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But nowadays, in company with the Neo-Impressionists, the Lampost Impressionists, Cubists, and Futurists, Munch might seem tame, conventional; nevertheless he was years ahead of the new crowd in painting big blocks of colour, juxtaposed, not as the early Impressionists juxtaposed their strokes of complementary colour to gain synthesis by dissociation of tonalities, but by obvious discords thus achieve a brutal optical impression.

That was the theory: and if the end of art were representation it would be sound enough. Some of them, to be sure, turned out polychromatic charts of desolating dullness Monet towards the end, for instance. The Neo-Impressionists Seurat, Signac, and Cross have produced little else. And any Impressionist, under the influence of Monet and Watteau, was capable of making a poor, soft, formless thing.

His is a most varied talent whose power is unquestionable. He made his début among the Neo-Impressionists and revealed the influence upon him of the Japanese and of Degas. It may be seen that these two influences predominate in the whole group.

He has signed a certain number of portraits, whose beautiful carriage and serious psychology would suffice to make him be considered as the most significant of the Neo-Impressionists. It is really in him that one has to see the young and worthy heir of Monet, of Sisley, and of Degas, and that is why we have insisted on adding here to the works of these masters the reproduction of one of his.

"Time was," he said, "when one met here the cream of Parisian wit and fashion: the great Flaubert, a noisy fellow at times, I vow; Dumas fils; Cabanel, Gérôme, Duran; ever-winning Carolus ah, what men! Now we get Polish pianists, crazy Belgians, anarchistic poets, and Neo-impressionists. I have warned the princess again and again." "Bécasse!" interrupted the lady herself.

After the hard-won victories of Impressionism there was bound to ensue a reaction. The symbolists crowded out the realists in literature and the Neo-Impressionists felt the call of Form as opposed to Colour. Well, we are getting form with a vengeance, and seldom has colour been so flouted in favour of cubes, cylinders, and wooden studio models and muddy paste.

At the time when, about 1885, the neo-Impressionists whom we shall study later on invented the Pointillist method, M. Pissarro tried it and applied it judiciously, with the patient, serious and slightly anxious talent, by which he is distinguished.