they are more
eagerly looked for than Diaz, and collectors have made fortunes with
these small canvases bought formerly, to use a colloquial expression
which is here only too literally true, "for a piece of bread."

Monticelli painted landscapes, romantic scenes, "fetes galantes" in the
spirit of Watteau, and still-life pictures: one could not imagine a more
inspired sense of colour than shown by these works which seem to be
painted with crushed jewels, with powerful harmony, and beyond all with
an unheard-of delicacy in the perception of fine shades. There are tones
which nobody had ever invented yet, a richness, a profusion, a subtlety
which almost vie with the resources of music. The fairyland atmosphere
of these works surrounds a very firm design of charming style, but, to
use the words of the artist himself, "in these canvases the objects are
the decoration, the touches are the scales, and the light is the tenor."
Monticelli has created for himself an entirely personal technique which
can only be compared with that of Turner; he painted with a brush so
full, fat and rich, that some of the details are often truly modelled in
relief, in a substance as precious as enamels, jewels, ceramics--a
substance which is a delight in itself. Every picture by Monticelli
provokes astonishment; constructed upon one colour as upon a musical
theme, it rises to intensities which one would have thought impossible.
His pictures are magnificent bouquets, bursts of joy and colour, where
nothing is ever crude, and where everything is ruled by a supreme sense
of harmony.

[Illustration: MANET

THE READER]

Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the
descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet. In all matters concerning
technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism. As regards
design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of
beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the
old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour,
Largilliere, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen. It
has resolutely held aloof from mythology, academic allegory, historical
painting, and from the neo-Greek elements of Classicism as well as from
the German and Spanish elements of Romanticism. This reactionary
movement is therefore entirely French, and surely if it deserves
reproach, the one least deserved is that levelled upon it by the
official painters: disobe