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 fictions reported by Henley that Monticelli was an illegitimate offshoot of the Gonzagas; that he was the natural son of Diaz; that Diaz kept him a prisoner for years, to “steal the secret of his colours.”

Like many another of his temperament, he had himself to thank for his woes, though it was a streak of ill-luck for him when the Prussians bore down on Paris.  He was beginning to be known.  A pupil of Raymond Aubert (1781-1857), he was at first a “fanatic of Raphael and Ingres.”  Delacroix and his violently harmonised colour masses settled the future colourist.  He met Diaz and they got on very well together.  A Southerner, handsome, passionate, persuasive, dashing, with the eloquence of the meridional, Monticelli and his musical name made friends at court and among powerful artists.  In 1870 he started on his walk of thirty-six days from Paris to Marseilles.  He literally painted his way.  In every inn he shed masterpieces.  Precious gold dripped from his palette, and throughout the Rhone valley there are, it is whispered—­by white-haired old men the memory of whose significant phrases awakes one in the middle of the night longing for the valley of Durance—­that if a resolute, keen-eyed adventurer would traverse unostentatiously the route taken by Monticelli during his Odyssey the rewards might be great.  It is an idea that grips one’s imagination, but unfortunately it is an idea that gripped the imagination of others thirty years ago.  Not an auberge, hotel, or hamlet has been left unexplored.  The fine-tooth comb of familiar parlance has been sedulously used by interested persons.  If there are any Monticellis unsold nowadays they are for sale at the dealers’.

In him was incarnate all that we can conceive as bohemian, with a training that gave him the high-bred manner of a seigneur.  He was a romantic, like his friend Felix Ziem—­Ziem, Marcellin, Deboutin, and Monticelli represented a caste that no longer exists; bohemians, yes, but gentlemen, refined and fastidious.  Yet, after his return to his beloved Marseilles, Monticelli led the life of an August vagabond.  In his velvet