Decorative painting in this sense may easily be carried so far as to
seem incongruous and inept, in spite of its superficial attractiveness.
The peril that threatens it is whim and freak. Some of Monticelli's,
some of Matthew Maris's pictures, illustrate the exaggeration of the
decorative impulse. After all, a painter must get his effect, whatever
it be and however it may shun the literal and the exact, by rendering
things with pigments. And some of the decorative painters only escape
things by obtruding pigments, just as the _trompe-l'oeil_ or optical
illusion painters get away from pigments by obtruding things. It is the
distinction of Diaz and Dupre that they avoid this danger in most
triumphant fashion. On the contrary, they help one to see the decorative
element in nature, in "things," to a degree hardly attained elsewhere
since the days of the great Venetians. Their predilection for the
decorative element is held in leash by the classic tradition, with its
reserve, its measure, its inculcation of sobriety and its sense of
security.
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