If, however, Manet failed in the larger tests, he excelled in his ability to beautify the surfaces of his models. His painting of texture is perhaps the most competent that has ever been achieved. In his flesh, fruits and stuffs, the sensation of hard, soft, rough or velvety exteriors reaches its highest degree of pictorial attainment. These many and varied textures are reunited in his Le Déjeuner—a canvas which must not be confused with Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Here we have a plant, a vase, four different materials in the boy’s clothing, a straw hat, a brass jug with all its reflections, a table cloth, a wall, an old sword, glassware, fruit and liquid. It is an orgy of textures, and Manet must have gloried in it. One critic of the day wondered why oysters and a cut lemon lay on the breakfast table. But we wonder why a cat with fluffy fur is not there also. Castagnary suggested that Manet, feeling himself to be the master of still-life, brought every possible texture into a single canvas for purposes of contrast and because he delighted in the material quality of objects. But the reason goes deeper. Manet was a superlatively conscious technician, and that sacrée commodité de la brosse, so displeasing to Delacroix, was his greatest intoxication. Hals also was seduced by it. Later, when the new vision of light was communicated to Manet by the Impressionists, his obsession for the purely technical diminished in intensity. In that topical bid for popularity, the Combat du Kerseage et de l’Alabama, we detect his interest in a new economy of means which would facilitate his search for broader illumination. This method took a step forward in Le Port de Bordeaux, and later reached maturity in his canvases painted in 1882, of which Le Jardin de Bellevue is a good example. But despite his heroic efforts, these last pictures, painted a year before he died when paralysis had already claimed him and he was devoting his time almost entirely to still-life, were without fulgency, and never approached the richness of even so slight a colourist as Monet.
Repose is a word used overmuch by modern critics to designate the dominant quality of Manet’s painting. From an entirely pictorial point of view the word is applicable, but in the precise æsthetic sense it is a misnomer. The illusion of repose in Manet is accounted for by his even use of greys, as in Le Chemin de Fer, Le Port de Bordeaux, the Exécution de Maximilien and the Course de Taureaux. Even in Les Bulles de Savon, the Rendez-vous de Chats, Le Clair de Lune and Le Bar des Folies-Bergère—canvases in which is exhibited Manet’s greatest opposition of tones—the ensemble is expressive of monotony. Real repose, however, is something much more recondite than uniformity or tedium. It is created by a complete harmonious organisation, not by an avoidance of movement. Giotto’s Death of Saint Francis and El Greco’s Annunciation have a simultaneity of presentation as unique as in Manet; but, because their compositions are so rhythmically co-ordinated, they present an absolute finality of movement and thus engender an emotional as well as an ocular repose.
Manet’s actual innovations are small, smaller even than Courbet’s. However, many critics credit him with grotesque novelties. There are very few books dealing with modern painting which do not assert that he was the first to note that flesh in the light is dazzlingly bright and of a cream-and-rose colour. But in this particular there is no improvement in Manet on the pictures of Rubens. He may have unearthed this illustrative point; certain it is he did not originate it. Yet no matter how slight his departures, we enjoy his pictures for their inherent æsthetic qualities, and not for their approximation to nature. Manet made many mistakes, but this was natural when we remember that in the whirlpool of new ambitions one is prone to forget the lessons of the past. Only by profiting by them can one go on toward the ever advancing goal of achievement. We must not forget that this new spirit of endeavour is only an impulse towards something greater, a rebellion against arbitrarily imposed obstacles. If men like Manet lost track of the fundamentals of the great art which had preceded them, it was only that their vision was clouded by new experiments.
The actual achievements of Manet epitomise the secondary in art. His attempt to combine artistic worth with popularity restricted him. That he was misunderstood at first was his own fault in continually changing his style. But acceptance or rejection by popular opinion does not indicate the measure of a painter’s significance. And Manet is to be judged by his contributions to the new idea. His importance lay in that he took the second step of the three which were to exhaust the possibilities of realism. In art every genuine method is consummated before a new one can take its place. Michelangelo brought architecture to its highest point of development; Rubens, linear painting; the Impressionists, the study of light; Beethoven, the classic ideal in music; Swinburne, the rhymed lyric. In fact, only after the épuisement of a certain line of endeavour, is felt the necessity to seek for a new and more adequate means of expression. Manet helped bring to a close a certain phase of art, thus hastening the advent of other and greater men. His accomplishments now stand for all that is academic and student-like; and although his interest as an innovator passed out with the appearance of Pissarro and Monet, men go on imitating his externals and using his brushing. In the same sense that Velazquez is a great painter, so is Manet. His influence has served the purpose of helping turn aside the academicians from their emulation of Italian painting.
COURBET was the first painter to turn his attention to naturalism. Manet carried forward Courbet’s standard. Impressionism took the last step, and brought to a close the objectively realistic conception in painting. By this final development of naturalistic means unlimited opportunities for achievement were offered. Impressionistic methods are now employed by a vast army of painters in all parts of the world, and the number of canvases which owe their existence to these discoveries is countless. Specifically Impressionism is ocular realism. It represents that side of actuality which has to do with light expressed by colour; and deals with a manner of approaching natural valuations whereby the painter is permitted to transfer a scene or subject to his canvas in such a way that it will give the spectator the sensation of dazzling light, broad atmosphere and truthful colours. To accomplish this Impressionism confines itself to the play of a light from a given source—its reflections and distributions on an object or a landscape. Therefore, it is the restricted study of the disappearance of the local colour in a model, and of the luminosity and divergencies of tones to be found in shadow. It approximates to a nature which becomes, for the moment, a theatre of chromatic light sensations. Subject-matter gave the Impressionists no concern. They advanced materially on the spirit in Manet which led him to paint any object at hand because of its susceptibility to artistic treatment. The Impressionists painted anything, not alone for æsthetic reasons, but because all objects make themselves visible by means of light and shadow. This manner of painting was the ultimate divorce of the picture from any convention, whether of arrangement, of drawing or of a fixed palette. Herein it was an elastic process par excellence, with no defined limitations.
