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To him Impressionism owes its existence; his tenacity enabled it to take root and to vanquish the opposition of the School; his work has enriched the world by some beautiful examples which demonstrate the union of the two principles of Realism and of that technical Impressionism which was to supply Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley with an object for their efforts.
In the pictures of Sisley there is the charm of the fact for itself, the delight of the problem of placing the object in relation to the luminous atmosphere which covers it. Men like Pissarro and Sisley were not forgetting Courbet and his admirable knowledge of reality.
Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and they felt a desire to try their hands at what was so typical of France; but they were frightened of its formal beauty, and set themselves deliberately to avoid it.
One feels likewise that the stately reticence of a man like Sisley is worth far more to us now, if only because we find in his works as they hang one beside another in numbers, a soberer and more cautious approach to the theme engrossing him and the other artists of the movement of that time.
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.
And Pissarro must have been a man to have so impressed all the men young and old of his time. After seeing a great number of Monet's one turns to any simple Pissarro for relief. And then there was also Sisley. But the talk is of Theodore Robinson.
I think that my taste is good, but I am conscious that it has no originality. I know very little about painting, and I wander along trails that others have blazed for me. At that time I had the greatest admiration for the impressionists. I longed to possess a Sisley and a Degas, and I worshipped Manet.
Otherwise how explain why this easily comprehended composition, with its attractive figures, daring hues, and brilliant technique, came to have the door of the Salon closed upon it? The historic exposition at Nadar's photographic studio, on the Boulevard des Capucines, of the impressionists, saw Renoir in company with Monet, Sisley, and the others.
His La Danseuse and La Loge were received with laughter by the discerning critics. Previously he had employed the usual clear green with the yellow touches in the shadows of conventional paysagistes. But Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir had discovered each for himself that the light and shade in the open air vary according to the hours, the seasons, the atmospheric conditions.
Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne are impressionists, and in America there is no impropriety in attaching this handle to the works of Twachtmann, J. Alden Weir, W.L. Metcalf, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Robert Reid, Ernest Lawson, Paul Cornoyer, Colin Campbell Cooper, Prendergast, Luks, and Glackens. But Manet, Degas!
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