m. I suppose he must be classed among the really great men,
so many painters of intelligence place him there, though I must myself
plead the laic privilege of a slight scepticism as to whether time will
approve their enthusiasm. He is certainly very effective, and in
certainly his own way, idle as it is to say that his drafts on the great
Italians are no greater than those of Raphael on the antique frescos. He
had a great love of color and a native instinct for it; with perhaps
more appreciation than invention, his imagination has something very
personal in the zealous enthusiasm with which he exercised it, though I
think it must be admitted that his reflections of Tiepolo, Titian,
Tintoretto and his attenuated expansions of Michael Angelo's condensed
grandiosity, recall the eclecticism of the Carracci far more than that
of Raphael. But his manner is the modern manner, and it is altogether
more effective, more "fetching," to use a modern term, than anything
purely academic can be. Elie Delaunay, another master of decoration, is,
on the other hand, as real as the most rigorous literalist could ask of
a painter of decorative works. Chartran, who has an individual charm
that both Baudry and Delaunay lack, inferior as he is to them in sweep
and power, is perhaps in this respect midway between the two. Clairin
is, like Mazerolles, a pure _fantaisiste_. Dubufe _fils_, whose at
least equally famous father ranks in a somewhat similar category with
Couture, shows a distinct advance upon him in reality of rendering, as
the term would be understood at present.

In other departments of painting the note of realism is naturally still
more universally apparent; but as in the work of the painters of
decoration it is often most noticeable as an undertone, indicating a
point of departure rather than an aim. Bonvin is a realist only as
Chardin, as Van der Meer of Delft, as Nicholas Maes were, before the
jargon of realism had been thought of. He is, first of all, an exquisite
artist, in love with the beautiful in reality, finding in it the
humblest material, and expressing it with the gentlest, sweetest,
aesthetic severity and composure imaginable. The most fastidious critic
needs but a touch of human feeling to convert any characterization of
this most refined and elevated of painters into pure panegyric. Vollon's
touch is felicity itself, and it is evident that he takes more pleasure
in exercising and exploiting it than in its successful