Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/252

 was not happy for art. It throws a lurid light on French art to find Madame de Pompadour engraving a plate, The Genius of the Arts Protecting France, the proofs of which were eagerly contended for by the debased court around her. If an abbé could not be appointed to a fat living, he received a proof impression instead. It reads like Gil Blas, who had sedulously cultivated the goodwill of the Licentiate Sedillo, only to find himself rewarded at his death with the legacy of his musty library.

Claude Gelée (1600-1682) and Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665), classic masters of landscape, found engravers to resuscitate them, and Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) had his band of contemporary interpreters in black and white.

Eighteenth-century French art smilingly stands on the crater of a volcano. There is nothing to suggest the Days of Terror. Watteau, who dominates all his successors although he lived only a quarter of the century through, lingers in sunny unrealities. His figures woven in a luscious green tapestry, stand in a world apart. Otium cum dignitate and leisured idleness hang somnolently over all his figures. They dance in a dream in misty sylvan glades, silently toying with life, with moss-grown faun and satyr beckoning them with finger of stone. There is the same stilly dreaminess of romance in the late Henry Harland's fancies in his Rosemary for Remembrance or his Merely Players, or in the unsubstantial dreams of Mr. Charles Conder delicately pencilled on a fan-mount—mortals who dance with noiseless feet, musicians who play in silent drowsiness.