THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING
[Illustration: ADOLF VON MENZEL. RESTAURANT AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION 1867.]
THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING
BY RICHARD MUTHER
PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY
AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF BRESLAU
IN FOUR
VOLUMES
[Illustration]
VOLUME
THREE
REVISED EDITION
CONTINUED BY THE AUTHOR
TO THE END OF THE XIX CENTURY
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. MCMVII
CONTENTS
PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
BOOK IV (_continued_)
THE REALISTIC PAINTERS AND MODERN IDEALISTS (_continued_)
CHAPTER XXVIII
REALISM IN ENGLAND
The mannerism of English historical painting: F. C. Horsley, J.
R. Herbert, J. Tenniel, E. M. Ward, Eastlake, Edward Armitage,
and others.--The importance of Ruskin.--Beginning of the efforts
at reform with William Dyce and Joseph Noël Paton.--The
pre-Raphaelites.--The battle against "beautiful form" and
"beautiful tone."--Holman Hunt.--Ford Madox Brown.--John Everett
Millais and Velasquez.--Their pictures from modern life opposed
to the anecdotic pictures of the elder _genre_ painters.--The
Scotch painter John Phillip 1
CHAPTER XXIX
REALISM IN GERMANY
Why historical painting and the anecdotic picture could no longer
take the central place in the life of German art after the
changes of 1870.--Berlin: Adolf Menzel, A. v. Werner, Carl
Güssow, Max Michael.--Vienna: August v. Pettenkofen.--Munich
becomes once more a formative influence.--Importance of the
impetus given in the seventies to the artistic crafts, and how it
afforded an incentive to an exhaustive study of the old
colourists.--Lorenz Gedon, W. Diez, E. Harburger, W. Loefftz,
Claus Meyer, A. Holmberg, Fritz August Kaulbach.--Good painting
takes the place of the well-told anecdote.--Transition from the
costume picture to the pure treatment of modern life.--Franz
Lenbach.--The Ramberg school.--Victor Müller brings into Germany
the knowledge of Courbet.--Wilhelm Leibl 39
CHAPTER XXX
THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE
The Paris International Exhibition of 1867 communicated to Europe
a knowledge of the Japanese.--A sketch of the history of Japanese
painting.--The "Society of the Jinglar," and the influence of the
Japanese on the founders of Impressionism 81
CHAPTER XXXI
THE IMPRESSIONISTS
Impressionism is Realism widened by the study of the
_milieu_.--Edouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred
Sisley, Claude Monet.--The Impressionist movement the final phase
in the great battle of liberation for modern art 105
CHAPTER XXXII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND
Rossetti and the New pre-Raphaelites: Edward Burne-Jones, R.
Spencer Stanhope, William Morris, J. M. Strudwick, Henry
Holliday, Marie Spartali-Stillman.--W. B. Richmond, Walter Crane,
G. F. Watts 151
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Arnold Boecklin, Hans von
Marées.--The resuscitation of biblical painting.--Review of
previous efforts from the Nazarenes to Munkacsy, E. von Gebhardt,
Menzel, and Leibermann.--Fritz von Uhde.--Other attempts: W.
Dürr, W. Volz.--L. von Hofmann, Julius Exter, Franz Stuck, Max
Klinger 210
BOOK V
A SURVEY OF EUROPEAN ART AT THE PRESENT TIME
INTRODUCTION 251
CHAPTER XXXIV
FRANCE
Bastien-Lepage, L'hermitte, Roll, Raffaelli, De Nittis, Ferdinand
Heilbuth, Albert Aublet, Jean Béraud, Ulysse Butin, Édouard
Dantan, Henri Gervex, Duez, Friant, Goeneutte,
Dagnan-Bouveret.--The landscape painters: Seurat, Signac,
Anquetin, Angrand, Lucien Pissarro, Pointelin, Jan Monchablon,
Montenard, Dauphin, Rosset-Granget, Émile Barau, Damoye, Boudin,
Dumoulin, Lebourg, Victor Binet, Réné Billotte.--The portrait
painters: Fantin-Latour, Jacques Émile Blanche, Boldini.--The
Draughtsmen: Chéret, Willette, Forain, Paul Renouard, Daniel
Vierge, Cazin, Eugène Carrière, P. A. Besnard, Agache, Aman-Jean,
M. Denis, Gandara, Henri Martin, Louis Picard, Ary Renan, Odilon
Redon, Carlos Schwabe 255
CHAPTER XXXV
SPAIN
From Goya to Fortuny.--Mariano Fortuny.--Official efforts for the
cultivation of historical painting.--Influence of Manet
inconsiderable.--Even in their pictures from modern life the
Spaniards remain followers of Fortuny: Francisco Pradilla Casado,
Vera, Manuel Ramirez, Moreno Carbonero, Ricardo Villodas, Antonio
Casanova y Estorach, Benliure y Gil, Checa, Francisco Amerigo,
Viniegra y Lasso, Mas y Fondevilla, Alcazar Tejeder, José
Villegas, Luis Jimenez, Martin Rico, Zamacois, Raimundo de
Madrazo, Francisco Domingo, Emilio Sala y Francés, Antonio Fabrés 307
CHAPTER XXXVI
ITALY
Fortuny's influence on the Italians, especially on the school of
Naples.--Domenico Morelli and his followers: F. P. Michetti,
Edoardo Dalbono, Alceste Campriani, Giacomo di Chirico, Rubens
Santoro, Edoardo Toffano, Giuseppe de Nigris.--Prominence of the
costume picture.--Venice: Favretto, Lonza.--Florence: Andreotti,
Conti, Gelli, Vinea.--The peculiar position of
Segantini.--Otherwise anecdotic painting still
preponderates.--Chierici, Rotta, Vannuttelli, Monteverde,
Tito.--Reasons why the further development of modern art was
generally completed not so much on Latin as on Germanic soil 326
CHAPTER XXXVII
ENGLAND
General characteristic of English painting.--The offshoots of
Classicism: Lord Leighton, Val Prinsep, Poynter, Alma
Tadema.--Japanese tendencies: Albert Moore.--The animal picture
with antique surroundings: Briton-Rivière.--The old _genre_
painting remodelled in a naturalistic sense by George Mason and
Frederick Walker.--George H. Boughton, Philip H. Calderon, Marcus
Stone, G. D. Leslie, P. G. Morris, J. R. Reid, Frank Holl.--The
portrait painters: Ouless, J. J. Shannon, James Sant, Charles W.
Furse, Hubert Herkomer.--Landscape painters.--Zigzag development
of English landscape painting.--The school of Fontainebleau and
French Impressionism rose on the shoulders of Constable and
Turner, whereas England, under the guidance of the
pre-Raphaelites, deviated in the opposite direction until
prompted by France to return to the old path.--Cecil Lawson,
James Clarke Hook, Vicat Cole, Colin Hunter, John Brett,
Inchbold, Leader, Corbett, Ernest Parton, Mark Fisher, John
White, Alfred East, J. Aumonier.--The sea painters: Henry Moore,
W. L. Wyllie.--The importance of Venice to English painting:
Clara Montalba, Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, Henry Woods.--French
influences: Dudley Hardy, Stott of Oldham, Stanhope Forbes, J. W.
Waterhouse, Byam Shaw, G. E. Moira, R. Anning Bell, Maurice
Greiffenhagen, F. Cayley Robinson, Eleanor Brickdale 341
BIBLIOGRAPHY 405
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES IN COLOUR
ADOLF VON MENZEL: Restaurant at the Paris Exhibition,
1867 _Frontispiece_
MILLAIS: The Vale of Rest _Facing_ p. 28
DEGAS: The Ballet Scene from _Robert the Devil_ " 118
MONET: A Study " 138
ROSSETTI: The Day-Dream " 160
BURNE-JONES: The Mill " 176
L'HERMITTE: The Pardon of Plourin " 266
RAFFAELLI: The Highroad to Argenteuil " 274
CARRIÈRE: School-Work " 304
SEGANTINI: Maternity " 338
ALMA-TADEMA: The Visit " 354
COLIN HUNTER: Their only Harvest " 394
IN BLACK AND WHITE
PAGE
ALMA TADEMA, LAURENS.
Sappho 354
AMAN-JEAN, EDMOND.
Sous la Guerlanda 303
AN UNKNOWN MASTER.
Harvesters resting 97
ANSDELL, RICHARD.
A Setter and Grouse 37
AUMONIER, M. J.
The Silver Lining to the Cloud 394
BASTIEN-LEPAGE, JULES.
Portrait of Jules Bastien-Lepage 256
Portrait of his Grandfather 257
The Flower Girl 258
Sarah Bernhardt 259
Mme. Drouet 260
The Hay Harvest 261
Le Père Jacques 262
Joan of Arc 263
The Beggar 264
The Pond at Damvillers 265
The Haymaker 266
BELL, R. ANNING.
Oberon and Titania with their Train 398, 399
BENLIURE Y GIL.
A Vision in the Colosseum 321
BESNARD, PAUL ALBERT.
Evening 299
Portrait of Mlles. D. 301
BOECKLIN, ARNOLD.
Portrait of Himself 227
A Villa by the Sea 229
A Rocky Chasm 231
The Penitent 232
Pan startling a Goat-Herd 234
The Herd 235
Venus despatching Cupid 237
Flora 241
In the Trough of the Waves 242
The Shepherd's Plaint 243
An Idyll of the Sea 244
Vita Somnium Breve 245
The Isle of the Dead 246
BOLDINI, GIOVANNI.
Giuseppe Verdi 290
BOUDIN, EUGÈNE LOUIS.
The Port of Trouville 289
BOUGHTON, GEORGE.
Green Leaves among the Sere 367
Snow in Spring 368
A Breath of Wind 369
The Bearers of the Burden 370
BRANGWYN.
Illustration to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 401
BROWN, FORD MADOX.
Portrait of Himself 10
Lear and Cordelia 11
Romeo and Juliet 13
Christ washing Peter's Feet 15
The Last of England 29
Work 31
BURNE-JONES, SIR EDWARD.
Chant d'Amour 169
The Days of Creation 170, 171
Circe 172
Pygmalion (the Soul attains) 173
Perseus and Andromeda 175
The Annunciation 176
The Enchantment of Merlin 177
The Sea Nymph 178
The Golden Stairs 179
The Wood Nymph 181
BUTIN, ULYSSE.
Portrait of Ulysse Butin 278
The Departure 279
CALDECOTT, RANDOLPH.
The Girl I left behind Me 363
CARRIÈRE, EUGÈNE.
Motherhood 297
CASADO DEL ALISAL.
The Bells of Huesca 323
CAZIN, JEAN CHARLES.
Judith 295
Hagar and Ishmael 296
CRANE, WALTER.
The Chariots of the Fleeting Hours 193
From _The Tempest_ 194
From _The Tempest_ 195
DAGNAN-BOUVERET, PASCAL ADOLPHE JEAN.
Consecrated Bread 284
Bretonnes au Pardon 285
The Nuptial Benediction 286
DANTAN, EDOUARD.
A Plaster Cast from Nature 280
DEGAS, HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGARD.
The Ballet in _Don Juan_ 119
A Ballet-Dancer 121
Horses in a Meadow 122
Dancing Girl fastening her Shoe 123
DIEZ, WILHELM.
Returning from Market 61
DUEZ, ERNEST.
On the Cliff 282
The End of October 283
DYCE, WILLIAM.
Jacob and Rachel 5
EASTLAKE, SIR CHARLES LOCK.
Christ blessing little Children 3
FAVRETTO, GIACOMO.
On the Piazzetta 331
Susanna and the Elders 333
FILDES, LUKE.
Venetian Women 396
FORAIN, J. L.
At the Folies-Bergères 293
FORBES, STANHOPE.
The Lighthouse 397
FORTUNY, MARIANO.
Portrait of Mariano Fortuny 309
The Spanish Marriage (La Vicaria) 310
The Trial of the Model 311
The Snake Charmers 312
Moors playing with a Vulture 313
The China Vase 314
At the Gate of the Seraglio 315
FURSE, CHARLES W.
Frontispiece to "Stories and Interludes" 381
GERVEX.
Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière 281
GÜSSOW, KARL.
The Architect 53
HARUNOBU.
A Pair of Lovers 101
HEILBUTH, FERDINAND.
Fine Weather 277
HERKOMER, HUBERT.
John Ruskin 382
Charterhouse Chapel 383
Portrait of his Father 384
Hard Times 385
The Last Muster 387
Found 389
HIROSHIGE.
The Bridge at Yeddo 93
A High Road 94
A Landscape 95
Snowy Weather 96
HIRTH, RUDOLF DU FRÉNES.
The Hop Harvest 70
HOKUSAI.
Hokusai in the Costume of a Japanese Warrior 82
Women Bathing 83
Fusiyama seen through a Sail 84
Fusiyama seen through Reeds 85
An Apparition 86
Hokusai sketching the Peerless Mountain 87
HOLL, FRANK.
"The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be
the Name of the Lord" 373
Leaving Home 374
Ordered to the Front 375
HUNT, WILLIAM HOLMAN.
The Scapegoat 8
The Light of the World 9
HUNTER, COLIN.
The Herring Market at Sea 393
KAULBACH, FRITZ AUGUST.
The Lute Player 64
KIYONAGA.
Ladies Boating 99
KORIN.
Landscape 89
Rabbits 91
LAWSON, CECIL.
The Minister's Garden 391
LEIBL, WILHELM.
Portrait of Wilhelm Leibl 71
In the Studio 72
The Village Politicians 73
The New Paper 74
In Church 75
A Peasant drinking 76
In the Peasant's Cottage 77
A Tailor's Workshop 79
LEIGHTON, LORD.
Portrait of Lord Leighton, P.R.A. 343
Captive Andromache 345
Sir Richard Burton 347
The Last Watch of Hero 348
The Bath of Psyche 349
LENBACH, FRANZ.
Portrait of Franz Lenbach 65
Portrait of Wilhelm I. 66
Portrait of Prince Bismarck 67
The Shepherd Boy 68
L'HERMITTE, LÉON.
Pay time in Harvest 267
Portrait of Léon L'Hermitte 268
MANET, ÉDOUARD.
Portrait of Édouard Manet 107
The Fifer 108
The Guitarero 109
Le Bon Bock 110
A Garden in Rueil 111
The Fight between the "Kearsarge" and "Alabama" 114
Boating 115
A Bar at the Folies Bergères 116
Spring: Jeanne 117
MASON, GEORGE HEMMING.
The End of the Day 365
MENZEL, ADOLF.
Portrait of Adolf Menze 40
From Kugler's _History of Friedrich the Great_ 41
The Coronation of King Wilhelm I. 43
From Kugler's _History of Friedrich the Great_ 45
The Damenstiftskirche at Munich 46
King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army 47
The Iron Mill 49
Sunday in the Tuileries Gardens 51
A Levee 52
MEYER, CLAUS.
The Smoking Party 63
MICHETTI, FRANCESCO PAOLO.
Going to Church 329
The Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti 330
MILLAIS, SIR JOHN EVERETT.
Portrait of Sir John Everett Millais 16
Lorenzo and Isabella 17
The North-West Passage 19
The Huguenot 20
Autumn Leaves 21
The Yeoman of the Guard 22
The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone 23
Yes or No 25
Mrs. Bischoffsheim 26
Thomas Carlyle 27
MONET, CLAUDE.
Portrait of Claude Monet 139
Monet's Home at Giverny 140
Morning on the Seine 141
A Walk in Grey Weather 143
The Church at Varangéville 144
River Scene 145
The Rocks at Bell-Isle 147
Hay-Ricks 148
A View of Rouen 149
MOORE, ALBERT.
Portrait of Albert Moore 355
Midsummer 356
Companions 357
Yellow Marguerites 359
Waiting to Cross 360
Reading Aloud 361
MOORE, HENRY.
Mount's Bay 395
MOREAU, GUSTAVE.
The Young Man and Death 213
Orpheus 214
Design for Enamel 215
The Plaint of the Poet 216
The Apparition 217
MORELLI, DOMENICO.
The Temptation of St. Anthony 327
NITTIS, GIUSEPPE DE.
Paris Races 276
OKIO.
A Carp 92
OULESS, WALTER WILLIAM.
Lord Kelvin 377
OUTAMARO.
Mother's Love 98
PATON, SIR JOSEPH NOËL.
The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania 7
PETTENKOFEN, AUGUST VON.
Portrait of August von Pettenkofen 56
A Woman Spinning 57
In the Convent Yard 59
PHILLIP, JOHN.
The Letter-Writer, Seville 33
Spanish Sisters 35
PISSARRO, CAMILLE.
Sitting up 133
Rouen 135
Sydenham Church 136
PISSARRO, LUCIEN.
Solitude 287
Ruth 288
POYNTER, EDWARD.
Idle Fear 350
The Ides of March 351
A Visit to Æsculapius 353
PRADILLA, FRANCISCO.
The Surrender of Granada 317
On the Beach 319
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES, PIERRE.
Portrait of Pierre de Chavannes 218
A Vision of Antiquity 219
The Beheading of John the Baptist 220
The Threadspinner 221
The Poor Fisherman 223
Summer 224
Autumn 225
RAFFAËLLI, FRANCISQUE JEAN.
Place St. Sulpice 271
The Midday Soup 272
The Carrier's Cart 273
Paris, 4K. 1 274
Le Chiffonier 275
RAMBERG, ARTHUR VON.
The Meeting on the Lake 69
REID, JOHN ROBERTSON.
Toil and Pleasure 371
RENOIR, FIRMIN AUGUSTE.
Supper at Bougival 125
The Woman with the Fan 126
Fisher Children by the Sea 127
The Woman with the Cat 129
A Private Box 130
The Terrace 131
ROBINSON, F. CAYLEY.
A Winter Evening 403
ROLL, ALFRED.
The Woman with a Bull 269
Manda Lamétrie, Fermière 270
ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL.
Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 153
Beata Beatrix 154
Monna Rosa 155
Ecce Ancilla Domini 157
Sancta Lilias 158
Astarte Syriaca 159
Study for Astarte Syriaca 161
Dante's Dream 163
Rosa Triplex 165
Sir Galahad 166
Mary Magdalene at the House of Simon the Pharisee 167
SANT, JAMES.
The Music Lesson 379
SISLEY, ALFRED.
Outskirts of a Wood 137
STANHOPE, R. SPENCER.
The Waters of Lethe 183
STRUDWICK, J. M.
Elaine 185
Thy Tuneful Strings wake Memories 186
Gentle Music of a bygone Day 187
The Ramparts of God's House 189
The Ten Virgins 191
TANYU.
The God Hoteï on a Journey 88
TITO, ETTORE.
The Slipper Seller 335
TOYOKUMI.
Nocturnal Reverie 103
VILLEGAS, JOSÉ.
Death of the Matador 320
WALKER, FREDERICK.
The Bathers 366
WATTS, GEORGE FREDERICK.
G. F. Watts in his Garden 196
Lady Lindsay 197
Hope 198
Paolo and Francesca 199
Love and Death 201
Ariadne 203
Orpheus and Eurydice 205
Artemis and Endymion 207
WILLETTE, ADOLFE.
The Golden Age 291
CHAPTER XXVIII
REALISM IN ENGLAND
The year 1849 was made famous by a momentous interruption in the quiet
course of English art brought about by the pre-Raphaelites. A movement,
recalling the Renaissance, laid hold of the spirit of painters. In all
studios artists spoke a language which had never been heard there
before; all great reputations were overthrown; the most celebrated
Cinquecentisti, whose names had hitherto been mentioned with respectful
awe, were referred to with a shrug as bunglers. A miracle seemed to have
taken place in the world, for the muse of painting was removed from the
pedestal on which she had stood for three centuries and set up in
triumph upon another.
To understand fully the aims of pre-Raphaelitism it is necessary to
recall the character of the age which gave it birth.
After English art had had its beginning with the great national masters
and enjoyed a prime of real splendour, it became, about the middle of
the nineteenth century, the prey to a tedious disease. A series of crude
historical painters endeavoured to fathom the noble style of the Italian
Cinquecento, without rising above the level of intelligent plagiarism.
As brilliant decorative artists possessed of pomp and majesty, and
sensuously affected by plastic beauty, as worshippers of the nude human
form, and as modern Greeks, the Italian classic painters were the worst
conceivable guides for a people who in every artistic achievement have
pursued spiritual expression in preference to plastic beauty. But in
spite of the experiences gained since the time of Hogarth, they all went
on the pilgrimage to Rome, as to a sacred spring, drank their fill in
long draughts, and came back poisoned. Even Wilkie, that charming
"little master," who did the work of a pioneer so long as he followed
the congenial Flemish painters and the Dutch, even Wilkie lost every
trace of individuality after seeing Spain and Italy. As this imitation
of the high Renaissance period led to forced and affected sentiment, it
also developed an empty academical technique. In accordance with the
precepts of the Cinquecento, artists proceeded with an affected ease to
make brief work of everything, contenting themselves with a superficial
_façade_ effect. A painting based on dexterity of hand took the place of
the religious study of nature, and a banal arrangement after celebrated
models took the place of inward absorption.
It was to no purpose that certain painters, such as _F. C. Horsley_, _J.
R. Herbert_, _J. Tenniel_, _Edwin Long_, _E. M. Ward_, and _Eastlake_,
the English Piloty, by imitation of the Flemish and Venetian masters,
made more of a return from idealism of form to colour, and that _Edwin
Armitage_, who had studied in Paris and Munich, introduced Continental
influences. They are the Delaroche, Gallait, and Bièfve of England.
Their art was an imposing scene painting, their programme always that of
the school of Bologna--the mother of all academies, great and
small--borrowing drawing from Michael Angelo and colour from Titian;
taking the best from every one, putting it all into a pot, and shaking
it together. Thus English art lost the peculiar national stamp which it
had had under Reynolds and Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. It became
an insignificant tributary of the false art which then held sway over
the Continent, insincere towards nature, full of empty rhetorical
passion, and bound to the most vacant routine. And as the grand painting
became hollow and mannered, _genre_ painting grew Philistine and
decrepit. Its innocent childishness and conventional optimism had led to
a tedious anecdotic painting. It repeated, like a talkative old man, the
most insipid tales, and did so with a complacency that never wavered and
with an unpleasant motley of colour. The English school still existed in
landscape, but for everything else it was dead.
A need for reform became urgent all the sooner because literature too
had diverged into new lines. In poetry there was the influence of the
Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had simplicity, direct feeling
for nature, and a Rousseau-like pantheism inscribed as a device upon
their banner, and it came as a reaction against the dazzling imaginative
fervour of those great and forceful men of genius Byron and Shelley.
Keats had again uttered the phrase which had before been Shaftesbury's
gospel: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In the year 1843 John Ruskin
published the first volume of his _Modern Painters_, the æsthetic creed
of which culminated in the tenet that nature alone could be the source
of all true art.
This transitional spirit, which strove for liberty from the academical
yoke, though diffidently at first, is represented in painting by the
Scotch artist _William Dyce_. In England he pursued, though undoubtedly
with greater ability, a course parallel to that of the German Nazarenes,
whose faith he championed. Born in 1806, he had in Italy, in the year
1826, made the acquaintance of Overbeck, who won him over to Perugino
and Raphael. Protesting against the histrionic emptiness of English
historical painting, he took refuge with the Quattrocentisti and the
young Raphael. His masterpiece, the Westminster frescoes, with the
Arthurian legends as their subject, goes to some extent on parallel
lines with Schnorr's frescoes on the Nibelungen myths. The
representation of vigorous manhood and tempestuous heroism has been here
attempted without sentimentality or theatrical heroics. In his oil
pictures--Madonnas, "Bacchus nursed by the Nymphs," "The Woman of
Samaria," "Christ in Gethsemane," "St. John leading Home the Virgin,"
etc.--he makes a surprising effect by the graceful, sensuous charm of
his women, by his exquisite landscapes and his tender idyllic
characters. The charming work "Jacob and Rachel," which represents
him in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, might be ascribed to Führich, except that
the developed feeling for colour bears witness to its English origin.
With yearning the youth hastens to the maiden, who stands, leaning
against the edge of the well, with her eyes cast down, half repulsing
him in her austere chastity.
[Illustration: EASTLAKE. CHRIST BLESSING LITTLE CHILDREN.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
DYCE. JACOB AND RACHEL.]
Where the Nazarenes obtain a pallid, corpse-like effect, a deep and
luminous quality of colour delights one in his pictures. He is
essentially graceful, and with this grace he combines the pure and quiet
simplicity of the Umbrian masters. There is something touching in
certain of his Madonnas, who, in long, clinging raiment, appeal to the
Godhead with arms half lifted, devout lips parted in prayer, and mild
glances lost in infinity. A dreamy loveliness brings the heavenly
figures nearer to us. Dyce expresses the magic of downcast lids with
long, dark lashes. Like the Umbrians, he delights in the elasticity of
slender limbs and the chaste grace of blossoming maiden beauty. Many
German fresco painters have become celebrated who never achieved
anything equal in artistic merit to the Westminster pictures of Dyce.
Yet he is to be reckoned with the Flandrin-Overbeck family, since he
gives a repetition of the young Raphael, though he certainly does it
well; but he only imitates and has not improved upon him.
The pictures of another Scotchman, _Sir Joseph Noël Paton_, born in
1821, appear at a rather later date. Most of them--"The Quarrel of
Oberon and Titania," "The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania" in the
Edinburgh Gallery, and his masterpiece, "The Fairy Queen"--have, from
the æsthetic standpoint, little enjoyment to offer. The drawing is hard,
the composition overladen, the colour scattered and motley. As in Ary
Scheffer, all the figures have vapid, widely opened eyes. Elves, gnomes,
women, knights, and fantastic rocks are crowded so tightly together that
the frame scarcely holds them. But the loving study of nature in the
separate parts is extraordinary. It is possible to give a botanical
definition of each plant and each flower in the foreground, with so much
character and such care has Paton executed every leaf and every blossom,
even the tiny creeping things amid the meadow grass. Here and there a
fresh ray of morning sun breaks through the light green and leaps from
blade to blade. The landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer are recalled to
mind. Emancipation from empty, heroically impassioned emphasis,
pantheistic adoration of nature, even a certain effort--unsuccessful
indeed--after an independent sentiment for colour, are what his pictures
seem to preach in their naïve angularity, their loving execution of
detail, and their bright green motley.
