I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet’s painting more clearly even than from Manet’s.  Suppression of local colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed colours—­these are the essential principles of chromatism (for this word should be used instead of the very vague term “Impressionism").  Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape painting.

There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.  One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself be sufficient to save from oblivion the man who has painted it.  But the study of light upon the figure has been the special preoccupation of Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and, after the Impressionists, of the great lyricist, Albert Besnard, who has concentrated the Impressionist qualities by placing them at the service of a very personal conception of symbolistic art.  Monet commenced with trying to find his way by painting figures, then landscapes and principally sea pictures and boats in harbours, with a somewhat sombre robustness and very broad and solid draughtsmanship.  His first luminous studies date back to about 1885.  Obedient to the same ideas as Degas he had to avoid the Salons and only show his pictures gradually in private galleries.  For years he remained unknown.  It is only giving M. Durand-Ruel his due, to state that he was one of the first to anticipate the Impressionist school and to buy the first works of these painters, who were treated as madmen and charlatans.  He has become great with them, and has made his fortune and theirs through having had confidence in them, and no fortune has been better deserved.  Thirty years ago nobody would have bought pictures by Degas or Monet, which are sold to-day for a thousand pounds.  This detail is only mentioned to show the evolution of Impressionism as regards public opinion.

[Illustration:  CLAUDE MONET

THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR]

So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis of the laws of light that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series of pictures painted from nature at all hours of the day.  This is the principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might be called “Investigation of the variations of sunlight.”  The most famous of these series are the Hay-ricks, the Poplars, the Cliffs of Etretat, the Golfe Juan, the Coins de Riviere, the Cathedrals, the Water-lilies, and finally the Thames series which Monet is at present engaged upon.  They are like great poems, and the splendour of the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the symphonic parti-pris of the colours, make their realism, the minute contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.