PARTISAN REVIEW
the works exhibited in a particular place. Like the travel book, it
follows an itinerary and conveys the impressions and feelings of
Fromentin on a journey in the summer of 1875. It adds to these
some vigorous pages of theory, it is concerned with principles and
makes excursions into history and aesthetics. It builds up distinct
images of artistic personalities. Finally, there is something of the
intimate journal in its avowals, hesitations, enthusiasms and regrets,
its monologue of artistic experience.
This variety of statement enables Fromentin to be more fully
himself and to draw on more of his powers and interests than if he
had adopted anyone of the established forms of writing on art. It is
a flexible medium for the complex culture and personality of the
author. The restriction to what he has seen on a single trip and in
Paris entails, of course, a disadvantage for a critic. It means that he
must ignore important pictures of Rubens and Rembrandt in other
countries although they were familiar to him through reproductions.
And he cannot confront the work of an artist in its entirety to check
his single judgments against a larger conception or in a perspective
of the whole.
Nevertheless, the limitation was also an advantage; for it was
precisely by restricting himself to the directly encountered paintings
that Fromentin could liberate the criticism of past art from the
established formalities and bookishness. We can see this better by a
comparison with Delacroix's writings on art. In the great romantic's
note-books there are long passages of the purest, most acute percep–
tion; but the articles on Gros, Poussin, Prud'hon and others that
he published during his lifetime are written in another style: they
are full-dress essays with much historical, biographic matter in a
tone of public speech; the best qualities of his journal appear only
faintly
in
these conventional works. Fromentin is the first writer to
give to published criticism of the old masters the spontaneous per–
sonal character of this hitherto private, yet highly objective, discern–
ment of art which must have been practiced by many artists.
His
relation to Delacroix is like that of Impressionist painting to its pre–
decessors; it treats as self-sufficient and valid what had formerly been
regarded as only a preparatory sketch or note, and it carries further
the implications of that direct approach. Fromentin introduced as
a governing principle into the studied criticism the immediacy of the
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