conditions of favorable stimulation.

Further favorable stimulation of the eye is given in the method
of the Impressionists in treating "values," that is, comparative
relations of light and shade. The real tones of objects
including the sky, light, etc., can never be reproduced. The
older schools, conscious of this, were satisfied to paint in a
scale of correspondence, in which the relative values were
fairly kept. But even by that means, the great differences of
intensity could not be given, for the brightest spot of any
painting is never more than sixty-six times brighter than the
darkest, while the gray sky on a dull rainy day is four hundred
and twenty times brighter than a white painted cross-bar of a
window seen against the sky as background.<1> There were
various ways of combating this difficulty. Rembrandt, for
instance, as Kirschmann tells us, chose the sombre brown tone,
"not out of caprice or an inclination for mystic dreaming
(Fromentin), but because the yellow and orange side of the
color-manifold admits of the greatest number of intervals
between full saturation and the darkest shade." The precursors
of the Impressionists, on the other hand, succeeded in painting
absolute values, confining themselves to a very limited gamut;
for this reason the first landscapes of the school were all
gray-green, dull, cloudy. But Monet did not stop there. He
painted the ABSOLUTE VALUES of objects IN SHADE on a sunny day,
which of course demands the brightest possibilities of the
palette, and got the lighted objects themselves as nearly as
he could,--thus destroying the relative values, but getting an
extraordinary joyous and glowing effect; and one, too, of
unexpected verisimilitude, for it would seem that in a sunlit