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Excerpt from Gems of French Art: A Series of Carbon-Photographs From the Pictures of Eminent Modern Artists, With Remarks on the Works Selected, and an Essay on the French School
This variety of character spreading out from a single studio may be taken as the visible expression of that variety in subject, treatment, and motive, which the French critics arrogate to themselves as belonging peculiarly to the national art. English art, they say, is always the same; the clever handling, the bright colours, the indispensable pretty girl's face, and the le'lz'le a'og, must be in every picture, whether of genre or history, whether tragic, comic, or conversational! The little dog I cannot always find, but the pretty girl's face and the bright colours, I fear, we must admit as almost universal on the walls of our exhibition rooms, and in the works of the painters who get most success with us. But on the other side of the water it is certainly not so. There are in Paris indeed many painters Whose lives are devoted to the production of pretty faces, but they are not less distinct than other classes Of artists, perhaps a good deal more so: they have their circle, which is not the best. The charm of mere execution also standing in the place of insight and quiet mastery is not'wanting, is indeed carried to monstrous excess on the canvas of such men as Courbet, the landscape painter, but these are at once distinguishable, while with us every landscape must be painted with a certain freedom of brush and no more, while the green and the grey pictures, so fresh and true to these latitudes, and so distinctive of French taste in landscapes, are nowhere to be seen. The bright colours we must have and the clever execution, and a spring landscape must keep its place, as they say, beside the figure picture, its neighbour, in which a red shawl and a yellow gown are the leading features.
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