fervour, the joy of painting and the passion for beautiful light. It is,
on the whole, the greatest pictorial movement that France has beheld
since Delacroix, and it brings to a finish gloriously the nineteenth
century, inaugurating the present. It has accomplished the great deed of
having brought us again into the presence of our true national lineage,
far more so than Romanticism, which was mixed with foreign elements. We
have here painting of a kind which could only have been conceived in
France, and we have to go right back to Watteau in order to receive
again the same impression. Impressionism has brought us an almost
unhoped-for renaissance, and this constitutes its most undeniable claim
upon the gratitude of the race.

It has exercised a very appreciable influence upon foreign painting.
Among the principal painters attracted by its ideas and research, we
must mention, in Germany, Max Liebermann and Kuehl; in Norway, Thaulow;
in Denmark, Kroyer; in Belgium, Théo Van Rysselberghe, Emile Claus,
Verheyden, Heymans, Verstraete, and Baertson; in Italy, Boldini,
Segantini, and Michetti; in Spain, Zuloaga, Sorolla y Bastida, Dario de
Regoyos and Rusiñol; in America, Alexander, Harrison, Sargent; and in
England, the painters of the Glasgow School, Lavery, Guthrie and the
late John Lewis Brown. All these men come within the active extension of
the French movement, and one may say that the honour of having first
recognised the truly national movement of this art must be given to
those foreign countries which have enriched their collections and
museums with works that were despised in the land which had witnessed
their birth. At the present moment the effects of this new vision are
felt all over the world, down to the very bosom of the academies; and at
the Salons, from which the Impressionists are still excluded, can be
witnessed an invasion of pictures inspired by them, which the most
retrograde juries dare not reject. In whatever measure the recent