All this was not suspected by Gauguin at the time, nor for years afterwards. For the time he was content to paint and to follow the prevailing fashions in his painting. And he soon found that the prevailing fashion of the day in Paris was Impressionism.
To define Impressionism it is not necessary, as many professional art-critics have done, to enter into long dissertations as to the supremacy of pure colors, nor to see in Constable or Turner the ancestry of the movement.
Impressionism was neither more nor less than the cult of Realism—or to speak better, Naturalism—carried out in painting. This cult had already possessed in painting one important precursor, Gustave Courbet. But it is to literature, always the advance guard of the arts, that we must turn to understand what impressionism intended and why it failed.
A little before 1870, which year marks a turning point not only in France's political but also in her intellectual life, there came a change over her literature. Romanticism, which had startled the world in 1830 with Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Hugo and Balzac, was now dead. The heroic, the Napoleonic, the Byronic attitude had somehow gone out of life. Under the Second Empire, the bourgeois triumphed over the Tuileries.
A few years before the crash of 1870, Charles Baudelaire gave to the world his Fleurs du Mal—the exasperated cry against life of a soul tortured with too great a sensibility. Almost at the same time Gustave Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, erected his monument of infamy to the memory of the bourgeois. These two books opened the path to Naturalism, to the "human document," to the de Goncourts, to de Maupassant, and to Zola.
Impressionism was the logical outgrowth, in another sphere, of the work of these Naturalist writers.
It abolished the lighting of the studio and substituted for it natural sunlight.
It abolished the classical "subject" and left the painter free to paint, as Manet said, "N'importe quoi."
Thus, on the one side, it led directly to the analysis of atmospheric vibration, foreshadowed by Constable and Turner, but not by them elevated to the rank of a science; and on the other side, it led with equal inevitability to the total dependence of the painter upon Nature, and the consequent atrophy of his imagination. It was, as Manet said again, "Nature seen through a temperament."
Against Impressionism, as against Romanticism, only one artist had dared to continue the tradition of classical, decorative painting descending from Giotto, through Raphael and Poussin, to Prud'hon and to Ingres. This was the Norman, Puvis de Chavannes.