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Some one asked him if he had not the "Legion d'honneur"? and being answered that it had not been offered, went on to say that it was not "offered," but "accordee" through the influence of some important personage, or by the pressure of public opinion; "and I think this should be your case," M. Lalanne's friend went on, "for you have rendered, and are still rendering, such great service to French art and to French artists, that it ought to be acknowledged.
Pennell modestly omits his own name; but the truth is that Pennell is as excellent if not more individual a draughtsman as Lalanne, and when it comes to vision, to invention, and to the manipulation of the metal he is the superior of the Frenchman. The American etcher rates Lalanne's lines above Titian's.
There is no attempt at the literal rendering of natural objects in detail, all is accomplished by suggestion: and while I do not wish to be understood as insisting upon such a severely simple style, much less upon the purist theory that the function of the pen is concerned with form alone, I would impress upon the student that Lalanne's is incomparably the finer manner of the two.
Dramatic in feeling and not without a note here and there of Rembrandt, this particular composition fails, just fails to hit the bull's-eye. After all, we must judge a man in his genre, as Keppel père puts it. Maxime Lalanne's style is that of a vanished generation in etching. He was a contemporary of Meryon, but that unhappy man of genius taught him nothing.
Ever after he remained, if not quite an intimate friend of my husband, at least more than an acquaintance, and whenever they had a chance of meeting they made the most of it. Gilbert, after one of these meetings, a dejeuner at M. Lalanne's, told me the following anecdote.
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