The skeptic who may very plausibly inquire the distinction
between that vague entity, "the ideal," and the personal idea of the
artist concerned with it, can be shown this distinction better than it
can be expressed in words. He will appreciate it very readily, to return
to Chapu, by contrasting the "Jeanne d'Arc" at the Luxembourg Gallery
with such different treatment of the same theme as M. Bastien-Lepage's
picture, now in the New York Metropolitan Museum, illustrates. Contrary
to his almost invariable practice of neglecting even design in favor of
impersonal natural representation, Bastien-Lepage's "Jeanne d'Arc" is
the creature of wilful originality, a sort of embodied protest against
conventionalism in historical painting; she is the illustration of a
theory, she is this and that systematically and not spontaneously; the
predominance of the painter's personality is plain in every detail of
his creation. Chapu's "Maid" is the ideal, more or less perfectly
expressed; she is everybody's "Maid," more or less adequately embodied.
The statue is the antipodes of the conventional much more so, even, to
our modern sense, than that of Rude; it suggests no competition with
that at Versailles or the many other characterless conceptions that
abound.
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