a purely optic art, a search for harmonies, a sort of natural poem,
quite distinct from expression, style and design, which were the
principal aims of former painting. It is almost necessary to invent
another name for this special art which, clearly pictorial though it be,
comes as near to music, as it gets far away from literature and
psychology. It is only natural that, fascinated by this study, the
Impressionists have almost remained strangers to the painting of
expression, and altogether hostile to historical and symbolist painting.
It is therefore principally in landscape painting that they have
achieved the greatness that is theirs.

Through the application of these principles which I have set forth very
summarily, Claude Monet 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. A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind
of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, _f.i._),
and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This
investigation is added to the habitual preoccupations of the landscapist
study of the character peculiar to the scene, style of the trees or
houses, accentuation of the decorative side--and to the habitual
preoccupations of the figure painter in the portrait. The canvases of
Monet, Renoir and Pissarro have, in consequence of this research, an
absolutely original aspect: their shadows are striped with blue,
rose-madder and green; nothing is opaque or sooty; a light vibration
strikes the eye. Finally, blue and orange predominate, simply because in
these studies--which are more often than not full sunlight
effects--blue is the complementary colour of the orange light of the
sun, and is profusely distributed in the shadows. In these canvases can
be found a vast amount of exact grades of tone, which seem to have been