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In the clearness of his vision and the faithfulness with which he painted the things and people with which he came in contact Whistler was an Impressionist—an Impressionist long before Monet, but in his search after color and line music, in his attempts to do things beyond and above nature, he was a Post-Impressionist.

From a psychological point of view it is not difficult to see how these movements come about.

Given exhibitions year after year filled with paintings of the imagination, with idealized peasants such as Millet’s, and idealized landscapes such as Rousseau’s, it is morally certain the younger painters will feel a restless longing to return to the realities of life, just as the reading or theater going public after being fed too long on fairy-tales and romances demand more realistic representations of life.

Every man who reads much has his fairy-tale period and his romantic period followed by a strong taste for realism, which in turn is followed by a new and finer appreciation of purely imaginative literature.