This would be
realism _a outrance_. I will not think that Monet was haunted for a
single instant by so shameful a thought. However this may be, the fact
remains that a _trompe-l'oeil_ has been achieved, and four inches of
any one of these pictures looked at separately would be mistaken by
sight and touch for a piece of stonework. In another picture, in a
haystack with the sun shining on it, the _trompe-l'oeil_ has again
been as cleverly achieved as by the most cunning of scene-painters. So
the haystack is a popular delight.
NOTES.
MR. MARK FISHER.
Mark Fisher is a nineteenth-century Morland; the disposition of mind
and character of vision seem the same in both painters, the outlook
almost identical: the same affectionate interest in humble life, the
same power of apprehending the pathos of work, the same sympathy for
the life that thinks not. But beyond these qualities of mind common to
both painters, Morland possessed a sense of beauty and grace which is
absent in Mark Fisher. Morland's pig-styes are more beautifully seen
than Mark Fisher could see them. But is the sense of beauty, which was
most certainly Morland's, so inherent and independent a possession
that we must regard it as his rather than the common inheritance of
those who lived in his time? Surely Mark Fisher would have seen more
beautifully if he had lived in the eighteenth century? Or, to put the
case more clearly, surely Morland would have seen very much as Mark
Fisher sees if he had lived in the nineteenth? Think of the work done
by Morland in the field and farmyard--it is in that work that he
lives; compare it with Mark Fisher's, subtracting, of course, all that
Morland owed to his time, quality of paint, and a certain easy sense
of beauty, and say if you can that both men do not stand on the same
intellectual plane.
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