FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
known artists: Venneer and Karel Fabritius, who interested the
younger painters for qualities congenial to the aims of modern art;
he wrote also on Frans Hals, a painter admired as an ancestor of the
scandalous Edouard Manet. Fromentin wished to avoid competition
with these writers. After reading their works, he concluded that on
one point everything was yet to be said; there existed no truly critical
book on the Flemish and Dutch masters, at least nothing correspond–
ing to
his
own insight into their character as artists. He recognized
the interest of the new historical approach which had enlarged
enonnously the knowledge about the artists and their age. The per–
sonality of Rembrandt had emerged for the first time from the docu–
ments discovered by Dutch students. But his intention from the be–
ginning was not to write a historical or systematic work. Rather than
search in fields in which he could be at best an intelligent but ignorant
amateur, he wisely held to the ground of his own experience.
Yet with this restriction of the field he is hardly narrow. In his
certainty that the artistic fabric of a work is the final matter of
judgment, he does not exclude other sides of art as irrelevant to
critical decision. His practice is broader and more attractive than
his theory.
If
only the artistic counts, why so much trouble to envision
the personality behind it? To see the beauty of a Ruisdael surely
doesn't require that we imagine the artist's melancholy, his solitary
rambling and hidden wound. Yet the perception of the personality
in the work may be a means of discovery of the fabric, a key to
certain nuances and accords, closed to .an eye which is unaware of
the humanity embodied in the colors.
Fromentin also gave to the subject of a painting more weight
than his theory would allow. In his chapter on the subject in Dutch
painting, where he noted the rarity of the anecdote and the historical
theme in this art, he affinned with the usual positiveness of modern
critics that only the painting as an artistic work mattered. Flaubert
admired this defense of pure painting as an important lesson for
artists.
If,
however, the chapter had not been written and we under–
took to discover through Fromentin's reactions to pictures precisely
what counted for him, we would quickly learn that the conception of
the themes and their meanings were important, that he sometimes
responded to them with emotion, and that certain kinds of painting
could be judged only in relation to the subject. In speaking of por-
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