even more
+valuable through the dispersal of the principal masterpieces of this art
+among the private collections of Europe and America. We render our
+thanks to M. Durand-Ruel no less in the name of the public interested in
+art, than in our own.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+  I. THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM--THE
+     BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT, THE
+     ORIGIN OF ITS NAME
+
+ II. THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS--THE
+     DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS,
+     THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE--THE IDEAS OF THE
+     IMPRESSIONISTS ON SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON
+     THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY,
+     AND ON STYLE
+
+III. EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+ IV. EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+  V. CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+ VI. AUGUSTE RENOIR: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+ VII. PISSARRO, SISLEY, CAILLEBOTTE,
+      CEZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MARY CASSATT;
+      THE SECONDARY ARTISTS OF
+      IMPRESSIONISM--JONGKIND, BOUDIN
+
+VIII. THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH
+      IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAELLI, TOULOUSE-LAUTREC,
+      FORAIN, CHERET, ETC.
+
+  IX. NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: GAUGUIN, DENIS,
+      THEO VAN RYSSELBERGHE--THE THEORY OF
+      POINTILLISM--SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE
+      THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC CHROMATISM--FAULTS
+      AND QUALITIES OF THE
+      IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE OWE
+      TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE
+      FRENCH SCHOOL--SOME WORDS ON ITS
+      INFLUENCE ABROAD
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+
+RENOIR.  At the Piano (Frontispiece)
+
+MANET.   Rest
+
+MANET.   In the Square
+
+MANET.   Young Man in Costume of Majo
+
+MANET.   The Reader
+
+DEGAS.   The Dancer at the Photographer's
+
+DEGAS.   Carriages at the Races
+
+DEGAS.   The Greek Dance--Pastel
+
+DEGAS.   Waiting
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Pines
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   Church at Vernon
+
+RENOIR.   Portrait of Madame Maitre
+
+MANET.   The Dead Toreador
+
+MANET.   Olympia
+
+MANET.   The Woman with the Parrot
+
+MANET.   The Bar at the Folies Bergere
+
+MANET.   Dejeuner
+
+MANET.   Portrait of Madame M. L.
+
+MANET.   The Hothouse
+
+DEGAS.   The Beggar Woman
+
+DEGAS.   The Lesson in the Foyer
+
+DEGAS.   The Dancing Lesson--Pastel
+
+DEGAS.   The Dancers
+
+DEGAS.   Horses in the Meadows
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   An Interior after Dinner
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Harbour, Honfleur
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Church at Varengeville
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   Poplars on the Epte in Autumn
+
+CLAUDE MONET.   The Bridge at Argenteuil
+
+RENOIR.   Dejeuner
+
+RENOIR.   In the Box
+
+RENOIR.   Young Girl Promenading
+
+RENOIR.   Woman's Bust
+
+RENOIR.   Young Woman in Empire Costume
+
+RENOIR.   On the Terrace
+
+PISSARRO.   Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen
+
+PISSARRO.   Boulevard Montmartre
+
+PISSARRO.   The Boildieaux Bridge at Rouen
+
+PISSARRO.   The Avenue de l'Opera
+
+SISLEY.   Snow Effect
+
+SISLEY.   Bougival, at the Water's Edge
+
+SISLEY.   Bridge at Moret
+
+CEZANNE.   Dessert
+
+BERTHE MORISOT.   Melancholy
+
+BERTHE MORISOT.   Young Woman Seated
+
+MARY CASSATT.   Getting up Baby
+
+MARY CASSATT.   Women and Child
+
+JONGKIND.   In Holland
+
+JONGKIND.   View of the Hague
+
+THEO VAN RYSSELBERGHE.   Portraits of Madame van Rysselberghe and her
+   Daughter
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+The illustrations contained in this volume have been taken from
+different epochs of the Impressionist movement. They will give but a
+feeble idea of the extreme abundance of its production.
+
+Banished from the salons, exhibited in private galleries and sold direct
+to art lovers, the Impressionist works have been but little seen. The
+series left by Caillebotte to the Luxembourg Gallery is very badly shown
+and is composed of interesting works which, however, date back to the
+early period, and are very inferior to the beautiful productions which
+followed later. Renoir is best represented. The private galleries in
+Paris, where the best Impressionist works are to be found, are those of
+MM. Durand-Ruel, Rouart, de Bellis, de Camondo, and Manzi, to which must
+be added the one sold by MM. Theodore Duret and Faure, and the one of
+Mme. Ernest Rouart, daughter of Mme. Morisot, the sister-in-law of
+Manet. The public galleries of M. Durand-Ruel's show-rooms are the place
+where it is easiest to find numerous Impressionist pictures.
+
+In spite of the firm opposition of the official juries, a place of
+honour was reserved at the Exposition of 1889 for Manet, and at that of
+1900 a fine collection of Impressionists occupied two rooms and caused a
+considerable stir.
+
+Amongst the critics who have most faithfully assisted this group of
+artists, I must mention, besides the early friends previously referred
+to, Castagnary, Burty, Edouard de Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geffroy, Arsene
+Alexandre, Octave Mirbeau, L. de Fourcaud, Clemenceau, Mallarme,
+Huysmans, Jules Laforgue, and nearly all the critics of the Symbolist
+reviews. A book on "Impressionist Art" by M. Georges Lecomte has been
+published by the firm of Durand-Ruel as an _edition-de-luxe_. But the
+bibliography of this art consists as yet almost exclusively of articles
+in journals and reviews and of some isolated biographical pamphlets.
+Manet is, amongst many, the one who has excited most criticism of all
+kinds; the articles, caricatures and pamphlets relating to his work
+would form a considerable collection. It should be added that, with the
+exception of Manet two years before his death, and Renoir last year at
+the age of sixty-eight, no Impressionist has been decorated by the
+French government. In England such a distinction has even less
+importance in itself than elsewhere. But if I insist upon it, it is only
+to draw attention to the fact that, through the sheer force of their
+talent, men like Degas, Monet and Pissarro have achieved great fame and
+fortune, without gaining access to the Salons, without official
+encouragement, decoration, subvention or purchases for the national
+museums. This is a very significant instance and serves well to complete
+the physiognomy of this group of independents.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM--THE BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT AND THE
+ORIGIN OF ITS NAME
+
+
+It will be beyond the scope of this volume to give a complete history of
+French Impressionism, and to include all the attractive details to which
+it might lead, as regards the movement itself and the very curious epoch
+during which its evolution has taken place. The proportions of this book
+confine its aim to the clearest possible summing up for the British
+reader of the ideas, the personalities and the works of a considerable
+group of artists who, for various reasons, have remained but little
+known and who have only too frequently been gravely misjudged. These
+reasons are very obvious: first, the Impressionists have been unable to
+make a show at the Salons, partly because the jury refused them
+admission, partly because they held aloof of their own free will. They
+have, with very rare exceptions, exhibited at special minor galleries,
+where they become known to a very restricted public. Ever attacked, and
+poor until the last few years, they enjoyed none of the benefits of
+publicity and sham glory. It is only quite recently that the admission
+of the incomplete and badly arranged Caillebotte collection to the
+Luxembourg Gallery has enabled the public to form a summary idea of
+Impressionism. To conclude the enumeration of the obstacles, it must be
+added that there are hardly any photographs of Impressionist works in
+the market. As it is, photography is but a poor translation of these
+canvases devoted to the study of the play of light; but even this very
+feeble means of distribution has been withheld from them! Exhibited at
+some galleries, gathered principally by Durand-Ruel, sold directly to
+art-lovers--foreigners mostly--these large series of works have
+practically remained unknown to the French public. All the public heard
+was the reproaches and sarcastic comments of the opponents, and they
+never became aware that in the midst of modern life the greatest, the
+richest movement was in progress, which the French school had known
+since the days of Romanticism. Impressionism has been made known to them
+principally by the controversies and by the fruitful consequences of
+this movement for the illustration and study of contemporary life.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+REST]
+
+I do not profess to give here a detailed and complete history of
+Impressionism, for which several volumes like the present one would be
+required. I shall only try to compile an _ensemble_ of concise and very
+precise notions and statements bearing upon this vast subject. It will
+be my special object to try and prove that Impressionism is neither an
+isolated manifestation, nor a violent denial of the French traditions,
+but nothing more or less than a logical return to the very spirit of
+these traditions, contrary to the theories upheld by its detractors. It
+is for this reason that I have made use of the first chapter to say a
+few words on the precursors of this movement.
+
+No art manifestation is really isolated. However new it may seem, it is
+always based upon the previous epochs. The true masters do not give
+lessons, because art cannot be taught, but they set the example. To
+admire them does not mean to imitate them: it means the recognition in
+them of the principles of originality and the comprehension of their
+source, so that this eternal source may be called to life in oneself,
+this source which springs from a sincere and sympathetic vision of the
+aspects of life. The Impressionists have not escaped this beautiful law.
+I shall speak of them impartially, without excessive enthusiasm; and it
+will be my special endeavour to demonstrate in each of them the cult of
+a predecessor, for there have been few artistic movements where the love
+for, and one might say the hereditary link with, the preceding masters
+has been more tenacious.
+
+The Academy has struggled violently against Impressionism, accusing it
+of madness, of systematic negation of the "laws of beauty," which it
+pretended to defend and of which it claimed to be the official priest.
+The Academy has shown itself hostile to a degree in this quarrel. It has
+excluded the Impressionists from the Salons, from awards, from official
+purchases. Only quite recently the acceptance of the Caillebotte
+bequest to the Luxembourg Gallery gave rise to a storm of indignation
+among the official painters. I shall, in the course of this book, enter
+upon the value of these attacks. Meanwhile I can only say how
+regrettable this obstinacy appears to me and will appear to every free
+spirit. It is unworthy even of an ardent conviction to condemn a whole
+group of artists _en bloc_ as fools, enemies of beauty, or as tricksters
+anxious to degrade the art of their nation, when these artists worked
+during forty years towards the same goal, without getting any reward for
+their effort, but poverty and derision. It is now about ten years since
+Impressionism has taken root, since its followers can sell their
+canvases, and since they are admired and praised by a solid and
+ever-growing section of the public. The hour has therefore arrived,
+calmly to consider a movement which has imposed itself upon the history
+of French art from 1860 to 1900 with extreme energy, to leave
+dithyrambics as well as polemics, and to speak of it with a view to
+exactness. The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of
+beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art,
+and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon
+itself as the guardian of the national tradition, because it exercises
+an hierarchic authority over the _Ecole de Rome_, the _Salons_, and the
+_Ecole des Beaux Arts_. All the same, its ideals are of very mixed
+origin and very little French. Its principles are the same by which the
+academic art of nearly all the official schools of Europe is governed.
+This mythological and allegorical art, guided by dogmas and formulas
+which are imposed upon all pupils regardless of their temperament, is
+far more international than national. To an impartial critic this
+statement will show in an even more curious light the excommunication
+jealously issued by the academic painters against French artists, who,
+far from revolting in an absurd spirit of _parti-pris_ against the
+genius of their race, are perhaps more sincerely attached to it than
+their persecutors. Why should a group of men deliberately choose to
+paint mad, illogical, bad pictures, and reap a harvest of public
+derision, poverty and sterility? It would be uncritical to believe
+merely in a general mystification which makes its authors the worst
+sufferers. Simple common sense will find in these men a conviction, a
+sincerity, a sustained effort, and this alone should, in the name of the
+sacred solidarity of those who by various means try to express their
+love of the beautiful, suppress the annoying accusations hurled too
+light-heartedly against Manet and his friends.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+IN THE SQUARE]
+
+I shall define later on the ideas of the Impressionists on technique,
+composition and style in painting. Meanwhile it will be necessary to
+indicate their principal precursors.
+
+Their movement may be styled thus: a reaction against the Greco-Latin
+spirit and the scholastic organisation of painting after the second
+Renaissance and the Italo-French school of Fontainebleau, by the century
+of Louis XIV., the school of Rome, and the consular and imperial taste.
+In this sense Impressionism is a protest analogous to that of
+Romanticism, exclaiming, to quote the old verse: "_Qui nous delivrera
+des Grecs et des Romains?_"[1] From this point of view Impressionism has
+also great affinities with the ideas of the English Pre-Raphaelites,
+who stepped across the second and even the first Renaissance back to the
+Primitives.
+
+[Footnote 1: Who will deliver us from the Greeks and the Romans.]
+
+This reaction is superimposed by another: the reaction of Impressionism,
+not only against classic subjects, but against the black painting of the
+degenerate Romanticists. And these two reactions are counterbalanced by
+a return to the French ideal, to the realistic and characteristic
+tradition which commences with Jean Foucquet and Clouet, and is
+continued by Chardin, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, Watteau, La Tour,
+Fragonard, and the admirable engravers of the eighteenth century down to
+the final triumph of the allegorical taste of the Roman revolution. Here
+can be found a whole chain of truly national artists who have either
+been misjudged, like Chardin, or considered as "small masters" and
+excluded from the first rank for the benefit of the pompous Allegorists
+descended from the Italian school.
+
+Impressionism being beyond all a technical reaction, its predecessors
+should first be looked for from this material point of view. Watteau is
+the most striking of all. _L'Embarquement pour Cythere_ is, in its
+technique, an Impressionist canvas. It embodies the most significant
+of all the principles exposed by Claude Monet: the division of tones by
+juxtaposed touches of colour which, at a certain distance, produce upon
+the eye of the beholder the effect of the actual colouring of the things
+painted, with a variety, a freshness and a delicacy of analysis
+unobtainable by a single tone prepared and mixed upon the palette.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+YOUNG MAN IN COSTUME OF MAJO]
+
+Claude Lorrain, and after him Carle Vernet, are claimed by the
+Impressionists as precursors from the point of view of decorative
+landscape arrangement, and particularly of the predominance of light in
+which all objects are bathed. Ruysdael and Poussin are, in their eyes,
+for the same reasons precursors, especially Ruysdael, who observed so
+frankly the blue colouring of the horizon and the influence of blue upon
+the landscape. It is known that Turner worshipped Claude for the very
+same reasons. The Impressionists in their turn, consider Turner as one
+of their masters; they have the greatest admiration for this mighty
+genius, this sumptuous visionary. They have it equally for Bonington,
+whose technique is inspired by the same observations as their own. They
+find, finally, in Delacroix the frequent and very apparent application
+of their ideas. Notably in the famous _Entry of the Crusaders into
+Constantinople_, the fair woman kneeling in the foreground is painted in
+accordance with the principles of the division of tones: the nude back
+is furrowed with blue, green and yellow touches, the juxtaposition of
+which produces, at a certain distance, an admirable flesh-tone.
+
+And now I must speak at some length of a painter who, together with the
+luminous and sparkling landscapist Felix Ziem, was the most direct
+initiator of Impressionist technique. Monticelli is one of those
+singular men of genius who are not connected with any school, and whose
+work is an inexhaustible source of applications. He lived at Marseilles,
+where he was born, made a short appearance at the Salons, and then
+returned to his native town, where he died poor, ignored, paralysed and
+mad. In order to live he sold his small pictures at the cafes, where
+they fetched ten or twenty francs at the most. To-day they sell for
+considerable prices, although the government has not yet acquired any
+work by Monticelli for the public galleries. The mysterious power alone
+of these paintings secures him a fame which is, alas! posthumous. Many
+Monticellis have been sold by dealers as Diaz's; now they are more
+eagerly looked for than Diaz, and collectors have made fortunes with
+these small canvases bought formerly, to use a colloquial expression
+which is here only too literally true, "for a piece of bread."
+
+Monticelli painted landscapes, romantic scenes, "fetes galantes" in the
+spirit of Watteau, and still-life pictures: one could not imagine a more
+inspired sense of colour than shown by these works which seem to be
+painted with crushed jewels, with powerful harmony, and beyond all with
+an unheard-of delicacy in the perception of fine shades. There are tones
+which nobody had ever invented yet, a richness, a profusion, a subtlety
+which almost vie with the resources of music. The fairyland atmosphere
+of these works surrounds a very firm design of charming style, but, to
+use the words of the artist himself, "in these canvases the objects are
+the decoration, the touches are the scales, and the light is the tenor."
+Monticelli has created for himself an entirely personal technique which
+can only be compared with that of Turner; he painted with a brush so
+full, fat and rich, that some of the details are often truly modelled in
+relief, in a substance as precious as enamels, jewels, ceramics--a
+substance which is a delight in itself. Every picture by Monticelli
+provokes astonishment; constructed upon one colour as upon a musical
+theme, it rises to intensities which one would have thought impossible.
+His pictures are magnificent bouquets, bursts of joy and colour, where
+nothing is ever crude, and where everything is ruled by a supreme sense
+of harmony.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE READER]
+
+Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the
+descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet. In all matters concerning
+technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism. As regards
+design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of
+beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the
+old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour,
+Largilliere, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen. It
+has resolutely held aloof from mythology, academic allegory, historical
+painting, and from the neo-Greek elements of Classicism as well as from
+the German and Spanish elements of Romanticism. This reactionary
+movement is therefore entirely French, and surely if it deserves
+reproach, the one least deserved is that levelled upon it by the
+official painters: disobedience to the national spirit. Impressionism is
+an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose
+followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting
+philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the
+consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation,
+and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We
+shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters,
+that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French
+blood.
+
+Impressionism has, then, hitherto been very badly judged. It is
+contained in two chief points: search after a new technique, and
+expression of modern reality. Its birth has not been a spontaneous
+phenomenon. Manet, who, by his spirit and by the chance of his
+friendships, grouped around him the principal members, commenced by
+being classed in the ranks of the Realists of the second Romanticism by
+the side of Courbet; and during the whole first period of his work he
+only endeavoured to describe contemporary scenes, at a time when the
+laws of the new technique were already dawning upon Claude Monet.
+Gradually the grouping of the Impressionists took place. Claude Monet is
+really the first initiator: in a parallel line with his ideas and his
+works Manet passed into the second period of his artistic life, and with
+him Renoir, Degas and Pissarro. But Manet had already during his first
+period been the topic of far-echoing polemics, caused by his realism and
+by the marked influence of the Spaniards and of Hals upon his style; his
+temperament, too, was that of the head of a school; and for these
+reasons legend has attached to his name the title of head of the
+Impressionist school, but this legend is incorrect.
