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EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
able truth of contour and foreshortening, to all appearances simply to prove his knowledge of the proportions and anatomy of the human form, or else he is inspired by the unblushing boldness of his model, and he paints her in a manner to cause the spectator to blush in her stead. When, by chance, the artist has a conception of the beauty of the form, and gives us something passably attractive, he seldom unites with it a pow T er to represent other and equally high attributes of human flesh, the surpassing richness and depth of color, delicacy and variety of tones, and the refined and velvety texture ! In a w r ord, successful flesh painters are uncommon among the French. With this general desire to paint the nude is joined often another equally unhealthy aspiration, hardly to be qualified by one word. By this latter impulse the artist is prompted to seek the extreme vigor of action, which renders his figures highly dramatic, and forces the sentiment to an obtrusive and unpleasant degree. This heat of dramatic power often finds refuge in the wildly outstretched arm, in the rigid straightening of the limbs, or in the sweep of the longest line in the body, from the foot to the tip of the extended hand. A glance at the walls of the French department revealed many of these tortured poses, each quite as significant as the other, and the sum-total hardly worth the mention.
The peasant painters of France, of whom Jules Breton and Jean François Millet are the strongest examples, occupy a sphere of labor which demands the most acute perception of all that is noble and poetical in the simple and unassuming rustic and his surroundings, and a deep, unchanging sympathy with him, his life, and his inmost feeling. Both of these artists—peasants in the simplicity of their natures, as well as by birth and a life-long residence among these people— love their neighbors with all the tenderness of brothers, and paint them with a fervent admiration for their honest, manly traits, and a feeling for the poetical current in their lives, that give to their pictures the stamp of an impressive seriousness of purpose, a harmonious rythm of sentiment and execution, and make them pastoral poems, marking the artist as a true poet.
Jules Breton’s Blessing the Harvest , from the Luxembourg