money to buy any but small canvases--he might have become a French
Tiepolo, and perhaps the greatest decorative artist of France. Even
his most delicate pictures are largely felt and sonorously executed;
not "finished" in the studio sense, but complete--two different
things.

Fate was against him, and the position he might have had was won by
the gentle Puvis de Chavannes, who exhibited a genius for decorating
monumental spaces. With his fiery vision, his brio of execution, his
palette charged with jewelled radiance, Monticelli would have been the
man to have changed the official interiors of Paris. His energy at one
period was enormous, consuming, though short-lived--1865-75. His lack
of self-control and at times his Italian superficiality, never backed
by a commanding intellect, produced the Monticelli we know. In truth
his soul was not complicated. He could never have attacked the
psychology of Zarathustra, Hamlet, or Peer Gynt. A Salome from him
would have been a delightfully decorative minx, set blithely dancing
in some many-hued and enchanted garden of Armida. She would never have
worn the air of hieratic lasciviousness with which Gustave Moreau
inevitably dowered her. There was too much joy of the south in
Monticelli's bones to concern himself with the cruel imaginings of the
Orient or the grisly visions of the north. He was Oriental _au fond_;
but it was the Orientalism of the Thousand and One Nights. He painted
scenes from the Decameron, and his _fetes galantes_ may be matched
with Watteau's in tone. His first period was his most graceful;
ivory-toned languorous dames, garbed in Second Empire style, languidly
stroll in charming parks escorted by fluttering Cupids or stately
cavaliers. The "decorative impulse" is here at its topmost. In his
second period we get the Decameron series, the episodes from Faust,
the Don Quixote--recall, if you can, that glorious tableau with its
Spanish group and the long, grave don and merry, rotund squire
entering on the scene, a fantastic sky behind them.

Painted music! The ruins, fountains, statues, and mellow herbage
abound in this middle period. The third is less known. Extravagance
began to rule; scarlet fanfares are sounded; amethysts and emeralds
sparkle; yet there is more thematic variety. Voluptuous, perfumed, and
semi-tragic notes were uttered by this dainty poet of the carnival of
life. The canvas glowed with more reverberating and infernal lights,
but lyric ever. Te