IMPRESSIONISM is the name given to a school of painting that began to manifest itself in Paris in 1863, when the works of Edouard Manet (1832-83) and his friends were rejected by the Salon jury of that year. The emperor, Napoleon III, liberally minded, demanded that these innovators should at least have the right to exhibit together and a special room was 1903), Alfred Sisley and Auguste Renoir (1841), received nothing but abuse and ridicule for 30 years. Their pictures, which now command enormous prices, were condemned for years by the Parisian critics and painters who led the taste of the period. A few far-sighted patrons, however, encouraged these great artists who worked industriously and patiently, producing an enormous number of works and obeying the creative instinct without any other dogma than the passionate observation of nature. The Caillebotte collec tion, bequeathed by Gustave Caillebotte to the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris, and a special ex hibition of their works at the Paris Exposition of 1900 compelled recognition. The public— in fact, the whole world—awoke (as it did to the sculpture of Rodin) to the truth and beauty of the Impressionist masters. To-day their place in art is unquestioned and secure.
Impressionist ideas may be summed up as follows: In nature no color exists by itself. The coloring of objects is a pure illusion. The only creative source of color is the sunlight which envelops all things. Our vision has formed the habit of discerning in the universe two things: form and color. Only artificially are outline and color distinguished one from the other. Light reveals the forms ; and, play ing upon different states of matter, i.e., the sub stance of leaves, the grain of stones, etc., the fluidity of the air, gives them dissimilar color ing. When the light disappears, forms and colors vanish. Everything has a color; and it is by the perception of the different color surfaces striking the eye, that forms, i.e., the outline of these colors, are perceived. The idea of dis tance, the idea of perspective and the idea of volume are given by darker, or lighter, colors. This is called in painting• the sense of values; and values are the only means by which depth on a flat surface can be expressed. Color, being the irradiation of light, it follows that all color is composed of the same elements as sunlight, namely, the seven tones of the spec trum. These seven tones appear different, owing to the unequal speed of the waves of light. The colors vary with the intensity of light. There is no color peculiar to any object, but only more or less rapid variation of light. The speed depends, as is demonstrated by op tics, on the degree of the inclination of the rays, which, according to their vertical or oblique direction, give different light and color. The colors of the spectrum are thus recom posed on every object. 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 a leaf and the brown of a tree-trunk are modified. If a painter wishes to recall color to the beholder of a picture, the composition of the atmosphere which separates objects from the eye must be studied. Therefore, the atmosphere is the real subject of the picture, and whatever is repre sented only exists through its medium. An other principle is that shadow is not absence of light to be represented with ready-made tones of bitumen and black, but is light of a different quality and value. In a shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with different speed. The third conclusion resulting from this is that colors in the shadows are modified by refrac tion. For instance in a picture representing an interior the source of light (a window) may not be indicated. The light in the picture will
be composed of the reflection of rays whose source is invisible and all the objects in the room catching reflections will consequently in fluence each other. Their colors will affect each other even if the surfaces be dull. A red vase placed on a blue carpet will lead to a very subtle but mathematically exact interchange be tween this blue and this red; and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two colors a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two principal colors. The science of optics can work out these complementary colors with mathematical exactness. If for example, 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 of the face. Here we touch upon the very foundations of Impressionism. The painter must paint with only the seven colors of the spectrum and discard all the others: that is what Claude Monet has done boldly, adding to them only white and black. Instead of composing mixtures on his palette the painter places on his canvas nothing, but the seven colors juxtaposed, leaving the indi vidual rays of each of these colors to blend at a certain distance, so as to act like sunlight itself upon the eye of the beholder. Such, then, is the dissociation of tones, which is the main point of Impressionist technique. It has the immense advantage of suppressing all mix tures, of leaving to each color its proper strength and consequently its freshness and brilliancy. The difficulties are extreme. The painter's eye must be subtle. Light becomes the sole subject of the picture: the interest of the object on which it plays is secondary. Painting becomes a purely optic art, a search for harmo nies, a sort of natural poem, quite distinct from expression, style and design, which were the principal aims of former painting. It is only natural that it is principally in landscape paint ing that the Impressionists have achieved the greatness that is theirs.
Impressionism is more than a school: It is a movement, 'a reactionary movement, against classic and romantic subject. It is anti-intel lectual, protesting against every literary, psy chological, or symbolical subject, and warring against historical painting, mythological paint ing and false idealism, substituting for such subjects what might be summed up in the word character. To search for and to express the true character of a site, a human being, or an object, seems to the Impressionists more sig nificant than to search for exclusive beauty. Before the days of Manet a distinction was made between noble subjects and genre (scenes of familiar life) subjects: the Impressionists consider all subjects worthy of the painter's brush, if nobly treated.
The Impressionists, coming immediately after the Barbizon School (Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, etc.), have had as much, if not more, in fluence than those painters who worked in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Among the principal exponents of Impressionism in other countries are the Americans, Childe Hassam, John S. Sargent, Henry Golden Dearth, J. W. Alex ander and Mary Cassatt; the Spaniards, Sorollo y Bastida, Zuloaga, Dario de Regoyos and Rusifiol; the Italians, Boldini, Segantini and Michetti; the Danish, Kroyer; the Belgians, Theo van Rysselberghe, Claus, Verheyden, Heyman, Verstraete and Baertson; the Nor wegian, Thaulow; the Dutch, Jongkind; and in England the °Glasgow School,)) Lavery, Guthrie and John Lewis Brown. Consult Duret, 'Les Impressionistes) (Paris 1906) ; Maudair, The French Impressionists> (London, n. d.); Muther, (History of Modern Painting) (Lon don 1896).