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.