Paul Cézanne, the hermit of Aix, had faced the problem of painting with the Impressionist palette while preserving the mass structure of his true spiritual ancestors--the Venetians and El Greco. As a result he was thought to be mad and even considered by some to be a myth, for he lived far from Paris and had for long enough sent no pictures to be exhibited. Finally, Degas, associating himself with the Impressionists at the outset, had been careful to preserve the classic line and composition of Ingres, who might be called the last of Florentines. Degas was considered an artist of small importance because, unlike Manet, he scorned to give himself airs. He lived a retired life in Paris, and did not exhibit. These three men--Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas--had, through their own inner necessity, become syntheticists. But no one of them preached Syntheticism, because their adherence to the creed was unconscious. The doctrine was first voiced by the men who exhibited with Paul Gauguin at the Café Volpini in 1889, who lived and worked with him at the Gloanec inn, near Pont-Aven. It was from these men that the reaction against Impressionism started, a reaction which, in its turn, was destined to provoke another reaction towards the theories of mathematical and analytical abstraction of line, color and form, which we know as Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. It was these men surrounding Gauguin, who forged the last living link in the chain of art tradition which goes back through Giotto and Cimabue to the Byzantine mosaics, and, through these, to the first essays in art of cave-men and savages. With Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism we may be witnessing the beginning of a new tradition. With Gauguin and his fellows we see the renaissance of an old one. II As early as 1886, in an article in the _Revue Indépendante_, the well-known critic Eduard Dujardin had spoken of a group calling themselves the Cloissonists, who painted in flat patches of tone, divided from each other by black lines. Cloissonism, as the name indicates, was borrowed from the Japanese. But as a method of painting, it had been derived less from cloisonné enamel than from the technique of the Japanese color-print artists. The artistic gods of the Cloissonists were Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro. It may be remembered that since 1865 men like Zola, Manet, Monet, Whistler, the de Goncourts--in short the entire generation of the naturalists--had collected these color prints, written about them, talked about them. Gauguin himself, when he returned to Paris at the close of this year 1889, pinned a frieze of Hokusai and Utamaro prints round the walls of his studio. But the existence of this somewhat baroque and exotic school of Cloissonism, of which the leader was Anquetin (later ranked with the Syntheticists), does not fully explain the use of Syntheticism with its greater insistence upon decorative unity, and its clearer affinities to the work of the Italian primitives.