in fairy-like patches of paint to represent figures.  In 1860 he literally resuscitated Watteau’s manner, adding a personal note and a richness hitherto unknown to French paint.  Mauclair thinks that to Watteau can be traced back the beginnings of modern Impressionism; the division of tones, the juxtaposition of tonalities.  Monticelli was the connecting link between Watteau and Monet.  The same critic does not hesitate to name Monticelli as one of the great quartet of harmonists, Claude, Turner, Monet being the other three.  Taine it was who voiced the philosophy of Impressionism when he announced in his Philosophie de l’Art that the principal personage in a picture is the light in which all things are plunged.  Eugene Carriere also asserted that a “picture is the logical development of light.”  Monticelli before him had said:  “In a painting one must sound the C.  Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, all the great ones have sounded the C.”  His C, his key-note, was the magic touch of luminosity that dominated his picture.  Like Berlioz, he adored colour for colour’s sake.  He had a touch all Venetian in his relation of tones; at times he went in search of chromatic adventures, returning with the most marvellous trophies.  No man before or since, not even those practitioners of dissonance and martyrs to the enharmonic scale, Cezanne, Gauguin, or Van Gogh, ever matched and modulated such widely disparate tints; no man before could extract such magnificent harmonies from such apparently irreconcilable tones.  Monticelli thought in colour and was a master of orchestration, one who went further than Liszt.

The simple-minded Monticelli had no psychology to speak of—­he was a reversion, a “throw back” to the Venetians, the decorative Venetians, and if he had possessed the money or the leisure—­he hadn’t enough money to buy any but small canvases—­he might have become a French Tiepolo, and perhaps the greatest decorative artist of France.  Even his most delicate pictures are largely felt and sonorously executed; not “finished” in the studio sense, but complete—­two different things.

Fate was against him, and the position he might have had was won by the gentle Puvis de Chavannes, who exhibited a genius for decorating monumental spaces.  With his fiery vision, his brio of execution, his palette charged with jewelled radiance, Monticelli would have been the man to have changed the official interiors of Paris.  His energy at one period was enormous, consuming, though short-lived—­1865-75.  His lack of self-control and at times his Italian superficiality, never backed by a commanding intellect, produced the Monticelli we know.  In truth his soul was not complicated.  He could never have attacked the psychology of Zarathustra, Hamlet, or Peer Gynt.  A Salome from him would have been a delightfully decorative minx, set blithely dancing in some many-hued and enchanted garden of Armida.  She would never have worn the air of hieratic lasciviousness