+
+To conclude, the very name "Impressionism" is due to Claude Monet. There
+has been much serious arguing upon this famous word which has given rise
+to all sorts of definitions and conclusions. In reality this is its
+curious origin which is little known, even in criticism. Ever since
+1860 the works of Manet and of his friends caused such a stir, that they
+were rejected _en bloc_ by the Salon jury of 1863. The emperor, inspired
+by a praiseworthy, liberal thought, demanded that these innovators
+should at least have the right to exhibit together in a special room
+which was called the _Salon des Refuses_. The public crowded there to
+have a good laugh. One of the pictures which caused most derision was a
+sunset by Claude Monet, entitled _Impressions_. From this moment the
+painters who adopted more or less the same manner were called
+_Impressionists_. The word remained in use, and Manet and his friends
+thought it a matter of indifference whether this label was attached to
+them, or another. At this despised Salon were to be found the names of
+Manet, Monet, Whistler, Bracquemont, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour, Renoir,
+Legros, and many others who have since risen to fame. Universal ridicule
+only fortified the friendships and resolutions of this group of men, and
+from that time dates the definite foundation of the Impressionist
+school. For thirty years it continued to produce without interruption
+an enormous quantity of works under an accidental and inexact
+denomination; to obey the creative instinct, without any other dogma
+than the passionate observation of nature, without any other assistance
+than individual sympathies, in the face of the disciplinary teaching of
+the official school.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE DANCER AT THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS--THE DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY
+COLOURS, THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE--THE IDEAS OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON
+SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY, AND ON STYLE
+
+
+It should be stated from the outset that there is nothing dogmatic about
+this explanation of the Impressionist theories, and that it is not the
+result of a preconceived plan. In art a system is not improvised. A
+theory is slowly evolved, nearly always unknown to the author, from the
+discoveries of his sincere instinct, and this theory can only be
+formulated after years by criticism facing the works. Monet and Manet
+have worked for a long time without ever thinking that theories would be
+built upon their paintings. Yet a certain number of considerations will
+strike the close observer, and I will put these considerations before
+the reader, after reminding him that spontaneity and feeling are the
+essentials of all art.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+CARRIAGES AT THE RACES]
+
+The Impressionist ideas may be summed up in the following manner:--
+
+In nature no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the objects is a
+pure illusion: the only creative source of colour is the sunlight which
+envelopes all things, and reveals them, according to the hours, with
+infinite modifications. The mystery of matter escapes us; we do not know
+the exact moment when reality separates itself from unreality. All we
+know is, that our vision has formed the habit of discerning in the
+universe two notions: form and colour; but these two notions are
+inseparable. Only artificially can we distinguish between outline and
+colour: in nature the distinction does not exist. Light reveals the
+forms, and, playing upon the different states of matter, the substance
+of leaves, the grain of stones, the fluidity of air in deep layers,
+gives them dissimilar colouring. If the light disappears, forms and
+colours vanish together. We only see colours; everything has a colour,
+and it is by the perception of the different colour surfaces striking
+our eyes, that we conceive the forms, _i.e._ the outlines of these
+colours.
+
+The idea of distance, of perspective, of volume is given us by darker or
+lighter colours: this idea is what is called in painting the sense of
+values. A value is the degree of dark or light intensity, which permits
+our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer than
+another. And as painting is not and cannot be the _imitation_ of nature,
+but merely her artificial interpretation, since it only has at its
+disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only means that
+remain for expressing depth on a flat surface.
+
+Colour is therefore the procreatrix of design. Or, colour being simply
+the irradiation of light, it follows that all colour is composed of the
+same elements as sunlight, namely the seven tones of the spectrum. It is
+known, that these seven tones appear different owing to the unequal
+speed of the waves of light. The tones of nature appear to us therefore
+different, like those of the spectrum, and for the same reason. The
+colours vary with the intensity of light. There is no colour peculiar
+to any object, but only more or less rapid vibration of light upon its
+surface. The speed depends, as is demonstrated by optics, on the degree
+of the inclination of the rays which, according to their vertical or
+oblique direction, give different light and colour.
+
+The colours of the spectrum are thus recomposed in everything we see. It
+is their relative proportion which makes new tones out of the seven
+spectral tones. This leads immediately to some practical conclusions,
+the first of which is, that what has formerly been called _local colour_
+is an error: a leaf is not green, a tree-trunk is not brown, and,
+according to the time of day, _i.e._ according to the greater or smaller
+inclination of the rays (scientifically called the angle of incidence),
+the green of the leaf and the brown of the tree are modified. What has
+to be studied therefore in these objects, if one wishes to recall their
+colour to the beholder of a picture, is the composition of the
+atmosphere which separates them from the eye. This atmosphere is the
+real subject of the picture, and whatever is represented upon it only
+exists through its medium.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE GREEK DANCE--PASTEL.]
+
+A second consequence of this analysis of light is, that shadow is not
+absence of light, but light of _a different quality_ and of different
+value. Shadow is not a part of the landscape, where light ceases, but
+where it is subordinated to a light which appears to us more intense. In
+the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with different speed.
+Painting should therefore try to discover here, as in the light parts,
+the play of the atoms of solar light, instead of representing shadows
+with ready-made tones composed of bitumen and black.
+
+The third conclusion resulting from this: the colours in the shadow are
+modified by _refraction_. That means, _f.i._ in a picture representing
+an interior, the source of light (window) may not be indicated: the
+light circling round the picture will then be composed of the
+_reflections_ of rays whose source is invisible, and all the objects,
+acting as mirrors for these reflections, will consequently influence
+each other. Their colours will affect each other, even if the surfaces
+be dull. A red vase placed upon a blue carpet will lead to a very
+subtle, but mathematically exact, interchange between this blue and this
+red, and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two
+colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite
+reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two
+principal colours. The science of optics can work out these
+complementary colours with mathematical exactness. If _f.i._ a head
+receives the orange rays of daylight from one side and the bluish light
+of an interior from the other, green reflections will necessarily appear
+on the nose and in the middle region of the face. The painter Besnard,
+who has specially devoted himself to this minute study of complementary
+colours, has given us some famous examples of it.
+
+The last consequence of these propositions is that the blending of the
+spectral tones is accomplished by a _parallel_ and _distinct_ projection
+of the colours. They are artificially reunited on the crystalline: a
+lens interposed between the light and the eye, and opposing the
+crystalline, which is a living lens, dissociates again these united
+rays, and shows us again the seven distinct colours of the atmosphere.
+It is no less artificial if a painter mixes upon his palette different
+colours to compose a tone; it is again artificial that paints have been
+invented which represent some of the combinations of the spectrum, just
+to save the artist the trouble of constantly mixing the seven solar
+tones. Such mixtures are false, and they have the disadvantage of
+creating heavy tonalities, since the coarse mixture of powders and oils
+cannot accomplish the action of light which reunites the luminous waves
+into an intense white of unimpaired transparency. The colours mixed on
+the palette compose a dirty grey. What, then, is the painter to do, who
+is anxious to approach, as near as our poor human means will allow, that
+divine fairyland of nature? Here we touch upon the very foundations of
+Impressionism. The painter will have to paint with only the seven
+colours of the spectrum, and discard all the others: that is what Claude
+Monet has done boldly, adding to them only white and black. He will,
+furthermore, instead of composing mixtures on his palette, place upon
+his canvas touches of none but the seven colours _juxtaposed_, and leave
+the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain
+distance, so as to act like sunlight itself upon the eye of the
+beholder.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+WAITING]
+
+This, then, is the theory of the _dissociation of tones_, which is the
+main point of Impressionist technique. It has the immense advantage of
+suppressing all mixtures, of leaving to each colour its proper strength,
+and consequently its freshness and brilliancy. At the same time the
+difficulties are extreme. The painter's eye must be admirably subtle.
+Light becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the
+object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes
+a purely optic art, a search for harmonies, a sort of natural poem,
+quite distinct from expression, style and design, which were the
+principal aims of former painting. It is almost necessary to invent
+another name for this special art which, clearly pictorial though it be,
+comes as near to music, as it gets far away from literature and
+psychology. It is only natural that, fascinated by this study, the
+Impressionists have almost remained strangers to the painting of
+expression, and altogether hostile to historical and symbolist painting.
+It is therefore principally in landscape painting that they have
+achieved the greatness that is theirs.
+
+Through the application of these principles which I have set forth very
+summarily, Claude Monet arrived at painting by means of the infinitely
+varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour spots which dissociate the
+tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the
+arabesque of their vibrations. A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind
+of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, _f.i._),
+and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This
+investigation is added to the habitual preoccupations of the landscapist
+study of the character peculiar to the scene, style of the trees or
+houses, accentuation of the decorative side--and to the habitual
+preoccupations of the figure painter in the portrait. The canvases of
+Monet, Renoir and Pissarro have, in consequence of this research, an
+absolutely original aspect: their shadows are striped with blue,
+rose-madder and green; nothing is opaque or sooty; a light vibration
+strikes the eye. Finally, blue and orange predominate, simply because in
+these studies--which are more often than not full sunlight
+effects--blue is the complementary colour of the orange light of the
+sun, and is profusely distributed in the shadows. In these canvases can
+be found a vast amount of exact grades of tone, which seem to have been
+entirely ignored by the older painters, whose principal concern was
+style, and who reduced a landscape to three or four broad tones,
+endeavouring only to explain the sentiment inspired by it.
+
+And now I shall have to pass on to the Impressionists' ideas on the
+style itself of painting, on Realism.
+
+From the outset it must not be forgotten that Impressionism has been
+propagated by men who had all been Realists; that means by a reactionary
+movement against classic and romantic painting. This movement, of which
+Courbet will always remain the most famous representative, has been
+_anti-intellectual_. It has protested against every literary,
+psychologic or symbolical element in painting. It has reacted at the
+same time against the historical painting of Delaroche and the
+mythological painting of the _Ecole de Rome_, with an extreme violence
+which appears to us excessive now, but which found its explanation in
+the intolerable tediousness or emphasis at which the official painters
+had arrived. Courbet was a magnificent worker, with rudimentary ideas,
+and he endeavoured to exclude even those which he possessed. This
+exaggeration which diminishes our admiration for his work and prevents
+us from finding in it any emotion but that which results from technical
+mastery, was salutary for the development of the art of his successors.
+It caused the young painters to turn resolutely towards the aspects of
+contemporary life, and to draw style and emotion from their own epoch;
+and this intention was right. An artistic tradition is not continued by
+imitating the style of the past, but by extracting the immediate
+impression of each epoch. That is what the really great masters have
+done, and it is the succession of their sincere and profound
+observations which constitutes the style of the races.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE PINES]
+
+Manet and his friends drew all their strength from this idea. Much finer
+and more learned than a man like Courbet, they saw an aspect of
+modernity far more complex, and less limited to immediate and grossly
+superficial realism. Nor must it be forgotten that they were
+contemporaries of the realistic, anti-romantic literary movement, a
+movement which gave them nothing but friends. Flaubert and the Goncourts
+proved that Realism is not the enemy of refined form and of delicate
+psychology. The influence of these ideas created first of all Manet and
+his friends: the technical evolution (of which we have traced the chief
+traits) came only much later to oppose itself to their conceptions.
+Impressionism can therefore be defined as a _revolution of pictorial
+technique together with an attempt at expressing modernity_. The
+reaction against Symbolism and Romanticism happened to coincide with the
+reaction against muddy technique.
+
+The Impressionists, whilst occupying themselves with cleansing the
+palette of the bitumen of which the Academy made exaggerated use, whilst
+also observing nature with a greater love of light, made it their object
+to escape in the representation of human beings the laws of _beauty_,
+such as were taught by the School. And on this point one might apply to
+them all that one knows of the ideas of the Goncourts and Flaubert, and
+later of Zola, in the domain of the novel. They were moved by the same
+ideas; to speak of the one group is to speak of the other. The longing
+for truth, the horror of emphasis and of false idealism which paralysed
+the novelist as well as the painter, led the Impressionists to
+substitute for _beauty_ a novel notion, that of _character_. To search
+for, and to express, the true character of a being or of a site, seemed
+to them more significant, more moving, than to search for an exclusive
+beauty, based upon rules, and inspired by the Greco-Latin ideal. Like
+the Flemings, the Germans, the Spaniards, and in opposition to the
+Italians whose influence had conquered all the European academies, the
+French Realist-Impressionists, relying upon the qualities of lightness,
+sincerity and expressive clearness which are the real merits of their
+race, detached themselves from the oppressive and narrow preoccupation
+with the beautiful and with all the metaphysics and abstractions
+following in its train.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+CHURCH AT VERNON]
+
+This fact of the substitution of _character_ for _beauty_ is the
+essential feature of the movement. What is called Impressionism is--let
+it not be forgotten--a technique which can be applied to any subject.
+Whether the subject be a virgin, or a labourer, it can be painted with
+divided tones, and certain living artists, like the symbolist Henri
+Martin, who has almost the ideas of a Pre-Raphaelite, have proved it by
+employing this technique for the rendering of religious or philosophic
+subjects. But one can only understand the effort and the faults of the
+painters grouped around Manet, by constantly recalling to one's mind
+their predeliction for _character_. Before Manet a distinction was made
+between _noble_ subjects, and others which were relegated to the domain
+of _genre_ in which no great artist was admitted to exist by the School,
+the familiarity of their subjects barring from them this rank. By the
+suppression of the _nobleness_ inherent to the treated subject, the
+painter's technical merit is one of the first things to be considered in
+giving him rank. The Realist-Impressionists painted scenes in the
+ball-room, on the river, in the field, the street, the foundry, modern
+interiors, and found in the life of the humble immense scope for
+studying the gestures, the costumes, the expressions of the nineteenth
+century.
+
+Their effort had its bearing upon the way of representing persons, upon
+what is called, in the studio language, the "_mise en cadre_." There,
+too, they overthrew the principles admitted by the School. Manet, and
+especially Degas, have created in this respect a new style from which
+the whole art of realistic contemporary illustration is derived. This
+style had been hitherto totally ignored, or the artists had shrunk from
+applying it. It is a style which is founded upon the small painters of
+the eighteenth century, upon Saint-Aubin, Debucourt, Moreau, and,
+further back, upon Pater and the Dutchmen. But this time, instead of
+confining this style to vignettes and very small dimensions, the
+Impressionists have boldly given it the dimensions and importance of big
+canvases. They have no longer based the laws of composition, and
+consequently of style, upon the ideas relative to the subjects, but upon
+values and harmonies. To take a summary example: if the School composed
+a picture representing the death of Agamemnon, it did not fail to
+subordinate the whole composition to Agamemnon, then to Clytemnestra,
+then to the witnesses of the murder, graduating the moral and literary
+interest according to the different persons, and sacrificing to this
+interest the colouring and the realistic qualities of the scene. The
+Realists composed by picking out first the strongest "value" of the
+picture, say a red dress, and then distributing the other values
+according to a harmonious progression of their tonalities. "The
+principal person in a picture," said Manet, "is the light." With Manet
+and his friends we find, then, that the concern for expression and for
+the sentiments evoked by the subject, was always subordinated to a
+purely pictorial and decorative preoccupation. This has frequently led
+the Impressionists to grave errors, which they have, however, generally
+avoided by confining themselves to very simple subjects, for which the
+daily life supplied the grouping.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+PORTRAIT OF MADAME MAITRE]
+
+One of the reforms due to their conception has been the suppression of
+the professional model, and the substitution for it of the natural
+model, seen in the exercise of his occupation. This is one of the most
+useful conquests for the benefit of modern painting. It marks a just
+return to nature and simplicity. Nearly all their figures are real
+portraits; and in everything that concerns the labourer and the
+peasant, they have found the proper style and character, because they
+have observed these beings in the true medium of their occupations,
+instead of forcing them into a sham pose and painting them in disguise.
+The basis of all their pictures has been first of all a series of
+landscape and figure studies made in the open air, far from the studio,
+and afterwards co-ordinated. One may wish pictorial art to have higher
+ambitions; and one may find in the Primitives an example of a curious
+mysticism, an expression of the abstract and of dreams. But one should
+not underrate the power of naive and realistic observation, which the
+Primitives carried into the execution of their works, subordinating it,
+however, to religious expression, and it must also be admitted that the
+Realist-Impressionists served at least their conception of art logically
+and homogeneously. The criticism which may be levelled against them is
+that which Realism itself carries in its train, and we shall see that
+esthetics could never create classifications capable of defining and
+containing the infinite gradations of creative temperaments.
+
+In art, classifications have rarely any value, and are rather damaging.
+Realism and Idealism are abstract terms which cannot suffice to
+characterise beings who obey their sensibility. It is therefore
+necessary to invent as many words as there are remarkable men. If
+Leonardo was a great painter, are Turner and Monet not painters at all?
+There is no connection between them; their methods of thought and
+expression are antithetical. Perhaps it will be most simple, to admire
+them all, and to renounce any further definition of the painter,
+adopting this word to mark the man who uses the palette as his means of
+expression.
+
+Thus preoccupation with contemporary emotions, substitution of character
+for classic beauty (or of emotional beauty for formal beauty), admission
+of the _genre_-painter into the first rank, composition based upon the
+reciprocal reaction of values, subordination of the subject to the
+interest of execution, the effort to isolate the art of painting from
+the ideas inherent to that of literature, and particularly the
+instinctive move towards the "symphonisation" of colours, and
+consequently towards music,--these are the principal features of the
+aesthetic code of the Realist-Impressionists, if this term may be
+applied to a group of men hostile towards esthetics such as they are
+generally taught.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+
+As I have said, Edouard Manet has not been entirely the originator of
+the Impressionist technique. It is the work of Claude Monet which
+presents the most complete example of it, and which also came first as
+regards date. But it is very difficult to determine such cases of
+priority, and it is, after all, rather useless. A technique cannot be
+invented in a day. In this case it was the result of long
+investigations, in which Manet and Renoir participated, and it is
+necessary to unite under the collective name of Impressionists a group
+of men, tied by friendship, who made a simultaneous effort towards
+originality, all in about the same spirit, though frequently in very
+different ways. As in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, it was first of
+all friendship, then unjust derision, which created the solidarity of
+the Impressionists. But the Pre-Raphaelites, in aiming at an idealistic
+and symbolic art, were better agreed upon the intellectual principles
+which permitted them at once to define a programme. The Impressionists
+who were only united by their temperaments, and had made it their first
+aim to break away from all school programmes, tried simply to do
+something new, with frankness and freedom.
