compositions, for which his method is admirably suited.  It has taken long years before such works were entrusted to Besnard, who, with Puvis de Chavannes, has given Paris her most beautiful modern decorations, but Besnard’s work is the direct outcome of Claude Monet’s harmonies.  The principle of the division of tones and of the study of complementary colours has been full of revelations, and one of the most fruitful theories.  It has probably been the principle which will designate most clearly the originality of the painting of the future.  To have invented it, is enough to secure permanent glory for a man.  And without wishing to put again the question of the antagonism of realism and idealism, one may well say that a painter who invents a method and shows such power, is highly intellectual and gifted with a pictorial intelligence.  Whatever the subjects he treats, he creates an aesthetic emotion equivalent, if not similar, to those engendered by the most complex symbolism.  In his ardent love of nature Monet has found his greatness; he suggests the secrets by stating the evident facts.  That is the law common to all the arts.

[Footnote 1:  Procede de la tache.]

[Illustration:  CLAUDE MONET

THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL]

VI

AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK

The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of forty years.  It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art movement.  It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite.  Like Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes and still-life, all with equal beauty.

His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.  His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses the same technique as Boucher:  fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy, laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the principal values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious attitudes and an effort towards decorative convention.  Nevertheless, his Bathers, of which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern and personal.  Renoir’s nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas, whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally looked for in the features of the clothed being.  Nor is Renoir’s