Impressionism has reached a more classical stage of existence in France than in England. The exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, New Bond Street, London, deals mainly with the works of four French masters of such long standing and high reputation that they have well earned the right to be regarded as veterans presently to become classics. At the Paris Exhibition last year the most perfect and harmonious expression of a really living modern school was that afforded by the gathering together of paintings by Monet, Sisley, Renoir, and Pissarro, and the show which has been now brought to London, if not so perfectly representative, is actually larger, and is full of interest to the student. Its appeal is to the student rather than to the casual observer, for the ordinary public has still to learn to see in a way that shall make Money, Sisley and the rest ╥come true.╙ A French critic has said that Monet ╥paints the atmosphere which lies between you and the object,╙ whereas with many looking at a thing pictorially implies an attempt to get rid of the atmosphere as an obstruction to the discovery of true form. Monet would say ╤╥There is no such things as form apart from light; learn to look at light and you will find form.╙ It is necessary to understand this point of view before beginning to look at his pictures. Even then a careless observer is in danger of doing them an injustice. Unless he finds the right distance from which the canvas is to be seen, it becomes a thing out of focus, inarticulate at several points, and it must be admitted as an occasional weakness of the school that the entirely right point of view remains sometimes undiscoverable. When these painters are not at their very best some portion is liable to fall out of focus, or at least to remain inexpressive and vague. Take Monet╒s ╥La Terrace de Vetheuil,╙ which represents a female figure reclining in a simmering expanse of sunlight and shade, with boughs overhead and a background of flowers and vague distant landscape. From many points of view it looks obviously wrong; from no point of view does the whole of it become quite right so as to carry conviction. Either the woman╒s form is too blurred or the foliage too hard; while what lies beyond the palings of the garden never explains itself; one is in doubt, even, whether it represent land or water. Yet, with all its shortcomings, the picture deals with a phase of light which presents peculiar difficulties for a perfect rendering. The artist is more thoroughly fortunate in such pieces as ╥Etretat,╙ of sea and grey rock, or ╥Chemin Creux,╙ a high-banked lane half-cavernous in its reception of soft filtering atmosphere; or, again, in ╥Gelee Blanche, Giverney,╙ most typical in its assertion of light as outweighing every other artistic consideration.
The art of Sisley and Pissarro is, as a rule, less audacious, more suave, more ruled by remnants of older conventions, more often touched here and there by a preconcerted sense of style, than that of Claude Monet. To the eye that is not rabid for discovery in one particular direction it remains more pleasant and alluring. Monet, in following out the old claim that truth and beauty are one, seems to lay the emphasis very much on truth; the others seem to come upon truth secondarily through a more idealising faculty. Beautiful instances of this tendency are to be found in such pieces as Sisley╒s ╥La Route de Verrieres╙ and ╥Le Loing A Moret,╙ or Pissarro╒s ╥Pommiers en Fleurs, Eraguy;╙ before them one says first, ╥How beautiful!╙ and remains to find out how true. Is not this, after all, the right order of things, when one is dealing with art and not with science? Would art ever have come to light if the artist had always looked into nature and found there the best of all possible worlds? The doctrinaire impressionist is apt in theory to reduce the artist to the subservient position of a humble attendant upon the phenomena of nature; it is interesting, therefore, to see how much strong leaders of impressionism as Sisley and Pissarro have been able to show that naturalism and individuality are not incompatible qualities. Monet may be stronger in his facts, but this is not the final proof that he is stronger in his art. If he is ╤ and it is quite possible ╤ it is because of other qualities.
