A group of New-Impressionists, who might be called prismatic painters, stand in this respect at the extreme left. Starting from the conviction that the traditional mixing of colours upon the palette results after all only in palette tones, and can never fully express the intensity and pulsating vividness of tone-values, they founded the theory of the resolution of tones,—in other words, they break up all compound colours into their primary hues, set these directly upon the canvas, and leave it to the eye of the spectator to undertake the mixture for itself. In particular George Seurat was an energetic disseminator of this painting in points which excited new discussions amongst artists and new polemics in the newspapers. His pictures were entirely composed of flaming, glowing, and shining patches. Close to these pictures nothing was to be seen but a confusion of blotches, but at the proper distance they took shape as wild sea-studies in the brilliant hues of noon, with rocks and stones standing out in relief, orgies of blue, red, and violet. Such was Seurat’s manner of seeing nature. That such a course brings with it a good deal of monotony, that it will hardly ever be possible to quicken art to this extent with science, is incontestable. But it is just as certain that Seurat was a painter of distinction who shows in many of his pictures a fine sense for delicate, pale atmosphere. Many of his landscapes, which at close quarters look like mosaics of small, smooth, variously coloured stones, acquire a vibrating light, such as Monet himself did not attain, when looked at from a proper distance. Signac, Anquetin, Angrand, Lucien Pissarro, Coss, Luèc, Rysselberghe, and Valtat are the names of the other representatives of this scientific painting, and their method has not seldom enabled them to give expression in an overpowering manner to the quiet of water and sky, the green of the meadows, and the softness of tender light shifting over the sea.

DAGNAN-BOUVERET.L’Art.
BRETONNES AU PARDON.
(By permission of the Artist.)

When these “spotted” pictures hang in a room where they are fewer in number than ordinary paintings they are difficult to understand. Only the disadvantages of such a method of painting are noticed; the disagreeable spottiness of the little points of colour ranged unpleasantly side by side, and putting one in mind of a piece of embroidery work, does not exactly appeal to the artist who looks for beautiful lines and belle pâte in a picture. Nevertheless, the method would scarcely have found so many exponents did it not afford an opportunity to get certain effects which are scarcely obtainable in any other way. As a matter of fact, one finds in these pictures a sense of life, such shimmering, glimmering effects, such tremulous, vibrating light, as could not be arrived at without this disintegration of colour into separate points. Moreover, they have at a distance a decorative effect that leaves other pictures far behind.

DAGNAN-BOUVERET.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
THE NUPTIAL BENEDICTION.
(By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the copyright.)

The importance of Neo-Impressionism, therefore, depends on two particulars. First, in the analysis of light it has carried the principles of Impressionism to their furthest limit; secondly, in the matter of decorative effect it has laid aside one great fault of Impressionism, and has given us pictures which, seen from a distance, take on a definite form instead of a blur of indistinct tones.

Amongst the younger painters exhibiting in the Salon, Pointelin—without any trace of imitation—perhaps comes nearest to the tender poetry of Corot, and has with most subtlety interpreted the delicate charm of cold moods of morning, the deep feeling of still solitude in a wide expanse. Jan Monchablon views the meadow and the grass, the blades and variegated flowers of the field, with the eyes of a primitive artist. Wide stretches of rolling ground upon radiant spring days are usually to be seen in his pictures. The sun shines, the grass sparkles, and the horizon spreads boundless around. In the background cows are grazing, or there move small figures bathed in air, whilst a dreamy rivulet murmurs in the foreground. The bright, soft light of Provence is the delight of Montenard, and he depicts with delicacy this landscape with its bright, rosy hills, its azure sky, and its pale underwood. Light, as he sees it, has neither motes nor shadows; its vibration is so intense and fine that it fills the air with liquid gold, and absorbs the tints of objects, wrapping them in a soft and mystic golden veil.

