w one must pay thousands for a
canvas. His most loving critic, Camille Mauclair, who, above any one,
has battled valiantly for his art, tells us that Monticelli once took
eighteen francs for a small canvas because the purchaser had no more
in his pocket! In this manner he disposed of a gallery. He smoked
happy pipes and sipped his absinthe--in his case as desperate an enemy
as it had proved to De Musset. He would always doff his hat at the
mention of Watteau or Rubens. They were his gods.

When Monticelli arrived in Marseilles after his tramp down from Paris
he was literally in rags. M. Chave, a good Samaritan, took him to a
shop and togged him out in royal raiment. They left for a promenade,
and then the painter begged his friend to let him walk alone so as not
to attenuate the effect he was bound to produce on the passersby, such
a childish, harmless vanity had he. His delight was to gather a few
chosen ones over a bottle of old vintage, and thus with spasmodic
attempts at work his days rolled by. He was feeble, semi-paralysed.
With the advent of bad health vanished the cunning of his hand. His
paint coarsened, his colours became crazier. His pictures at this
period were caricatures of his former art. Many of the early ones were
sold as the productions of Diaz, just as to-day some Diazs are palmed
off as Monticellis. After four years of decadence he died, repeating
for months before his taking off: "Je viens de la lune." He was one
whose brain a lunar ray had penetrated; but this ray was transposed to
a spectrum of gorgeous hues. Capable of depicting the rainbow, he died
of the opalescence that clouded his glass of absinthe. _Pauvre Fada!_

II

It is only a coincidence, yet a curious one, that two such dissimilar
spirits as Stendhal and Monticelli should have predicted their future
popularity. Stendhal said: "About 1880 I shall be understood."
Monticelli said in 1870: "I paint for thirty years hence." Both
prophecies have been realised. After the exhibition at Edinburgh and
Glasgow in 1890 Monticelli was placed by a few discerning critics
above Diaz in quality of paint. In 1892 Mr. Brownell said of
Monticelli in his French Art--a book that every student and amateur of
painting should possess--that the touch of Diaz, patrician as it was,
lacked the exquisiteness of Monticelli's; though he admits the
"exaggeration of the decorative impulse" in that master. For Henley
Monticelli's art was purely sensuous; "his f