A Louis Quinze fan is a
genuine and spontaneous product of a free and elastic aesthetic impulse
beside one of his stereotyped sentimentalities.
The truth is, Greuze is as sentimental as a bullfinch, but he has hardly
a natural note in his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is
never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this
description is not minute enough. His conventions are those not merely
of the _litterateur_, but of the extremely conventional _litterateur_.
An artless platitude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it
doesn't even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it
deals. Greuze's _genre_ is really a _genre_ of his own--his own and that
of kindred spirits since. It is as systematic and detached as the art of
Poussin. The forms it embodies merely have more natural, more familiar
associations. But compare one of his compositions with those of the
little Dutch and Flemish masters, for truth, feeling, nature handled
after her own suggestions, instead of within limits and on lines imposed
upon her from without.
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