chnical drill to a poetic
temperament than these imaginative drawings. In them Fantin gives full
rein to his emotional delight in tender visions and twilight dreams. The
lovely rhythm of his lines, the rise and fall of his sensitive shadows
and lights that play and interplay in as strict obedience to law as the
waves of the sea, his delicate modeling by which he brings form out of
nebulous half-tones with the slightest touches, the least discernible
accents, the accurate bland drawing, the ordered composition, the subtle
spacing, the innumerable indications of close observation of life--all
these qualities combine to give an impression of fantasy and reality so
welded and fused as to be indistinguishable to the casual glance.

[Illustration: In the Brooklyn Art Museum.

PORTRAIT OF MME. MAITRE

_From a painting by Fantin-Latour_]

In spite of the assiduous study of Dutch and Italian masters, Fantin's
work is characteristically French in both its fantasy and its realism.
Not only the grace of the forms and the elegance of the gestures, but
the sentiment of the composition and the quality of the color, are
undisguisedly Gallic. He is closer to Watteau than to any other painter
but his firmer technic and more patient temperament give him an
advantage over the feverish master of eighteenth-century idyls. His art
throbs with a fuller life and in his airiest dreams his world is made of
a more solid substance. For melancholy he offers serenity, for
daintiness he offers delicacy.

His technique, especially in his later work, is quite individual in its
character. He models with short swift strokes of the brush--not unlike
the brush work in some of Manet's pictures. His pigment is rather dry
and often almost crumbly in texture, but his values are so carefully
considered that this delicately ruffled surface has the effect of
casting a penumbra about the individual forms, of causing them to swim
in a thickened but fluent atmosphere, instead of suggesting the rugosity
of an ill-managed medium.

In his paintings of flowers he found the best possible expression for
his subtle color sense. The letters written to him by Whistler in the
sixties show how fervently these paintings were admired by the American
master of harmony, and also how much good criticism came to him from his
comrade whose enthusiasm for Japanese art already was fully awakened.

As a portraitist, Fantin was peculiarly fortunate. His exquisitely
painted flower