The Barbizon men continue to hold one’s attention by a splendid Troyon.  It is one of the best of his canvases I have ever seen.  The little Diaz alongside of it is also typical of this very luminous painter, who often attains a lusciousness of colour in his work not reached by any other of the Barbizon men.

Fortuny, in an Algiers picture, shows the same brilliant technical quality which is so much in evidence in a small watercolor in the preceding gallery.  Jules Bastien-LePage’s studio nude seems very unhappily placed in a naturalistic background into which it does not fit, and Cazin’s big canvas, while very dignified, hardly comes up to the level of his repenting “Simon Peter”, in the other gallery.  Pelouse’s landscape, of singularly beautiful composition and colour, should not be overlooked.  It is alongside the Cazin.

While almost all the pictures referred to so far are of the French school, there are three pictures of the older German school — two Lenbachs, one a very accurately drawn portrait of the German philosopher Mommsen, and the other a portrait of himself.  They show this powerful artist in two different aspects.  While the Mommsen is one of his later, broader pictures, the portrait of himself is of an earlier date, showing the artist as the serious student he has always been.  Adolph Schreyer, another German, with his Bedouin pictures, was the pet of the art lovers in his day, and pictures like this can be found in almost every collection in the world.

The miscellaneous sculpture in this gallery is full of interest and gives one a good suggestion of the great mass of small modern sculpture found throughout the galleries.  Mora’s Indian figures are particularly interesting from their originality of theme.  Mora tries hard to be unconventional, without going into the bizarre, and succeeds very well.

Gallery 61.

The difference of appearance in the four older galleries discussed and the one now visited is so marked as to lead one to believe that our investigations have not been conducted in the proper chronological order.  All the art of the world, up to and including the Barbizon school, is characterized by a predominant brown colour which, on account of its warmth, is never disagreeable, although sometimes monotonous.  The daring of the Englishman Constable in painting a landscape outdoors led to the development of a new point of view, which the older artists did not welcome.  Constable and the men of the Barbizon school realized for the first time that outdoor conditions were totally different from the studio atmosphere, and while the work of such men as Corot, Millet, Daubigny, Rousseau, and Diaz is only slightly removed from the somber brown of the studio type, it recognizes a new aspect of things which was to be much farther developed than they ever dreamed.  Just as Constable shocked his contemporaries by his — for that time — vivid outdoor blues and greens, so the men of the school of 1870,