Chardin, on the other hand, is the one distinguished exception to the
general character of French art in the artificial and intellectual
eighteenth century. He is as natural as a Dutchman, and as modern as
Vollon. As you walk through the French galleries of the Louvre, of all
the canvases antedating our own era his are those toward which one feels
the most sympathetic attraction, I think. You note at once his
individuality, his independence of schools and traditions, his personal
point of view, his preoccupation with the object as he perceives it.
Nothing is more noteworthy in the history of French art, in the current
of which the subordination of the individual genius to the general
consensus is so much the rule, than the occasional exception--now of a
single man, now of a group of men, destined to become in its turn a
school--the occasional accent or interruption of the smooth course of
slow development on the lines of academic precedent. Tyrannical as
academic precedent is (and nowhere has it been more tyrannical than in
French painting) the general interest in aesthetic subjects which a
general subscription to academic precedent implies is certainly to be
credited with the force and genuineness of the occasional protestant
against the very system that has been powerful enough to popularize
indefinitely the subject both of subscription and of revolt.
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