w insipid it might become. It has too little body,
its scheme is too timorous, too vaporous to be handled by another. Puvis
de Chavannes will probably have few successful imitators. But one must
immediately add that if he does not found a school, his own work is,
perhaps for that reason, at all events in spite of it, among the most
important of the day. Quite unperturbed by current discussions, which
are certainly of the noisiest by which the current of artistic
development was ever deflected, he has kept on his way, and has finally
won all suffrages for an aesthetic expression that is really antagonistic
to the general aesthetic spirit of his time.

Puvis de Chavannes is, perhaps, the most interesting figure in French
painting to-day. Couture is little more than a name. It is curious to
consider why. Twenty years ago he was still an important figure. He had
been an unusually successful teacher. Many American painters of
distinction, especially, were at one time his pupils--Hunt, La Farge,
George Butler. He theorized as much, as well--perhaps even better
than--he painted. His "Entretiens d'atelier" are as good in their way as
his "Baptism of the Prince Imperial." He had a very distinguished
talent, but he was too distinctly clever--clever to the point of
sophistication. In this respect he was distinctly a man of the
nineteenth century. His great work, "Romains de la Decadence," created
as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World's Fair
in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it
was distinctly a decorative effect--the effect of a fine panel in the
general mass of color and design; it made a fine centre. It remains his
greatest performance, the performance upon which chiefly his fame will
depend, though as painting it lacks the quality and breadth of "Le
Fauconnier," perhaps the most interesting of his works to painters
themselves, and of the "Day-Dreams" of the New York Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Its permanent interest perhaps will be the historical one, due
to the definiteness with which it assigns Couture his position in the
evolution of French painting. It shows, as everything of Couture shows,
the absence of any pictorial feeling so profound and personal as to make
an impression strong enough to endure indefinitely. And it has not, on
the other hand, the interest of reality--that faithful and enthusiastic
rendering of the external world which gives importance to and