Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/57

 III VIBRATION

most splendid achievement of the nineteenth century in painting, and its best legacy to the future, was the discovery of the technical means by which the scintillating effect of living light could be transferred to the dead and rigid surface of a canvas. Of this the old masters had absolutely no conception. The discovery belongs to our generation, and is a distinction of which any age might well be proud for it is the only important step in advance made since the great Renaissance of the fifteenth century. Without it landscape art had hardly been possible landscape art, that is, in the modern sense [31]