that failing throat.  The rays of light and the smoke all melt into one another; the temple smokes and the mists of incense ascend everywhere.  Night is rolling above the day.  The sun falls into the gloom and casts a reflected glare.  The gleams of sulphur flames illuminate the faces and the throng.  Fragonard lavishly threw the lights of fairyland upon his masterpiece:  it is Rembrandt combined with Ruggieri.

And what movement, what action are in this agitated and convulsive painting!  The clouds and the garments whirl, the gestures are rapid, the attitudes are despairing, horror shudders in every pose and on every lip, and a great mute cry seems to rise throughout this entire temple and throughout this entire lyrical composition.

This cry of a picture, so new for the Eighteenth Century, is Passion.  Fragonard introduces it into his time in this picture so full of tragic tenderness where we might fancy the entombment of Iphigenia.  The phantasmagoria raises his art to the level of the emotion of the Alceste of Euripides; it reveals a future for French painting:  pathos.

    L’Art du Dix-Huitieme Siecle (3d ed., Paris, 1882).

FOOTNOTES: 

[27] Callirhoe by Pierre-Charles Roy, was written in 1712.—­E.S.

THE MARKET-CART

(GAINSBOROUGH)

RICHARD AND SAMUEL REDGRAVE

It is said that Sir Joshua at an Academy dinner gave “the health of Mr. Gainsborough, the greatest landscape painter of the day,” to which Wilson, in his blunt, grumbling way, retorted, “Ay, and the greatest portrait painter, too.”  In Gainsborough’s own time, the world of Art patrons seem to have employed his talents as a portrait painter, but to have disregarded his landscape art.  Beechey said that “in Gainsborough’s house in Pall Mall the landscapes stood ranged in long lines from his hall to his painting-room, and that those who came to sit to him for his portraits, on which he was chiefly occupied, rarely deigned to honour them with a look as they passed them.”  After his death, however, and the eulogium Reynolds had pronounced on his landscapes and rustic children, these came to be considered his finest works, and it is usual now to speak of him as a landscape rather than as a portrait painter.  But it is more than doubtful whether Wilson did not judge more truly of his talent than Sir Joshua; and without wishing to place him above Reynolds in that painter’s peculiar branch, it is certain that Gainsborough, in his finest portraits, formed a style equally original, and produced works that are every way worthy to take rank with those of the great President.  They contrast with the latter in being more silvery and pure, and in the absence of that impasto and richness in which Reynolds indulged, but his figures are surrounded by air and light, and his portraits generally are easy and graceful without affectation....