Such biographies as the foregoing are sufficiently inept to disqualify
the Encyclopædia as a source for accurate æsthetic information; but when
Renoir, who is indeed recognized as the great master of Impressionism,
is dismissed with one-fifth of a page, the height of injustice has been
reached. Renoir, even in academic circles, is admittedly one of the great
painters of all time. Not only did he sum up the Impressionists, close
up an experimental cycle, and introduce compositional form into the
realistic painting of his day, but by his colossal vision and technical
mastery he placed himself in the very front rank of all modern painters,
if not of ancient painters as well. Yet he is accorded just twenty-seven
lines and dismissed with this remark: “Though he is perhaps the most
unequal of the great Impressionists, his finest works rank among the
masterpieces of the modern French school.” Critical incompetency could
scarcely go further. We can only excuse such inadequacy and ignorance
on the ground that the Encyclopædia’s English critic has seen none of
Renoir’s greatest work; and color is lent this theory when we note that
in the given list of his paintings no mention is made of his truly
masterful canvases.
Turning to the other lesser moderns in French painting but those who
surpass the contemporaneous British painters who are given liberal
biographies, we find them very decidedly neglected as to both space and
comment. Such painters as Cazin, Harpignies, Ziem, Cormon, Bésnard,
Cottet and Bonnot are dismissed with brief mention, whereas sometimes
twice and three times the attention is paid to English painters like
Alfred East, Harry Furniss (a caricaturist and illustrator), Francis
Lathrop, E. J. Poynter, and W. B. Richmond. Even Meissonier and Puvis de
Chavannes draw only three-fourths of a page. Pissarro and Monet, surely
important painters in the modern evolution, are given short shrift. A few
brief facts concerning Pissarro extend to twenty lines; and Monet gets
a quarter of a page without any criticism save that “he became a _plein
air_ painter.” Examples of this kind of incompetent and insufficient
comment could be multiplied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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