Mention has already been made of his appearance in 1880 among the Impressionists and of the praise bestowed by Huysmans on one of his pictures for its frank realism. This very nude, however, shows Gauguin massing his shadows, making them heavy and dark, which was the direct contrary to Impressionist practice. A year later we find Huysmans complaining of the low and muddy color of his pictures; another proof that the painter was already trying to mass tones, to escape from the division of tones employed by the Impressionist group. We are safe in assuming also that Gauguin felt already an inward desire to paint nature as he had seen her in the tropics. His early years had shown him the tropics; and the art of the greatest masters, as well as of the worst daubers, is based on the instinctive knowledge they have obtained during childhood and the use they have made of it in later years. Pissarro, too, had seen the tropics; but they had not in any way influenced his color sense, which, indeed, grew colder and grayer as his years advanced. But he may have had something to do with Gauguin's inclination towards tropical subjects, though the feeling of kinship with Nature which Gauguin brought to such subjects was all his own. If Gauguin had but known it, there waited for him not the future of fame and fortune of which he dreamed, but seventeen years of life-and-death struggle with actual hunger in a world that gave him neither the means of living nor the slightest encouragement, but only hampered him in every way, so that he was forced to paint his finest decorative pictures on small pieces of board or canvas instead of on great walls. He was to quit his own country, and to go to the ends of the earth, only to find that the system of civilization possessed by his country, whatever its other advantages, did not permit of an artist to live and enjoy the fruits of his labor. He was finally to sink into an unmarked grave, to be almost forgotten, and to attain to a commercial apotheosis only when no longer able to profit by it. Even if Gauguin could have realized this, it is doubtful if he would have changed his mind. Ready to dare everything, he strode forward into the future. PART II: THE STRUGGLE WITH IMPRESSIONISM 1885-1889 I