The injustice of this is patent.  Between Fortuny and Meissonier there lies the gulf that separates the genius and the hard-working man of talent.  Nevertheless Meissonier’s statue is in the garden of the Louvre, Meissonier is extolled as a master, while Fortuny is usually described in patronising terms as a facile trifler.  The reverse is the truth.  No one has painted sunlight with more intensity; he was an impressionist before the word was coined.  He is a colourist almost as sumptuous as Monticelli, with a precision of vision never attained by the Marseilles rhapsodist.  His figures are as delicious as Watteau’s or Debucourt’s—­he recalls the latter frequently—­and as an Orientalist he ranks all but a few.  Gerome, Guillaumet, Fromentin, Huguet are not to be mentioned in the same breath with Fortuny as to the manipulation of material; and has Guillaumet done anything savouring more of the mysterious East than Fortuny’s At the Gate of the Seraglio?  The magician of jewelled tones, he knew all the subtler modulations.  His canvases vibrate, they emit sparks of sunlight, his shadows are velvety and warm.  Compared with such a picture as The Choice of a Model, the most laboriously minute Meissonier is as cold and dead as a photograph—­Meissonier, who was a capital fan painter, a patient miniaturist without colour talent, a myopic delineator of costumes, who, as Manet said, pasted paper soldiers on canvas and called the machine a battle-field.

The writer recalls the sensations once evoked by a close view of Fortuny’s Choice of a Model at Paris years ago, and at that time in the possession of Mr. Stewart.  Psychology is not missing in this miracle of virtuosity; the nude posing on the marble table, the absolute beauty of the drawing, the colouring, the contrast of the richly variegated marble pillars in the background, the eighteenth-century costumes of the Academicians so scrupulously yet so easily set forth, all made a dazzling ensemble.  Since Fortuny turned the trick a host of spurious pictures has come overseas, and we now say “Vibert” at the same time as “Fortuny,” just as some enlightened persons couple the names of Ingres and Bouguereau.  In the kingdom of the third rate the mediocre is conqueror.

Listen to this description of La Vicaria (The Spanish Wedding), which first won for its painter his reputation.  Begun in 1868, it was exhibited at Goupil’s, Paris, the spring of 1870 (some say 1869), when the artist was thirty-two years old.  Theophile Gautier—­whose genius and Theodore de Banville’s have analogies with Fortuny’s in the matter of surfaces and astounding virtuosity—­went up in the air when he saw the work, and wrote a feuilleton that is still recalled by the old guard.  The following, however, is not by Gautier, but from the pen of Dr. Richard Muther, the erudite German critic:  “A marriage is taking place in the sacristy of a rococo church in Madrid.  The walls are covered with faded Cordova leather hangings figured in gold and