File:American painters- with eighty-three examples of their work engraved on wood (1879) (14583965229).jpg

Identifier: americanpainters00shel (find matches)
Title: American painters: with eighty-three examples of their work engraved on wood
Year: 1879 (1870s)
Authors: Sheldon, George William, 1843-1914
Subjects: Painters Painting, American
Publisher: New York : D. Appleton and company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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lower than an epic. Intellectually, emotionally, poetically,Gerome is away in advance of Meissonier. The latters merits are chieflydependent upon his technique, and are largely of a mechanical order. InGerornes works you lose sight of his methods, and become interested in hissubjects and in the people who make them up. Gerome is an idealist; heuses realistic material, and combines it ideally. Meissonier, on the otherhand, is a realist. In mechanical skill he is Geromes superior; but Geromedoes not try to reach the point that Meissonier does. If he carried technicalqualities so far he would injure his pictures. Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, and Daubigny, are all men of one idea. Diaz, forexample, paints forever the forest of Fontainebleau. He is a perpetual copyistof himself. Now, we dont care to live on one dish all our lives. No artist isgreat who has made a reputation on one idea—and Corots idea was a very in-definite one at that. I have but a small opinion of his large Orphee, recently
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SOLITUDE. From a Painting by Thomas Moron. p. 127. THOMAS MOHAN. 127 iii the Cottier Collection. The work is bad in drawing—it is not drawing atall—and certainly it cannot be called color. It has some tone, to be sine, juslas black-and-white may have tone ; but there is in it no quality that demandeda canvas of that size. It is a small conception of the subject expended on avery large surface. A picture ten inches by twelve would have given all thaithis picture contains probably better than a larger one. Indeed, French art,in my opinion, scarcely rises to the dignity of landscape—a swamp and a treeconstitute its sum total. It is more limited in range than the landscape-art ofany other country. I am not an admirer of Millet. His pictures are coarse and vulgar incharacter; they are repulsive. He shows us only the ignorant and debasedpeasant; he suggests nothing noble or high, nothing that is not degraded.His peasants are very little above animals; they do not look capable of educa

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