Impressionism, though analytic and self-conscious, was not based on science. One may look in vain for parallels between its theories and those of Dove, Thomas Young and Chevreul. It was the imitation, pure and simple, of the disintegrations of colour in nature’s broad planes. And this achievement of diversity in simplicity was brought about by the only method possible:—the juxtaposition of myriad tints. In other words, Impressionism was a statement that vision is the result of colour forces coming into contact with the retina. However, the men of the movement did not see nature as an agglomeration of coloured spots, but as a series of planes made vibrant by light. To reproduce this vibration they were necessitated to use nature’s methods: they broke up surfaces into sensitive parts, each one of which was a separate tint. There are no broad planes of unified colour in nature. In each natural atom are absorption and reflection; and the preponderance of either of these two attributes results in a specific colour. Before the advent of this new school painters had made warm or cold green by combining green with yellow ochre or raw sienna, or by the admixture of blues and purples. But the Impressionists laid on these colours, pure or modified, side by side, and let the eye do the work of blending. They discovered not only that in green the shadow is tinged with blue, but that blue is the direct result of the yellow-orange of light. Every one nowadays has noticed that, in looking fixedly at a green, it appears now bluish, now yellowish; just as in listening to an orchestra we can, by focusing our attention, hear predominantly the bass or the treble. So the Impressionists observed that in the most luminous colour there is a proportion of absorption, and that in the darkest shadow there exists some reflection. The association of these molecular properties is what produces vibration in nature. By the application of these observations the Impressionists generated a feeling of grouillement;—the movement by contrast in the smallest parts.
In attempting to explain their canvases many commentators have credited them with systems of complementaries which resulted in grey, and with other exorbitant theories of oppositions. But one may look in vain in their work for any synthesis of scientific discoveries. Colour, not neutrality, was their aim; and, as they themselves admitted, they painted comme l’oiseau chante. Birds are not conscious of the metallic dissonance of diminished fifths; and the Impressionists were equally unaware of the harshness of red with green, blue with orange, yellow with violet. They only substituted a balance of cold and warm colours for the balance of lines which the older painters had used. They copied the tints they found in nature after analysing nature’s processes, in order to arrive closer to its visual effect. In one way they almost achieved colour photography, for their study, in its narrow character, was deep, and their vision was highly realistic. But whereas they depicted nature, they could call it up only in its instantaneous aspects. In this ephemerality alone were they impressionists; indeed, their methods were the most exact and probing of any painters of that time. Each hour of the day raises or lowers the colour values in nature; and he who would copy nature’s form as a permanent interpretation must ignore the exactitude of its reflections and approximate only to its local colours. This latter method is more truly impressionism than the theories of the Impressionists. They repudiated local colours as being too illusory, holding that the most highly coloured object modifies its tint under the influence of the least variation of light. The point is technically true, but it is an observation in objective research, and the word Impressionism must not be accepted as explanatory of the methods of the school it designates.
By decomposing the parts of a surface, in order to represent objects in their atmospheric materiality, the Impressionists were impelled by a force stronger than a mere desire for superficial accuracy: they felt the need for complete and minute organisation in a work of art. In landscape, where the many accidentals appeared to lack cohesion, the Impressionists achieved co-ordination by a unity of light which welded all the objects into an interdependent group. Plasticity of form had resulted from the efforts of preceding painters, but here for the first time was a plasticity of method which moulded itself like putty with the slightest change of illumination. Preoccupation in this new compositional element made its users forget, for the time being, the older precepts for obtaining composition. This forgetfulness however was not due entirely to exuberance over a novel procedure. The painters antecedent to Delacroix had used landscape as unimportant backgrounds for figures, and there was no precedent for its adaptation to organisation. Courbet had composed landscape by the linear balance of black and white volumes. The Barbizon artists had brought out-of-door painting into more general notice; but their greys were insufficient to give it more than a factitious and purely conventional unity. The Impressionists, feeling the urgency for a more virile expression in landscape work, saw a solution to their problem in the depiction of light through colour. Thus their conceptions took birth.
Their technique, like Manet’s, was wholly consistent with their objective. To the Impressionists this objective seemed possessed of the merit of finality. Since Corot had carried painting out of doors and Manet had portrayed studio light from every vantage point, what indeed was left for this new group of men? They might have organised Manet or Corot, but even the most competent of such modifications would have presented an appearance like that of a Rubens or a Tiepolo. They were too avid for genuine novelty to content themselves with slight innovation; and they were too modern to derive satisfaction from the stereotyped teachings of an antiquity whose tones were unemotional and whose themes were hackneyed. The spirit of servility which is willing to learn second-hand lessons and adopt indoor conceptions spelled decadence to them. Their attitude was a healthy and correct one, for the cup of linear tone-composition had been drained. They were wrong in that they threw aside the cup: they should have filled it with more powerful concepts. Their attitude was indicative of immaturity. The Impressionists in truth were the adolescents of the modern art which was born with Delacroix and Turner, and which only recently has become a concrete engine for the projection of inspiration into an infinity of possibilities.
