Lancret, Pater,
Nattier, and Van Loo--the very names suggest not merely freedom but a
sportive and abandoned license. But in what a narrow round they move!
How their imaginativeness is limited by their artificiality! What a
talent, what a genius they have for artificiality. It is the era _par
excellence_ of dilettantism, and nothing is less romantic than
dilettantism. Their evident feeling--and evidently genuine feeling--is
feeling for the factitious, for the manufactured, for what the French
call the _confectionne_. Their romantic quality is to that of the modern
Fontainebleau group as the exquisite _vers de societe_ of Mr. Austin
Dobson, say, is to the turbulent yet profound romanticism of Heine or
Burns. Every picture painted by them would go as well on a fan as in a
frame. All their material is traditional. They simply handle it as
_enfants terribles_. Intellectually speaking, they are painters of a
silver age. Of ideas they have almost none. They are as barren of
invention in any large sense as if they were imitators instead of, in a
sense, the originators of a new phase.
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