. He studied Turner in London, 1870; then his
manner changed. He had been a devoted pupil of Eugene Boudin and could
paint the discreet, pearly gray seascapes of his master. But Turner
and Watteau and Monticelli modified his style, changed his way of
envisaging the landscape. Not Edouard Manet but Claude Monet was the
initiator of the impressionistic movement in France, and after
witnessing the rout and confusion that followed in its wake one is
tempted to misquote Nietzsche (who said that the first and only
Christian died on the cross) and boldly assert that there has been but
one impressionist; his name, Monet. "He has arrived at painting by
means of the infinitely varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour
spots which dissociate the tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of
objects through the arabesque of their vibrations." How his landscapes
shimmer with the heat of a summer day! Truly, you can say of these
pictures that "the dawn comes up like thunder." How his fogs, wet and
clinging, seem to be the first real fogs that ever made misty a
canvas! What hot July nights, with few large stars, has Monet not
painted! His series of hayricks, cathedrals, the Thames are precious
notations of contemporary life; they state facts in terms of exquisite
artistic value; they resume an epoch. It is therefore no surprise to
learn that in 1874 Monet gave the name (so variously abused) to the
entire movement when he exhibited a water piece on the Boulevard des
Capucines entitled Impression: Soleil Levant. That title became a
catchword usually employed in a derisive manner. Monet earlier had
resented the intrusion of a man with a name so like his, but succumbed
to the influence of Monet. One thing can no longer be
controverted--Claude Monet is the greatest landscape and marine
painter of the second half of the last century. Perhaps time may alter
this limit clause.

What Turgenieff most condemned in his great contemporary,
Dostoievsky--if the gentle Russian giant ever condemned any one--was
Feodor Mikhailovitch's taste for "psychological mole runs"; an
inveterate burrowing into the dark places of humanity's soul. Now, if
there is a dark spot in a highly lighted subject it is the question,
Who was the first impressionist? According to Charles de Kay, Whistler
once told him that he, James the Butterfly, began the movement; which
is a capital and characteristic anecdote, especially if one recalls
Whistler's boast made to a young et