The impressionists claim as their common ancestors Claude Lorraine, Watteau, Turner, Monticelli.  Watteau, Latour, Largilliere, Fragonard, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen are their sponsors in the matters of design, subject, realism, study of life, new conceptions of beauty and portraiture.  Mythology, allegory, historic themes, the neo-Greek and the academic are under the ban—­above all, the so-called “grand style.”  Impressionism has actually elevated genre painting to the position occupied by those vast, empty, pompous, frigid, smoky, classic pieces of the early nineteenth century.  However, it must not be forgotten that modern impressionism is only a new technique, a new method of execution—­we say new, though that is not exactly the case.  The home of impressionism is in the East; it may be found in the vivid patterns woven in Persia or in old Japan.  In its latest avatar it is the expression of contemporaneous reality.  Therein lies its true power.  The artist who turns his face only to the past—­his work will never be anything but an echo.  To depict the faces and things and pen the manners of the present is the task of great painters and novelists.  Actualists alone count in the 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.”