[Illustration: RENOIR. FISHER CHILDREN BY THE SEA. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: RENOIR. THE WOMAN WITH THE CAT. (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)] That light is movement is here made obvious, and that all life is movement is just what their art reveals. Courbet was an admirable painter of plain surfaces. If he had to paint a wall he took it upon his strong shoulders and transferred it to his canvas in such a way that a stonemason might have been deceived. If it was a question of rocks, the body of a woman, or the waves of the sea, he began to mix his pigments thick, laid a firm mass of colour on the canvas, and spread it with a knife. This spade-work gave him unrivalled truth to nature in reproducing the surface of hard substances. Rocks, banks, and walls look as they do in nature, but in the case of moving, indeterminate things his power deserts him. His landscapes are painted in a rich, broad, and juicy style, but his earth has no pulsation. Courbet has forgotten the birds in his landscape. His seas have been seen with extraordinary largeness of feeling, and they are masterpieces of drawing; the only drawback is that they seem uninhabitable for fish. Under the steady hand of the master the sea came to a standstill and was changed into rock. If he has to paint human beings they stand as motionless as blocks of wood. The expression of their faces seems galvanised into life, like their bodies. Placing absolute directness in the rendering of impressions in their programme, as the chief aim of their artistic endeavours, the Impressionists were the first to discover the secret of seizing with the utmost freshness the _nuances_ of expression and movement, which remained petrified in the hands of their predecessors. Only the flash of the spokes is painted in the wheel of a carriage in motion, and never the appearance of the wheel when it is at rest; in the same way they allow the outlines of human figures to relax and become indistinct, to call up the impression of movement, the real vividness of the appearance. Colour has been established as the sole, unqualified medium of expression for the painter, and has so absorbed the drawing that the line receives, as it were, a pulsating life, and cannot be felt except in a pictorial way. In the painting of nude human figures the waxen look--which in the traditional painting from the nude had a pretence of being natural--has vanished from the skin, and thousands of delicately distinguished gradations give animation to the flesh. Moreover, a finer and deeper observation of temperament was made possible by lighter and more sensitive technique. In the works of the earlier _genre_ painters people never are what they are supposed to represent. The hired model, picked from the lower strata of life, and used by the painter in bringing his picture slowly to completion, was obvious even in the most