Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAFfER III THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES T]HE movement in French art which, as already said, was almost contemporaneous with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England, was, like the latter, a revolt against tradition?indeed, against an almost identical tradition, though the French movement took a very different course from the English one, and has since reacted strongly on English art and on that of other countries. We have seen that the English movement was not a simple one?not homogeneous, if the reader do not object to a long word. Art can 110 more be simple than is our whole intellectual and emotional life, of which it is one of the chief modes of expression. There has been complexity in moder n French painting, much the same as that of contemporary English painting; for although there are always peculiarities clearly marking off the art of different nations, there are also many general resemblances. It is hardly too much to say that we can find the French equivalents of our Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Watts, Burne-Jones, and others; yet not the mere equivalents, be it emphasised, but the French equivalents. As many if not most of those who read these pages will necessarily be less familiar with French than with English painting, it may be well to discuss at greater length thanwas done with reference to English art, the work of the artists who led up to the new departure of the middle of the nineteenth century. The observant English traveller in France can hardly fail to notice, before he has gone very far on his journey from one of the northern seaports, how much more symmetrical are the French country-houses than those in our own country. The door is exactly in the centre of the main front; there is the same number of windows at each side of it; and then …
