As one has, however, so often occasion to note in France--where in every
field of intellectual effort the influence of schools and groups and
movements is so great that almost every individuality, no matter how
strenuous, falls naturally and intimately into association with some one
of them--there is every now and then an exception that escapes these
categories and stands quite by itself. In modern painting such
exceptions, and widely different from each other as the poles, are
Couture and Puvis de Chavannes. Better than in either the true
romanticists with the classic strain, or the academic romanticists with
the classic temperament, the blending of the classic and romantic
inspirations is illustrated in Couture. The two are in him, indeed,
actually fused. In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel
combination; his classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism
unreal beyond the verge of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions
that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does _not_
exist--in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly
personal. He lives evidently on an exceedingly high plane--dwells
habitually in the delectable uplands of the intellect. The fact that his
work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental. His talent,
his genius if one chooses, requires large spaces, vast dimensions. There
has been a great deal of rather profitless discussion as to whether he
expressly imitates the _primitifs_ or reproduces them sympathetically.
But really he does neither; he deals with their subjects occasionally,
but always in a completely modern, as well as a thoroughly personal,
way. His color is as original as his general treatment and composition.
He had no schooling, in the Ecole des Beaux Arts sense. A brief period
in Henri Scheffer's studio, three months under Couture, after he had
begun life in an altogether different field of effort, yielded him all
the explicit instruction he ever had. His real study was done in Italy,
in the presence of the old masters of Florence. With this equipment he
revolutionized modern decoration, established, at any rate, a new
convention for it. His convention is a little definite, a little bald.
One may discuss it apart from his own handling of it, even. It is a
shade too express, too confident, too little careless both of tradition
and of the typical qualities that secure permanence. In other hands one
can easily imagine ho