Nothing is funnier than to read the explanation of the terms “Impressionists” and “Impressionism” of certain art-gossipers among the critics in Germany. These transcendental phrasegrinders, who have no notion how the word arose, believe it was invented by painters or æsthetics with the set purpose of characterising an artistic tendency, and of indicating elliptically a method of execution; and, with the rapturous, prophet-mien common among this brotherhood, they treat us to the deepest and most breath-ravishing explanations of the word. The truth is that the expression owes its origin to the jest of a comic paper that intended nothing special by it, least of all an æsthetic theory. In 1874 the painters who for ten years had been known as the “Open Air” artists or “Realists” exhibited a number of their works in the reception-room of the writer and photographer, Nadar. Claude Monet appeared, amongst others, with a sunset, which was quite in the manner of Turner’s last years, and he entitled it “Impression.” It was a remarkable and characteristic work, without form, consisting only of streaks of red and orange, in the highest degree offensive to those who will not have the contemplation of nature restricted to the observation of colours, but look also for outline and modelling. A wanton scoffer, making merry in the “Charivari” over this exhibition, seized on Monet’s “Impression” as the pattern of the new style, sneered at it in the tone of a genuine back-biter, and, with the object of belittling them, called Monet’s fellow-combatants “Impressionists,” by which he meant only that, according to his view, their pictures were daubs, just like Claude Monet’s “Impression.” That is the simple origin of the word into which the German commentators have read something exceedingly mysterious and wonderful. Pissarro belonged to Monet’s circle of friends, and fell under the designation, which rapidly became current, of “Impressionist.” In his case, it only means that he sought and found in nature only effects of light, only the play of sunbeams on things and around things. In the three or four centuries that landscape painting has been raised to the rank of a branch of art—I leave out of consideration, in this place, the ancient landscape, because the modern development is unconnected with it—an enquiry, which enters into the motives and aims of painters, can distinguish three different kinds of landscape, which I would term respectively the literary, the lyric, and the optical. I do not choose these new designations for old and well-known things arbitrarily, but because, in my opinion, they mark what is essential better than do the prescriptive ones.