PARTISAN REVIEW
a masterpiece of cntlclsm which may be read beside Baudelaire's.
We certainly prefer it to anything written about art by the defenders
of Impressionism or Realism. Had he been sympathetic to these,
Fromentin would no doubt have written more understandingly of
Rembrandt too. But
if
he had possessed so daring and modern a mind
as a painter, he would perhaps not have written at all. Yet the best
qualities of his criticism are not far from the advanced contemporary
arts
in spirit. He is intensely empirical, in spite of his traditional
norms. He knows how to see and explores the fabric and color of the
old paintings with a sureness that has to do with the general move–
ment of the new art toward a direct vision of things and a lyricism
of color and light. His power of discerning the personality in the
touch and the tone, as well as in the conception of the whole, corre–
sponds to the self-consciousness of the modern artist as a responsive
individual who represents only objects of immediate experience, who
attends to his sensations and strives to make his pigment and brush–
strokes and the surface of the pictures the evident carriers of his
art.
The progressive elements of Fromentin's criticism are inconsistent
with the rules and standards that he applies to Rembrandt and his
own time. I have suggested that these contradictions arise from con–
flicts within Fromentin; but it should also be said that he surpassed
himself in the strength of his book. It is not the work of revery and
poetic paraphrase of art, that we might expect from the author of
Dominique,
but grows out of a constant contact with human things,
a tense effort of perception and judgment. The forceful qualities that
he cannot realize in his studied painting of nature or in his sad
autobiographical novel, surge up abundantly when he has to speak
about art. In his encounter with the works of the past, he shows
an energy of feeling denied him in daily life and in his own painting.
The "unreal" world of past art is for him the fullest and richest
reality, and the task of judging it, a personal liberation.
Fromentin wrote
The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland
as a relief from the intractable problems of painting. He was fifty-five
years old, respected, covered with the official honors of the Salon,
but very tired and uncertain of his art. He felt himself to be a failure
as an artist, condemned in perpetuity, he said, to repeat his doubt–
ful successes, the exotic little landscapes with horsemen, remembered
from the African travels of his youth. In this mood, he undertook
50