+
+Manet was, in their midst, the personality marked out at the same time
+by their admiration, and by the attacks of the critics for the post of
+standard-bearer. A little older than his friends, he had already, quite
+alone, raised heated discussions by the works in his first manner. He
+was considered an innovator, and it was by instinctive admiration that
+his first friends, Whistler, Legros, and Fantin-Latour, were gradually
+joined by Marcelin Desboutin, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro,
+Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, the young painter Bazille, who met his
+premature death in 1870, and by the writers Gautier, Banville,
+Baudelaire (who was a passionate admirer of Manet's); then later by
+Zola, the Goncourts, and Stephane Mallarme. This was the first nucleus
+of a public which was to increase year by year. Manet had the personal
+qualities of a chief; he was a man of spirit, an ardent worker, and an
+enthusiastic and generous character.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE DEAD TOREADOR]
+
+Manet commenced his first studies with Couture. After having travelled a
+good deal at sea to obey his parents, his vocation took hold of him
+irresistibly. About 1850 the young man entered the studio of the severe
+author of the _Romains de la Decadence_. His stay was short. He
+displeased the professor by his uncompromising energy. Couture said of
+him angrily: "He will become the Daumier of 1860." It is known that
+Daumier, lithographer, and painter of genius, was held in meagre esteem
+by the academicians. Manet travelled in Germany after the _coup d'etat_,
+copied Rembrandt in Munich, then went to Italy, copied Tintoretto in
+Venice, and conceived there the idea of several religious pictures. Then
+he became enthusiastic about the Spaniards, especially Velasquez and
+Goya. The sincere expression of things seen took root from this moment
+as the principal rule of art in the brain of this young Frenchman who
+was loyal, ardent, and hostile to all subtleties. He painted some fine
+works, like the _Buveur d'absinthe_ and the _Vieux musicien_. They show
+the influence of Courbet, but already the blacks and the greys have an
+original and superb quality; they announce a virtuoso of the first
+order.
+
+It was in 1861 that Manet first sent to the Salon the portraits of his
+parents and the _Guitarero_, which was hailed by Gautier, and rewarded
+by the jury, though it roused surprise and irritation. But after that he
+was rejected, whether it was a question of the _Fifre_ or of the
+_Dejeuner sur l'herbe._ This canvas, with an admirable feminine nude,
+created a scandal, because an undressed woman figured in it amidst
+clothed figures, a matter of frequent occurrence with the masters of the
+Renaissance. The landscape is not painted in the open air, but in the
+studio, and resembles a tapestry, but it shows already the most
+brilliant evidence of Manet's talent in the study of the nude and the
+still-life of the foreground, which is the work of a powerful master.
+From the time of this canvas the artist's personality appeared in all
+its maturity. He painted it before he was thirty, and it has the air of
+an old master's work; it is based upon Hals and the Spaniards together.
+
+The reputation of Manet became established after 1865. Furious critics
+were opposed by enthusiastic admirers. Baudelaire upheld Manet, as he
+had upheld Delacroix and Wagner, with his great clairvoyance,
+sympathetic to all real originality. The _Olympia_ brought the
+discussion to a head. This courtesan lying in bed undressed, with a
+negress carrying a bouquet, and a black cat, made a tremendous stir. It
+is a powerful work of strong colour, broad design and intense sentiment,
+astounding in its _parti-pris_ of reducing the values to the greatest
+simplicity. One can feel in it the artist's preoccupation with
+rediscovering the rude frankness of Hals and Goya, and his aversion
+against the prettiness and false nobility of the school. This famous
+_Olympia_ which occasioned so much fury, appears to us to-day as a
+transition work. It is neither a masterpiece, nor an emotional work, but
+a technical experiment, very significant for the epoch during which it
+appeared in French art, and this canvas, which is very inferior to
+Manet's fine works, may well be considered as a date of evolution. He
+was doubtful about exhibiting it, but Baudelaire decided him and wrote
+to him on this occasion these typical remarks: "You complain about
+attacks? But are you the first to endure them? Have you more genius than
+Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by derision. And, in
+order not to make you too proud, I must tell you, that they are models
+each in his own way and in a very rich world, whilst you are only the
+first in the decrepitude of your art."
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+OLYMPIA]
+
+Thus it must be firmly established that from this moment Manet passed as
+an innovator, years before Impressionism existed or was even thought of.
+This is an important point: it will help to clear up the twofold origin
+of the movement which followed. To his realism, to his return to
+composition in the modern spirit, and to the simplifying of planes and
+values, Manet owed these attacks, though at that time his colour was
+still sombre and entirely influenced by Hals, Goya and Courbet. From
+that time the artist became a chief. As his friends used to meet him at
+an obscure Batignolles cafe, the cafe Guerbois (still existing), public
+derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des
+Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the _Angels at the Tomb of Christ_, a
+souvenir of the Venetians; _Lola de Valence_, commented upon by
+Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the _Fleurs du Mal_; the
+_Episode d'un combat de taureaux_ (dissatisfied with this picture, he
+cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The
+_Acteur tragique_ (portrait of Rouviere in Hamlet) and the _Jesus
+insulte_ followed, and then came the _Gitanos_, _L'Enfant a l'Epee_, and
+the portrait of Mme. Manet. This series of works is admirable. It is
+here where he reveals himself as a splendid colourist, whose design is
+as vigorous as the technique is masterly. In these works one does not
+think of looking for anything but the witchery of technical strength;
+and the abundant wealth of his temperament is simply dazzling. Manet
+reveals himself as the direct heir of the great Spaniards, more
+interesting, more spontaneous, and freer than Courbet. The _Rouviere_ is
+as fine a symphony in grey and black as the noblest portraits by
+Bronzino, and there is probably no Goya more powerful than the _Toreador
+tue_. Manet's altogether classic descent appears here undeniably. There
+is no question yet of Impressionism, and yet Monet and Renoir are
+already painting, Monet has exhibited at the _Salon des Refuses_, but
+criticism sees and attacks nobody but Manet. This great individuality
+who overwhelmed the Academy with its weak allegories, was the butt of
+great insults and the object of great admiration. Banished from the
+Salons, he collected fifty pictures in a room in the Avenue de l'Alma
+and invited the public thither. In 1868 appeared the portrait of Emile
+Zola, in 1860 the _Dejeuner_, works which are so powerful, that they
+enforced admiration in spite of all hostility. In the Salon of 1870 was
+shown the portrait of Eva Gonzales, the charming pastellist and pupil of
+Manet, and the impressive _Execution of Maximilian at Queretaro_. Manet
+was at the apogee of his talent, when the Franco-German war broke out.
+At the age of thirty-eight he had put forth a considerable amount of
+work, tried himself in all styles, severed his individuality from the
+slavish admiration of the old masters, and attained his own mastery. And
+now he wanted to expand, and, in joining Monet, Renoir and Degas,
+interpret in his own way the Impressionist theory.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE WOMAN WITH THE PARROT]
+
+The _Fight of the Kearsage and the Alabama_, a magnificent sea-piece,
+bathed in sunlight, announced this transformation in his work, as did
+also a study, a _Garden_, painted, I believe, in 1870, but exhibited
+only after the crisis of the terrible year. At that time the Durand-Ruel
+Gallery bought a considerable series by the innovator, and was imitated
+by some select art-lovers. The _Musique aux Tuileries_ and the _Bal de
+l'Opera_ had, some years before, pointed towards the evolution of this
+great artist in the direction of _plein-air_ painting. The _Bon Bock_,
+in which the very soul of Hals is revived, and the grave _Liseur_, sold
+immediately at Vienne, were the two last pledges given by the artist to
+his old admirers; these two pictures had moreover a splendid success,
+and the _Bon Bock_, popularised by an engraving, was hailed by the very
+men who had most unjustly attacked the author of the portrait of Mme.
+Morisot, a French masterpiece. But already Manet was attracted
+irresistibly towards the study of light, and, faithful to his programme,
+he prepared to face once again outbursts of anger and further sarcasms;
+he was resolved once again to offer battle to the Salons. Followed by
+all the Impressionists he tried to make them understand the necessity
+of introducing the new ideas into this retrograde _Milieu_. But they
+would not. Having already received a rebuff by the attacks directed for
+some years against their works, they exhibited among themselves in some
+private galleries: they declined to force the gate of the Salons, and
+Manet remained alone. In 1875 he submitted, with his _Argenteuil_, the
+most perfect epitome of his atmospheric researches. The jury admitted it
+in spite of loud protests: they were afraid of Manet; they admired his
+power of transformation, and he revolted the prejudiced, attracting them
+at the same time by the charm of his force. But in 1876 the portrait of
+_Desboutin_ and the _Linge_ (an exquisite picture,--one of the best
+productions of open-air study) were rejected. Manet then recommenced the
+experience of 1867, and opened his studio to the public. A register at
+the door was soon covered with signatures protesting against the jury,
+as well as with hostile jokes, and even anonymous insults! In 1877 the
+defeated jury admitted the portrait of the famous singer Faure in the
+part of Hamlet, and rejected _Nana_, a picture which was found
+scandalising, but has charming freshness and an intensely modern
+character. In 1878, 1879 and 1880 they accepted _la Serre_, the
+surprising symphony in blue and white which shows Mr George Moore in
+boating costume, the portrait of Antonin Proust, and the scene at the
+_Pere Lathuile_ restaurant, in which Manet's nervous and luminous
+realism has so curious a resemblance to the art of the Goncourts. In
+1881 the portrait of Rochefort and that of the lion-killer, Pertuiset,
+procured the artist a medal at the Salon, and Antonin Proust, the friend
+of Manet's childhood, who had become Minister of Fine Arts, honoured
+himself in decorating him with the legion of honour. In 1882 appeared a
+magnificent canvas, the _Bar des Folies-Bergere_, in which there is some
+sparkling still-life painting of most attractive beauty. It was
+accompanied by a lady's portrait, _Jeanne_. But on April 30, 1883, Manet
+died, exhausted by his work and struggles, of locomotor ataxy, after
+having vainly undergone the amputation of a foot to avoid gangrene.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGERE]
+
+It will be seen that Manet fought through all his life: few artists'
+lives have been nobler. His has been an example of untiring energy; he
+employed it as much in working, as in making a stand against prejudices.
+Rejected, accepted, rejected again, he delivered with enormous courage
+and faith his attack upon a jury which represented routine. As he fought
+in front of his easel, he still fought before the public, without ever
+relaxing, without changing, alone, apart even from those whom he loved,
+who had been shaped by his example. This great painter, one of those who
+did most honour to the French soul, had the genius to create by himself
+an Impressionism of his own which will always remain his own, after
+having given evidence of gifts of the first order in the tradition
+handed down by the masters of the real and the good. He cannot be
+confused either with Monet, or with Pissarro and Renoir. His
+comprehension of light is a special one, his technique is not in
+accordance with the system of colour-spots; it observes the theory of
+complementary colours and of the division of tones without departing
+from a grand style, from a classic stateliness, from a superb sureness.
+Manet has not been the inventor of Impressionism which co-existed with
+his work since 1865, but he has rendered it immense services, by taking
+upon himself all the outbursts of anger addressed to the innovators, by
+making a breach in public opinion, through which his friends have passed
+in behind him. Probably without him all these artists would have
+remained unknown, or at least without influence, because they all were
+bold characters in art, but timid or disdainful in life. Degas, Monet
+and Renoir were fine natures with a horror of polemics, who wished to
+hold aloof from the Salons, and were resigned from the outset to be
+misunderstood. They were, so to say, electrified by the magnificent
+example of Manet's fighting spirit, and Manet was generous enough to
+take upon himself the reproaches levelled, not only against his work,
+but against theirs. His twenty years of open war, sustained with an
+abnegation worthy of all esteem, must be considered as one of the most
+significant phenomena of the history of the artists of all ages.
+
+This work of Manet, so much discussed and produced under such tormenting
+conditions, owes its importance beyond all to its power and frankness.
+Ten years of developing the first manner, tragically limited by the war
+of 1870; thirteen years of developing the second evolution, parallel
+with the efforts of the Impressionists. The period from 1860 to 1870 is
+logically connected with Hals and Goya; from 1870 to 1883 the artist's
+modernity is complicated by the study of light. His personality appears
+there even more original, but one may well give the palm to those works
+of Manet which are painted in his classic and low-toned manner. He had
+all the pictorial gifts which make the glory of the masters: full, true,
+broad composition, colouring of irresistible power, blacks and greys
+which cannot be found elsewhere since Velasquez and Goya, and a profound
+knowledge of values. He has tried his hand at everything: portraits,
+landscapes, seascapes, scenes of modern life, still-life and nudes have
+each in their turn served his ardent desire of creation. His was a much
+finer comprehension of contemporary life than seems to be admitted by
+Realism: one has only to compare him with Courbet, to see how far more
+nervous and intelligent he was, without loss to the qualities of truth
+and robustness. His pictures will always remain documents of the
+greatest importance on the society, the manners and customs of the
+second Empire. He did not possess the gift of psychology. His _Christ
+aux Anges_ and _Jesus insulte_ are obviously only pieces of painting
+without idealism. He was, like the great Dutch virtuosos, and like
+certain Italians, more eye than soul. Yet his _Maximilian_, the drawings
+to Poe's _Raven_, and certain sketches show that he might have realised
+some curious, psychological works, had he not been so completely
+absorbed by the immediate reality and by the desire for beautiful paint.
+A beautiful painter--this is what he was before everything else, this is
+his fairest fame, and it is almost inconceivable that the juries of the
+Salons failed to understand him. They waxed indignant over his subjects
+which offer only a restricted interest, and they did not see the
+altogether classic quality of this technique without bitumen, without
+glazing, without tricks; of this vibrating colour; of this rich paint;
+of this passionate design so suitable for expressing movement and
+gestures true to life; of this simple composition where the whole
+picture is based upon two or three values with the straightforwardness
+one admires in Rubens, Jordaens and Hals.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+DEJEUNER]
+
+Manet will occupy an important position in the French School. He is the
+most original painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, the
+one who has really created a great movement. His work, the fecundity of
+which is astonishing, is unequal. One has to remember that, besides the
+incessant strife which he kept up--a strife which would have killed many
+artists--he had to find strength for two grave crises in himself. He
+joined one movement, then freed himself of it, then invented another and
+recommenced to learn painting at a point where anybody else would have
+continued in his previous manner. "Each time I paint," he said to
+Mallarme, "I throw myself into the water to learn swimming." It is not
+surprising that such a man should have been unequal, and that one can
+distinguish in his work between experiments, exaggerations due to
+research, and efforts made to reject the prejudices of which we feel the
+weight no longer. But it would be unjust to say that Manet has only had
+the merit of opening up new roads; that has been said to belittle him,
+after it had first been said that these roads led into absurdity. Works
+like the _Toreador_, _Rouviere_, _Mme. Manet_, the _Dejeuner_, the
+_Musique aux Tuileries_, the _Bon Bock_, _Argenteuil_, _Le Linge_, _En
+Bateau_ and the _Bar_, will always remain admirable masterpieces which
+will do credit to French painting, of which the spontaneous, living,
+clear and bold art of Manet is a direct and very representative product.
+
+There remains, then, a great personality who knew how to dominate the
+rather coarse conceptions of Realism, who influenced by his modernity
+all contemporary illustration, who re-established a sound and strong
+tradition in the face of the Academy, and who not only created a new
+transition, but marked his place on the new road which he had opened. To
+him Impressionism owes its existence; his tenacity enabled it to take
+root and to vanquish the opposition of the School; his work has enriched
+the world by some beautiful examples which demonstrate the union of the
+two principles of Realism and of that technical Impressionism which was
+to supply Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley with an object for their
+efforts. For the sum total of all that is evoked by his name, Edouard
+Manet certainly deserves the name of a man of genius--an incomplete
+genius, though, since the thought with him was not on the level of his
+technique, since he could never affect the emotions like a Leonardo or a
+Rembrandt, but genius all the same through the magnificent power of his
+gifts, the continuity of his style, and the importance of his part which
+infused blood into a school dying of the anaemia of conventional art.
+Whoever beholds a work of Manet's, even without knowing the conditions
+of his life, will feel that there is something great, the lion's claw
+which Delacroix had recognised as far back as 1861, and to which, it is
+said, even the great Ingres had paid homage on the jury which examined
+with disgust the _Guitarero_.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+PORTRAIT OF MADAME M.L.]
+
+To-day Manet is considered almost as a classic glory; and the progress
+for which he had given the impulse, has been so rapid, that many are
+astonished that he should ever have been considered audacious. Sight is
+transformed, strife is extinguished, and a large, select public,
+familiar with Monet and Renoir, judge Manet almost as a long defunct
+initiator. One has to know his admirable life, one has to know well the
+incredible inertia of the Salons where he appeared, to give him his full
+due. And when, after the acceptance of Impressionism, the unavoidable
+reaction will take place, Manet's qualities of solidity, truth and
+science will appear such, that he will survive many of those to whom he
+has opened the road and facilitated the success at the expense of his
+own. It will be seen that Degas and he have, more than the others, and
+with less apparent _eclat_, united the gifts which produce durable works
+in the midst of the fluctuations of fashion and the caprices of taste
+and views. Manet can, at the Louvre or any other gallery, hold his own
+in the most crushing surroundings, prove his personal qualities, and
+worthily represent a period which he loved.
+
+An enormous amount has been written on him, from Zola's bold and
+intelligent pamphlet in 1865, to the recent work by M. Theodore Duret.
+Few men have provoked more comments. In an admirable picture, _Hommage a
+Manet_, the delicate and perfect painter Fantin-Latour, a friend from
+the first hour, has grouped around the artist some of his admirers,
+Monet, Renoir, Duranty, Zola, Bazille, and Braquemond. The picture has
+to-day a place of honour at the Luxembourg, where Manet is
+insufficiently represented by _Olympia_, a study of a woman, and the
+_Balcony_. A collection is much to be desired of his lithographs, his
+etchings and his pastels, in which he has proved his diversified
+mastery, and also of his portraits of famous contemporaries, Zola,
+Rochefort, Desboutin, Proust, Mallarme, Clemenceau, Guys, Faure,
+Baudelaire, Moore, and others, an admirable series by a visionary who
+possessed, in a period of unrest and artificiality, the quality of rude
+sincerity, and the love of truth of a Primitive.
+
+[Illustration: MANET
+
+THE HOTHOUSE]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+
+I have said how vain it is to class artistic temperaments under a title
+imposed upon them generally by circumstances and dates, rather than by
+their own free will. The study of Degas will furnish additional proof
+for it. Classed with the Impressionists, this master participates in
+their ideas in the sphere of composition, rather than in that of colour.
+He belongs to them through his modernity and comprehension of character.
+Only when we come to his quite recent landscapes (1896), can we link him
+to Monet and Renoir as colourist, and he has been more their friend than
+their colleague.
+
+Degas is known by the select few, and almost ignored by the public. This
+is due to several reasons. Degas has never wished to exhibit at the
+Salons, except, I believe, once or twice at the beginning of his
+career. He has only shown his works at those special exhibitions
+arranged by the Impressionists in hired apartments (rue le Peletier, rue
+Laffitte, Boulevard des Capucines), and at some art-dealers. The art of
+Degas has never had occasion to shock the public by the exuberance of
+its colour, because he restricted himself to grey and quiet harmonies.
