Another distinguished painter was the thoroughly American Winslow Homer (1836-1910). He is concerned with life in the open, especially with the sea, and his water colours of such sub jects constitute the most powerful expression in American painting.
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is another strong personality. His portrait subjects and figures are observed with superb scien tific self-discipline, but there is a forbidding renunciation of sensuous appeal. His temperamental opposite is Albert P. Ryder (1847-1917) who escapes from dingy actuality into dreams. The nineteenth century closes on the work of the thoroughly expatriate Mary Cassatt ; of Childe Hassam, exponent of crisp impression ism; Arthur B. Davies, dreamer of beguiling dreams; and the famous John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) whose precocious bravura astonished the Anglo-Saxon world. (H. B. WE.) In France the reaction against the excessive rigidity of the classical dogmatism of David was begun by Prud'hon (17S8 1823), who saved for posterity the precious treasure of that French tradition which the Davidian revolution had proscribed.
He was not influenced, or only in a slight degree, by David's ascendancy, but he sincerely shared David's enthusiasm for an tiquity, loving it as an elegiac poet—not as an archaeologist or theorist—modestly and without pedantry, and appreciating it through the medium of his own sensibility without ceasing to be a man of his own time. He evoked the antique in his charming drawings, in his allegorical compositions and even in his por traits of women. Delacroix has devoted to him one of his best writings, and with justice for Prud'hon, before Gros and Gericault had prepared the anti-Davidian reaction which, thanks to the genius of the author of the Massacre de Scio and of the Barricade, restored in France the true principles of the fine art of painting, flexibility in composition, charm of touch and richness and harmony in colour.
The pupils of David were in general marked with an indelible stamp. Some knew how to retain, in one way or another, part of their freedom. Gerard (177o-1837) in his allegorical or mytho logical compositions does not escape academic frigidity. But when he painted his celebrated picture, Amour et Psyche, he added a pure and elegant grace entirely his own. This grace forms the value of his portraits which constitute his best work, especially his portraits of women. Gros (1771-1835) has a stronger per sonality, the gifts of an executant, a sense of drama and an aptitude for expressing it by composition and colour. In the
Pestiferes de Jaffa and the Bataille d'Eylau he showed himself as the authentic forerunner of romanticism and of Delacroix. But a strange return of fidelity to the teaching of David para lyzed his natural impulses in the second part of his career.
Gericault (1791-1824), who had the makings of a great artist, was alone capable of finding in David the solid basis of a classic art, and infusing this with passion and life. Unfortunately he died prematurely. Le Radeau de la Mediae (1819) proves that he would have been capable of the highest achievements and the boldest efforts. At once Romanticist and realist and always im pelled by a lofty inspiration he must be acknowledged as the first exponent of modern painting in France.
These three artists have one common merit, that of having understood and encouraged from his earliest efforts Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). Gericault was his senior only by seven years. Through his personality and character as well as by his example, he exerted a strong and fertile influence on his young friend. Delacroix was 20 years old when Gericault composed his Radeau de la Meduse. A few years later he deplored as a public calamity the death of the heroic youth. Delacroix learned much from Gericault, and forfeited nothing of his own nature, which was entirely different. He is no less passionate, he is even more stormy; but his passion is less physical, its springs are more lofty and complex. He possessed an advantage accorded to few men in the history of art, that of being a great thinker as well as a great painter. And, what is still rarer, the special bent of his intelligence predisposed him to critical analysis and psycho logical introspection, that is to say, to intellectual operations which have no essential relationship with the artistic genius. He was not content, like the majority of his predecessors, Reynolds for example, to publish art treatises showing sense and wisdom. Neither was he content to frequent the salons of his time as a brilliant conversationalist. He left behind him a book, his Journal, which was at more or less regular intervals the con fidante of his thoughts. It is only a series of fragments of which many are made up of careless or unfinished phrases. Nevertheless, this book, unique in being the work of a painter and of a great painter, connects Delacroix the writer with perhaps the most typically French of the intellectual glories of France, the line of psychologists and moralists from Montaigne to Stendhal.