painted on the wall itself: it is mural decoration if it form part of
the wall, if it be, if I may so express myself, a variant of the
stonework. No other painter ever kept this end so strictly before his
eyes. For this end Chavannes reduced his palette almost to a
monochrome, for this end he models in two flat tints, for this end he
draws in huge undisciplined masses.

Let us examine his palette: many various greys, some warmed with
vermilion, some with umber, and many more that are mere mixtures of
black and white, large quantities of white, for Chavannes paints in a
high key, wishing to disturb the colour of the surrounding stone as
little as may be. Grey and blue are the natural colours of building
stone; when the subject will not admit of subterfuge, he will
introduce a shade of pale green, as in his great decoration entitled
"Summer"; but grey is always the foundation of his palette, and it
fills the middle of the picture. The blues are placed at the top and
bottom, and he works between them in successive greys. The sky in the
left-hand top corner is an ultramarine slightly broken with white; the
blue gown at the bottom of the picture, not quite in the middle of the
picture, a little on the right, is also ultramarine, and here the
colour is used nearly in its first intensity. And the colossal woman
who wears the blue gown leans against some grey forest tree trunk, and
a great white primeval animal is what her forms and attitude suggest.
There are some women about her, and they lie and sit in disconnected
groups like fragments fallen from a pediment. Nor is any attempt made
to relate, by the aid of vague look or gesture, this group in the
foreground to the human hordes engaged in building enclosures in the
middle distance. In Chavannes the composition is always as disparate
as an early tapestry, and the drawing of the figures is almost as
rude. If I may be permitted a French phrase, I will say _un peu