Impressionism was more important than any preceding departure, for it turned the thoughts of artists from mere results to motivating forces, from the ripples on the surface to the power which causes the tides. It foreshadowed the philosophical idea in art which concerns itself with causes rather than effects, and thereby brought about a fundamental reform which made of painting, not a mere vision, but an idea. The Impressionists, it is true, worked from the surface down, but they had the depths ever in mind; and the posing of their problem set in motion in all serious painters that intellectual process which eventually would begin with foundations and build upward. Impressionism was the undeniable implication that the possibilities of the older art methods had been exhausted, and that a substitution of a new method, however fragmentary, was of greater importance than the sycophantic imitations of an unapproachable past. Beneath this attitude we feel the broadness of mind which, when a mistake has been made, does not ignore causes but attaches to them different interpretations in an effort to arrive at the truth. The Impressionists kept their palette intact; but they employed its parts in a way that made new combinations possible. By doing this they unconsciously reacted against the mere dexterity of brushing with which so many painters, like Hals, Velazquez and Raeburn, became obsessed and, as a consequence, failed to heed the deeper demands of æsthetic research. By thus facilitating technique they not only reduced the difficulties attached to the production of a picture, but made the thing expressed of greater relative significance.
Pissarro, Monet, Sisley and Guillaumin who, with Bazille, composed the original group of Impressionists, had all been influenced in youth by the revolutionary doctrines of Corot and Courbet, and to a great extent had adopted the palette of these two men. Landscape painting at that time was almost a new development, and these four readily succumbed to its inspiration. There is little of the strictly picturesque and still less of the grandiose in the French landscape. Consequently a school which worked along the line of old conventions could not have existed in France. But when Rousseau and Diaz, striking out in a new direction, poetised the charm of the hills and forests about Fontainebleau, the painting of the out-of-doors was liberated both as to purpose and to freedom of arrangement. The object of Turner’s work had been to astonish and charm the spectator with nature’s vastness and complexity. But, with the men of 1830, landscape art took on softness, introspection, stillness, solemnity. In fine, it became more intimate. Each tree and stone hid a nymph; each stream and hill, a mystery. With the Impressionists all this was changed. They had seen and admired the work of Manet. They applauded his reactions against studio lighting, and later became his personal friends. Manet was then the cynosure of all eyes in the art world of Paris, and it was only natural that he should have been the dominating figure in a sort of cénacle held in the Café Guerbois in the quarter of the Batignolles. Here the revolutionists of the day forgathered, and, by their uncompromising spirit, inspired one another to practical protestations against the routine of the academies. Manet’s eloquence argued away the older idea of lighting as a type; and the younger men, using this negotiation as a starting point, gave birth to the methods which congealed into Impressionism.
Although Monet and Pissarro were the first to profit by Manet’s teachings, there is no definite history to tell who was the first of the group to blossom into colour. However, there is little doubt that Pissarro was the man. He was a Jew with a philosophic turn of mind, and possessed more genuine intelligence than his confrères. Monet was the cleverest and the most enthusiastic, and when the new process was outlined it was he who first developed it to its ultimate consequences. Pissarro, compared with Monet, was conservative, and his practicality did not permit him so great an élan. His canvases beside those of Monet’s appear almost tentative, and the greys he had adopted from Corot never entirely forsook him. Both these painters went to London during the Franco-Prussian War, and we may take it for granted that the works of Turner had an enormous influence on them. They had already seen Jongkind who, despite his adherence to the sombre greys of the older men, had, five years previous, more than foreshadowed the later divisionistic technique. But in Turner they discovered not only all that Jongkind had to offer, but the additional quality of joyous and dazzling colour. After their return their palettes became rapidly cleaner.
In 1874, in an effort to bestir the public, the Impressionists held an exhibition. The excitement was all they could have desired, but it led rather to obloquy than to sales. Again and again they exposed in the hope of obtaining recognition, but not until 1888 were they successful. The average spectator did not recognise nature in their canvases. The vision was an unusual one, and bore but slight resemblance to what had gone before. But gradually things underwent a change. Friends of the Impressionists launched a campaign of proselytising. Now and then a picture was sold to a collector; formerly restaurant keepers and bricklayers had been the only buyers of their work. The popular press softened its criticisms and in many instances went so far as to defend their pictures. As a result of these numerous indications of a growing approval among connoisseurs, the public, that almost immovable mass of reactionary impulses, began to look with favour on the new works it had so recently ridiculed. The great majority of people had cared only for such canvases as those in which the intellect might jump from one familiar object to another, recognising it wholly, comprehending its uses, but without giving thought to its meaning. Being thus interested primarily in a picture’s conventionally painted details, they were opposed to any innovations which tended to obscure the actualities of delineation. Later their attitude, influenced by acts of authoritative sanction, relaxed. Instead of seeing, as formerly, only a series of raucously coloured spots in these new pictures, the public began to sense the deep reverence for nature that emanated from them. Thus has it always been the case with art: appreciation for anything newly vital lags far behind the achievement.
