Really Lesueur is as nearly conventional as
Lebrun. He has at any rate far less force; and even if we may maintain
that he had a more individual point of view, his works are assuredly
more monotonous to the scrutinizing sense. It is impossible to recall
any one of the famous San Bruno series with any particularity, or,
except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet and
soft "St. Scholastica" in the _Salon Carre_. With more sapience and less
sensitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur's true successor, to say which is
certainly not to affirm a very salient originality of the older painter.
He had a great deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined and
elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an aesthetic delicacy
that he exhibits, and aesthetically he exercises his sweeter and more
sympathetic sensibility within the same rigid limits which circumscribe
that of Lebrun. He has, indeed, less invention, less imagination, less
sense of composition, less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no
greater concentration or sense of effect; and though his color is more
agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its tone through the absence of
variety rather than through juxtapositions and balances.
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