Excerpt from French Impressionists and Their Contemporaries Represented in American CollectionsTo these technical matters I shall return later on. At this initial juncture it will be well, I think, to get our theme launched on a human basis: a basis of human drama. Of such drama there was, as we peer back at the period in question, no dearth. For, be the precise nature of their paint theories what they might, the artists responsible for the Impressionist movement in France had, like all pioneering artists in the history of art, to battle for their cause against the usual obstacles and with little beyond bootstrap encouragement.Suppose then, first, we consider the Impressionists simply as an insurgent group of artists who, along in the 1860's, found themselves drawn together by interests sufficiently mutual to make some sort of concerted action, when the time came, imperative. It was by no means a group formed over' night, nor, even after it had got pretty well established, was it a closely knit group.One of the underlying factors, as I see it now, was simply a shared wish to make the Salon, failing which where, in those days, would one be? The Paris Salon, like all academic organizations, was governed according to certain fixed canons of taste. It stood for what was accepted and respectable.Young artists with revolutionary ideas, it goes without saying, were treated as disruptive and dangerous rebels who must be suppressed in the interest of maintaining the dignity of Art - even in behalf of safeguarding the Morals of the State. An Old story, endlessly reverberant down the corridor of time, which need not be dwelt upon save to the extent of noting that (again true to form) the be havior of the Salon's administrators acted ultimately as a boomerang by impelling our outré artists of the 6o's and 70's never to relax until they had achieved public recognition.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.