File:Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers (1899) (14782468274).jpg

Identifier: greatpicturesassx00sing (find matches)
Title: Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930, ed. and tr
Subjects: Painting
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and Company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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ry, taking the expression in thetruth and height of its meaning; poetry, which is an eleva-tion or an enchantment of the imagination, the contributionof an ideal of reverie or gaiety to human thought; poetry,which carries away and suspends above the world the soulof a period and the spirit of a people, was unknown to theFrance of the Eighteenth Century, and her two only poetswere two painters: Watteau and Fragonard. Watteau, the man of the North, the child of Flanders,the great poet of Love ! the master of sweet serenity andtender Paradises, whose work may be likened to the ElysianField of Passion ! Watteau, the melancholy enchanterwho has made nature sigh so heavily in his autumn woods,full of regret around dreamful pleasure! Watteau, thePensieroso of the Regency ; Fragonard, the little poet ofthe Art of Love of the time. Have you noticed in LEmbarquement de Cythere all thosenaked little forms of saucy and knavish Loves half lost inthe heights of the sky ? Where are they going ? They
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CORESUS AND CALLIRHOE 263 are going to play at Fragonards and to put on his palettethe hues of their butterfly wings. Fragonard is the bold narrator, the gallant amoroso, therogue with Gallic malice, nearly Italian in genius butFrench in spirit \ the man of foreshortened mythology androguish undress, of skies made rosy by the flesh of goddesses and alcoves lighted with female nudity. Upon a table beside a bunch of roses let us allow theleaves of his work to be ruffled by the wind of a lovely day :from landscapes where robes of satin are escaping incoquettish flight, our glance skips to meadows guarded byAnnettes of fifteen years, to granges where the somersaultsof love upset the painters easel, to pastures where themilk-maid of the milk-jug reveals her bare legs and weepslike a nymph over her broken urn, for her sheep, herflocks, and her vanished dream. Upon another page amaiden in love is writing a beloved name on the bark of atree on a lovely summer evening. The breeze is alwaysturn

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