... literary or anecdotal overtones. They also rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing treatments of academic painting. By the late 1860s, Manet's art reflected a new aesthetic-which was to be a guiding force in Impressionist work-in which the importance of the traditional subject matter was downgraded and attention was shifted to the artist's manipulation of colour, tone, and texture as ends in themselves. In Manet's painting the subject became a vehicle for the artful composition of areas of flat colour, and perspectival depth was minimized so that the viewer would look at the surface patterns and relationships of the picture rather than into the illusory three-dimensional space it created. About the same time, Monet was influenced by the innovative painters Eugene Boudin and J.R. Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky by means of highly coloured and texturally varied methods of paint application. The Impressionists also adopted Boudin's practice ...

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