In France it is generally assumed that to
devote one's self exclusively to any one branch of painting is to betray
limitations, and there are few painters who would not resent being
called landscapists. Something, perhaps, is lost in this way. It
witnesses a greater pride in accomplishment than in instinctive bent.
But however that may be, Cazin never penetrates to the sentiment of
nature that one feels in such a work as Harpignies's "Moonrise," for
example, or in almost any of Pointelin's grave and impressive
landscapes. Hardly less truthful, I should say, though perhaps less
intimately and elaborately real (a romanticist would say less
superficially real) than Cazin's, the work of both these painters is
more pictorial. They have a quicker sense for the beautiful, I think.
They feel very certainly much more deeply the suggestiveness of a scene.
They are not so _debonnaires_ in the presence of their problems. In a
sense, for that reason, they understand them better. There is very
little feeling of the desert, the illimitable space, where, according to
Balzac, God is and man is not, in the "Hagar and Ishmael;" indeed there
seems to have been no attempt on the part of the painter to express any.
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