dominated his picture. Like Berlioz, he adored colour for colour's
sake. He had a touch all Venetian in his relation of tones; at times
he went in search of chromatic adventures, returning with the most
marvellous trophies. No man before or since, not even those
practitioners of dissonance and martyrs to the enharmonic scale,
Cézanne, Gauguin, or Van Gogh, ever matched and modulated such widely
disparate tints; no man before could extract such magnificent
harmonies from such apparently irreconcilable tones. Monticelli
thought in colour and was a master of orchestration, one who went
further than Liszt.

The simple-minded Monticelli had no psychology to speak of--he was a
reversion, a "throw back" to the Venetians, the decorative Venetians,
and if he had possessed the money or the leisure--he hadn't enough
money to buy any but small canvases--he might have become a French
Tiepolo, and perhaps the greatest decorative artist of France. Even
his most delicate pictures are largely felt and sonorously executed;
not "finished" in the studio sense, but complete--two different
things.

Fate was against him, and the position he might have had was won by
the gentle Puvis de Chavannes, who exhibited a genius for decorating
monumental spaces. With his fiery vision, his brio of execution, his
palette charged with jewelled radiance, Monticelli would have been the
man to have changed the official interiors of Paris. His energy at one
period was enormous, consuming, though short-lived--1865-75. His lack
of self-control and at times his Italian superficiality, never backed
by a commanding intellect, produced the Monticelli we know. In truth
his soul was not complicated. He could never have attacked the
psychology of Zarathustra, Hamlet, or Peer Gynt. A Salome from him