This was the mood of the young artists who united to form the
pre-Raphaelite group of 1848. They were students at the Royal Academy of
from twenty to four-and-twenty years of age. The first of the group,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had already written some of his poems. The
second, Holman Hunt, had still a difficulty in overcoming the opposition
of his father, who was not pleased to see him giving up a commercial
career. John Everett Millais, the youngest, had made most progress as a
painter, and was one of the best pupils at the Academy. But they were
contented neither by the artistic achievement of their teachers nor by
the method of instruction. Etty, the most valued of them all, according
to the account of Holman Hunt, painted mythological pictures, full of
empty affectation; Mulready drew in a diluted fashion, and sacrificed
everything to elegance; Maclise had fallen into patriotic banalities;
Dyce had stopped short in his course and begun again when it was too
late. Thus they had of necessity to provide their own training for
themselves. All three worked in the same studio; and it so happened that
one day--in 1847 or 1848--chance threw into their hands some engravings
of Benozzo Gozzoli's Campo-Santo frescoes in Pisa. Nature and
truth--everything which they had dimly surmised, and had missed in the
productions of English art--here they were. Overcome with admiration for
the sparkling life, the intensity of feeling, and the vigorous form of
these works, which did not even shrink from the consequences of
ugliness, they were agreed in recognising that art had always stood on
the basis of nature until the end of the fifteenth century, or, more
exactly, until the year 1508, when Raphael left Florence to paint in the
Vatican in Rome. Since then everything had gone wrong; art had stripped
off the simple garment of natural truthfulness and fallen into
conventional phrases, which in the course of centuries had become more
and more empty and repellent by vapid repetition. Was it necessary that
the persons in pictures should, to the end of the world, stand and move
just as they had done a thousand times in the works of the
Cinquecentisti? Was it necessary that human emotions--love, boldness,
remorse, and renunciation--should always be expressed by the same turn
of the head, the same lift of the eyebrows, the same gesture of the
arms, and the same folded hands, which came into vogue through the
Cinquecentisti? Where in nature are the rounded forms which Raphael, the
first Classicist, borrowed from the antique? And in the critical moments
of life do people really form themselves into such carefully balanced
groups, with the one who chances to have on the finest clothes in the
centre?
[Illustration: _Annan, photo._
PATON. THE RECONCILIATION OF OBERON AND TITANIA.]
From this reaction against the Cinquecentisti and against the shallow
imitation of them, the title pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the secret,
masonic sign P.R.B., which they added to their signatures upon their
pictures, are rendered comprehensible. But whilst Dyce, to avoid the
Cinquecentisti, imitated the Quattrocentisti, the title here is only
meant to signify that these artists, like the Quattrocentisti, had
determined to go back to the original source of real life. The Academy
pupils Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, together with the young
sculptor Thomas Woolner, who had just left school, were at first the
only members of the Brotherhood. Later the _genre_ painter James
Collinson, the painter and critic F. G. Stephens, and Rossetti's
brother, William Michael Rossetti, were admitted to the alliance.
[Illustration: HOLMAN HUNT. THE SCAPEGOAT.
(_By Permission of Messrs. Henry Graves & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
Boldly they declared war against all conventional rules, described
themselves as beginners and their pictures as attempts, and announced
themselves to be, at any rate, sincere. The programme of their school
was truth; not imitation of the old masters, but strict and keen study
of nature such as the old masters had practised themselves. They were in
reaction against the superficial dexterity of technique and the beauty
of form and intellectual emptiness to which the English historical
picture had fallen victim; they were in reaction against the trivial
banality which disfigured English _genre_ painting. In the
representation of passion the true gestures of nature were to be
rendered, without regard to grace and elegance, and without the stock
properties of pantomime. The end for which they strove was to be true
and not to create what was essentially untrue by a borrowed idealism
which had an appearance of being sublime. In opposition to the negligent
painting of the artists of their age, they demanded slavishly faithful
imitation of the model by detail, carried out with microscopic
exactness. Nothing was to be done without reverence for nature; every
part of a picture down to the smallest blade or leaf was to be directly
painted from the original. Even at the expense of total effect every
picture was to be carried out in minutest detail. It was better to
stammer than to make empty phrases. A young and vigorous art, such as
had been in the fifteenth century, could win its way, as they believed,
from this conception alone.
In all these points, in the revolt against the emptiness of the _beauté
suprême_ and the flowing lines of the accepted routine of composition,
they were at one with Courbet and Millet. It was only in further
developments that the French and English parted company; English realism
received a specifically English tinge. Since every form of
Classicism--for to this point they were led by the train of their
ideas--declares the ideal completion of form, of physical presentment,
to be its highest aim, the standard-bearers of realism were obliged to
seek the highest aim of their art, founded exclusively on the study of
nature, in the representation of moral and intellectual life, in a
thoughtful form of spiritual creation. The blending of realism with
profundity of ideas, of uncompromising truth to nature in form with
philosophic and poetic substance, is of the very essence of the
pre-Raphaelites. They are transcendental naturalists, equally widely
removed from Classicism, which deals only with beautiful bodies, as from
realism proper, which only proposes to represent a fragment of nature.
From opposition to abstract beauty of form they insist upon what is
characteristic, energetic, angular; but their figures painted faithfully
from nature are the vehicles of a metaphysical idea. From the first they
saturated themselves with poetry. Holman Hunt has an enthusiasm for
Keats and the Bible, Rossetti for Dante, Millais for the mediæval poems
of chivalry.
[Illustration: HOLMAN HUNT. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
(_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.
(_By permission of Theodore Watts Dunton, Esq., the owner of the
picture._)]
All three appeared before the public for the first time in the year
1849. John Millais and Holman Hunt exhibited in the Royal Academy, the
one being represented by his "Lorenzo and Isabella," a subject drawn
from Keats, the other by his "Rienzi." Rossetti had his picture, "The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin," exhibited at the Free Exhibition, afterwards
known as the Portland Gallery. All three works excited attention and
also derision, and much shaking of heads. The three next works of
1850--"A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary," by
Holman Hunt; "The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,"
by Millais; and "The Annunciation" by Rossetti--were received with the
same amused contempt. When they exhibited for the third time--Holman
Hunt, a scene from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_; Millais, "The Return
of the Dove to the Ark" and "The Woodman's Daughter"--such a storm of
excitement broke forth that the pictures had to be removed from the
exhibition. A furious article appeared in _The Art Journal_; the
exhibitors, it was said, were certainly young, but they were too old to
commit such sins of youth. Even Dickens turned against them in
_Household Words_. The painters who had been assailed made their answer.
William Michael Rossetti laid down the principles of the Brotherhood by
an article in a periodical called _The Critic_, and smuggled a second
article into _The Spectator_. In 1850 they founded a monthly magazine
for the defence of their theories, _The Germ_, which on the third number
took the title _Art and Poetry_, and was most charmingly embellished
with drawings by Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and others. Stephens
published an essay in it, on the ways and aims of the early Italians,
which gave him occasion to discuss the works recently produced in the
spirit of simplicity known to these old masters. Madox Brown wrote a
paper on historical painting, in which he asserted that the true basis
of historical painting must be strict fidelity to the model, to the
exclusion of all generalisation and beautifying, and exact antiquarian
study of costumes and furniture in contradistinction to the fancy
history of the elder painters. But all these articles were written to no
purpose. After the fourth number the magazine was stopped, and in these
days it has become a curiosity for bibliomaniacs. But support came from
another side. Holman Hunt's picture dealing with a scene from
Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ received the most trenchant
condemnation in _The Times_. John Ruskin came forward as his champion
and replied on 13th May 1851. _The Times_ contained yet a second letter
from him on 30th May. And soon afterwards both were issued as a
pamphlet, with the title _Pre-Raphaelitism_, _its Principles, and
Turner_. These works, he said, did not imitate old pictures, but nature;
what alienated the public in them was their truth and rightness, which
had broken abruptly and successfully with the conventional sweep of
lines.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. LEAR AND CORDELIA.
(_By permission of Albert Wood, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
_Holman Hunt_ is the painter who has been most consistent in clinging
throughout his life to these original principles of the Brotherhood. He
is distinguished by a depth of thought which at last tends to become
entirely elusive, and often a depth of spirit more profound than diver
ever plumbed; but at the same time by an angular, gnarled realism which
has scarcely its equal in all the European art of the century.
"The Flight of Madeleine and Porphyro," from Keats' _Eve of St. Agnes_,
was the first picture, the subject being borrowed in 1848 from his
favourite poet. In the work through which he first acknowledged himself
a member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he has given a plain and
simple rendering of the scene in the introductory chapter of Bulwer
Lytton's _Rienzi_. He has chosen the moment when Rienzi, kneeling beside
the corpse of his brother, takes a vow of vengeance against the murderer
who is riding away. The composition avoids any kind of conventional
pyramidal structure. In the foreground every flower is painted and every
colour is frankly set beside its neighbour without the traditional
gradation. His third picture, "A Converted British Family sheltering a
Christian Missionary," is not to be reckoned amongst his best
performances. It is forced naïveté, suggesting the old masters, to unite
two entirely different scenes upon the same canvas: in the background
there are fugitives and pursuers, and a Druid, merely visible by his
outstretched arms, inciting the populace to the murder of a missionary;
in the foreground a hut open on all sides, which could really offer no
protection at all. Yet in this hut a priest is hiding, tended by
converted Britons. However, the drawing of the nude bodies is an
admirable piece of realism; admirable, also, is the way in which he has
expressed the fear of the inmates, and the fanatical bloodthirsty rage
of the pursuers, and this without any false heroics, without any
rhetoric based upon the traditional language of gesture. The picture
from Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, with the motto, "Death is
a fearful thing, and shamed life a hateful," is perhaps theatrical in
its arrangement, though it is likewise earnest and convincing in
psychological expression.
Microscopic fidelity to nature, which formed the first principle in the
programme of the Brotherhood, has been carried in Holman Hunt to the
highest possible point. Every flower and every ear of corn, every
feather and every blade of grass, every fragment of bark on the trees
and every muscle, is painted with scrupulous accuracy. The joke made
about the pre-Raphaelites has reference to Holman Hunt: it was said that
when they had to paint a landscape they used to bring to their studio a
blade of grass, a leaf, and a piece of bark, and they multiplied them
microscopically so many thousand times until the landscape was finished.
His works are a triumph of industry, and for that very reason they are
not a pleasure to the eye. A petty, pedantic fidelity to nature injures
the total effect, and the hard colours--pungent green, vivid yellow,
glaring blue, and glowing red--which Holman Hunt places immediately
beside each other, give his pictures something brusque, barbaric, and
jarring. But as a reaction against a system of painting by routine,
which had become mannered, such truth without all compromise, such
painstaking effort at the utmost possible fidelity to nature, was, in
its very harshness, of epoch-making significance.
With regard, also, to the transcendental purport of his pictures Holman
Hunt is perhaps the most genuine of the group. In the whole history of
art there are no religious pictures in which uncompromising naturalism
has made so remarkable an alliance with a pietistic depth of ideas. The
first, which he sent to the exhibition of 1854, "The Light of the
World," represents Christ wandering through the night in a
gold-embroidered mantle, with a lantern in His hand, like a Divine
Diogenes seeking men. Taine, who studied the picture impartially without
the catalogue, describes it, without further addition, as "Christ by
night with a lantern." But for Holman Hunt the meaning is Christianity
illuminating the universe with the mystic light of Faith and seeking
admission at the long-closed door of unbelief. It was because of this
implicit suggestion that the work made an indescribable sensation in
England; it had to go on pilgrimage from town to town, and hundreds of
thousands of copies of the engraving were sold. The pietistic feeling
of this ascetic preacher was so strong that he was able to venture on
pictures like "The Scapegoat" of 1856 without becoming comical.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
FORD MADOX BROWN. ROMEO AND JULIET.]
[Illustration: FORD MADOX BROWN. CHRIST WASHING PETER'S FEET.]
A striving to attain the greatest possible local truth had led Holman
Hunt to the East when he began these biblical pictures. He spent several
years in Palestine studying the topographical character of the land, its
buildings and its people, and endeavoured with the help of these actual
men and women and these landscape scenes to reconstruct the events of
biblical history with antiquarian fidelity. To paint "The Shadow of
Death" he searched in the East until he discovered a Jew who
corresponded to his idea of Christ, and painted him, a strong, powerful
man, the genuine son of a carpenter, with that astounding truth to
nature with which Hubert van Eyck painted his Adam. Even the hairs of
the breast and legs are as faithfully rendered as if one saw the model
in a glass. Near this naked carpenter--for He is clothed only with a
leather apron--there kneels a modern Eastern woman, bowed over a chest,
in which various Oriental vessels are lying. The ground is covered with
shavings of wood. Up to this point, therefore, it is a naturalistic
picture from the modern East. But here Holman Hunt's pietistic sentiment
is seen: it is the eve of a festival; the sun casts its last dying rays
into the room; the journeyman carpenter wearily stretches out His arms,
and the shadow of His body describes upon the wall the prophetic form of
the Cross.
Another picture represented the discovery of our Lord in the Temple, a
third the flock which has been astray following the Good Shepherd into
His Father's fold. On his picture of the flight into Egypt, or, as he
has himself called it, "The Triumph of the Innocents," he published a
pamphlet of twelve pages, in which he goes into all the historical
events connected with the picture with the loyalty of an historian; he
discusses everything--in what month the flight took place, and by what
route, how old Christ was, to what race the ass belonged, and what
clothes were worn by Saint Joseph and Mary. One might be forgiven for
thinking such a production the absurd effusion of a whimsical pedant
were it not that Hunt is so grimly in earnest in everything he does. In
spite of all his peculiarities it must be admitted that he gave a deep
and earnest religious character to English art, which before his time
had been so paltry; and this explains the powerful impression which he
made upon his contemporaries.
The artist most closely allied to him in technique is _Ford Madox
Brown_, who did not reckon himself officially with the pre-Raphaelites,
though he followed the same principles in what concerned the treatment
of detail. Only a little senior to the founders of the Brotherhood--he
was nine-and-twenty at the time--he is to be regarded as their more
mature ally and forerunner. Rossetti was under no illusion when, in the
beginning of his studies, he turned to him directly. In those years
Madox Brown was the only English painter who was not addicted to the
trivialities of paltry _genre_ painting or the theatrical heroics of
traditional history. He is a bold artist, with a gift of dramatic force
and a very rare capacity of concentration, and these qualities hindered
him from following the doctrine of the pre-Raphaelites in all its
consequences. If he had, in accordance with their programme, exclusively
confined himself to work from the living model, several of his most
striking and powerful pictures would never have been painted.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
MILLAIS. LORENZO AND ISABELLA.]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MILLAIS. THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.]
Madox Brown passed his youth on the Continent--in Antwerp with Wappers,
in Paris, and in Rome. The pictures which he painted there in the
beginning of the forties were produced, as regards technique, under the
influence of Wappers. The subjects were taken from Byron: "The Sleep of
Parisina" and "Manfred on the Jungfrau." It is only in the latter that
an independent initiative is perceptible. In contradistinction from the
generalities of the school of Wappers he aimed at greater depth of
psychology and accuracy of costume, while at the same time he
endeavoured, though without success, to replace the conventional studio
light by the carefully observed effect of free light. These three
things--truth of colour, of spiritual expression, and of historical
character--were from this time forth his principal care. And when his
cartoon of "Harold," painted in Paris in the year 1844, was exhibited in
Westminster Hall, it was chiefly this scrupulous effort at truth which
made such a vivid impression upon the younger generation. In the first
masterpiece which he painted after his return to London in 1848 he
stands out already in all his rugged individuality. "Lear and Cordelia,"
founded on a most tragic passage in the most tragic of the great dramas
of Shakespeare, is here treated with impressive cogency. It stood in
such abrupt opposition to the traditional historical painting that
perhaps nothing was ever so sharply opposed to anything so universally
accepted. The figures stand out stiff and parti-coloured like card
kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalised beauty. And
the colouring is just as incoherent. The brown sauce, which every one
had hitherto respected like a binding social law, had given way to a
bright joy of colour, the half-barbaric motley which one finds in old
miniatures. It is only when one studies the brilliant details, used
merely in the service of a great psychological effect, that this
outwardly repellent picture takes shape as a powerful work of art, a
work of profound human truth. Nothing is sacrificed to pose, graceful
show, or histrionic affectation. Like the German masters of the
fifteenth century, Madox Brown makes no attempt to dilute what is ugly,
nor did Holbein either when he painted the leprous beggars in his "Altar
to St. Sebastian." Every figure, whether fair or foul, is, in bearing,
expression, and gesture, a character of robust and rigorous hardihood,
and has that intense fulness of life which is compressed in those carved
wooden figures of mediæval altars: the aged Lear with his weather-beaten
face and his waving beard; the envious Regan; the cold, cruel, ambitious
Goneril; Albany, with his fair, inexpressive head; the gross, brutal
Cornwall; Burgundy, biting his nails in indecision; and Cordelia, in her
touching, bashful grace. And to this angular frankness of the primitive
masters he unites the profound learning of the modern historian. All the
archæological details, the old British costumes, jewels, modes of
wearing the hair, weapons, furniture, and hangings, have been studied
with the accuracy of Menzel. He knows nothing of the academic rules of
composition, and his robes fall naturally without the petty appendage of
fair folds and graceful motives.
[Illustration: MILLAIS. THE HUGUENOT.]
The picture in which he treated the balcony scene in Shakespeare's
_Romeo and Juliet_ is outwardly repellent, like "Lear and Cordelia," but
what a hollow effect is made by Makart's theatrical heroics beside this
aboriginal sensuousness, this intensity of expression! Juliet's dress
has fallen from her shoulders, and, devoid of will and thought, with
closed lids, half-naked, and thrilling in every fibre with the lingering
joy of the hours that have passed, she abandons herself to the last
fiery embraces of Romeo, who in stormy haste is feeling with one foot
for the ladder of ropes.
He has solved a yet more difficult problem in the picture "Elijah and
the Widow."
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
MILLAIS. AUTUMN LEAVES.]
"See, thy son liveth," are the words in the Bible with which the hoary
Elijah brings the boy, raised from death and still enveloped in his
shroud, to the agonised mother kneeling at the foot of the sepulchre.
The woman makes answer: "Now by this I know that thou art a man of God."
In the embodiment of this scene likewise Madox Brown has aimed in
costume and accessories at a complete harmony between the figures and
the character of the epoch, and has set out with an entirely accurate
study of Assyrian and Egyptian monuments. Even the inscription on the
wall and the Egyptian antiquities correspond to ancient originals. At
the same time the figures have been given the breath of new life. Elijah
looks more like a wild aboriginal man than a saint of the Cinquecento.
The ecstasy of the mother, the astonishment of the child whose great
eyes, still unaccustomed to the light, gaze into the world again with a
dreamy effort, after having beheld the mysteries of death--these are
things depicted with an astonishing power. The downright but convincing
method in which Hogarth paints the soul has dislodged the hollow,
heroical ideal of beauty of the older historical painting. Madox Brown's
confession of faith, which he formulated as an author, culminates in the
tenet that truth is the means of art, its end being the quickening of
the soul. This he expresses in two words: "emotional truth."
While Holman Hunt and Madox Brown held fast throughout their lives to
the pre-Raphaelite principles, pre-Raphaelitism was for _John Everett
Millais_, the youngest of the three, merely a transitory phase, a stage
in his artistic development.
Sir John Millais was born 8th June 1829, in Southampton, where his
family had come from Jersey. Thus he is half a Frenchman by descent.
His childhood was passed in Dinant in Brittany, but when he was nine
years old he went to a London school of drawing. He was then the little
fair-haired boy in a holland blouse, a broad sash, and a large sailor's
collar, whom John Phillip painted in those days. When eleven he entered
the Royal Academy, probably being the youngest pupil there; at thirteen
he won a prize medal for the best drawing from the antique; at fifteen
he was already painting; and at seventeen he exhibited an historical
picture, "Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru," which was praised by the
critics as the best in the exhibition of 1846. With "Elgiva," a work
exhibited in 1847, this first period, in which he followed the lines of
the now forgotten painter Hilton, was brought to an end. His next work,
"Lorenzo and Isabella," now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, bore
the letters P.R.B., as a sign of his new confession of faith.
Microscopically exact work in detail has taken the place of the large
bravura and the empty imitation of the Cinquecentisti. The theme was
borrowed from one of Boccaccio's tales, _The Pot of Basil_--the tale on
which Keats founded _Isabella_. A company of Florentines in the costume
of the thirteenth century are assembled at dinner. Lorenzo, pale and in
suppressed excitement, sits beside the lovely Isabella, looking at her
with a glance of deep, consuming passion. Isabella's brother, angered at
it, gives a kick to her dog. All the persons at the table are
likenesses. The critic F. G. Stephens sat for the beloved of Isabella,
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the toper holding his glass to his lips
at the far right of the table. Even the ornaments upon the damask cloth,
the screen, and the tapestry in the background are painted, stroke after
stroke, with the conscientious devotion of a primitive painter. Jan van
Eyck's brilliancy of colour is united to Perugino's suavity of feeling,
and the chivalrous spirit of the _Decameron_ seized with the sureness of
a subtle literary scholar.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLAIS. THE YEOMAN OF THE GUARD.]
The work of 1850, "The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the
Carpenter," illustrated a verse in the Bible (Zechariah xiii. 6): "And
one shall say unto Him, What are these wounds in Thine hands? Then He
shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My
friends." The Child Jesus, who is standing before the joiner's bench,
has hurt Himself in the hand. St. Joseph is leaning over to look at the
wound, and Mary is kneeling beside the Child, trying to console Him
with her caresses, whilst the little St. John is bringing water in a
wooden vessel. Upon the other side of the bench stands the aged Anna, in
the act of drawing out of the wood the nail which has caused the injury.
A workman is labouring busily at the joiner's bench. The floor of the
workshop is littered with shavings, and tools hang round upon the walls.
The Quattrocentisti were likewise the determining influence in the
treatment of this subject. Ascetic austerity has taken the place of
ideal draperies, and angularity that of the noble flow of line. The
figure of Mary, who, with her yellow kerchief, resembled the wife of a
London citizen, was the cause of special offence.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
MILLAIS. THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE.
(_By permission of Messrs. Thomas Agnew & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
MILLAIS. YES OR NO?]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLAIS. MRS. BISCHOFFSHEIM.
(_By permission of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, the owner of the picture._)]
Up to the seventies Millais continued to paint such pictures out of the
Bible, or from English and mediæval poets, with varying success. One of
them, which in its brilliant colouring looked like an old picture upon
glass, represented the return of the dove to Noah's ark. The central
point was formed by two slender young women in mediæval costume, who
received the exhausted bird in their delicate hands. The picture, "The
Woodman's Daughter," was an illustration to a poem by Coventry Patmore,
on the love of a young noble for a poor child of the wood. In a
semicircular picture of 1852 he painted Ophelia as she floats singing in
the green pool where the white water-lilies cover her like mortuary
wreaths--floats with her parted lips flickering with a gentle smile of
distraction. The other picture of this year, "The Huguenot," represented
two lovers taking leave of each other in an old park upon the eve of St.
Bartholomew. She is winding a white scarf round his arm to save him from
death by this badge of the Catholics, whilst he is gently resisting. The
mood of the man standing before the dark gate of death, the moral
strength which vanquishes his fear, and all the solemnity of his
farewell to life are expressed in his glance. A world of love rests in
the eyes of the woman. Millais has often treated this problem of the
loving woman with earnest and almost sombre realism, that knows no touch
of swooning sentimentality. "The Order of Release" of 1853 shows a
jailor in the scarlet uniform of the eighteenth century opening a heavy
prison door to set at liberty a Highlander, whose release has been
obtained by his wife. A scene from the seventeenth century is treated in
"The Proscribed Royalist": a noble cavalier, hidden in a hollow tree, is
kissing the hand of a graceful, trembling woman, who has been daily
bringing him food at the risk of her life. "The Black Brunswicker" of
1856 closed this series of silent and motionless dramas. In the picture
of 1857, "Sir Isumbras at the Ford," an old knight is riding home
through the twilight of a sultry day in June. The dust of the journey
lies upon his golden armour. At a ford he has fallen in with two
children, and has lifted them up to carry them over the water. And "The
Vale of Rest," a picture deep and intense in its scheme of colour,
earnest and melancholy as a requiem, revealed--with a sentiment a little
like that of Lessing--a cloister garden where two nuns are silently
preparing a grave in the evening light; while "The Eve of Saint Agnes"
in 1863 illustrated the same poem of Keats to which ten years previously
Holman Hunt had devoted his work of early years. Madeleine has heard the
old legend, telling how girls receive the tender homage of their future
husbands if they go through their evening prayer supperless at midnight.
With her heart filled with the thoughts of love she quits the hall where
the guests are seated at a merry feast, and mounts to her room so
hastily that her thin taper is extinguished on the way. She enters her
little chamber, kneels down, repeats the prayer, and rises to her feet,
taking off her finery and loosening her hair. The clear moonlight
streams through the window, throwing a ghostly illumination over the
little images of saints in the room, falling like a caress upon the
tender young breast of the girl, playing upon her folded hands, and
touching her long, fair hair with a radiance like a vaporous glory. In
the shadow of the bed she sees him whom she loves. Motionless, as in a
dream, she stands, nor ventures to turn lest the fair vision should
vanish. "The Deliverance of a Heretic condemned to the Stake," "Joan of
Arc," "Cinderella," "The Last Rose," that dreamy picture of romantic
grace, "The Childhood of Sir Walter Raleigh," and the picture of the
hoary Moses, supported by Hur and Aaron, watching from the mountain-top
the victory of Joshua, were the principal works achieved in the later
years of the master. But when these pictures were executed England had
become accustomed to honour Millais, not as a pre-Raphaelite, but as her
greatest portrait painter.
[Illustration: MILLAIS. THOMAS CARLYLE.]
His portrait of himself explains this transformation. With his white
linen jacket and his fresh sunburnt face Sir John Millais does not look
in the least like a "Romanticist," scarcely like a painter; he has
rather the air of being a wealthy landowner. He was a man of a sound and
straightforward nature, a great and energetic master, conscious of his
aim, but a poet in Ruskin's sense of the word is what he has never been.
His pre-Raphaelitism was only a flirtation. His methods of thought were
too concrete, his hand too powerful, for him to have lingered always in
the world of the English poets, or endured the precise style of the
pre-Raphaelites. "Millais will 'go far' if he will only change his
boots," About had written on the occasion of the World Exhibition of
1855; when that of 1867 was opened Millais appeared in absolutely new
shoes. The great exhibition of 1857 in Manchester, which made known for
the first time how many of the works of Velasquez were hidden in English
private collections, had helped Millais to the knowledge of himself.
From the naturalism of the Quattrocentisti he made a transition to the
naturalism of Velasquez.
Millais was a born portrait painter. His cool and yet finely sensitive
nature, his simple, manly temperament, directed him to this department,
which rather gravitates to the observant and imitative than to the
creative pole of art. In his pictures he has the secret of enchanting
and of repelling; he has arrived at really definite issues in portrait
painting. His likenesses are all of them as convincing as they are
actual. Together with the Venetians and with Velasquez, Millais belongs
to the master spirits of the grand style, which relies upon the large
movement of lines, in figure and in face, upon the broad foundation of
surfaces, and the strict subordination of individual details. His
figures are characteristic and recognisable even in outline. He makes no
effort to render them interesting by picturesque attitudes, or to vivify
them by placing them in any situation. There they stand calm, and
sometimes stiff and cold; they make no attempt at conversation with the
spectator, nor come out of themselves, as it were, but fix their eyes
upon him with an air of well-bred composure and indifference. Even the
hands are not made use of for characterisation.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
MILLAIS. THE VALE OF REST.]
The extraordinary intensity of life which sparkles in his great figures,
so simply displayed, is almost exclusively concentrated in the heads.
Millais is perhaps the first master of characterisation amongst the
moderns. To bold and powerful exposition there is united a noble and
psychical gaze. The eyes which he paints are like windows through which
the soul is visible.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. THE LAST OF ENGLAND.]
