MASTERS OF MODERN ART : FANTIN•-,LATot •11-. By Gustave Kahn.
CONSTABLE. By Andre. Fontainas. Translated by Wilfred Jackson. (Bodley Head. 5s. each.)---L It is easier to follow a criticism of the work of a painter so familiar as Constable than one of Fantin-Latour, less known to. us. here by his -real creations than by-the relatively -unim- portant still-lifer and flower pieces ; but, making allowance
for this, we have to express strong preference for M. Fontainas as against M. Kahn. The study of Constable can be read by anyone, for it is simple and unpretentious ; yet how good is a sentence like this : The life of a landscape, what dominates it and sustains and exalts it, is much less the structure and the stable natural elements of the composition than the air and light " I In the volume on Fantin-Latour, English readers will probably be a good deal perplexed by the text, which is only intelligible to those who have a considerable knowledge of French painters and paintings. Even Fantin's most significant relation to Whistler is not clearly set out. But there is good reason to be grateful for the plates, which illustrate what is too little known to us—how he " struggled to render the grace, the iridescence, the tender flesh, the soft shining of the body of women." He painted flowers because he had to live ; and delicious" those works are, but they are not in the same order with the lovely simplicity of his Bathing Girl "—exquisitely sensuous, yet painted with a caress as impersonal as if the substance he renders were the corolla of a lily.
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