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What did the Luxembourg do for Corot, Millet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro? The Luxembourg chose rather to honour such pretentious mediocrities as Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre, Jules Breton, and their like. What has our Academy done to rescue struggling genius from poverty and obscurity?
I absently fumbled in my coat pockets, then guiltily dropped my hands. What a terrible thing habit is! "You may smoke," said the Bouguereau child who was grown into womanhood. Wasn't that fine of her? And wasn't it rather observant, too? I learned later that she had a brother who was fond of tobacco. To her eyes my movement was a familiar one. "With your kind permission," said I gratefully.
"I thought it was a Jesuit College," began Hastings, but was at once overwhelmed with a Baedecker description of the place, ending with, "On one side stand the palatial hotels of Jean Paul Laurens and Guillaume Bouguereau, and opposite, in the little Passage Stanislas, Carolus Duran paints the masterpieces which charm the world."
The only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun's painting Louis Quatorze painting is not the perfunctory thing we are apt to assume it to be. That is not the same thing, I hope, as maintaining that M. Bouguereau is significant rather than insipid. Lebrun was assuredly not a strikingly original painter.
As a painter and draughtsman Raphael is perhaps outclassed by Bouguereau, Cabanel or Lefevre of our own time, and as a composer of either decorative or pictorial design he has had superiors. But the work of Raphael possesses the loving unction of real conviction and nothing to which he put his well trained hand failed of the baptism of genius. Through this mark, therefore, it will live forever.
Grady was right in saying that "gay Paree" had nothing like it; nor has any other city that I know. It is, indeed, unique and thoroughly American; and I walked along it that night in the most leisurely fashion, savouring it to the full; pausing, now and then, for a glance at a shop-window, and stopping at the Hoffman House now denuded, alas! of its Bouguereau to replenish my supply of cigarettes.
Bodenhausen, Defregger, Bouguereau, have all followed Raphael in representing the Queen of Heaven as a full-length figure in the sky; but their conception has not the dignity corresponding to the style of treatment. Impatient and dissatisfied with such modern art, we turn back to the old masters with new appreciation of their great gifts.
Its principal ornament was a nude Bouguereau in a red-draped alcove, heavily overlighted and fearfully framed; the sort of picture any one would have yawned at in a gallery, it acquired here, from the hard-working indecency of its intent, a weak salaciousness.
He presently departed arm in arm with Bouguereau, to the relief of Clifford, who was then at liberty to jam his hat on his head and depart. The next day he did not appear, and Selby, who had counted on seeing him at the studio, a thing which he learned later it was vanity to count on, wandered back to the Latin Quarter alone. Paris was still strange and new to him.
A strikingly pessimistic tale, only less good than "Mr. Incoul." There is superb writing in these pages, many delightful passages. La Cenerentola and Lucrezia Borgia are mentioned in passing. The pictures which Gerome, Cabanel, Bouguereau, and the acolytes of these pastry-cooks exposed were stupid and sterile as church doors." This required courage in 1888.
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