And feats of war defeats
With plain heroic magnitude of mind....
Why is it always in purchases of this sort the nation sinks the best part of its miserable art fund? Well, in this case I think it is possible to follow the workings of official taste. Officials know as well as the rest of us that T'ang art is well thought of, and that without some important example of it no Oriental collection is deemed complete. But T'ang art, as a rule, is neither literary nor pretty nor at all the sort of thing the collecting class cares for. What this class really likes is the art of the eighteenth century and the art of the high Renaissance. Miraculously comes to light an important figure labelled T'ang yet rich in the dear, familiar qualities of Renaissance sculpture. As usual, the officials have got it both ways. Surely Providence had a hand in this, unless it was the dealers.
IV
MARCHAND
Preface. Carfax Exhibition, June 1915
Of the younger French artists Marchand seems to me the most interesting. By "the younger" I mean those who, though they descend from Cézanne, have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Matisse or Picasso or both. These form a just distinguishable group sandwiched between the quasi-impressionists—Bonnard, Manguin, Vuillard—and the Cubists. To be precise, it is of a battered sandwich that they are the core; the jam oozes through on either side. It always does. That is why scholars and historians have a hard time of it.
I dare say Marchand would deny that he had been influenced by any one; for some strange reason artists like to suppose that, unlike all other living things, they are unaffected by their environment. The matter is of no consequence, but with the best will in the world I should find it hard to believe that the Femme couchée devant un paysage (No. 5) would have been just what it is if Gauguin had never existed, or that the scheme of the beautiful Portrait de femme (No. 4) owes nothing to Picasso. And isn't it pretty clear that Marchand would have painted in an altogether different style if Cézanne had never existed?