When you stand before one of Fragonard's bewitching models, modishly
modified into a great--or rather a little--lady, you not only note the
color--full of tone on the one hand and of variety on the other, besides
exhibiting the happiest selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues
and tints; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever touch just
poised between suggestion and expression, coquettishly suppressing a
detail here, and emphasizing a characteristic there; you feel, in
addition, that the entire object floats airily in an atmosphere of
cleverness; that it is but a bit, an example, a miniature type of an
environment wholly attuned to the note of cleverness--of competence,
facility, grace, elegance, and other abstract but not at all abstruse
qualities, quite unrelated to what, in any profound sense, at least, is
concrete and vitally significant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis
Quinze epoch, indeed, that one may say that nature itself was
artificial--that is to say, all the nature Louis Quinze painters had to
paint; at least all they could have been called upon to think of
painting.
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