Mr. Roger Fry on French Art

Extract

The difficulty of dealing adequately with French painting as a whole is that the very use of the term ‘French painting’ implies a continuity, a unifying tradition, which among French painters is entirely absent. Appreciation of tradition alone suffices to explain why Sasseta was Sasseta or Greco Greco, but it is vain to ask Fragonard why Daumier was Daumier or to look in Watteau for the germ of Delacroix. In each separate case to find the original influence we have to go outside France, with Wat teau and Delacroix to Rubens, with Fragonard and Daumier to the atelier of Rembrandt. Though certain French painters group themselves together, Ingres and David and Prud’hon or Monet and Sisley and Berthe Morisot, we can look for a very long time without discovering a common denominator between any two such groups. There are French painters; there is no French painting. In French art more than in the art of any other country we are dealing with the individual as a single entity and not as part of a progressive chain and we therefore find ourselves, more frequently than elsewhere, coming up again and again against the personal, unheralded assertion of individuality that we call genius. Study of these inconsequent phenomena can necessarily only take the form of interpretative biography and not of the mere objective history certain writers have attempted to make of it.