In this month’s The Art of Seeing, just one work of art will be our focus as we consider the mode of perception and the effects of Nature’s light and colour through art.  We will take as a starting point some ideas from French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who posited that perception is a mode of knowing allowing one to know more deeply, and which touched the inner essence of things through empathy.  He wrote, “A true empiricism is that which proposes to get as near to the original itself as possible, to search deeply into its life, and so, by a kind of intellectual auscultation, to feel the throbbings of its soul.” Contemporaneous with the French Impressionists, some of Bergson’s ideas influenced their work. The Impressionists attempted to capture the fleeting impression of a moment, particularly the effects of light and colour, and it is to one of their beautiful images that we will turn to in this session.