Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/269

THE TRUE IMPRESSIONISM brain behind it, declined to accept as a symbol of motion anything which the eye had not been able to see for and by itself unaided. In this case, of course, it was only during the two instants of arrest of motion that the eye had been able to note the position of the horse's limbs. And these two positions of comparative inaction had, through long association, become the permanent and fixed symbols of action in the racing horse. The kodak had revealed hitherto unsuspected facts and aspects of motion, but the eye would have none of them, and clung only to that which was visual. It was this experience with the earliest kodaks which finally made plain the reason why, from time out of mind, artists desiring to convey the concept of motion had instinctively chosen the end or the beginning of the stroke or [209]