Lately, in London, we have been looking at the works of Pissarro, and I could wish that Marquet would look at them, too.  Like him, Pissarro was a painter of streets and landscapes who returned again and again to the same motif.  In the course of a long life he must, I should think, have painted the Quai Voltaire, the Quai des Grands Augustins, and the Quai St. Michel almost as often as Marquet has knocked them off.  And if Pissarro never invented a shorthand wherewith to make notes of what was going on beneath his window, that was because Pissarro, for all his impressionist theory, was less concerned with the transitory aspect of things than with their aesthetic significance.  He, too, approached everything, men and women, trees, rivers, and houses, in the same spirit:  he approached them in the spirit of a painter.  Never for the ugliest harlot, the sorriest thief, or the most woebegone gas-jet did he feel that whimpering, simpering, sentiment that Tolstoy frankly admired and Philippe felt the want of.  But always he seems to have seen his motif with the finely disinterested passion of an artist.  Now, the passion of an artist is not to be jotted down:  it has to be deliberately transmuted into form.

If Marquet were as familiar with naked women as he is with the hats, coats, and petticoats he sees from his window, doubtless by this time he would have elaborated a set of symbols wherewith to record his sense of them.  Happily he is not:  so, before the model, he finds himself obliged to demand of the artist that is in him some plastic equivalent for his intense and agitated vision.  Thus goaded and disarmed he can produce a masterpiece.  And, therefore, were it for me to give advice, what I should say to Marquet would be—­throw away your sketch-book and panel-box, and settle down in a studio, with a top light, a model or two, and a six-foot canvas.  Only, as this must be just what M. Lhote has been telling him, naturally he would tell me to mind my own business.

His apologist, M. Besson, at any rate, has no patience with those who would set artists in the way they should go.  In this essay he gives them a piece of his mind, and he does it so well and so gaily that it is a pleasure to be scolded.  First, he has a few words with “une dame, que Gerome fit heritiere de ses uniformes et qui devint la muse d’un geometre-arpenteur de certaine recente peinture.” (Whom can he mean?)

Je connais l’atelier de Marquet, Madame, en marge de l’Atelier ou l’on esthetise, ou l’on fabrique les manifestes et les novateurs de genie.  Marquet garde son role de peintre.  Il n’est guere pour lui de souci plus serieux que le souci de sa liberte.  Il veut etre libre pour peindre, libre meme pour oublier la peinture, libre encore, libre davantage pour n’etre ni questionne ni consulte, pour ne devenir ni un expert, ni un educateur de sots.

    Et voila pourquoi, vous n’avez jamais fait de conference en son
    atelier.