Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/197

Rh to sobriety, and attention is concentrated on the figure. Two portraits of Pasqualina, the painter’s wife—in one she has a light shawl, in the other she is wearing a blue dress—represent this transition.

But Spadini, who had discovered Goya without visiting Spain, proceeded to discover impressionism without going to Paris. And in impressionism he finally approached the rediscovery of himself. Some of his groups, painted a few years ago, suggest a humbler and less stylistic Renoir. But though Spadini may be rightly called the first and the sanest of the Italian impressionists, he cannot be classed as a mere scholar of the French. Like the French, he forms his art on the old masters—Cézanne copied the Venetians and sought to paint like Titian—but he has his own way of representing the fragments of the world which he discerns from time to time. His very near-sightedness helps him to see things in a personal manner. His ambition is to be the copyist of reality, not the copyist of painters who have recast reality. His painting now is freer, more spontaneous, broader, more essential. He gives no thought to photographic and scholastic exactness, he makes no concessions to the prettiness beloved of the bourgeoisie, he does not search for sentimental effects or for external novelty. A mere ordinary group of living beings in the open air, undisturbed by artificial