Amongst his portraits of men, those of Gladstone and Hook stand in the
first rank: as paintings perhaps they are not specially eminent; both
have an opaque, sooty tone, from which Millais' works not unfrequently
suffer, but as a definition of complex personalities they are comparable
only with the best pictures of Lenbach. How firmly does the statesman
hold himself, despite his age, the old tree-feller, the stern idealist,
a genuine English figure chiselled out of hard wood. The play of light
centres all the interest on the fine, earnest, and puckered features,
the lofty forehead, the energetic chin, and the liquid, thoughtful eyes.
All the biography of Gladstone lies in this picture, which is simpler
and greater in intuition than that which Lenbach painted of him. Hook,
with his broad face, furrowed with wrinkles, looks like an apostle or a
fisher. Millais has looked into the heart of this man, who has in him
something rugged and faithful, massive and tender; the painter of
vigorous fishermen and vaporous sunbeams. Hook's landscapes have a
forceful, earnest, and well-nigh religious effect, and something
patriarchal and biblical lies in his gentle, reflective, and
contemplative glance.
In his portrait of the Duke of Westminster, painted in 1878, Millais
depicts him in hunting dress, red coat, white corduroys, and high,
flexible boots, as he stands and buttons on his glove. The same year
"The Yeoman of the Guard" was exhibited in Paris--the old type of
discipline and loyalty, who sits there in his deep red uniform, with
features cast in bronze, like a Velasquez of 1878. Disraeli, Cardinal
Newman, John Bright, Lord Salisbury, Charles Waring, Sir Henry Irving,
the Marquis of Lorne, and Simon Fraser are all worthy descendants of the
eminent men whom Reynolds painted a century before. The plastic effect
of the figures is increased by the vacant, neutral ground of the
picture. Like Velasquez, Millais has made use of every possible
background, from the simplest, from the nullity of an almost black or
bright surface, to richly furnished rooms and views of landscape.
Sometimes it is only indicated by a plain chair or table that the figure
is standing in a room, or a heavy crimson curtain falls to serve as a
_repoussoir_ for the head. With a noble abstention he avoids prettiness
of line and insipid motives, and remains true to this virile taste even
in his portraits of women. His women have curiously little of the
æsthetical trait which runs elsewhere through English portraits of
ladies. Millais renders them--as in the picture "Dummy Whist"--neither
sweet nor tender, gives them nothing arch, sprightly, nor triumphant.
Severe and sculptural in their mien, and full of character rather than
beauty, proud in bearing and upright in pose, their serious, energetic
features betray decision of character; and the glance of their brown
eyes--eyes like Juno's--is indifferent and almost hard. A straight and
liberal forehead, a beautifully formed and very determined mouth, and a
full, round chin complete this impression of earnest dignity, august
majesty, and chilling pride. To this regular avoidance of every trace of
available charm there is joined a strict taste in toilette. He prefers
to work with dark or subdued contrasts of colour, and he is also fond of
large-flowered silks--black with citron-yellow and black with dark red.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. WORK.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
And this same stringent painter of character commands, as few others,
the soft light brush of a painter of children. No one since Reynolds and
Gainsborough has painted with so much character as Millais the dazzling
freshness of English youth; the energetic pose of a boy's head or the
beauty of an English girl--a thing which stands in the world alone: the
soft, glancing, silken locks, rippling to a _blonde cendrée_, pale,
delicate little faces, pouting little mouths, and great, shining blue,
dreamy, childish eyes. Sometimes they stand in rose-coloured dresses
embroidered with silver in front of a deep green curtain, or sit reading
upon a dark red carpet flowered with black. At other times they are
arrayed like the little Infantas of Velasquez, and play with a spaniel
like the Doge's children of Titian, or hold out with both hands an apron
full of flowers, which Millais paints with a high degree of finish. A
spray of pale red roses, chrysanthemums, or lilies stands near. One must
be a great master of characterisation to paint conscious, dignified, and
earnest feminine beauty like that of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, and at the same
time that fragrant perfume of the fresh and dewy spring of youth which
breathes from Millais' pictures of children.
[Illustration: PHILLIP. THE LETTER-WRITER, SEVILLE.]
Millais is one of those men in the history of nineteenth-century
painting who are as forcible and healthy as they are many-sided. I do
not know one who could have developed so swiftly from a style of the
most minute exactness to one of the most powerful breadth; not one who
could have united such poetry of conception with such an enormous
knowledge of human beings; not one who could have been so like Proteus
in variety--at one moment charming, at another dreamy, at another
entirely positive. In their firm structure and largeness of manner his
landscapes sometimes recall Théodore Rousseau. And now the
pre-Raphaelite is just a little evident in an excess of detail. He
paints every blade of grass and every small plant, though there is at
the same time a largeness in the midst of this scrupulous exactitude. He
does not merely see the isolated fact through a magnifying lens, but has
eyes that are sensitive to the poetry of the whole, and in spite of all
study of detail he sometimes reaches a total effect which is altogether
impressionist. His picture "Chill October" has an airy life, a grey,
vibrating atmosphere, such as only John Constable painted elsewhere.
Such a concrete study of nature as was made by the pre-Raphaelites of
necessity led at last to entirely realistic pictures from modern life.
In their biblical and poetic pictures they had started from the
conviction that new life-blood could only be poured into the old
conventional types, which had gradually become meaningless by tactfully
drawing the models for them from popular life. They believed, as the
masters of Florence and Bruges had done before them, that there could be
no good painting without strict dependence on the model; that it was of
the utmost importance to give a poetic or legendary figure the stamp of
nature, the strong savour of individuality. All their creations are
based upon the elements of portrait painting, even when they illustrate
remote scenes from the New Testament or from mediæval poetry. And these
elements at last led them altogether to give up transposing such figures
into an alien _milieu_, and simply to paint what was offered by their
own surroundings. In this way they reached the goal which was arrived at
in French painting through Courbet and Ribot. It is due in the first
place to the pre-Raphaelites that the well-meant and moderately painted
_genre_ picture of the old style, which, with its wealth of pathetic
stories, was once a prime source of supposed artistic pleasure, was
finally vanquished in England, and made way for earnest and vigorous
painting,--painting which sought to make its effect by purely artistic
means, and proudly declined attempt to conceal intrinsic weakness in
"interesting" subject drawn from external sources. As early as 1855
Millais exhibited a picture in the Royal Academy which Ruskin called a
truly great work containing the elements of immortality--"The Rescue."
It represented a fireman who has carried three children from a burning
house and laid them in the arms of their parents. Narrative purport was
entirely renounced. The fireman was treated without sentimentality, and
in a way that suggested the cool fulfilment of a duty, and the agitation
of the parents was also rendered without any dash of melodrama. Then
there followed that masterpiece of exquisite and soft colouring, tender
and moving expression, and infinite grace, "The Gambler's Wife," sadly
taking up the cards which have brought her misery upon her. In 1874 was
painted "The North-West Passage," a sort of modern symbol of the
forceful, enterprising English people who have populated and subdued
half the world from their little island kingdom. "There is a passage to
the Pole, and England will find it--must find it." These are more or
less the words spoken by Trelawney, the old friend and comrade of Byron
in Greece. With a chart before him he is brooding over the plan of the
North-West Passage, and upon his own outstretched hand, which would fain
hold the future in its grasp, the hand of a youthful woman is soothingly
laid, as she sits at his feet reading to him the narrative of the last
voyage of discovery. The figure of the seaman with his white beard has
a strong, sinewy life, and the broad daylight streams through the room,
filled with charts and atlases. The sea and clear, bright sky gleam
through the open window. It is a powerful and moving picture, one of
those modern creations in which the ideas of the nineteenth century are
concentrated with simplicity and a renunciation of all hollow emphasis.
[Illustration: PHILLIP. SPANISH SISTERS.]
A few pictures of modern life which have nothing in common with the
older _genre_ painting may even be found among the works of the
devotionalist Holman Hunt. "Awakened Conscience," according to the
explanation of the painter, tells the story of a young woman seduced by
a cruel and light-minded man, and kept in a luxurious little
country-house. They are together. Seated at the piano he is playing the
old melody "Oft in the Stilly Night," and the strains of the song recall
to the frail maiden her youth, and the years of purity and innocence.
Thus even Hunt has not overcome the moralising tendencies of Hogarth,
though his taste is more discreet and delicate. He has struck deeper
chords of thought than the English public had heard before. And in
particular the painting is not a mere substratum for the story; it has
become the principal thing, and the story subsidiary. In another
picture, "May Morning on Magdalen Tower," he renounced all deeper
purpose altogether, and merely painted a number of Oxford dons and
students, who, in accordance with the old custom, usher in the May with
a hymn from the college tower.
But the most remarkable work of this description has been executed by
Madox Brown, the English Menzel, who has not merely reconstructed the
environment of past ages with the accuracy of an eye-witness, but has
looked upon the drama of modern life as an attentive observer. His first
picture, "The Last of England," was executed in the June of 1852, at a
time when emigration to America began to take serious proportions. A
married couple, humble, middle-class people, are sitting on the deck of
a ship. The man, in his thick cloth overcoat, with a soft felt hat on
his head, a pale face, and sunken eyes with dark rings underneath, casts
one more look upon his native-land, which vanishes in the hazy distance,
as he thinks bitterly of lost hopes and vain struggles. But the young
wife, in a light-coloured cloak and a pretty round bonnet with wide
strings, gazes before her with gentle resignation, from underneath a
great umbrella protecting her from the boisterous sea-wind.
In "Work," begun at the same period, and finished, after various
interruptions, in 1865, he has produced the first modern picture of
artisans after Courbet's "Stone-breakers." The painter, who was then
living in Hampstead, where extensive cuttings were being made for the
laying down of gas-pipes, daily saw the English artisan at labour in all
his thick-set strength. This gave him the theme for his picture. In
bright daylight on a glaring summer afternoon artisans are digging a
trench for gas-pipes in a busy street. Women and poor children are
standing near. Even the older _genre_ artists had painted men in their
working blouses, but only joking and making merry, never at work. Like
stage-managers who are sure of their public, they always set the same
troop of puppets dancing. Madox Brown's artisans are robust and
raw-boned figures; where the older artists affected to be witty with
their _genre_ painting, Madox Brown painted straightforwardly, without
humour and without making his figures beautiful. The composition of his
pictures is just as plain. No one poses, no one makes impassioned
gestures, no one thinks of grouping himself with his neighbour in fine
flowing lines. It is pleasant to think that this powerful symbol of work
has passed by presentation into the possession of one of the greatest
manufacturing towns in England, into the gallery of Manchester.
[Illustration: R. ANSDELL. A SETTER AND GROUSE.]
A Scotchman, born in Aberdeen, _John Phillip_ was the vigorous abettor
of the pre-Raphaelites in these realistic endeavours. He, too, was a
painter in the full meaning of the word, and he has therefore left works
with which the future will have to reckon. Velasquez had opened his eyes
as he had opened those of Millais. When Phillip went to Spain in 1851,
he was not the first who had trod the Museo del Prado. Wilkie had
painted in Spain before him, and Ansdell had been busy there at the same
time. But no one had been able to grasp in any degree the impressive
majesty of the old Spanish painters. John Phillip alone gained something
of the _verve_ of Velasquez, a broad, virile technique which
distinguishes him from all his English contemporaries. The impression
received from his pictures is one of opulence, depth, and weight; they
unite something of the strength of Velasquez to a more Venetian
splendour of colour. The streets of Seville, the Spanish port on the
Guadalquivir, the town where Velasquez and Murillo were born, were his
chief field of study. Here he saw those market-women, black as mulattoes
and sturdy as grenadiers, who sit in front of their fruit-baskets under
a great umbrella, and those water-carriers with sunburnt visages,
strongly built chests, and athletic arms.
After he had returned to Scotland he occasionally painted pictures of
ceremonies, "The House of Commons," "The Wedding of the Princess
Royal," and so forth, but he soon returned to subjects from Spanish
life. Gipsy-looking, cigarette-smoking women, with sparkling eyes and
jet-black hair, young folks dancing to the castanets, bull-fighters with
glittering silver-grey costume and flashing glances, dark-brown peasants
in citron-yellow petticoats, hollow-eyed manufactory girls, potters, and
glass-blowers.--such are the materials of Phillip's pictures. They give
no scope to anecdote; but they always reveal a fragment of reality which
emits a world of impressions and an opulence of artistic ability. As
painter _par excellence_, John Phillip stands in opposition to older
English _genre_ painters. Whilst they were, in the first place, at pains
to tell a story intelligibly, Phillip was a colourist, a _maître
peintre_, whose figures were developed from the colours, and whose
creations are so full of character that they will always assert their
place with the best that has ever been painted. Even in England, the
country of literary and narrative painting, art was no longer an
instrument for expressing ideas; it had become an end in itself, and had
discovered colour as its prime and most essential medium of expression.
CHAPTER XXIX
REALISM IN GERMANY
In Germany the realistic movement was carried out in much the same way
as in France, though it came into action two decades after its French
original. Here also it was recognised that the well-meant but badly
painted anecdote must give way to the well-painted picture: and if we
inquire who it was that gave to Germany the first serious paintings
inspired by the modern spirit the reply, without hesitation, must be
Adolf Menzel. The pioneering work of this great little man, who for
fifty years had embodied in their typical perfection all phases of
German art, is something fabulous: the greatest and, one might almost
say, the only historical painter of bygone epochs, the only one who knew
a previous period so intimately that he could venture on painting it,
was also the leader of the great movement which, in the seventies, aimed
at the representation of our own life. His first appearance was in the
time when the proud Titan Cornelius sought to take heaven by storm.
Little Menzel was no Titan in those days; he seems in that generation
like one bound to the earth, yet he belonged to the Cyclopean race. He
was a mighty architect with the powers of a giant; and this uncouth
Cyclops rough-hewed and chiselled the blocks, and, fitting each in its
place, raised an edifice to as lofty a height as the Romanticists had
reached on the perilous wings of Icarus. Having been first the
draughtsman and then the painter of Frederick the Great, he gave up
history after finishing the picture of the Battle of Hochkirch: his
talent was too modern, too much set upon what was concrete, to admit of
its being given full scope to the end by constructive work from a
_milieu_ that was not his own. Until his fortieth year he had celebrated
the glorious past of his country. When, with the death of Friedrich
Wilhelm IV, a great and decisive turn was given to the politics of the
Prussian state--one which put an end to the stagnation of civil life in
Prussia and Germany, and ushered in a new and brilliant period for the
realm and the heirs of Friedrich--the painter of Friedrich the Great
became the painter of the new realm. After he had already, in the first
half of the century, placed reality on the throne of art in the place of
rhetoric and a vague ideal, he went one step further in the direction of
keen and direct observation, and now painted what he saw around him--the
stream of palpitating life.
"The Coronation of King Wilhelm at Königsberg" is the great and
triumphant title-page to this section of his art. The effects of light,
the red tones of the uniforms, the shimmering white silk dresses, the
surging of the mass of people, the perfect ease with which all the
personages are individualised, the princes, the ministers, the
ambassadors, the men of learning, the instantaneousness in the movement
of the figures, the absolutely unforced and yet subtle and pictorial
composition, render this painting no picture of ceremonies, in the
traditional sense of the phrase, but a work of art at once intimate and
august in the impression which it makes. In the picture "King Wilhelm
setting out to join the Army"--the representation of the thrilling
moment, on the afternoon of 31st July 1870, when the King drove along
the linden avenue to the railway station--this phase, which he began
with the Coronation picture, was brought to a close. Everything surges
and moves, speaks and breathes, and glows with the palpitating life
which vibrates through all in this moment of patriotic excitement. But
the painter's course led him further.
[Illustration: ADOLF MENZEL.]
He first became entirely Menzel when he made the discovery of toiling
humanity. In 1867, in the year of the World Exhibition, he came to Paris
and became acquainted with Meissonier and Stevens. With Meissonier in
particular--whose portrait he painted--he entered into a close
friendship, and it was curious afterwards to see the two together at
exhibitions--the little figure of Menzel with his gigantic bald forehead
and the little figure of Meissonier with his gigantic beard, a Cyclops
and a Gnome, two kings in the realm of Liliput, of whom one was unable
to speak a word of German and the other unable to speak a word of
French, although they had need merely of a look, a shrug, or a movement
of the hand to understand each other entirely. He also came into the
society of Courbet, who had just made the famous separate exhibition of
his works, at the Café Lamartine, in the company of Heilbuth, Meyerheim,
Knaus, and others. Here in Paris he produced his first pictures of
popular contemporary life, and if as an historical painter he had
already been a leader in the struggle against theatrical art, he became
a pioneer in these works also. Everywhere he let in air and made free
movement possible for those who pressed forward in his steps. In the
course of years he painted and drew everything which excited in him
artistic impulse upon any ground whatever, and not one of these
endeavours was work thrown away. A universal genius amongst the painters
of real life, he combined all the qualities of which other men of
excellent talent merely possessed fragments separately apportioned
amongst them: the sharpest eye for every detail of form, the most
penetrative discrimination for the life of the spirit, and at times a
glistening play of colour possessed by none of his German predecessors.
[Illustration: MENZEL. FROM KUGLER'S "HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH THE GREAT."]
Catholic churches seem always to have had a great attraction for him, as
well as the people moving in them, and in this an echo of his _rococo_
enthusiasm is still perceptible. The quaint, _rococo_ churches in the
ornate style favoured by the Jesuits, which are still preserved intact
in Munich and the Tyrol, were those for which he had a peculiar
preference. He lost himself voluptuously in the thousand details of
sculpture, framework, organs, balustrades, and carved pulpits, dimly
outlined in the subdued light from stained-glass windows. In the gloom
it was all transformed into a forest of ornaments, expanding their
traceries like trees in a wood. Sick and infirm people, women in prayer
burying their faces in their hands, and lame men with crutches, kneel or
move amid the luxuriant efflorescence of stone and wood and gold, of
angels' heads and shrines, garlands of flowers, consoles, and fonts of
holy water. Twisted marble pillars, church banners, lamps and lustres
mount in a confusion of capricious outlines at once tasteful and piquant
to the vaulted dome, where the painted skies, blackened by the
ascending mist of incense, seem waywardly fantastic.
After the churches the salons appealed to him. There came his pictures
of modern society: ladies and cavaliers of the Court upon ballroom
balconies, the conversation of Privy Councillors in the salon, the
marvellous ball supper, where a mass of beautiful shoulders, splendid
uniforms, and rustling silken trains move amid mirrors, lustres,
colonnades, and gilded frames. "The Ball Supper" of 1870 is a vivid
picture, bathed in glistening light. The music has stopped. And from a
door of the brilliantly lighted ballroom the company is streaming into
the neighbouring apartment, where the supper-table has been laid, and
groups of ladies and men in animated conversation are beginning to
occupy the chairs and sofas. In 1879 there followed the famous "Levee":
the Emperor Wilhelm in the red Court uniform of the _Gardes du Corps_ is
talking with a lady, surrounded by a sea of heads, uniforms, and naked
bowing shoulders. Though it was always necessary in earlier
representations of the kind to have a _genre_ episode to compensate the
insufficient artistic interest of the work, in Menzel's pictures the
pictorial situation is grasped as a whole. They have the value of a
book; they neither falsify nor beautify anything, and they will hand
down to the future an encyclopædia of types of the nineteenth century.
From the salon he went to the street, from exclusive aristocratic
circles into the midst of the eddying crowd. For many years in
succession Menzel was a constant visitor at the small watering-places in
the Austrian and Bavarian Alps. The multitude of people at the concerts,
in the garden of the restaurant, on the promenade, at the open-air
services, were precisely the things to occupy his brush. The light
rippled through the leaves of the trees; women, children, and well-bred
men of the world listened to the music or the words of the preacher. One
person leaves a seat and another takes it; everything lives and moves.
Huge and lofty trees stretch out their arms, protecting the company from
the sun. Unusually striking was "The Procession in Gastein": in the
centre was the priest bearing the Host, then the choristers in their red
robes, in front the visitors and tourists who had hastened to see the
spectacle, and in the background the mountain heights. The bustle of
people gives Menzel the opportunity for a triumph. In Kissingen he
painted the promenade at the waters; in Paris the Sunday gaiety in the
garden of the Tuileries, the street life upon the boulevard, the famous
scene in the _Jardin des Plantes_, with the great elephants and the
vivid group of Zouaves and ladies; in Verona the Piazza d'Erbe, with the
swarm of people crowding in between the open booths and shouting at the
top of their voices. Many after him have represented such scenes,
although few have had the secret of giving their figures such seething
life, or painting them, like Menzel, as parts of one great, surging, and
many-headed multitude.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. THE CORONATION OF KING WILHELM I.]
People travelling have always been for him a source of much amusement:
men sitting in the corner of a railway carriage with their legs crossed
and their hats over their eyes, yawning or asleep; women looking out of
the windows or counting their ready money. Alternating with such themes
are those monotonous yet simple and therefore genial landscapes from the
suburbs of the great city, poor, neglected regions with machines and men
at their labour. Children bathing in a dirty stream bordered by little,
stunted willows; small craft gliding over a river, sailors leaping from
one vessel to another, men landing sacks or barrels, and great, heavy
cart-horses dragging huge waggons loaded with beer-barrels along the
dusty country road. Or the scaffolding of a house is being raised. Six
masons are at work upon it, and they are working in earnest. A green
bush waves (German fashion) above the scaffolding, and further off long
rows of houses stretch away, and the aqueducts and gas-works which
supply the huge crater of Berlin, and day-labourers are seen wheeling up
barrow-loads of stones. For the first time a German painter sings the
canticle of labour.
[Illustration: MENZEL. FROM KUGLER'S "HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH THE GREAT."]
From the streets he enters the work-places, and interprets the wild
poetry of roaring machines in smoky manufactories. The masterpiece of
this group is that bold and powerful picture, his "Iron Mill" of 1876.
The workshop of the great rail-forge of Königshütte in Upper Silesia is
full of heat and steam. The muscular, brawny figures of men with glowing
faces stand at the furnace holding the tongs in their swollen hands.
Their vigorous gestures recall Daumier. Upon the upper part of their
bodies, which is naked, the light casts white, blue, and dark red
reflections, and over the lower part it flickers in reddish, greenish,
and violet tinges, on the creases in their clothing. The smoke rising in
spirals is of a whitish-red, and the beams supporting the roof are lit
up with a sombre glow. Heat, sweat, movement, and the glare of fire are
everywhere. Dust and dirt, strong, raw-boned iron-workers washing
themselves, or exhausted with hard toil, snatching a hasty meal, a
confusion of belting and machinery, no pretty anecdote but sober
earnest, no story but pure painting--these were the great and decisive
achievements of this picture. Courbet's "Stone-breakers" of 1851, Madox
Brown's "Work" of 1852, and Menzel's "Iron Mill" are the standard works
in the art of the nineteenth century.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. THE DAMENSTIFTSKIRCHE AT MUNICH.]
Within German art Menzel has won an _enclave_ for himself, a rock amid
the sea. In France during the sixties he represented German art in
general. France offered him celebrity, and after this recognition he had
the fortune to be honoured in his native-land before he was overtaken by
old age. His realism was permitted to him at a time when realistic aims
were elsewhere reckoned altogether as æsthetic errors. This explains the
remarkable fact that Menzel's toil of fifty years had scarcely any
influence on the development of German painting; it would scarcely be
different from what it is now if he had never existed. When he might
have been an exemplar there was no one who dared to follow him. And
later, when German art as a whole had entered upon naturalistic lines,
the differences between him and the younger generation were more
numerous than their points of sympathy, so that it was impossible for
him to have a formative influence. He stood out in the new period merely
as a power commanding respect, like a hero of ancient times. Even the
isolated realistic onsets made in Berlin in the seventies are in no way
to be connected with him.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. KING WILHELM SETTING OUT TO JOIN THE ARMY.]
If realism consisted in the dry and sober illustration of selected
fragments of reality, if upright feeling, loyalty, and honest patriotism
were serviceable qualities in art, a lengthier consideration should
certainly be accorded to _Anton von Werner_. In his _genre_ pictures of
campaign life everything is spick and span, everything is in its right
place and in soldierly order: it is all typically Prussian art. His
portraits are casino pictures, and as such it is impossible to imagine
how they could better serve their purpose. From the spurs to the
cuirassier helmet everything is correct and in accordance with military
regulation; even the likeness has something officially prescribed which
would make any recruit form front if suddenly brought face to face with
such a person. In his pictures of ceremonies his ability was just
sufficient to chronicle the function in question with the
conscientiousness of a clerk in a law court. The intellectual capacity
for seeing more of a great man than his immaculately polished boots and
the immaculately burnished buttons of his uniform was denied him, as was
the artistic capacity of exalting a picture-sheet to the level of a
picture.
Equipped with a healthy though trivial feeling for reality, _Carl
Güssow_ ventured to approach nature in a sturdy and robust fashion in
some of his works, and exhibited in Berlin a few life-sized figures,
"Pussy," "A Lover of Flowers," "Lost Happiness," "Welcome," "The Oyster
Girl," and so forth. Through these he opened for a brief period in
Berlin the era of yellow kerchiefs and black finger-nails, and on the
strength of them was exalted by the critics as a pioneer of realism or
else anathematised, according to their æsthetic creed. He had a robust
method of painting muscles and flesh and clothes of many colours, and of
setting green beside red and red beside yellow, yet even in these first
works--his only works of artistic merit--he never got beyond the banal
and barbaric transcript of a reality which was entirely without
interest.
_Max Michael_ seems to be somewhat influenced by Bonvin. Like the
latter, he was attracted by the silent motions of nuns, juicy
vegetables, dark-brown wainscoting, and the subdued light of interiors.
He was, like Ribot in France, although with less artistic power, a good
representative of that "school of cellar skylights" which imitated in a
sound manner the tone of the old Spanish masters. One of his finest
pictures, which hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, represents a girls'
school in Italy. A nun is presiding over the sewing-lesson; the
background is brown; the light comes through the yellow glass of a high
and small window (like that of an attic), and throws a brown dusky tone
over the room, in which the gay costumes of the little Italian girls,
with their white kerchiefs, make exceedingly pretty and harmonious spots
of colour. No adventure is hinted at, no episode related, but the
picturesque appearance of the little girls, and their tones in the
space, are all the more delicately rendered. A refined scheme of colour
recalling the old masters compensates for the want of incident.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. THE IRON MILL.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. SUNDAY IN THE TUILERIES GARDENS.]
In Vienna _August von Pettenkofen_ made a transition from the ossified,
antediluvian _genre_ painting to painting which was artistically
delicate. While the successors of Gauermann and Danhauser indulged in
heart-breaking scenes or humorous episodes, Pettenkofen was the first to
observe the world from a purely pictorial point of view. Alfred Stevens
had opened his eyes in Paris in 1851. Troyon's pictures and Millet's
confirmed him in his efforts. He was brought up on a property belonging
to his father in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before he
turned to painting: horses, peasants, and oxen are the simple figures of
his pictures. In the place of episodic, ill-painted stories he set the
meagre plains of lonely Pusta, sooty forges, gloomy cobblers' work
shops, dirty courtyards with middens and rubbish-heaps, gipsy
encampments, and desolate garrets. There is no pandering to
sentimentality or the curiosity excited by _genre_ painting. There are
delicate chords of colour, and that is enough. The artist was in the
habit of spending the summer months in the little town of Spolnok on the
Theiss, to the east of Pesth. Here he wandered about amongst the little
whitewashed houses, the booths of general dealers, and the
fruit-sellers' stalls. A lazily moving yoke of oxen with a lad asleep,
dark-eyed girls fetching water, poor children playing on the ground, old
men dreaming in the sun in a courtyard, are generally the only breathing
beings in his pictures. Here is a sandy village-square with low,
white-washed houses; there is a wain with oxen standing in the street,
or a postilion trotting away on his tired nag. Like Menzel, Pettenkofen
paints busy humanity absorbed in their toil, simple beings who do not
dream of leaving off work for the sake of those who frequent picture
galleries. What differentiates him from the Berlin painter is a more
lyrical impulse, something tender, thoughtful, and contemplative. Menzel
gives dramatic point to everything he touches; he sets masses in
movement, depicts a busy, noisy crowd, pressing together and elbowing
one another, forcing their way at the doors of theatres or the windows
of cafés in a multifarious throng. Pettenkofen lingers with the petty
artisan and the solitary sempstress. In Menzel's "Iron Mill" the sparks
are flying and the machines whirring, but everything is peaceful and
quiet in the cobblers' workshops and the sunny attics visited by
Pettenkofen. Menzel delights in momentary impressions and quivering
life; Pettenkofen in rest and solitude. In the former every one is
thinking and talking and on the alert; in the latter every one is
yawning or asleep. If Menzel paints a waggon, the driver cracks his whip
and one hears the team rattling over the uneven pavement; in Pettenkofen
the waggon stands quietly in a narrow lane, the driver enjoys a midday
rest, and an enervating, sultry heat broods overhead. Menzel has a love
for men and women with excitement written on their faces; Pettenkofen
avoids painting character, contenting himself with the reproduction of
simple actions at picturesque moments. The Berlin artist is
epigrammatically sharp; the Viennese is elegiac and melancholy. Menzel's
pictures have the changing glitter of rockets; those of Pettenkofen are
harmonised in the tone of a refined amateur. They have only one thing in
common: neither has found disciples; they are not culminating peaks in
Berlin or Vienna art so much as boulders wedged into another system.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. A LEVEE.]
Whilst the realistic movement in both towns was confined to particular
masters, Munich had once again the mission of becoming a guiding
influence. Here all the tendencies of modern art have left the most
distinct traces, all movements were consummated with most consistency.
The heroes of Piloty followed the divinities of Cornelius, and these
were in turn succeeded by the Tyrolese peasants of Defregger, and amid
all this difference of theme one bond connected these works: for
interesting subject was the matter of chief importance in them, and the
purely pictorial element was something subordinate. The efforts of the
seventies had for their object the victory of this pictorial element. It
was recognised that the talent for making humorous points and telling
stories, which came in question as the determining quality in the
pictures of monks and peasants of the school of Defregger and Grützner,
was the expression of no real faculty for formative art--that it was
merely technical incompleteness complacently supported by the lack of
artistic sensibility in the public which had produced this narrative
painting. It was felt that the task of formative art did not consist in
narrative, but in representation, and in representation through the most
sensuous and convincing means which stood at its disposal. A renewed
study of the old masters made this recognition possible.
[Illustration: GÜSSOW. THE ARCHITECT.
(_By permission of M. H. Salomonson, Esq., the owner of the
picture._)]
Up to this time the most miserable desolation had also reigned over the
province of the artistic crafts. But, borne up by the rekindled
sentiment of nationality, and favoured by the high tide of the milliards
paid by France, since 1870, that eventful movement bearing the words
"Old German" and "Fine Style" on its programme had become an
accomplished fact. The German Renaissance, which research had been
hitherto neglected, was discovered afresh. Lübke explored it thoroughly
and systematically; Woltmann wrote on Hans Holbein, Thausing on Dürer;
Eitelberger founded the Austrian Industrial Museum; Georg Hirth brought
out his _Deutsches Zimmer_, and began the publication of the
_Formenschatz_. The national form of art of the German Renaissance was
taken up everywhere with a proud consciousness of patriotism: here, it
was thought, was a panacea. Those who followed the artistic crafts
declared open war against everything pedestrian and tedious. _Lorenz
Gedon_ in particular--in union with Franz and Rudolf Seitz--was the soul
of the movement. With his black, curly hair, his little, fiery, dark
eyes, his short beard, his negligent dress, and his two great hands
expert in the exercise of every description of art, he had himself
something of the character of an old German stone-cutter. His manner of
expressing himself corresponded to this appearance. In every thing it
was original, saturated with his own personal conception of the world.
As the son of a dealer in old pictures and curiosities, he was familiar
with the old masters from his childhood, and followed them in the method
of his study. He was far from confining himself to one branch. The
façades of houses, the architecture of interiors, tavern rooms and
festal decorations, furniture and state carriages, statues and
embellishments in stone, bronze, wood, and iron, portrait busts in wax,
clay, and marble, models for ornaments, for iron lattices, for the
adornment of ships and the fittings of cabins, all objects that were
wayward, fantastic, quaint, and curious lay in his province; and for the
execution of each in turn this remarkable man felt that he had in him an
equal capacity. And, at the same time, the temperament of a collector
was united in him with that of an artist in an entirely special way. In
the bushy wilderness of a garden before his house in the Nymphenburger
Strasse countless stone fragments of mediæval sculpture were strewn
about, up to the very hedge dividing it from the street. Rusty old
trellises of wrought iron slanted in front of the windows, and in the
house itself the most precious objects, which artists ten years before
had passed without heed, stood in masses together. As Gedon was taken
from his work when he was forty his artistic endeavour never got beyond
efforts of improvisation, but the impulse which he gave was very
powerful. Through his initiative the whole province of the artistic
crafts was brought under observation from a pictorial point of view. The
bald Philistine style of decoration gave way and a blithe revel of
colour was begun. The great carnival feasts arranged by him on the model
of the Renaissance period are an important episode in the history of
culture in Munich, and have contributed in no unessential manner to the
refinement of taste in the toilette of women. The Munich Exhibition of
the Arts and Crafts in 1876 (before the entrance of which he had erected
that great portal made of old fragments of architecture, wood-carving,
and splendid stuffs, and bearing the inscription "The Works of our
Fathers") indicated the zenith of that movement in the handicrafts which
was flooding all Germany in those days.
The course which was run by this movement in the following years is well
known, and it is well known how the imitation of the German Renaissance
soon became as wearisome as in the beginning it had been attractive.
After it had been a little overdone another step was taken, and from the
Renaissance people went to the _baroque_ period, and soon afterwards the
_rococo_ period followed. In these days sobriety has taken the place of
this fever for ornamentation, and the mania for style has resulted in a
surfeit, a weariness and a desire for simplicity and quietude.
Nevertheless the beneficial influence of the movement on the general
elevation of taste is undeniable, and indirectly it was of service to
painting.
[Illustration: _Seeman, Leipzig._ AUGUST VON PETTENKOFEN.]
In rooms where the owner was the only article of the inventory repugnant
to the conception of style, only those pictures were admitted which had
been executed in the exact manner of the old masters. Works of art were
regarded as tasteful furniture, and were obliged to harmonise correctly
with the other appointments of the room; they had, moreover, to be
themselves legitimate "imitations of the Works of our Fathers." And, in
this way, the movement in the handicrafts gave an impulse to a renewed
study of the old masters, carried out with far more refinement than had
hitherto been the case. Amongst the costume painters spread over all
Germany, the experts in costume, working in Munich during the seventies,
form a really artistic race of able painters who were peculiarly
sensitive to colour. They were the historians of art, the connoisseurs
of colour in the ranks of the painters. Piloty did not satisfy them;
they buried themselves in the study of old masters with a delicately
sensitive appreciation of them; they began to mix soft, luxuriant, and
melting colours upon their palettes, and to feel the peculiar joy of
painting. Whilst they imitated the exquisite "little masters" of former
ages, in dimly lighted studios hung with Gobelins, imitating at the same
time the beautifying rust of centuries, they gradually abandoned all
their own tricks of art; and whilst they devoted themselves to detail
they brought about the Renaissance of oil-painting. Compared with
earlier works, their pictures are like rare dainties. They no longer
recognised the end of their calling, as the _genre_ painters had done,
in a one-sided talent for characterisation, but tried once more to lay
chief weight upon the pictorial and artistic appearance of their
pictures. They were conscious of a presentiment that there were higher
spheres of art than the commonplace humour of _genre_ painting, and this
recognition had a very wide bearing. Pictorial point took the place of
narrative humour. If artists had previously painted thoughts they now
began to paint things, and even if the things were bundles of straw,
mediæval hose, and the old robes of cardinals, they were no longer
"invented," but something which had been seen as a whole. It was a
transition towards ultimately painting what had actually taken place
before the artist's eyes.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
PETTENKOFEN. A WOMAN SPINNING.]
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
PETTENKOFEN. IN THE CONVENT YARD.]
That sumptuous, healthy artist of such pictorial ability, _Diez_, the
Victor Scheffel of painting, stands at the head of the group. From his
youth upwards his chief place of resort had been the cabinet of
engravings where he studied Schongauer, Dürer, and Rembrandt, and all
the boon-companions and vagabonds etched or cut in copper or wood, and
on the model of these he painted his own marauders, robber-barons,
peasants in revolt, old German weddings and fairs. His picture "To the
Church Consecration" recalls Beham, his "Merry Riding" Schongauer, and
his "Ambuscade" Dürer, whilst Teniers served as model for his fairs.
Diez knows the period from Dürer and Holbein to Rubens, Rembrandt,
Wouwerman, and Brouwer as thoroughly as an historian of art, and
sometimes--for instance in his "Picnic in the Forest"--he has even drawn
the eighteenth century into the circle of his studies. His pictures had
an unrivalled delicacy of tone, and could certainly hang beside their
Dutch models in the Pinakothek without losing anything by such
proximity.
Something of Brouwer or Ostade revived once more in _Harburger_, the
talented draughtsman of _Fliegende Blätter_, the undisputed monarch
of the kingdom of slouching hats, old mugs, and Delft pipes. Pictures
like "The Peasants' Doctor," "The Card-players," "The Grandmother," "By
the Quiet Fireside," "In the Armchair," and "Easy-going Folk" were
masterpieces of delicate Dutch painting: the tone of his pictures shows
distinction and temperament; they have deep and fine _chiaroscuro_, and
are soft and fluent in execution. _Loefftz_ with his picture "Love and
Avarice" appeared as Quentin Matsys _redivivus_, and then attached
himself in turn to Holbein and Van Dyck; and exercised, like Diez, a
great influence on the younger generation by his activity as a teacher.
_Claus Meyer_, who became one of the best known amongst the young Munich
painters by his "Sewing School in the Nunnery" of 1883, is worthy of
remark inasmuch as he acquired a method of painting which was full of
_nuances_, through modelling himself upon Pieter de Hoogh and Van der
Meer of Delft. Through the windows hung with thin curtains the warm,
quiet daylight falls into the room, glancing on the clean boards of the
floor, on the polished tops of the tables, the white pages of the books,
and the blond and brown hair of the children, playing round it like a
golden nimbus. Another sunbeam streams through the door, which is not
entirely closed, and quivers over the floor in a bright and narrow strip
of light. The intimate representation of peaceful scenes of modest life,
the entirely pictorial representation of peaceful and congenial events,
has taken the place of the adventures dear to _genre_ painting. Old
gentlemen with a glass of beer and a clay pipe, servant-girls peeling
potatoes in the kitchen, pupils at the cloister sitting over their books
in the library, drinkers, smokers, and dicers--such were the quiet,
passive, and silent figures of his later pictures. The mild sunshine
breaks in and plays over them. Light clouds of tobacco smoke float in
the air. Everything is homely and pleasant, touched with a breath of
pictorial charm, comfortable warmth, and poetic fragrance. A hundred
years hence his works will be sold as flawlessly delicate and genuine
old Dutch pictures. _Holmberg_ became the historian of cardinals. A
window, consisting of rounded, clumpy panes, with little glass pictures
let in, forms the background of the room, and in the subdued oil-light
which beams over splendid vessels and ornaments, chests and Gobelins,
the white satin dresses of ladies in the mode of 1640, or the lilac and
purple robes of cardinals from the artist's rich wardrobe, are
displayed, together with the appropriate models.
In _Fritz August Kaulbach_, the most versatile of the group in his
adoption of various manners, the essence of this whole tendency is to be
found. He did not belong to the specialists who restricted themselves,
in a one-sided fashion, to the imitation of the Flemish or the Dutch
masters, but appeared like old Diterici, Proteus-like, now in one and
now in another mask; and, whether he assumed the features of Holbein,
Carlo Dolci, Van Dyck, or Watteau, he had the secret of being invariably
graceful and _chic_.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
DIEZ. RETURNING FROM MARKET.]
[Illustration: CLAUS MEYER. THE SMOKING PARTY.]
When the German Renaissance was at its zenith he painted in the
Renaissance style: harmless _genre_ pictures _à la_ Beyschlag--the joys
of love and of the family circle--but not being so banal as the latter
he painted them with more delicate colouring and finer poetic charm.
Certain single figures were found specially acceptable--for instance,
the daughters of Nuremberg patricians, and noble ladies in the old
German caps, dark velvet gowns, and long plaits like Gretchen's, with
their eyes sometimes uplifted and sometimes lowered, and their hands at
one moment folded and at another carrying a shining covered goblet.
Occasionally these single figures were portraits, but none the less were
they transformed into "ladies in old German costume"; and Kaulbach
understood how to paint, to the utmost satisfaction of his patrons, the
black caps, no less well than the little veil and the net of pearls, and
the greenish-yellow silk of the puffed sleeves, no less well than the
plush border of the dark gown and the antique red Gretchen pocket. Many
of them held a lute and stood amid a spring landscape, before a
streamlet, or a silver-birch, such as Stevens delighted in painting ten
years previously. At that time Fritz August Kaulbach, with greater
softness in his treatment, occupied in Germany the place which Florent
Willems had occupied in Belgium. Since then he has brought nearer to the
public the most various old and modern masters, and he has done so with
fine artistic feeling: in his "May Day" he has revived the pastoral
scenes of Watteau with a felicitous cleverness; in his "St. Cecilia" he
created a total effect of great grace by going arm in arm with Carlo
Dolci and Gabriel Max; his "Pietà" he composed with "the best figures of
Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Titian," just as Gerard de Lairesse
had once recommended to painters. Intermediately he painted frail
flower-like girls _à la_ Gabriel Max, charming little angels _à la_
Thoma, children in Pierrot costume _à la_ Vollon, and little landscapes
_à la_ Gainsborough. He did not find in himself the plan for a new
edifice in erecting his palace of art, but built according to any plans
that came in his way; he simply chose from all existing forms the most
graceful, the most elegant, the most precious, culled from their
beauties only the flowers, and bound them into a tasteful bouquet. In
his modern portraits of women, which in recent years have been his chief
successes, he placed himself between Van Dyck and the English. Of
course, a really _chic_ painter of women, like Sargent, is not to be
thought of in this connection; but for Germany these portraits were in
exceedingly fine taste, had an interesting Kaulbachian trace of
indifferent health, and breathed an _odeur de femme_ which found very
wide approval. In his "Lieschen, the Waitress of the Shooting Festival"
he risked a fresh attempt at treating popular life, and made of it such
a graceful picture that it might almost have been painted by Piglhein;
while in a series of spirited caricatures he even succeeded in
being--Kaulbach. The history of art is wide, and since Fritz August
Kaulbach knows it extremely well, he will certainly find much to paint
that is pleasing and attractive, "_s'il continue à laisser errer son
imagination à travers les formes diverses créées par l'art de tous les
temps_," as the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ said of him on the occasion of
the Vienna World Exhibition of 1878.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
KAULBACH. THE LUTE PLAYER.]
After all, these pictures will have little that is novel for an
historian of the next century. "_Être maître_," says W. Bürger, "_c'est
ne ressembler à personne._" But these were the works of painters who
merely announced the dogma of the infallibility of universal
eclecticism, as the Caracci had done in their familiar sonnets: they
were spirited imitators, whose connection with the nineteenth century
will be known in after years only by the dates of their pictures. As
old masters called back to life, they have enriched the history of art,
as such, by nothing novel. Yet, in replacing superficial imitations by
imitations which were excellent and congenial, they have nevertheless
advanced the history of art in the nineteenth century in another way.
[Illustration: FRANZ LENBACH.]
By the labour of his life each one of them helped to make a place in
Germany for the art of oil-painting, which had been forgotten under the
influence of Winckelmann and Carstens, and in this sense their works
were very important stations, as one might say, on the great
thoroughfare of art. Through systematic imitation of the finest old
masters, the Munich school had in a comparatively short time regained
the appreciation of colour and treatment which had so long been lost. At
a hazy distance lay those times when the distinctive peculiarity of
German painting lay in its wealth of ideas, its want of any sense for
colour, and its clumsy technique, whilst the æsthetic spokesmen praised
these qualities as though they were national virtues. These views had
been altogether renounced, and a decade of strenuous work had been
devoted to the extirpation of all such defects. Such an achievement was
sufficiently great, and sufficiently important and gratifying. This last
resuscitation of the old masters was capable of being turned into a
bridge leading to new regions.
A feeling arose that the limit had been reached, and it arose in those
very men who had advanced furthest in pictorial accomplishment, adapting
and making their own all the ability of the old masters. Painters
believed that they had learnt enough of technique to be able to treat
subjects from modern life in the spirit of these old masters, not
handling them any longer as laboriously composed _genre_ pictures, but
as real works of art. And a group of realists came forward as they had
done in France, and began to seek truth with scientific rigour and an
avoidance of any kind of anecdotic by-play.
The greatest pupil of the old masters, _Franz Lenbach_, stands in a
close and most important relationship with these endeavours of modern
art, through some of his youthful works.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
LENBACH. PORTRAIT OF WILHELM I.]
The public has accustomed itself to think of him only as a portrait
painter, and he is justly honoured as the greatest German portraitist of
the century. But posterity may one day regard it as a special favour of
the gods that Lenbach should have been born at the right time, and that
his progress to maturity fell in the greatest epoch of the century. His
gallery of portraits has been called an epic in paint upon the heroes of
our age. The greatest historical figures of the century have sat to him,
the greatest conquerors and masters in the kingdom of science and art.
Nevertheless this gallery would be worthless to posterity if Lenbach had
not had at his disposal one quality possessed by none of his immediate
predecessors, a sacred respect for nature. At a time when rosy tints,
suave smiles, and idealised drawing were the requirements necessary in
every likeness, at a time when Winterhalter painted great men, not as
they were, but as, in his opinion, they ought to have been--without
reflecting that God Almighty knows best what heads are appropriate for
great men--Lenbach appeared with his brusque veracity of portraiture.
That alone was an achievement in which only a man of original
temperament could have succeeded. If a portrait painter is to prevail
with society a peculiar combination of faculties is necessary, apart
from his individual capacity for art. Lenbach had not only an eye and a
hand, but likewise elbows and a tongue which placed him _hors concours_.
He could be as rude as he was amiable, and as deferential as he was
proud; half boor and half courtier, at once a great artist and an
accomplished _faiseur_, he succeeded in doing a thing which has brought
thousands to ruin--he succeeded in forcing upon society his own taste,
and setting genuine human beings of strong character in the place of the
smiling automatons of fashionable painters. In comparison with the works
of earlier portrait painters it might be said that a touch of pantheism
and nature-worship goes through Lenbach's pictures.
[Illustration: _Seeman, Leipzig._
LENBACH. PRINCE BISMARK.]
And what makes this so invaluable is that his greatness depends really
less upon artistic qualities than upon his being a highly gifted man who
understands the spirit of others. It is not merely artistic technique
that is essential in a portrait, but before everything a psychical grasp
of the subject. No artist, says Lessing, is able to interpret a power
more highly spiritual than that which he possesses himself. And this is
precisely the weak side in so many portrait painters, since a man's art
is by no means always in any direct relationship with the development of
his spiritual powers. In this respect a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach
stands to one by Anton von Werner, as an interpretation of Goethe by
Hehn stands to one by Düntzer. To speak of the congenial conception in
Lenbach's pictures of Bismarck is a safe phrase. There will always
remain something wanting, but since Lenbach's works are in existence one
knows, at any rate, that this something can be reduced to a far lower
measure than it has been by the other Bismarck portraits. "_Bien
comprendre son homme_," says Bürger-Thoré, "_est la première qualité du
portraitiste_," and this faculty of the gifted psychologist has made
Lenbach the historian elect of a great period, the active recorder of a
mighty era. It even makes him seem greater than most foreign portrait
painters. How solid, but at the same time how matter-of-fact, does
Bonnat seem by Lenbach's side! One should not look at a dozen Bonnats
together; a single one arrests attention by the plastic treatment of the
person, but if you see several at the same time all the figures have
this same plastic character, all of them have the same pose, and they
all seem to have employed the same tailor. Lenbach has no need of all
that characterisation by means of accessories in which Bonnat delights.
He only paints the eyes with thoroughness, and possibly the head; but
these he renders with a psychological absorption which is only to be
found amongst modern artists, perhaps in Watts. In a head by Lenbach
there glows a pair of eyes which burn themselves into you. The
countenance, which is the first zone around them, is more or
less--generally less--amplified; the second zone, the dress and hands,
is either still less amplified, or scarcely amplified at all. The
portrait is then harmonised in a neutral tone which renders the lack of
finish less obvious. In this sketchy treatment and in his striking
subjectivity Lenbach is the very opposite of the old masters. Holbein,
and even Rubens--who otherwise sets upon everything the stamp of his own
personality--characterised their figures by a reverent imitation of
every trait given in nature. They produced, as it were, real documents,
and left it to the spectator to interpret them in his own way.
[Illustration: LENBACH. THE SHEPHERD BOY.]
Lenbach, less objective, and surrendering himself less absolutely to his
subject, emphasises one point, disregards another, and in this way
conjures up the spirit by his faces, just as he sees it. It may be open
to dispute which kind of portraiture is the more desirable; but Lenbach,
at any rate, has now forced the world to behold its great men through
his eyes. He has given them the form in which they will survive. No one
has the same secret of seizing a fleeting moment; no one turned more
decisively away from every attempt at idealising glorification or at
watering down an individual to a type. He takes counsel of photography,
but only as Molière took counsel of his housekeeper: he uses it merely
as a medium for arriving at the startling directness, the instantaneous
impression of life, in his pictures. Works like the portraits of King
Ludwig I, Gladstone, Minghetti, Bishop Strossmayer, Prince Lichtenstein,
Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Paul Heyse, Wilhelm Busch, Schwind,
Semper, Liphart, Morelli, and many others have no parallel as analyses
of the character of complex personalities. Some of his Bismarck
portraits, as well as his last pictures of the old Emperor Wilhelm, will
always stand amongst the greatest achievements of the century in
portraiture. In the one portrait is indestructible power, as it were the
shrine built for itself by the mightiest spirit of the century; in the
other the majesty of the old man, already half alienated from the earth,
and glorified by a trace of still melancholy, as by the last radiance of
the evening sun. In these works Lenbach appears as a wizard calling up
spirits, an _évocateur d'âmes_, as a French critic has named him.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
RAMBERG. THE MEETING ON THE LAKE.]
But what the history of art has forgotten in estimating the fame of the
portrait painter Lenbach is, that in the beginning of his career this
very man paved the way for the "Realistic" movement in German painting
which later he confronted so haughtily and with so much reserve. The
first of these works of his, which have for Germany much the same
significance as the early works of Courbet have for France, is the
well-known "Shepherd Boy" in the Schack Gallery. Stretched on his back,
he lies in the high grass where flowers grow thickly, and looks up while
butterflies and dragon-flies flutter through the dusty air of a Roman
summer day. Such a frank, an audacious, naked realism, breaking away
from everything traditional in its representation of fact, was something
entirely novel and surprising in Germany in the year 1856. Up to this
time no one had seen a fragment of nature depicted with such unqualified
veracity. The tanned shepherd lad, with his naked sunburnt feet, covered
by a dark crust of mire from the damp earth, seemed to be lying there in
the flesh, plastically thrown into relief by the glowing midday sun. The
next of these pictures, "Peasants taking Refuge from the Weather," which
appeared in the exhibition of 1858, called down a storm of indignation
on account of its "trivial realism." Every figure was painted after
nature with blunt and rigorous sincerity, and no anecdotic incident was
devised in it.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
HIRTH. THE HOP HARVEST.]
After the sixties the influence of Courbet began to be directly felt. In
the days when he worked in Couture's studio _Victor Müller_ had taken up
some of the ideas of the master of Ornans, and when he settled in 1863
in Munich, Müller communicated to the painters there the first knowledge
of the works of the great Frenchman. He did not follow Courbet, however,
in his subjects. "The Man in the Heart of the Night lulled to Sleep by
the Music of a Violin," "Venus and Adonis," "Hero and Leander," "Hamlet
in the Churchyard," "Venus and Tannhäuser," "Faust on the Promenade,"
"Romeo and Juliet," "Ophelia by the Stream"--such are the titles of his
principal works. But how far they are removed from the anæmic, empty
painting of beauty which reigned in the school of Couture! Though a
Romanticist of the purest water in his subjects, Müller appears, in the
manner in which he handles them, as a Realist on whom there is no speck
of the academical dust of the schools. The dominant features of Victor
Müller's pictures are the thirst for life and colour, full-blooded
strength, haughty contempt for every species of hollow exaggeration and
all outward pose, genuine human countenances and living human forms
inspired with tameless passion, an audacious rejection of all the
traditional rules of composition, and, even in colour, a veracity which
in that age, given up to an ostentatious painting of material, must have
had an effect that was absolutely novel. In 1863 the blooming flesh of
his "Wood Nymph" excited the Munich public to indignation, just as the
nude female figures of Courbet had roused indignation about the same
time in Paris. Pictures painted with singular sureness of hand were
executed by him during the few years that he yet had to live--portraits
of dogs, landscapes of a flaming glow of colour, single figures of
red-haired Bacchantes and laughing flower-girls, old men dying, and
charming fairy pictures. The nearer he came to his death the more his
powers of work seemed to increase. The most remarkable ideas came into
his head. He drew, and painted without intermission designs which had
occupied him for years. "I feel," he said, "like an architect who has
been commissioned to carry out a great building, and I cannot do it: I
must die."
But the impulse which he had given in more than one direction had
further issues. As Hans Thoma in later years continued the work of the
great Frankfort master in the province of fairy-tale, _Wilhelm Leibl_
realised Müller's realistic programme.
[Illustration: WILHELM LEIBL. _Kunst für Alle._]
Wilhelm Leibl, son of the conductor of music in the cathedral, was born
at Cologne on 23rd October 1844. At Munich he entered the studio of
_Arthur van Ramberg_, that unjustly forgotten master who, both by his
own work and by his activity as a teacher, exercised upon the younger
Munich school a far healthier influence than Piloty. Ramberg was a
modern man, was always eager to come into immediate contact with life
and break the fetters of tradition which hung everywhere upon that
generation. He was an aristocrat and a dandy, and, having occupied
himself in the beginning with romantic fairy subjects, he painted, soon
after his migration to Munich, a series of pictures from modern
life--"Dachau Girls on Sunday," "The Return from the Masked Ball," "A
Walk with the Tutor," "The Meeting on the Lake," "The Invitation to
Boat," and others, which rose above the mass of contemporary productions
by their great distinction, fragrance, and grace. At a time when others
held nothing but the smock-frock fit for representation, Ramberg painted
the fashionable modern costume of women. And when others devoted
themselves to clumsy _genre_ episodes, he created songs without words
that were full of fine reserve, nobility, and delicate feeling.
_Rudolf Hirth_, who made a stir with his "Hop Harvest"; _Albert Keller_,
the tasteful painter of fashionable life; _Karl Haider_, the sincere and
conscientious miniature painter whose energy of manner had a suggestion
of the old masters, together with Wilhelm Leibl, all issued from
Ramberg's school, not from Piloty's.
The young student from Cologne was thus saved, in the beginning, from
occupying himself with history, and he had no need to addict himself to
narrative _genre_ painting, since his entire organisation preordained
him to painting pure and simple. Wilhelm Leibl was in those days a
handsome fellow, with powerful limbs and shining brown eyes. He was
realism incarnate--rather short, but strongly made, and with a frame
almost suggesting a beast of burden, broad in the chest,
high-shouldered, and bull-necked. His arms were thick and his feet
large. His gait was slow, heavy, and energetic, and he made with his
arms liberal gestures which took up a good deal of room. He had not the
fiery spirit of Courbet, being more prosaic, sober, and deliberate, but
he resembled him both in appearance and in the artistic faculty of eye
and hand. "He had," as a French critic wrote of him, "one of those
organisations which are predestined for painting, as Courbet had amongst
us Frenchmen. Such men extract the most remarkable things from
painting."
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
LEIBL. IN THE STUDIO.]
[Illustration: _American Art Review._
LEIBL. THE VILLAGE POLITICIANS.]
Even his first picture, exhibited in 1869, and representing his two
fellow-pupils Rudolf Hirth and Haider looking at an engraving, had a
soft, full golden harmony, which left all the products of conventional
_genre_ painting far behind it, and came into direct competition with
the refined works of the Dutch painter Michael Swert. His second
picture, a portrait of Frau Gedon, made an impression even in Paris by
its Rembrandtesque beauty of tone, and was awarded there in 1870 the
gold medal which the judges had not ventured to give him the year before
at Munich, because he was still an Academy pupil. Yet 1869 was the
decisive year in Leibl's life. The Munich Exhibition gave at that time
an opportunity for learning the importance of French art upon a scale
previously unknown. Over four hundred and fifty pictures were
accessible, and the works of the smooth, conventional historical
painters were the minority. Troyon was to be seen there, and Millet and
Corot. But Courbet, to whose works the committee had devoted an entire
room, was chiefly the hero, and one over whom there was much conflict.
Opinions were violently at odds about him in the painters' club. The
official circle greeted the master of Ornans with the same hoot of
indignation which had been accorded him in France. But for Leibl he
became an adored and marvellous ideal. His eyes sparkled when he sat
opposite him at the _Deutsches Haus_, and in default of any other means
of making himself understood he assured Courbet of his veneration by
sturdily drinking to him: "Prosit Courbet--Prosit Leibl." He stretched
his powerful limbs, and threw himself into vigorous attitudes to evince
in sanguinary quarrels, when necessary, his enthusiasm for the great
Frenchman. How false and paltry seemed the whole school of Piloty, with
its rose-coloured insipidity and its conventional bloom of the palette,
when set against the downright veracity and the masterly painting of
these works!
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
LEIBL. THE NEW PAPER.]
In the same year he went to Paris, special occasion for the journey
being given by a commission for a portrait which he received from the
Duc Tascher de la Pagerie. There he painted "La Cocotte," the portrait
of a fat Frenchwoman seated upon a sofa and watching the clouds of smoke
from her clay pipe. In its massive realism, and in the exuberant power
of its broad, liquid painting, it might have been signed "Courbet," and
Leibl told afterwards with pride how Courbet slapped him on the shoulder
when he was at his work, saying: "_Il faut que vous restez à Paris._"
The breaking out of the war brought his residence in Paris to an end
more quickly than he had foreseen, but though he was there only nine
months that was long enough to give for ever a firm direction to the
efforts of the painter. Leibl became the apostle of Courbet in Germany,
and in his outward life the German Millet. Back once more in Bavaria, he
migrated in 1872 to Grasolfingen, then to Schondorf on the Ammersee,
then to Berbling near Aibling, and in 1884 to Aibling itself; he became
a peasant, and, like Millet, he painted pictures of peasants.
The poetic and biblical, the august and epical bias which characterises
the works of Millet, is not to be expected in Leibl. A spirit bent upon
what is great and heroic speaks out of Millet's pictures. A
Rembrandtesque feeling for space, the great line, the simplification,
the intellectual restraint from anecdotic triviality of form, are the
things which constitute his style. Leibl is at his best when he buries
himself with delight in the hundred little touches of nature. He
triumphs when he has to paint the faces of old peasant women, full of
wrinkles, and furrowed with care; the ruddy cheeks of girls, sparkling
in all their natural rustic freshness; figured dresses, the material and
texture of which are clearly recognisable; flowered silk kerchiefs worn
round the neck, coarse woollen bodices, and heavy hobnail shoes. He is
to Millet what Holbein is to Michael Angelo.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
LEIBL. IN CHURCH.]
Nor can he be called an artist of intimate feeling in the sense in which
the Scandinavians are amongst the moderns. In Viggo Johansen the painter
disappears; what he paints has not the effect of a picture, but of a
moment of existence, a memory of something clear and familiar--something
which has been lived and seen, but not fashioned with deliberate
intention. His figures are like the sudden appearance of actual persons,
spied upon, as if one were looking through the window into a strange
room under cover of night. One feels that there is no occasion to pay
the artist a compliment; but one would like to sit in such a warm, cosy
room, impregnated with tobacco smoke, to inhale the fine cloud of steam
issuing from the tea-kettle, to hear the water bubbling and humming upon
the glimmering fire. But the painter is always seen in Leibl's pictures.
A communicative spirit, something which touches the heart and sets one
dreaming, is precisely what is not expressed in them. The spectator
invariably thinks, in the first place, of the astonishing ability, the
incredible patience, which went to the making of them. And with all
their photographic fidelity he is, moreover, conscious that the painter
himself was less concerned in seizing the poetry of a scene, the
instantaneous charm of an impression of nature, than in forcing into the
foreground particular evidences of his technical powers which he has
reserved for display. For instance, newspapers in which, if it is
possible, a fragment of the leading article may be deciphered, earthen
vessels, bottles, and brandy glasses, play in his pictures a _rôle_
similar to that assumed by the little caskets with brass covers that
catch the flashing lights, the overturned settles, the tapestry, and
the globe in works of the school of Piloty.
Wilhelm Leibl is a good workman, like Courbet, a man of fresh, vigorous,
and energetic nature and robust health, very material, and at times
matter-of-fact and prosaic. Painting is as natural to him as breathing
and walking are to the rest of us. He goes his way like an ox in the
plough, steadily and without tiring, without vibration of the nerves,
and without the touch of poetry. He goes where his instinct leads him
and paints with a muscular flexibility of hand whatever appeals to his
eye or suits his brush. Opposed to the neurotic and hurrying moderns, he
has something of a mediæval monk who sits quietly in his cell, without
counting the hours, the days, and the years, and embellishes the pages
of his service-book with artistic miniatures, to depart in peace when he
has set "Amen, Finis" at the bottom of the last page. But he has, too,
all the capacity and all the boundless veneration for nature of these
old artists. He is the greatest _maître peintre_ that Germany has had in
the course of the century, and in this sense his advent was of
epoch-making importance.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
LEIBL. A PEASANT DRINKING.]
[Illustration: LEIBL. IN THE PEASANT'S COTTAGE.]
Even Defregger had observed peasant life altogether from a narrative and
anecdotic point of view. In Leibl this narrative _genre_ has been
overcome. He had ability enough to give artistic attractions even to an
"empty subject." To avoid exaggerated characterisation, to avoid the
expression of anything divided into _rôles_, he consistently painted
people employed in the least exciting occupations--peasants reading a
newspaper, sitting in church, or examining a gun. Pains are taken to
avoid the slightest movement of the figures. Whilst all his predecessors
were romance writers, Leibl is a painter. His themes--simple scenes of
daily life--are a matter of indifference; the beauty of his pictures
lies in their technique. They are works of which it may be said that
every attempt to give an impression of them in words is useless, for
they have not proceeded from delight in anecdotic theme, but, as in the
good periods of art, from the discipline of the sense for colour and
from an eminent capacity for drawing: they are pictures in which mere
interest in subject is lost in the consideration of their artistic
value, while the matter of what is represented is entirely thrown into
the background by the manner in which it is carried out. The chief aim
of the historical as of the _genre_ painters had been to draw a fluent
cartoon based upon single studies, to mix the colours nicely upon the
palette, lay them upon the canvas according to the rules, blend them and
let them dry, so as then to attain the proper harmony of colour by
painting over again and finally glazing. Leibl's mastery, which of
itself resulted in an astonishing truth to nature, lay in seizing an
impression as quickly as possible, taking hold of the reality rightly at
the first glance, and transferring the colours to his canvas with
decision and sureness, in clear accord with the hues of the original.
Lessing's maxim, "From the eyes straight to the arm and the brush," has
been realised here for the first time in Germany.
As yet no German had, in the same measure, what the painter calls
qualities, and even in France two apparently heterogeneous faculties
have seldom been united in one master in the same measure as they were
in Leibl: a broad and large technique, a bold _alla prima_ painting,
and, on the other hand, a joy in work of detail with a fine brush, such
as was known by Quentin Matsys, the smith of Antwerp. "The Village
Politicians" of 1879 was the chief work that he painted in Schondorf.
What would Knaus, the king of illustration and the ruler over the
province of vignettes, have made out of this theme! By a literary
evasion he would have subordinated the interest of the picture to his
ideas. One would have learnt what it is that peasants read, and received
instruction as to their political allegiance to party and their offices
and honours in the village: that would be the magistrate, that the
smith, and that the tailor. In Leibl there are true and simple peasants,
who, by way of relaxation from the toil of the week, listen stupidly and
indifferently to the reading of a Sunday paper, in which one of them is
endeavouring to discover the village news and the price of crops. They
are harsh-featured and common, but they have been spared theatrical
embellishment and impertinent satire; they are not artistically grouped,
though they sit there in all the rusticity of their physiognomies, and
all the angularity of their attitudes, without polish or Sunday state.
Leibl renders the reality without altering it, but he renders it fully
and entirely. The fidelity to nature held fast on the canvas surpassed
everything that had hitherto been seen, and it was gained, moreover, by
the soundest and the simplest means. Whereas Lenbach, in his effort to
reproduce the colour-effects of the old masters, destroyed the
durability of his pictures even while he worked upon them, Leibl seemed
to have chosen as his motto the phrase which Dürer once used in writing
to Jacob Heller: "I know that, if you preserve the picture well, it will
be fresh and clean at the end of five hundred years, for it has not been
painted as pictures usually are in these days."
He took a further step in the direction of truth when he made a
transition from the Dutch towards the old German masters. After he had,
in his earlier productions, worked very delicately at the tone of his
pictures, and, for a time, had particularly sought to attain specific
effects of _chiaroscuro_, attaching himself to Rembrandt, he took up an
independent position in his conception of colour, painting everything
not as one of the old masters might have seen it, but as he had seen it
himself. All the tricks of painting and sleights of virtuosity were
despised, special emphasis being scarcely laid upon pictorial unity of
effect. Everything was simple and true to nature, and had a sincerity
which is not to be surpassed.
The picture of the three peasant women, "In Church," is the masterpiece
in this "second manner" of his, and when it appeared in the Munich
International Exhibition of 1883 it was an event. From that date Leibl
was established--at any rate in the artistic circles of Munich--as the
greatest German _painter_ of his time. That Leibl painted the picture
without sketching for himself an outline, that he began with the eye of
the peasant girl and painted bit by bit, like fragments of a mosaic, was
a feat of technique in which there were few to imitate him. The young
generation in Munich studied the pages of the service-book and the
squares of the gingham dress, the girl's jug and the carvings of the
pew, with astonishment, as though they were the work of magic. They were
beside themselves with delight over such unheard-of strength, power, and
delicacy of modelling, the fusion of colour suggesting Holbein, and the
intimate study of nature. They perpetually discovered new points that
came upon them as a surprise, and many felt as Wilkie did when he sat in
Madrid before the drinkers of Velasquez, and at last rose wearily with a
sigh.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
LEIBL. A TAILOR'S WORKSHOP.]
Leibl did for Germany what the pre-Raphaelites did for England. Men and
women were represented with astonishing pains just as they sat and
suffered themselves to be painted. He was determined to give the whole,
pure truth, and he gave it; that, and nothing more and nothing less. He
reproduced nature in her minutest traits and in her finest movements,
bringing the imitative side of art to the highest perfection
conceivable. In virtue of these qualities he was a born portrait
painter; and although he never had "conception," as Lenbach had, his
portraits belong, with those of Lenbach, to the best German
performances of the century. Only Holbein when he painted his "Gysze"
had this remorseless manner of analysing the human countenance in every
wrinkle. Leibl once more taught the German painters to go into detail,
and led them constantly to hold nature as the only source of art; and
that has been the beginning of every renaissance.
His works were pictorially the most complete expression of the aims of
the Munich school in colour. As a representative of the efforts of the
decade from 1870 he is as typical as Cornelius for the art of the
thirties, Piloty for that of the fifties, and as Liebermann became later
as a representative of the efforts of the eighties.
CHAPTER XXX
THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE
Courbet and Ribot for France, Holman Hunt and Madox Brown for England,
Stevens for Belgium, Menzel, Lenbach, and Leibl for Germany, are the
great names of modern Realism, the names of the men who subjected modern
life to art, and subjected art to the nineteenth century.
One point, however, the question of colour, still remained unsolved: as
the preceding generation took their form, so these painters took their
colour, not from nature, but from the treasury of old art.
Courbet announced it as his programme to express the manners, ideas, and
aspect of his age--in a word, to create living art. He described himself
as the sincere lover of _la vérité vraie_: "_la véritable peinture doit
appeler son spectateur par la force et par la grande vérité de son
imitation_." But one may question how far his figures, and the
environment of them, are true in colour? Where there is a delightful
subtlety of fleeting _nuances_ in nature, an oppressive opaque heaviness
is found in this modern Caravaggio of Franche-Comté. He certainly
painted modern stone-breakers, but it was in the tone of saints of the
Spanish school of the seventeenth century. His pictures of artisans have
the odour of the museum. The home of his men and women is not the open
field of Ornans, but that room in the Louvre where hang the pictures of
Caravaggio.
_Alfred Stevens_ made a great stride by painting modern _Parisiennes_.
Whereas the costume picture had up to his time sought the truth of the
old masters only in the matter of the skirts which the fashion of their
age prescribed, Stevens was the first to dress his women in the garb of
1860, just as Terborg painted his in the costume of 1660 and not of
1460. But the very atmosphere in which the _Parisienne_ of the
nineteenth century lived is no longer that in which the women of de
Hoogh moved. The whole of life is brighter. The studios in which
pictures are painted are brighter, and the rooms in which they are
destined to hang. Van der Meer of Delft, the greatest painter of light
amongst the Dutch, still worked behind little casements; and in dusky
patrician dwellings, "where the very light of heaven breaks sad through
painted window," his pictures were ultimately hung. The old masters paid
special attention to these conditions of illumination. The golden
harmony of the Italian Renaissance came into being from the character of
the old cathedrals furnished with glass windows of divers colours; the
half-light of the Dutch corresponded to the dusky studios in which
painters laboured, and the gloomy, brown-wainscoted rooms for which
their pictures were destined. The nineteenth century committed the
mistake even here of regarding what was done to meet a special case as
something absolute. Rooms had long become bright when studios were
artificially darkened, and artists still sought, by means of coloured
windows and heavy curtains, to subdue the light, so as to be able to
paint in tones dictated by the old masters. Stevens shed over a modern
woman, a _Parisienne_, sitting in a drawing-room in the Avenue de Jena,
the light of Gerard Dow, without reflecting that this illumination,
filtered through little lattice-windows, was quite correct in Holland
during the seventeenth century, but no longer proper in the Paris of
1860, in a salon where the windows had great cross-bars and clear white
panes which were not leaded. It is chiefly this that makes his pictures
untrue, lending them an old Flemish heaviness, something earthy,
savouring of the clay, and not in keeping with the fresh fragrance of
the modern _Parisienne_. Her modernity is seen through the yellowish
glass which the old Flemish masters seemed to hold between Stevens and
his model.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI IN THE COSTUME OF A JAPANESE WARRIOR.]
Considered as a separate personality _Ribot_, too, is a great artist;
his works are masterpieces. Yet when young men spoke of him as the last
representative of the school of cellar-windows there was an atom of
truth in what they said. Like Courbet, he continued the art of
galleries. The master of a style and yet the servant of a manner, he
marks the summit of a tendency in which the great traditions of Frans
Hals and Ribera were once more embodied. When he paints subjects
resembling the themes of these old masters he is as great as they are,
as genuine and as much a master of style; but as soon as he turns to
other subjects the imitative mannerist is revealed. Even things as
tender and unsubstantial as the flowers of the field seem as if they
were made of wax. His disdain for what is light, fluent, and fickle,
like air and water, is evident in his sea-pieces. His steamers plough
their way through a greyish-black sea beneath a thick black stormy sky,
as though through grey deserts. Nature quivering in the air and bathed
in light is not so heavy and compact, nor has it such plasticity of
appearance. His women reading are the _ne plus ultra_ of painting; only
it is astonishing that any human being can read in such a dark room.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI. WOMEN BATHING.]
Ribot's parallel in Germany is _Lenbach_, who had less pictorial and
greater intellectual power. As a painter of copies, particularly copies
of the artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he formed and
perfected a school for the understanding of the old masters, as none of
his contemporaries had done. The copies which he made as a young man for
Count Schack in Italy and Spain are probably the best translations by
the brush that have ever been executed. He has reproduced Titian and
Rubens, Velasquez and Giorgione, with equal magic; no other painter has
entered into all the subtleties of their technique with such
intelligence and keenness; and by the aid of these sleights of art,
which he learnt as a copyist from classic masterpieces, he communicated
to his own works that impress which qualifies them for the gallery and
suggests the old masters with such refinement. His pictures mark the
summit of ability reached in Germany in the pictorial style of the old
artists.
But, at the same time, his weakness lies in this very eminence. The man
who had passed through the high-school of the old masters with the
greatest success was entered as a student for life, and never took the
professorial chair himself. Helferich has called him the impersonated
spirit of the galleries, the spirit which is centuries old.
This indicates the direction which must be taken by the further
development of painting. A really new and independent art must finally
emancipate itself from the Renaissance colouring, the tone of Church
painting, and the _chiaroscuro_ of pictures painted behind the
variegated panes of lattice-windows. It must be evident that the methods
of the old Spanish and old Dutch schools, excellent in themselves, were
fully in keeping with strange scenes of martyrdom or quiet interiors
with peasants and fat matrons, but that they could not possibly be
employed in pictures of artisans beneath the free sky, nor in those of
elegant interiors of our own days, nor of pale and delicate
_Parisiennes_ attired in silks, beings of a new epoch. A different
period necessitates different methods. It is not merely that the
subjects of art change, but the way in which they are handled must bear
the marks of the period. Nature should no longer be studied through the
prism of old pictures, and the phrase _beau par la vérité_ must be
exalted to a principle applying to colour also.
The pre-Raphaelites and Menzel were the first to become alive to the
problem. They were never taken captive by the tones of the early
masters, but placed themselves always in conscious opposition to the
artists of older ages. The battle against "brown sauce" even formed an
essential point in the programme of the Brotherhood. They protested
against conventional colouring as violently as against the sweeping line
taught by traditional rules of beauty.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI. FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH A SAIL.]
But, as so often happens in the nineteenth century, though the English
found the jewel, they did not understand how to cut it. The
pre-Raphaelites had a quickening influence, in exciting a feeling for
hue and tint, and rendering it keener by their own insistence on the
elementary effects of colour. They sought to free themselves from brown
sauce and to be just to local tones, through straightforward,
independent observation. They painted the trees green, the earth grey,
the sky blue, the sunbeams yellow, in sharply accentuated colours, as
little blended as possible. But in most cases the result was not
particularly pleasant; there was almost always a hard, motley colouring
which produced a most unpleasant, glaring effect. Their audacity was
somewhat barbaric. There was a want of warmth and softness, the
atmosphere did not combine the whole by its mitigating and harmonising
power. Even Madox Brown's "Work" is an offensive chaos of crying
colours. The bright clothes, the blue blouses, the red uniforms have a
gaudy and unquiet effect. The problem was attacked, but the solution was
harsh and crude.
[Illustration: HOKUSAI. FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH REEDS.]
Of _Menzel's_ pictures the same is true, though not perhaps in the same
degree. In pictorial conception he also has not quite reached the
summit. His method of painting is sometimes sparkling and full of
spirit, holding the mean, more or less, between the quiet and plain
painting of Meissonier and the crisp, glittering style of Fortuny; he
lets off a flickering, dazzling, rocket-like firework, but at bottom he
has been cut from the block from which draughtsmen are made. Sometimes
it is astonishing how his brush sweeps over costumes, ornaments, and
buildings, but he does not think in colour; it is supplementary to the
drawing, and not of earlier origin, nor even of equal birth. Much as he
tried to paint smoke and steam in his "Iron Mill," he had no
understanding for atmospheric life; for this reason harsh and glaring
tones almost invariably make a disturbing effect in his works. His
"Piazza d'Erbe" as well as his "King Wilhelm setting out to join the
Army" have a motley and restless effect in the picture, and only in
photography or black and white do they acquire something of the
simplicity which is to be desired in the originals. The best of his
drawings may stand beside the sketches of Dürer without detriment; to
place his pictures on the same level is impossible, because quietude and
pure harmony are wanting in them.
So extremes meet. Courbet, Ribot, and Lenbach are greater connoisseurs
of colour than Europe had seen previous to their appearance, but this
they are at the expense of truth; they have identified themselves with
the old masters, and not arrived at any personal conception of colour.
Menzel and the pre-Raphaelites despised the old masters, but their
conception of colour had something primitive, jarring, and
undisciplined.
The note of truth was still missing in the mighty orchestra. By what
possible means could it be supplied? How bring to perfection that great
harmony which is ever the end and aim of all true artistic effort. It
was not until the art of the Far East was unfolded before the eyes of
Western painters that this disquieting problem reached its solution.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI. AN APPARITION.]
In the year in which Millet exhibited his "Winnower" and Courbet painted
his "Stone-breakers" a man died in the Far East whose name was Hokusai.
He was the last great representative of an art of painting more than a
thousand years old--one which had no Raphael, Correggio, or Titian,
though it was, nevertheless, art in the loftiest meaning of the word.
Marco Polo, the great traveller of the Middle Ages, had told of a
remarkable land "towards the sunrise," the soil of which it was not
permitted to him to tread. And the artistic views of the eighteenth
century were revolutionised when the first Japanese porcelain and
lacquer-work arrived at the Courts of Dresden and Paris. The aged Louis
XIV himself began to find pleasure in idols, pagodas, and "stuffs
printed with flowers." In a short time these works formed an important
part of superior collections, and led to the movement against the
inflexible despotism of the pompous Lebrun style. For the Japanese gave
Europe the unfettered principles of a freer intuition of beauty; they
excited a preference for things which were unsymmetrical, capricious,
full of movement, for everything by which the charming Louis XV style is
to be distinguished from the tiresome academic art of Louis XIV. In the
sixties of the nineteenth century Japan exerted, for the second time, a
revolutionary influence on the development of European painting. If
Japanese productions were in earlier days regarded as curiosities, for
which place was to be found in cabinets of rarities, as trifles the
artistic value of which was less prized than the dexterity of their
construction, it was reserved for the present age to do justice to
Japanese art as such.
[Illustration: HOKUSAI. HOKUSAI SKETCHING THE PEERLESS MOUNTAIN.]
As is well known, oil-painting exists neither in China nor Japan. Just
as the Japanese choose the slightest material for building, so
everything in their painting bears a trace of extreme lightness.
Japanese pictures, _kakemonos_, are painted in water colour or Chinese
ink upon framed silk or paper; but this paper has an advantage over the
European article in its unsurpassed toughness, its remarkable softness
and pliability, its surface which has either a dull, silky lustre, or
may only be compared with the finest parchment. And the pictures
themselves are kept rolled up, and only hung, as occasion offers, in
the Tokonama, the little closet near the reception-room, and according
to very refined rules. Only a few are hung at a time, and only such as
harmonise. When a visit is expected the taste of the guest determines
the selection. Fresh and variously coloured flowers and branches, placed
near them in vases, are obliged to harmonise in colour with the
pictures.
[Illustration: TANYU. THE GOD HOTEÏ ON A JOURNEY.]
As an instrument for painting use is only made of the pliant brush of
hair, which executes everything with a free and fluent effect. Pen,
crayon, or chalk, and all hard mediums which offer resistance, are
consistently excluded. The subject-matter of these pictures is
surprisingly rich, and assumes for their proper understanding some
acquaintance with Japanese literature. An opulent folk-lore, in which
cannibals and heroes like Tom Thumb live and move and have their being,
just as in European fairy stories, stands at the disposal of the artist.
Historical representations from the life of fabulous national heroes,
ghosts, and apparitions half man and half bird, alternate with simple
landscapes and scenes from daily life. And in all pictures, whether they
are fanciful or plain renderings of fact, attention is riveted by the
same keenness of observation, the same refinement of taste, in the
highest sense of the word by pictorial charm. After the Japanese have
been long recognised as the first decorative artists in the world, after
the highest praise has been accorded to them in the industrial crafts
taken jointly--in lacquer-work and bronze work, weaving, embroidery,
and pottery--they are now likewise celebrated as the most spirited
draughtsmen in existence.
[Illustration: _Studio._
KORIN. LANDSCAPE.]
[Illustration: _Studio._
KORIN. RABBITS.]
The Japanese artist lives with nature and in her as no artist of any
other country has ever done. Life in the open air creates a relation to
nature suggestive of the doctrines of Rousseau; it makes earth, sky, and
water as familiar to man as are the beings that move in them. Every
house, even in the centre of towns, has a garden laid out with fine
taste, and combining beautiful flowers, trees, and cascades, everything
incidental to the soil. The form of trees, the shape and colour of
flowers, the ripple of leaves, and the gleaming mail of insects are so
imprinted in the memory of the painter that his fancy can summon them at
pleasure without the need of fresh study. The most fleeting moment of
the life of nature is held as firmly in his mind as the everlasting form
of rocks and gigantic trees shadowing the temple groves of Nippon. Every
one of these artists works with the unfettered falcon glance of the
child of nature. His keen eye sees in the flight of birds turns and
movements first revealed to us by instantaneous photography. This
quickness of eye and this astonishing exercise of memory enable him to
obtain the most striking effects with the slightest means. If a Japanese
executes figures, race, station, age, business, personality are all
seized with the keenest vision, and pregnantly rendered in their
essential features. Robes and unclad forms, heads and limbs, animated
and still nature, are all reproduced with the same reality. Yet little
as the doctrine ever gained ground that to create works of art nature
should be mastered upon a system, trivial realism was just as little at
any time the vogue.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
OKIO. A CARP.]
