We shall not have to wait so very long before what we are now producing will have become important. You yourself can see well enough--and it is one of the signs of the times with which I am most pleased--that there is a growing tendency for people to give one-man shows, or exhibitions of the work of a few men who belong to the same school. In my opinion this is a development in the art-dealing world which will have a far greater future than other enterprises. What a good thing it is that people are beginning to understand that the effect is bad when a Bouguereau is placed beside a Jacques, or a figure by Beyle or Lhermitte is hung close to a Schelfhout or a Koekkoek.
If I kept my work by me for long, I feel sure I should paint many of the pieces over again. But owing to the fact that I send them either to you or to Pottier the instant they are free from my brush, a number of them will probably not be worth much,--though by this means many studies will be preserved which otherwise would not have been improved by repeated retouching.
Peasant life provides such abundant material that “_travailler comme plusieurs nègres_,” as Millet says, is the only possible way of accomplishing anything.
People may laugh at Courbet’s having said: “Paint angels? But who on earth has ever seen an angel?” Yet on the same principle I should like to say of Benjamin Constant’s “La Justice au Harem,” for instance, who has ever seen a court of justice in a harem? And the same thing applies to so many other Moorish and Spanish pictures,--“The Reception at the Cardinal’s, etc.” And then there are all the historical pictures which are always as long as they are broad--what is the good of them all? And what do their painters mean by them? They will all lose their freshness and look like leather in the space of a few years, and will grow ever more and more tedious.
...When, nowadays, connoisseurs stand before a picture like the one by Benjamin Constant, or before a reception given by a Cardinal, painted by some Spaniard or other, they have acquired the habit of gravely muttering something about “clever technique.” If, however, the same men were to stand before a scene from peasant life--a drawing by Raffaëlli--they would criticize the technique with the same gravity.