His convention is a little definite, a little bald.  One may discuss it apart from his own handling of it, even.  It is a shade too express, too confident, too little careless both of tradition and of the typical qualities that secure permanence.  In other hands one can easily imagine how insipid it might become.  It has too little body, its scheme is too timorous, too vaporous to be handled by another.  Puvis de Chavannes will probably have few successful imitators.  But one must immediately add that if he does not found a school, his own work is, perhaps for that reason, at all events in spite of it, among the most important of the day.  Quite unperturbed by current discussions, which are certainly of the noisiest by which the current of artistic development was ever deflected, he has kept on his way, and has finally won all suffrages for an aesthetic expression that is really antagonistic to the general aesthetic spirit of his time.

Puvis de Chavannes is, perhaps, the most interesting figure in French painting to-day.  Couture is little more than a name.  It is curious to consider why.  Twenty years ago he was still an important figure.  He had been an unusually successful teacher.  Many American painters of distinction, especially, were at one time his pupils—­Hunt, La Farge, George Butler.  He theorized as much, as well—­perhaps even better than—­he painted.  His “Entretiens d’atelier” are as good in their way as his “Baptism of the Prince Imperial.”  He had a very distinguished talent, but he was too distinctly clever—­clever to the point of sophistication.  In this respect he was distinctly a man of the nineteenth century.  His great work, “Romains de la Decadence,” created as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World’s Fair in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it was distinctly a decorative effect—­the effect of a fine panel in the general mass of color and design; it made a fine centre.  It remains his greatest performance, the performance upon which chiefly his fame will depend, though as painting it lacks the quality and breadth of “Le Fauconnier,” perhaps the most interesting of his works to painters themselves, and of the “Day-Dreams” of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Its permanent interest perhaps will be the historical one, due to the definiteness with which it assigns Couture his position in the evolution of French painting.  It shows, as everything of Couture shows, the absence of any pictorial feeling so profound and personal as to make an impression strong enough to endure indefinitely.  And it has not, on the other hand, the interest of reality—­that faithful and enthusiastic rendering of the external world which gives importance to and fixes the character of the French painting of the present day.