d what objects happen to
be the outside cause of these shapes matters little to the
impressionist. Nothing is ugly when seen in a beautiful aspect of light,
and aspect is with them everything. This consideration of the visual
appearance in the first place necessitated an increased dependence on
the model. As he does not now draw from his mental perceptions the
artist has nothing to select the material of his picture from until it
has existed as a seen thing before him: until he has a visual impression
of it in his mind. With the older point of view (the representation by a
pictorial description, as it were, based on the mental idea of an
object), the model was not so necessary. In the case of the
Impressionist the mental perception is arrived at from the visual
impression, and in the older point of view the visual impression is the
result of the mental perception. Thus it happens that the Impressionist
movement has produced chiefly pictures inspired by the actual world of
visual phenomena around us, the older point of view producing most of
the pictures deriving their inspiration from the glories of the
imagination, the mental world in the mind of the artist. And although
interesting attempts are being made to produce imaginative works founded
on the impressionist point of view of light and air, the loss of
imaginative appeal consequent upon the destruction of contours by
scintillation, atmosphere, &c., and the loss of line rhythm it entails,
have so far prevented the production of any very satisfactory results.
But undoubtedly there is much new material brought to light by this
movement waiting to be used imaginatively; and it offers a new field for
the selection of expressive qualities.

This point of view, although continuing to some extent in the Spanish
school, did not come into general recognition until the last century in
France. The most extreme exponents of it are the body of artists who
grouped themselves round Claude Monet. This impressionist movement, as
the critics have labelled it, was the result of a fierce determination
to consider nature solely from the visual point of view, making no
concessions to any other associations connected with sight. The result
was an entirely new vision of nature, startling and repulsive to eyes
unaccustomed to observation from a purely visual point of view and used
only to seeing the "feel of things," as it were. The first results were
naturally rather crude. But a great amo