Impressionist Painting Its Genesis and Development

Excerpt: ?It may perhaps be interesting to the readers of this book to give a short account of its origin. From the earliest days of my pupilage to art I had been instinctively drawn towards the paintings of Turner, Corot, Constable, Bonington, and Watts, with an intense admiration for their manner in viewing, and methods of recreating, nature upon their canvases; and in later years I had been fascinated by the works of more modern artists, such as La Thangue, George Clausen, Edward Stott, and Robert Meyerheim. In 1891, a student in Paris, I found myself face to face with a beautiful development of landscape painting, which was quite new to me. ?Impressionism,? together with its numerous progeny of eccentric offshoots, was at the time causing a great furore in the schools. Curiously enough I had been charged with copying Monet?s style long before I had seen his actual work, so that my conversion into an enthusiastic Impressionist was short, in fact, an instantaneous process.