z, Daubigny, Troyon, and Delacroix, his hopes were cracked by
the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian war. He escaped to Marseilles,
there to die poor, neglected, half mad. Perhaps he was to blame for
his failures; perhaps his temperament was his fate. Yet to-day his
pictures are sought for as were those of Diaz two decades ago, though
there was a tacit conspiracy among dealers and amateurs not to drag
his merits too soon before the foot-lights. In 1900 at the Paris
Exposition a collection of his works, four being representative,
opened the eyes of critics and public alike. It was realised that
Monticelli had not received his proper ranking in the
nineteenth-century theatre of painting; that while he owed much to
Watteau, to Turner, to Rousseau, he was a master who could stand or
fall on his own merits. Since then the Monticelli pictures have been
steadily growing in favour.

There is a Monticelli cult. America can boast of many of his most
distinguished specimens, while the Louvre and the Luxembourg are
without a single one. The Musee de Lille at Marseilles has several
examples; the private collections of M. Delpiano at Cannes and a few
collections in Paris make up a meagre list. The Comparative Exhibition
in New York, 1904, revealed to many accustomed to overpraising Diaz
and Fromentin the fact that Monticelli was their superior as a
colourist, and a decorator of singularly fascinating characteristics,
one who was not always a mere contriver of bacchanalian riots of
fancy, but who could exhibit when at his best a _justesse_ of vision
and a controlled imagination.

The dictionaries offer small help to the student as to the doings of
this erratic painter. He was born October 24, 1824. He died June 29,
1886. He was of mixed blood, Italian and French. His father was a
gauger, though Adolphe declared that he was an authentic descendant of
the Crusader, Godefroy Monticelli, who married in 1100 Aurea Castelli,
daughter of the Duca of Spoleto. Without doubt his Italian blood
counted heavily in his work, but whether of noble issue matters
little. Barbey d'Aurevilly and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, two men of
letters, indulged in similar boasts, and no doubt in their poverty and
tribulations the oriflamme of aristocracy which they bravely bore into
the cafe life of Paris was a source of consolation to them. But it is
with brains, not blood, that painters mix their pigments, and the
legend of high birth can go with the other fictio