future. The mills of the
antique grind swiftly--like the rich, they will be always with us--but
they only grind out imitations; and from pseudo-classic marbles and
pseudo-"beautiful" pictures may Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies, deliver
us.

That able and sympathetic writer D.S. MacColl has tersely summed up in
his Vision of the Century the difference between the old and new
manner of seeing things. "The old vision had beaten out three separate
acts--the determination of the edges and limits of things, the
shadings and the modellings of the spaces in between with black and
white, and the tintings of those spaces with their local colour. The
new vision that had been growing up among the landscape painters
simplifies as well as complicates the old. For purposes of analysis it
sees the world as a mosaic of patches of colour, such and such a hue,
such and such a tone, such and such a shape... The new analysis looked
first for colour and for a different colour in each patch of shade or
light. The old painting followed the old vision by its three processes
of drawing the contours, modelling the chiaroscura in dead colour, and
finally in colouring this black-and-white preparation. The new
analysis left the contours to be determined by the junction, more or
less fused, of the colour patches, instead of rigidly defining them as
they are known to be defined when seen near at hand or felt... 'Local
colour' in light or shade becomes different not only in tone but in
hue."

To the layman who asked, "What is impressionism?" Mauclair has given
the most succinct answer in his book L'Impressionisme: "In nature," he
declares, "no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the object is
pure illusion; the only creative source of colour is the sunlight,
which envelops all things and reveals them, according to the hours,
with infinite modifications... The idea of distance, of perspective,
of volume is given us by darker or lighter colours; this is the sense
of values; a value is the degree of light or dark intensity which
permits our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer
than another. And as painting is not and cannot be the imitation of
nature, but merely her artificial interpretation, since it has only at
its disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only
means that remain for expressing depth on a flat surface. Colour is
therefore the procreatrix of design... Colours vary with the intensity
of light... Lo