There is no more or less actual composition in Sisley than in other of the Impressionists. He supplied no innovations, and he differed from his fellows only in so far as his temperament indicated variation. In Monet and Guillaumin there is a concentration and precision which the Englishman fell short of. His nature was less akin to these Impressionists than to the Turner of wide and open skies, of the softness and dreaminess of summer, of that perfect satisfaction which is content with inaction. Sisley’s very colour preference for which the public reproached him—light lilac—indicates his penchant for prettiness and repose. His choice of theme was invariably dictated by a poetical and sentimental need for the intimate.
In Guillaumin we have a man who gave promise of good work but who, up to the last, failed in its fulfilment. Indubitably talented, he never succeeded in reaching that point where talent is only a means to an end. But nevertheless there was in him a solidity of modelling, a real feeling for the ponderous hardness of hills and plains. He was a friend of Cézanne, and undoubtedly learned much from that master of form. At first he had painted in sombre tones, but later, after meeting Cézanne and Pissarro in the Académie Suisse, he adopted their lighter and more joyous colour schemes. There is a canvas in the Caillebotte Collection in the Luxembourg which, in its broadness of treatment and extensive planes, suggests Gauguin both as to gamut and conception. Guillaumin was the most masculine talent of the early Impressionist group. He cared less for the transient views of nature than for its eternal aspect. His colour, by its liberality of application, counts more forcibly than that of Pissarro, Monet or Sisley. His contributions to the new idea, however, were comparatively small. He was not an explorer, but followed diligently in the path others had marked out. Only after he had won a fortune in a lottery did he break away from his environment. But this release came to him too late. His formative period of development had passed, and his work, from that time on, did not alter in technique. Only in his picturesque and bizarre subject-matter is noticeable any deviation from his habitual routine.
| PAYSAGE | GUILLAUMIN |
The individual achievements of the Impressionists, however, no matter how competent, are of minor importance. Impressionism was a new weapon in the hands of art’s anarchists. It has come to be regarded as a faultless faith whose devotees can do no wrong. There has been little or no adequate literature devoted to its exposition, its causes and influence; and the exaggeration of its attainments are as grotesque as the calumny with which it was at first received. It was not an ultimate and isolated movement, but a simple and wholly natural offshoot in the evolution of new means. The artists who fathered it were, except in one instance, men whose enthusiasm outstripped their abilities as composers. Their greatest good lay in that they turned the thoughts of painters toward colour, and outlined, summarily to be sure, the uses to which this new and highly intense element might be put. They expressed just what their desires permitted them:—nature in all its visible changes. Those exquisite moments of full sunlight on land and water, of cloud shadows over the hills, of the warm brilliancy of a blue sky on the upturned faces of flowers; the stillness of summer amid the woods; the cold serenity of snow-clad fields—all were seen and captured and immortalised by these men. They were the greatest painters of effects the world has ever known. They never strove to evoke the sensation of weight in the objects they painted; and that organisation of parts, which is a replica of the cosmos, they were too busy to attempt. Their very deficiencies were what permitted them so complete a vision of the only side of realism which still remained for painting to investigate.
The Impressionists did not embody concretely the teachings of their forerunners, but used them all in the abstract. Delacroix had sacrificed photographic truth in drawing in order to present a more intense impression of truth. Daumier had built form as nature builds it, colour aside. Courbet had turned painters from the poetic contemplation of a great past to the life about them. Manet had made images of whatever was at hand for the pure love of painting. The Impressionists turned to the things nearest them, paid scant heed to scholastic drawing, translated Daumier’s doctrine of form into light, and like Manet painted for the joy of the work. As experimenters they were valuable; but their pictures, to those unsentimental persons whose appreciations of art are wholly æsthetic, mean little more than records of how a cabbage patch appears at sunrise, a lily pond at midday, or a country lane at twilight. The Impressionists did not amalgamate and express the dreams of their forerunners. They were one of those transitional generations whose vitality is spent in a stupendous endeavour to conceive before the time is ripe. The need for a great birth had not yet made itself felt; for only when the period of embryo is complete can great art be born. Renoir brought forth that issue; and with him evolution seems to halt a moment before plunging onward. The meagre æsthetics of the early Impressionists could not lead to the highest artistic results. Indeed, their animating aims had to be abandoned before Renoir could attain to true significance.