All
objects take their places with a precision that, nevertheless, is in
nowise pedantic, and is perfectly free. Cazin's palette is, moreover, a
thoroughly individual one. It is very pure, and if its range is not
great, it is at any rate not grayed into insipidity and ineffectualness,
but is as positive as if it were more vivid. A distinct air of elegance,
a true sense of style, is noteworthy in many of his pictures; not only
in the important ones, but occasionally when the theme is so slight as
to need hardly any composition whatever--the mere placing of a tree, its
outline, its relation to a bank or a roadway, are often unmistakably
distinguished. Cazin is not exclusively a landscape painter, and though
the landscape element in all his works is a dominant one, even in his
"Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert," and his "Judith Setting out for
Holofernes's Camp" (in which latter one can hardly identify the heroine
at all), the fact that he is not a landscape painter, pure and simple,
like Harpignies and Pointelin, perhaps accounts for his inferiority to
them in landscape sentiment.
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