“clangours of bronze and gold and scarlet” and admits that “there are moments when his work is as infallibly decorative as a Persian crock or a Japanese brocade.”  D.S.  MacColl, in his study of Nineteenth-Century Painting, gives discriminating praise:  “Monticelli’s own exquisite sense of grace in women and invention in grouping add the positive new part without which his art would be the mannerising of Rousseau,” while Arthur Symons in his Studies in Seven Arts declares all Monticelli’s art “tends toward the effect of music... his colour is mood ... his mood is colour.”

It remained, however, for Camille Mauclair, a Parisian critic in sympathy with the arts of design, literature, and music, to place Monticelli in his proper niche.  This Mauclair has done with critical tact.  In his Great French Painters, the bias of which is evidently strained in favour of the impressionistic school, in his L’Impressionisme, and in his monograph on Watteau this critic declares that Monticelli’s art “recalls Claude Lorraine a little and Watteau even more by its sentiment, and Turner and Bonington by its colour...  His work has the same subtlety of gradations, the same division into fragments of tones (as in Watteau’s ’Embarkment for Cythera’), the same variety of execution, which has sometimes the opaqueness of china and enamel and sometimes the translucence of precious stones or the brilliancy of glass, metal, or oxides and seems to be the result of some mysterious chemistry...  Monticelli had an absolutely unique perception of tonalities, and his glance took in certain shades which had not been observed before, which the optic and chromatic science of the day has placed either by proof or hypothesis between the principal tones of the solar spectrum thirty years after Monticelli had fixed them.  There is magic and high lyric poetry in his art.”  I wrote of the Monticellis exhibited at the Comparative Exhibition in New York:  “At the opposite end of the room there is A Summer Day’s Idyll, upon which Monticelli had squeezed all his flaming tubes.  It seems orchestrated in crushed pomegranate, the light suffusing the reclining figures like a jewelled benediction.  Marvellous, too, are the colour-bathed creatures in this No Man’s Land of drugged dreams...  Do not the walls fairly vibrate with this wealth of fairy tints and fantasy?” But it must not be forgotten that he struck other chords besides blazing sun-worshipping.  We often encounter landscapes of vaporous melancholy, twilights of reverie. 8888 Monticelli once told an admiring young amateur that in his canvases “the objects are the decorations, the touches are the scales, and the light is the tenor,” thereby acknowledging himself that he felt colour as music.  There was hyperaesthesia in his case; his eyes were protuberant and, like the ears of violinists, capable of distinguishing quarter tones, even sixteenths.  There are affiliations with Watteau; the same gem-like style of laying on the thick pate, the same delight