Dauphin, who is nearly allied with him, always remains a colourist. His painting is more animated, provocative, and blooming, especially in those sea-pieces with their bright harbours, glittering waves, and rocking ships with their sails shimmering and coquetting in the sunshine. The name of Rosset-Granget recalls festal evenings, houses all aglow with lights and fireworks, or red lanterns shedding forth their gleam into the dark blue firmament, and reflected with a thousand fine tints in the sea.

Dial.
LUCIEN PISSARRO.SOLITUDE (WOODCUT).LUCIEN PISSARRO.RUTH (WOODCUT).
(By permission of Messrs. Hacon & Ricketts, theowners of the copyright.)

The melancholy art of Émile Barau, a thoroughly rustic painter, who renders picturesque corners of little villages with an extremely personal accent, stands in contrast with the blithe painting of the devotees of light; it is not the splendour of colour that attracts him, but the dun hues of dying nature. He has come to a halt immediately in front of Paris, in the square before the church of Creile. He knows the loneliness of village streets when the people are at work in the fields, and the houses give a feeling that their inhabitants are not far off and may return at any moment. His pictures are harmonies in grey. The leading elements in his works are the pale light lying upon colourless autumn sward, the mournful outlines of leafless trees stretching their naked boughs into the air as though complaining, small still ponds where ducks are paddling, the scanty green of meagre gardens, the muddy waters of old canals, reddish-grey roofs and narrow little streets amid moss-covered hills, tall poplars and willows by the side of swampy ditches, and in the background the old village steeple, which is scarcely ever absent. Damoye, likewise, is fond of twilight, and autumn and winter evenings. He is the poet of the great plains and dunes and the sombre heaven, where isolated sunbeams break shyly from behind white clouds. A fine sea-painter, Boudin, studies in Etretat, Trouville, Saint Valery, Crotoy, and Berck the dunes and the misty sky, spreading in cold northern grey across the silent sea. Dumoulin paints night landscapes with deep blue shadows and bright blue lights, while Albert Lebourg has a passion for the grey of rain and the glittering snow which gleams in the light, blue in one place, violet and rosy in another. Victor Binet and Réné Billotte have devoted themselves to the study of that poor region, still in embryo, which lies around Paris, a region where a delicate observer finds so much that is pictorial and so much hidden poetry. Binet is so delicate that everything grows nobler beneath his brush. He specially loves to paint the poetry of twilight, which softens forms and tinges the trees with a greyish-green, the quiet, monotonous plains where tiny footpaths lose themselves in mysterious horizons, the expiring light of the autumn sun playing with the fallen yellow leaves upon dusty highways. Réné Billotte’s life is exceedingly many-sided. In the forenoon he is an important ministerial official, in the evening the polished man of society in dress-clothes and white tie whom Carolus Duran painted. Of an afternoon, in the hours of dusk and moonrise, he roams as a landscape painter in the suburbs of Paris; he is an exceedingly accomplished man of the world, who only speaks in a low tone, and what he specially loves in nature, too, is the hour when moonlight lies gently and delicately over all forms. The scenes he usually chooses are a quarry with light mist settling over it, a light-coloured cornfield in a bluish dusk, a meadow bathed in pale light, or a strip of the seashore where the delicate air is impregnated with moisture.

To be at once refined and true is the goal which portrait painting in recent years has also specially set itself to reach. In the years of chic it started with the endeavour to win from every personality its beauties, to paint men and women “to advantage”; but later, when the Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage stood at its zenith, it strove at all costs to seize the actual human being, to catch, as it were, the work-a-day character of the personality as it is in involuntary moments when people believe themselves to be unobserved and give up posing. The place of those pompous arrangements of the painters of material was taken by a soul, and temperament interpreted by an intelligence. And corresponding with the universal principle of conceiving man and nature as an indivisible whole, it became imperative in portrait painting no longer to place persons before an arbitrary background, but in their real surroundings—to paint the man of science in his laboratory, the painter in his studio, the author at his work-table—and to observe with accuracy the atmospheric influences of this environment.