Identifier: greatpicturesassx00sing (find matches)
Title: Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930, ed. and tr
Subjects: Painting
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and Company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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ies ofhis brain, from the caprice of his art, from his perfectlyoriginal genius, not one but a thousand fairies took theirflight. From the enchanted visions of his imagination,the painter has drawn an ideal world, and, superior to hisown time, he has created one of those Shakespearian realms,one of those countries of love and light, one of those para-dises of gallantry that Polyphile built upon the cloud ofdreams for the delicate joy of poetic mortals. Watteau revived grace. Grace with Watteau is not theantique grace — a rigid and solid charm, the perfection ofthe marble of a Galatea, the entirely plastic and the materialglory of a Venus. Grace with Watteau is grace. It isthat nothing that invests a woman with an attraction, acoquetry, a more than physical beauty. It is that subtilequalitv which seems the smile of a line, the soul of form,the spiritual physiognomy of matter. All the fascinations of a woman in repose: languor,idleness, abandon, leaning back, reclining at full length,
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LEMBARQUEMENT POUR i/lLE DE CYTHERE 39 nonchalance, the cadences of pose, the pretty air of profilesbending over the scales of love (gammes damour), the re-ceding curves of the bosom, the serpentine lines and undu-lations, the suppleness of the female body, the play ofslender fingers on the handle of a fan and the indiscretionsof high heels beyond the skirts, and the happy fortune ofdeportment, and the coquetry of actions, and the manage-ment of the shoulders, and all that knowledge that wastaught to women by the mirrors of the last century, — themimicry of grace!—-lives in Watteau with its blossomand its accent, immortal and fixed in a more vital proofthan the bosom of the wife of Diomedes moulded by theashes of Pompeii. And if this grace is animated by Wat-teau, if he looses it from repose and immobility, if herenders it active and moving, it seems that it works with arhythm and that its measured pace is a dance led by someharmony. How decorative is the form of woman, and her gr

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