our modern art that all of it that is good for anything is home-made or
self-made. Each artist has had to create his art as best he could out of
his own temperament and his own experience--has sat in his corner like a
spider, spinning his web from his own bowels. If the art so created was
essentially fine and noble the public has at last found it out, but only
after years of neglect have embittered the existence and partially
crippled the powers of its creator. And so, to our modern imagination,
the neglected and misunderstood genius has become the very type of the
great artist, and we have allowed our belief in him to color and distort
our vision of the history of art. We have come to look upon the great
artists of all times as an unhappy race struggling against the
inappreciation of a stupid public, starving in garrets and waiting long
for tardy recognition.

The very reverse of this is true. With the exception of Rembrandt, who
himself lived in a time of political revolution and of the emergence to
power of a burgher class, you will scarce find an unappreciated genius
in the whole history of art until the beginning of the nineteenth
century. The great masters of the Renaissance, from Giotto to Veronese,
were men of their time, sharing and interpreting the ideals of those
around them, and were recognized and patronized as such. Rembrandt's
greatest contemporary, Rubens, was painter in ordinary to half the
courts of Europe, and Velazquez was the friend and companion of his
king. Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard painted for the frivolous
nobility of the eighteenth century just what that nobility wanted, and
even the precursors of the Revolution, sober and honest Chardin, Greuze
the sentimental, had no difficulty in making themselves understood,
until the revolutionist David became dictator to the art of Europe and
swept them into the rubbish heap with the rest.