painted with a vigor and
point of realistic detail that are peculiar to our own time; painted
to-day, Bonnat's fine and sculptural "Fellah Woman and Child," of the
Metropolitan Museum, would be accented in a dozen ways in which now it
is not. But it is perhaps in portraiture that the eminence of these
painters is most explicit. They are at the head of contemporary
portraitists, at all events. And their portraits are almost defiantly
real, void often of arrangement, and as little artificial as the very
frequently prosaic atmosphere appertaining to their sometimes very stark
subjects suggests. A portrait by Bonnat blinks nothing in the subject;
its aim and accomplishment are the rendering of the character in a vivid
fashion--including the reproduction of cobalt cravats and creased
trousers even--which would have mightily embarrassed Van Dyck or
Velasquez. Ribot reproduces Ribera often, but he deals with fewer
externals, fewer effects, taken in the widest sense. Carolus-Duran, the
"swell" portrait-painter of the day, artificial as he may be in the
quality of his mind, nevertheless seeks and attains, first of all, the
sense of an even exaggerated life-likeness in his charming sitters.
They are, first of all, people; the pictorial element takes care of
itself; sometimes even--so overmastering is the realistic tendency--the
plush of the chair, the silk of the robe, the cut of the coat, seems, to
an observer who thinks of the old traditions of Titian, of Raphael, of
Moroni, unduly emphasized, even for realism.

V

One element of modernity is a certain order of eclecticism. It is not
the eclecticism of the Bolognese painters, for example, illustrating the
really hopeless attempt to combine the supposed and superficial
excellences, always dissociated from the essence, of different points of
view. It is a free choice of attitude, rather, due to the release of the
individual from the thraldom of conformity that ruled even during the
romantic epoch. Hence a great deal of admirable work, of which one
hardly thinks whether it is realistic or not, side by side with the more
emphatic expressions of the realistic spirit. And this work is of all
degrees of realism, never, however, getting very far away from the
naturalistic basis on which more and more everyone is coming to insist
as the necessary and only solid pedestal of any flight of fancy. Baudry
is perhaps the nearest of the really great men to the Bolognese order
of eclecticis