It may be replied, and I confess I think with excellent reason, that
Gerome's picture has no window in it, and therefore that to ask of him
to paint a picture as he would if he were painting a different picture,
is pedantry. The old masters are still admirable, though they only
observed a correspondence to the actual scale of natural values, and
were not concerned with imitation of it. But it is to be observed that,
successful as their practice is, it is successful in virtue of the
unconscious co-operation of the beholder's imagination. And nowadays not
only is the exercise of the imagination become for better or worse a
little old-fashioned, but the one thing that is insisted on as a
starting-point and basis, at the very least, is the sense of reality.
And it is impossible to exaggerate the way in which the sense of reality
has been intensified by Manet's insistence upon getting as near as
possible to the individual values of objects as they are seen in
nature--in spite of his abandonment of the practice of painting on a
parallel scale.
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