kies are beautifully observed--graduated in value
with delicate verisimilitude from the horizon up, and wind-swept, or
drenched with mist, or ringing clear, as the motive may dictate. All
objects take their places with a precision that, nevertheless, is in
nowise pedantic, and is perfectly free. Cazin's palette is, moreover, a
thoroughly individual one. It is very pure, and if its range is not
great, it is at any rate not grayed into insipidity and ineffectualness,
but is as positive as if it were more vivid. A distinct air of elegance,
a true sense of style, is noteworthy in many of his pictures; not only
in the important ones, but occasionally when the theme is so slight as
to need hardly any composition whatever--the mere placing of a tree, its
outline, its relation to a bank or a roadway, are often unmistakably
distinguished. Cazin is not exclusively a landscape painter, and though
the landscape element in all his works is a dominant one, even in his
"Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert," and his "Judith Setting out for
Holofernes's Camp" (in which latter one can hardly identify the heroine
at all), the fact that he is not a landscape painter, pure and simple,
like Harpignies and Pointelin, perhaps accounts for his inferiority to
them in landscape sentiment. In France it is generally assumed that to
devote one's self exclusively to any one branch of painting is to betray
limitations, and there are few painters who would not resent being
called landscapists. Something, perhaps, is lost in this way. It
witnesses a greater pride in accomplishment than in instinctive bent.
But however that may be, Cazin never penetrates to the sentiment of
nature that one feels in such a work as Harpignies's "Moonrise," for
example, or in almost any of Pointelin's grave and impressive
landscapes. Hardly less truthful, I should say, though perhaps less
intimately and elaborately real (a romanticist would say less
superficially real) than Cazin's, the work of both these painters is
more pictorial. They have a quicker sense for the beautiful, I think.
They feel very certainly much more deeply the suggestiveness of a scene.
They are not so _debonnaires_ in the presence of their problems. In a
sense, for that reason, they understand them better. There is very
little feeling of the desert, the illimitable space, where, according to
Balzac, God is and man is not, in the "Hagar and Ishmael;" indeed there
seems to have been no attempt on the part of t