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Updated: May 7, 2025
"I made signs to you, my dear Abbe," said he, "but you didn't see me. Ah! how superb was the expression of that dark woman who fell rigid beside the platform with her arms outstretched. She reminded me of a masterpiece of one of the primitives, Cimabue, Giotto, or Fra Angelico. And the others, those who devoured the chair arms with their kisses, what suavity, beauty, and love!
A beautiful Fra Angelico, a beautiful Mantegna open your eyes, for the Italian Primitives are conspicuous by their absence. Correggio is magnificent. The well-known Magdalen and Christ Risen, Noli Me Tangere! His Virgin with Jesus and St. John is in his accustomed melting pâte. One Del Sarto is of prime quality, The Virgin, Jesus and St. John, called Asunto Mistico at the Prado.
But unless that subject has been carried to the high regions of art, and there, in a dry æsthetic atmosphere, sealed up in a purely æsthetic conception it can never be externalized in pure form. That is what the great Primitives did, and what the douanier could not do always. In his pudding there are doughy patches. He is sentimental; and he is not sentimental as Raphael and El Greco are.
Perhaps in no other earthly scene do the gradations of life blend so obviously in form and appearance. This mud is primal, fertile with primitives, for similitude of environment checks variations.
But one should not underrate the power of naïve and realistic observation, which the Primitives carried into the execution of their works, subordinating it, however, to religious expression, and it must also be admitted that the Realist-Impressionists served at least their conception of art logically and homogeneously.
"Don't you see ... if the Baldies know anything at all about the Foanna, and I'm betting they do and want to learn all they can, they'll visit the citadel. They won't want to depend on second- and third-hand reports of the place, especially ones delivered by primitives such as the Wreckers. They had a sub there. I'll bet the crew are in picking over the loot right now!"
It is difficult to form an opinion on the matter, because the Penguins, before they began to admire their primitive painters, destroyed all their works. We cannot be too sorry for this loss. For my own part I feel it cruelly, for I venerate the Penguin antiquities and I adore the primitives. They are delightful.
With the seekers obviously lie all the mystery and romance of the pursuit. The rest surely need not be envied to the sought. One thinks of Consul J.J. Jarves gradually getting together that little collection of Italian primitives, at New Haven, which, scorned in his lifetime and actually foreclosed for a trifling debt, is now an object of pilgrimage for European amateurs and experts.
There has been a good deal of profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the Primitives or reproduces them sympathetically; but really he does neither, he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a completely modern as well as a thoroughly personal way. His colour is as original as his general treatment and composition."
He expresses the unalloyed sensibility of an artist in terms of delicious contemporary life and gives us, adventitiously, romance. A fascinating period, but not the great one. He is too thorough a Frenchman to be much of anything else. The emphatic statement and counter-statement of the great Primitives is not in his way. He prefers to insinuate.
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