Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/30

 band of innovators who have since become known as the French Impressionists or Luminarists. They were in reality, as their name implies, painters of light, and their technique was founded upon the scientific principle that light is essentially prismatic. White, being made up of the three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—should so be painted, they declared, the three pure pigments lying side by side upon the canvas—and the same with red, with yellow, and with blue; there could be no blue so powerful that it would not be qualified with touches of red and yellow, no yellow so brilliant that the red and the blue were not felt in its composition, no red so intense that the blue and the yellow did not play across it. The work of these men really seems to vibrate with light, and the word "vibration," first employed by them, has now