and Pater—­and Boucher has a great deal of the same feeling—­were sensitive to that vibration of atmosphere that blends local hues into the ensemble that produces tone.  The ensemble of their tints is what we mean by color.  Since the Venetians this note had not appeared.  They constitute, thus, a sort of romantic interregnum—­still very classic, from an intellectual point of view—­between the classicism of Lebrun and the still greater severity of David.  Nothing in the evolution of French painting is more interesting than this reverberation of Tintoretto and Tiepolo.

By cleverness, as exhibited by the Louis Quinze painters, I do not mean mere technical ability, but something more inclusive, something relating quite as much to attitude of mind as to dexterity of treatment.  They conceive as cleverly as they execute.  There is a sense of confidence and capability in the way they view, as well as in the way they handle, their light material.  They know it thoroughly, and are thoroughly at one with it.  And they exploit it with a serene air of satisfaction, as if it were the only material in the world worth handling.  Indeed, it is exquisitely adapted to their talent.  So little significance has it that one may say it exists merely to be cleverly dealt with, to be represented, distributed, compared, and generally utilized solely with reference to the display of the artist’s jaunty skill.  It is, one may say, merely the raw material for the production of an effect, and an effect demanding only what we mean by cleverness; no knowledge and love of nature, no prolonged study, no acquaintance with the antique, for example, no philosophy whatever—­unless poco-curantism be called a philosophy, which eminently it is not.  To be adequate to the requirements—­rarely very exacting in any case—­made of one, never to show stupidity, to have a great deal of taste and an instinctive feeling for what is elegant and refined, to abhor pedantry and take gayety at once lightly and seriously, and beyond this to take no thought, is to be clever; and in this sense the Louis Quinze painters are the first, as they certainly are the typical, clever artists.

In Louis Quinze art the subject is more than effaced to give free swing to technical cleverness; it is itself contributory to such cleverness, and really a part of it.  The artists evidently look on life, as they paint their pictures, as the web whereon to sketch exhibitions of skill in the composition of sensation-provoking combinations—­combinations, thus, provoking sensations of the lightest and least substantial kind.  When you stand before one of Fragonard’s bewitching models, modishly modified into a great—­or rather a little—­lady, you not only note the color—­full of tone on the one hand and of variety on the other, besides exhibiting the happiest selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues and tints; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever touch just poised between suggestion