Degas is an
impressionist, pray what then is Monet? Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne are
impressionists, and in America there is no impropriety in attaching
this handle to the works of Twachtmann, J. Alden Weir, W.L. Metcalf,
Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Robert Reid, Ernest Lawson, Paul
Cornoyer, Colin Campbell Cooper, Prendergast, Luks, and Glackens. But
Manet, Degas! It would have been a happier invention to have called
the 1877 group independents; independent they were, each man pursuing
his own rainbow. We may note an identical confusion in the mind of the
public regarding the Barbizon school. Never was a group composed of
such dissimilar spirits. Yet people talk about Millet _and_ Breton,
Corot _and_ Daubigny, Rousseau _and_ Dupre. They still say Goethe
_and_ Schiller, Beethoven _and_ Mozart, Byron _and_ Shelley. It is the
result of mental inertia, this coupling of such widely disparate
temperaments.

Nevertheless, divided tones and "screaming" palette do not always a
picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic
innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells
improvisation--an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process,
facile as well as factitious. Albert Wolff must have thought these
things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great
when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the
painstaking Bonnat. Whistler shocked Ruskin when he confessed to
having painted a nocturne in two days, but with a lifetime experience
in each stroke of the brush. Whistler was a swift worker, and while he
claimed the honour of being the originator of impressionism--didn't he
"originate" Velasquez?--he really belongs to the preceding generation.
He was impressionistic, if you will, yet not an impressionist. He was
Japanese and Spanish, never Watteau, Monticelli, Turner, or Monet.

MacColl has pointed out the weakness of the scientific side of
impressionism. Its values are strictly aesthetic; attempts to paint on
a purely scientific basis have proved both monotonous and ludicrous.
The experiments of the neo-impressionists (the 1885 group), of Signac,
Seurat, were not very convincing. Van Rhysselberge, one of the few
painters to-day who practise _pointillisme_, or the system of dots, is
a gifted artist; so is Anquetin. The feminine group is headed by the
name of Berthe Morisot (the wife of Eugene Manet, a brother of Edouard
and the great granddaughter of Fragonard), a pupil of