V
With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get into so different a
sphere of thought and feeling that the change has been called a "return
to nature"--that "return to nature" of which we hear so much in
histories of literature as well as of the plastic arts. The notion is
not quite sound. Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to
stand quite apart, quite alone, in the development of French painting,
whereas there could not be a more marked instance of the inherence of
the classic spirit in the French aesthetic nature than is furnished by
Greuze. The first French painter of _genre_, in the full modern sense of
the term, the first true interpreter of scenes from humble life--of
lowly incident and familiar situations, of broken jars and paternal
curses, and buxom girls and precocious children--he certainly is. There
is certainly nothing _regence_ about him. But the beginning and end of
Greuze's art is convention. He is less imaginative, less romantic, less
real than the painting his replaced. That was at least a mirror of the
ideals, the spirit, the society, of the day.
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