It is not strange that so erratic, so eccentric a genius bewildered the public and the critics of his day, for in the painting of light he was a generation ahead of his time, and in the attempt to paint pure color harmonies he was two generations ahead.
Take, for instance, his “Sunrise, with a Sea Monster,” and “Sunrise, with Boat between Headlands,” in the Tate Gallery. If these pictures had been hung anonymously in the International Exhibition in New York they would have excited more laughter than any of the Cubists. They are simply color schemes compared with which an “Improvisation” by Kandinsky is a legible message.
A Turner in the National or Tate Gallery is accepted as a masterpiece; the same picture hung anonymously with a lot of extreme Post-Impressionists in the Grafton Gallery would be the occasion of much hilarity.
While all painting is more or less impressionistic, in the art literature of the day the term “Impressionists” is appropriated to the school of men who paint in the open direct from nature, and who attempt to record faithfully, many almost mechanically, their visual impressions of objects and light-effects.
Hence the term Post-Impressionism means not an accentuation or a further development of Impressionism such as Neo-Impressionism or “pointillism,” but a reaction.
When Impressionism has had its day and done its best, then something different must come, and logically that something different is a return to the art that is the antithesis of Impressionism—the art of the imagination—a creative art.[14]
For a generation the poetic, the imaginative work of the Barbizon School—to use this one school as typical of the painting of practically the entire western world in the sixties and seventies—held sway.