Claude Monet has been thus far the most successful practitioner of impressionism; this by reason of his extraordinary analytical power of vision and native genius rather than the researches of Helmholtz, Chevreul, and Rood.  They gave him his scientific formulas after he had worked out the problems.  He studied Turner in London, 1870; then his manner changed.  He had been a devoted pupil of Eugene Boudin and could paint the discreet, pearly gray seascapes of his master.  But Turner and Watteau and Monticelli modified his style, changed his way of envisaging the landscape.  Not Edouard Manet but Claude Monet was the initiator of the impressionistic movement in France, and after witnessing the rout and confusion that followed in its wake one is tempted to misquote Nietzsche (who said that the first and only Christian died on the cross) and boldly assert that there has been but one impressionist; his name, Monet.  “He has arrived at painting by means of the infinitely varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour spots which dissociate the tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the arabesque of their vibrations.”  How his landscapes shimmer with the heat of a summer day!  Truly, you can say of these pictures that “the dawn comes up like thunder.”  How his fogs, wet and clinging, seem to be the first real fogs that ever made misty a canvas!  What hot July nights, with few large stars, has Monet not painted!  His series of hayricks, cathedrals, the Thames are precious notations of contemporary life; they state facts in terms of exquisite artistic value; they resume an epoch.  It is therefore no surprise to learn that in 1874 Monet gave the name (so variously abused) to the entire movement when he exhibited a water piece on the Boulevard des Capucines entitled Impression:  Soleil Levant.  That title became a catchword usually employed in a derisive manner.  Monet earlier had resented the intrusion of a man with a name so like his, but succumbed to the influence of Monet.  One thing can no longer be controverted—­Claude Monet is the greatest landscape and marine painter of the second half of the last century.  Perhaps time may alter this limit clause.

What Turgenieff most condemned in his great contemporary, Dostoievsky—­if the gentle Russian giant ever condemned any one—­was Feodor Mikhailovitch’s taste for “psychological mole runs”; an inveterate burrowing into the dark places of humanity’s soul.  Now, if there is a dark spot in a highly lighted subject it is the question, Who was the first impressionist?  According to Charles de Kay, Whistler once told him that he, James the Butterfly, began the movement; which is a capital and characteristic anecdote, especially if one recalls Whistler’s boast made to a young etcher as to the initiative of Corot.  Whistler practically said:  “Before Corot was, I am!” And he adduced certain canvases painted with the misty-edged trees long before—­but why continue?  Whistler didn’t start Corot—­apart