Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/471

Rh the head are particularly fine. The large synthetic treatment of the forms has enabled M Marchand to find an easy and flowing rhythm which expresses at once the form and the character. It is at once a portrait in the literal sense of the word and an impressive formal design. He has avoided altogether the descriptive and accidental, and within a severely restricted scheme of browns and greys he has managed to attain luminosity and brilliance. There is much in these paintings that reminds one of Courbet. M Marchand has something of his "fist" in the downright straightforwardness and uncompromising assertion of his statements. This extreme simplicity and directness of vision enable him to give a surprising value and purity to his colour. This is especially noticeable in the richness and transparency of his shadows. Without losing anything of the intensity of their contrasts with the light, they yet have nothing of the muddiness and neutrality which a more anxious and timid handling would give. M Marchand never takes refuge in a noncommittal statement. There is a portrait called La Belle Provençale which shows us a red-faced, weather-beaten peasant girl in a blue dress seen against a dark red chair-back. At first sight this does not strike one as being of particular interest, but a closer scrutiny discovers in this perhaps as much as in anything here M Marchand's great qualities as a painter. The larger aspects of the form are held with uncompromising sureness and are expressed in handling of the utmost simplicity and directness. The matière is dense, rich and transparent, and the colour, for all its unflattering dryness, has a deep resonance. This is the painter’s art at its best. There is no confectionery, no fabrications of agreeable pigment; the quality comes directly out of the necessities of expression. If our Professors are alive to their opportunities they will send all their pupils here to see and study this; since one can learn more easily from one's own contemporaries than from any old master, and no better example could be found of sheer downright good painting than this. Some of the drawings—particularly the figure drawings—are very good. Here, too, there is nothing brilliant or clever—all is purposeful and exact. The artist's feeling for the essentials of direction and volume enables him to realize his figures with something of the synthetic power that we see in primitive sculpture, and this without any hint of archaism, with no imposition of a ready-made style.