IN the year 1780 Immanuel Kant finished his Critique of Pure Reason, and about 1880
Cézanne painted the first of his pictures to reveal his definitive style -- these two events
can be adduced as justification of the two dates on the title-page of the present book. It
is doubtful whether, during the intervening period, there were any other turning-points
of such general significance and so pregnant with consequences. One of these events
occurred in the field of thought at the end of the Baroque period, the other in the field
of pictorial representation of the world at the beginning of modern painting; yet they
are basically related because of their profoundly revolutionary character and because
they both represented a kind of 'Copernican turning-point'. Both stand for a trend
away from the objective world of things towards new perceptive possibilities, towards
a new kind of investigation of the premises and constructional laws of the objective
world.

It is certainly tempting to ask the reason for such a similarity between two changes of
spirit, one of which took place a hundred years later than the other. Does it mean merely
that there was an essential relationship between the achievements of two geniuses which,
welling up from unfathomable sources, determined future developments for a long
time? Are we to consider it as just another proof of the fact that comparable develop-
ments in different fields of creative activity do not always take place contem-
poraneously? Can we, because the difference between the two fields excludes a complete
parallelism between their own laws, define as a necessity the fact that an event in the
history of thought finds its analogy in the history of painting only much later? These
questions cannot receive detailed answers here, but they cannot be disregarded altogether,
in so far as they concern laws which seem to govern the development of art. For an
attempt to give a condensed account of a century of European painting and sculpture
must in part consist in an attempt to define the prevailing lines of development.

The nineteenth century has been and still is decried -- though perhaps less than our
own -- on account of the lack of uniformity in its art, on account of its fragmentary
nature and many-sidedness, and on account of the increasing rapidity of its changes in
the treatment of form. Other reproaches are also levelled against it, above all the increase
of individualism, which is regarded as an essential cause of these disturbing features.
Nevertheless there is a fundamental tendency underlying the multitude of variations be-
tween the end of Baroque art and the last days of Impressionism about 1900. It can be
defined as the study of the external appearance of nature. We are not doing an injustice
to the nineteenth century if we call it the century of Naturalism. This is certainly true
if Naturalism is taken without any more exact limitations. Never before had there been
such a degree of Naturalism in painting, not even in Holland in the seventeenth century.
To use 'closeness to nature' rather than Naturalism may be a little less precise, but it is

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