After 1865 the mannerism but not the spirit of his work alters a little, evolving towards more liberty, more suppleness, more cleanness. His pastels multiplied and landscape occupied a larger and larger place. In Spring the artist, for the first time, meant not so much to picture a certain site arranged in a certain way but to seize, as the impressionists were to do, an effect of light not yet observed or rendered with so much truth.
Daumier (1808-79) has left us few completed pictures. But they are inspired with such vitality, they are built on a frame work of a drawing so expressive and true, the brush handles the colour with such impetuous frenzy that nothing is left to be desired in these powerful sketches. It was after 1848 that Daumier made his debut as painter. He is more essentially a painter than Millet, and his technique more akin to Decamps (1803-186o), whom he admired but who is now neglected because of the tiring and deceiving virtuosity of his genre pictures. But it is not without reason that the painter of the Defaite des Cimbres has obtained the esteem of two judges such as Daumier and Delacroix. Daumier is not rustic ; he is the "man about town." He was curious about all who lived there, of all he saw, of all that was said, and all that was done there. He was perhaps the first, in the 19th century, to explore as a painter the strange world of the theatre, where the ridiculous, the chimerical and the marvellous rub elbows, in the midst of passions and illusions. His masterpiece in this genre, the Drame, displays the double spectacle played on the stage and in the hall. Daumier is among those painters who are always ready to paint and who can accommodate themselves to any subject. There is nothing strained, nor forced in Daumier. He struck out several of the paths which painting was to follow, and though he may not have had any direct influence on Manet, Degas and Lautrec we can see the connecting link.
Impressionism (q.v.) in the following period, corresponds to the great upheaval of Romanticism, whose ebb and flow fills the first part of the 19th century. The former, moreover, was merely the culmination of a movement which began almost on the morrow of victory of Romanticism—about Gustave Courbet (1819-77) far from breaking with the past did not appear in his early works to be destined for any other vocation than the practice of a large, robust and rich manner of painting after the example of the masters. Such endowments could not but oppose him to the poor and adulterated style of Paul Delaroche's imitators. Thomas Couture (1815-79) came to the
fore about the same time with similar qualifications. But his example shows that the fairest physical gifts do not suffice to make a great painter: Art, as Leonardo da Vinci said, is cosa mentale. If Courbet did not have a very strong mind, Couture's was even less strong. Being able to paint excellent pieces, Couture believed himself to be a modern rival of Veronese; the theatrical success of his immense Les Romains de la decadence only made his error irretrievable. Courbet's misfortune, happily of less con sequence, was to encounter on his path certain political meta physicians and certain realistic aestheticians. Without them he would have probably painted throughout his life great portraits or subjects of family life without any tendencious intentions such as l'Homme a la ceinture de cuir, l'Apres diner a Ornans, l'En terrement a Onions, or Demoiselles de la Seine. To-day we forget some wretched pictures inspired by a confused ideology; we even forget the traces of this ideology in his greatest effort, the Atelier, which is amongst the small number of these audacious paintings which a certain touch of the bizarre and a certain incoherence do not prevent us placing in the first rank, and of which the most celebrated is Rembrandt's Night Watch. And when he let himself go Courbet produced some new and classical masterpieces in which the perfection of his scholarly and free handiwork makes him the equal of the great masters of the past, e.g., the Curee and Remise des chevreuils. While Courbet is without a rival in his time and perhaps in the whole of the century, Ricard (1823-73) a portraitist who sought to give expression to the most subtle signs of the inner life, and Monticelli (1824-86) a great and original colourist, were each in their way alchemists of . colour; but although they both wrestled with the secret of mixing and shading, harmonies and contrasts, sometimes exploring mysterious depths of shadow, sometimes producing the glint of enamel or precious stones, both merely looked upon the subject as a means of expressing a spiritual idea; visions of unknown princesses in fairy-like gardens with Monticelli, with Ricard dreams of psycho logical divination. Ricard's conception of the intimate portrait was later to be resumed with different modes of expression: Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and Ernest Laurent (1859-1929) who, with Aman-Jean, emerged from the post-impressionist group where Seurat evolved the elements of a new style.