principles (for instance, sunlight through trees in a wood), were found to be quite paintable, considered as an impression of various colour masses.  The early formula could never free itself from the object as a solid thing, and had consequently to confine its attention to beautiful ones.  But from the new point of view, form consists of the shape and qualities of masses of colour on the retina; and what objects happen to be the outside cause of these shapes matters little to the impressionist.  Nothing is ugly when seen in a beautiful aspect of light, and aspect is with them everything.  This consideration of the visual appearance in the first place necessitated an increased dependence on the model.  As he does not now draw from his mental perceptions the artist has nothing to select the material of his picture from until it has existed as a seen thing before him:  until he has a visual impression of it in his mind.  With the older point of view (the representation by a pictorial description, as it were, based on the mental idea of an object), the model was not so necessary.  In the case of the Impressionist the mental perception is arrived at from the visual impression, and in the older point of view the visual impression is the result of the mental perception.  Thus it happens that the Impressionist movement has produced chiefly pictures inspired by the actual world of visual phenomena around us, the older point of view producing most of the pictures deriving their inspiration from the glories of the imagination, the mental world in the mind of the artist.  And although interesting attempts are being made to produce imaginative works founded on the impressionist point of view of light and air, the loss of imaginative appeal consequent upon the destruction of contours by scintillation, atmosphere, &c., and the loss of line rhythm it entails, have so far prevented the production of any very satisfactory results.  But undoubtedly there is much new material brought to light by this movement waiting to be used imaginatively; and it offers a new field for the selection of expressive qualities.

This point of view, although continuing to some extent in the Spanish school, did not come into general recognition until the last century in France.  The most extreme exponents of it are the body of artists who grouped themselves round Claude Monet.  This impressionist movement, as the critics have labelled it, was the result of a fierce determination to consider nature solely from the visual point of view, making no concessions to any other associations connected with sight.  The result was an entirely new vision of nature, startling and repulsive to eyes unaccustomed to observation from a purely visual point of view and used only to seeing the “feel of things,” as it were.  The first results were naturally rather crude.  But a great amount of new visual facts were brought to light, particularly those connected with the painting of sunlight and half light effects.  Indeed the