Of the realistic landscape painters, the strict impressionists apart, none is more eminent than M. Cazin, whose work is full of interest, and if at times it leaves one a little cold, this is perhaps an affair of the beholder’s temperament rather than of M. Cazin’s.  He is a thoroughly original painter, and, what is more at the present day, an imaginative one.  He sees in his own way the nature that we all see, and paints it not literally but personally.  But his landscapes invariably attest, above all, an attentive study of the phenomena of light and air, and their truthfulness is the more marked for the personality they illustrate.  The impression they make is of a very clairvoyant and enthusiastic observation exercised by an artist who takes more pleasure in appreciation than in expression, whose pleasure in his expression is subordinate to his interest in the external world, and in large measure confined to the delight every artist has in technical felicity when he can attain it.  Their skies are beautifully observed—­graduated in value with delicate verisimilitude from the horizon up, and wind-swept, or drenched with mist, or ringing clear, as the motive may dictate.  All objects take their places with a precision that, nevertheless, is in nowise pedantic, and is perfectly free.  Cazin’s palette is, moreover, a thoroughly individual one.  It is very pure, and if its range is not great, it is at any rate not grayed into insipidity and ineffectualness, but is as positive as if it were more vivid.  A distinct air of elegance, a true sense of style, is noteworthy in many of his pictures; not only in the important ones, but occasionally when the theme is so slight as to need hardly any composition whatever—­the mere placing of a tree, its outline, its relation to a bank or a roadway, are often unmistakably distinguished.  Cazin is not exclusively a landscape painter, and though the landscape element in all his works is a dominant one, even in his “Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert,” and his “Judith Setting out for Holofernes’s Camp” (in which latter one can hardly identify the heroine at all), the fact that he is not a landscape painter, pure and simple, like Harpignies and Pointelin, perhaps accounts for his inferiority to them in landscape sentiment.  In France it is generally assumed that to devote one’s self exclusively to any one branch of painting is to betray limitations, and there are few painters who would not resent being called landscapists.  Something, perhaps, is lost in this way.  It witnesses a greater pride in accomplishment than in instinctive bent.  But however that may be, Cazin never penetrates to the sentiment of nature that one feels in such a work as Harpignies’s “Moonrise,” for example, or in almost any of Pointelin’s grave and impressive landscapes.  Hardly less truthful, I should say, though perhaps less intimately and elaborately real (a romanticist would say less superficially real) than Cazin’s, the work of both these painters is more pictorial.