; but he had the fundamentals of decorative art well in
hand.

After his death thousands of sketches, designs, pencilled memoranda,
and cartoons were found, and then there was whistled another tune. His
draughtsmanship is that of a decorative artist, as the Rodin drawings
are those of a sculptor, not of a painter. Considering the rigid
standard by which the work of Puvis was judged, criticism was not
altogether wrong, as was claimed when the wave of reaction set in. His
easel pictures are not ingratiating. He does not show well in a
gallery. He needs huge spaces in which to swim about; there he makes
the compositions of other men seem pigmy. [It is the case of Wagner
repeated, though there is little likeness between the ideas of the
Frenchman and the German, except an epical bigness. Judged by the
classical concert-room formulas, Wagner must not be compared with the
miniaturist Mendelssohn. His form is the form of the music-drama, not
the symphonic form.] Puvis adhered to one principle: A wall is a wall,
and not an easel picture; it is flat, and that flatness must be
emphasised, not disguised; decoration is the desideratum. He contrived
a schematic painting that would harmonise with the flatness, with the
texture and the architectural surroundings, and, as George Moore has
happily said: "No other painter ever kept this end so strictly before
his eyes. For this end Chavannes reduced his palette almost to a
monochrome, for this end he models in two flat tints, for this end he
draws in huge undisciplined masses.... Mural decoration, if it form
part of the wall, should be a variant of the stonework." One might
take exception to the word "undisciplined"--Puvis was one of the most
calculating painters that ever used a brush, and one of the most
cerebral. His favourite aphorism was: "Beauty is character." His
figures have been called immobile, his palette impoverished; the
unfair sex abused his lean, lanky female creatures, and finally he was
named a painter for Lent--for fast-days. Even the hieratic figures of
Moreau were pronounced opulent in comparison with the pale moonlighted
spectres of the Puvis landscapes. Courbet, in Paris, was known as the
"furious madman"; Puvis, as the "tranquil lunatic." Nine of his
pictures were refused at the Salon, though in 1859 he exhibited there
his Return from Hunting, and, in 1861, even received a second-class
medal. His fecundity was enormous. His principal work comprises the
Life of Ste