The true significance of Impressionism, however—like the true significance of all emotion-provoking art—remained undiscovered to the general. When the mean intelligence of mankind brings itself to bear on a work of art, it applies itself through the channels of literature, archæology, photography, botany, mineralogy and physiology. To be a popular artist a painter must be something of a professor in all these sciences. With all other considerations—such as psychology and æsthetics—he need not trouble himself. The public, even after centuries of rigorous training and constant association with art, is no nearer a comprehension of rhythmic ensembles—perfectly synthesised form in three dimensions—than it was during the Renaissance. The two major requisites to an understanding of the formal relations in momentous art are a highly developed sensitivity and an active intelligence. An eye and a nervous system are not enough. Society as a whole may, after a long course of training and sedulous study, reach that perceptive point where it can grasp the simple æsthetic hypothesis founded on two dimensions. But such a hypothesis is but a beginning. It embraces only the rudimentary æsthetic organisations that are found in Japanese art, the works of the Byzantine masters, the primitives of France and the pictures of Botticelli, Manet and Gauguin. The form in art of this kind is, strictly speaking, not form at all. It is balance, harmonious rhythm, linear adjustment, parallelism, co-ordinated silhouette, sensitive arrangement, outline melody—in fact, whatever is possible in two dimensions. Significant form must move in depth—backward and forward, as well as from side to side. Furthermore it must imply an infinity of depth. This third (and sometimes fourth) dimension informs all truly great art.
While the Impressionists did not attain to depth in the æsthetic connotation of the word, they nevertheless went beyond mere linear balance, for by the means of a higher emotional element—light—they organised, in a superficial manner, all the objects in their canvases. There were no dissevered objects, unrelated backgrounds, no concessions to the hagiographa or other literature. What chance, therefore, had they of being understood? Their subject-matter was too abstract; their effects were too general. No line was accentuated above another. There were no modifications to achieve vastness or splendour. Impressionism was the unadulterated reproduction of atmosphere, the smile or frown of a mood in nature. It is small wonder that the unæsthetic found it obscure: in it there was too much rapture, too much frankness, too much exultation in mere living, and too little restraint. It was the false dawn in the great modern Renaissance of colour—the most ecstatically joyful style of painting the world has ever seen. It was feminine in that it was a reflection, and its hysteria may also be attributed to this fact. The Impressionists seated themselves, free from all trammels, before the face of nature. Nature dictated: they transcribed. Nature smiled; and they, completely blent with it, smiled also. This very enthusiasm is what kept them young and held them to their initial path. To paint as they did was an intoxication, subtler and stronger than a drug and more elating than young love.
The vital history of the individual men who formed this group reduces itself to a record of their temperamental tastes in subject selection and to a statement of the degree to which each developed the new method. The individualities of the units of an experimental school are always unimportant. Temperament can dictate to the artist only two phases of variation: what he is to use in his composition, and those transcendental qualities, such as joy and sorrow, drama and comedy, which reflect the timbre of his predispositions. Rhythm, form, balance, organisation, drawing—all these æsthetic considerations spring from deeper matrices in a man’s nature than do his temperamental predilections. Whether one man is intrigued by sunlight or another by mist, mankind is, after all, so similar in externals, that one individual’s slight departure from a predecessor, or his trifling deviation from a contemporary, is of little moment. The true key to a man’s genius lies in his ability to organise as well as, or better than, others. The compositional figure on which he builds will alone give us the substance of his character. We are all capable of receiving sensations: we have our personal likes and dislikes for subjects, even for actions and smells. But these choices are the outgrowths of our instincts, mere habits of association. In nowise are they fundamental. They are the physiological recognition of pleasant or unpleasant impressions. Their importance is limited to the individual who experiences them. Being the results of receptivity, they have no more to do basically with the æsthetic expression of an artist whose work is pure creation, than phonograph disks with the sounds they receive. By the intelligence alone can a man be judged. Here there is order, extensive in artists like Michelangelo, partially restricted in such painters as El Greco and Giorgione, and severely limited as in the case of the Impressionists. However, it must not be implied that the intelligence alone can create. Such a contention would be preposterous; but it is true that impressions must first be consciously organised before they can be given concrete expression.
The intelligence of Pissarro was synthetic to a small extent, but not once did it exhibit signs of extended apperception. He thought clearly up to a certain point beyond which his art never went. His temperament was not an uncommon one among Hebrews. He viewed life as a social reformer who regards the world as a sad place, but one susceptible of improvement. From this psychological standpoint he painted. His pictures depict ubiquitous greys, occasionally brightened by a stream of lurid light; sombre scenes in which the impression is one of late afternoon; peasants who seem wearied of their unceasing and thankless labours; gaunt trees which epitomise the decay of the year. His technique is not dissimilar to that of Jongkind, and his drawing is allied to the construction found in the Dutch landscapists of the early nineteenth century rather than in those of his own group. That he was the transition from Jongkind to Monet is a plausible contention; in him are found qualities of both these other painters. But he was too conscientious ever to attain to the technical heights Monet reached. If one aspires to innovation of means, graphic traits have to be sacrificed: steps must be taken in the dark. Those who cling with one hand to the old while groping toward the new can never reach their desires. Pissarro’s lack of constructive genius was too evident, his timidity too great, his intelligence too literal for him ever to effectuate new plastic forms. His instincts were those of a teacher, and he displayed indubitable traits of an exalted doctrinaire. But his art, with these limitations, was able and complete. Cézanne says he learned all he knew of colour from him. This is not wholly true; but it is certain that Guillaumin and Sisley are greatly indebted to his clarity of reason.
