Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and
Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road
to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study
of the laws of light. His work is a magnificent verification of the
optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul. It is born
spontaneously from the artist's vision, and happens to be a rigorous
demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared
to know. Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to
join hands with the scientist. His work supplies not only the very
basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed
it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws. It
will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds
met by the artists hitherto, and it will also serve to endow decorative
art and mural painting with a process, the applications of which are
manyfold and splendid.

I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet's
painting more clearly even than from Manet's. Suppression of local
colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and
division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed
colours--these are the essential principles of _chromatism_ (for this
word should be used instead of the very vague term "Impressionism").
Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape
painting.

There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an
excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.
One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined
jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself