All of the following are true of French art, except

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More than that of any other of modern people, French art is a national expression. It epitomizes very definitely the national esthetic judgment and feeling, and its manifestations share a certain character that is very salient. Of almost any French picture or statue of any modern epoch one's first thought is that it is French. In the field of the fine arts, as in many others, the results are evident of an intellectual co-operation which insures the development of a common standard and tends to subordinate idiosyncrasy. The fine arts, as well as every other department of mental activity, reveal the effect of that intellectual as distinguished from the sensuous instinct which is so much more powerful in France than it is anywhere else. I think, one does feel the absence of imagination, opportunity, of spirituality, of poetry in a word. The French themselves feel something of this. At the Great Exposition of 1889 no pictures were so much admired by them as the English, in which appeared, even to an excessive degree, just the qualities in which French art is lacking.
Some French critics, far from denying this preference of French art, express pride in it, and, indeed, defend it. The French rooms, at least until modern periods are reached, are a demonstration that in the sphere of esthetics, science does not produce the greatest artists  — that something other than intelligent interest and technical accomplishment are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. The French classical painters show little absorption, little delight in their subject. They are too cultivated to invent. Selection has taken the place of discovery in their inspiration. They are addicted to the rational and the regulated. Their substance is never sentimental and incommunicable. Their works have a distinctly professional air. Everywhere is the air of reserve, of intellectual good-breeding, of avoidance of extravagance. That French painting is at the head of contemporary painting, as far and away incontestably it is, is due to the fact that it alone has kept alive the traditions of art which, elsewhere than in France, have given place to other and more material ideals. From the first its practitioners have been artists rather than poets, have possessed, that is to say, the organizing rather than the imaginative temperament, but they have rarely been perfunctory and never common.
And one quality is always present: elegance; it is always evidently aimed at and measurably achieved. A refined and cultivated sense of what is sound, estimable, competent, reserved, satisfactory, up to the mark, and above all, elegant and distinguished — has been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of excellence in French painting. It is this which has made the France of the past three centuries, and especially the France of to-day.