[Footnote D:  His exhibits in the salon d’automne of 1921, however, suggest that he has come off his high horse.]

To me these artists all seem to be of the first generation of Cezanne’s descendants.  About the dates of one or two, however, I may well be mistaken; and so may I be when I suppose half a dozen more of whose existence I became aware rather later—­only a year or two before the war, in fact—­to be of a slightly later brood.  For instance, it must have been at the end of 1912, or the beginning of 1913, that I first heard of Modigliani, Utrillo, Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert Moreau and Kisling, though doubtless all were known earlier to wide-awake men on the spot.  None of them can fairly be described as doctrinaire:  by that time an artist with a pronounced taste for abstractions betook himself to Cubism almost as a matter of course.  All owe much to Cezanne—­Utrillo least; Modigliani and Marie Laurencin owe a good deal to Picasso’s blue period; while Luc-Albert Moreau owes something to Segonzac.  Of the two first Modigliani is dead and Utrillo so ill that he is unlikely ever to paint again. [E] A strange artist, Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of madness and an odd nostalgic passion—­expressing itself in an inimitable white—­for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the Parisian suburbs.  Towards the end, when he was already very ill, he began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes which might have been his undoing.  His career was of a few years only, but those years were prolific; beginning in a rather old-fashioned, impressionistic style, he soon found his way into the one he has made famous.  To judge his art as a whole is difficult:  partly because his early productions are not only unequal to, but positively unlike, what he achieved later; partly because many of the Utrillos with which Paris is overstocked were painted by someone else.

[Footnote E:  With great pleasure I contradict this.  According to latest reports Utrillo is so far recovered that before long he may be painting again.]

Perhaps the most interesting, though neither the most startling nor seductive, of this batch is Segonzac.  Like all the best things in nature, he matures slowly and gets a little riper every day; so, as he is already a thoroughly good painter, like the nigger of Saint-Cyr he has but to continue.  Before nature, or rather cultivation, with its chocolate ploughed fields and bright green trees, as before the sumptuous splendours of a naked body, his reaction is manifestly, flatteringly, lyrical.  He might have been a bucolic rhapsodist had not his sensibility been well under the control of as sound a head as you would expect to find on the shoulders of a gentleman of Gascony.  His emotions are kept severely in their place by rigorous concentration on the art of painting.  Nevertheless, there are critics who complain that his compositions still tend to lack organization and his forms definition.  And perhaps they do sometimes:  only in these, as in other respects, his art improves steadily. [F]