+Degas is a modest character, fond of silence and solitude, with a horror
+of the crowd and of controversies, and almost disinclined to show his
+works. He is a man of intelligence and ready wit, whose sallies are
+dreaded; he is almost a misanthrope. His pictures have been gradually
+sold to foreign countries and dispersed in rich galleries without having
+been seen by the public. His character is, in short, absolutely opposed
+to that of Manet, who, though he suffered from criticism, thought it his
+duty to bid it defiance. Degas's influence has, however, been
+considerable, though secretly so, and the young painters have been
+slowly inspired by his example.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE BEGGAR WOMAN]
+
+Degas is beyond all a draughtsman of the first order. His spirit is
+quite classical. He commenced by making admirable copies of the Italian
+Primitives, notably of Fra Angelico, and the whole first series of his
+works speaks of that influence: portraits, heads of deep, mat, amber
+colour, on a ground of black or grey tones, remarkable for a severity of
+intense style, and for the rare gift of psychological expression. To
+find the equal of these faces--after having stated their classic
+descent--one would have to turn to the beautiful things by Ingres, and
+certainly Degas is, with Ingres, the most learned, the most perfect
+French draughtsman of the nineteenth century. An affirmation of this
+nature is made to surprise those who judge Impressionism with
+preconceived ideas. It is none the less true that, if a series of
+Degas's first portraits were collected, the comparison would force
+itself upon one's mind irrefutably. In face of the idealist painting of
+Romanticism, Ingres represented quite clearly the cult of painting for
+its own sake. His ideas were mediocre, and went scarcely beyond the
+poor, conventional ideal of the Academy; but his genius was so great,
+that it made him paint, together with his tedious allegories, some
+incomparable portraits and nudes. He thought he was serving official
+Classicism, which still boasts of his name, but in reality he dominated
+it; and, whilst he was an imitator of Raphael, he was a powerful
+Realist. The Impressionists admire him as such, and agree with him in
+banishing from the art of painting all literary imagination, whether it
+be the tedious mythology of the School, or the historical anecdote of
+the Romanticists. Degas and Besnard admire Ingres as colossal
+draughtsman, and, beyond all, as man who, in spite of the limitations of
+his mind, preserved the clear vision of the mission of his art at a time
+when art was used for the expression of literary conceptions. Who would
+have believed it? Yet it is true, and Manet, too, held the same view of
+Ingres, little as our present academicians may think it! It happens that
+to-day Impressionism is more akin to Ingres than to Delacroix, just as
+the young poets are more akin to Racine than to Hugo. They reject the
+foreign elements, and search, before anything else, for the strict
+national tradition. Degas follows Ingres and resembles him. He is also
+reminiscent of the Primitives and of Holbein. There is, in his first
+period, the somewhat dry and geometrical perfection, the somewhat heavy
+colour which only serves to strengthen the correctness of the planes. At
+the Exposition of 1900, there was a Degas which surprised everybody. It
+was an _Interior of a cotton factory_ in an American town. This small
+picture was curiously clear: it would be impossible to paint better and
+with a more accomplished knowledge of the laws of painting. But it was
+the work of a soulless, emotionless Realist; it was a coloured
+photograph of unheard-of truth, the mathematical science of which left
+the beholder cold. This work, which is very old (it dates back to about
+1860), gave no idea of what Degas has grown into. It was the work of an
+unemotional master of technique; only just the infinitely delicate value
+of the greys and blacks revealed the future master of harmony. One
+almost might have wished to find a fault in this aggravating perfection.
+But Degas was not to remain there, and already, about that time, certain
+portraits of his are elevated by an expression of ardent melancholy, by
+warm, ivory-like, grave colouring which attracts one's eye. Before this
+series one feels the firm will of a very logical, serious, classic
+spirit who wants to know thoroughly the intimate resources of design,
+before risking to choose from among them the elements which respond best
+to his individual nature. If Degas was destined to invent, later on, so
+personal a style of design that he could be accused of "drawing badly,"
+this first period of his life is before us, to show the slow maturing of
+his boldness and how carefully he first proved to himself his knowledge,
+before venturing upon new things. In art the difficulty is, when one has
+learnt everything, to forget,--that is, to appear to forget, so as to
+create one's own style, and this apparent forgetting cloaks an
+amalgamation of science with mind. And Degas is one of those patient and
+reticent men who spend years in arriving at this; he has much in common
+with Hokusai, the old man "mad with painting," who at the close of his
+prodigious life invented arbitrary forms, after having given immortal
+examples of his interpretation of the real.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE LESSON IN THE FOYER]
+
+Degas is also clearly related to Corot, not only in the silvery
+harmonies of his suave landscapes, but also, and particularly, in his
+admirable faces whose inestimable power and moving sincerity we have
+hardly commenced to understand. Degas passed slowly from classicism to
+modernity. He never liked outbursts of colour; he is by no means an
+Impressionist from this point of view. As a draughtsman of genius he
+expresses all by the precision of the planes and values; a grey, a black
+and some notes of colour suffice for him. This might establish a link
+between him and Whistler, though he is much less mysterious and diffuse.
+Whenever Degas plays with colour, it is with the same restraint of his
+boldness; he never goes to excess in abandoning himself to its charm. He
+is neither lyrical, nor voluptuous; his energy is cold; his wise spirit
+affirms soberly the true character of a face or an object.
+
+Since a long time this spirit has moved Degas to revel in the
+observation of contemporary life. His nature has been that of a patient
+psychologist, a minute analyst, and also of a bitter ironist. The man is
+very little known. His friends say that he has an easily ruffled
+delicacy, a sensibility open to poetry, but jealous of showing its
+emotion. They say that Degas's satirical bitterness is the reverse side
+of a soul wounded by the spectacle of modern morality. One feels this
+sentiment in his work, where the sharp notation of truth is painful,
+where the realism is opposed by colouring of a sober distinction, where
+nothing, not even the portrait of a drab, could be vulgar. Degas has
+devoted himself to the profound study of certain classes of women, in
+the state of mind of a philosopher and physiologist, impartially
+inclined towards life.
+
+His work can be divided into several great series: the race-courses, the
+ballet-dancers, and the women bathing count among the most important.
+The race-courses have inspired Degas with numerous pictures. He shows in
+them a surprising knowledge of the horse. He is one of the most perfect
+painters of horses who have ever existed. He has caught the most curious
+and truest actions with infallible sureness of sight. His racecourse
+scenes are full of vitality and picturesqueness. Against clear skies,
+and light backgrounds of lawn, indicated with quiet harmony, Degas
+assembles original groups of horses which one can see moving,
+hesitating, intensely alive; and nothing could be fresher, gayer and
+more deliciously pictorial, than the green, red and yellow notes of the
+jockey's costumes strewn like flowers over these atmospheric, luminous
+landscapes, where colours do not clash, but are always gently
+shimmering, dissolved in uniform clearness. The admirable drawing of
+horses and men is so precise and seems so simple, that one can only
+slowly understand the extent of the difficulty overcome, the truth of
+these attitudes and the nervous delicacy of the execution.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE DANCING LESSON--PASTEL]
+
+The dancers go much further still in the expression of Degas's
+temperament. They have been studied at the _foyer_ of the Opera and at
+the rehearsal, sometimes in groups, sometimes isolated. Some pictures
+which will always count among the masterpieces of the nineteenth
+century, represent the whole _corps de ballet_ performing on the stage
+before a dark and empty house. By the feeble light of some lamps the
+black coats of the stage managers mix themselves with the gauze skirts.
+Here the draughtsman joins the great colourist: the petticoats of pink
+or white tulle, the graceful legs covered with flesh-coloured silk, the
+arms and the shoulders, and the hair crowned with flowers, offer
+motives of exquisite colour and of a tone of living flowers. But the
+psychologist does not lose his rights: not only does he amuse himself
+with noting the special movements of the dancers, but he also notes the
+anatomical defects. He shows with cruel frankness, with a strange love
+of modern character, the strong legs, the thin shoulders, and the
+provoking and vulgar heads of these frequently ugly girls of common
+origin. With the irony of an entomologist piercing the coloured insect
+he shows us the disenchanting reality in the sad shadow of the scenes,
+of these butterflies who dazzle us on the stage. He unveils the reverse
+side of a dream without, however, caricaturing; he raises even, under
+the imperfection of the bodies, the animal grace of the organisms; he
+has the severe beauty of the true. He gives to his groups of
+ballet-dancers the charming line of garlands and restores to them a
+harmony in the _ensemble_, so as to prove that he does not misjudge the
+charm conferred upon them by rhythm, however defective they may be
+individually. At other times he devotes himself to the study of their
+practice. In bare rooms with curtainless windows, in the cold and sad
+light of the boxes, he passionately draws the dancers learning their
+steps, reaching high bars with the tips of their toes, forcing
+themselves into quaint poses in order to make themselves more supple,
+manoeuvring to the sound of a fiddle scratched by an old teacher--and he
+leaves us stupefied at the knowledge, the observation, the talent
+profusely spent on these little pictures. Furthermore there are humorous
+scenes: ballet-dancers chatting in the dark with _habitues_ of the
+Opera, others looking at the house through the small opening of the
+curtain, others re-tying their shoe-laces, and they all are prodigious
+drawings of movement anatomically as correct as they are unexpected.
+Degas's old style of drawing undergoes modification: with the help of
+slight deformations, accentuations of the modelling and subtle
+falsifications of the proportions, managed with infinite tact and
+knowledge, the artist brings forth in relief the important gesture,
+subordinating to it all the others. He attempts _drawing by movement_ as
+it is caught by our eyes in life, where they do not state the
+proportions, but first of all the gesture which strikes them. In these
+drawings by Degas all the lines follow the impulsion of the thought.
+What one sees first, is the movement transmitted to the members by the
+will. The active part of the body is more carefully studied than the
+rest, which is indicated by bold foreshortenings, placed in the second
+plane, and apparently only serves to throw into relief the raised arm or
+leg. This is no longer merely _exact_, it is _true_; it is a superior
+degree of truth.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+THE DANCERS]
+
+These pictures of dancers are psychologic documents of great value. The
+physical and moral atmosphere of these surroundings is called forth by a
+master. Such and such a figure or attitude tells us more about Parisian
+life than a whole novel, and Degas has been lavish of his intellect and
+his philosophy of bitter scepticism. But they are also marvellous
+pictorial studies which, in spite of the special, anecdotal subjects,
+rise to the level of grand painting through sheer power of
+draughtsmanship and charm of tone. Degas has the special quality of
+giving the precise sensation of the third dimension. The atmosphere
+circulates round his figures; you walk round them; you see them in their
+real plane, and they present themselves in a thousand unexpected
+arrangements. Degas is undoubtedly the one man of his age who has most
+contributed towards infusing new life into the representation of human
+figures: in this respect his pictures resemble no one else's. The same
+qualities will be found in his series of women bathing. These interiors,
+where the actions of the bathers are caught amidst the stuffs, flowered
+cushions, linen, sponges and tubs, are sharp visions of modernity. Degas
+observes here, with the tenacious perfection of his talent, the
+slightest shiver of the flesh refreshed by cold water. His masterly
+drawing follows the most delicate inflexion of the muscles and suggests
+the nervous system under the skin. He observes with extraordinary
+subtlety the awkwardness of the nude being at a time when nudity is no
+longer accustomed to show itself, and this true nudity is in strong
+contrast to that of the academicians. One might say of Degas that he has
+the disease of truth, if the necessity of truth were not health itself!
+These bodies are still marked with the impressions of the garments; the
+movements remain those of a clothed being which is only nude as an
+exception. The painter notices beauty, but he looks for it particularly
+in the profound characterisation of the types which he studies, and his
+pastels have the massiveness and the sombre style of bronze. He has also
+painted cafe-scenes, prostitutes and supers, with a mocking and sad
+energy; he has even amused himself with painting washerwomen, to
+translate the movements of the women of the people. And his colour with
+its pearly whites, subdued blues and delicate greys, always elevates
+everything he does, and confers upon him a distinctive style.
+
+Finally, about 1896, Degas has revealed himself as a dreamy landscapist.
+His recent landscapes are symphonies in colours of strange harmony and
+hallucinations of rare tones, resembling music rather than painting. It
+is perhaps in these pictures that he has revealed certain dreams
+hitherto jealously hidden.
+
+And now I must speak of his technique. It is very singular and varied,
+and one of the most complicated in existence. In his first works, which
+are apparently as simple as Corot's, he does not employ the process of
+colour-spots. But many of the works in his second manner are a
+combination of drawing, painting and pastel. He has invented a kind of
+engraving mixed with wash-drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of
+special pattern. Here one can find again his meticulous spirit. He has
+many of the qualities of the scientist; he is as much chemist as
+painter. It has been said of him, that he was a great artist of the
+decadence. This is materially inexact, since his qualities of
+draughtsmanship are those of a superb Classicist, and his colouring of
+very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail,
+his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the signs of an
+extremely alert intellect who regards life prosaically and with a
+lassitude and disenchantment which are only consoled by the passion for
+truth. Certain water-colours of his heightened by pastel, and certain
+landscapes, are somewhat disconcerting through the preciousness of his
+method; others are surprisingly spontaneous. All his work has an
+undercurrent of thought. In short, this Realist is almost a mystic. He
+has observed a limited section of humanity, but what he has seen has not
+been seen so profoundly by anybody else.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS
+
+HORSES IN THE MEADOWS]
+
+Degas has exercised an occult, but very serious, influence. He has lived
+alone, without pupils and almost without friends; the only pupils one
+might speak of are the caricaturist Forain, who has painted many small
+pictures inspired by him, and the excellent American lady-artist Miss
+Mary Cassatt. But all modern draughtsmen have been taught a lesson by
+his painting: Renouard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen have been
+impressed by it, and the young generation considers Degas as a master.
+And that is also the unexpressed idea of the academicians, and
+especially of those who have sufficient talent to be able to appreciate
+all the science and power of such an art. The writer of this book
+happened one day to mention Degas's name before a member of the
+Institute. "What!" exclaimed he, "you know him? Why didn't you speak to
+me about him?" And when he received the reply, that I did not consider
+Degas to be an agreeable topic for him, the illustrious official
+answered vivaciously, "But do you think I am a fool, and that I do not
+know that Degas is one of the greatest draughtsmen who have ever
+lived?"--"Why, then, my dear sir, has he never been received at the
+Salons, and not even been decorated at the age of sixty-five?"--"Ah,"
+replied the Academician a little angrily, "that is another matter!"
+
+Degas despises glory. It is believed that he has by him a number of
+canvases which will have to be burnt after his death in accordance with
+his will. He is a man who has loved his art like a mistress, with
+jealous passion, and has sacrificed to it all that other
+artists--enthusiasts even--are accustomed to reserve for their personal
+interest. Degas, the incomparable pastellist, the faultless draughtsman,
+the bitter, satirical, pessimistic genius, is an isolated phenomenon in
+his period, a grand creator, unattached to his time. The painters and
+the select few among art-lovers know what considerable force there is in
+him. Though almost latent as yet, it will reveal itself brilliantly,
+when an opportunity arises for bringing together the vast quantity of
+his work. As is the case with Manet, though in a different sense, his
+powerful classic qualities will become most prominent in this ordeal,
+and this classicism has never abandoned him in his audacities. To Degas
+is due a new method of observation in drawing. He will have been the
+first to study the relation between the moving lines of a living being
+and the immovable lines of the scene which serves as its setting; the
+first, also, to define drawing, not as a graphic science, but as the
+valuation of the third dimension, and thus to apply to painting the
+principles hitherto reserved for sculpture. Finally, he will be counted
+among the great analysts. His vision, tenacious, intense, and sombre,
+stimulates thought: across what appears to be the most immediate and
+even the most vulgar reality it reaches a grand, artistic style; it
+states profoundly the facts of life, it condenses a little the human
+soul: and this will suffice to secure for Degas an important place in
+his epoch, a little apart from Impressionism. Without noise, and through
+the sheer charm of his originality, he has contributed his share towards
+undermining the false doctrines of academic art before the painters, as
+Manet has undermined them before the public.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+AN INTERIOR, AFTER DINNER]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
+
+
+With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant
+technical expression, and touch upon the principal points referred to in
+the second chapter of this book.
+
+Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and
+Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road
+to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study
+of the laws of light. His work is a magnificent verification of the
+optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul. It is born
+spontaneously from the artist's vision, and happens to be a rigorous
+demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared
+to know. Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to
+join hands with the scientist. His work supplies not only the very
+basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed
+it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws. It
+will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds
+met by the artists hitherto, and it will also serve to endow decorative
+art and mural painting with a process, the applications of which are
+manyfold and splendid.
+
+I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet's
+painting more clearly even than from Manet's. Suppression of local
+colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and
+division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed
+colours--these are the essential principles of _chromatism_ (for this
+word should be used instead of the very vague term "Impressionism").
+Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape
+painting.
+
+There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an
+excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.
+One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined
+jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself
+be sufficient to save from oblivion the man who has painted it. But the
+study of light upon the figure has been the special preoccupation of
+Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and, after the Impressionists, of the great
+lyricist, Albert Besnard, who has concentrated the Impressionist
+qualities by placing them at the service of a very personal conception
+of symbolistic art. Monet commenced with trying to find his way by
+painting figures, then landscapes and principally sea pictures and boats
+in harbours, with a somewhat sombre robustness and very broad and solid
+draughtsmanship. His first luminous studies date back to about 1885.
+Obedient to the same ideas as Degas he had to avoid the Salons and only
+show his pictures gradually in private galleries. For years he remained
+unknown. It is only giving M. Durand-Ruel his due, to state that he was
+one of the first to anticipate the Impressionist school and to buy the
+first works of these painters, who were treated as madmen and
+charlatans. He has become great with them, and has made his fortune and
+theirs through having had confidence in them, and no fortune has been
+better deserved. Thirty years ago nobody would have bought pictures by
+Degas or Monet, which are sold to-day for a thousand pounds. This detail
+is only mentioned to show the evolution of Impressionism as regards
+public opinion.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR]
+
+So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis of the laws of light
+that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show
+clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series
+of pictures painted from nature at all hours of the day. This is the
+principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might
+be called "Investigation of the variations of sunlight." The most famous
+of these series are the _Hay-ricks_, the _Poplars_, the _Cliffs of
+Etretat_, the _Golfe Juan_, the _Coins de Riviere_, the _Cathedrals_,
+the _Water-lilies_, and finally the _Thames_ series which Monet is at
+present engaged upon. They are like great poems, and the splendour of
+the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the
+symphonic _parti-pris_ of the colours, make their realism, the minute
+contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.
