He is, first of all, an exquisite
artist, in love with the beautiful in reality, finding in it the
humblest material, and expressing it with the gentlest, sweetest,
aesthetic severity and composure imaginable. The most fastidious critic
needs but a touch of human feeling to convert any characterization of
this most refined and elevated of painters into pure panegyric. Vollon's
touch is felicity itself, and it is evident that he takes more pleasure
in exercising and exploiting it than in its successful imitation,
striking as its imitative quality is. Gervex and Duez are very much more
than impressionists, both in theory and practice. There is nothing
polemic in either. Painters extol in the heartiest way the color, the
creative coloration of Gervex's "Rolla," quite aside from its dramatic
force or its truth of aspect. Personal feeling is clearly the
inspiration of every work of Duez, not the demonstration of a theory of
treating light and atmosphere. The same may be said of Roll at his best,
as in his superb rendering of what may be called the modern painter's
conception of the myth of Europa.
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