The gods of Van Gogh were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Daumier, Monticelli, and Millet. The latter was a veritable passion with him. He said of him, and the remark was a sign-post for his own future: "Rembrandt and Delacroix painted the person of Jesus, Millet his teaching." This preoccupation with moral ideas lent a marked intensity to his narrow temperament. Ill-balanced he was; there was madness in the family; both his brother and himself committed suicide. His adoration of Monticelli and his jewelled style led him to Impressionism. But colour for colour's sake or optical illusion did not long hold him. The overloaded paint in his earlier works soon gave way to flat modelling. His effects are achieved by sweeping contours instead of a series of planes. There are weight, sharp silhouettes, and cruel analysis. His colour harmonies are brilliant, dissociated from our notions of the normal. He is a genuine realist as opposed to the decorative classicism of Gauguin. His work was not much affected by Gauguin, though he has been classed in the same school. Cezanne openly repudiated both men. "A sun in his head and a hurricane in his heart," was said of him, as it was first said of Delacroix by a critical contemporary. Vincent Van Gogh is, to my way of thinking, the greatest genius of the trio under discussion. After them followed the Uglicists and the passionate patterns and emotional curves of the Cubists. Henri Matisse has science, he is responsive to all the inflections of the human form, and has at his finger-tips all the nuances of colour. He is one of those lucky men for whom the simplest elements suffice to create a living art. With a few touches a flower, a woman, grow before your eyes. He is a magician, and when his taste for experimenting with deformations changes we may expect a gallery of masterpieces. At present, pushed by friends and foes, he can't resist the temptation to explode fire-crackers on the front stoop of the Institute. But a master of line, of decoration, of alluring rhythms. Whistler went to Japan on an artistic adventure. Matisse has gone to China, where rhythm, not imitation, is the chiefest quality in art.