+
+Monet paints these series from nature. He is said to take with him in a
+carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to
+hour, taking them up again the next day. He notes, for example, from
+nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick;
+at ten o'clock he passes on to another canvas and recommences the study
+until eleven o'clock. Thus he follows step by step the modifications of
+the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of
+the whole series. He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times
+over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different. He exhibits them
+together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history
+of light playing upon one and the same object. It is a dazzling display
+of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation. Light is certainly
+the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is
+thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see
+the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the
+arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with
+infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric
+vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights
+where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange,
+predominate, and it is the proportional quantity of the spots that
+differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights,
+just as it actually happens in optic science. There are some midday
+scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette--tree, hay-rick,
+or rock--is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust
+of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as
+he would in actual sunlight. Sometimes even there are no more shadows at
+all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create
+contrasts of colours. Everything is light, and the painter seems easily
+to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a
+gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE]
+
+Generally he finds a very simple _motif_ sufficient; a hay-rick, some
+slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also
+proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater
+complexity. Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst
+tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction
+of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a
+cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river,
+or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun. All
+this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or
+fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in
+the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped
+with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain
+distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented
+with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has
+dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the
+secret order which has presided over this accumulation of spots which
+seem projected in a furious shower. It is a veritable orchestral piece,
+where every colour is an instrument with a distinct part, and where the
+hours with their different tints represent the successive themes. Monet
+is the equal of the greatest landscape painters as regards the
+comprehension of the true character of every soil he has studied, which
+is the supreme quality of his art. Though absorbed beyond all by study
+of the sunlight, he has thought it useless to go to Morocco or Algeria.
+He has found Brittany, Holland, the _Ile de France_, the _Cote d'Azur_
+and England sufficient sources of inspiration for his symphonies, which
+cover from end to end the scale of perceptible colours. He has
+expressed, for instance, the mild and vaporous softness of the
+Mediterranean, the luxuriant vegetation of the gardens of Cannes and
+Antibes, with a truthfulness and knowledge of the psychology of land and
+water which can only be properly appreciated by those who live in this
+enchanted region. This has not prevented him from understanding better
+than anybody the wildness, the grand austereness of the rocks of
+_Belle-Isle en mer_, to express it in pictures in which one really feels
+the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking
+against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of
+_Water-lilies_ expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet
+basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has
+painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of
+bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at
+twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, tulip-fields in Holland,
+bouquets, effects of snow and hoar frost of exquisite softness, and
+sailing boats passing in the sun. He has painted some views of the banks
+of the Seine which are quite wonderful in their power of conjuring up
+these scenes, and over all this has roved his splendid vision of a
+great, amorous and radiant colourist. The _Cathedrals_ are even more of
+a _tour de force_ of his talent. They consist of seventeen studies of
+Rouen Cathedral, the towers of which fill the whole of the picture,
+leaving barely a little space, a little corner of the square, at the
+foot of the enormous stone-shafts which mount to the very top of the
+picture. Here he has no proper means to express the play of the
+reflections, no changeful waters or foliage: the grey stone, worn by
+time and blackened by centuries, is for seventeen times the monochrome,
+the thankless theme upon which the painter is about to exercise his
+vision. But Monet finds means of making the most dazzling atmospheric
+harmonies sparkle upon this stone. Pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at
+midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun,
+standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist,
+the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with
+its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without
+minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the
+composite, bold and rich tone of Oriental carpets.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+POPLARS ON THE EPTE IN AUTUMN]
+
+Monet excels also in suggesting the _drawing of light_, if I may venture
+to use this expression. He makes us understand the movement of the
+vibrations of heat, the movement of the luminous waves; he also
+understands how to paint the sensation of strong wind. "Before one of
+Manet's pictures," said Mme. Morisot, "I always know which way to
+incline my umbrella." Monet is also an incomparable painter of water.
+Pond, river, or sea--he knows how to differentiate their colouring,
+their consistency, and their currents, and he transfixes a moment of
+their fleeting life. He is intuitive to an exceptional degree in the
+intimate composition of matter, water, earth, stone or air, and this
+intuition serves him in place of intellectuality in his art. He is a
+painter _par excellence_, a man born for painting, and this power of
+penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a
+kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate
+truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is
+the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist,
+Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.
+
+His work is immense. He produces with astonishing rapidity, and he has
+yet another characteristic of the great painters: that of having put his
+hand to every kind of subject. His recent studies of the Thames are, at
+the decline of his energetic maturity, as beautiful and as spontaneous
+as the _Hay-ricks_ of seventeen years back. They are thrillingly
+truthful visions of fairy mists, where showers of silver and gold
+sparkle through rosy vapours; and at the same time Monet combines in
+this series the dream-landscapes of Turner with Monticelli's
+accumulation of precious stones. Thus interpreted by this intense
+faculty of synthesis, nature, simplified in detail and contemplated in
+its grand lines, becomes truly a living dream.
+
+Since the _Hay-ricks_ one can say that the work of Claude Monet is
+glorious. It has been made sacred to the admiring love of the
+connoisseurs on the day when Monet joined Rodin in an exhibition which
+is famous in the annals of modern art. Yet no official distinction has
+intervened to recognise one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth
+century. The influence of Monet has been enormous all over Europe and
+America. The _process of colour spots_[1] (let us adhere to this
+rudimentary name which has become current) has been adopted by a whole
+crowd of painters. I shall have to say a few words about it at the end
+of this book. But it is befitting to terminate this all too short study
+by explaining that the most lyrical of the Impressionists has also been
+the theorist _par excellence_. His work connects easel painting with
+mural painting. No Minister of Fine Arts has been found, who would
+surmount the systematic opposition of the official painters, and give
+Manet a commission for grand mural compositions, for which his method is
+admirably suited. It has taken long years before such works were
+entrusted to Besnard, who, with Puvis de Chavannes, has given Paris
+her most beautiful modern decorations, but Besnard's work is the direct
+outcome of Claude Monet's harmonies. The principle of the division of
+tones and of the study of complementary colours has been full of
+revelations, and one of the most fruitful theories. It has probably been
+the principle which will designate most clearly the originality of the
+painting of the future. To have invented it, is enough to secure
+permanent glory for a man. And without wishing to put again the question
+of the antagonism of realism and idealism, one may well say that a
+painter who invents a method and shows such power, is highly
+intellectual and gifted with a pictorial intelligence. Whatever the
+subjects he treats, he creates an aesthetic emotion equivalent, if not
+similar, to those engendered by the most complex symbolism. In his
+ardent love of nature Monet has found his greatness; he suggests the
+secrets by stating the evident facts. That is the law common to all the
+arts.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Procede de la tache._]
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
+
+THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK
+
+
+The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of
+forty years. It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist
+art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general
+destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art
+movement. It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy
+magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the
+technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite. Like
+Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has
+treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes
+and still-life, all with equal beauty.
+
+His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.
+His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses
+the same technique as Boucher: fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy,
+laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the principal
+values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those
+of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the
+opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious attitudes and an
+effort towards decorative convention. Nevertheless, his _Bathers_, of
+which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern
+and personal. Renoir's nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas,
+whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in
+the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally
+looked for in the features of the clothed being. Nor is Renoir's nude
+that of the academicians, that poetised nude arranged according to a
+pseudo-Greek ideal, which has nothing in common with contemporary women.
+What Renoir sees in the nude is less the line, than the brilliancy of
+the epidermis, the luminous, nacreous substance of the flesh: it is the
+"ideal clay"; and in this he shows the vision of a poet; he transfigures
+reality, but in a very different sense from that of the School.
+Renoir's woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless,
+wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub. He sets her in backgrounds of
+foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents. She is a luxuriant, firm,
+healthy and naive woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes
+wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and
+her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti,
+born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where
+entire ingenuousness is a guarantee against all indecency. One cannot
+but be astonished at this mixture of "Japanism," savagism and eighteenth
+century taste, which constitutes inimitably the nude of Renoir.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+DEJEUNER]
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+IN THE BOX]
+
+M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist
+methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits.
+Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet.
+These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the
+objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are
+frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in
+the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of
+depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as
+interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the
+interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the
+essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He
+knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time;
+how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate,
+behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches
+which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is
+now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the _Dejeuner des
+Canotiers_, the _Bal au Moulin de la Galette_, the _Box_, the _Terrace_,
+the _First Step_, the _Sleeping Woman with a Cat_, and his most
+beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied
+with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent
+of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the _Woman with the broken neck_ is related
+to Manet; the portrait of _Sisley_ invents pointillism fifteen years
+before the pointillists; _La Pensee_, this masterpiece, evokes
+Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the
+_Jeune Fille au panier_ is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the
+delightful _Jeune Fille a la promenade_ is connected with Fragonard; the
+_Box_, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole
+worldliness of 1875. The portrait of _Jeanne Samary_ is an evocation of
+the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white
+satin and golden hair.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+YOUNG GIRL PROMENADING]
+
+Renoir's realism bears in spite of all, the imprint of the lyric spirit
+and of sweetness. It has neither the nervous veracity of Manet, nor the
+bitterness of Degas, who both love their epoch and find it interesting
+without idealising it and who have the vision of psychologist novelists.
+Before everything else he is a painter. What he sees in the _Bal au
+Moulin de la Galette_, are not the stigmata of vice and impudence, the
+ridiculous and the sad sides of the doubtful types of this low resort.
+He sees the gaiety of Sundays, the flashes of the sun, the oddity of a
+crowd carried away by the rhythm of the valses, the laughter, the
+clinking of glasses, the vibrating and hot atmosphere; and he applies
+to this spectacle of joyous vulgarity his gifts as a sumptuous
+colourist, the arabesque of the lines, the gracefulness of his bathers,
+and the happy eurythmy of his soul. The straw hats are changed into
+gold, the blue jackets are sapphires, and out of a still exact realism
+is born a poem of light. The _Dejeuner des Canotiers_ is a subject which
+has been painted a hundred times, either for the purpose of studying
+popular types, or of painting white table-cloths amidst sunny foliage.
+Yet Renoir is the only painter who has raised this small subject to the
+proportions and the style of a large canvas, through the pictorial charm
+and the masterly richness of the arrangement. The _Box_, conceived in a
+low harmony, in a golden twilight, is a work worthy of Reynolds. The
+pale and attentive face of the lady makes one think of the great English
+master's best works; the necklace, the flesh, the flounce of lace and
+the hands are marvels of skill and of taste, which the greatest modern
+virtuosos, Sargent and Besnard, have not surpassed, and, as far as the
+man in the background is concerned, his white waistcoat, his
+dress-coat, his gloved hand would suffice to secure the fame of a
+painter. The _Sleeping Woman_, the _First Step_, the _Terrace_, and the
+decorative _Dance_ panels reveal Renoir as an _intimiste_ and as an
+admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of
+grasping nature and of ingenuity--strangers to all decadent
+complexity--have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have
+expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with
+over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of
+dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with
+inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+WOMAN'S BUST]
+
+His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It
+seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the
+palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches
+for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical
+dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to
+take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and
+conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in assembling those tones
+which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed
+strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded
+colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he
+can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One
+feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian
+shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one
+refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional
+virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It
+is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the
+most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his
+generation. The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques
+according to their own character: the gladioles and roses in pasty
+paint, the poor flowers of the field are defined by a cross-hatching of
+little touches. Influenced by the purple shadow of the large
+flower-decked hats, the heads of young girls are painted on coarse
+canvas, sketched in broad strokes, with the hair in one colour only.
+Some little study appears like wool, some other has the air of agate,
+or is marbled and veined according to his inexplicable whim. We have
+here an incessant confusion of methods, a complete emancipation of the
+virtuoso who listens only to his fancy. Now and then the harmonies are
+false and the drawing incorrect, but these weaknesses do at least no
+harm to the values, the character and the general movement of the work,
+which are rather accentuated by them.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+YOUNG WOMAN IN EMPIRE COSTUME]
+
+Surely, it would be false to exclude ideologist painting which has
+produced wonders, and not less iniquitous to reproach Impressionism with
+not having taken any interest in it! One has to avoid the kind of
+criticism which consists in reproaching one movement with not having had
+the qualities of the others whilst maintaining its own, and we have
+abandoned the idea of Beauty divided into a certain number of clauses
+and programmes, towards the sum total of which the efforts of the
+eclectic candidates are directed. M. Renoir is probably the most
+representative figure of a movement where he seems to have united all
+the qualities of his friends. To criticise him means to criticise
+Impressionism itself. Having spent half of its strength in proving to
+its adversaries that they were wrong, and the other half in inventing
+technical methods, it is not surprising to find that Impressionism has
+been wanting in intellectual depth and has left to its successors the
+care of realising works of great thought. But it has brought us a sunny
+smile, a breath of pure air. It is so fascinating, that one cannot but
+love its very mistakes which make it more human and more accessible.
+Renoir is the most lyrical, the most musical, the most subtle of the
+masters of this art. Some of his landscapes are as beautiful as those of
+Claude Monet. His nudes are as masterly in painting as Manet's, and more
+supple. Not having attained the scientific drawing which one finds in
+Degas's, they have a grace and a brilliancy which Degas's nudes have
+never known. If his rare portraits of men are inferior to those of his
+rivals, his women's portraits have a frequently superior distinction.
+His great modern compositions are equal to the most beautiful works by
+Manet and Degas. His inequalities are also more striking than theirs.
+Being a fantastic, nervous improvisator he is more exposed to radical
+mistakes. But he is a profoundly sincere and conscientious artist.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR
+
+ON THE TERRACE]
+
+The race speaks in him. It is inexplicable that he should not have met
+with startling success, since he is voluptuous, bright, happy and
+learned without heaviness. One has to attribute his relative isolation
+to the violence of the controversies, and particularly to the dignity of
+a poet gently disdainful of public opinion and paying attention solely
+to painting, his great and only love. Manet has been a fighter whose
+works have created scandal. Renoir has neither shown, nor hidden
+himself: he has painted according to his dream, spreading his works,
+without mixing up his name or his personality with the tumult that raged
+around his friends. And now, for that very reason, his work appears
+fresher and younger, more primitive and candid, more intoxicated with
+flowers, flesh and sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE SECONDARY PAINTERS OF IMPRESSIONISM--CAMILLE PISSARRO, ALFRED
+SISLEY, PAUL CEZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MISS MARY CASSATT, EVA GONZALES,
+GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE, BAZILLE, ALBERT LEBOURG, EUGENE BOUDIN.
+
+
+Manet, Degas, Monet and Renoir will present themselves as a glorious
+quartet of masters, in the history of painting. We must now speak of
+some personalities who have grown up by their side and who, without
+being great, offer nevertheless a rich and beautiful series of works.
+
+Of these personalities the most considerable is certainly that of M.
+Camille Pissarro. He painted according to some wise and somewhat timid
+formulas, when Manet's example won him over to Impressionism to which he
+has remained faithful. M. Pissarro has been enormously productive. His
+work is composed of landscapes, rustic scenes, and studies of streets
+and markets. His first landscapes are in the manner of Corot, but bathed
+in blond colour: vast cornfields, sunny woods, skies with big, flocking
+clouds, effects of soft light--these are the motifs of some charming
+canvases which have a solid, classic quality. Later the artist adopted
+the method of the dissociation of tones, from which he obtained some
+happy effects. His harvest and market scenes are luminous and alive. The
+figures in these recall those of Millet. They bear witness to high
+qualities of sincere observation, and are the work of a man profoundly
+enamoured of rustic life. M. Pissarro excels in grouping the figures, in
+correctly catching their attitudes and in rendering the medley of a
+crowd in the sun. Certain fans in particular will always remain
+delightful caprices of fresh colour, but it would be vain to look in
+this attractive, animated and clear painting for the psychologic gifts,
+the profound feeling for grand silhouettes, and the intuition of the
+worn and gloomy soul of the men of the soil, which have made Millet's
+noble glory. At the time when, about 1885, the neo-Impressionists whom
+we shall study later on invented the Pointillist method, M. Pissarro
+tried it and applied it judiciously, with the patient, serious and
+slightly anxious talent, by which he is distinguished. Recently, in a
+series of pictures representing views of Paris (the boulevards and the
+Avenue de l'Opera) M. Pissarro has shewn rare vision and skill and has
+perhaps signed his most beautiful and personal paintings. The
+perspective, the lighting, the tones of the houses and of the crowds,
+the reflections of rain or sunshine are intensely true; they make one
+feel the atmosphere, the charm and the soul of Paris. One can say of
+Pissarro that he lacks none of the gifts of his profession. He is a
+learned, fruitful and upright artist. But he has lacked originality; he
+always recalls those whom he admires and whose ideas he applies boldly
+and tastefully. It is probable that his conscientious nature has
+contributed not little towards keeping him in the second rank.
+Incapable, certainly, of voluntarily imitating, this excellent and
+diligent painter has not had the sparks of genius of his friends, but
+all that can be given to a man through conscientious study, striving
+after truth and love of art, has been acquired by M. Pissarro. The rest
+depended on destiny only. There is no character more worthy of respect
+and no effort more meritorious than his, and there can be no better
+proof of his disinterestedness and his modesty, than the fact that,
+although he has thirty years of work behind him, an honoured name and
+white hair, M. Pissarro did not hesitate to adopt, quite frankly, the
+technique of the young Pointillist painters, his juniors, because it
+appeared to him better than his own. He is, if not a great painter, at
+least one of the most interesting rustic landscape painters of our
+epoch. His visions of the country are quite his own, and are a
+harmonious mixture of Classicism and Impressionism which will secure one
+of the most honourable places to his work.
+
+[Illustration: PISSARRO
+
+RUE DE L'EPICERIE, ROUEN]
+
+[Illustration: PISSARRO
+
+BOULEVARDE MONTMARTRE]
+
+[Illustration: PISSARRO
+
+THE BOILDIEAUX BRIDGE AT ROUEN]
+
+[Illustration: PISSARO
+
+THE AVENUE DE L'OPERA]
+
+There has, perhaps, been more original individuality in the landscape
+painter Alfred Sisley. He possessed in the highest degree the feeling
+for light, and if he did not have the power, the masterly passion of
+Claude Monet, he will at least deserve to be frequently placed by his
+side as regards the expression of certain combinations of light. He did
+not have the decorative feeling which makes Monet's landscapes so
+imposing; one does not see in his work that surprising lyrical
+interpretation which knows how to express the drama of the raging waves,
+the heavy slumber of enormous masses of rock, the intense torpor of the
+sun on the sea. But in all that concerns the mild aspects of the _Ile de
+France_, the sweet and fresh landscapes, Sisley is not unworthy of being
+compared with Monet. He equals him in numerous pictures; he has a
+similar delicacy of perception, a similar fervour of execution. He is
+the painter of great, blue rivers curving towards the horizon; of
+blossoming orchards; of bright hills with red-roofed hamlets scattered
+about; he is, beyond all, the painter of French skies which he presents
+with admirable vivacity and facility. He has the feeling for the
+transparency of atmosphere, and if his technique allies him directly
+with Impressionism, one can well feel, that he painted spontaneously and
+that this technique happened to be adapted to his nature, without his
+having attempted to appropriate it for the sake of novelty. Sisley has
+painted a notable series of pictures in the quaint village of Moret on
+the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he died at a ripe
+age, and these canvases will figure among the most charming landscapes
+of our epoch. Sisley was a veteran of Impressionism. At the Exhibition
+of 1900, in the two rooms reserved for the works of this school, there
+were to be seen a dozen of Sisley's canvases. By the side of the finest
+Renoirs, Monets and Manets they kept their charm and their brilliancy
+with a singular flavour, and this was for many critics a revelation as
+to the real place of this artist, whom they had hitherto considered as a
+pretty colourist of only relative importance.