The love of nature is born in the Japanese, but the photographic
imitation, the servile reproduction of reality, is never his ultimate
aim. Geoffroy has noted with much subtlety the resemblance which exists
between Japanese poets and painters in this respect. Their poets never
describe, but only endeavour to express a spiritual feeling, to hold a
memory fast--the blitheness of smiling pleasure, the mournfulness of
vanished joy. They sing of the mist passing over the mountain summits,
the fishing boats, the reeds by the seashore, the plash of waves, the
flying streaks of cloud, the sunset streaming purple over the weary
world. The same economy of means, the same sureness in the choice of
characteristic features, and a similar rapidity in striking the keynote
are peculiar to the painters. They, too, express themselves by the
scantiest means, shrink from saying too much, and aim only at a rapid
and right expression of total effect, leaving to the imagination the
task of supplementing and amplifying what is given. The heaviness of
matter is overcome, the absurd pretence of reality not attempted. Like
the French of the eighteenth century, the Japanese possess the sportive
grace, the _esprit_ of the brush hovering over objects, extracting
merely their bloom and essence, and using them as the basis for free and
independent caprices of beauty. They have the remarkable faculty of
being synthetic and discarding every ponderous and disturbing element,
without losing the local accent in a landscape or a figure. They fasten
upon the most vivid impression of things, but in great, comprehensive
lines, subordinating every peculiarity to the light which shines upon
them and the shadow in which they are muffled. Their handwriting is at
once broad and precise, graceful and bizarre. What a nonchalant,
fragile, piquant, or coquettish effect have their feminine figures! And
but a few firm strokes sufficed to create the impression. A dexterous
sweep of the brush was all that was necessary for the modelling, all
that was wanted to summon the idea of the velvet softness of the flesh
and the firmness of the bosom. Or surging waves have been painted, or
foaming cataracts. But with what consummate mastery, with what peculiar
knowledge, the swirl and eddying of the waters have been represented.
And how slight are the means which have been employed! Everything has
the freshness of life, and the sheer, intangible movement of objects has
been caught by a simple and decisive line. A few dashes of Chinese ink
are made, and the forcible strokes unite without effort in forming a
mountain path or a hillside stream foaming over rocks and trees. Or the
prow of a vessel is represented. Nothing is to be seen of the water, and
yet it is as if the waves were rocking the ship. The billow swells,
rises, and sinks, suggesting the wide sea, the rhythm in the universe.
The lines in which the motives are executed render only what is
essential. But combined with this striving after simplified form there
is a sense of space which of itself, as it were, controls everything,
producing the poetic illusion of distance.
[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. THE BRIDGE AT YEDDO.]
The Japanese are masters of the art of enlarging a narrow picture frame
to a great expanse, and indicating by a few strokes the distance between
foreground and horizon. There is often nothing, or next to nothing, in
the wide space, but proximity and distance are so correctly related that
all the geological structure is clear, whilst light air is pervasive,
giving the eye a vision of boundless perspective. The spur of a
headland, the bank of a river, or a cleft between two mountains enables
the eye to measure far landscapes. In the presence of their works one
dreams, one has the presentiment of infinite distances. They divest
objects of their earthiness by bold simplifications, and transform
reality into dreamland. It is the spirit of things, their smile, and
their intangible perfume which live in these veiled masterpieces which
are yet so precise.
The bold irregularity of Japanese works, which know nothing of the
stiffness of symmetrical composition, contributes much to this
impression. Their pictures are never "composed" in our sense of the
word, but rather resemble the instantaneous pictures of photographers.
A bird is seen to dart past, only half visible, a cluster of trees is a
chance slice from the forest, as it is seen out of the window of a
railway train whizzing past. Or it is merely the bough of a tree with a
bird upon it that stretches into the picture, which is otherwise filled
with a fragment of blue sky. Without appearing to concern themselves
about it, they compose little poems of grace and freshness, with a frog,
a butterfly, and a blossoming apple-branch sprouting out of a vase. They
play with beetles, grasshoppers, tortoises, crabs, and fish as did the
artists of the Renaissance with Cupids and angels.
[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. A HIGH ROAD.]
And in everything, as regards colour too, the Japanese have a strain of
refinement peculiar to themselves. It is as though they were controlled
by the finest tact, as by a _force majeure_, even in their intuition of
colour. That great harmony of which Théodore Rousseau spoke, and to
which it was the aim of his life to attain, is reached by the Japanese
artist almost instinctively. The most vivid effects of red and green
trees, yellow roads, and blue sky are represented; the most refined
effects of light are rendered--illuminated bridges, dark firmaments, the
white sickle of the moon, glittering stars, the bright and rosy blossoms
of spring, the dazzling snow as it falls upon trim gardens; and there
are discords nowhere. How heavy and motley our colouring is compared
with these delicious chords, set beside each other so boldly, and
invariably so harmonious. Is it that our eyes are by nature less
delicate? or is everything in the Japanese only the result of a more
rational training? We have not the same intense force of perception,
this instinctive and sensuous gift of colour. Their colouring is a
delight to the eyes, a magic potion. Offence is nowhere given by a
glaring or an entirely crude tone; everything is finely calculated,
delicately indicated, and has that melting softness so enchanting in
Japanese enamel. The simplest chords of colour are often the most
effective; nothing can be more charming than the delicate duet of grey
and gold. And the cheapest wood-cut has often all these refinements in
common with the most costly _kakemono_. Even here, where they turn to
lowly things, their art is never vulgar, but maintains itself at such an
aristocratic height that we barbarians of the West, blessed with
oleographs and Academies of Art, can only look up with envy to this
nation of connoisseurs.
[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. A LANDSCAPE.]
The oldest of these Japanese artists working in wood-cut engraving was
Matahei, who lived in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and
executed scenes from the theatres and Japanese family and street life.
Icho and Moronobu followed at the close of the seventeenth century, the
one being a spirited caricaturist, the other a genuine _baroque_ artist
of noble and classic reserve. Through the masters of the eighteenth
century, as through Eisen, Fragonard, and Boucher, this reproductive art
took fresh development. The soft girls of Soukénobu with their delicate
round faces, the graceful beauties of Harunobu arrayed in costly
toilettes, the tall feminine forms of the marvellous Outamaro in all
their provocative charm, the vivid scenes from popular life of the great
colourist Shunsho, are works pervaded with a delicate perfume of which
Edmond de Goncourt alone could render any impression in words.
Outamaro, the poet of women, was, in a special sense, the Watteau of
aristocratic life in Japan. He knew the life of the Japanese woman as no
other has ever done--her domestic occupations, her walks and her
charming graces, her vanities and her love affairs. He knew also the
scenes of nature which she contemplated, the streets through which she
passed, and the banks along which she sauntered with an undulating step.
His women are slender beings, isolated like idols, and standing
motionless in poses hieratically august; æsthetic souls, who swoon and
grow pale under the sway of disquieting visions; fading flowers, forms
roaming wearily by the verge of a lonely sea or a sluggish stream, or
flitting timidly, like bats, through the soft brilliancy of lights amid
a festival by night. And in killing what is fleshly and physical he
renders the faces visionary and dreamy, renders the hands and the
gestures finer, and at the same time subdues and mitigates the colours
and the splendour of the clothes, taking pleasure in dying chords, in
deep black and tender white, in fine, pallid _nuances_ of rose-colour
and lilac. Every one of his pupils became a fresh chronicler of
aristocratic life. Toyohami painted night festivals; Toyoshiru, animated
crowds; Toyokumi, scenes of the theatre; Kunisada, women upon their
walks; Kunioshi, melodramatic representations full of pomp, with
marvellous fantastic landscapes.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HIROSHIGE. SNOWY WEATHER.]
The nineteenth century brought the widest popularisation of art,
corresponding more or less to the "resort to popular national life," as
the beginning of modern _genre_ painting and of the modern art of
illustration was called in Germany. The refined son of Nippon shrugs his
shoulders over these last creations of Japanese reproduction in colours;
he prefers those earlier charming masters of grace, and misses the
aristocratic _cachet_ in the new men, with as much justification as the
refined European collector has when he does not care to place the plates
of Granville or Doré in a portfolio with those of Eisen or Fragonard.
Nevertheless amongst the draughtsmen who followed the popular tendency
there was at any rate one great genius, one of the most important
artists of his country, who became more familiar to Europe than any of
his other compatriots: this was _Hokusai_.
[Illustration: AN UNKNOWN MASTER. HARVESTERS RESTING.]
All the qualities of Japanese art are united in him as in a focus. His
work is the encyclopædia of a whole nation, and in his technical
qualities he stands by the side of the greatest men in Europe. He is the
most attentive observer, a painter of manners as no other has ever been;
he takes strict measure of everything, analysing the slightest
movements. He draws the solid things of earth, the immovable rocks, the
everlasting primæval mountains, and yet follows the changing phenomena
of light and shade upon its surface. He has, in the highest degree, that
peculiarly Japanese quality of giving tangible expression to the
movements of things and living creatures. His men and women gesticulate,
his animals run, his birds fly, his reptiles crawl, his fish swim; the
leaves on the trees, the water of the rivers, and the sea and the clouds
of the sky move gently. He is a magnificent landscape painter,
celebrating all the seasons, from blossoming spring to ice-bound winter.
In his designs he maps out orchards, fields, and woods, follows the
winding course of rivers, summons a fine mist from the sea, sends the
waves surging forward, and the billows racing up against the rocks and
losing themselves as murmuring rivulets in the sand. But he is also a
philosopher and a poet of wide flight, who makes the boldest journeys
into the land of dreams. His imagination rises above the work-a-day
world, rides upon the chimera, bodies forth a new life, creates
monsters, and tells visions of terrible poetry. The deep feeling of the
primitive masters revives in him, and he appears as a strange mystic,
when he paints his blithe ethereal goddesses, or that old Buddhist who,
when banished, came every day across the sea, as the legend tells, to
behold once more Fuji, the sacred mountain.
[Illustration: _Studio._
OUTAMARO. MOTHER'S LOVE.]
Hokusai was born in 1760, amid flowery gardens in a quiet corner of
Yeddo, fourteen years after Goya and twelve years after David. His
father was purveyor of metallic mirrors to the Court. Hokusai took
lessons from an illustrator, but does not seem to have been much known
until his fortieth or fiftieth year. In 1810 he first founded an
industrial school of art, which attracted numbers of young people. To
provide them with a compendium of instruction in drawing he published in
1810 the first volume of his _Mangwa_. From that time he was recognised
as the head of a school. When his fame began to spread he changed his
residence almost every month to protect himself from troublesome
visitors. And just as often did he alter his name. Even that under which
he became famous in Europe is only a pseudonym, like "Gavarni": amongst
various _noms de guerre_ it was that which he bore the longest and by
which he was definitely recognised.
As a painter he was only active in his youth. The achievement of his
life is not his pictures, but a magnificent series of illustrated books,
a life's work richer than that of any of his compatriots. Like Titian
and Corot, fate had predestined him to reach a very great age without
ever growing old.
"From my sixth year," he writes in the preface to one of his books, "I
had a perfect mania for drawing every object that I saw. When I had
reached my fiftieth year I published a vast quantity of drawings; but I
am unsatisfied with all that I have produced before my seventieth year.
At seventy-three I had some understanding of the form and real nature of
birds, fish, and plants. At eighty I hope to have made further progress,
and at ninety to have discovered the ultimate foundation of things. In
my hundredth year I shall rise to yet higher spheres unknown, and in my
hundred and tenth, every stroke, every point, and in short everything
that comes from my hand will be alive." Hokusai certainly did not reach
so great an age as that. He died at eighty-nine, on 13th April 1849, and
is buried in the temple at Yeddo. During the period between 1815 and
1845 he published about eighty great works, altogether over five hundred
volumes.
"I rose from my seat at the window, where I had idled the whole day long
... softly, softly.... Then I was up and away.... I saw the countless
green leaves tremble in the densely embowered tops of the trees; I
watched the flaky clouds in the blue sky, collecting fantastically into
shapes torn and multiform.... I sauntered here and there carelessly,
without aim or volition.... Now I crossed the Bridge of Apes and
listened as the echo repeated the cry of the wild cranes.... Now I was
in the cherry-grove of Owari.... Through the mists shifting along the
coast of Miho I descried the famous pines of Suminoye.... Now I stood
trembling upon the Bridge of Kameji and looked down in astonishment at
the gigantic Fuki plants.... Then the roar of the dizzy waterfall of Ono
resounded in my ear. A shudder ran through me.... It was only a dream
which I dreamed, lying in bed near my window with this book of pictures
by the master as a cushion beneath my head."
[Illustration: KIYONAGA. LADIES BOATING.]
In these words a learned Japanese has indicated the great range of
subject, the unspeakably rich material of the works of the master. By
preference he leads us to the work-places of artisans, to woodcarvers,
smiths, workers in metal, dyers, weavers, and embroiderers. Then come
the pleasures of the nobility, who are displayed in their refinement,
reserve, and dignity; the country-folk at their daily avocations, or
making merry upon holidays; the fantastic shapes of fabulous animals and
demons, who figure in the life of Japanese national heroes, mighty with
the sword; apparitions, drunken men, wrestlers, street figures of every
conceivable description, mythical reptiles, snow-clad mountain tops,
waving rice-fields lashed by the wind, woodland glens, strange gateways
of rock, far views over waters with cliffs clothed with pine.
The most celebrated of those works which contain landscapes exclusively
are the views, published in three volumes in 1834-36, of the mountain of
Fuji, the great volcano rising close by Yeddo, and from old time playing
a part in the works of Japanese landscape painters. In Hokusai's book
the cone of the mountain is sometimes seen rising clear in a cloudless
sky, whilst it is sometimes shrouded by clouds of various shapes. Its
beautiful outline glimmers through the meshes of a net, through the
spindrift of snow falling in great flakes, or through a curtain of rain
splashing vertically down. It rises from misty valleys coloured by the
rays of the evening sun, or is reflected--itself out of sight--in the
smooth surface of a lake, upon the reedy shores of which the wild geese
cackle, or it stands in ghostly outlines against the night sky flooded
with silver moonlight. Summer breezes and winter storms drive over it,
rattling showers of hail, lashed by the wind, or light falls of snow
descend round it. In spring the blossoms of peach and plum-trees flutter
to the earth, like swarms of white and rosy butterflies. Only famished
wolves or dragons, which popular superstition has located in the
mountain of Fuji, occasionally animate the grandiose solitude of the
landscape.
"Never," says Gonse, "has a more dexterous hand rested upon paper. It is
impossible to study his plates without an excited feeling of pleasure,
for they are absolute perfection, the highest that Japanese art has
produced in freshness, brilliancy, life, and originality. Hokusai's
capacity of giving the impression of relief and colour with a stroke of
the brush has nothing like it except in Rembrandt, Callot, and Goya.
Men, animals, landscapes, and everything in his drawings are reduced to
their simplest expression. Groups are seen in motion, priests in
procession, soldiers on the march, and often a single stroke is
sufficient to render an individual or create the impression of life and
movement. Every plate is a masterpiece of coloured woodcut engraving, of
singular flavour in colour, delightful in its gravely harmonised chord
of golden yellow, faded green, and fiery red, to which are sometimes
added golden, silvern, and other metallic tones."
After the beginning of the sixties Paris came under the captivating
influence of Japan. And there is no doubt that as the English influenced
the landscape painters of Fontainebleau, the Venetians Delacroix, and
the Neapolitan masters Courbet and Ribot, the newest phase of French
art, which took its departure from Manet, was inaugurated by the
enthusiasm for things Japanese. From the moment when the peculiar
isolation of Japan was ended by the breaking up of the Japanese feudal
state, Paris was flooded by splendid works of Japanese art. A painter
discovered amongst the mass of articles newly arrived albums, colour
prints, and pictures. Their drawing, colouring, and composition deviated
from everything hitherto accounted as art, and yet the æsthetic
character of these works was too artistic to permit of any one smiling
over them as curiosities. Whether the discoverer was Alfred Stevens or
Diaz, Fortuny, James Tissot, or Alphonse Legros, the enthusiasm for the
Japanese swept over the studios like a storm. The artistic world never
wearied of admiring the capricious ability of these compositions, the
astonishing power of drawing, the fineness in tone, the originality of
pictorial effect, nor of wondering at the refined simplicity of the
means by which these results were achieved. Japanese art made itself
felt by its fresh and tender charm, its creative opulence, its lightness
and delicacy of observation; it arrested attention because directness,
unfailing tact, and inherent distinction were of the essence of its
conception; and it was recognised as the production of a nation of
artists combining the subtilised taste of an originally refined
civilisation with the freshness of feeling peculiar to primitive people.
Colour prints, now to be had for a few francs at every bazaar, were
bought at the highest figures. Every new consignment was awaited with
feverish impatience. Old ivory, enamel, porcelain and embellished
pottery, bronzes and wood and lacquer-work, ornamented stuffs,
embroidered silks, albums, books of wood-cuts, and knick-knacks were
scarcely unpacked in the shop before they found their way into the
studios of artists and the libraries of scholars. In a short time great
collections of the artistic productions of Japan passed into the hands
of the painters Manet, James Tissot, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Degas,
Carolus Duran, and Monet; of the engravers Bracquemond and Jules
Jacquemart; of the authors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Champfleury,
Philippe Burty, and Zola; and of the manufacturers Barbedienne and
Christofle.
[Illustration: HARUNOBU. A PAIR OF LOVERS.]
The International Exhibition of 1867 brought Japan still more into
fashion, and from this year must be dated the peculiar influence of the
West upon the East and the East upon the West. The Japanese came over to
study at the European polytechnic institutes, universities, and military
academies. On the other hand, we became the pupils of the Japanese in
art. Even during the course of the Exhibition a group of artists and
critics founded a Japanese society of the "Jinglar," which met every
week in Sèvres at the house of Solon, the director of the manufactory.
They used a Japanese dinner-service, designed by Bracquemond, and
everything except the napkins, cigars, and ash-trays was Japanese. One
of the members, Dr. Zacharias Astruc, published in _L'Étendard_ a series
of articles upon "The Empire of the Rising Sun," which made a great
sensation. Soon afterwards the Parisian theatres brought out Japanese
ballets and fairy plays. Ernest d'Hervilly wrote his Japanese piece _La
Belle Saïnara_, which Lemère printed for him in Japanese fashion and
paged from right to left, giving it a yellow cover designed by
Bracquemond. A Japanese ballet was performed at the opera, and a
Japanese turn was given to the toilettes of women.
For painters Japanese art was a revelation. Here was uttered the word
that hovered on so many lips, and that no one had dared to pronounce.
With what a fleeting touch, and yet with what precision, with what
incomparable sureness, lightness, and grace, was everything carried out.
How intuitive and spontaneous, how imaginative and how full of
suggestion, how effortless and how rich in surprises, was this strange
art. How happily was industry united with caprice, and nonchalance with
endeavour at the highest finish. How suggestive was this disregard for
symmetry, this piquant method of introducing a flower, an insect, a
frog, or a bird here and there, merely as a pictorial spot in the
picture. How the Japanese understood the art of expressing much with few
means, where the Europeans toiled with a great expenditure of means to
express little.
It would certainly have been an exceedingly false move if a direct
imitation of the Japanese had been thought of. Japanese art is the
product of a sensuous people, and European art that of intellectual
nations. The latter is greater and more serious; it is nobler, and it
reaches heights of expression not attained by the grotesque and terrible
distortions and the morbidly droll or melancholy outbursts of sentiment
known to the Japanese. Our imagination is alien to that of these
children of the sensuous world, who quake and tremble for joy, horrify
themselves with their masks, and pass from convulsive laughter to sheer
terror, and from the shudder of hallucination to ecstatic bliss. Had
Japanese art been coarsely transposed by imitators it would have led to
caricature.
But if its poetics were little suitable for Europe in the specialised
case, they nevertheless contained general laws better fitted for modern
art than those which had been hitherto borrowed from Greece. All arts,
music as well as poetry, were then striving for the dissolution of
simple, tyrannical rhythms. The recurrence of unyielding measures beaten
out with unwavering repetition no longer corresponded with the
complicated, neurotic emotions of the new age. In painting, likewise,
exertions were being made to burst the old shell, and a style was sought
after for the treatment of modern life which had been violently handled
in the effort to force it to fit the Procrustean bed of traditional
rules. Then came the Japanese with their astonishing, rapid, and
pictorial sketches, and revealed a new method for the interpretation of
nature. At a time when the symmetrical balance of lines, borrowed from
the works of the Renaissance masters, became wearisome in its monotony,
they taught a much freer architecture of form, and one which was broken
by charming caprices. Where there had been rhythm, tension, clarity,
largeness, and quietude in the old European painting, there was in them
a nervous freedom, an artful carelessness, and life and charm. Art was
concealed beneath the fancy shown in their facile construction, which
seemed to have been improvised by nature herself. An artistic method of
deviating from geometrical arrangement, freedom of distribution,
unforced and unsymmetrical structure, in the place of balance and
construction according to rules, were learnt from the Japanese in the
matter of composition.
[Illustration: TOYOKUMI. NOCTURNAL REVERIE.]
At the same time, they threw light upon what had been flat and trivial
in Courbet's realism. These spirited narrators never told a story for
the sake of telling it; they never painted to give a prosaic copy of
some particle of reality. They liberated European painting from the
heaviness of matter, and rendered it tender and delicate. They taught
that art of not saying everything, which says so much, the method of
compendious drawing, the secret of expanding distance by a special
treatment of lines, the touch thrown rapidly in, the unforeseen, the
surprise, the fleeting hint, the way of increasing effect by the
incompletion of motive, the suggestion of the whole by a part. Artists
learnt from them another manner of drawing and modelling, a manner of
giving the impression of the object without the need for the whole of it
being executed, so that one knows that it is there only through one's
knowledge. They brought in the taste for pithy sketches dealing only
with essentials, the consciousness of the endless catalogue of what may
be contained--in life, reality, and fancy--by one fluent outline. They
introduced the preference for perspective bird's-eye views, the
disposition to throw groups, dense masses, and crowds more into the
distance, and render them more animated and vivid by a relief of the
foreground, which (though confirmed by photography) is apparently
improbable.
The influence of Japan on colouring is just as visible as upon
composition and drawing. It had been clearly shown in Courbet's pictures
of artisans that the rules of the Bolognese school, with their brown
sauce and their red shadows, could not possibly be applied to objects in
the open air. It was therefore necessary to discover a new principle of
colour for modern subjects, a principle by which oil-painting would be
divested of its oil, and light and air would come to their rights. It
was seen from the works of the painters of Nippon that it was not
absolutely necessary to paint brown to be a painter. They taught a new
method of seeing things, opened the eyes to the changing play of the
phenomena of light, the fugitive nature and constant mutability of which
had up to this time seemed to mock at every rendering. The softness of
their bright harmonies was studied and artistically transposed.
These are the points in which Japanese art has had a revolutionary
effect upon the development of European. Each one of those who at that
time belonged to the Society of the Jinglar has had more or less
experience of its influence. Alfred Stevens owes to it certain
delicacies of colouring; Whistler, his exquisite refinement of tone and
his capriciously artistic method in the treatment of landscape; Degas,
his fantastic and free grouping, his unrivalled audacities of
composition. Manet especially became now the artist to whom history does
honour, and Louis Gonse tells a story with a very characteristic touch
of the first exhibition of the _Maîtres impressionistes_. He went there,
coming from the official Salon in the company of a Japanese, and, while
the French public declared the fresh brightness of the pictures to be
untrue and barbaric, the son of sacred Nippon, accustomed from youth to
see nature in light, airy tones without a yellow coating of varnish,
said: "Over there I was in an exhibition of oil-pictures, here I feel as
if I were entering a flowery garden. What strikes me is the animation of
these figures, and the feeling is one I have never had elsewhere in your
picture exhibitions."
CHAPTER XXXI
THE IMPRESSIONISTS
The name Impressionists dates from an exhibition in Paris which was got
up at Nadar's in 1871. The catalogue contained a great deal about
impressions--for instance, "_Impression de mon pot au feu_,"
"_Impression d'un chat qui se promène_." In his criticism Claretie
summed up the impressions and spoke of the _Salon des Impressionistes_.
The beginning of the movement, however, came about the middle of the
sixties, and Zola was the first to champion the new artists with his
trenchant pen. Assuming the name of his later hero Claude, he
contributed in 1866 to _L'Événement_, under the title _Mon Salon_, that
article which swamped the office with such a flood of indignant letters
and occasioned such a secession of subscribers that the proprietor of
the paper, the sage and admirable M. de Villemessant, felt himself
obliged to give the naturalist critic an anti-naturalistic colleague in
the person of M. Théodore Pelloquet. In these reviews of the Salon,
collected in 1879 in the volume _Mes Haines_, and in the essay upon
_Courbet, the Painter of Realism_--Courbet, the already recognised
"master of Ornans "--those theories are laid down which Lantier and his
friends announced at a later date in _L'Oeuvre_. Then the architect
Dubiche, one of the members of the young _Bohème_, dreamed in a spirit
of presage of a new architecture. "With passionate gestures he demanded
and insisted upon the formula for the architecture of this democracy,
that work in stone which should give expression to it, a building in
which it should feel itself at home, something strong and forcible,
simple and great, something already proclaimed in our railway stations
and our markets in the grace and power of their iron girders, but
purified and made beautiful, declaring the largeness of our conquests."
A few years went by, and then the Paris Centenary Exhibition provided
that something, though it was not in monumental stone. The great
edifices were fashioned of glass and iron, and the mighty railway
buildings were their forerunners. The enormous engine-rooms which gave
space for thousands and the Eiffel Tower announced this new
architecture. And as Dubiche prophesied a new architecture, so did
Claude prophesy a new painting. "Sun and open air and bright and
youthful painting are what we need. Let the sun come in and render
objects as they appear under the illumination of broad daylight." In
Zola Claude Lantier is the martyr of this new style. He is scorned,
derided, avoided, and cast out. His best picture is smuggled, through
grace and mercy, into the Exhibition by a friend upon the hanging
committee as a _charité_. But, ten years after, these new doctrines had
penetrated all the studios of Paris and of Europe like germs borne in
the air.
The artistic ideas of Claude Lantier were given to Zola by his friend
_Édouard Manet_, the father of Impressionism, and in that way the
creator of the newest form of art. Manet appeared for the first time in
1862. In 1865, when the Committee of the Salon gave up a few secondary
rooms to the rejected, the first of his pictures which made any
sensation were to be seen--a "Scourging of Christ" and a picture of a
girl with a cat resting--both invariably surrounded by a dense circle of
the scornful. Forty years before, the first works of the Romanticists,
whose doctrine was likewise scoffed at in the formula _Le laid c'est le
beau_, had called forth a similar outcry against the want of taste
common to them all. A generation later people laughed at "The Funeral in
Ornans," and now the same derision was directed against Manet, who
completed Courbet's work. His pictures were held to be a practical joke
which the painter was playing upon the public, the most unheard of farce
that had ever been painted. If any one had declared that these works
would give the impulse to a revolution in art, people would have turned
their backs upon him or thought that he was jesting. "Criticism treated
Manet," wrote Zola, "as a kind of buffoon who put out his tongue for the
amusement of street boys." The rage against "The Scourging of Christ"
went so far that the picture had to be protected by special precautions
from the assaults of sticks and umbrellas.
