know which way to
incline my umbrella." Monet is also an incomparable painter of water.
Pond, river, or sea--he knows how to differentiate their colouring,
their consistency, and their currents, and he transfixes a moment of
their fleeting life. He is intuitive to an exceptional degree in the
intimate composition of matter, water, earth, stone or air, and this
intuition serves him in place of intellectuality in his art. He is a
painter _par excellence_, a man born for painting, and this power of
penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a
kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate
truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is
the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist,
Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.

His work is immense. He produces with astonishing rapidity, and he has
yet another characteristic of the great painters: that of having put his
hand to every kind of subject. His recent studies of the Thames are, at
the decline of his energetic maturity, as beautiful and as spontaneous
as the _Hay-ricks_ of seventeen years back. They are thrillingly
truthful visions of fairy mists, where showers of silver and gold
sparkle through rosy vapours; and at the same time Monet combines in
this series the dream-landscapes of Turner with Monticelli's
accumulation of precious stones. Thus interpreted by this intense
faculty of synthesis, nature, simplified in detail and contemplated in
its grand lines, becomes truly a living dream.

Since the _Hay-ricks_ one can say that the work of Claude Monet is
glorious. It has been made sacred to the admiring love of the
connoisseurs on the day when Monet joined Rodin in an exhibition which
is famous in the annals of modern art. Yet no official distinction has
intervened to recognise one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth
century. The influence of Monet has been enormous all over Europe and
America. The _process of colour spots_[1] (let us adhere to this
rudimentary name which has become current) has been adopted by a whole
crowd of painters. I shall have to say a few words about it at the end
of this book. But it is befitting to terminate this all too short study
by explaining that the most lyrical of the Impressionists has also been
the theorist _par excellence_. His work connects easel painting with
mural painting. No Minister of Fine Arts has been found, who would
s