The French Impressionists (1860-1900) | Page 8

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