And their portraits are almost defiantly real, void often of arrangement, and as little artificial as the very frequently prosaic atmosphere appertaining to their sometimes very stark subjects suggests.  A portrait by Bonnat blinks nothing in the subject; its aim and accomplishment are the rendering of the character in a vivid fashion—­including the reproduction of cobalt cravats and creased trousers even—­which would have mightily embarrassed Van Dyck or Velasquez.  Ribot reproduces Ribera often, but he deals with fewer externals, fewer effects, taken in the widest sense.  Carolus-Duran, the “swell” portrait-painter of the day, artificial as he may be in the quality of his mind, nevertheless seeks and attains, first of all, the sense of an even exaggerated life-likeness in his charming sitters.  They are, first of all, people; the pictorial element takes care of itself; sometimes even—­so overmastering is the realistic tendency—­the plush of the chair, the silk of the robe, the cut of the coat, seems, to an observer who thinks of the old traditions of Titian, of Raphael, of Moroni, unduly emphasized, even for realism.

V

One element of modernity is a certain order of eclecticism.  It is not the eclecticism of the Bolognese painters, for example, illustrating the really hopeless attempt to combine the supposed and superficial excellences, always dissociated from the essence, of different points of view.  It is a free choice of attitude, rather, due to the release of the individual from the thraldom of conformity that ruled even during the romantic epoch.  Hence a great deal of admirable work, of which one hardly thinks whether it is realistic or not, side by side with the more emphatic expressions of the realistic spirit.  And this work is of all degrees of realism, never, however, getting very far away from the naturalistic basis on which more and more everyone is coming to insist as the necessary and only solid pedestal of any flight of fancy.  Baudry is perhaps the nearest of the really great men to the Bolognese order of eclecticism.  I suppose he must be classed among the really great men, so many painters of intelligence place him there, though I must myself plead the laic privilege of a slight scepticism as to whether time will approve their enthusiasm.  He is certainly very effective, and in certainly his own way, idle as it is to say that his drafts on the great Italians are no greater than those of Raphael on the antique frescos.  He had a great love of color and a native instinct for it; with perhaps more appreciation than invention, his imagination has something very personal in the zealous enthusiasm with which he exercised it, though I think it must be admitted that his reflections of Tiepolo, Titian, Tintoretto and his attenuated expansions of Michael Angelo’s condensed grandiosity, recall the eclecticism of the Carracci far more than that of Raphael.  But his manner is the modern manner, and it is altogether