Dupre paints Seine sunsets and the edge of the forest at
Fontainebleau, its "long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight," in a
way that conveys the golden glow, the silvery gleam, the suave outline
of spreading leafage, and the massive density of mysterious boscage with
the force of an almost abstract acuteness. Does nature look like this?
Who knows? But in this semblance, surely, she appeared to Dupre's
imagination. And doubtless Diaz saw the mother-of-pearl tints in the
complexion of his models, and is not to be accused of artificiality,
but to be credited with a true sincerity of selection in juxtaposing his
soft corals and carnations and gleaming topaz, amethyst, and sapphire
hues. The most exacting literalist can hardly accuse them of solecism in
their rendering of nature, true as it is that their decorative sense is
so strong as to lead them to impose on nature their own sentiment
instead of yielding themselves to absorption in _hers_, and thus, in
harmonious and sympathetic concert with her, like Claude and Corot,
Rousseau and Daubigny, interpreting her subtle and supreme significance.
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