French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture

III. Realistic Painting, 89 I. Realism. II. Courbet and Bastien-Lepage. III. The Landscape Painters; Fromentin and Guillaumet. IV. Historical and Portrait Painters. V. Baudry, D...

Poussin, however, was the incarnation of the classic spirit, and perhaps the reason why a disinterested foreigner finds it difficult to appreciate the French estimate of him is...

In a word, his choice of subjects, of _genre_, is really no disguise at all of his essential classicality. Both ideally and technically, in the way he conceives and the way he h...

Géricault died early and left but a meagre product. Delacroix is _par excellence_ the representative of the romantic epoch. And both by the mass and the quality of his work he f...

Rousseau carried the fundamental principle of the school farther than the others--with him interest, delight in, enthusiasm for nature became absorption in her. Whereas other me...

To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own time must, I think, be more interesting than any other. The sentimental, the scholastic, the speculative temperament may look...

The contrast which Guillaumet presents to Fromentin affords a very striking illustration of the growth of the realistic spirit in recent years. Fromentin is so admirable a paint...

Nothing is more simple. Take a landscape with a cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old sense of the term, and observe the effect upon it of a sudden burst of sunlight...

He remains, too, one of the very finest, even in a competition constantly growing more exacting since his day. He had a very particular talent, and it was exhibited in manifold...

Why is he so obviously great as well as so obviously extraordinary? one constantly asks himself in the presence of his bronzes. Perhaps because he expresses with such concretene...

With considerably less force than M. Dubois and decidedly less piquancy than M. Saint-Marceaux, M. Antonin Mercié has perhaps greater refinement than either. His outline is a tr...

M. Emmanuel Frémiet occupies a place by himself. There have been but two modern sculptors who have shown an equally pronounced genius for representing animals--namely, Barye, of...

The literary artist does not proceed in this way. He does not content himself with telling us, for example, that one of his characters is a good man or a bad man, an able, a sel...

Certainly M. Dalou is far more nearly in the current of contemporary art than his friend Rodin, who stands with his master Barye rather defiantly apart from the regular evolutio...