Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from De Luxe Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings by "the Men of 1830" Forming the Private Collection of Mr. H. S. Henry, Philadelphia: To Be Sold at Unrestricted Public Sale on the Date Herein Stated
But the popular impression that Diaz was the unrestrained happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care painter of the group is somewhat wide of the mark. That a painter has a fanciful spirit and easy execution does not necessarily argue a careless hand or a superficial eye. Watteau was just as serious in his mood as Michael Angelo; and Diaz, though he had not Dupre's melancholy or Rousseau's great thoughtfulness, was very far from knocking off his Fontainebleau landscapes with a dash and a laugh. He studied long and hard over his canvases, and the gayer - hued and more volatile they appeared the harder he had to study over them. Of course he was uneven in his work (every painter is so more or less), but one seldom finds him uninteresting. His drawing was not faultless compared with Rousseau's; but this comparison - and it is always made - is hard upon poor Diaz. Rousseau's drawing of landscape has never been equalled, and if there were no Rousseau we should find no fault with Diaz. Besides, drawing means different things to different men. Diaz would not tolerate outline where he could use the color patch, and in that respect he was a true follower of Delacroix. It is his color patch that people talk about as his uncertain draw ing, and they talk about it quite unconscious of the fact that Diaz meant it to be a patch, a tone, a value, and not a rim or a line. They often talk, too, of his distorted lights, just. As though he did not design them so with full knowledge of the result they would produce.
If we choose to run on in this vein, the light, the color, the trees, the skies, everything by Diaz - or, for that matter, by anyone else - could be written down as false to nature. But that is not. Recognizing painting as the convention that it is. The first and final question is always: Has the painter made a picture? And to that, in the case of Diaz, there can be but one answer. He made many of them, and most excellent ones into the bargain. Ilis figure pieces are his slighter works, and are not the ones that gave him his fame. He lives by his Fontainebleau landscapes. He is the third man in the great triad, and, though different in sentiment, mood and individuality from Rousseau or Dupre, he is not unworthy to be named with them as one of the great landscape painters of the last century.
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