To whom then shall we give the right to claim the name of Impressionism in its entirety? Will it only be deserved by the purely landscape artists, or at least by those who first and fore most are landscape painters—Monet, Pissarro (183o-1903), Sisley (184o-99)? Indeed, if Impressionism has a doctrine, and if this doctrine has a legitimate application, it is when it is applied to a landscape. It is not surprising that the author of this doctrine is a man, gifted with a powerful will, who has used his efforts to eliminate from his thoughts all not landscape. If one tries to find the characteristics of a school among the Impressionists and more particularly a common bias in the manner of painting, of seeing nature and conceiving the picture, it is to these that one must turn—though Sisley, who was no theorist and who, once provided with the technique acquired from Monet, had no other ambition than to be a charming minor poet of the country. But did they not on this or that point exceed the limits of their pro gramme? The passion and energy of Monet made of him a visionary, a lyricist; and it is surely not the characteristic of a narrow conception of art to close a career of landscapist with that unprecedented and unclassifiable work, the Nymplteas, a vast cyclic poem of the water, flowers, leaves and light, to which he devoted in solitude at Giverny the last 20 years of his long life. As for Pissarro, his gaze also wandered more than once beyond the horizons of pure Impressionism. Even in certain pictures where at first glance the eye seems to grasp only the technical preoccupations, one discovers a desire for order and organization, which the doctrine of Impressionism was not made to encourage. It was through this, that he was worthy of the curious and glorious role that he played in turn with Cezanne, Gauguin and Seurat, that is to say, with the three men who, with different means and more or less clear intentions, were to lead French Art into new paths.
Thus, in this century, the schools were immense seething reservoirs of strength but were all doomed to futility. To create beauty, that beauty which does not seek to flatter the prejudices, illusions or infatuations of a generation but rather illuminates space and time, great artists must raise themselves above the school which they had helped to found or even abandon it de liberately and take sides against it. From Romanticism to Real: ism, and from Realism to Impressionism, the same pathetic event keeps on repeating itself. Such was the fate of Delacroix: such was that of Manet, a master-hand whose vision spreads grandeur all around ; of Renoir, a spontaneous artist, an inventive colour ist who unites Delacroix and Watteau ; of Cezanne, that strange genius, at once powerful, naïve and calculating, creator of an art which even to-day remains a sealed book to us as far as his most inmost intentions are concerned, who, whatever we may say, burst with all the force of a new revelation into the firmament of painting; and finally, of their comrades, contemporaries and successors, to the extent that their contribution is valid.
It would however, be unjust to Impressionism to omit the fact that in spite of its doctrinal failure, it left behind it precious acquisitions from which artists are profiting and will continue to profit, whatever their conception of art and their vision of nature and of life may be. They created a colour scale. Cezanne to be sure, added a chromatism at once more robust and more subtle; but it is within the limits of the impressionist key-board that he found his famous "modulations" of which he talks almost as much as of his "small sensation," one set of which served by equivalence to interpret the others.
Seurat (1859-91) never concealed how much his inventive technique owed to Claude Monet. The very name he gave to us, "Neo-impressionism" is a confession whose meaning is patent to all. But, considered from another point of view, Seurat ranges himself under that law whose effects we seem to have recognized through the various turns and changes of the century. Neo impressionism belongs to him in his own right, but he is closely connected with Impressionism. To-day that is, in our eyes, ' nothing more than the external aspect of things. Seurat personi fies an intellectual reaction against the dispersive and inorganic tendencies favoured by impressionistic orthodoxy; he possessed the sense of order and grandeur; in an original fashion he knew how to convey that order and that grandeur, and this accounts for the fact that his role is of prime importance in the latter end of the century. Impressionism was unable to give him what he was searching for. The intellectual stimulus which he needed came to him from a man who was notably older than the Impressionists and at once a great intellectual and independent. Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), who had a genius for monumental painting, was connected with the charming painter Chasseriau (1819-56), and through him with the Ingres tradition, but even more closely with Delacroix, the great man who dominates the century and was the outcome of two schools. His technical influence and his triumphs as a colourist extended right into the heart of Impres sionism. His genius animates almost all those who in the 19th century had the ambition to associate painting with architecture and to cover vast mural spaces. Chasseriau was the first who really understood the master's lesson. He died before he had completed his 37th year, and fate willed that the work which constituted his best title to fame, his decoration at the Cour des Comptes, was almost utterly destroyed by the revolutionaries' mania for destruction.
Puvis de Chavannes, who was helped by his example, is quite the opposite of a precocious genius. He is of the family of those who, like Nicolas Poussin, only found in maturity the language capable of expressing their lonely thoughts. At practically the same time another lonely soul with a refined but more visionary imagination, Gustave Moreau (1826-98) endeavoured to create a cycle of mythical visions. For him art represented a poetical transfiguration of humanity. Such ideas were, one must believe, in the air at the time, but Puvis and Degas are the only ones who knew, each in his own very different way, how in the service of such high ambition to hold the balance true between dreams and reality, without which equilibrium art falls into mere phantas magoria, becomes too sentimental or too heavily pretentious, or finally, exhausts itself in the aristocratic morbidity of a Burne Jones. The rare and fine merit of Puvis de Chavannes especially, consists in his avoidance of literary contamination; it is his great honour that his Pauvre Pecheur, his Jeunes flues air bard de la mer and his Doux Pays turn one's thoughts to Poussin's masterpieces without suggesting imitation. This legitimate filial relationship of Puvis with Poussin does not preclude the connecting—with real meaning—or the names of Puvis and Degas. Starting at first from Delacroix, Puvis proceeds towards high-light painting on lines parallel with Impressionism. He is almost as close to the authentic Impressionists as Degas who, however, does not share in their beliefs.