of nature the intensity of Goya and his sense of life, the charm of Velasquez and his sober dignity are recalled by the painting of a young Spanish artist who a decade ago was unknown.  Nor is Zuloaga an eclectic.  His force and individuality are too patent for us to entertain such a heresy.  A glance at Jacques-Emile Blanche’s portrait of the Spanish painter explains other things.  There is the physique of a man who can work many hours a day before an easel; there are the penetrating eyes of an observer, spying eyes, slightly cruel; the head is an intellectual one, the general conformation of the face harmonious and handsome.  The body is that of an athlete, but not of the bull-necked sort we see in Goya.  The temperament suggested is impetuous, controlled by a strong will; it has been fined down by study and the enforced renunciations of poverty-haunted youth.  Above all, there is race; race in the proud, resolute bearing, race in the large, firm, supple, and nervous hands.  Indeed, the work of Zuloaga is all race.  He is the most Spanish painter since Goya.

IX.  CHARDIN

Zola, as reported by George Moore, said of Degas:  “I cannot accept a man who shuts himself up all his life to draw a ballet girl as ranking co-equal in dignity and power with Flaubert, Daudet, and Goncourt.”  This remark gives us the cue for Zola’s critical endowment; despite his asseverations his naturalism was only skin deep.  He, too, was swayed by his literary notions concerning the importance of the subject.  In painting the theme may count for little and yet a great picture result; in Zola’s field there must be an appreciable subject, else no fiction.  But what cant it is to talk about “dignity.”  Zola admits ingrained romanticism.  He would not see, for instance, that the Degas ballet girls are on the same plane as the Ingres odalisques; that a still-life by Chardin outweighs a big canvas by David; and it must be admitted that the world is on the side of Zola.  The heresy of the subject will never be stamped out, the painted anecdote will always win the eye of the easily satisfied majority.

It may be remembered that the great Spaniard began his apprenticeship to art by copying still-life, which he did in a superlative manner; his Bodegones, or kitchen pieces, testify to this.  Chardin, who led as laborious an existence as Degas, shutting himself away from the world, studied surfaces with an intensity that Zola, the apostle of realism, would have misunderstood.  Later the French painter devoted himself with equal success to genre and figure subjects; but for him there was no such category as still-life.  Everything of substance, shape, weight, and colour is alive for the eye that observes, and, except Velasquez, Vermeer, and a few others, no man was endowed with the eye of Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, an eye microscopic in intensity and that saw the beautiful in the homely.