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POST-Impressionism means exactly what the prefix means—the art-development following Impressionism. It does not mean a further, or a higher, or a more subtle form of Impressionism, but it means something radically different, it means a reaction from Impressionism.

The evolution of the new movement has been logical and inevitable.

After the Barbizon school with its romantic representation of nature, there came inevitably the realistic painters, headed by Courbet, later by Manet—men who painted things not romantically but realistically, pitilessly, brutally. There was the same rage against these men as against the Cubists today. Both Whistler and Manet were in the Salon des Refuses of 1864.

Along with the men who painted things as they saw them, came naturally men like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, who tried endless experiments in the effort to paint light as they saw it.

So that the final twenty-five years of the last century were given up in France to attempts to paint things and light as they really are.