had considerable influence in confirming their aims – just as the exhibition of Constable’s ‘Hay Wain’ in Paris had profoundly affected an earlier generation of French painters. It was in 1874 that the word ‘Impressionism’ was first coined, and by accident. Under the title of ‘Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs du 15 avril au 15 mai 1874’, the artists already named, with others, arranged a collective exhibition at Nadar’s, in the Boulevard des Capucines. Among the works by Monet there was one entitled ‘Sunrise, an Impression’, merely by way of description. The word ‘Impressionists’ was seized upon as a term of ridicule for the whole group, and though many of them had nothing in common with Monet they cheerfully accepted it as a battle-cry. Financially the exhibition was a disaster, the works being sold by auction the following year at prices averaging about 100 francs. It was at this time that Manet, who was well off, suggested to Duvet a way of helping Monet, then very poor, by buying ten of his pictures between them for 1,000 francs without disclosing the purchasers.
The Impressionists, as they were now called, continued to hold exhibitions, being supported by Durand-Ruel and other dealers with the courage of their convictions, and little by little, with the aid of intelligent criticism, hostility was overcome and the aims of Monet and his associates began to be understood. It was not, however, until 1889, when he shared an exhibition with Rodin at the Georges Petit Gallery, that Monet had a substantial success, his first one-man show in 1880 having been a failure.
With his studies of the Gare Saint Lazare in the third group exhibition of 1877, Monet had already begun the series of the same or similar subjects – railway stations, cathedrals, hay-ricks, river banks, poplars, water-lilies – under different conditions of light which were to establish his fame, and from 1889 onward his artistic reputation steadily increased. In 1883 he had settled at Giverny, in the department of the Eure, Normandy, and he remained there for the rest of his life, with occasional visits abroad, quietly and happily producing his pictures. Monet never received any honour from the State, though a tardy offer was made to him of a seat on the Académie des Beaux Arts, which he declined, and such pictures of his as are to be found in French national collections, at the Luxembourg Museum and elsewhere, are gifts or bequests. He himself presented to the French nation a series of 19 ‘Water-Lily’ paintings, and in 1923, at the age of 83, in the company of his old friend, M. Clemenceau, who was a supporter of the Impressionists in the stormy days of the ’seventies, Monet visited the Tuileries Gardens to inspect the building which was being specially constituted to contain them.
London Views
His work has been frequently shown in London, at the Goupil Gallery, the Leicester Galleries, the Lefèvre Galleries, the French Gallery, the Independent Gallery, and elsewhere, and some years ago an association of English and foreign artists was formed in London called the ‘Monarro Group’, combining the names of Monet and Pissarro as heads of the movement with which they found themselves in sympathy. In connection with Monet’s visits to England his views of the Thames, including ‘Waterloo Bridge’ and ‘The Houses of Parliament’, must not be forgotten. He is represented in the Modern Foreign Section of the Tate Gallery by two pictures only: ‘Plage de Trouville’, painted in 1870, purchased in 1924 by the Trustees of the Courtauld Fund; and ‘Vetheuil: Sunshine and Snow’, painted in 1881, included in the Lane Bequest of 1917.
Monet’s artistic progress may be described as the more and more purely æsthetic organization of his technical conquest of light and atmosphere. He did not follow the so-called neo-Impressionists into the formal dotting which was the logical outcome, or scientific application, of his own system of laying strokes or touches of pure colour side by side, eliminating all browns from the palette, but contented himself with a method which produced the effects he desired; and it was the æsthetic value, the poetry, rather than the mere realization of light that inspired him. Nor, though he was a pioneer in the discovery of ‘colour in shadow’, was he a decorative colourist by intention; he painted colour for the sake of light rather than light for the sake of colour. His work has been called lacking in design, but the charge cannot be supported. It stands to reason that if an artist is designing in atmospheric values, in veils of light, the design will not be so emphatic, so easily grasped, as if he were designing in solid forms, but nobody can look with attention at a picture by Monet and regard it as a mere representation of the facts and conditions. In this respect his work might well be compared to the music of his countryman Claude Debussy, in which, under an atmospheric shimmer, the melodies are not so immediately recognizable as they are in the works of Bach or Beethoven, but are nevertheless present to the attentive ear.
At the same time it must be allowed that the aim and methods of Monet were better adapted to some subjects than others, and with due appreciation of his cathedrals, railway stations, and Venetian scenes, we find his happiest expression in those river subjects in which a leafy garland of poplars reflects the influence of sky and water, such as the beautiful ‘Poplars on the Epte’, in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, or in the arabesques of water lilies. A fair description of the emotional effect of a typical work of Monet at his best would be that of a ‘sunny smile’. It was inevitable that after so much trafficking in airy regions painting should come to earth again, and the concern for plastic volumes and a more emphatic design instituted by Cézanne and other leaders of the movement conveniently known as Post-Impressionism was as natural a sequence to the Impressionism of Monet, as is the desire for physical exercise after loitering in a garden. But, so far as it is humanly possible to judge, Monet left a gleam upon the surface of painting which will never entirely disappear. Monet has been the subject of many writings, including an exhaustive study by M. Camille Mauclair.
Emmeline Pankhurst
A pioneer of woman suffrage
14 June 1928
Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, whose death is announced on another page, was born in Manchester on July 14, 1858. In her early childhood she was brought into close touch with those who had inherited the spirit of the Manchester reformers. Her father, Mr Robert Goulden, a calico-printer, was keenly interested in the reform question and the dawn of the movement for woman’s suffrage; her grandfather nearly lost his life in the Peterloo franchise riots in 1819. At the age of 13, soon after she had been taken to her first woman suffrage meeting by her mother, she went to school in Paris, where she found a girl-friend of her own way of thinking in the daughter of Henri Rochefort. In 1879 she married Dr R. M. Pankhurst, a man many years older than herself. An intimate friend of John Stuart Mill and an able lawyer, he shared and helped to mould his wife’s political views. She served with him on the committee which promoted the Married Women’s Property Act, and was at the same time a member of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee. In 1889 she helped in forming the Women’s Franchise League, which, however, was discontinued after a few years. She remained a Liberal until 1892, when she joined the Independent Labour Party. After being defeated for the Manchester School Board, she was elected at the head of the poll for the board of guardians and served for five years. When her husband died, in 1898, she was left not well off, and with three girls and a boy to bring up. Accordingly she found work as registrar of births and deaths at Chorlton-on-Medlock, but her propaganda activities were considered inconsistent with her official position and she resigned.
In 1903 her interest in the cause of woman suffrage was reawakened by the enthusiasm of her daughter Christabel and she formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, the first meeting of which was held in her house in Manchester in October of that year. Two years later the militant movement was started as the immediate result of the treatment received by Miss Christabel Pankhurst and Miss Annie Kenney, two members of the union who endeavoured to question Sir Edward Grey on the prospects of woman suffrage, at a political meeting held in Manchester. In 1906 Mrs Pankhurst and her union began a series of pilgrimages to the House of Commons, which resulted in conflicts with the police and the imprisonment of large numbers of the members. In October, 1906, she was present at the first of these demonstrations, when 11 women were arrested. In January, 1908, she was pelted with eggs and rolled in the mud during the Mid-Devon election at Newton Abbot, and a month later she was arrested when carrying a petition to the Prime Minister at the House of Commons, but was released after undergoing five of the six weeks’ imprisonment to which