hich are
manyfold and splendid.

I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet's
painting more clearly even than from Manet's. Suppression of local
colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and
division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed
colours--these are the essential principles of _chromatism_ (for this
word should be used instead of the very vague term "Impressionism").
Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape
painting.

There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an
excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.
One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined
jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself
be sufficient to save from oblivion the man who has painted it. But the
study of light upon the figure has been the special preoccupation of
Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and, after the Impressionists, of the great
lyricist, Albert Besnard, who has concentrated the Impressionist
qualities by placing them at the service of a very personal conception
of symbolistic art. Monet commenced with trying to find his way by
painting figures, then landscapes and principally sea pictures and boats
in harbours, with a somewhat sombre robustness and very broad and solid
draughtsmanship. His first luminous studies date back to about 1885.
Obedient to the same ideas as Degas he had to avoid the Salons and only
show his pictures gradually in private galleries. For years he remained
unknown. It is only giving M. Durand-Ruel his due, to state that he was
one of the first to anticipate the Impressionist school and to buy the
first works of these painters, who were treated as madmen and
charlatans. He has become great with them, and has made his fortune and
theirs through having had confidence in them, and no fortune has been
better deserved. Thirty years ago nobody would have bought pictures by
Degas or Monet, which are sold to-day for a thousand pounds. This detail
is only mentioned to show the evolution of Impressionism as regards
public opinion.

[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET

THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR]

So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis of the laws of light
that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show
clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series
of pictures painted from nature at