or and
design--their decorative quality, in a word.

The decorative painter is he to whom what is called "subject," even in
its least restricted sense and with its least substantial suggestions,
is comparatively indifferent. Nature supplies him with objects; she is
not in any intimate degree his subject. She is the medium through which,
rather than the material of which, he creates his effects. It is her
potentialities of color and design that he seeks, or at any rate, of all
her infinitely numerous traits, it is her hues and arabesques that
strike him most forcibly. He is incurious as to her secrets and calls
upon her aid to interpret his own, but he is so independent of her, if
he be a decorative painter of the first rank--a Diaz or a Dupre--that
his rendering of her, his picture, would have an agreeable effect, owing
to its design or color or both, if it were turned upside down.
Decorative painting in this sense may easily be carried so far as to
seem incongruous and inept, in spite of its superficial attractiveness.
The peril that threatens it is whim and freak. Some of Monticelli's,
some of Matthew Maris's pictures, illustrate the exaggeration of the
decorative impulse. After all, a painter must get his effect, whatever
it be and however it may shun the literal and the exact, by rendering
things with pigments. And some of the decorative painters only escape
things by obtruding pigments, just as the _trompe-l'oeil_ or optical
illusion painters get away from pigments by obtruding things. It is the
distinction of Diaz and Dupre that they avoid this danger in most
triumphant fashion. On the contrary, they help one to see the decorative
element in nature, in "things," to a degree hardly attained elsewhere
since the days of the great Venetians. Their predilection for the
decorative element is held in leash by the classic tradition, with its
reserve, its measure, its inculcation of sobriety and its sense of
security. Dupre paints Seine sunsets and the edge of the forest at
Fontainebleau, its "long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight," in a
way that conveys the golden glow, the silvery gleam, the suave outline
of spreading leafage, and the massive density of mysterious boscage with
the force of an almost abstract acuteness. Does nature look like this?
Who knows? But in this semblance, surely, she appeared to Dupre's
imagination. And doubtless Diaz saw the mother-of-pearl tints in the
complexion of his models, and is not