When the principles which animated these epoch-making English artists are contrasted with those which ruled the Impressionists, their resemblance is found to be strong. “There is room enough for a natural painter,” wrote Constable to a friend after visiting an exhibition which had bored him. “Come and see sincere works,” wrote Manet in his catalogue. “Tone is the most seductive and inviting quality a picture can possess,” said Constable. It cannot be too clearly understood that the Impressionistic idea is of English birth. Originated by Constable, Turner, Bonington, and some members of the Norwich School, like most innovators they found their practice to be in advance of the age. British artists did not fully grasp the significance of their work, and failed to profit by their valuable discoveries. It was not the first brilliant idea which, evolved in England, has had to cross the Channel for due appreciation, for appreciated it certainly was not in the country of its origin. As the genius of the dying Turner flickered out, English art reached its deepest degradation. The official art of the Great Exhibition of 1851 has become a byword and a reproach. In English minds it stands for everything that is insincere, unreal, tawdry, and trivial. The group of pre-Raphaelites, brilliantly gifted as they undoubtedly were, worked upon a foundation of retrograde mediævalism. And, as the years followed each other, English art failed as a whole to recover its lost vitality. Domestic anecdote, according to the formulæ of Augustus Egg, Poole, or, slightly higher in the scale, Mulready and Maclise, formed the product of nearly every studio. The false Greco-Roman convention of Lord Leighton luckily had no following. Rejuvenescence came from France in the shape of Impressionism, and English art received back an idea she had, as it proved, but lent. [Illustration: A STUDY · J. CONSTABLE ] [Illustration: VIEW OF THE THAMES · THOMAS GIRTIN ] [Illustration: _Photo by W. A. Mansell & Co._ HENRI IV. AND THE SPANISH AMBASSADOR · R. P. BONINGTON ] Those Englishmen who are taunted with following the methods of the French Impressionists, sneered at for imitating a foreign style, are in reality but practising their own, for the French artists simply developed a style which was British in its conception. Many things had assisted this development, some accidental, some natural. All the Englishmen had worked to a large extent in the open. Now the atmosphere of France lends itself admirably to Impressionistic painting “en plein air.” All landscapists notice that the light is purer, stronger, and less variable in France than in England.