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Naturally there is the grumbling element who claim that absinthe never hurt any one, and cite as example the painter Harpignies, who lived to be almost a hundred, having absorbed on the average of two a day until the very last. But all have become so accustomed to making sacrifices that even this one is passed off with a smile. What can one more or less mean now?
"He didn't even seem to know that there was a problem of the lower classes." "Did he tell you that he had a picture?" asked Cecilia gloomily. "Oh yes, by Harpignies, with the accent on the 'pig. It's worth three times what he gave for it. It's so nice to be made to feel that there is still all that mass of people just simply measuring everything by what they gave for it."
Telling the story afterwards, he had spoken thus: "The old chap knew where he lived right enough; but dash me if I believe he noticed that I was taking him there in my car I had the A.i. Damyer out. That's how I came to make the acquaintance of these Dallisons. He's the writer, you know, and she paints rather the new school she admires Harpignies.
It was the time when the great Barbizon school was in its prime, when Diaz and Rousseau and Harpignies and the rest of that goodly company were heading the return to Nature which the epoch needed, just as later it was to need, with equal sincerity, a return to the primitive in art.
Purcey, however, was not a man who allowed the finest shades of feeling to interfere with his enjoyments. She was a "strikin'-lookin' woman," and there was, thanks to Harpignies, a link between them. "Your father and I, Mrs. Dallison, can't quite understand each other," he began. "Our views of life don't seem to hit it off exactly."
Probably the latter, for the possession of that Harpignies, a good specimen, which he had bought by accident, and subsequently by accident discovered to have a peculiar value, had become a factor in his life, marking him out from all his friends, who went in more for a neat type of Royal Academy landscape, together with reproductions of young ladies in eighteenth-century costumes seated on horseback, or in Scotch gardens.
But in company with less conspicuous though equally unacceptable pieces by such men as Bracquemond, Cazin, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J. P. Laurens, Le Gros, Pissarro, Vollon, and Whistler, it was accorded an exhibition, alongside the official Salon, which was called le Salon des refusés.
In Henri Harpignies, a living painter, though now aged, the influence is felt in the careful attention to form throughout the landscape. The delicate branching of trees is depicted in his work with accuracy tempered by a sense of the beauty of line, which prevents it from becoming photographic.
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