imitation,
striking as its imitative quality is. Gervex and Duez are very much more
than impressionists, both in theory and practice. There is nothing
polemic in either. Painters extol in the heartiest way the color, the
creative coloration of Gervex's "Rolla," quite aside from its dramatic
force or its truth of aspect. Personal feeling is clearly the
inspiration of every work of Duez, not the demonstration of a theory of
treating light and atmosphere. The same may be said of Roll at his best,
as in his superb rendering of what may be called the modern painter's
conception of the myth of Europa. Compared with Paul Veronese's
admirable classic, that violates all the unities (which Veronese,
nevertheless, may readily be pardoned by all but literalists and
theorists for neglecting), this splendid nude girl in _plein air_,
flecked with splotches of sunlight filtered through a sieve of leafage,
with her realistic taurine companion, and their environment of
veridically rendered out-of-doors, may stand for an illustrative
definition of modernity; but what you feel most of all is Roll. It is
ten chances to one that he has never even been to Venice or thought of
Veronese. He has not always been so successful; as when in his "Work" he
earned Degas's acute comment: "A crowd is made with five persons, not
with fifty." ("Il y a cinquante figures, mais je ne vois pas la foule;
on fait une foule avec cinq, et non pas avec cinquante.") But he has
always been someone. Compare with him L'Hermitte, a painter who
illustrates sometimes the possibility of being an artificial realist.
His "Vintage" at the Metropolitan Museum, his "Harvesters" at the
Luxembourg, are excellently real and true in detail, but in idea and
general expression they might compete for the prix de Rome. The same is
measurably true of Lerolle, whose pictures are more sympathetic--sometimes
they are _very_ sympathetic--but on the whole display less power. But
in each instance the advocate _a outrance_ of realism may justly, I
think, maintain that a painter with a natural predisposition toward the
insipidity of the academic has been saved from it by the inherent sanity
and robustness of the realistic method. Jean Beraud, even, owes something
to the way in which his verisimilitude of method has reinforced his
artistic powers. His delightful Parisiennes--modistes' messengers crossing
wet glistening pavements against a background of gray mist accented with
poster-bedizened ki