Gallery 92.

Chronologically a typical old Charles Le Brun presides over a very interesting lot of pictures, mostly French.  This academic canvas, of Darius’ family at the feet of Alexander, has not the simplicity and decorative quality of the Italian pictures of that period, and it is entirely too complex to be enjoyable.  The beautiful Courbet on the left, while suggestive of Ribera in its severe disposal of light and shadow, has also a quality of its own, a wonderful mellowness which gives it a unity of expression lacking in its turbulent neighbor on the right.

Among the other bigger pictures in this small gallery, a very poetic Cazin, “The Repentance of Simon Peter,” commands attention by a certain outdoor quality which faintly suggests the Barbizon school.  One does not know what to admire most in this fine canvas.  As a figural picture it is intensely beautiful, and merely as a landscape it is of convincing charm.  It is to my mind one of the finest paintings in the exhibition, and a constant source of great pleasure.

The big Tissot offers few excuses for having been painted at all.  It is nothing but a big illustration — all it tells could have been said on a very small canvas.  There is no real painting in it, nor composition — nothing else, for that matter.  The two Monticellis on the same wall make up for the Tissot.  Rich in colour and design, the one to the left is particularly fine.  The Van Marcke on the same wall is typical of this painter’s methods, but does not disclose his talent for very interesting pictorial compositions, for which he was known.

On the opposite wall an older Israels gives lone a good idea of the earlier period of this great Dutch painter, justly counted as one of the great figures of the second half of the last century.  While of recent date, his art belongs to the older school — without attaching any odium to that classification.  The Barbizon school, the most important of the last century, is very fitly represented by two charming and most delicate Corots on either side of the Israels.  The one to the right is particularly tender and poetic.  While by no means an attempt at a naturalistic impressionistic interpretation of nature, like a modern Metcalf, for instance, their suggestive power is so great as to overcome a certain lack of colour by the convincingness of the mood represented.  Daubigny and Rousseau, of that great company of the school of 1825, are merely suggested in two small and very conscientious studies.

Gallery 62.

This will always be remembered as the gallery of the “Green Madonna”.  Whatever caused this “Green Madonna” to be honored by a Grand Prix at Paris will always remain one of those mysteries with which the world is laden.  Of all disagreeable colour schemes, it is certainly one of the least appealing ever put upon a canvas.  It is hardly a scheme at all, since I do not believe the juxtaposition of so many different slimy greens, nowhere properly relieved nor accentuated by a complementary red, can ever be called a scheme.  Technically speaking, the canvas is well painted, but it is hardly worthy of the attention its size and subject win.  Dagnan-Bouveret has rendered good service as a teacher and also as a painter of animal life, but in this canvas he surely is not up to his best.