s least inclined toward interest
in the actual feel its influences, and show the effects of these. The
most recalcitrant illustrate this technically, however rigorously they
may preserve their point of view. They paint at least more
circumspectly, however they may think and feel. An historical painter
like Jean Paul Laurens, interested as he is in the memorable moments and
dramatic incidents of the past, and exhibiting as he does, first of all,
a sense of what is ideally forceful and heroic, is nevertheless clearly
concerned for the realistic value of his representation far more than a
generation ago he would have been. When Luminais paints a scene from
Gaulish legend, he is not quite, but nearly, as careful to make it
pictorially real as he is to have it dramatically effective. M. Francois
Flameng, expanding his book illustration into a mammoth canvas
commemorative of the Vendean insurrection, is almost daintily fastidious
about the naturalistic aspect of his abundant detail. M.
Benjamin-Constant's artificially conceived seraglio scenes are as
realistically rendered as is indicated by a recent caricature depicting
an astonished sneak-thief, foiled in an attempted rape of the jewels in
a sultana's diadem, painted with such deceptive illusoriness by M.
Benjamin-Constant's clever brush. The military painters, Detaille, De
Neuville, Berne-Bellecour, do not differ from Vernet more by painting
incidents instead of phases of warfare, by substituting the touch of
dramatic _genre_ for epic conceptions, than they do by the scrupulously
naturalistic rendering that in them supplants the old academic
symbolism. Their dragoons and _fantassins_ are not merely more real in
what they do, but in how they look. Vernet's look like tin soldiers by
comparison; certainly like soldiers _de convenance_. Aime Morot
evidently used instantaneous photography, and his magnificent cavalry
charges suggest not only carnage, but Muybridge as well.
The great portrait-painters of the day--Carolus-Duran, Bonnat,
Ribot--are realists to the core. They are very far from being purely
portrait-painters of course, and their realism shows itself with
splendid distinction in other works. Few painters of the nude have
anything to their credit as fine as the figure M. Carolus-Duran
exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1889. Ribot's "Saint Sebastian" is
one of the most powerful pictures of modern French art. Bonnat's
"Christ" became at once famous. Each picture is
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