PARTISAN
REVIEW
traiture, he requires always that the nature of the sitter be expressed
in the image; he explains the inferiority of Rubens' portraits to
his
other works by the painter's robust extraversion which made it im–
possible for him to concentrate on the inner life of others. On the
other hand, if the
Saint George
"is the pure essence of his genius,"
Fromentin believes that this is due to Rubens' affection for the subject.
It is remarkable with how much pathos Fromentin describes reli–
gious painting-whether of Rubens or Rembrandt or Memling;
some of the finest pages in the book are about the Christian sentiment
of works like the
Last Communion of Saint Francis,
which are seen
mainly from this point of view; their greatness as art appears as a
moral or spiritual achievement more than as a triumph of plastic
invention. It is clear that if Fromentin condemned the concern with
subject as inartistic, he exempted from this criticism the religious and
the epic theme for which he preserved the traditional respect. His
attitude toward the theme of curiosity is not truly the modern one;
he maintained rather the hierarchy of subjects taught by the old clas–
sical academicians. He could praise the still-life painter Vollon as a
superior artist but only with the qualification that his genre was
inferior. Like others of his time, he failed so see that although still–
life and landscape were not subject-matters which had to
be
de–
ciphered and "understood," they embodied nevertheless an attitude
to things no less significant philosophically than the religious or
his–
torical themes, and that like these they were individualized by the
artists, so that one could discover in the choice of objects by Chardin
a distinct personality and a relation to his mode of painting.
One cannot say then of Fromentin that he is a purely formal
or aesthetic critic. His whole culture is engaged in seeing. Psychology,
religion, history interest him too, although none of these, when seen
through the work of art, approaches in importance the individual
aesthetic fabric of the work. But where they help to illuminate the
latter, they belong necessarily to the critic's domain. In Fromentin's
book we do not feel that they are simply a "background" to au
interpretation, a set of more or less relevant facts that he has coldly
excerpted from books. They are matters of conviction and high
curiosity, of which he sees the human and poetic side; they have
occupied
his
thought for some time, although they have never been
for him an object of research. He is no theoretical mind, however,
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