Beginning in 1886 a group of painters and their critical defenders adopted the term symbolist to proclaim their rejection of the impressionist devotion to the sensory moment. They sought to create a nonfigurative language of expressive, evocative form capable of conveying emotional states to the viewer and externalizing the dream, the fluid inner world of the artist. A robust idealism, often underemphasized, accompanied the heightened subjectivism of the symbolist generation. Theirs was a quest to link individual emotion to humanity at large, to relate the cultivation of inner vision and experience to the search for communication and connection at a new level, a more direct and more universal mode of discourse. They aspired to express the inexpressible—the binding power of an ideal, essential order beyond the surface of appearances, a realm of metaphysical mystery and the incorporeal. These two interrelated and difficult aims—to embody the dream and the ideal—united a surprising company of artists, poets, and musicians in radical experiments within and across their media in the 1880s. At its center was the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who claimed that the purpose of language was not to describe but to suggest, evoking mystery and states of the soul through allusion and a fusion of verse and sound, independent of a conventional story line. Claude Debussy, a devotee of Mallarmé and a regular at his weekly salons, similarly sought a new musical language that aimed not to tell a story but to evoke a mood or an atmosphere; his experiments attempted to discover new tonal forms “supple enough,” as Debussy wrote to Émile Baron, “to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.” Symbolist painters faced the distinctive challenges of their own medium as they explored ways to evoke the dream and the ideal in the visual arts. At the heart of the challenge was what can be called the paradox of dematerialization that troubled the generation of the 1880s, from Paul Gauguin and Édouard Vuillard to Vincent van Gogh and Émile Bernard: how could painters achieve such spiritual and immaterial ends in the plastic and material forms of pigment, primer, brush, and canvas?