+
+[Illustration: SISLEY
+
+SNOW EFFECT]
+
+[Illustration: SISLEY
+
+BOUGIVAL, AT THE WATER'S EDGE]
+
+[Illustration: SISLEY
+
+BRIDGE AT MORET]
+
+Paul Cezanne, unknown to the public, is appreciated by a small group of
+art lovers. He is an artist who lives in Provence, away from the world;
+he is supposed to have served as model for the Impressionist painter
+Claude Lantier, described by Zola in his celebrated novel "L'Oeuvre."
+Cezanne has painted landscapes, rustic scenes and still-life pictures.
+His figures are clumsy and brutal and inharmonious in colour, but his
+landscapes have the merit of a robust simplicity of vision. These
+pictures are almost primitive, and they are loved by the young
+Impressionists because of their exclusion of all "cleverness." A charm
+of rude simplicity and sincerity can be found in these works in which
+Cezanne employs only just the means which are indispensable for his end.
+His still-life pictures are particularly interesting owing to the
+spotless brilliancy of their colours, the straightforwardness of the
+tones, and the originality of certain shades analogous to those of old
+faience. Cezanne is a conscientious painter without skill, intensely
+absorbed in rendering what he sees, and his strong and tenacious
+attention has sometimes succeeded in finding beauty. He reminds more of
+an ancient Gothic craftsman, than of a modern artist, and he is full of
+repose as a contrast to the dazzling virtuosity of so many painters.
+
+[Illustration: CEZANNE
+
+DESSERT]
+
+Berthe Morisot will remain the most fascinating figure of
+Impressionism,--the one who has stated most precisely the femineity of
+this luminous and iridescent art. Having married Eugene Manet, the
+brother of the great painter, she exhibited at various private
+galleries, where the works of the first Impressionists were to be
+seen, and became as famous for her talent as for her beauty. When Manet
+died, she took charge of his memory and of his work, and she helped with
+all her energetic intelligence to procure them their just and final
+estimation. Mme. Eugene Manet has certainly been one of the most
+beautiful types of French women of the end of the nineteenth century.
+When she died prematurely at the age of fifty (in 1895), she left a
+considerable amount of work: gardens, young girls, water-colours of
+refined taste, of surprising energy, and of a colouring as
+distinguished, as it is unexpected. As great grand-daughter of
+Fragonard, Berthe Morisot (since we ought to leave her the name with
+which her respect for Manet's great name made her always sign her works)
+seemed to have inherited from her famous ancestor his French
+gracefulness, his spirited elegance, and all his other great qualities.
+She has also felt the influence of Corot, of Manet and of Renoir. All
+her work is bathed in brightness, in azure, in sunlight; it is a woman's
+work, but it has a strength, a freedom of touch and an originality,
+which one would hardly have expected. Her water-colours, particularly,
+belong to a superior art: some notes of colour suffice to indicate sky,
+sea, or a forest background, and everything shows a sure and masterly
+fancy, for which our time can offer no analogy. A series of Berthe
+Morisot's works looks like a veritable bouquet whose brilliancy is due
+less to the colour-schemes which are comparatively soft, grey and blue,
+than to the absolute correctness of the values. A hundred canvases, and
+perhaps three hundred water-colours attest this talent of the first
+rank. Normandy coast scenes with pearly skies and turquoise horizons,
+sparkling Nice gardens, fruit-laden orchards, girls in white dresses
+with big flower-decked hats, young women in ball-dress, and flowers are
+the favourite themes of this artist who was the friend of Renoir, of
+Degas and of Mallarme.
+
+[Illustration: BERTHE MORISOT
+
+MELANCHOLY]
+
+[Illustration: BERTHE MORISOT
+
+YOUNG WOMAN SEATED]
+
+Miss Mary Cassatt will deserve a place by her side. American by birth,
+she became French through her assiduous participation in the exhibitions
+of the Impressionists. She is one of the very few painters whom Degas
+has advised, with Forain and M. Ernest Rouart. (This latter, a painter
+himself, a son of the painter and wealthy collector Henri Rouart, has
+married Mme. Manet's daughter who is also an artist.) Miss Cassatt has
+made a speciality of studying children, and she is, perhaps, the artist
+of this period who has understood and expressed them with the greatest
+originality. She is a pastellist of note, and some of her pastels are as
+good as Manet's and Degas's, so far as broad execution and brilliancy
+and delicacy of tones are concerned. Ten years ago Miss Cassatt
+exhibited a series of ten etchings in colour, representing scenes of
+mothers and children at their toilet. At that time this _genre_ was
+almost abandoned, and Miss Cassatt caused astonishment by her boldness
+which faced the most serious difficulties. One can relish in this
+artist's pictures, besides the great qualities of solid draughtsmanship,
+correct values, and skilful interpretation of flesh and stuffs, a
+profound sentiment of infantile life, childish gestures, clear and
+unconscious looks, and the loving expression of the mothers. Miss
+Cassatt is the painter and psychologist of babies and young mothers whom
+she likes to depict in the freshness of an orchard, or against
+backgrounds of the flowered hangings of dressing-rooms, amidst bright
+linen, tubs, and china, in smiling intimacy. To these two remarkable
+women another has to be added, Eva Gonzales, the favourite pupil of
+Manet who has painted a fine portrait of her. Eva Gonzales became the
+wife of the excellent engraver Henri Guerard, and died prematurely, not,
+however, before one was able to admire her talent as an exquisitely
+delicate pastellist. Having first been a pupil of Chaplin, she soon came
+to forget the tricks of technique in order to acquire under Manet's
+guidance the qualities of clearness and the strength of the great
+painter of _Argenteuil_; and she would certainly have taken one of the
+first places in modern art, had not her career been cut short by death.
+A small pastel at the Luxembourg Gallery proves her convincing qualities
+as a colourist.
+
+[Illustration: MARY CASSATT
+
+GETTING UP BABY]
+
+[Illustration: MARY CASSATT
+
+WOMEN AND CHILD]
+
+Gustave Caillebotte was a friend of the Impressionists from the very
+first hour. He was rich, fond of art, and himself a painter of great
+merit who modestly kept hidden behind his comrades. His picture _Les
+raboteurs de parquets_ made him formerly the butt of derision. To-day
+his work, at the Luxembourg Gallery seems hardly a fit pretext for so
+much controversy, but at that time much was considered as madness,
+that to our eyes appears quite natural. This picture is a study of
+oblique perspective and its curious _ensemble_ of rising lines sufficed
+to provoke astonishment. The work is, moreover, grey and discreet in
+colour and has some qualities of fine light, but is on the whole not
+very interesting. Recently an exhibition of works by Caillebotte has
+made it apparent that this amateur was a misjudged painter. The
+still-life pictures in this exhibition were specially remarkable. But
+the name of Caillebotte was destined to reach the public only in
+connection with controversies and scandal. When he died, he left to the
+State a magnificent collection of objets-d'art and of old pictures, and
+also a collection of Impressionist works, stipulating that these two
+bequests should be inseparable. He wished by this means to impose the
+works of his friends upon the museums, and thus avenge their unjust
+neglect. The State accepted the two legacies, since the Louvre
+absolutely wanted to benefit by the ancient portion, in spite of the
+efforts of the Academicians who revolted against the acceptance of the
+modern part. On this occasion one could see how far the official
+artists were carried by their hatred of the Impressionists. A group of
+Academicians, professors at the _Ecole des Beaux-Arts_, threatened the
+minister that they would resign _en masse_. "We cannot," they wrote to
+the papers, "continue to teach an art of which we believe we know the
+laws, from the moment the State admits into the museums, where our
+pupils can see them, works which are the very negation of all we teach."
+A heated discussion followed in the press, and the minister boldly
+declared that Impressionism, good or bad, had attracted the attention of
+the public, and that it was the duty of the State to receive impartially
+the work of all the art movements; the public would know how to judge
+and choose; the Government's duty was not to influence them by showing
+them only one style of painting, but to remain in historic neutrality.
+Thanks to this clever reply, the Academicians, among whom M. Gerome was
+the most rabid, resigned themselves to keeping their posts. A similar
+incident, less publicly violent, but equally strange, occurred on the
+occasion of the admission to the Luxembourg Gallery of the portrait of
+M. Whistler's mother, a masterpiece of which the gallery is proud
+to-day, and for which a group of writers and art lovers had succeeded in
+opening the way. It is difficult to imagine the degree of irritation and
+obstruction of the official painters against all the ideas of the new
+painting, and if it had only depended upon them, there can be no doubt
+that Manet and his friends would have died in total obscurity, not only
+banished from the Salons and museums, but also treated as madmen and
+robbed of the possibility of living by their work.
+
+The Caillebotte collection was installed under conditions which the
+ill-will of the administrators made at least as deplorable as possible.
+The works were crowded into a small, badly lighted room, where it is
+absolutely impossible to see them from the distance required by the
+method of the division of tones, and the meanness of the opposition was
+such that, the pictures having been bequeathed without frames, the
+keeper was obliged to have recourse to the reserves of the Louvre,
+because he was refused the necessary credit for purchasing them. The
+collection is however beautiful and interesting. It does not represent
+Impressionism in all its brilliancy, since the works by which it is
+composed had been bought by Caillebotte at a time, when his friends were
+still far from having arrived at the full blossoming of their qualities.
+But some very fine things can at least be found there. Renoir is
+marvellously represented by the _Moulin de la Galette_, which is one of
+his masterpieces. Degas figures with seven beautiful pastels, Monet with
+some landscapes grand in style; Sisley and Pissarro appear scarcely to
+their advantage, and finally it is to be regretted, that Manet is only
+represented by a study in black in his first manner, the _Balcony_,
+which does not count among his best pictures, and the famous _Olympia_
+whose importance is more historical than intrinsic. The gallery has
+separately acquired a _Young Girl in Ball Dress_ by Berthe Morisot,
+which is a delicate marvel of grace and freshness. And in the place of
+honour of the gallery is to be seen Fantin-Latour's great picture
+_Hommage a Manet_, in which the painter, seated before his easel, is
+surrounded by his friends; and this canvas may well be considered the
+emblem of the slow triumph of Impressionism, and of the amends for a
+great injustice.
+
+It is in this picture that the young painter Bazille is represented, a
+friend and pupil of Manet's, who was killed during the war of 1870, and
+who should not be forgotten here. He has left a few canvases marked by
+great talent, and would no doubt have counted among the most original
+contemporary artists. We shall terminate this all too short enumeration
+with two remarkable landscapists; the one is Albert Lebourg who paints
+in suave and poetic colour schemes, with blues and greens of particular
+tenderness, a painter who will take his place in the history of
+Impressionism. The other is Eugene Boudin. He has not adopted Claude
+Monet's technique; but I have already said that the vague and inexact
+term "Impressionism" must be understood to comprise a group of painters
+showing originality in the study of light and getting away from the
+academic spirit. As to this, Eugene Boudin deserves to be placed in the
+first rank. His canvases will be the pride of the best arranged
+galleries. He is an admirable seascape painter. He has known how to
+render with unfailing mastery, the grey waters of the Channel, the
+stormy skies, the heavy clouds, the effects of sunlight feebly piercing
+the prevailing grey. His numerous pictures painted at the port of Havre
+are profoundly expressive. Nobody has excelled him in drawing
+sailing-boats, in giving the exact feeling of the keels plunged into the
+water, in grouping the masts, in rendering the activity of a port, in
+indicating the value of a sail against the sky, the fluidity of calm
+water, the melancholy of the distance, the shiver of short waves rippled
+by the breeze. Boudin is a learned colourist of grey tones. His
+Impressionism consists in the exclusion of useless details, his
+comprehension of reflections, his feeling for values, the boldness of
+his composition and his faculty of directly perceiving nature and the
+transparency of atmosphere: he reminds sometimes of Constable and of
+Corot. Boudin's production has been enormous, and nothing that he has
+done is indifferent. He is one of those artists who have not a brilliant
+career, but who will last, and whose name, faithfully retained by the
+elect, is sure of immortality. He may be considered an isolated
+artist, on the border line between Classicism and Impressionism, and
+this is unquestionably the cause of the comparative obscurity of his
+fame. The same might be said of the ingenuous and fine landscapist
+Hervier, who has left such interesting canvases; and of the Lyons
+water-colour painter Ravier who, almost absolutely unknown, came very
+close to Monticelli and showed admirable gifts. It must, however, be
+recognised that Boudin is nearer to Impressionism than to any other
+grouping of artists, and he must be considered as a small master of pure
+French lineage. Finally, if a question of nationality prevents me from
+enlarging upon the subject of the rank of precursor which must be
+accorded to the great Dutch landscapist Jongkind, I must at least
+mention his name. His water-colour sketches have been veritable
+revelations for several Impressionists. Eugene Boudin and Berthe Morisot
+have derived special benefit from them, and they are valuable lessons
+for many young painters of the present day.
+
+[Illustration: JONGKIND
+
+IN HOLLAND]
+
+[Illustration: JONGKIND
+
+VIEW OF THE HAGUE]
+
+We do not pretend to have mentioned in this chapter all the painters
+directly connected with the first Impressionist movement. We have
+confined ourselves to enumerating the most important only, and each of
+them would deserve a complete essay. But our object will have been
+achieved, if we have inspired art-lovers with just esteem for this brave
+phalanx of artists who have proved better than any aesthetic
+commentaries the vitality, the originality, and the logic of Manet's
+theories, the great importance of the notions introduced by him into
+painting, and who have, on the other hand, clearly demonstrated the
+uselessness of official teaching. Far from the traditions and methods of
+the School, the best of their knowledge and of their talent is due to
+their profound and sincere contemplation of nature and to their freedom
+of spirit. And for that reason they will have a permanent place in the
+evolution of their art.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAELLI,
+TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, FORAIN, CHERET, ETC.
+
+
+Not the least important result of Impressionism has been the veritable
+revolution effected by it in the art of illustration. It was only
+natural that its principles should have led to it. The substitution of
+the beauty of character for the beauty of proportion was bound to move
+the artists to regard illustration in a new light; and as pictorial
+Impressionism was born of the same movement of ideas which created the
+naturalist novel and the impressionist literature of Flaubert, Zola and
+the Goncourts, and moreover as these men were united by close relations
+and a common defence, Edouard Manet's modern ideas soon took up the
+commentary of the books dealing with modern life and the description of
+actual spectacles.
+
+The Impressionists themselves have not contributed towards illustration.
+Their work has consisted in raising to the style of grand painting
+subjects, that seemed at the best only worthy of the proportion of
+vignettes, in opposition to the subjects qualified as "noble" by the
+School. The series of works by Manet and Degas may be considered as
+admirable illustrations to the novels by Zola and the Goncourts. It is a
+parallel research in modern psychologic truth. But this research has
+remained confined to pictures. It may be presumed that, had they wished
+to do so, Manet and Degas could have admirably illustrated certain
+contemporary novels, and Renoir could have produced a masterpiece in
+commenting, say, upon Verlaine's _Fetes Galantes_. The only things that
+can be mentioned here are a few drawings composed by Manet for Edgar A.
+Poe's _The Raven_ and Mallarme's _L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune_, in addition
+to a few music covers without any great interest.
+
+But if the Impressionists themselves have neglected actively to assist
+the interesting school of modern illustration, a whole legion of
+draughtsmen have immediately been inspired by their principles. One of
+their most original characteristics was the realistic representation of
+the scenes, the _mise en cadre_, and it afforded these draughtsmen an
+opportunity for revolutionising book illustration. There had already
+been some excellent artists who occupied themselves with vignette
+drawings, like Tony Johannot and Celestin Nanteuil, whose pretty and
+smart frontispieces are to be found in the old editions of Balzac. The
+genius of Honore Daumier and the high fancy of Gavarni and of Grevin had
+already announced a serious protest of modern sentiment against academic
+taste, in returning on many points to the free tradition of Eisen, of
+the two Moreaus and of Debucourt. Since 1845 the draughtsman Constantin
+Guys, Baudelaire's friend, gave evidence, in his most animated
+water-colour drawings, of a curious vision of nervous elegance and of
+expressive skill quite in accord with the ideas of the day.
+Impressionism, and also the revelation of the Japanese colour prints,
+gave an incredible vigour to these intuitive glimpses. Certain
+characteristics will date from the days of Impressionism. It is due to
+Impressionism that artists have ventured to show in illustration, for
+instance, figures in the foreground cut through by the margin, rising
+perspectives, figures in the background that seem to stand on a higher
+plane than the others, people seen from a second story; in a word, all
+that life presents to our eyes, without the annoying consideration for
+"style" and for arrangement, which the academic spirit obstinately
+insisted to apply to the illustration of modern life. Degas in
+particular has given many examples of this novelty in composition. One
+of his pastels has remained typical, owing to the scandal caused by it:
+he represents a dance-scene at the Opera, seen from the orchestra. The
+neck of a double bass rises in the middle of the picture and cuts into
+it, a large black silhouette, behind which sparkle the gauze-dresses and
+the lights. That can be observed any evening, and yet it would be
+difficult to recapitulate all the railleries and all the anger caused by
+so natural an audacity. Modern illustration was to be the pretext of a
+good many more outbursts!
