n to this interest by a central organ of authority,
that dignifies the subject with which it occupies itself and draws
attention to its value and its importance, has, _a priori_, the manifest
effect of leading persons to occupy themselves with it, also, who
otherwise would never have had their attention drawn to it. It would
scarcely be an exaggeration to say, in other words, that but for the
Institute there would not be a tithe of the number of names now on the
roll of French artists. When art is in the air--and nothing so much as
an academy produces this condition--the chances of the production of
even an unacademic artist are immensely increased.

So in the midst of the Mignardise of Louis Quinze painting it is only
superficially surprising to find a painter of the original force and
flavor of Chardin. His wholesome and yet subtle variations from the art
_a la mode_ of his epoch might have been painted in the Holland of his
day, or in our day anywhere that art so good as Chardin's can be
produced, so far as subject and moral and technical attitude are
concerned. They are, in quite accentuated contra-distinction from the
works of Greuze, thoroughly in the spirit of simplicity and directness.
One notes in them at once that moral simplicity which predisposes
everyone to sympathetic appreciation. The special ideas of his time seem
to pass him by unmoved. He has no community of interest with them. While
he was painting his still life and domestic genre, the whole fantastic
whirl of Louis Quinze society, with its aesthetic standards and
accomplishments--accomplishments and standards that imposed themselves
everywhere else--was in agitated movement around him without in the
least affecting his serene tranquillity, his almost sturdy composure.
There can rarely have been such an instance as he affords of an artist's
selecting from his environment just those things his own genius needed,
and rejecting just what would have hampered or distracted him. He is as
sane, as unsentimental, as truthful and unpretending as the most literal
and unimaginative Dutchman of his time or before it; but he has also
that feeling for style, and that instinct for avoiding the common and
unclean which always seem to prevent French painters from "sinking with
their subject," as Dutch painters have been said to do. He seems never
to let himself go either in the direction of Greuze's literary and
sentimental manipulation of his homely material, or in t