Cezanne and a great deal to Picasso: he was no doctrinaire:
towards the end he became the slave of a formula of his own
devising--but that is another matter. Modigliani had an intense
but narrow sensibility, his music is all on one string: he had a
characteristically Italian gift for drawing beautifully with ease: and I
think he had not much else. I feel sure that those who would place him
amongst the masters of the movement--Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Bonnard,
and Friesz--mistake; for, with all his charm and originality, he was too
thoughtless and superficial to achieve greatly. He invented something
which he went on repeating; and he could always fascinate simply by
his way of handling a brush or a pencil. His pictures, delightful and
surprising at first sight, are apt to grow stale and, in the end, some
of them, unbearably thin. A minor artist, surely.

[Footnote B: He was at work, however, by 1906--perhaps earlier.]

Though Paris is unquestionably the centre of the movement, no one who
sees only what comes thither and to London--and that is all I see--can
have much idea of what is going on in Germany and America. Germany has
not yet recommenced sending her art in quantities that make judgement
possible, while it is pretty clear that the American art which reaches
Europe is by no means the best that America can do. From both come
magazines with photographs which excite our curiosity, but on such
evidence it would be mere impertinence to form an opinion. Of
contemporary art in Germany and America I shall say nothing. And what
shall I say of the home-grown article? Having taken Paris for my point
of view, I am excused from saying much. Not much of English art is seen
from Paris. We have but one living painter whose work is at all well
known to the serious amateurs of that city, and he is Sickert. [C] The
name, however, of Augustus John is often pronounced, ill--for they
_will_ call him Augustin--and that of Steer is occasionally murmured.
Through the _salon d'automne_ Roger Fry is becoming known; and there is
a good deal of curiosity about the work of Duncan Grant, and some about
that of Mark Gertler and Vanessa Bell. Now, of these, Sickert and Steer
are essentially, and in no bad sense, provincial masters. They are
belated impressionists of considerable merit working in a thoroughly
fresh and personal way on the problems of a bygone age. In the remoter
parts of Europe as late as the beginning of the seventeenth centur