PARTISAN REVIEW
results of his senility. For us today those two late works of Hals-the
Regents of the Home for the Aged-are among his best and approach
Rembrandt in their austere pathos and revelation of old age. Fro–
mentin has judged them inferior because of his narrow standard
of good
facture.
Besides, their relation to Manet is less obvious than
he supposed; if they recall the modern paioter in their bareness of
tones and contrasts, the psychological insight of these exceptional,
most mature works of Hals' old age is in spirit foreign to Manet.
We recognize also in Fromentin's criticism of Rembrandt's thick
crusty painting and intensified light a connection with his judgment
of contemporary art; these are qualities attractive to the independent
young artists in 1875. (We may ask, too, whether his neglect of
Rubens' sketches- he ignores the marvellous one of
The Martyrdom
of
St.
Ursula
which he undoubtedly saw in the Brussels Museum–
is not related to his dislike of the sketchiness of the new art of his
day.) In attacking the unnamed Impressionists for giving an unde–
served importance to sunlight and the open air, he seems to approach
the criticism of this art made a generation later by a more advanced
modern school; for one thing, he urges a return from this sketchy
naturalism to pure painting, by which he means a more studied and
constructed picture. But Fromentin's attack is too indiscriminate to
convince us that he has looked at this contemporary art with the same
care as at the old Dutch painting to which it corresponds. He is un–
able to see what is genuinely artistic in the originality of the Impres–
sionists; that genteel discretion which forbids him to name living
artists, also permits him to condemn entire schools
en masse
for vio–
lating his arbitrary rules of form. He excepts from his general con–
demnation a few artists: the old Corot, who had died in 1875, and
two unnamed figures, Diaz and perhaps Jacque. Corot he admires
chiefly in his weaker vaporous style and makes into an academic
model by speaking of "the rules of value-painting" established and
demonstrated by Corot in his works. On the other hand, in a criticism
of the Salon of 1876, published under a journalist's name, Fromentin
commended Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau as the true
masters of his own generation and called VolIon "one of the rare
good painters of our times." We are surprised that an artist who
understood so finely Rubens and Ruisdael could prefer those academ–
icians to their great contemporaries. That is the fatality of taste
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