the division of tones, his couches are fat and his colour is laid on lusciously.  His colour is never hot; coolness of tone is his chief allurement.  Greuze, passing one of his canvases at an exhibition, a long time regarded it and went away, heaving a sigh of envy.  The frivolous “Frago,” who studied with Chardin for a brief period, even though he left him for Boucher, admired his former master without understanding him.  Decamps later exclaimed in the Louvre:  “The whites of Chardin!  I don’t know how to recapture them.”  He might have added the silvery grays.  M. Pilon remarks that as in the case of Vermeer the secret of Chardin tones has never been surprised.  The French painter knew the art of modulation, while his transitions are bold; he enveloped his objects in atmosphere and gave his shadows a due share of luminosity.  He placed his colours so that at times his work resembles mosaic or tapestry.  He knew a century before the modern impressionists the knack of juxtaposition, of opposition, of tonal division; his science was profound.  He must have studied Watteau and the Dutchmen closely.  Diderot was amazed to find that his surpassing whites were neither black nor white, but a neuter—­but by a subtle transposition of tones looked white.  Chardin worked from an accumulation of notes, but there are few sketches of his in existence, a sanguine or two.  The paucity of the Velasquez sketches has piqued criticism.  Like Velasquez, Chardin was of a reflective temperament, a slow workman and a patient corrector.

The intimate charm of the Chardin interiors is not equalled even in the Vermeer canvases.  At the Louvre, which contains at least thirty of the masterpieces, consider the sweetness of Le Benedicite, or the three pastels, and then turn to the fruits, flowers, kitchen utensils, game, or to La Raie Ouverte, that magnificent portrait of a skatefish, with its cat slyly stealing over opened oysters, the table-cloth of such vraisemblance that the knife balanced on the edge seems to lie in a crease.  What bulk, what destiny, what chatoyant tones!  Here are qualities of paint and vision pictorial, vision that has never been approached; paint without rhetoric, paint sincere, and the expression in terms of beautiful paint of natural truths.  In Chardin’s case—­by him the relativity of mundane things was accepted with philosophic phlegm—­an onion was more important than an angel, a copper stew-pan as thrilling as an epic.  And then the humanity of his youth holding a fiddle and bow, the exquisite textures of skin and hair, and the glance of the eyes.  You believe the story told of his advice to his confrere:  “Paint with sentiment.”  But he mixed his sentiment with lovely colours, he is one of the chief glories of France as a colourist.

X. BLACK AND WHITE.

I