+
+We must now consider four artists of great importance who are remarkable
+painters and have greatly raised the art of illustration. This title
+illustrator, despised by the official painters, should be given them as
+the one which has secured them the best claim to fame. They have
+restored to this title all its merit and all its brilliancy and have
+introduced into illustration the most serious qualities of painting. Of
+these four men the first in date is M.J.F. Raffaelli, who introduced
+himself about 1875 with some remarkable and intensely picturesque
+illustrations in colours in various magazines. He gave an admirable
+series of _Parisian Types_, in album form, and a series of etchings to
+accompany the text of M. Huysmans, describing the curious river "la
+Bievre" which penetrates Paris in a thousand curves, sometimes
+subterranean, sometimes above ground, and serves the tanners for washing
+the leather. This series is a model of modern illustration. But, apart
+from the book, the entire pictorial work of M. Raffaelli is a humorous
+and psychological illustration of the present time. He has painted with
+unique truth and spirit the working men's types and the small
+_bourgeois_, the poor, the hospital patients and the roamers of the
+outskirts of Paris. He has succeeded in being the poet of the sickly and
+dirty landscapes by which the capitals are surrounded; he has rendered
+their anaemic charm, the confused perspectives of houses, fences, walls
+and little gardens, and their smoke, under the melancholy of rainy
+skies. With an irony free from bitterness he has noted the clumsy
+gestures of the labourer in his Sunday garb and the grotesque
+silhouettes of the small townsmen, and has compiled a gallery of very
+real sociologic interest. M. Raffaelli has also exhibited Parisian
+landscapes in which appear great qualities of light. He excels in
+rendering the mornings in the spring, with their pearly skies, their
+pale lights, their transparency and their slight shadows, and finally he
+has proved his mastery by some large portraits, fresh harmonies,
+generally devoted to the study of different qualities of white. If the
+name "Impressionist" meant, as has been wrongly believed, an artist who
+confines himself to giving the impression of what he sees, then M.
+Raffaelli would be the real Impressionist. He suggests more than he
+paints. He employs a curious technique: he often leaves a sky completely
+bare, throwing on to the white of the canvas a few colour notes which
+suffice to give the illusion. He has a decided preference for white and
+black, and paints very slightly in small touches. His very correct
+feeling for values makes him an excellent painter; but what interests
+him beyond all, is psychologic expression. He notes it with so hasty a
+pencil, that one might almost say that he writes with colour. He is also
+an etcher of great merit, and an original sculptor. He has invented
+small bas-reliefs in bronze which can be attached to the wall, like
+sketches or nick-nacks; and he has applied his talent even to renewing
+the material for painting. He is an ingenious artist and a prolific
+producer, a roguish, but sympathetic, observer of the life of the small
+people, which has not prevented him from painting very seriously when he
+wanted to, as is witnessed among other works by his very fine portrait
+of M. Clemenceau speaking at a public meeting, in the presence of a
+vociferous audience from which rise some hundred of heads whose
+expressions are noted with really splendid energy and fervour.
+
+Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died recently, insane, leaves a great
+work behind him. He had a kind of cruel genius. Descended from one of
+the greatest families of France, badly treated by nature who made him a
+kind of ailing dwarf, he seemed to take a bitter pleasure in the study
+of modern vice. He painted scenes at cafe-concerts and the rooms of
+wantons with intense truth. Nobody has revealed better than he the
+lowness and suffering of the creatures "of pleasure," as they have been
+dubbed by the heartrending irony of life. Lautrec has shown the
+artificiality of the painted faces; the vulgarity of the types of the
+prostitutes of low origin; the infamous gestures, the disorder, the
+slovenliness of the dwellings of these women; all the shady side of
+their existence. It has been said that he loved ugliness. As a matter of
+fact, he did not exaggerate, he raised a powerful accusation against
+everything he saw. But his terrible clairvoyance passed for caricature.
+This sad psychologist was a great painter; he pleased himself with
+dressing in rose-coloured costumes the coarsest and most vulgar
+creatures he painted, such as one can find at the cabarets and concerts,
+and he enjoyed the contrast of fresh tones with the faces marked by vice
+and poverty; Lautrec's two great influences have been the Japanese and
+Degas. Of the former he retained the love for decorative arabesques and
+the unconventional grouping; of the other the learned draughtsmanship,
+expressive in its broad simplification, and one might say that the pupil
+has often been worthy of the masters. One can only regret that Lautrec
+should have confined his vision and his high faculties to the study of a
+small and very Parisian world; but, seeing his works, one cannot deny
+the science, the spirit and the grand bearing of his art. He has also
+signed some fine posters, notably a _Bruant_ which is a masterpiece of
+its kind.
+
+Degas's deep influence can be found again in J.L. Forain, who has made
+himself known by an immense series of drawings for the illustrated
+papers, drawings as remarkable in themselves as they are, through their
+legends, bitterly sarcastic in spirit. These drawings form a synthesis
+of the defects of the _bourgeoisie_, which is at the same time amusing
+and grave. They also concern, though less happily, the political world,
+in which the artist, a little intoxicated with his success, has thought
+himself able to exercise an influence by scoffing at the parliamentary
+regime. Forain's drawing has a nervous character which does, however,
+not weaken its science: every stroke reveals something and has an
+astonishing power. In his less known painting can be traced still more
+clearly the style and influence of his master Degas. They are generally
+incidents behind the scenes and at night restaurants, where caricatured
+types are painted with great force. But they are insistently
+exaggerated, they have not the restraint, the ironical and discreet
+plausibility, which give so much flavour, so much value to Degas's
+studies. Nevertheless, Forain's pictures are very significant and are of
+real interest. He is decidedly the most interesting newspaper
+illustrator of his whole generation, the one whose ephemeral art most
+closely approaches grand painting, and one of those who have most
+contributed towards the transformation of illustration for the
+contemporary press.
+
+Jules Cheret has made for himself an important and splendid position in
+contemporary art. He commenced as a lithographic workman and lived for a
+long time in London. About 1870 Cheret designed his first posters in
+black, white and red; these were at the time the only colours used. By
+and by he perfected this art and found the means of adding other tones
+and of drawing them on the lithographic stone. He returned to France,
+started a small studio, and gradually carried poster art to the
+admirable point at which it has arrived. At the same time Cheret drew
+and painted and composed himself his models. About 1885 his name became
+famous, and it has not ceased growing since. Some writers, notably the
+eminent critic Roger Marx and the novelist Huysmans, hailed in Cheret an
+original artist as well as a learned technician. He then exhibited
+decorative pictures, pastels and drawings, which placed him in the first
+rank. Cheret is universally known. The type of the Parisian woman
+created by him, and the multi-coloured harmony of his works will not be
+forgotten. His will be the honour of having invented the artistic
+poster, this feast for the eyes, this fascinating art of the street,
+which formerly languished in a tedious and dull display of commercial
+advertisements. He has been the promoter of an immense movement; he has
+been imitated, copied, parodied, but he will always remain inimitable.
+He has succeeded in realising on paper by means of lithography, the
+pastels and gouache drawings in which his admirable colourist's fancy
+mixed the most difficult shades. In Cheret can be found all the
+principles of Impressionism: opposing lights, coloured shadows,
+complementary reflections, all employed with masterly sureness and
+delightful charm. It is decorative Impressionism, conceived in a
+superior way; and this simple poster-man, despised by the painters, has
+proved himself equal to most. He has transformed the street, in the open
+light, into a veritable Salon, where his works have become famous. When
+this too modest artist decided to show his pictures and drawings, they
+were a revelation. The most remarkable pastellists of the period were
+astonished and admired his skill, his profound knowledge of technique,
+his continual _tours-de-force_ which he disguised under a shimmering
+gracefulness. The State had the good sense to entrust him with some
+large mural decorations, in which he unfolded the scale of his sparkling
+colours, and affirmed his spirit, his fancy and his dreamy art. Cheret's
+harmonies remain secrets; he uses them for the representation of
+characters from the Italian comedy, thrown with fiendish _verve_ upon a
+background of a sky, fiery with the Bengal lights of a fairy-like
+carnival, and he strangely intermingles the reality of the movements
+with the most arbitrary fancy. Cheret has also succeeded in proving his
+artistic descent by a beautiful series of drawings in sanguine: he
+descends from Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard; he is a Frenchman of pure
+blood; and when one has done admiring the grace and the happy animation
+of his imagination, one can only be surprised to see on what serious and
+sure a technique are based these decorations which appear improvised.
+Cheret's art is the smile of Impressionism and the best demonstration
+of the decorative logic of this art.
+
+These are the four artists of great merit who have created the
+transition between Impressionist painting and illustration. It would be
+fit to put aside Toulouse-Lautrec, who was much younger, but his work is
+too directly connected with that of Degas for one to take into account
+the difference of age. He produced between 1887 and 1900 works which
+might well have been ante-dated by fifteen years. We shall study in the
+next chapter his Neo-Impressionist comrades, and we shall now speak of
+some illustrators more advanced in years than he. The oldest in date is
+the engraver Henri Guerard, who died three years ago. He had married Eva
+Gonzales and was a friend of Manet's, many of whose works have been
+engraved by him. He was an artist of decided and original talent, who
+also occupied himself successfully with pyrogravure, and who was happily
+inspired by the Japanese colour-prints. His etchings deserve a place of
+honour in the folios of expert collectors; they are strong and broad. As
+to the engraver Felix Buhot, he was a rather delicate colourist in
+black and white; his Paris scenes will always be considered charming
+works. In spite of his Spanish origin, the painter, _aquarelliste_, and
+draughtsman Daniel Vierge, should be added to the list of the men
+connected with Impressionism. His illustrations are those of a great
+artist--admirable in colour, movement and observation; all the great
+principles of Impressionism are embodied in them. But there are four
+more illustrators of the first rank: Steinlen, Louis Legrand, Paul
+Renouard and Auguste Lepere.
+
+Steinlen has been enormously productive: he is specially remarkable for
+his illustrations. Those which he has designed for Aristide Bruant's
+volume of songs, _Dans la rue_, are masterpieces of their kind. They
+contain treasures of bitter observation, quaintness and knowledge. The
+soul of the lower classes is shown in them with intense truth, bitter
+revolt and comprehensive philosophy. Steinlen has also designed some
+beautiful posters, pleasing pastels, lithographs of incontestable
+technical merit, and beautifully eloquent political drawings. It cannot
+be said that he is an Impressionist in the strict sense of the word; he
+applied his colour in flat tints, more like an engraver than a painter;
+but in him too can be felt the stamp of Degas, and he is one of those
+who best demonstrate that, without Impressionism, they could not have
+been what they are.
+
+The same may be said of Louis Legrand, a pupil of Felicien Rops, an
+admirably skilful etcher, a draughtsman of keen vision, and a painter of
+curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the artists of
+to-day. Louis Legrand also shows to what extent the example of Manet and
+Degas has revolutionised the art of illustration, in freeing the
+painters from obsolete laws, and guiding them towards truth and frank
+psychological study. Legrand is full of them, without resembling them.
+We must not forget that, besides the technical innovation (division of
+tones, study of complementary colours), Impressionism has brought us
+novelty of composition, realism of character and great liberty in the
+choice of subjects. From this point of view Rops himself, in spite of
+his symbolist tendencies, could not be classed with any other group, if
+it were not that any kind of classification in art is useless and
+inaccurate. However that may be, Louis Legrand has signed some volumes
+resplendent with the most seductive qualities.
+
+Paul Renouard has devoted himself to newspaper illustration, but with
+what surprising prodigality of spirit and knowledge! The readers of the
+"Graphic" will know. This masterly virtuoso of the pencil might give
+drawing-lessons to many members of the Institute! The feeling for the
+life of crowds, psychology of types, spirited and rapid notation,
+astonishing ease in overcoming difficulties--these are his undeniable
+gifts. And again we must recognise in Renouard the example of Degas and
+Manet. His exceptional fecundity only helps to give more authority to
+his pencil. Renouard's drawings at the Exhibition of 1900 were, perhaps,
+more beautiful than the rest of his work. There was notably a series of
+studies made from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, an
+accumulation of wonders of perspectives framing scenes of such animation
+and caprice as to take away one's breath.
+
+Finally, Auguste Lepere appears as the Debucourt of our time. As
+painter, pastellist and wood-engraver he has produced since 1870, and
+has won for himself the first place among French engravers. It would be
+difficult to recount the volumes, albums and covers on which the fancy
+of his burin has played; but it is particularly in wood-engraving that
+he stands without rival. Not only has he produced masterpieces of it,
+but he has passionately devoted himself to raising this admirable art,
+the glory of the beautiful books of olden days, and to give back to it
+the lustre which had been eclipsed by mechanical processes. Lepere has
+started some publications for this purpose; he has had pupils of great
+merit, and he must be considered the master of the whole generation of
+modern wood-engravers, just as Cheret is the undisputed master of the
+poster. Lepere's ruling quality is strength. He seems to have
+rediscovered the mediaeval limners' secrets of cutting the wood, giving
+the necessary richness to the ink, creating a whole scale of half-tones,
+and specially of adapting the design to typographic printing, and making
+of it, so to say, an ornament and a decorative extension for the type.
+Lepere is a wood-engraver with whom none of his contemporaries can be
+compared; as regards his imagination, it is that of an altogether
+curious artist. He excels in composing and expressing the life, the
+animation, the soul of the streets and the picturesque side of the
+populace. Herein he is much inspired by Manet and, if we go back to the
+real tradition, by Guys, Debucourt, the younger Moreau and by Gabriel de
+Saint-Aubin. He is decidedly a Realist of French lineage, who owes
+nothing to the Academy and its formulas.
+
+It would be evidently unreasonable to attach to Impressionism all that
+is ante-academical, and between the two extremes there is room for a
+crowd of interesting artists. We shall not succumb to the prejudice of
+the School by declaring, in our turn, that there is no salvation outside
+Impressionism, and we have been careful to state repeatedly that, if
+Impressionism has a certain number of principles as kernel, its
+applications and its influence have a radiation which it is difficult to
+limit. What can be absolutely demonstrated is, that this movement has
+had the greatest influence on modern illustration, sometimes through its
+colouring, sometimes simply through the great freedom of its ideas. Some
+have found in it a direct lesson, others an example to be followed.
+Some have met in it technical methods which pleased them, others have
+only taken some suggestions from it. That is the case, for instance,
+with Legrand, with Steinlen, and with Renouard; and it is also the case
+with the lithographer Odilon Redon, who applies the values of Manet and,
+in his strange pastels, the harmonies of Degas and Renoir, placing them
+at the service of dreams and hallucinations and of a symbolism which is
+absolutely removed from the realism of these painters. It is, finally,
+the case with the water-colour painter Henri Riviere, who is misjudged
+as to his merit, and who is one of the most perfect of those who have
+applied Impressionist ideas to decorative engraving. He has realised
+images in colours destined to decorate inexpensively the rooms of the
+people and recalling the grand aspects of landscapes with a broad
+simplification which is derived, curiously enough, from Puvis de
+Chavannes's large decorative landscapes and from the small and precise
+colour prints of Japan. Riviere, who is a skilful and personal poetic
+landscapist, is not exactly an Impressionist, in so far as he does not
+divide the tones, but rather blends them in subtle mixtures in the
+manner of the Japanese. Yet, seeing his work, one cannot help thinking
+of all the surprise and freedom introduced into modern art by
+Impressionism.
+
+Everybody, even the ignorant, can perceive, on looking through an
+illustrated paper or a modern volume, that thirty years ago this manner
+of placing the figures, of noting familiar gestures, and of seizing
+fugitive life with spirit and clearness was unknown. This mass of
+engravings and of sketches resembles in no way what had been seen
+formerly. They no longer have the solemn air of classic composition, by
+which the drawings had been affected. A current of bold spontaneity has
+passed through here. In modern English illustration, it can be stated
+indisputably that nothing would be such as it can now be seen, if
+Morris, Rossetti and Crane had not imposed their vision, and yet many
+talented Englishmen resemble these initiators only very remotely. It is
+exactly in this sense that we shall have credited Impressionism with the
+talents who have drawn their inspiration less from its principles, than
+from its vigorous protest against mechanical formulas, and who have
+been able to find the energy, necessary for their success, in the
+example it set by fighting during twenty years against the ideas of
+routine which seemed indestructible. Even with the painters who are far
+removed from the vision and the colouring of Manet and Degas, of Monet
+and Renoir, one can find a very precise tendency: that of returning to
+the subjects and the style of the real national tradition; and herein
+lies one of the most serious benefits bestowed by Impressionism upon an
+art which had stopped at the notion of a canonical beauty, until it had
+almost become sterile in its timidity.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+NEO-IMPRESSIONISM--GAUGUIN, DENIS, THEO VAN RYSSELBERGHE--THE THEORY OF
+POINTILLISM--SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC
+CHROMATISM--FAULTS AND QUALITIES OF THE IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE
+OWE TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL--SOME WORDS ON
+ITS INFLUENCE ABROAD
+
+
+The beginnings of the movement designated under the name of
+Neo-Impressionism can be traced back to about 1880. The movement is a
+direct offshoot of the first Impressionism, originated by a group of
+young painters who admired it and thought of pushing further still its
+chromatic principles. The flourishing of Impressionism coincided, as a
+matter of fact, with certain scientific labours concerning optics.
+Helmholtz had just published his works on the perception of colours and
+sounds by means of waves. Chevreul had continued on this path by
+establishing his beautiful theories on the analysis of the solar
+spectrum. M. Charles Henry, an original and remarkable spirit, occupied
+himself in his turn with these delicate problems by applying them
+directly to aesthetics, which Helmholtz and Chevreul had not thought of
+doing. M. Charles Henry had the idea of creating relations between this
+branch of science and the laws of painting. As a friend of several young
+painters he had a real influence over them, showing them that the new
+vision due to the instinct of Monet and of Manet might perhaps be
+scientifically verified, and might establish fixed principles in a
+sphere where hitherto the laws of colouring had been the effects of
+individual conception. At that moment the criticism which resulted from
+Taine's theories tried to effect a _rapprochement_ of the artistic and
+scientific domains in criticism and in the psychologic novel. The
+painters, too, gave way to this longing for precision which seems to
+have been the great preoccupation of intellects from 1880 to about 1889.
+
+Their researches had a special bearing on the theory of complementary
+colours and on the means of establishing some laws concerning the
+reaction of tones in such manner as to draw up a kind of tabula. Georges
+Seurat and Paul Signac were the promoters of this research. Seurat died
+very young, and one cannot but regret this death of an artist who would
+have been very interesting and capable of beautiful works. Those which
+he has left us bear witness to a spirit very receptive to theories, and
+leaving nothing to chance. The silhouettes are reduced to almost
+rigorously geometrical principles, the tones are decomposed
+systematically. These canvases are more reasoned examples than works of
+intuition and spontaneous vision. They show Seurat's curious desire to
+give a scientific and classic basis to Impressionism. The same idea
+rules in all the work of Paul Signac, who has painted some portraits and
+numerous landscapes. To these two painters is due the method of
+_Pointillism_, _i.e._ the division of tones, not only by touches, as in
+Monet's pictures, but by very small touches of equal size, causing the
+spheric shape to act equally upon the retina. The accumulation of these
+luminous points is carried out over the entire surface of the canvas
+without thick daubs of paint, and with regularity, whilst with Manet the
+paint is more or less dense. The theory of complementary colours is
+systematically applied. On a sketch, made from nature, the painter notes
+the principal relations of tones, then systematises them on his picture
+and connects them by different shades which should be their logical
+result. Neo-Impressionism believes in obtaining thus a greater exactness
+than that which results from the individual temperament of the painter
+who simply relies on his own perception. And it is true, in theory, that
+such a conception is more exact. But it reduces the picture to a kind of
+theorem, which excludes all that constitutes the value and charm of an
+art, that is to say: caprice, fancy, and the spontaneity of personal
+inspiration. The works of Seurat, Signac, and of the few men who have
+strictly followed the rules of Pointillism are lacking in life, in
+surprise, and make a somewhat tiring impression upon one's eyes. The
+uniformity of the points does not succeed in giving an impression of
+cohesion, and even less a suggestion of different textures, even if the
+values are correct. Manet seems to have attained perfection in using the
+method which consists in directing the touches in accordance with each
+of the planes, and this is evidently the most natural method. Scientific
+Chromatism constitutes an _ensemble_ of propositions, of which art will
+be able to make use, though indirectly, as information useful for a
+better understanding of the laws of light in presence of nature. What
+Pointillism has been able to give us, is a method which would be very
+appreciable for decorative paintings seen from a great distance--friezes
+or ceilings in spacious buildings. It would in this case return to the
+principle of mosaic, which is the principle _par excellence_ of mural
+art.
