[Illustration: MANET

IN THE SQUARE]

I shall define later on the ideas of the Impressionists on technique,
composition and style in painting. Meanwhile it will be necessary to
indicate their principal precursors.

Their movement may be styled thus: a reaction against the Greco-Latin
spirit and the scholastic organisation of painting after the second
Renaissance and the Italo-French school of Fontainebleau, by the century
of Louis XIV., the school of Rome, and the consular and imperial taste.
In this sense Impressionism is a protest analogous to that of
Romanticism, exclaiming, to quote the old verse: "_Qui nous délivrera
des Grecs et des Romains?_"[1] From this point of view Impressionism has
also great affinities with the ideas of the English Pre-Raphaelites,
who stepped across the second and even the first Renaissance back to the
Primitives.

[Footnote 1: Who will deliver us from the Greeks and the Romans.]

This reaction is superimposed by another: the reaction of Impressionism,
not only against classic subjects, but against the black painting of the
degenerate Romanticists. And these two reactions are counterbalanced by
a return to the French ideal, to the realistic and characteristic
tradition which commences with Jean Foucquet and Clouet, and is
continued by Chardin, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, Watteau, La Tour,
Fragonard, and the admirable engravers of the eighteenth century down to
the final triumph of the allegorical taste of the Roman revolution. Here