Hence a great deal of admirable work, of which one
hardly thinks whether it is realistic or not, side by side with the more
emphatic expressions of the realistic spirit. And this work is of all
degrees of realism, never, however, getting very far away from the
naturalistic basis on which more and more everyone is coming to insist
as the necessary and only solid pedestal of any flight of fancy. Baudry
is perhaps the nearest of the really great men to the Bolognese order
of eclecticism. I suppose he must be classed among the really great men,
so many painters of intelligence place him there, though I must myself
plead the laic privilege of a slight scepticism as to whether time will
approve their enthusiasm. He is certainly very effective, and in
certainly his own way, idle as it is to say that his drafts on the great
Italians are no greater than those of Raphael on the antique frescos. He
had a great love of color and a native instinct for it; with perhaps
more appreciation than invention, his imagination has something very
personal in the zealous enthusiasm with which he exercised it, though I
think it must be admitted that his reflections of Tiepolo, Titian,
Tintoretto and his attenuated expansions of Michael Angelo's condensed
grandiosity, recall the eclecticism of the Carracci far more than that
of Raphael.
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