in portraiture, and in the still-life of Chardin. This girl's
genius never reached to the force of La Tour, nor the superb handling
or colour-sense or vigour of Chardin, but she painted with rare skill
the eminent women of her day and, with near as remarkable a skill, more
than one man; her loss would have left a serious gap in the statement
of the French genius of the end of the seventeen hundreds.

It has been a custom too long indulged in by literary critics to praise
her at the expense of Boucher's "conventionality"; but she never
painted a portrait that surpassed the Wallace "Pompadour" or the
"Infant Orleans," to say nothing of other rare portraits from Boucher's
easel. To set her up in rivalry against one of the greatest decorative
artists of the years is but to give her an ugly fall. The astounding
part is not that she painted better than she did, but that she achieved
what she did.

But free from convention? No. She was a woman, and a painter of
women--a painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires
the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent,
careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the
violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the
eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part,
and well dressed. She was incapable of stating the deeps of character;
and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something
of an indecency--or worse, an indelicacy. She would, in fact, have
preferred to deny the deeps. She sets her sitter ever in the
drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between
the drawing-room and the inner boudoir (the "sulking room"), slams the
door on the bedroom, or any hint that there is a bedroom, before she
cries "come in," to admit us to her studio; she prefers to show the
woman in her properties as the creature of fashion, not in the intimacy
of her inner living and full significance.

This is as much and as absolutely convention as any tricking out of
ladies as Dresden shepherdesses, and the more subtle in that it is the
less obvious; as much convention as any painting of large eyes or
rose-bud mouths. It is as misleading as convention. But it is the
basis of a woman's life; and, in that, it is true.

Boucher has been blamed for being conventional; is often sneered at as
the arch-make-believe. But when he painted women he painted them as
men really see