By J. Wély
By Malteste
PSYCHOLOGUE
IX
LOUIS MALTESTE
Among the workers on the French illustrated papers none produces a steadier flow of thoroughly conscientious, sound work than Louis Malteste.
His are no chance effects, no tours de force of mere eccentricity or charlatanism, but are the outcome of knowledge, hard work and assurance.
He is a splendid draughtsman, unerring and direct, a seeker and finder of individual character, who does not attempt to electrify the world with his audacity, or his at-any-cost originality; for he is content to delineate for us, in masterly fashion, specimens of humanity as they appear to the man of keen discernment.
At the time of the loathsome trials of Dreyfus, Malteste was one of several artists who specially distinguished themselves by splendid sketches of the actors concerned therein. In the writer’s possession is a collection of these spirited and life-like drawings. They are doubly admirable when one considers under what disadvantages they were produced. The task of the artist, told off to a sweltering, over-crowded court-house, surcharged with violent excitement, and commissioned to make portrait groups of interested persons, who are incessantly changing their positions, is none too easy. Yet these drawings show no hesitation; in each case some fleeting gesture or attitude is caught in a vigorous drawing, and fixed for ever.