Although Pissarro is the greater artist, Monet is the finer craftsman. He is widely credited with the invention of divisionistic methods; but in this conclusion an inaccurate syllogism has played havoc with the facts. None of the Impressionists invented the procédé de la tâche; and not having invented it detracts nothing from their achievement. Liszt did not invent the pianoforte, yet he was its greatest master. The practice of crediting Frenchmen with the invention and development of methods has scant authority with which to justify itself. Poussin was an offshoot, and a weak one, of the great Titian. Watteau and Boucher come to us direct out of the corners of Rubens’s pictures. Daumier and Courbet, temperamentally unrelated to the French tradition, stem from the Dutch and the Spaniards. Cézanne emanated from the Dutch and the Italians via Impressionism. Matisse’s procedure is little more than a modification of that of the Persians and the early Italians. Cubism was imported from Spain by a Spaniard. Futurism is strictly Italian: there is not a French name among its originators. Synchromism was brought into the world by Americans. And Impressionism, which, like all these other departures, has come to be looked upon as French, is incontrovertibly of English parentage. True, there is small credit due the inventor. The man capable of employing new discoveries (as Marconi employed the principles of wireless telegraphy) is the truly important figure. But we should not confuse discovery with employment. Since Monet was French, France has a perfect right to claim the results of colour division. The honours attaching to its discovery are Turner’s and Constable’s.
Monet, like many great men, had little schooling. He went direct to nature, impelled by the new impetus toward landscape. His first pictures in the Impressionist manner resemble Manet’s except for trivial innovations in the differentiation of shadows; but in this difference we divine the later Monet. Viewed cursorily these paintings appear to be conventional figure pieces. But they are more than that. The figures have no other significance than that which attaches to a vase or a landscape. “Facial expression,” “sympathetic gestures,” the “appeal”—all are absent from them. In these pictures the costume plays the hero’s part. La Japonaise is representative of that treatment of subject wherein the figure is only an excuse for a pattern of colour. The modern attitude toward theme which Manet handed down is again in evidence in Monet. Its reductio ad absurdum was the late epidemic of illustrative pictures by such men as Whistler, Shannon, Sargent, Zuloaga and Alexander, the titles of which were derived from the flowers held in the hands of the principals, a bowl of goldfish in the background, or the colour of a lace shawl.
Monet, however, soon tired of figure pieces. His true penchant lay toward landscape. In this field he found an infinity of colour possibilities, innumerable subtleties of light gradation, and ready-to-paint arrangements as appealing as the ones he had formerly had to pose in his interiors. At first his technique was broad and radiant, much like a dispersed Manet. The large flat planes of unified colour which later were to disintegrate into a thousand touches, were laid on silhouetted forms. His boat pieces in the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg gallery, appear, in their simplicity and breadth of treatment, like the unfinished underpainting of a Turner or a Rembrandt. Much of the bare canvas is visible; and in them one feels the presence of the experimenter. At this time the war drove Monet to London, and his exile proved a salutary one. On his return his pictures bloomed with a new brilliance, and his flat surfaces became fragmentised. Racial characteristics no doubt establish a bond between Sisley and the English landscapists, but nothing less than an active influence could have made so typical a Frenchman as Monet paint a canvas like L’Église à Varengeville in which Turner is so much in evidence. Turner is also unmistakably present in Pissarro at times, as witness Sydenham Road, but never to any great extent.
Despite his great debt to Turner, Manet and Pissarro, Monet owed even more to the Japanese. They influenced his style and his selection of subjects. From them he lifted the idea of painting a single object many times in its varied atmospheric manifestations. But where the Japanese shifted their vantage-ground with each successive picture, Monet’s observation point remained stationary. His composition too, superficial as it is, is frankly Japanese. It is generally represented by a straight line which runs near the lower frame from one side to the other of the canvas, and which supports the principal objects of the work. This line slants, now up to the left, now up to the right; but seldom is it curved as in the more advanced drawings of Hiroshige or Hokusai. His kinship to the Japanese is, after all, a natural one, for the temperaments of France and Japan are as similar as is possible between east and west. The Japanese artists presented atmospheric conditions by means of gradating large colour planes into white or dark. The consequent effects of rain, snow, wind and sun are as vivid as Monet’s, but they differ from the Frenchman’s in that they are concerned principally with nature’s decorative possibilities. Monet adheres to graphic transcription for the purpose of presenting the dynamics of a mood-producing phase of nature. But though differing as to aims, they both reach very similar visual results. Compare, for instance, Monet’s suite of Les Peupliers with Hiroshige’s series of the Tokaido or with Hokusai’s Views of Fuji. Many of the pictures are alike in composition and choice of subject; but the European has achieved a living light, while the Oriental has presented a more lucid and intensive vision. These differences of purposes and similarities of appearance are again discernible in Monet’s Coins de Rivière and Shiubun’s Setting Sun. A further proof of this Impressionist’s affinities with the Japanese will be found by collating Monet’s figure pieces with those of Utamaro.
There is one important point of divergence, however, between the arts of Japan and Monet’s canvases. Whereas the Japanese ignored texture, Monet at all times devoted himself more or less sedulously to its portrayal. The Falaise à Étretat and The Houses of Parliament—London are examples of his freedom from a rigid system of scientific application. In both pictures the sky is drawn with broad intersecting strokes in order to achieve transparency and vastness. The water, in the former, is painted with long curved strippings to give the wave effect, as in Courbet’s La Vague; and, in the latter, ripples are formed by minute touches. Monet’s architecture is often built up with colour-spots as a man lays bricks; and the cliffs in the Falaise à Étretat are corrugated in exactly the same way the strata lie in nature. Later this preciosity of style disappeared, except in his treatment of slightly ruffled water. His brushing became irregular and elongated, and he applied his stroke so that it would merge into the other innumerable touches of diverse colour. His eyesight was highly trained, and after years of labour in the conscious analysis of colour planes, he was able to divide these planes unconsciously.
