They are very far from being purely
portrait-painters of course, and their realism shows itself with
splendid distinction in other works. Few painters of the nude have
anything to their credit as fine as the figure M. Carolus-Duran
exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1889. Ribot's "Saint Sebastian" is
one of the most powerful pictures of modern French art. Bonnat's
"Christ" became at once famous. Each picture is painted with a vigor and
point of realistic detail that are peculiar to our own time; painted
to-day, Bonnat's fine and sculptural "Fellah Woman and Child," of the
Metropolitan Museum, would be accented in a dozen ways in which now it
is not. But it is perhaps in portraiture that the eminence of these
painters is most explicit. They are at the head of contemporary
portraitists, at all events. And their portraits are almost defiantly
real, void often of arrangement, and as little artificial as the very
frequently prosaic atmosphere appertaining to their sometimes very stark
subjects suggests. A portrait by Bonnat blinks nothing in the subject;
its aim and accomplishment are the rendering of the character in a vivid
fashion--including the reproduction of cobalt cravats and creased
trousers even--which would have mightily embarrassed Van Dyck or
Velasquez.
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