REPORT OF ME. MILLETT.
165
face of the child, hugging its mother with impulsive affection ; a little crude, but not altogether unpleasant in color. Cabanel triumphs with his crayon in perfecting his lines, shows great facility in a certain weak manner of execution in which he appears to have set his palette with onion skins, and his sentiment always remains a long distance behind his skill. With him, artfully posed and perfectly draped figures constitute all worth striving for, and as in his Francesca di Rimini , you find perfectly imitated stuffs, irreproachable contours, and not a note struck in the melody of the human heart. His Triumph of Flora , painted for the Louvre, was exposed in the Salon d'Honneur. Its greatest merit was its size, if that be a merit. His portraits are as feelingless as his skilfully arranged and well posed groups.
If, for a moment, I turn to the portraitists, I must rank Carolus Duran among the class who bow down to the power of execution, and are artists with their fingers but not with their brains. He contributed three very dazzling full-length portaits of ladies in rich costumes. They are posed with 'Skill, and painted with much nerve and swing, but speak only as portraits of costume ; for the faces are subordinate to everything else. Without grace, and with little more than rude dramatic effect, the portraits shock from their harsh oppositions of tones and general poverty of color, though painted with all the richness of M. Duran’s rather meagre palette.
There were, as I have said, many examples of the nude, without exception perversely opposed to any ideas of delicacy °f sentiment or power of execution. Among these were found several by Lefebure, for the most part finely drawn;— il ud all is said. Contrasting strongly with these trivialities, a lai 'go number of the works of the late Delacroix, stand prominently forth. All deliciously rich in color, strong in tone, u nd full of delicate sentiment, they serve as a sort of landmark to guide us iii our review of the twenty years since they Were painted. A wan, haggard, savage woman, with her newborn babe, a tale of suffering on the mother’s features, and sympathetic lines in the wild face of the father kneeling by ^ e r side; a lion tearing his prey, all bloody and mangled; biblical and historical scenes ; all are treated with like feeling