But the matter took a somewhat different aspect when, five years
afterwards, from twenty to thirty more recent pictures were exhibited
together in Manet's studio. Whether it was because the aims of the
painter had become clearer in the meanwhile, or because his works
suffered less from the proximity of others, they made an impression, and
that although they represented nothing in the least adventurous and
sensational. Life-size figures, light and almost without shadow, rowed
over blue water, hung out white linen, watered green flower-pots, and
leant against grey walls. The light colours placed immediately beside
each other had a bizarre effect on the eye accustomed to chiaroscuro.
The eye, which, like the human spirit, has its habitudes, and believes
that it always sees nature as she is painted, was irritated by these
delicately chosen tone-values which seemed to it arbitrary, by these
novel harmonies which it took for discords. Nevertheless the clarity of
the pictures made a striking effect, and something of "Manet's sun"
lingered in the memory. People still laughed, only not so loud, and they
gave Manet credit for having the courage of his convictions. "A
remarkable circumstance has to be recorded. A young painter has followed
his personal impressions quite ingenuously, and has painted a few things
which are not altogether in accord with the principles taught in the
schools. In this way he has executed pictures which have been a source
of offence to eyes accustomed to other paintings. But now, instead of
abusing the young artist through thick and thin, we must be first clear
as to why our eyes have been offended, and whether they ought to have
been." With these words criticism began to take Manet seriously. Charles
Ephrussi and Duranty, besides Zola, came forward as his first literary
champions in the press. "Manet is bold" was now the phrase used about
him in public. The Impressionists took the salon by storm. And Manet's
bright and radiant sun was seen to be a better thing than the brown
sauce of the Bolognese. It was as if a strong power had suddenly
deranged the focus of opinion in all the studios, and Manet's victory
brought the same salvation to French art as that of Delacroix had done
forty years before and that of Courbet ten years before. _Manet et
manebit._ Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet are the three great names of
modern French painting, the names of the men who gave it the most
decisive impulses.
[Illustration: ÉDOUARD MANET.]
Édouard Manet, _le maître impressioniste_, was born in 1832, in the Rue
Bonaparte, exactly opposite the École des Beaux-Arts, and his life was
quietly and simply spent, without passion and excitement, unusual
events, or sanguinary battles. At sixteen, having passed through the
_Collège Rollin_, he entered the navy with the permission of his
parents, and made a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, which was accomplished
without any incident of interest, without shipwreck or any one being
drowned. With his cheerful, even temperament he looked on the boundless
sea and satiated his eyes with the marvellous spectacle of waves and
horizon, never to forget it. The luminous sky was spread before him, the
great ocean rocked and sported around, revealing colours other than he
had seen in the Salon. On his return he gave himself up entirely to
painting. He is said to have been a slight, pale, delicate, and refined
young man when he became a pupil of Couture in 1851, almost at the same
time as Feuerbach. Nearly six years he remained with the master of "The
Decadent Romans," without a suspicion of how he was to find his way, and
even after he had left the studio he was still pursued by the shade of
Couture; he worked without knowing very well what he really wanted. Then
he travelled, visiting Germany, Cassel, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and
Munich, where he copied the portrait of Rembrandt in the Pinakothek; and
then he saw Florence, Rome, and Venice. Under the influence of the
Neapolitan and Flemish artists, to whom Ribot, Courbet, and Stevens
pointed at the time, he gradually became a painter. His first picture,
"The Child with Cherries," painted in 1859, reveals the influence of
Brouwer. In 1861 he exhibited, for the first time, the "double portrait"
of his parents, for which he received honourable mention, although--or
because--the picture was entirely painted in the old Bolognese style.
These works are only of interest because they make it possible to see
the rapidity with which Manet learnt to understand his craft with the
aid of the old masters, and the sureness and energy with which he
followed, from the very beginning, the realistic tendency initiated by
Courbet. "The Nymph Surprised," in 1862, was a medley of reminiscences
from Jordaens, Tintoretto, and Delacroix. His "Old Musician," executed
with diligence but trivial in its realism, had the appearance of being a
tolerable Courbet. Then he made--not at first in Madrid, which he only
knew later, but in the Louvre--the eventful discovery of another old
master, not yet known in all his individuality to the master of Ornans.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MANET. THE FIFER.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MANET. THE GUITARERO.
(_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)]
At the great Manchester Exhibition of 1857 Velasquez had been revealed
to the English; in the beginning of the sixties he was discovered by the
French. William Stirling's biography of Velasquez was translated into
French by G. Brunet, and provided with a _Catalogue raisonné_ by W.
Bürger. The works of Charles Blanc, Théophile Gautier, and Paul Lefort
appeared, and in a short time Velasquez, of whom the world outside
Madrid had hitherto known little, was in artistic circles in Paris a
familiar and frequently cited personality, who began not only to occupy
the attention of the historians of art, but of artists also. Couture was
in the habit of saying to his pupils that Velasquez had not understood
the orchestration of tones, that he had an inclination to monochrome,
and that he had never comprehended the nature of colour. From the
beginning of the sixties France came under the sway of that serious
feeling for colour known to the great Spaniard, and Manet was his first
enthusiastic pupil. Certain of his single figures against a pearl-grey
background--"The Fifer," "The Guitarero," "The Bull-fighter wounded to
Death"--were the decisive works in which, with astonishing talent, he
declared himself as the pupil of Velasquez. W. Bürger praised Velasquez
as _le peintre le plus peintre qui fût jamais_. As regards the
nineteenth century, the same may be said of Manet. Only Frans Hals and
Velasquez had these eminent pictorial qualities. In the way in which the
black velvet dress, the white silk band, and the red flag were painted
in the toreador picture, there was a feeling for beauty which bore
witness to the finest understanding of the great Spaniard. In his
"Angels at the Tomb of Christ" he has sought, as little as did Velasquez
in his picture of the Epiphany, to introduce any trace of heavenly
expression into the faces, but as a piece of painting it takes its place
amongst the best religious pictures of the century. His "Bon Bock"--a
portrait of the engraver Belot, a stout jovial man smoking a pipe as he
sits over a glass of beer--is one of those likenesses which stamp
themselves upon the memory like the "Hille Bobbe" of Frans Hals. "Faure
as Hamlet" stands out from the vacant light grey background like the
"Truhan Pablillos" of Velasquez. The doublet and mantle are of black
velvet, the mantle lined with rose-coloured silk; and the toilette is
completed by a broad black hat with a large black feather. He seems as
though he had just stepped to the footlights, and stands there with his
legs apart, the mantle thrown over the left arm, and his right hand
closing upon his sword. The cool harmony of black, white, grey, and
rose-colour makes an uncommonly refined effect. Manet has the rich
artistic methods of Velasquez in a measure elsewhere only attained by
Raeburn, and as the last of these studies he has created in his "Enfant
à l'Épée" a work which--speaking without profanity--might have been
signed by the great Spaniard himself. In the beginning of the sixties,
when he gave a separate exhibition of his works, Courbet is said to have
exclaimed upon entering, "Nothing but Spaniards!"
But even this following of the Spaniards indicated an advance upon
Courbet; it meant the triumph over brown sauce and a closer
approximation to truth. For, amongst all the old masters, Velasquez and
Frans Hals--who greatly resemble each other in this respect--are the
simplest and most natural in their colouring; they are not idealists in
colour like Titian, Paul Veronese, and Rubens, nor do they labour upon
the tone of their pictures like the Dutch "little masters" and Chardin.
They paint their pictures in the broad and common light of day. Their
flesh-tint is truer than the juicy tint of the Venetians, and the fiery
red of Rubens, with his shining reflections. Beside Velasquez, as Justi
says, the colouring of Titian seems conventional, that of Rembrandt
fantastic, and that of Rubens is tinged with something which is not
natural. Or, as a contemporary of Velasquez expressed himself:
"Everything else, old and new, is painting; Velasquez alone is truth."
[Illustration: MANET. LE BON BOCK.
(_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)]
Thus the difference between the youthful works of Manet and those of his
predecessor Courbet is the difference between Velasquez and Caravaggio.
Of course, in Manet's earliest pictures there were found the broad, dull
red-brown surfaces which characterise the works of the Bolognese and the
Neapolitans. A cool silver tone, a shadowless treatment gleaming in
silver, has now taken the place of this warm brown sauce. He has the
white of Velasquez, his cool subdued rose-colour, his delicate grey
which has been so much admired and against which every touch of colour
stands out clear and determined, and that celebrated black of the
Spaniard which is never heavy and dull, but makes such a light and
transparent effect. What is bright is contrasted with what is bright,
and light colours are placed upon a silvery grey background. The most
perfect modelling and plastic effect is attained without the aid of
strong contrasts of shadow. Thus he closed his apprenticeship to the old
masters by being able to see with the eyes of that old master whose
vision was the truest.
[Illustration: MANET. A GARDEN IN RUEIL.]
This was the point of departure for Manet's further development. The
study of Velasquez did not merely set him free from sauce; it also
started the problem of painting light. He went through a course of
development similar to that of the old Spaniard himself. When Velasquez
painted his first picture with a popular turn, the "Bacchus," he still
stood upon the ground of the tenebrous painters; he represented an
open-air scene with the illumination of a closed room. Although the
ceremony is taking place in broad daylight, the people seem to be
sitting in a dingy tavern, receiving light from a studio window to the
left. Ten years afterwards, when he painted "The Smithy of Vulcan," he
had emancipated himself from this Bolognese tradition, which he spoke of
henceforward as "a gloomy and horrible style." The deep and sharply
contrasted shadows have vanished, and daylight has conquered the light
of the cellar. The great equestrian portraits which followed gave Mengs
occasion to remark, even a hundred years ago, that Velasquez was the
first who understood how to paint what is "ambiant," the air filling the
vacuum between objects. And at the end of his life he solved the final
problem in "The Women Spinning." In the "Bacchus" might be found the
treatment of an open-air scene in the key of sauce, but here was the
glistening of light in an interior. The sun quivers over silken stuffs,
falls upon the dazzling necks of women, plays through coal-black
Castilian locks, renders one thing plastically distinct and another
pictorially vague, dissolves corporeality, and lends surface the
rounding of life. Contours touched with the brightness of light surround
the heads of the girls at work. The shadows are not warm brown but cool
grey, and the tints of reflected light play from one object to another.
Two remarkable pictures of 1863 and 1865 show that Manet had grasped the
problem and was endeavouring in a tentative way to give expression to
his ideas.
In one of these, "The Picnic," painted in 1863, there was a stretch of
sward, a few trees, and in the background a river in which a woman was
merrily splashing in her chemise; in the foreground were seated two
young men in frock-coats opposite another woman, who has just come out
of the water and been drying herself. Needless to say, this picture was
rejected as something unprecedented, by the committee, which included
Ingres, Léon Cogniet, Robert Fleury, and Hippolyte Flandrin. Eugène
Delacroix was the only one in its favour. So Manet was relegated to the
_Salon des Refusés_, where Bracquemond, Legros, Whistler, and Harpignies
were hung beside him. This Exhibition was held in the Industrial Hall,
and the public went through a narrow little door from one gallery to the
other. Half Paris was bewildered and discomposed by these works of the
rejected; even Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie ostentatiously
turned their backs upon Manet's picture when they visited the Salon.
This naked woman made a scandal. How shocking! A woman without the
slightest stitch of clothes between two gentlemen in their frock-coats!
In the Louvre, indeed, there were about fifty Venetian paintings with
much the same purport. Every manual of art refers to "The Family," as it
is called, and the "Ages of Life" of Giorgione, in which nude and
clothed figures are moving in a landscape and placed ingenuously beside
each other. But that a painter should claim for a modern artist the
right of painting for the joy of what is purely pictorial was a
phenomenon that had never been encountered before. The public searched
for something obscene, and they found it; but for Manet the whole
picture was only a technical experiment: the nude woman in front was
only there because the painter wanted to observe the play of the sun and
the reflections of the foliage upon naked flesh; the woman in her
chemise merely owed her existence to the circumstance of her charming
outline making such a delightful patch of white amid the green meadows.
Manet for the first time touched the problem which Madox Brown had
thrown out in his "Work" ten years before in England, though for the
present he did so with no greater success: the sunbeams glanced no
doubt, but they were heavy and opaque; the sky was bright, but without
atmosphere. As yet there is nothing of the Manet who belongs to history.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MANET. THE FIGHT BETWEEN THE "KEARSARGE" AND "ALABAMA."]
The celebrated "Olympia" of 1865, now to be found in the Luxembourg, was
painted during this stage in his development: it represents a neurotic,
anæmic creature, who stretches out, pale and sickly, her meagre nudity
upon white linen, with a purring cat at her feet; whilst a negress in a
red dress draws back the curtain, offering her a bouquet. With this
picture--no one can tell why--the definite battles over Impressionism
began. The critics who talked about obscenity were not consistent,
because Titian's pictures of Venus with her female attendant, the little
dog, and the youth sitting upon the edge of the bed, are not usually
held to be obscene. But it is nevertheless difficult to find in this
flatly modelled body, with its hard black outlines, those artistic
qualities which Zola discovered in it. The picture has nothing whatever
of Titian in it, but it may almost be said to have something of Cranach.
"The Picnic" and "Olympia" have both only an historical interest as the
first works in which the artist trusted his own eyes, refusing to look
through any one's spectacles. Feeling that he would come to nothing if
he continued to study nature through the medium of an old master, he had
to render some real thing just as it appeared to him when he was not
looking into the mirror of old pictures. He tried to forget what he had
studied in galleries, the tricks of art which he had learnt with
Couture, and the famous pictures he had seen. In his earlier works there
had been a far-fetched refinement and a delicacy taken from the old
masters, but "The Picnic" and "Olympia" are simpler and more
independent. In both he was already an "Impressionist," true to his
personal vision, though he could not entirely express the new language
that hovered upon his lips. He had tried both to rid himself of
Courbet's brown sauce and of the ivory tone of Bouguereau, and to be
just to local tones through simple and independent observation; in his
"Picnic" he had painted the trees green, the earth yellow, and the sky
grey, and in "Olympia" the bed white and the body of the woman
flesh-colour. But he was as little successful as the pre-Raphaelites in
bringing the local tones into full harmony. This is the step which Manet
made in advance of the pre-Raphaelites: after he had emancipated himself
from the conventional brown and ivory scheme of tone, and had been for a
time, like the pre-Raphaelites, true although hard, he attained that
harmony which hitherto had been either not reached by artistic means or
not reached at all, by strict observation of the medium by which nature
produces her harmonies--light. As the air, the pervasive atmosphere,
renders nature everywhere harmonious and refined in colour, so it
forthwith became for the artist the means of reaching that great harmony
which is the object of all pictorial endeavour, and which had never
previously been reached except through some mannerism.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
MANET. BOATING.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MANET. A BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRES.]
This movement, so historically memorable, when Manet discovered the sun
and the fine fluid of the atmosphere, was shortly before 1870. Not long
before the declaration of war he was in the country, in the
neighbourhood of Paris, staying with his friend de Nittis; but he
continued to work as though he were at home, only his studio was here
the pleasure-ground. Here one day he sat in full sunlight, placed his
model amid the flowers of the turf, and began to paint. The result was
"The Garden," now in the possession of Madame de Nittis. The young wife
of the Italian painter is reclining in an easy-chair, between her
husband, who is lying on the grass, and her child asleep in its cradle.
Every flower is fresh and bright upon the fragrant sward. The green of
the stretch of grass is luminous, and everything is bathed in soft,
bright atmosphere; the leaves cast their blue shadows upon the yellow
gravel path. "Plein-air" made its entry into painting.
In 1870 his activity had to be interrupted. He entered a company of
Volunteers consisting chiefly of artists and men of letters, and in
December he became a lieutenant in the Garde Nationale, where he had
Meissonier as his colonel. The pictures, therefore, in which he was
entirely Manet belong exclusively to the period following 1870.
From this time his great problem was the sun, the glow of daylight, the
tremor of the air upon the earth basking in light. He became a natural
philosopher who could never satisfy himself, studying the effect of
light and determining with the observation of a man of science how the
atmosphere alters the phenomena of colour.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
MANET. SPRING: JEANNE.]
In tender, virginal, light grey tones, never seen before, he depicted,
in fourteen pictures exhibited at a dealer's, the luxury and grace of
Paris, the bright days of summer and _soirées_ flooded with gaslight,
the faded features of the fallen maiden and the refined _chic_ of the
woman of the world. There was to be seen "Nana," that marvel of
audacious grace. Laced in a blue silk corset, and otherwise clad merely
in a muslin smock with her feet in pearl-grey stockings, the blond woman
stands at the mirror painting her lips, and carelessly replying to the
words of a man who is watching her upon the sofa behind. Near it hung
balcony scenes, fleeting sketches from the skating rink, the _café
concert_, the _Bal de l'Opéra_, the _déjeuner_ scene at Père
Lathuille's, and the "Bar at the Folies-Bergères." In one case he has
made daylight the subject of searching study, in another the artificial
illumination of the footlights. "Music in the Tuileries" reveals a crowd
of people swarming in an open, sunny place. Every figure was introduced
as a patch of colour, but these patches were alive and this multitude
spoke. One of the best pictures was "Boating"--a craft boldly cut away
in its frame, after the manner of the Japanese, and seated in it a
young lady in light blue and a young man in white, their figures
contrasting finely with the delicate grey of the water and the
atmosphere impregnated with moisture. And scattered amongst these
pictures there were to be found powerful sea-pieces and charming,
piquant portraits.
Manet had a passion for the world. He was a man with a slight and
graceful figure, a beard of the colour known as _blond cendré_, deep
blue eyes filled with the fire of youth, a refined, clever face,
aristocratic hands, and a manner of great urbanity. With his wife, the
highly cultured daughter of a Dutch musician, he went into the best
circles of Parisian society, and was popular everywhere for his
trenchant judgment and his sparkling intellect. His conversation was
vivid and sarcastic. He was famous for his wit _à la_ Gavarni. He
delighted in the delicate perfume of drawing-rooms, the shining
candle-light at receptions; he worshipped modernity and the piquant
_frou-frou_ of toilettes; he was the first who stood with both feet in
the world which seemed so inartistic to others. Thus the progress made
in the acquisition of subject and material may be seen even in the
outward appearance of the three pioneers of modern art. Millet in his
portrait stands in wooden shoes, Courbet in his shirt-sleeves; Manet
wears a tall hat and a frock-coat. Millet, the peasant, painted
peasants. Courbet, the democrat from the provinces, gave the rights of
citizenship to the artisan, but without himself deserting the provinces
and the _bourgeoisie_. He was repelled by everything either
distinguished or refined. In such matters he could not find the force
and vehemence which were all he sought. Manet, the Parisian and the man
of refinement, gave art the elegance of modern life.
In the year 1879 he made the Parisian magistracy the offer of painting
in the session-room of the Town Hall the entire _Ventre de Paris_, the
markets, railway stations, lading-places, and public gardens, and
beneath the ceiling a gallery of the celebrated men of the present time.
His letter was unanswered, and yet it gave the impulse to all those
great pictures of contemporary life painted afterwards in Paris and the
provinces for the walls of public buildings. In 1880 he received,
through the exertions of his friend Antonin Proust, a medal of the
second class, the only one ever awarded to him. And the dealer Duret
began to buy pictures from him; Durand-Ruel followed suit, and so did M.
Faure, the singer of the Grand Opera, who himself is the owner of
five-and-thirty Manets. The poor artist did not long enjoy this
recognition. On 30th April 1883, the varnishing day at the Salon, he
died from blood-poisoning and the consequences of the amputation of a
leg.
But the seed which he had scattered had already thrown out roots. It had
taken him years to force open the doors of the Salon, but to-day his
name shines in letters of gold upon the façade of the École des
Beaux-Arts as that of the man who has spoken the most decisive final
utterance on behalf of the liberation of modern art. His achievement,
which seems to have been an unimportant alteration in the method of
painting, was in reality a renovation in the method of looking at the
world and a renovation in the method of thinking.
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
DEGAS. THE BALLET SCENE IN ROBERT THE DEVIL.]
[Illustration: DEGAS. THE BALLET IN _DON JUAN_.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: DEGAS. A BALLET DANCER.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
Up to this time it was only the landscape painters who had emancipated
themselves from imitation of the gallery tone, and what was done by
Corot in landscape had, logically enough, to be carried out in
figure-painting likewise; for men and women are encompassed by the air
as much as trees. After the landscape painters of Barbizon had made
evident the vast difference between the light of day and that of a
closed room in their pictures painted in the open air, the
figure-painters, if they made any claim to truth of effect, could no
longer venture to content themselves with the illumination falling upon
their models in the studio, when they were painting incidents taking
place out of doors. Yet even the boldest of the new artists did not set
themselves free from tradition. Even after they had become independent
in subject and composition they had remained the slaves of the old
masters in their intuition of colour. Some imitated the Spaniards,
without reflecting that Ribera painted his pictures in a small, dark
studio, and that the cellar-light with which they were illuminated was
therefore correct, whereas applied, in the present age, to the bright
interiors of the nineteenth century it was utterly false. Others treated
open-air scenes as if they were taking place in a ground-floor parlour,
and endeavoured by curtains and shutters to create a light similar to
that which may be found in old masters and pictures dimmed with age. Or
the artist painted according to a general recipe and in complete
defiance of what he saw with his eyes. For instance, an exceedingly
characteristic episode is told of the student days of Puvis de
Chavannes. Upon a grey, misty day the young artist had painted a nude
figure. The model appeared enveloped in tender light as by a bright,
silvery halo. "That's the way you see your model?" grumbled Couture
indignantly when he came to correct the picture. Then he mixed together
white, cobalt blue, Naples yellow, and vermilion, and turned Puvis de
Chavannes' nude grey figure by a universal recipe into one that was
highly coloured and warmly luminous--such a figure as an old master
might perhaps have painted under different conditions of light. With his
"Fiat Lux" Manet uttered a word of redemption that had hovered upon
many lips. The jurisdiction of galleries was broken now also in regard
to colour; the last remnant of servile dependence upon the mighty dead
was cast aside; the aims attained by the landscape painters thirty years
before were reached in figure-painting likewise.
[Illustration: DEGAS. HORSES IN A MEADOW.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: DEGAS. DANCING GIRL FASTENING HER SHOE.]
Perhaps a later age may even come to recognise that Manet made an
advance upon the old masters in his delicacy and scrupulous analysis of
light; in that case it will esteem the discovery of tone-values as the
chief acquisition of the nineteenth century, as a conquest such as has
never been made in painting since the Eycks and Masaccio, since the
establishment of the theory of perspective. In a treatise commanding all
respect Hugo Magnus has written of how the sense of colour increased in
the various periods of the world's history; since the appearance of the
Impressionists, verification may be made of yet another advance in this
direction. The study of tone-values has never been carried on with such
conscientious exactitude, and in regard to truth of atmosphere one is
disposed to believe that our eyes to-day see and feel things which our
ancestors had not yet noticed. The old masters have also touched the
problem of "truth in painting." It is not merely that the character of
their colours often led the Italian tempera and fresco painters to the
most natural method of treating light. They even occupied themselves in
a theoretical way with the question. An old Italian precept declares
that the painter ought to work in a closed yard beneath an awning, but
should place his model beneath the open sky. In the frescoes which he
painted in Arezzo in 1480, Piero della Francesca, in particular, pursued
the problem of _plein-air_ painting with a fine instinct. But love of
the beautiful and luminous tints, such as the technique of oil-painting
enabled artists to attain at a later date, quickly seduced them from
carrying out the natural treatment of light in the gradation of colour.
Under the influence of oil-painting the Italians of the great period,
from Leonardo onwards, turned more and more to strong contrasts. And in
spite of Albert Cuyp, even the Dutch landscape painters of the
seventeenth century have seen objects rather in line and form,
plastically, than pictorially in their environment of light and air. The
nineteenth century was the first seriously to attack a problem
which--except by Velasquez--had been merely touched upon by the old
schools, but never solved.
[Illustration: RENOIR. SUPPER AT BOUGIVAL.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: RENOIR. THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
What the masters of Barbizon had done through instinctive genius was
made the object of scientific study by the Impressionists. The new
school set up the principle that atmosphere changes the colour of
objects; for instance, that the colour and outline of a tree painted in
a room are completely different from those of the same tree painted upon
the spot in the open air. As an unqualified rule they claimed that every
incident was to be harmonised with time, place, and light; thus a scene
taking place out of doors had of necessity to be painted, not within
four walls, but under the actual illumination of morning, or noon, or
evening, or night. In making this problem the object of detailed and
careful inquiry the artist came to analyse life, throbbing beneath its
veil of air and light, with more refinement and thoroughness than the
old masters had done. The latter painted light deadened in its fall, not
shining. Oils were treated as an opaque material, colour appeared to be
a substance, and the radiance of tinted light was lost through this
material heaviness. Courbet still represented merely the object apart
from its environment; he saw things in a plastic way, and not as they
were, bathed in the atmosphere; his men and women lived in oil, in brown
sauce, and not where it was only possible for them to live--in the air.
Everything he painted he isolated without a thought of atmospheric
surroundings. Now a complete change of parts was effected: bodies and
colours were no longer painted, but the shifting power of light under
which everything changes form and colour at every moment of the day. The
elder painters in essentials confined light to the surface of objects;
the new painters believed in its universality, beholding in it the
father of all life and of the manifold nature of the visible world, and
therefore of colour also. They no longer painted colours and forms with
lights and cast-shadows, but pellucid light, pouring over forms and
colours and absorbed and refracted by them. They no longer looked merely
to the particular, but to the whole, no longer saw nothing except
deadened light and cast-shadows, but the harmony and pictorial charm of
a moment of nature considered as such. With a zeal which at times seemed
almost paradoxical, they proceeded to establish the importance of the
phenomena of light. They discovered that, so far from being gilded,
objects are silvered by sunlight, and they made every effort to analyse
the multiplicity of these fine gradations down to their most delicate
_nuances_. They learnt to paint the quiver of tremulous sunbeams
radiating far and wide; they were the lyrical poets of light, which they
often glorified at the expense of what it envelops and causes to live.
At the service of art they placed a renovated treasury of refined,
purified, and pictorial phases of expression, in which the history of
art records an increase in the human eye of the sense of colour and the
power of perception.
[Illustration: RENOIR. FISHER CHILDREN BY THE SEA.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: RENOIR. THE WOMAN WITH THE CAT.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
That light is movement is here made obvious, and that all life is
movement is just what their art reveals. Courbet was an admirable
painter of plain surfaces. If he had to paint a wall he took it upon his
strong shoulders and transferred it to his canvas in such a way that a
stonemason might have been deceived. If it was a question of rocks, the
body of a woman, or the waves of the sea, he began to mix his pigments
thick, laid a firm mass of colour on the canvas, and spread it with a
knife. This spade-work gave him unrivalled truth to nature in
reproducing the surface of hard substances. Rocks, banks, and walls look
as they do in nature, but in the case of moving, indeterminate things
his power deserts him. His landscapes are painted in a rich, broad, and
juicy style, but his earth has no pulsation. Courbet has forgotten the
birds in his landscape. His seas have been seen with extraordinary
largeness of feeling, and they are masterpieces of drawing; the only
drawback is that they seem uninhabitable for fish. Under the steady hand
of the master the sea came to a standstill and was changed into rock. If
he has to paint human beings they stand as motionless as blocks of wood.
