FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
I have implied that Fromentin's judgment of Rembrandt was
affected by his own relation to contemporary art. This is not a dis–
covery for which we must go beneath the suIface of the book. Fro–
mentin himself believed that it was impossible to criticize past
art
without commenting implicitly on the art of one's time. And he took
this
principle seriously enough to make his views on contemporary
painting as explicit as he could. While engaged on the book, he wrote
to a friend that his text still lacked "the lessons that should be drawn
from it, the applications to the present.... And that is the indis–
pensable moral without which my work will have neither value, nor
relevance nor novelty." The commitment is surely excessive and
would hardly have been risked in print. The book lives in spite of
its pages on modern art.
These were written at a moment when academic art was in
hopeless decline and the Impressionists were exhibiting as a vigorous,
insurgent group in whose works the younger artists, writers and
amateurs sensed an absolute modernity keyed to the new tempo of
life and liberty of ideas. In the defense of Impressionism (as of
Realism in the generation before) the example of the Dutch painters
had been a powerful argument. The art of the 1860's and '70s renewed
a tradition of bourgeois painting that had been interrupted by the
authoritative grand style of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
The painter Boudin wrote that the people and landscape of his
own century were no less worthy subjects of painting than had been
the Hollanders and Holland of the seventeenth. The actuality of
color and brushstroke, light and atmosphere, outdoor painting and
direct vision in the most recent art made the old works seem almost
contemporary.
It
would have been impossible at this time to write
about the Flemish and Dutch masters without hinting at the modern
school.
Fromentin, whose art was exotic in theme and classicizing in
mood, could only be embarrassed by this new trend. Where he refers
to living painters, it is mainly to polemize against Manet and the
emerging Impressionist art or to lament the general decay. The line
from Courbet to Monet was to him a sad corruption of the art he
had loved in his youth. Manet disturbed him most, and in his letters
he remarks with some ill-humor that all of Manet is already in Hals,
but that the Frenchman has copied the weaknesses of Hals, the
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