+
+The Pointillists have to-day almost abandoned this transitional theory
+which, in spite of the undeniable talent of its adepts, has only
+produced indifferent results as regards easel pictures. Besides Seurat
+and Signac, mention should be made of Maurice Denis, Henri-Edmond Cross,
+Angrand, and Theo Van Rysselberghe. But this last-named and Maurice
+Denis have arrived at great talent by very different merits. M. Maurice
+Denis has abandoned Pointillism a few years ago, in favour of returning
+to a very strange conception which dates back to the Primitives, and
+even to Giotto. He simplifies his drawing archaically, suppresses all
+but the indispensable detail, and draws inspiration from Gothic stained
+glass and carvings, in order to create decorative figures with clearly
+marked outlines which are filled with broad, flat tints. He generally
+treats mystic subjects, for which this special manner is suitable. One
+cannot love the _parti pris_ of these works, but one cannot deny M.
+Denis a great charm of naivete, an intense feeling for decorative
+arrangements and colouring of a certain originality. He is almost a
+French pre-Raphaelite, and his profound catholic faith inspires him
+nobly.
+
+[Illustration: THEO VAN RYSSELBERGHE
+
+PORTRAITS OF MADAME VAN RYSSELBERGHE AND HER DAUGHTER]
+
+M. Theo Van Rysselberghe continues to employ the Pointillist method. But
+he is so strongly gifted, that one might almost say he succeeds in
+revealing himself as a painter of great merit in spite of this dry and
+charmless method. All his works are supported by broad and learned
+drawing and his colour is naturally brilliant. M. Van Rysselberghe, a
+prolific and varied worker, has painted nudes, large portraits,
+landscapes with figures, seascapes, interiors and still-life, and in all
+this he evinces faculties of the first order. He is a lover of light and
+understands how to make it vibrate over flesh and fabrics. He is an
+artist who has the sense of style. He has signed a certain number of
+portraits, whose beautiful carriage and serious psychology would suffice
+to make him be considered as the most significant of the
+Neo-Impressionists. It is really in him that one has to see the young
+and worthy heir of Monet, of Sisley, and of Degas, and that is why we
+have insisted on adding here to the works of these masters the
+reproduction of one of his. M. Van Rysselberghe is also a very delicate
+etcher who has signed some fine works in this method, and his seascapes,
+whether they revel in the pale greys of the German Ocean or in the warm
+sapphire and gold harmonies of the Mediterranean, count among the finest
+of the time; they are windows opened upon joyous brightness.
+
+To these painters who have never taken part at the Salons, and are only
+to be seen at the exhibitions of the _Independants_ (except M. Denis),
+must be added M. Pierre Bonnard, who has given proof to his charm and
+fervour in numerous small canvases of Japanese taste; and M. Edouard
+Vuillard, who is a painter of intimate scenes of rare delicacy. This
+artist, who stands apart and produces very little, has signed some
+interiors of melancholic distinction and of a colouring which revels in
+low tones. He has the precision and skill of a master. There is in him,
+one might say, a reflection of Chardin's soul. Unfortunately his works
+are confined to a few collections and have not become known to the
+public. To the same group belong M. Ranson, who has devoted himself to
+purely decorative art, tapestry, wall papers and embroideries; M.
+Georges de Feure, a strange, symbolist water-colour painter, who has
+become one of the best designers of the New Art in France; M. Felix
+Vallotton, painter and lithographer, who is somewhat heavy, but gifted
+with serious qualities. It is true that M. de Feure is Dutch, M.
+Vallotton Swiss, and M. Van Rysselberghe Belgian; but they have settled
+down in France, and are sufficiently closely allied to the
+Neo-Impressionist movement so that the question of nationality need not
+prevent us from mentioning them here. Finally it is impossible not to
+say a few words about two pupils of Gustave Moreau's, who have both
+become noteworthy followers of Impressionism of very personal
+individuality. M. Eugene Martel bids fair to be one of the best painters
+of interiors of his generation. He has the feeling of mystical life and
+paints the peasantry with astonishing psychologic power. His vigorous
+colouring links him to Monticelli, and his drawing to Degas. As to M.
+Simon Bussy who, following Alphonse Legros's example, is about to make
+an enviable position for himself in England, he is an artist of pure
+blood. His landscapes and his figures have the distinction and rare tone
+of M. Whistler, besides the characteristic acuteness of Degas. His
+harmonies are subtle, his vision novel, and he will certainly develop
+into an important painter. Together with Henri le Sidaner and Jacques
+Blanche, Simon Bussy is decidedly the most personal of that young
+generation of "Intimists" who seem to have retained the best principles
+of the Impressionist masters to employ them for the expression of a
+psychologic ideal which is very different from Realism.
+
+Outside this group there are still a few isolated painters who are
+difficult to classify. The very young artists Laprade and Charles Guerin
+have shown for the last three years, at the exhibition of the
+_Independants_, some works which are the worthy result of Manet's and
+Renoir's influence. They, too, justify great expectations. The
+landscapists Paul Vogler and Maxime Maufra, more advanced in years, have
+made themselves known by some solid series of vigorously presented
+landscapes. To them must be added M. Henry Moret, M. Albert Andre and M.
+Georges d'Espagnet, who equally deserve the success which has commenced
+to be their share. But there are some older ones. It is only his due,
+that place should be given to a painter who committed suicide after an
+unhappy life, and who evinced splendid gifts. Vincent Van Gogh, a
+Dutchman, who, however, had always worked in France, has left to the
+world some violent and strange works, in which Impressionism appears to
+have reached the limits of its audacity. Their value lies in their naive
+frankness and in the undauntable determination which tried to fix
+without trickery the sincerest feelings. Amidst many faulty and clumsy
+works, Van Gogh has also left some really beautiful canvases. There is a
+deep affinity between him and Cezanne. A very real affinity exists, too,
+between Paul Gauguin, who was a friend and to a certain extent the
+master of Van Gogh, and Cezanne and Renoir. Paul Gauguin's robust talent
+found its first motives in Breton landscapes, in which the method of
+colour-spots can be found employed with delicacy and placed at the
+service of a rather heavy, but very interesting harmony. Then the artist
+spent a long time in Tahiti, whence he returned with a completely
+transformed manner. He has brought back from these regions some
+landscapes with figures treated in intentionally clumsy and almost wild
+fashion. The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad,
+flat tints on canvas which has the texture almost of tapestry. Many of
+these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multi-coloured, crude
+and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental
+qualities, the beautiful values, the ornamental taste, and the
+impression of primitive animalism. On the whole, Paul Gauguin has a
+beautiful, artistic temperament which, in its aversion to virtuosoship,
+has perhaps not sufficiently understood that the fear of formulas, if
+exaggerated, may lead to other formulas, to a false ignorance which is
+as dangerous as false knowledge. Gauguin's symbolical intentions, like
+those of his pupil Emile Bernard, are sincere, but are badly served by
+minds which do not agree with their technical qualities, and both
+Gauguin and Emile Bernard are most happily inspired when they are
+painters pure and simple.
+
+Next to Gauguin, among the seniors of the present generation and the
+successors of Impressionism, should be placed the landscapist Armand
+Guillaumin who, without possessing Sisley's delicate qualities, has
+painted some canvases worthy of notice; and we must, finally, terminate
+this far too summary enumeration by referring to one of the most gifted
+painters of the French School of the day, M. Louis Anquetin. His is a
+most varied talent whose power is unquestionable. He made his _debut_
+among the Neo-Impressionists and revealed the influence upon him of the
+Japanese and of Degas. It may be seen that these two influences
+predominate in the whole group. Then M. Anquetin became fascinated by
+the breadth and superb freedom of Manet's works, and signed a series of
+portraits and sketches, some of which are not far below so great a
+master's. They are works which will surprise the critics, when our
+contemporary painting will be examined with calm impartiality. After
+these works, M. Anquetin gave way to his impetuous nature which led him
+to decorative painting, and he became influenced by Rubens, Jordaens,
+and the Fontainebleau School. He painted theatre curtains and
+mythological scenes, in which he gave free rein to his sensual
+imagination. In spite of some admirable qualities, it seems as though
+the artist had strayed from his true path in painting these brilliant,
+but somewhat declamatory works, and he has since returned to a more
+modern and more direct painting. In all his changed conditions Anquetin
+has shown a considerable talent, pleasing in its fine vigour,
+impetuosity, brilliancy and sincerity. His inequality is perhaps the
+cause of his relative want of success; it has put the public off, but
+nevertheless in certain of this brave and serious painter's canvases can
+be seen the happy influence of Manet.
+
+It seems to us only right to sum up our impartial opinion of
+Neo-Impressionism by saying that it has lacked cohesion, that
+Pointillism in particular has led painting into an aimless path. It has
+been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical
+researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day,
+after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate
+attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the
+"Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious
+painter, Besnard, imposes upon the Salons, where the elect draw
+inspiration from him. We can here only indicate with a few words the
+considerable part played by Besnard: his clever work has proved that the
+scientific colour principles of Impressionism may be applied, not to
+realism, but to the highest thoughts, to ideologic painting most nobly
+inspired by the modern intellectual preoccupations. He is the
+transition between Impressionism and the art of to-morrow. Of pure
+French lineage by his portraits and his nudes, which descend directly
+from Largilliere and Ingres, he might have restricted himself to being
+placed among the most learned Impressionists. His studies of reflections
+and of complementary colours speak for this. But he has passed this
+phase and has, with his decorations, returned to the psychical domain of
+his strangely beautiful art. The "Intimists," C. Cottet, Simon, Blanche,
+Menard, Bussy, Lobre, Le Sidaner, Wery, Prinet, and Ernest Laurent, have
+proved that they have profited by Impressionism, but have proceeded in
+quite a different direction in trying to translate their real
+perceptions. Some isolated artists, like the decorative painter Henri
+Martin, who has enormous talent, have applied the Impressionist
+technique to the expression of grand allegories, rather in the manner of
+Puvis de Chavannes. The effort at getting away from mere cleverness and
+escaping a too exclusive preoccupation with technique, and at the same
+time acquiring serious knowledge, betrays itself in the whole position
+of the young French School; and this will furnish us with a perfectly
+natural conclusion, of which the following are the principal points:--
+
+What we shall have to thank Impressionism for, will be moral and
+material advantages of considerable importance. Morally it has rendered
+an immense service to all art, because it has boldly attacked routine
+and proved by the whole of its work that a combination of independent
+producers could renew the aesthetic code of a country, without owing
+anything to official encouragement. It has succeeded where important but
+isolated creators have succumbed, because it has had the good fortune of
+uniting a group of gifted men, four of whom will count among the
+greatest French artists since the origin of national art. It has had the
+qualities which overcome the hardest resistance: fecundity, courage and
+sure originality. It has known how to find its strength by referring to
+the true traditions of the national genius, which have happily
+enlightened it and saved it from fundamental errors. It has, last, but
+not least, inflicted an irremediable blow on academic convention and has
+wrested from it the prestige of teaching which ruled tyrannically for
+centuries past over the young artists. It has laid a violent hand upon a
+tenacious and dangerous prejudice, upon a series of conventional notions
+which were transmitted without consideration for the evolution of modern
+life and intelligence. It has dared freely to protest against a
+degenerated ideal which vainly parodied the old masters, pretending to
+honour them. It has removed from the artistic soul of France a whole
+order of pseudo-classic elements which worked against its blossoming,
+and the School will never recover from this bold contradiction which has
+rallied to it all the youthful. The moral principle of Impressionism has
+been absolutely logical and sane, and that is why nothing has been able
+to prevent its triumph.
+
+Technically Impressionism has brought a complete renewal of pictorial
+vision, substituting the beauty of character for the beauty of
+proportions and finding adequate expression for the ideas and feelings
+of its time, which constitutes the secret of all beautiful works. It has
+taken up again a tradition and added to it a contemporary page. It will
+have to be thanked for an important series of observations as regards
+the analysis of light, and for an absolutely original conception of
+drawing. Some years have been wasted by painters of little worth in
+imitating it, and the Salons, formerly encumbered with academic
+_pastiches_, have been encumbered with Impressionist _pastiches_. It
+would be unfair to blame the Impressionists for it. They have shown by
+their very career that they hated teaching and would never pretend to
+teach. Impressionism is based upon irrefutable optic laws, but it is
+neither a style, nor a method, likely ever to become a formula in its
+turn. One may call upon this art for examples, but not for receipts. On
+the contrary, its best teaching has been to encourage artists to become
+absolutely independent and to search ardently for their own
+individuality. It marks the decline of the School, and will not create a
+new one which would soon become as fastidious as the other. It will only
+appear, to those who will thoroughly understand it, as a precious
+repertory of notes, and the young generation honours it intelligently by
+not imitating it with servility.
+
+Not that it is without its faults! It has been said, to belittle it,
+that it only had the value of an interesting attempt, having only been
+able to indicate some excellent intentions, without creating anything
+perfect. This is inexact. It is absolutely evident, that Manet, Monet,
+Renoir and Degas have signed some masterpieces which did not lose by
+comparison with those in the Louvre, and the same might even be said of
+their less illustrious friends. But it is also evident that the time
+spent on research as well as on agitation and enervating controversies
+pursued during twenty-five years, has been taken from men who could
+otherwise have done better still. There has been a disparity between
+Realism and the technique of Impressionism. Its realistic origin has
+sometimes made it vulgar. It has often treated indifferent subjects in a
+grand style, and it has too easily beheld life from the anecdotal side.
+It has lacked psychologic synthesis (if we except Degas). It has too
+willingly denied all that exists hidden under the apparent reality of
+the universe and has affected to separate painting from the ideologic
+faculties which rule over all art. Hatred of academic allegory,
+defiance of symbolism, abstraction and romantic scenes, has led it to
+refuse to occupy itself with a whole order of ideas, and it has had the
+tendency of making the painter beyond all a workman. It was necessary at
+the moment of its arrival, but it is no longer necessary now, and the
+painters understand this themselves. Finally it has too often been
+superficial even in obtaining effects; it has given way to the wish to
+surprise the eyes, of playing with tones merely for love of cleverness.
+It often causes one regret to see symphonies of magnificent colour
+wasted here in pictures of boating men; and there, in pictures of cafe
+corners; and we have arrived at a degree of complex intellectuality
+which is no longer satisfied with these rudimentary themes. It has
+indulged in useless exaggerations, faults of composition and of harmony,
+and all this cannot be denied.
+
+But it still remains fascinating and splendid for its gifts which will
+always rouse enthusiasm: freedom, impetuousness, youth, brilliancy,
+fervour, the joy of painting and the passion for beautiful light. It is,
+on the whole, the greatest pictorial movement that France has beheld
+since Delacroix, and it brings to a finish gloriously the nineteenth
+century, inaugurating the present. It has accomplished the great deed of
+having brought us again into the presence of our true national lineage,
+far more so than Romanticism, which was mixed with foreign elements. We
+have here painting of a kind which could only have been conceived in
+France, and we have to go right back to Watteau in order to receive
+again the same impression. Impressionism has brought us an almost
+unhoped-for renaissance, and this constitutes its most undeniable claim
+upon the gratitude of the race.
+
+It has exercised a very appreciable influence upon foreign painting.
+Among the principal painters attracted by its ideas and research, we
+must mention, in Germany, Max Liebermann and Kuehl; in Norway, Thaulow;
+in Denmark, Kroyer; in Belgium, Theo Van Rysselberghe, Emile Claus,
+Verheyden, Heymans, Verstraete, and Baertson; in Italy, Boldini,
+Segantini, and Michetti; in Spain, Zuloaga, Sorolla y Bastida, Dario de
+Regoyos and Rusinol; in America, Alexander, Harrison, Sargent; and in
+England, the painters of the Glasgow School, Lavery, Guthrie and the
+late John Lewis Brown. All these men come within the active extension of
+the French movement, and one may say that the honour of having first
+recognised the truly national movement of this art must be given to
+those foreign countries which have enriched their collections and
+museums with works that were despised in the land which had witnessed
+their birth. At the present moment the effects of this new vision are
+felt all over the world, down to the very bosom of the academies; and at
+the Salons, from which the Impressionists are still excluded, can be
+witnessed an invasion of pictures inspired by them, which the most
+retrograde juries dare not reject. In whatever measure the recent
+painters accept Impressionism, they remain preoccupied with it, and even
+those who love it not are forced to take it into account.
+
+The Impressionist movement can therefore now be considered, apart from
+all controversies, without vain attacks or exaggerated praise, as an
+artistic manifestation which has entered the domain of history, and it
+can be studied with the impartial application of the methods of
+critical analysis which is usually employed in the study of the former
+art movements. We shall not pretend to have given in these pages a
+complete and faultless history; but we shall consider ourselves well
+rewarded for this work, which is intended to reach the great public, if
+we have roused their curiosity and sympathy with a group of artists whom
+we consider admirable; and if we have rectified, in the eyes of the
+readers of a foreign nation, the errors, the slanders, the undeserved
+reproaches, with which Frenchmen have been pleased to overwhelm sincere
+creators who thought with faith and love of the pure tradition of the
+national genius, and who have for that reason been vilified as much as
+if they had in an access of anarchical folly risen against the very
+common sense, taste, reason and clearness, which will remain the eternal
+merits of their soil. This small, imperfect volume will perhaps find its
+best excuse in its intention of repairing an old injustice and of
+affirming a useful and permanent truth: that of the authenticity of the
+classicism of Impressionism, in the face of the false classicism of the
+academic world which official honours have made the guardian of a French
+heritage, whose soul it denied and whose spirit it deceived with its
+narrow and cold formulas.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
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