Impressionist painting, sometimes trivialized after a century of success, was once a dazzling revelation. To recover that moment, that original vision, we must resort to the reactions of the critic of the time. the first defenders of Manet and Degas, Monet and Pisarro, approached their works from a naturalistic creed, but they already appreciated in them a subjective turn: the Impressionist painter did not want to capture the nature itself, but a personal sensation before the nature. In the middle of the 1870s, an oculist model was formed in art criticism, which sought to explain the new painting by studying the physiology of the impressionist eye. A primitive eye, reduced to pure vibrations of color; an analytical eye, determined to break down the subtlest shades of light; a hypersensitive eye, degenerate or advanced to the future evolution of the human retina. That optical paradigm would dominate until 1890, when symbolist critics, in assuming the defense of Van Gogh and Gauguin, defined art as writing signs. In this anthology, the essential texts of the critique of the moment about impressionism, until now unpublished in Castilian, gather. Among its authors are some of the most celebrated writers of the time, as well as many others. The essays are accompanied by a wide selection of paintings by Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pisarro, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh, among others.