W. C. Brownell

“ He is a shade desultory, and too spontaneous to be systematic. One must be systematic to reach the highest point, even in the least material spheres. But never have the grave and solemn aspects of landscape found a sweeter and serener spirit to interpret them. In some of his pictures there is a truly religious feeling. His frankness recalls Constable's, but it is more distinguished in being more spiritual. He has not Diaz's elegance, nor Corot's witchery, nor Rousseau's power, but nature is more mysteriously, more mystically significant to him, and sets a deeper chord vibrating within him. ”

“ Certainly M. Dalou is far more nearly in the current of contemporary art than his friend Rodin, who stands with his master Barye rather defiantly apart from the regular evolution of French sculpture, whereas one can easily trace the derivation of M. Dalou and his relations to the present and the immediate past of his art in his country. His work certainly has its Fragonard, its Clodion, its Carpeaux side. Like every temperament that is strongly attracted by the decorative as well as the significant and the expressive, pure style in and for itself has its fascinations, its temptations for him. ”

“ But imagine the devotion to style of a milieu in which a person who would throw ink on a confessedly fine work of art is actuated by an impersonal dislike of incongruity! Dislike of the incongruous is almost a French passion, and, like all qualities, it has its defect, the defect of tolerating the conventional. It is through this tolerance, for example, that one of the freest of French critics of art, a true Voltairian, Stendhal, was led actually to find Guido's ideal of beauty higher than Raphael's, and to miss entirely the grandeur of Tintoretto. ”

“ Indeed, if one really reflects upon the subject, it will not seem exaggeration to say that to anyone who has studied both with any thoroughness it would be more difficult to individualize the mass of modern French sculpture than even that of the best Greek epoch—the epoch when style was most perfect, when its reign was, as it sometimes appears to us, most absolute. And if we consider the Renaissance sculpture, its complexity is so great, its individuality is so pronounced, that one is apt to lose sight of the important part which style really plays in it. ”

“ While he was painting his still life and domestic genre, the whole fantastic whirl of Louis Quinze society, with its æsthetic standards and accomplishments—accomplishments and standards that imposed themselves everywhere else—was in agitated movement around him without in the least affecting his serene tranquillity, his almost sturdy composure. There can rarely have been such an instance as he affords of an artist's selecting from his environment just those things his own genius needed, and rejecting just what would have hampered or distracted him. ”

“ Rousseau carried the fundamental principle of the school farther than the others—with him interest, delight in, enthusiasm for nature became absorption in her. Whereas other men have loved nature, it has been acutely remarked, Rousseau was in love with her. It was felicitously of him, rather than of Dupré or Corot, that the naif peasant inquired, "Why do you paint the tree; the tree is there, is it not?" And never did nature more royally reward allegiance to her than in the sustenance and inspiration she furnished for Rousseau's genius. ”

“ For sculpture especially, art is eminently, as it has been termed, "the discipline of genius," and it is only after the sculptor's genius has submitted to the discipline of culture that it evinces an individuality which really counts, which is really thrown out in relief on the background of crude personality. And if there be no question of perfection, but only of the artist's attitude, one has but to ask himself the real meaning of the epithet Shakespearian to be assured of the harmony between individuality and the most impersonal practice. ”

“ Technical excellence is simply the inseparable accompaniment, the outward expression of the kind of æsthetic ideas the French are enamoured of. Their substance is not our substance, but while it is perfectly legitimate for us to criticise their substance it is idle to maintain that they are lacking in substance. If we call a painting by Poussin pure style, a composition of David merely the perfection of convention, one of M. Rochegrosse's dramatic canvasses the rhetoric of technic and that only, we miss something. ”

“ They leave us equally cold, at all events, and in the same way—for the same reason. They betray the painter's preoccupation with art rather than with nature. They do, in truth, differ widely from the works which they succeeded, but the difference is not temperamental. They suggest the French phrase, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Gérôme, for example, feels the exhilaration of the free air of romanticism fanning his enthusiasm. He does not confine himself, as, born a decade or two earlier, certainly he would have done, to classic subject. ”

“ He realized as nearly as possible the effect of sunlight—that is to say, he did as well and no better in this respect than Fortuny had done—but he created a much greater illusion of a sunlit landscape than anyone had ever done before him, by painting those parts of his picture not in sunlight with the exact truth that in painting objects in shadow the palette can compass.
Nothing is more simple. Take a landscape with a cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old sense of the term, and observe the effect upon it of a sudden burst of sunlight. ”

“ The impressionist not only does not show you what he thinks, he does not even show you how he feels, except by betraying a fondness for violets and diffused light, and by exhibiting the temper of the radical and the rioter. The order of a blithe, idyllic landscape by Corot, of one of Delacroix's pieces of concentric coloration, of an example of Ingres's purity of outline, shows not only temperament, but the position of the painter in regard to the whole intellectual world so far as he touches it at all. What does a canvas of Claude Monet show in this respect? ”

“ Never, perhaps, since the early Renaissance, however, has nature asserted her supremacy over convention in such unmistakable, such insistent, and, one may say, I think, such intolerant fashion as she is doing at the present moment. Sculpture, in virtue of the defiant palpability of its material, is the most impalpable of the plastic arts, and therefore it feels less quickly than the rest, perhaps, the impress of the influences of the epoch and their classifying canons. Natural imitation shows first in sculpture, and subsists in it longest. ”

“ The French classic painters—and the classic-spirit, in spite of every force that the modern world brings to its destruction, persists wonderfully in France—show little absorption, little delight in their subject. Contrasted with the great names in painting they are eclectic and traditional, too purely expert. They are too cultivated to invent. Selection has taken the place of discovery in their inspiration. They are addicted to the rational and the regulated. Their substance is never sentimental and incommunicable. ”

“ Degas is the only other painter usually classed with the impressionists, of whom this may not be said. But Degas is hardly an impressionist at all. He is one of the most personal painters, if not the most personal painter, of the day. He is as original as Puvis de Chavannes. What allies him with the impressionists is his fondness for fleeting aspects, his caring for nothing beyond aspect—for the look of things and their transitory look. He is an enthusiastic admirer of Ingres—who, one would say, is the antithesis of impressionism. He never paints from nature. ”

“ The pre-eminent fact of Greek sculpture, for example, is, from one point of view, the directness with which it concerns itself with the ideal—the slight temporary or personal element with which it is alloyed. When one calls an artist or a work Greek, this is what is really meant; it is the sense in which Raphael is Greek. Chapu is Greek in this way, and thus individualized among his contemporaries, not only by having a different inspiration from them, but by depending for his interest on no convention fixed or fleeting and on no indirect support of accentuated personal characteristics. ”

“ They are always realized, executed—sculpture in a word whose suggestiveness, quite as potent as that of feebler executants, begins only when actual representation has been triumphantly achieved instead of impotently and skilfully avoided.
Of Rude's genius one's first thought is of its robustness, its originality. Everything he did is stamped with the impress of his personality. At the same time it is equally evident that Rude's own temperament took its color from the transitional epoch in which he lived, and of which he was par excellence the sculptor. ”