Monticelli painted landscapes, romantic scenes, “fetes galantes” in the spirit of Watteau, and still-life pictures:  one could not imagine a more inspired sense of colour than shown by these works which seem to be painted with crushed jewels, with powerful harmony, and beyond all with an unheard-of delicacy in the perception of fine shades.  There are tones which nobody had ever invented yet, a richness, a profusion, a subtlety which almost vie with the resources of music.  The fairyland atmosphere of these works surrounds a very firm design of charming style, but, to use the words of the artist himself, “in these canvases the objects are the decoration, the touches are the scales, and the light is the tenor.”  Monticelli has created for himself an entirely personal technique which can only be compared with that of Turner; he painted with a brush so full, fat and rich, that some of the details are often truly modelled in relief, in a substance as precious as enamels, jewels, ceramics—­a substance which is a delight in itself.  Every picture by Monticelli provokes astonishment; constructed upon one colour as upon a musical theme, it rises to intensities which one would have thought impossible.  His pictures are magnificent bouquets, bursts of joy and colour, where nothing is ever crude, and where everything is ruled by a supreme sense of harmony.

[Illustration:  MANET

THE READER]

Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet.  In all matters concerning technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism.  As regards design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour, Largilliere, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen.  It has resolutely held aloof from mythology, academic allegory, historical painting, and from the neo-Greek elements of Classicism as well as from the German and Spanish elements of Romanticism.  This reactionary movement is therefore entirely French, and surely if it deserves reproach, the one least deserved is that levelled upon it by the official painters:  disobedience to the national spirit.  Impressionism is an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation, and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art.  We shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters, that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French blood.