Monet was artistic in that he felt deeply what was before him. Henri Martin, on the other hand, who painted with independent touches in the hope of obtaining flickering sunlight, and who knew his palette fully as well as Monet, laboured mechanically. His work is more optical than emotional. He is a realist in the same sense that Roll is a realist; but both these men present only the husk of reality. Monet, to the contrary, experienced and expressed nature’s ecstasy. He is like a string which vibrates to any harmony: Martin is little more than an eye. Both finished their work in the open; and both stippled. But here the parallelism ends, for where Monet completed the effects of the Japanese, Martin only took light into the academies. Perhaps this is why Martin was at once acclaimed by the public, and why Monet, during those first dark years of struggle and poverty, was compelled to sell his canvases for practically nothing. Duret confesses to having obtained one for eighty francs. Martin was early accorded academic honours, and received numerous government orders.
Monet found himself at home wherever there was light and water. His canvases describe scenes from all over Europe. But his most famous pictures are his two series, Les Meules and Les Nymphéas. In the first, a single haystack is set forth in a diversity of illuminations and seasons; and the second repeats a small pond of water-lilies, in shade and in sun, ruffled and calm. His La Cathédrale, Venice and London series are also widely known. These represent acute observation and an implacable inspiration to work, for they had to be finished simultaneously. Their accomplishment was a stupendous tour de force. At sunrise Monet would go forth with twenty blank canvases so that the changes of sunlight and mist might be caught from hour to hour. They seem infantile to us today—these imitations of the subtleties of light, these meteorological histories of haystacks and lilies, these atmospheric personalities of cathedrals and canals. Yet it is by just such self-burials in data that one exhausts the æsthetic possibilities of nature’s actualities. And not until this probing to the bottom has been accomplished does the artist possess that complete knowledge which impels him to push forward to something newer and more vital.
Sisley was the last of the original five to adopt Impressionistic methods. He had long had an admiration for the exploits of the more revolutionary painters, but a comfortable income had acted as a sedative on his ambitions. He did not feel the necessity for difficult endeavour. But when, at the death of his father, he found himself penniless and with a family to care for, he joined the ranks of Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and Bazille. He had talent and an accurate eye, and his earlier academic work, done in the sixties, served as a practical foundation. After he had adopted the more modern technique of Pissarro and Monet, he was prepared for the achievement of new art. If we had no other proof that Impressionism at its inception was a shallow craft, Sisley’s immediate mastery of it would be conclusive, for his appropriation of its means was not an æsthetic impulse but a financial expedient. But more extensive corroboration can be found in a score of academies where Impressionism is taught and taught conclusively.
There is no more or less actual composition in Sisley than in other of the Impressionists. He supplied no innovations, and he differed from his fellows only in so far as his temperament indicated variation. In Monet and Guillaumin there is a concentration and precision which the Englishman fell short of. His nature was less akin to these Impressionists than to the Turner of wide and open skies, of the softness and dreaminess of summer, of that perfect satisfaction which is content with inaction. Sisley’s very colour preference for which the public reproached him—light lilac—indicates his penchant for prettiness and repose. His choice of theme was invariably dictated by a poetical and sentimental need for the intimate.
In Guillaumin we have a man who gave promise of good work but who, up to the last, failed in its fulfilment. Indubitably talented, he never succeeded in reaching that point where talent is only a means to an end. But nevertheless there was in him a solidity of modelling, a real feeling for the ponderous hardness of hills and plains. He was a friend of Cézanne, and undoubtedly learned much from that master of form. At first he had painted in sombre tones, but later, after meeting Cézanne and Pissarro in the Académie Suisse, he adopted their lighter and more joyous colour schemes. There is a canvas in the Caillebotte Collection in the Luxembourg which, in its broadness of treatment and extensive planes, suggests Gauguin both as to gamut and conception. Guillaumin was the most masculine talent of the early Impressionist group. He cared less for the transient views of nature than for its eternal aspect. His colour, by its liberality of application, counts more forcibly than that of Pissarro, Monet or Sisley. His contributions to the new idea, however, were comparatively small. He was not an explorer, but followed diligently in the path others had marked out. Only after he had won a fortune in a lottery did he break away from his environment. But this release came to him too late. His formative period of development had passed, and his work, from that time on, did not alter in technique. Only in his picturesque and bizarre subject-matter is noticeable any deviation from his habitual routine.
The individual achievements of the Impressionists, however, no matter how competent, are of minor importance. Impressionism was a new weapon in the hands of art’s anarchists. It has come to be regarded as a faultless faith whose devotees can do no wrong. There has been little or no adequate literature devoted to its exposition, its causes and influence; and the exaggeration of its attainments are as grotesque as the calumny with which it was at first received. It was not an ultimate and isolated movement, but a simple and wholly natural offshoot in the evolution of new means. The artists who fathered it were, except in one instance, men whose enthusiasm outstripped their abilities as composers. Their greatest good lay in that they turned the thoughts of painters toward colour, and outlined, summarily to be sure, the uses to which this new and highly intense element might be put. They expressed just what their desires permitted them:—nature in all its visible changes. Those exquisite moments of full sunlight on land and water, of cloud shadows over the hills, of the warm brilliancy of a blue sky on the upturned faces of flowers; the stillness of summer amid the woods; the cold serenity of snow-clad fields—all were seen and captured and immortalised by these men. They were the greatest painters of effects the world has ever known. They never strove to evoke the sensation of weight in the objects they painted; and that organisation of parts, which is a replica of the cosmos, they were too busy to attempt. Their very deficiencies were what permitted them so complete a vision of the only side of realism which still remained for painting to investigate.
