But he belongs completely to the classic
epoch. Neither he nor his refined and sympathetic pupil, Flandrin, did
aught to pave the way for the modern movement. Intimations of the
shifting point of view are discoverable rather in a painter of far
deeper poetic interest than either, spite of Ingres's refinement and
Flandrin's elevation--in Prudhon. Prudhon is the link between the last
days of the classic supremacy and the rise of romanticism. Like Claude,
like Chardin, he stands somewhat apart; but he has distinctly the
romantic inspiration, constrained and regularized by classic principles
of taste. He is the French Correggio in far more precise parallelism
than Lesueur is the French Raphael. With a grace and lambent color all
his own--a beautiful mother-of-pearl and opalescent tone underlying his
exquisite violets and graver hues; a color-scheme, on the one hand, and
a sense of design in line and mass more suave and graceful than anything
since the great Italians, on the other--he recalls the lovely
chiaro-oscuro of the exquisite Parmesan as it is recalled in no other
modern painter.
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