PARTISAN REVIEW
habits and opinions and struggles with judgment painfully, until he
has reached a point of rest.
What is astonishing and yet on reflection perfectly right is that
the book is the fruit of a trip less than a month long in the Low
Countries. There stand behind it, of course, the thought of a life–
time and
.a
habit of judgment formed in almost forty years as a
painter. One of its main virtues is that it reads like a report of a
month's journey, but a month of most intense and concentrated
vision.
If
it has something of the quality of a travel book, it is by
an explorer with a special purpose whose attention is fixed on his
own objects, who knows his domain with a sovereign expertness,
and in encountering certain things for the first time, brings to bear
on them his entire personality as well as his knowledge of the field.
Much that he has to say about Flemish and Dutch painting had been
said before, at least in a general way; but in Fromentin's experience
there is a liveness and sharp edge of appetite which we rarely if
ever find in the older writers.
It
is the first book on art that he has
written and is therefore a fresh enterprise, uninfluenced by a routine
of composition (although we suspect that he has included in it some
ideas that belong to an older stage of his thought). The chapters,
designed in a seemingly formless way, with occasional repetitions,
correspond for the most part to the order of the journey. And to
maintain this direct vision and informality, he also describes the
towns as he sees them, in finely nuanced, picturesque word strokes
which call up images resembling certain of the paintings that he is
to discover there and confirm for the reader both the local, rooted
character of the art and the singlemindedness of the author who
looks at the world and art with the same appreciating eyes.
Before undertaking this work, Fromentin considered whether
he had anything really new to say. He hesitated for some time before
committing himself to the task. The art of the Low Countries had
recently been the object of important studies and now seemed an
exhausted topic. Taine had included in his
Philosophy of Art
a dazz–
ling section on Flemish and Dutch painting, asserting the influence
of race and milieu upon this art in a rich, highly articulated prose.
Thore-Burger, a radical exile from France, one of the keenest critics
of the time, had travelled in the Netherlands and reported in the
Gazette des Beaux-A rts
his discoveries of works by unknown or little
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