The difference between the elegant (or
perhaps rather the handsome) drawings of Bida, an artist of the utmost
distinction, and that of the illustrators of the present day who are
comparable with him--their name is not legion--is a special attestation
of the influence of the realistic ideal in a sphere wherein, if
anywhere, one may say, realism reigns legitimately, but wherein also the
conventional is especially to be expected. One cannot indeed be quite
sure that the temptations of the conventional are resisted by the
ultra-realistic illustrators of our own time, Rossi, Beaumont, Albert
Lynch, Myrbach. They have certainly a very handy way of expressing
themselves; one would be justified in suspecting the labor-saving, the
art-sparing kodak, behind many of their most unimpeachable successes.
But the attitude taken is quite other than it used to be, and the change
that has come over French aesthetic activity in general can be noted in
very sharp definition by comparing a book illustrated twenty years ago
by Albert Lynch, with, for example, Maupassant's "Pierre et Jean," the
distinguished realism of whose text is adequately paralleled--and the
implied eulogy is by no means trivial--by the pictorical commentary, so
to speak, which this first of modern illustrators has supplied.
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