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This at least may be said of him, that he shows what, given genius, can be got out of the impressionist method artistically and practically employed to the end of illustrating a personal point of view. A mere amateur can hardly distinguish between a Caillebotte and a Sisley, for example, but everyone identifies a Degas as immediately and as certainly as he does a Whistler.
He is, if not a great painter, at least one of the most interesting rustic landscape painters of our epoch. His visions of the country are quite his own, and are a harmonious mixture of Classicism and Impressionism which will secure one of the most honourable places to his work. There has, perhaps, been more original individuality in the landscape painter Alfred Sisley.
And sparks of originality gleamed here and there; the passion for adventure had not flickered out at every step through the galleries some subject for the discussion we exulted in stopped us short. It might be Impressionism, Sisley still showing if Monet did not, and Vibrism and Pointillism and all the other isms springing up and out of it.
M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits. Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet. These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time; how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate, behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the Déjeûner des Canotiers, the Bal au Moulin de la Galette, the Box, the Terrace, the First Step, the Sleeping Woman with a Cat, and his most beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the Woman with the broken neck is related to Manet; the portrait of Sisley invents pointillism fifteen years before the pointillists; La Pensée, this masterpiece, evokes Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the Jeune Fille au panier is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the delightful Jeune Fille
Monet's production had become a kind of mercerized production, and a kind of spurious radiance invested them, in the end. It remained for Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, and Seurat to stabilize the new discovery, and to give it the stamina it was meant to contain, as a scientific idea, scientifically applied.
What did the Luxembourg do for Corot, Millet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro? The Luxembourg chose rather to honour such pretentious mediocrities as Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre, Jules Breton, and their like. What has our Academy done to rescue struggling genius from poverty and obscurity?
Monet, Sisley, and Renoir contented themselves with the abolition of all blacks and browns, for they were but half-hearted reformers, and it was clearly the duty of those who came after to rid the palette of all ochres, siennas, Venetian, Indian, and light reds.
The "test of endurance" in the impressionistic movement is borne out; the strength of realization is to be found in Pissarro and Sisley and not in the vapid niceties of Monet, whose work became thinner and thinner by habitual repetitive painting, and by a possible false sense of security in his argument.
One may say as much, having regard to their differing degrees of success, of Pissaro, who influenced him, and of Caillebotte, Renoir, Sisley, and the rest of the impressionists who followed him. He is himself the prominent representative of the school, however, and the fact that one representative of it is enough to consider, is eloquent of profound criticism of it.
So it seems then, that if Monet invented the principle of impressionism as applied to painting, Pissarro and Sisley assisted greatly in the creative idea for our lasting use and pleasure by the consideration of the intellect which they applied to it; just as Seurat has given us a far greater realization than either Signac or Cross have offered us in the principle of pointillism.
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