The Impressionists did not embody concretely the teachings of their forerunners, but used them all in the abstract. Delacroix had sacrificed photographic truth in drawing in order to present a more intense impression of truth. Daumier had built form as nature builds it, colour aside. Courbet had turned painters from the poetic contemplation of a great past to the life about them. Manet had made images of whatever was at hand for the pure love of painting. The Impressionists turned to the things nearest them, paid scant heed to scholastic drawing, translated Daumier’s doctrine of form into light, and like Manet painted for the joy of the work. As experimenters they were valuable; but their pictures, to those unsentimental persons whose appreciations of art are wholly æsthetic, mean little more than records of how a cabbage patch appears at sunrise, a lily pond at midday, or a country lane at twilight. The Impressionists did not amalgamate and express the dreams of their forerunners. They were one of those transitional generations whose vitality is spent in a stupendous endeavour to conceive before the time is ripe. The need for a great birth had not yet made itself felt; for only when the period of embryo is complete can great art be born. Renoir brought forth that issue; and with him evolution seems to halt a moment before plunging onward. The meagre æsthetics of the early Impressionists could not lead to the highest artistic results. Indeed, their animating aims had to be abandoned before Renoir could attain to true significance.
THE entire past progress of painting is condensed and expressed in each of its great men. The creation of new art cannot be accomplished overnight, any more than that of a new organism; it must stem from first impulses and be formed on the differentiations of the past. Those men who declare themselves primitives and seek to acquire the eyes and minds of the Phœnicians or Aztecs are as conscious of their inability to create new art forms as are those visionaries who live in a mythical future and try to prophesy the forms that are to come. No man is born too soon or too late. There are those who strive toward classic intellectual ideals, toward Utopian economic states, toward new orders of society: but such reformers are only the malcontents. The truly great and practical men quickly assimilate the impulses of their own epochs and push the frontiers of the mind’s possibilities further into the unknown. These latter comprise the maligned vanguard of heroic thinkers who fight the battles for their weaker followers. Often, however, these followers rise to great heights, for in the world of endeavour two conspicuous types exist—the man who experiments and the man who achieves. Delacroix, Manet and the Impressionists belong to the first; Courbet and Renoir are of the second.
In Renoir’s life story, as in that of Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt, we see in miniature the evolution of all the painting that preceded him—the bitter struggles with the chimeras of convention, and each slow change that came over drawing, style, colour and composition. In the end, after a life full of near defeats, strife, yearning and anxiety, we behold the great man emerge triumphantly from his broken fetters and take his place beside the masters of the past. Some painters have more arduous fights than others, for the odds against them are greater. Rubens and Delacroix seemed the pampered favourites of a high destiny: Courbet and Renoir had to cleave and chisel each step of the way through the adamant of public suspicion. The world appears incapable of recognising either an intensification or a modification of an old and accepted formula. Hence Courtois and Puget were preferred to Delacroix; Ribera and Rembrandt to Courbet; the Avignon painters to Manet; Corot, Diaz and Rousseau to the Impressionists; and Rubens and Ingres to Renoir. In all of these parallelisms, the latter had their roots in the former. They were complications and variations of their forerunners—dissimilar only in method and manner.
Renoir began to paint at an early age. The poverty of his family necessitated him to make his own living, and at the age of thirteen he was in a factory painting porcelains. Five years later he applied for work at a place given over to the decoration of transparent screens. Here his unusual facility permitted him to paint ten times as fast as his fellow decorators, and since he was paid by the piece, he soon saved enough money to give himself an education in the art which had now become with him a conscious instinct—painting. From his earliest youth he had evinced a discontent with the slow-moving minds about him, and it was natural that he should first look upon art through the eyes of his great revolutionary contemporary, Courbet. His earliest work, of which Le Cabaret de la Mère Anthony and Diane Chasseresse are the best-known examples, reflected Courbet in both palette and conception. Even later, when Manet claimed him, he clung to his first influence. For while his work now reached out toward the substance of light to be found in La Musique aux Tuileries, it revealed at the same time all the form of the Ornans master. Le Ménage Sisley and Lise strikingly combine these two early influences.
Since humanity has emerged from the darkness of unconsciousness and the individual from the darkness of the womb, it is consistent with nature that in a man’s creative development—the route of which lies between dark and dark—the use of black should be his first instinct. Renoir, like all painters of great promise, started with this negation of colour. But wherein his intellectual distinction manifested itself was his innate proclivity for the rhythm of surface lines which he alone of all his contemporaries recognised in Courbet. In Lise, painted in 1867, a year after his Diane Chasseresse, both of these early penchants are evident. Black is the keynote of his sunlight; and while in conception the canvas is akin to Manet, it is a Manet made dexterous and masterly. It contains a balance and a linear rhythm of which that painter was ignorant. Lise is one of the few Renoirs into which the influence of Velazquez and Goya can be imagined. Even in its pyramidal form, which when used by most painters becomes a static figure, there is a movement at its apex which opens into a shape like a lily. This is brought about by the tilt of the sunshade and the continuation of the line of the sash outward in the tree trunk. By just such obvious and simple signs as these in early works, can we foretell an artist’s later developments.
