Meissonier is extolled as a master, while Fortuny is usually
described in patronising terms as a facile trifler. The reverse is the
truth. No one has painted sunlight with more intensity; he was an
impressionist before the word was coined. He is a colourist almost as
sumptuous as Monticelli, with a precision of vision never attained by
the Marseilles rhapsodist. His figures are as delicious as Watteau's
or Debucourt's--he recalls the latter frequently--and as an
Orientalist he ranks all but a few. Gerome, Guillaumet, Fromentin,
Huguet are not to be mentioned in the same breath with Fortuny as to
the manipulation of material; and has Guillaumet done anything
savouring more of the mysterious East than Fortuny's At the Gate of
the Seraglio? The magician of jewelled tones, he knew all the subtler
modulations. His canvases vibrate, they emit sparks of sunlight, his
shadows are velvety and warm. Compared with such a picture as The
Choice of a Model, the most laboriously minute Meissonier is as cold
and dead as a photograph--Meissonier, who was a capital fan painter, a
patient miniaturist without colour talent, a myopic delineator of
costumes, who, as Manet said, pasted paper soldiers on canvas and
called the machine a battle-field.

The writer recalls the sensations once evoked by a close view of
Fortuny's Choice of a Model at Paris years ago, and at that time in
the possession of Mr. Stewart. Psychology is not missing in this
miracle of virtuosity; the nude posing on the marble table, the
absolute beauty of the drawing, the colouring, the contrast of the
richly variegated marble pillars in the background, the
eighteenth-century costumes of the Academicians so scrupulously yet so
easily set forth, all made a dazzling ensemble. Since Fortuny turned
the trick a host of spurious pictures has come overseas, and we now
say "Vibert" at the same time as "Fortuny," just as some enlightened
persons couple the names of Ingres and Bouguereau. In the kingdom of
the third rate the mediocre is conqueror.

Listen to this description of La Vicaria (The Spanish Wedding), which
first won for its painter his reputation. Begun in 1868, it was
exhibited at Goupil's, Paris, the spring of 1870 (some say 1869), when
the artist was thirty-two years old. Theophile Gautier--whose genius
and Theodore de Banville's have analogies with Fortuny's in the matter
of surfaces and astounding virtuosity--went up in the air when he saw
the work, and wrote a feu