matter and presented in a lively manner.  The impressionist’s habit of painting before nature entirely is not calculated to do this.  Going time after time to the same place, even if similar weather conditions are waited for, although well enough for studies, is against the production of a fine picture.  Every time the artist goes to the selected spot he receives a different impression, so that he must either paint all over his picture each time, in which case his work must be confined to a small scale and will be hurried in execution, or he must paint a bit of today’s impression alongside of yesterday’s, in which case his work will be dull and lacking in oneness of conception.

And further, in decomposing the colour rays that come to the eye and painting in pure colour, while great addition was made to the power of expressing light, yet by destroying the definitions and enveloping everything in a scintillating atmosphere, the power to design in a large manner was lost with the wealth of significance that the music of line can convey.

But impressionism has opened up a view from which much interesting matter for art is to be gleaned.  And everywhere painters are selecting from this, and grafting it on to some of the more traditional schools of design.

Our concern here is with the influence this point of view has had upon draughtsmanship.  The influence has been considerable, particularly with those draughtsmen whose work deals with the rendering of modern life.  It consists in drawing from the observation of the silhouette occupied by objects in the field of vision, observing the flat appearance of things as they are on the retina.  This is, of course, the only accurate way in which to observe visual shapes.  The difference between this and the older point of view is its insistence on the observation of the flat visual impression to the exclusion of the tactile or touch sense that by the association of ideas we have come to expect in things seen.  An increased truth to the character of appearances has been the result, with a corresponding loss of plastic form expression.

On pages 66 and 67 a reproduction of a drawing in the British Museum, attributed to Michael Angelo, is contrasted with one in the Louvre by Degas.  The one is drawn from the line point of view and the other from the mass.  They both contain lines, but in the one case the lines are the contours of felt forms and in the other the boundaries of visual masses.  In the Michael Angelo the silhouette is only the result of the overlapping of rich forms considered in the round.  Every muscle and bone has been mentally realised as a concrete thing and the drawing made as an expression of this idea.  Note the line rhythm also; the sense of energy and movement conveyed by the swinging curves; and compare with what is said later (page 162 [Transcribers Note:  Sidenote “Curved Lines"]) about the rhythmic significance of swinging curves.

Then compare it with the Degas and observe the totally different attitude of mind in which this drawing has been approached.  Instead of the outlines being the result of forms felt as concrete things, the silhouette is everywhere considered first, the plastic sense (nowhere so great as in the other) being arrived at from the accurate consideration of the mass shapes.