airy meadows and enchanted
gardens are that sweet word 'Mesopotamia' in two dimensions." Henley
speaks of his "clangours of bronze and gold and scarlet" and admits
that "there are moments when his work is as infallibly decorative as a
Persian crock or a Japanese brocade." D.S. MacColl, in his study of
Nineteenth-Century Painting, gives discriminating praise:
"Monticelli's own exquisite sense of grace in women and invention in
grouping add the positive new part without which his art would be the
mannerising of Rousseau," while Arthur Symons in his Studies in Seven
Arts declares all Monticelli's art "tends toward the effect of
music... his colour is mood ... his mood is colour."

It remained, however, for Camille Mauclair, a Parisian critic in
sympathy with the arts of design, literature, and music, to place
Monticelli in his proper niche. This Mauclair has done with critical
tact. In his Great French Painters, the bias of which is evidently
strained in favour of the impressionistic school, in his
L'Impressionisme, and in his monograph on Watteau this critic declares
that Monticelli's art "recalls Claude Lorraine a little and Watteau
even more by its sentiment, and Turner and Bonington by its colour...
His work has the same subtlety of gradations, the same division into
fragments of tones (as in Watteau's 'Embarkment for Cythera'), the
same variety of execution, which has sometimes the opaqueness of china
and enamel and sometimes the translucence of precious stones or the
brilliancy of glass, metal, or oxides and seems to be the result of
some mysterious chemistry... Monticelli had an absolutely unique
perception of tonalities, and his glance took in certain shades which
had not been observed before, which the optic and chromatic science of
the day has placed either by proof or hypothesis between the principal
tones of the solar spectrum thirty years after Monticelli had fixed
them. There is magic and high lyric poetry in his art." I wrote of the
Monticellis exhibited at the Comparative Exhibition in New York: "At
the opposite end of the room there is A Summer Day's Idyll, upon which
Monticelli had squeezed all his flaming tubes. It seems orchestrated
in crushed pomegranate, the light suffusing the reclining figures like
a jewelled benediction. Marvellous, too, are the colour-bathed
creatures in this No Man's Land of drugged dreams... Do not the walls
fairly vibrate with this wealth of fairy tints and fantasy?" But it
mu