The result of this exhibition was that the public laughed, the papers protested, the young students of art in the various ateliers of Paris were stimulated to furious discussion. But a few spirits, more venturesome or more prophetic, took the trouble to test the new ideas. A few, chief among them Sérusier of the Académie Julian, even set out to visit the birthplace of the new movement, a lonely inn kept by a family of the name of Gloanec at Le Poldu, a short distance from Pont-Aven. A brief survey of the history of Syntheticism is necessary to an understanding of the theories of the new school. Here we enter upon debatable ground. It has already been said that the chief opponents of the academicism of Cabanel and Bougereau were the Impressionists. Their movement was already through its second phase and entering upon its third. The earliest of the Impressionists, led by Manet, insisted that a picture was only nature seen through a temperament; in other words, that a picture must be naturalistic. This doctrine found parallel literary expression in the writings of the de Goncourts, de Maupassant and Zola. The first phase in Impressionism was therefore synthetic and maintained a belief in form. It was succeeded by an analytical phase, based upon the application to color of the scientific theories of light, of Rood, Chevreuil and Helmholtz. To Claude Monet, the founder of this new school of Impressionism, nothing mattered in a picture but the atmosphere. Form was abandoned. After Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Guillamin, a new group, of whom the chief were Seurat and Signac, attempted to combine the tenets of their two sets of predecessors. They retained formal composition but broke up color into minute points or dots. This third generation of Impressionists were originally termed Neo-Impressionists but now, more frequently, Pointillists. Three artists stood out against the tendency towards scientific theory. Puvis de Chavannes had, within the very precincts of the official salon, created an art based on something wholly distinct, alike from the photographic and frigid eclecticism of Cabanel and Bougereau and from the work of both Manet and Monet. Puvis was a decorator who could think and paint only in terms of walls. He had achieved, after a long struggle, a decorative synthesis of his own, based upon the ruthless simplification of masses, contours and coloring. Reserved, cold, solitary, he had emptied his art of all rhetorical emphasis and in his old age was tending closer and closer to the methods of Giotto, that father of all European painting.