everyone to sympathetic appreciation. The special ideas of his time seem
to pass him by unmoved. He has no community of interest with them. While
he was painting his still life and domestic genre, the whole fantastic
whirl of Louis Quinze society, with its æsthetic standards and
accomplishments--accomplishments and standards that imposed themselves
everywhere else--was in agitated movement around him without in the
least affecting his serene tranquillity, his almost sturdy composure.
There can rarely have been such an instance as he affords of an artist's
selecting from his environment just those things his own genius needed,
and rejecting just what would have hampered or distracted him. He is as
sane, as unsentimental, as truthful and unpretending as the most literal
and unimaginative Dutchman of his time or before it; but he has also
that feeling for style, and that instinct for avoiding the common and
unclean which always seem to prevent French painters from "sinking with
their subject," as Dutch painters have been said to do. He seems never
to let himself go either in the direction of Greuze's literary and
sentimental manipulation of his homely material, or in the direction of
supine satisfaction with this material, unrelieved and unelevated by an
individual point of view, illustrated by the Brauers and Steens and
Ostades. One perceives that what he cared for was really art itself, for
the æsthetic aspect and significance of the life he painted.
Affectionate as his interest in it evidently was, he as evidently
thought of its artistic potentialities, its capability of being treated
with refinement and delicacy, and of being made to serve the ends of
beauty equally well with the conventionally beautiful material of his
fan-painting contemporaries. He looked at the world very originally
through and over those round, horn-bowed spectacles of his, with a very
shrewd and very kindly and sympathetic glance, too; quite untinctured
with prejudice or even predisposition. One can read his artistic
isolation in his countenance with a very little exercise of fancy.