Chardin, on the other hand, is the one distinguished exception to the general character of French art in the artificial and intellectual eighteenth century.  He is as natural as a Dutchman, and as modern as Vollon.  As you walk through the French galleries of the Louvre, of all the canvases antedating our own era his are those toward which one feels the most sympathetic attraction, I think.  You note at once his individuality, his independence of schools and traditions, his personal point of view, his preoccupation with the object as he perceives it.  Nothing is more noteworthy in the history of French art, in the current of which the subordination of the individual genius to the general consensus is so much the rule, than the occasional exception—­now of a single man, now of a group of men, destined to become in its turn a school—­the occasional accent or interruption of the smooth course of slow development on the lines of academic precedent.  Tyrannical as academic precedent is (and nowhere has it been more tyrannical than in French painting) the general interest in aesthetic subjects which a general subscription to academic precedent implies is certainly to be credited with the force and genuineness of the occasional protestant against the very system that has been powerful enough to popularize indefinitely the subject both of subscription and of revolt.  Without some such systematic propagandism of the aesthetic cultus as from the first the French Institute has been characterized by, it is very doubtful if, in the complexity of modern society, the interest in aesthetics can ever be made wide enough, universal enough, to spread beyond those immediately and professionally concerned with it.  The immense impetus given to this interest by a central organ of authority, that dignifies the subject with which it occupies itself and draws attention to its value and its importance, has, a priori, the manifest effect of leading persons to occupy themselves with it, also, who otherwise would never have had their attention drawn to it.  It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say, in other words, that but for the Institute there would not be a tithe of the number of names now on the roll of French artists.  When art is in the air—­and nothing so much as an academy produces this condition—­the chances of the production of even an unacademic artist are immensely increased.

So in the midst of the Mignardise of Louis Quinze painting it is only superficially surprising to find a painter of the original force and flavor of Chardin.  His wholesome and yet subtle variations from the art a la mode of his epoch might have been painted in the Holland of his day, or in our day anywhere that art so good as Chardin’s can be produced, so far as subject and moral and technical attitude are concerned.  They are, in quite accentuated contra-distinction from the works of Greuze, thoroughly in the spirit of simplicity and directness.  One notes in them at once that moral simplicity which predisposes