Favory, Soutine, and I think of Corneau, was known to me even, through photographs, before the Armistice was signed.  As certainly I think it is true that all are of a later crop than Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert Moreau, etc., while Monzain, Richard, Togores, Gromaire, Alix, Guindet, and Halicka are very young indeed.  So here are a dozen painters—­most of them little known at present outside a smallish circle of artists, critics, and inquisitive amateurs—­who appear to give promise of excellence:  amongst them I should be inclined to look for the masters of a coming age. [G]

[Footnote G:  Twelve years ago I made a list of young or youngish painters—­the men of thirty or thereabouts—­from whom it seemed to me reasonable to expect great things.  It included such names as Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck, Marchand, Friesz, Maillol, Duncan Grant:  one need not be laudator temporis acti to feel that the men of the new generation are on a smaller scale.  This merely confirms my often expressed notion that the decade 1875-85 produced a prodigious quantity of greatly gifted babies.  On the other hand, if by comparison with the salon d’automne of 1911 that of ’2l seems unexciting, we must not fail to do justice to the extraordinarily high level of painting that has now been attained.  And this confirms another of my pet theories—­that we live in an age comparable (so far as painting goes) with the quattro cento.  The works of even the smallest artists of that age enchant us now, because in that age any man of any talent could make a picture; but doubtless at the time critics and amateurs sighed for the first thrilling years of the movement—­for the discoveries of Masaccio and Donatello—­and were quite ready to welcome the novelties of the high renaissance when they came.  The world moves faster nowadays; already we look regretfully back to the days when Matisse and Picasso were launching the movement, and another high renaissance may be nearer than we suppose.]

To this list I would add, in no spirit of paradox, two names which, at first sight, must appear singularly out of place—­Camoin and Guerin.  Both were at work before the contemporary movement—­the Cezanne movement—­was born or, at any rate, launched; both for a long time seemed to be, if anything, opposed to it; both for some years lay dormant in a chrysalis-like state to emerge recently a pair of very interesting painters.  The Camoin and the Guerin with whom I am concerned appeared since the war; they may, of course, relapse into their former condition:  time will show.  Apparently it was only three or four years ago that Camoin realized that Matisse—­his contemporary—­was the master from whom he could draw that nourishment which one good artist may very legitimately draw from another.  So nourished, he seems to have made a fresh start; at any rate his work has now a freshness and vivacity which in his younger days he could never impart.  The case of Guerin is odder still.