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Art had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on these walls; and even the Church, on that first Sunday of my visit, forgot the blood of her martyrs that she might adorn an appropriate niche in the setting. The clergyman, at one of the dinner parties, gravely asked a blessing as upon an Institution that included and absorbed all other institutions in its being....
If we look through the catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition, we notice the preponderance of scenes illustrative of English or other literature of canvases that tell a story or point a moral or bear a punning or a sentimental title. And we notice the great number of quotations introduced into the catalogue without any actual explanatory necessity.
Brownell once wrote: "We only care for facts when they explain truths," and the facts of Cézanne have that merit. He is truthful to the degree of eliminating many important artistic factors from his canvases. But he realises the bulk and weight of objects; he delineates their density and profile. His landscapes and his humans are as real as Manet's; he seeks to paint the actual, not the relative.
He was not prolific, apparently; he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a part of it. Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three or four canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious Descent from the Cross.
It is a style which is founded upon the small painters of the eighteenth century, upon Saint-Aubin, Debucourt, Moreau, and, further back, upon Pater and the Dutchmen. But this time, instead of confining this style to vignettes and very small dimensions, the Impressionists have boldly given it the dimensions and importance of big canvases.
I always feel that such bad art cannot be good religion. When the Roman Catholic religion commanded respect it expressed itself better as in the days when it carved itself in harmonies of solid stone, and wrote itself in tint and tone on glowing canvases, and learnt to speak in thundering mass and mighty hymns of praise!
In the present canvases the heads are painted with an interest and a thoroughness very different from that displayed in the costumes. These latter are skilfully done. The dexterity displayed is amazing and such as no copyist is at all likely to have had, but it is dexterity applied to getting a striking result as quickly as possible and with the least possible effort of hand or brain.
Around me, and among the medley of pictures and casts and the piles of canvases stacked against the wall, the eye encountered only a series of cinder-gray tints and undetermined outlines casting long amorphous shadows half-way across the ceiling. A draped lay figure leaning against a door seemed to listen to the whistling of the wind outside; a large glass bay opened upon the night.
The hundred thousand francs I have made, quite in spite of myself, will pay for their fencing lessons, horses, dress, and theatres, pay the masters who teach them accomplishments, procure them canvases to spoil, the books they may wish to buy, in short, all the little fancies which a father finds so much pleasure in gratifying.
And they had spoken of the colours of sails, of the red, the brown, the tawny orange-hued canvases, that, catching the winds under sunset skies, bring romance, like some rare fruit from hidden magical islands, upon emerald, bright-blue or indigo seas. The talk had run on without any effort. They had been happily sunk in talk. She had kept the fire from her face with the big fan.
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