Then, about the middle of the Century appeared Gustave Courbet who loudly proclaimed himself a realist. He meant by this that he was not moved by sentiment, as the Barbizon naturalists were; that he believed that the only thing which concerned a painter was to paint what he could see, as it appeared to his eye alone. He wished to limit his art to what is visible to sight. So he thought it was foolish for an artist to attempt to represent a scene from the Bible or any historical subject or subject invented by the imagination. As the artist had never seen these things, he had no business, as a painter, to try and represent them. He was going outside his own art and meddling with some one else’s: the art of the writer or actor, for example.
Courbet’s point of view of realism and his motive, to paint only what he could see, were carried further by another Frenchman, Édouard Manet. He had become a student of the works of Velasquez, from whom he had learnt: firstly, a new way of viewing his subject; secondly a new way of rendering what he saw. This new way of viewing the subject is what is now called “impressionism.”
I am sorry to have to trouble you with a new word; but I think you are prepared for it, since impressionism professes to be only a more natural and real way of seeing things. Of seeing things, that is the point. It does not take account of what things are, but of the impression they produce upon our mind, when they appear before our eyes. You are at work in school, and a stranger enters the class room. He converses for a few minutes with the teacher and then goes out. What sort of man was he? If there are twenty children in the class, and each, on arriving home, relates the circumstance of the visit, there will probably be twenty different impressions of the visitor’s appearance. They will agree in some points and differ in others; yet each one of the impressions may be a true one—as far as it goes. How far it goes will depend on the quickness and thoroughness of your observation. But anyhow, it will not include a great number of details; it will rather be a general impression.
If you look out of window into a street, you may see a number of figures on the sidewalks. You receive a general impression of figures, moving or standing still; some men, some women, representing various spots of one color. Now a realistic painter might say, “Each one of those figures represents a real person; I will paint him as he really is; and, to do so, will ask him to stand still long enough for me to study him exactly in all his visible details.” “And if you do,” retorts the impressionist painter, “you will paint something so real, that it will be too real. For you never could see these people in
Evening. Anton Mauve.
this way, if you look at them on the street. The greater part of the details would be lost in the general impression.”
Well! the more you think of it, the more right you see the impressionist is—from his point of view. He says, if you are going to be natural, be really natural; if you want to make your pictures look real, make them real in a natural way. If the only thing in art is to be as like nature as possible, and to represent things only as they would appear, if you suddenly looked at them, the impressionist is right. And what makes this way of looking at things particularly interesting is the fact, that it is so often the momentary effect in nature that is most beautiful: the effect that lasts but a moment, that is fugitive or fleeting, caught in an instant, before it changes to something else. You know what I mean from your own experience. A certain expression passes over your friend’s face. “Oh! if I could only photograph her now,” you exclaim; but by the time you have arranged your camera, it is gone, and cannot be brought back to order. Well, it is just that fugitive, fleeting expression of a subject that the realist, who is an impressionist, tries to represent in his pictures.