Studio: international art (8.1896)

A Modern Portrait-Painter

We may congratulate our-
selves that he has been
inspired to perpetuate the
features, and in those
features to reveal the souls,
of his contemporaries. No
easy task, truly, in this age
of ours, when everything
tends towards the efface-
ment of character, when
uniformity of dress is
almost universal, when the
levelling of the classes is
every day causing our per-
sonality to disappear more
and more. A risky task,
too, and one requiring a
rare gift of perception for
its thorough accomplish-
ment. For it is really a
fine and fertile subject of
study for an artist, con-
scious of his mission—
an age like our own, full
of elegancies and refine-
ments of every kind, and
instinct with a feverish
activity, throbbing per-
petually throughout the
civilised world, with its
thirst for the joys of the
moment, its love of
pleasure and luxury, its
craving for a life crowded
with the greatest possible

PORTRAIT OF M. DAMPT, THE SCULPTOR BY E. AMAN-JEAN variety of SenSatiOUS

Cosmopolitanism has

careers, when the very experts themselves disdained smoothed down the angularities of the races, and

their work. It were hard to exaggerate the respect dilettantism has clothed our minds as it were with

due to natures such as these, hard to pay sufficient a cloak of subtle comprehension. A thousand

homage to will power so strong, to personality bonds of intellectual kinship unite persons of equal

so forceful as theirs. social rank, albeit of different nationality. One

These general remarks are not, I think, out of circle intermingles with another, and each imparts

place, inasmuch as they have a special bearing to its neighbour something of its own manner

upon the place occupied by M. Aman-Jean among of thinking and feeling and understanding,

those few artists of whom it may be said that they The external side of life has developed beyond

will in the future be considered the representatives measure, to the detriment of its inner workings;

of the French art of to-day. If they are not yet for that self-communion, that long conference

acknowledged as leaders, at least they will be some between the moral being and his conscience, all

day ; for they are winning their way slowly but that, in short, which little by little reveals upon the

surely, with admirable patience, by dint of honest features the nature of the soul, is unknown in a

work, backed up by gifts of the highest order, to restless age like ours.

the first rank in the near future. Mere talent as a painter, therefore, will not

First and foremost, M. Aman-Jean is a portraitist, suffice nowadays for the portraitist, if indeed it
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