in crushed pomegranate, the light suffusing the reclining figures like
a jewelled benediction. Marvellous, too, are the colour-bathed
creatures in this No Man's Land of drugged dreams... Do not the walls
fairly vibrate with this wealth of fairy tints and fantasy?" But it
must not be forgotten that he struck other chords besides blazing
sun-worshipping. We often encounter landscapes of vaporous melancholy,
twilights of reverie.
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Monticelli once told an admiring young amateur that in his canvases
"the objects are the decorations, the touches are the scales, and the
light is the tenor," thereby acknowledging himself that he felt colour
as music. There was hyperæsthesia in his case; his eyes were
protuberant and, like the ears of violinists, capable of
distinguishing quarter tones, even sixteenths. There are affiliations
with Watteau; the same gem-like style of laying on the thick pâte, the
same delight in fairy-like patches of paint to represent figures. In
1860 he literally resuscitated Watteau's manner, adding a personal
note and a richness hitherto unknown to French paint. Mauclair thinks
that to Watteau can be traced back the beginnings of modern
Impressionism; the division of tones, the juxtaposition of tonalities.
Monticelli was the connecting link between Watteau and Monet. The same
critic does not hesitate to name Monticelli as one of the great
quartet of harmonists, Claude, Turner, Monet being the other three.
Taine it was who voiced the philosophy of Impressionism when he
announced in his Philosophie de l'Art that the principal personage in
a picture is the light in which all things are plunged. Eugène
Carrière also asserted that a "picture is the logical development of
light." Monticelli before him had said: "In a painting one must sound
the _C_. Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, all the great ones have sounded
the C." His C, his key-note, was the magic touch of luminosity that