The next year, 1868, Renoir’s work is more net, more able in its balance, more sure in its effect. Le Ménage Sisley is one of his finest early examples of how this rhythmic continuity of line obsesses a mind avid for form, colour, vitality. At first glance we see only an irregular pyramid formed by the outline of the two figures; but after a minute’s study we notice that on the right the line of the skirt curves gracefully inward to the waist-line, sweeps up to the woman’s neck, then begins an outward flexure, and finally disperses itself amid the tree’s slanting branches in the right-hand upper corner. On the left, the outline of the man’s right leg and arm and hair forms another curve which bends back the line of the opposing curve of the woman’s dress, and completes the figure of the pyramid. But the first curve, the force of which is seemingly ended at the woman’s waist, is continued in the outline of the light tonality which begins at the man’s right elbow, curves outward to the frame, then inward, and ends on the upper frame a little to the left of the man’s head. Furthermore, the volume made by the light tonality in the upper left-hand corner serves as a balance to the form of the woman’s tunic. This composition is, in all essentials, the same as in Lise, and embraces that rhythm in two dimensions which Manet did not know, and that balance of tonal form of which Manet was never capable. Manet’s mind was that of the lesser Dutch and Spaniards. Renoir’s was the plastic and flowing mind of the Latin races, never satisfied with angularity and immobility, but needful of the smooth progression of sequence and movement.
The recognition of the artistic necessity for linear rhythm led Renoir to search for it in others than Courbet. Among the painters by whom he might profit, Delacroix stood nearest his own time. To him Renoir turned; and it was out of him that Renoir’s greatness was to grow. Delacroix’s organisations appealed to him—especially the triangular one which opens at the top. His admiration for this artist’s talent led him to paint in 1872 a canvas called Parisiennes Habillées en Algériennes, an ambitious essay to compete with Les Femmes d’Alger dans Leur Appartement. Intrinsically the picture was a failure, but it taught its creator more than he had heretofore learned concerning colour and drawing. In it are discernible indications of the formal unconventionalities and the chromatic brilliancies which later were to be such dominant qualities in Renoir’s work. Although for two years he had used Impressionistic methods, it was through this picture that Delacroix introduced him to the Impressionists’ colour. Manet had already introduced him to Ingres: and these two incidents went far toward laying the foundation for his greatness. On neither the Impressionists nor Ingres did he build a style; but from both he learned something of far more value:—freedom from the dictates of style. Here again Delacroix had a hand, for by studying this artist’s uses of Ingres’s simplifications, Renoir was able to make these simplifications plastic.
Renoir’s colour up to this time had been restrained by the dictates of his epoch. But with the inspiration and encouragement given him by Les Femmes d’Alger dans Leur Appartement, it burst forth with all the force of long-imprisoned energy, and drove him out of doors. In this picture he found excuse to carry colour to any extreme he desired. At once the instincts of the porcelain painter, ever latent in him, came uppermost. Delacroix, in giving him the Impressionists’ freedom of colour, had brought him back to those rich and full little designs he had painted on china between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. In this early training alone lies the explanation of his later matière which has for so long puzzled the critics. Many attribute his colour effects to Watteau. But Renoir had developed his technique before he knew the older master. Years previous he had been intensely interested in the very material of his models. In Le Ménage Sisley, La Baigneuse au Griffon and La Femme à la Perruche is evinced the love of the connoisseur for rare and rich stuffs. Furthermore he had begun to turn his eyes toward Impressionist methods two years before he painted Les Parisiennes Habillées en Algériennes. Up to that time his brushing had been broad like Manet’s or Courbet’s; immediately afterward it tended toward spotting, and Monet took the upper hand. Watteau’s manner of application served only to substantiate Renoir in his choice of method.
The years from 1865 to 1876 constitute a period of Renoir’s life rich in its promise of splendid things. His keen admirations and high enthusiasms made of him throughout this time a disciple. But his achievements, small as they were, were more sumptuous and effectual than either Manet’s or Monet’s. Their true significance, though, lay in their assurance of what was to come after he had completed that unlearning process through which all great men must pass. Only by sitting at a master’s feet can one acquire the knowledge that informs one which influences should be utilised and which cast aside. One cannot learn from experience the total lessons of many men, each one of whom has given a lifetime to the study of a different side of a subject. If these men are to be surpassed their life work must be used as a starting point. Renoir began thus. He had fallen under the sway of Courbet, Manet, Delacroix and Monet; but after eleven years he had exhausted his creative interest in both their theories and their attainments. These men had expressed all that was in them. For Renoir to cling to them was to stand still. If he was to go down in history as a constructive genius and not merely as an able imitator, it was time for him to strike out alone.
He did not hesitate. The portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, done in 1876, marks his transformation. In it he achieved the scintillation of light which is not linked with colour or painting, but which seems to arise, by some mysterious alchemy, from the surface of the canvas. In this picture, and also in the Moulin de la Galette, finished in the same year, he consummated the fondest ambition of the Impressionists, namely: to make the spectator feel a picture, not as a depiction of nature’s light, but as a medium from which emanates the very force of light itself. But Renoir did not stop here: to this achievement he added form and rhythm—two attributes which the Impressionists, preoccupied with objectivity, were too busy to attempt. And in addition he displayed a technique so perfect in its adaptability to any expression, that its mannerisms were completely submerged in the picture’s total effect. These were the qualities which Renoir was to develop to so superlative a degree. He had begun to express form in 1870 in his Portrait de Dame. Two years later in his Delacroix adaptation he had branched out into colour. And in his very first canvases there was rhythmic balance of lines. In 1876 all these tendencies coalesced. In consequence Renoir blossomed forth free from aggressive influences, knowing his own limitations and possibilities. This cannot be said even of those excellent works, La Loge, La Danseuse and La Fillette Attentive, done the two preceding years. It is only by contemplating such pictures as the portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, La Chevelure and La Source that we can perceive the path along which his development was to take place. For these canvases, though far more significant than the works of Pissarro and Monet, are almost negligible beside his later work. He was a man never satisfied with results, no matter how exalted. His every new achievement was only a higher elevation from which his horizon ever receded.