| I stop at the sending of Mr. Girieud. Its four landscapes of Provence are harmoniously decorative, with a happy simplification, and the clear masses of the dark cypresses. In the Toilet of Venus, a large canvas in the middle of nature, we see that this landscape painter, of delicate execution, is a painter of common figures. For her six naked women, including the goddess, have a shocking barrier beauty in this subject; the suburban vulgarity of the camera-makers is of a realism which can not be suitable for a heroic vision. This canvas, treated in a melted material, attests, moreover, for the execution, a primitive drought, which - this resurrection of the past admitted - would require faces of a distant idealism. Nevertheless, it is necessary to stop before this painting, or the composition, characters standing out on a mountainous perspective, attest to the merits that I do not dream to deny. |