THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS 



analysis of light stated in terms of apothecaries' paint. Modern 

 scientific Impressionism abolished the good demon Chiaroscuro, 

 and the idea of beauty in line and mass. Values were forgotten, 

 and the masters of old, from the great Dutchmen to Corot, might 

 as well have died with Babylon. 



In this total abandonment of tradition for colour reaction, Im- 

 pressionism signed its own death warrant. In its oils, the " pure 

 sunlight " imprisoned in the pigment will have blackened in the 

 passing of a century, and the flat picture will become flatter and 

 duller ; nothing will awake those colour reactions when once the 

 morphia of Time has done its opiate work. Ghosts, and poor 

 dull ghosts at that, will then haunt the heavy golden frames, for 

 colour without form is pure sensuality and must die the death. 

 Beside the atmosphere of Nature which modern painters have 

 been at such pains to render there is also what the French call 

 an " Atmosphere of the picture," of which the Impressionists have 

 been frequently ignorant or unmindful. Compare a fine Dutch 

 landscape or a Constable with an impressionist piece by Monet, 

 and you will immediately be conscious that, although there is more 

 light in the Monet, it is all as flat as a pancake ; that everything is 

 treated with a fine democratic indifference ; sky, trees, or build- 

 ings, all are mere light and colour sensation ; there is neither such 

 depth nor such weight in the picture as in the work of the older 

 men. Composition is at an end as for the painter's emotion, 

 since he has failed to convey any, we must believe it to have 

 been non-existent. Mere transcription, what the older men called 

 a " study," has long been the currency of landscape art, and the 

 result has been sundry documents in colour and " effects " of 

 light. Handling and style are finished with, for the mind loses 

 control in the act of copying nature. Naturalistic painters had 

 been mad enough to set the tints of their palettes against the 

 living colour of nature. 



Martens was saved from any such folly by a true knowledge of 

 the limitations of medium. " The art of landscape painting," he 

 says in his Lecture, " lies not in imitating individual objects but in 

 imitating an effect which nature has produced with means far 

 beyond anything we have at command." Illusion, that was the 



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