Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/296

LANDSCAPE PAINTING to deal with impressionism, says mighty little about the impressionists. But I have failed singularly in my intention if, by this time, I have not made it clear that anyone who honestly and sincerely records his impressions of nature is in the truest sense an impressionist—that Velasquez and Titian and Rembrandt were as truly impressionists as were Manet or Monet or Sisley—because, in the canvases of these great masters of the Renaissance, there rings the true note of personality proof positive of their honesty, their reverence, and their humility before nature. To tell the truth, the so-called French impressionists were far more accurately termed luminarists, or painters of light. Their special achievement in art was a purely technical triumph—the discovery that by the use of broken color in its prismatic simplicity the [232]