For the eye sensitive to color and value, there is a remarkable satisfaction in Daumier’s choice of hues. How deftly he contrasts the cool, shadowed paper in the old man’s hands with the warm white of the sheets below, yet how nicely distinguished the grayish paper is from the gray smock of the young man! These cool hues reappear, echoed in the background, to climax in the blue portfolio which rests against the red couch. The starkly simple, brown-clad old man stands out against the cool colors about him. On his face a few details, boldly indicated in dark lines and planes of light, strengthen the picture’s emotional content. Such a composition has qualities analogous to the majestic movements of a symphony. [Illustration: Canvas. 16⅛ × 12⅞ inches Painted probably after 1860] Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) _La Grotte de la Loue_ _Gift of Charles L. Lindemann_ Below a three-hundred-foot perpendicular cliff in the Jura mountains, the Loue River issues in cascades from a cavernous grotto and flows through Courbet’s native town, Ornans, to join the Doubs and ultimately swell the Saône. Courbet, who loved his native scenery, does not choose to paint the picturesque aspects of this fine scene. Instead he looks with new intensity at nature and places his unprecedented, forthright vision almost brutally on canvas. Having little patience with refinements of draftsmanship, he seems to have used the thick body of his generously applied paint to counterfeit reality in his picture. While light and shade are present, Courbet is unconventional in his modeling of the great rocks. The eye is often uncertain of the surfaces of these rocks; their directions in space are ill-defined and one form is not connected with another. But viewing the work broadly, we are conscious of the painter’s power. How solidly the man spearing a fish stands before the opening of the spacious cavern and how substantially the huge masses of rock swell forward from the darkness! With his powerful, unorthodox style, Courbet broke radically with traditional modes of painting “to transcribe,” as he said, “the customs, ideas, the appearances,” of his time, “in a word, to create a living art.” [Illustration: Canvas. 38¾ × 51⅜ inches Painted c. 1865] Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) _Still Life_ _Chester Dale Collection_