He got his faded, spectral colours by imitating the fresco painters of the Quattrocentro. His ideal of picturesque beauty united in inseparable association the stateliness of the old monumental wall-paintings with their fadedness; and when he wished to paint in their style and produce their æsthetic effects, he at once gave his pictures the faint coloration which had never been intended by the Quattrocentists, but which their works have suffered through the devastating force of five centuries. The obliterated, remote, ghostly qualities of this faded type of painting came to meet a morbid mood of the time. This mystic coloration harmonised with the prevalent mysticism. The decadents were thankful to him for his moon-stricken colouring; those athirst for beauty for his conversion to classical tradition; and so he became a great man through the sins of the naturalists and their critical heralds. Puvis was the first academical and recognised master in France who began to paint the morbid. His whim is chalk-wash. He covers, on principle, his pictures with a white, semi-transparent broth that extinguishes all the colours. His eye detests colour. His glance has a sort of chloridising effect; it takes the colour out of everything it ranges over. With him, however, morbidity is natural and not an affectation. He has that horror of all that is loud, full, and impressive, which marks the nervous man, whom every rough touch pains. It is well with him only when nature whispers, when her looks are veiled in a fine mist, when all life in her is motionless. In his soul reigns a melancholy absence of sound, and he likes to carry this into the outer world also. Moreover, the multiplicity of living forms confuses and repels him; it is too full of motion and gaudiness. He simplifies, therefore, all lines which thus lose their distinctive individuality. He retains only what is typical of the phenomenon; he infuses his style into all that his brush and pencil touch, and this cold stylisation is then called by people his “idealism.”