Page:A Motor-Flight Through France.djvu/297

 is curious, and a little disconcerting, on first entering, to see faces of such marked individuality—from the rough unshorn Vernezobre to the mincing Camargo—overrun by the same simper of "good company"—so disconcerting that only by eliminating the universal Cupid's-bow mouth, and trying to see the other features without it, can one do justice to the vigorous and penetrating portraiture of Latour. Then indeed the pictures affirm themselves as "documents," and the artist's technical skill in varying his methods with the type of his sitters becomes only less interesting than the psychological insight of which, after all, it is a partial expression. One's attention is at first absorbed by the high personal interest of the protraitsportraits [sic]; but when this has been allowed for, the general conclusion resulting from their collective study is that, even in that day of feminine ascendancy, the man's face, not only plastically but psychologically, was a far finer "subject" than the woman's. Latour had before his easel some of the most distinguished examples of both; and how the men triumph and stand out, how Rousseau and d'Alembert, Maurice de Saxe and the matchless Vernezobre [ 189 ]