not as forceful as David's portrait of Madame Récamier, but it is a
finer thing. I should like the two to have changed subjects in this
instance. His "Source" is beautifully drawn and modelled. In everything
he did distinction is apparent. Inferior assuredly to David when he
attempted the grand style, he had a truer feeling for the subtler
qualities of style itself. All his works are linearly beautiful
demonstrations of his sincerity--his sanity indeed--in proclaiming that
drawing is "the probity of art."

With a few contemporary painters and critics, whose specific penetration
is sometimes in curious contrast with their imperfect catholicity, he
has recently come into vogue again, after having been greatly neglected
since the romantic outburst. But he belongs completely to the classic
epoch. Neither he nor his refined and sympathetic pupil, Flandrin, did
aught to pave the way for the modern movement. Intimations of the
shifting point of view are discoverable rather in a painter of far
deeper poetic interest than either, spite of Ingres's refinement and
Flandrin's elevation--in Prudhon. Prudhon is the link between the last
days of the classic supremacy and the rise of romanticism. Like Claude,
like Chardin, he stands somewhat apart; but he has distinctly the
romantic inspiration, constrained and regularized by classic principles
of taste. He is the French Correggio in far more precise parallelism
than Lesueur is the French Raphael. With a grace and lambent color all
his own--a beautiful mother-of-pearl and opalescent tone underlying his
exquisite violets and graver hues; a color-scheme, on the one hand, and
a sense of design in line and mass more suave and graceful than anything
since the great Italians, on the other--he recalls the lovely
chiaro-oscuro of the exquisite Parmesan as it is recalled in no other
modern painter. Occupying, as incontestably he does, his own niche in
the pantheon of painters, he nevertheless illustrates most distinctly