unconsciously we see and note and know, and the illusion is greater if the relation between them and the objects in sunlight, whose value habitually we do not note, be neglected or falsified. Add to this source of illusion the success of Monet in giving a juster value to the sunlit half of his picture than has ever been systematically attempted before his time, and his astonishing ‘trompe d’œil’ is, I think, explained. Each part is truer than ever before, and unless one have a specially developed sense of ‘ensemble’ in this very special matter of values in and affected by sunlight, one gets from Monet an impression of actuality so much greater than he has ever got before, that one may be pardoned for feeling, and even for enthusiastically proclaiming, that in Monet realism finds its apogee. Monet paints absolute values in a very wide range, plus sunlight, as nearly as pigments can be got to represent it.” W. C. BROWNELL. (“Realistic Painting.”) “Impressionism is the art that surveys the field and determines which of the shapes and tones are of chief importance to the interested eye, enforces these, and sacrifices the rest. “If three objects, A, B, and C, stand at different depths before the eye, we can at will fix A, whereupon B and C must fall out of focus, or B, whereupon A and C must be blurred, or C, sacrificing the clearness of A and B. All this apparatus makes it impossible to see everything at once with equal clearness, enables us, and forces us for the uses of real life, to frame and limit our picture, according to the immediate interest of the eye, whatever it may be. “The painter instinctively uses these means to arrive at the emphasis and neglect that his choice requires. If he is engaged on a face he will screw his attention to a part and now relax it, distributing the attention over the whole so as to restore the bigger relations of aspect. “Sir J. Reynolds describes this process as seeing the whole ‘with the dilated eye;’ the commoner precept of the studios is, ‘to look with the eyes half closed.’ In any case the result is the minor planes are swamped in bigger, that smaller patches of colour are swept up into broader, that markings are blurred. “The Impressionist painter does not allot so much detail to a face in a full-length portrait as to a head alone, nor to twenty figures on a canvas as to one.” D. S. MACCOLL. (“Encyclopædia Britannica.”)