The expression of their faces seems galvanised into life, like their
bodies. Placing absolute directness in the rendering of impressions in
their programme, as the chief aim of their artistic endeavours, the
Impressionists were the first to discover the secret of seizing with the
utmost freshness the _nuances_ of expression and movement, which
remained petrified in the hands of their predecessors. Only the flash of
the spokes is painted in the wheel of a carriage in motion, and never
the appearance of the wheel when it is at rest; in the same way they
allow the outlines of human figures to relax and become indistinct, to
call up the impression of movement, the real vividness of the
appearance. Colour has been established as the sole, unqualified medium
of expression for the painter, and has so absorbed the drawing that the
line receives, as it were, a pulsating life, and cannot be felt except
in a pictorial way. In the painting of nude human figures the waxen
look--which in the traditional painting from the nude had a pretence of
being natural--has vanished from the skin, and thousands of delicately
distinguished gradations give animation to the flesh. Moreover, a finer
and deeper observation of temperament was made possible by lighter and
more sensitive technique. In the works of the earlier _genre_ painters
people never are what they are supposed to represent. The hired model,
picked from the lower strata of life, and used by the painter in
bringing his picture slowly to completion, was obvious even in the most
elegant toilette; but now real human beings are represented, men and
women whose carriage, gestures, and countenances tell at once what they
are. Even in portrait painting people whom the painter has surprised
before they have had time to put themselves in order, at the moment when
they are still entirely natural, have taken the place of lay-figures
fixed in position. The effort to seize the most unconstrained air and
the most natural position, and to arrest the most transitory shade of
expression, produces, in this field of art also, a directness and
vivacity divided by a great gulf from the pose and the grand airs of the
earlier drawing-room picture.
[Illustration: RENOIR. A PRIVATE BOX.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
From his very first appearance there gathered round Manet a number of
young men who met twice a week at a café in Batignolles, formerly a
suburb at the entrance of the Avenue de Clichy. After this
trysting-place the society called itself _L'École des Batignolles_.
Burty, Antonin Proust, Henner, and Stevens put in an occasional
appearance, but Legros, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Duranty, and Zola were
constant visitors. Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, Gauguin, and
Zandomeneghi were the leading spirits of the impressionistic staff, and,
being excluded from the official Salon, they generally set up their tent
at Nadar's, Reichshofen's, or some other dealer's. These are the names
of the men who, following Manet, were the earliest to make the new
problem the object of their studies.
_Degas_, the subtle colourist and miraculous draughtsman, who celebrates
dancers, gauze skirts, and the _foyers_ of the Opera, is the boldest and
the most original of those who banded together from the very outset of
the movement--the worst enemy of everything pretty and banal, the
greatest dandy of modern France, the man whose works are caviare to the
general and so refreshing to the _gourmet_, the painter who can find a
joy in the sublime beauty of ugliness.
[Illustration: RENOIR. THE TERRACE.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
Degas was older than Manet. He had run through all phases of French art
since Ingres. His first pictures, "Spartan Youths" and "Semiramis
building the Walls of Babylon," might indeed have been painted by
Ingres, to whom he looks up even now as to the first star in the
firmament of French art. Then for a time he was influenced by the
suggestive and tender intimacy in feeling and the soft, quiet harmony of
Chardin. He had also an enthusiasm for Delacroix: less for his
exaggerated colouring than for the lofty mark of style in the gestures
and movements painted by this great Romanticist, which Degas endeavoured
to transfer to the pantomime of the ballet. From Manet he learnt
softness and fluency of modelling. And finally the Japanese communicated
to him the principle of their dispersed composition, the choice of
standpoint, allowing the artist to look up from beneath or down from
above, the taste for fantastic decoration, the suggestive method of
emphasising this and suppressing that, the surprise of detail introduced
here and there in a perfectly arbitrary fashion. From the original and
bizarre union of all these elements he formed his exquisite,
marvellously expressive, and entirely personal style, which is hard to
describe with the pen, and would be defectively indicated by reference
to Besnard, who is allied to him in the treatment of light. It is only
in literature that Degas has a parallel. If a comparison between them be
at all possible, it might be said that his style in many ways recalls
that of the brothers de Goncourt. As these have enriched their language
with a new vocabulary for the expression of new emotions, Degas has made
for himself a new technique. Utterly despising everything pretty and
anecdotic, he has the secret of gaining the effect intended by
refinements of drawing and tone-values, just as the de Goncourts by the
association of words; he has borrowed phrases from all the lexicons of
painting; he has mixed oils, pastel, and water-colour together, and,
such as he is to-day, he must, like the de Goncourts, be reckoned
amongst the most delicate and refined artists of the century.
His range of subjects finds its limit in one point: he has the greatest
contempt for banality, for the repetition of others and of himself.
Every subject has to give opportunity for the introduction of special
models, not hitherto employed, of pictorial experiments and novel
problems of light. He made his starting-point, the grace and charming
movements of women. Trim Parisian laundresses in their spotless aprons,
little shop-girls in their _boutiques_, the spare grace of racehorses
with their elastic jockeys, marvellous portraits, like that of Duranty,
women getting out of the bath, the movements of the workwoman, and the
toilette and _négligé_ of the woman of the world, boudoir scenes, scenes
in court, and scenes in boxes at the theatre--he has painted them all.
And with what truth and life! How admirably his figures stand! how
completely they are what they give themselves out to be! The Circus and
the Opera soon became his favourite field of study. In his ballet-girls
he found fresher artistic material than in the goddesses and nymphs of
the antique.
At the same time the highest conceivable demands were here made on the
capacities of the painter and the draughtsman, and on his powers of
characterisation. Of all modern artists Degas is the man who creates the
greatest illusion as an interpreter of artificial light, of the glare of
the footlights before which these _décolleté_ singers move in their
gauze skirts. And these dancers are real dancers, vivid every one of
them, every one of them individual. The nervous force of the born
ballerina is sharply differentiated from the apathy of the others who
merely earn their bread by their legs. How fine are his novices with
tired, faded, pretty faces, when they have to sweep a curtsey, and pose
so awkwardly in their delightful shyness. How marvellously he has
grasped the fleeting charm of this moment. With what spirited
nonchalance he groups his girls enveloped in white muslin and coloured
sashes. Like the Japanese, he claims the right of rendering only what
interests him and appears to make a striking effect--"the vivid points,"
in Hokusai's phrase--and does not hold himself bound to add a lifeless
piece of canvas for the sake of "rounded composition." In pictures,
where it is his purpose to show the varied forms of the legs and feet of
his dancers, he only paints the upper part of the orchestra and the
lower part of the stage--that is to say, heads, hands, and instruments
below, and dancing legs above. He is equally uncompromising in his
street and racing scenes, so that often it is merely the hindquarters of
the horses and the back of the jockey that are visible. His pictures,
however, owe not a little of their life and piquancy to this brilliant
method of cutting through the middle, and to these triumphant evasions
of all the vulgar rules of composition. But, for the matter of that,
surely Dürer knew what he was about when, in his pictures of apocalyptic
riders, instead of completing the composition, he left it fragmentary,
to create an impression of the wild gallop.
[Illustration: C. PISSARRO. SITTING UP.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: C. PISSARRO. ROUEN.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
A special group amongst the artist's ballet pictures is that in which he
represents the training of novices, the severe course through which the
grub must pass before taking wing as a butterfly. Here is displayed a
strange fantastic anatomy, only comparable to the acrobatic distortions
to which the Japanese are so much addicted in their art. But it is
precisely these pictures which were of determining importance for the
development of Degas. In the quest of unstable lines and expressions,
instead of feeling reality in all its charming grace, he came to behold
it only in its degeneration. He was impelled to render the large outline
of the modern woman--the female figure which has grown to be a product
of art beneath the array of toilette--even in the most ungraceful
moments. He painted the woman who does not suspect that she is being
observed; he painted her seen, as it were, through the key-hole or the
slit of a curtain, and making, to some extent, the most atrociously ugly
movements. He was the merciless observer of creatures whom society turns
into machines for its pleasure--dancing, racing, and erotic machines. He
has depicted cruelly the sort of woman Zola has drawn in Nana--the woman
who has no expression, no play in her eyes, the woman who is merely
animal, motionless as a Hindu idol. His pictures of this class are a
natural history of prostitution of terrible veracity, a great poem on
the flesh, like the works of Titian and Rubens, except that in the
latter blooming beauty is the substance of the brilliant strophes,
while in Degas it is wrinkled skin, decaying youth, and the artificial
brightness of enamelled faces. "_A vous autres il faut la vie naturelle,
à moi la vie factice._"
[Illustration: _L'Art française._
C. PISSARRO. SYDENHAM CHURCH.]
This sense of having lived too much expressed itself also in the haughty
contempt with which he withdrew himself from exhibitions, the public,
and criticism. Any one who is not a constant visitor at Durand-Ruel's
has little opportunity of seeing the pictures of Degas. The conception
of fame is something which he does not seem to possess. Being a man of
cool self-reliance, he paints to please himself, without caring how his
pictures may suit the notions of the world or the usages of the schools.
For years he has kept aloof from the Salon, and some people say that he
has never exhibited at all. And he keeps at as great a distance from
Parisian society. In earlier days, when Manet, Pissarro, and Duranty met
at the Café Nouvelle Athènes, he sometimes appeared after ten o'clock--a
little man with round shoulders and a shuffling walk, who only took part
in the conversation by now and then breaking in with brief, sarcastic
observations. After Manet's death he made the Café de la Rochefoucauld
his place of resort. And young painters went on his account also to the
Café de la Rochefoucauld and pointed him out to each other, saying,
"That is Degas." When artists assemble together the conversation usually
turns upon him, and he is accorded the highest honours by the younger
generation. He is revered as the haughty _Independant_ who stands
unapproachably above the _profanum vulgus_, the great unknown who never
passed through the ordeal of a hanging committee, but whose spirit
hovers invisibly over every exhibition.
[Illustration: SISLEY. OUTSKIRTS OF A WOOD.]
A refined _charmeur_, _Auguste Renoir_, has made important discoveries,
in portrait painting especially. He is peculiarly the painter of women,
whose elegance, delicate skin, and velvet flesh he interprets with
extraordinary deftness. Léon Bonnat's portraits were great pieces of
still-life. The persons sit as if they were nailed to their seats. Their
flesh looks like zinc and their clothes like steel. In Carolus Duran's
hands portrait painting degenerated into a painting of draperies. Most
of his portraits merely betray the amount which the toilettes have cost;
they are inspired by their rich array of silk and heavy curtains; often
they are crude symphonies in velvet and satin. The rustle of robes, the
dazzling--or loud--fulness of colour in glistening materials, gave him
greater pleasure than the lustre of flesh-tints and any glance of
inquiry into the moral temperament of his models. Renoir endeavours to
arrest the scarcely perceptible and transitory movements of the features
and the figure. Placing his persons boldly in the real light of day
which streams around, he paints atmospheric influences in all their
results, like a landscapist. Light is the sole and absolute thing. The
fallen trunk of a tree upon which the broken sunlight plays in yellow
and light green reflections, and the body or head of a girl, are subject
to the same laws. Stippled with yellowish-green spots of light, the
latter loses its contours and becomes a part of nature. With this study
of the effects of light and reflection there is united an astonishing
sureness in the analysis of sudden phases of expression. The way in
which laughter begins and ends, the moment between laughter and weeping,
the passing flash of an eye, a fleeting motion of the lips, all that
comes like lightning and vanishes as swiftly, shades of expression which
had hitherto seemed indefinable, are seized by Renoir in all their
suddenness. In the portraits of Bonnat and Duran there are people who
have "sat," but here are people from whom the painter has had the power
of stealing and holding fast the secret of their being at a moment when
they were not "sitting." Here are dreamy blond girls gazing out of their
great blue eyes, ethereal fragrant flowers, like lilies leaning against
a rose-bush through which the rays of the setting sun are shining. Here
are coquettish young girls, now laughing, now pouting, now blithe and
gay, now angry once more, and now betwixt both moods in a charming
passion. And there are women of the world of consummate elegance,
slender and slight-built figures, with small hands and feet, an even
pallor, almond-shaped eyes catching every light, moist shining lips of a
tender grace, bearing witness to a love of pleasure refined by artifice.
And children especially there are, children of the sensitive and
flexuous type: some as yet unconscious, dreamy, and free from thought;
others already animated, correct in pose, graceful, and wise. The three
girls, in his "Portrait of Mesdemoiselles M----," grouped around the
piano, the eldest playing, the second accompanying upon the violin, and
the youngest quietly attentive, with both hands resting upon the piano,
are exquisite, painted with an entirely naïve and novel truth. All the
poses are natural, all the colours bright and subtle--the furniture, the
yellow bunches of flowers, the fresh spring dresses, the silk stockings.
But such tender poems of childhood and blossoming girlhood form merely a
part of Renoir's work. In his "Dinner at Chaton" a company of ladies and
gentlemen are seated at table, laughing, talking, and listening; the
champagne sparkles in the glasses, and the cheerful, easy mood which
comes with dessert is in the ascendant. In his "Moulin de la Galette" he
painted the excitement of the dance--whirling pairs, animated faces,
languid poses, and everything enveloped in sunlight and dust. Renoir's
peculiar field is the study of the various delicate emotions which
colour the human countenance.
[Illustration: _By permission of M. Durand-Ruel._
MONET. A STUDY.]
The merit of _Camille Pissarro_ is to have once more set the painting of
peasants, weakened by Breton, upon the virile lines of Millet, and to
have supplemented them in those places where Millet was technically
inadequate. When the Impressionist movement began Camille Pissarro had
already a past: he was the recognised landscape painter of the Norman
plains; the straightforward observer of peasants, the plain and simple
painter of the vegetable gardens stretching round peasant dwellings.
Since Millet, no artist had placed himself in closer relationship to the
life of the earth and of cultivated nature. Though a delicate analyst,
Pissarro had not the epic feeling nor the religious mysticism of Millet;
but like Millet he was a rustic in spirit, like him a Norman, from the
land of vineyards, of large farmyards, green meadows, soft avenues of
poplars, and wide horizons reddened by the sun. He was healthy, tender,
and intimate in feeling, rejoiced in the richness of the land and the
voluptuous undulation of fields, and he could give a striking impression
of a region in its work-a-day character. Celebrated in the press as the
legitimate descendant of Millet, he might have contented himself with
his regular successes. He had, indeed, arrived at an age when men
usually leave off making experiments, and reap what they have sown in
their youth, at an age when many conquerors occupy themselves with the
mechanical reproduction of their own works. Nevertheless the
Impressionistic movement became for Pissarro the starting-point of a new
way.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET. _The Century._]
[Illustration: MONET'S HOME AT GIVERNY. _The Century._]
He aimed at fresher, intenser, and more transparent light, at a more
cogent observation of phenomena, at a more exact analysis of the
encompassing atmosphere. He celebrated the eternal, immutable light in
which the world is bathed. He loved it specially during clear
afternoons, when it plays over bright green meadows fringed by soft
trees, or at the foot of low hills. He has sought it on the slopes
across which it ripples deliciously, on the plains from which it rises
like a light veil of gauze. He studied the play of light upon the
bronzed skin of labourers, on the coats of animals, on the foliage and
fruit of trees. He characterised the seasons, the hour of day, the
moment, with the conscientiousness of a peasant intent upon noting the
direction of the wind and the position of the sun. The cold, chilly
humour of autumn afternoons, the vivid clarity of sparkling wintry
skies, the bloom and lightness of spring mornings, the oppressive
brooding of summer, the luxuriance or the aridity of the earth, the
young vigour of foliage or the fading of nature robbed of her
adornment,--all these Pissarro has painted with largeness, plainness,
and simplicity. He strays over the fields, watching the shepherd driving
out his flock, the wains rumbling along the uneven roads, the quiet,
rhythmical movement of the gleaners, the graceful gait of the women who
have been reaping and now return home in the evening with a rake across
their shoulders; he stations himself at the entrance of villages where
the apple-pickers are at work, and the women minding geese stand by
their drove; he notes the whole life of peasants, and gives truer and
more direct intelligence of it than Millet did in his broad, synthetic
manner. Where there is a classic quietude and an oily heaviness in
Millet, there is in Pissarro palpitating life, transparence, and
freshness. He sees the country in bright, laughing tones; and the pure
white of the kerchiefs, the pale rose-colour or tender blue bodices of
his peasant women, lend his pictures a blithe delicacy of colour. His
girls are like fresh flowers of the field which the sun of June brings
forth upon the meadows. There is something intense and yet soft, strong
and delicate, true and rhythmical in Pissarro's tender poems of country
life.
[Illustration: MONET. MORNING ON THE SEINE.]
[Illustration: MONET. A WALK IN GREY WEATHER.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
So long as any advance beyond Rousseau and Corot seemed impossible,
pictures of talent but only moderate importance had increased in number
in the province of landscape. The landscape painters who immediately
followed the great pioneers loved nature on account of her comparative
coolness in summer; upon sites where the classic artists of
Fontainebleau dreamed and painted they built comfortable villas and
settled down with the sentiments of a householder. The country was
parcelled out, and each one undertook his part, and painted it
conscientiously without arousing any novel sensations. Impressionism
gave landscape painting, which showed signs of being split into
specialties, once more a firm basis, a charming field of study. To
communicate impressions without any of the studio combinations, just as
they strike us suddenly, to preserve the vividness and cogency of the
first imprint of nature upon the mind, was the great problem which
Impressionism placed before the landscape painters. The artists of
Fontainebleau painted neither the rawness and rigidity of winter nor the
sultry atmosphere and scorching heat of summer; they painted artistic
and dignified and exquisite works. The Impressionists did not approach
their themes as poets, but as naturalists. In their hands landscape,
which in Corot, Millet, Diaz, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Jongkind is an
occasional poem, becomes a likeness of a region under special influences
of light. With more delicate nerves, and a sensibility almost greater,
they allowed nature to work upon them, and perceived in the symphonies
of every hour strains never heard before, transparent shadows, the
vibration of atoms of light. decomposing the lines of contour, that
tremor of the atmosphere which is the breath of landscape. Here also
England was not without influence. As Corot and Rousseau received an
impulse from Constable and Bonington in 1830, Monet and Sisley returned
from London with their eyes dazzled by the light of the great Turner.
Laid hold upon, like Turner, by the miracles of the universe, by the
golden haze which trembles in a sunbeam, they succeeded in painting
light in spite of the defectiveness of our chemical mediums.
[Illustration: MONET. THE CHURCH AT VARANGÉVILLE.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
_Alfred Sisley_ might be compared with Daubigny. He settled in the
neighbourhood of Moret, upon the banks of the Loing, and is the most
soft and tender amongst the Impressionists. Like Daubigny, he loves the
germinating energy, the blossoming, and the growth of young and luminous
spring; the moist banks of quiet streamlets, budding beeches, and the
rye-fields growing green, the variegated flowering of the meadows, clear
skies, ladies walking in bright spring dresses, and the play of light
upon the vernal foliage. He has painted tender mornings breathed upon
with rosy bloom, reeds with a bluish gleam, and moist duck-weed, grey
clouds mirrored in lonely pools, alleys of poplar, peasants' houses, and
hills and banks, melting softly in the warm atmosphere. His pictures,
like those of the master of Oise, leave the impression of youth and
freshness, of quiet happiness, or of smiling melancholy.
[Illustration: MONET. RIVER SCENE.]
[Illustration: MONET. THE ROCKS AT BELLE-ISLE.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: MONET. HAY-RICKS.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
On many of his pictures, saturated as they are with light, _Claude
Monet_ could inscribe the name of Turner without inciting unbelief. In
exceedingly unequal works, which are nevertheless full of audacity and
genius, he has grasped what would seem to be intangible. Except Turner
there is no one who has carried so far the study of the effects of
light, of the gradations and reflections of sunbeams, of momentary
phases of illumination, no one who has embodied more subtle and forcible
impressions. For Monet man has no existence, but only the earth and the
light. He delights in the rugged rocks of Belle-Isle, and the wild banks
of the Creuse, when the oppressive sun of summer is brooding over them.
He paints phenomena as transitory as the shades of expression in Renoir.
The world appears in a glory of light, such as it only has in fleeting
moments, and such as would be blinding were it always to be seen.
Nature, in his version, is an inhospitable dwelling where it is
impossible to dream and live. One hopes sometimes to hear a word of
intimate association from Monet--but in vain; Claude Monet is only an
eye. Carouses of sunshine and orgies in the open air are the exclusive
materials of his pictures. Thus he has little to say for those who seek
the soul of a human being in every landscape. Like Degas, he is _par
excellence_ the master in technique whose highest endeavour is to
enrich the art of painting with novel sensations and unedited effects,
even if it has to be done by violence. There are sea-pieces filled with
the spirit of evening, when the sea, red as a mirror of copper, merges
into the glory of the sky, in a great radiant ocean of infinity; moods
of evening storm, when gloomy clouds over the restless tree-tops race
across the smoky red sky, losing tiny shreds in their flight, little
thin strips of loosened cloud, saturated through and through with a
wine-red glow by the splendour of the sun. Or there are spring meadows
fragrant with bloom, and hills parched by the sun; rushing trains with
their white smoke gleaming in the light; yellow sails scudding over
glittering waters; waves shining blue, red, and golden; and burning
ships, with shooting tongues of flame leaping upon the masts; and,
behind, a jagged rim of the evening glow. Claude Monet has followed
light everywhere--in Holland, Normandy, the South of France,
Belle-Isle-en-Mer, the villages of the Seine, London, Algiers, Brittany.
He became an enthusiast for nature as she is in Norway and Sweden, for
French cathedrals rising into the sky, tall and fair, like the peaks of
great promontories. He interpreted the surge of towns, the movement of
the sea, the majestic solitude of the sky. But he knows too that the
artist could pass his life in the same corner of the earth and work for
years upon the same objects without the drama of nature played before
him ever becoming exhausted. For the light which streams between things
is for ever different. So he stood one evening two paces in front of his
little house, in the garden, amid a flaming sea of flowers scarlet like
poppies. White summer clouds shifted in the sky, and the beams of the
setting sun fell upon two stacks, standing solitary in a solitary field.
Claude Monet began to paint, and came again the next day, and the day
after that, and every day throughout the autumn, and winter, and spring.
In a series of fifteen pictures, "The Hay-ricks," he painted--as Hokusai
did in his hundred views of the Fuji mountain--the endless variations
produced by season, day, and hour upon the eternal countenance of
nature. The lonely field is like a glass, catching the effects of
atmosphere, the breeze, and the most fleeting light. The stacks gleam
softly in the brightness of the beautiful afternoons, stand out sharp
and clear against the cold sky of the forenoon, loom like phantoms in
the mist of a November evening, or sparkle like glittering jewels
beneath the caress of the rising sun. They shine like glowing ovens,
absorbed by the light of the autumnal sunset; they are surrounded as by
a rosy halo, when the early sun pierces like a wedge through the dense
morning mist. They rise distinctly, covered with sparkling, rose-tinged
snow, into the cloudless heaven, and cast their pure, blue shadows upon
the silent, white, wintry landscape, or stand out in ghostly outlines
against the night firmament, mantled with silver by the moonlight.
Without moving his easel, Monet has interpreted the silence of winter,
and autumn with her sad and splendid feasts of colour--dusk and rain,
snow and frost and sun. He heard the voices of evening and the
jubilation of morning; he painted the eternal undulation of light upon
the same objects, the altered impression which the same particle of
nature yields according to the changing light of the hour. He chanted
the poetry of the universe in a single fragment of nature, and would be
a pantheistic artist of world-wide compass had he merely painted these
stacks of hay for the rest of his natural existence.
[Illustration: _Gaz des Beaux-Arts._
MONET. A VIEW OF ROUEN.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
And here ends the battle for the liberation of modern art. _Libertas
artibus restituta._ The painters of the nineteenth century are no longer
imitators, but have become makers of a new thing, "enlargers of the
empire." The prophetic words written in the beginning of the nineteenth
century by the Hamburger, Philipp Otto Runge, "light, colour, and moving
life," were to form the great problem, the great conquest of modern art;
they were fulfilled after two generations. Through the Impressionists
art was enriched by an opulence of new beauties. A new and independent
style had been discovered for the representation of new things, and a
new province--a province peculiar to herself--was won for painting.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND
The flood of Impressionism was at the same time crossed by another
current. Impressionism was a phase of progressive art of world-wide
influence. It proclaimed that nature and life were the inexhaustible
mine of beauty. Then after Naturalism had taught artists to work upon
the impressions of external reality in an independent manner, a
transition was made by some who embodied the impressions of their inward
spirit in a free creative fashion, unborrowed from the old masters.
We feel the need of living not merely in the world around us, but in an
inner world that we build up ourselves, a world far more strange and
fair, far more luminous than that in which our feet stumble so
helplessly. We must needs mount upon the pinions of fancy into the wide
land of vision, build castles in the clouds, watch their rise and their
fall, and follow into misty distance the freaks of their changing
architecture. The more grey and colourless the present may be, the more
alluringly does the fairy splendour of vanished worlds of beauty flit
before us. It is the very banality of everyday life that renders us more
sensitive to the delicate charm of old myths, and we receive them in a
more childlike, impressionable way than any earlier age, for we look
upon them with fresh eyes that have been rendered keen by yearning.
From all this it is evident that Impressionism could not remain the mode
of expression for the whole world of the present day. The longing for
old-world romance would brook no refusal. It was demanded from art not
that she should mirror nature, nature could be seen without her aid, but
that she should carry us away on dream-wings to a distant world more
beautiful than our own; not that she should be merely modern, but that
she should afford us even to-day some reflection of that beauty which
sheds forth its lustre from the works of the old masters.
This yearning after far-off worlds of beauty was combined with a demand
for new delights of colour. The Impressionists had centred every effort
in compassing the most difficult elements of the world of
phenomena--light, air, and colour--ending in extreme imitation of
reality. Then came a desire for colours, more radiant, more vivid than
ever was seen on this poor world of ours; and since hardly any of the
younger generation fulfilled the desire of the modern longing, the
standard of a bygone age was raised aloft, and there set in the
anti-naturalistic, anti-modern current that still survived from the age
of romance in the work-a-day world of the present.
How was it possible that England should have taken the lead upon this
occasion also? Can an Englishman, a matter-of-fact being who finds his
happiness in comfort and a practical sphere of action, be at the same
time a Romanticist? Is not London the most modern town in Europe? Yet,
without a question, this is the very reason why the New Romanticism
found its earliest expression there, although it was the place where
Naturalism had reigned longest and with the greatest strictness. There
was a reaction against the prose of everyday life, just as, in the
earlier part of the century, English landscape painting had been a
reaction against town life. To escape the whistle of locomotives and the
restless bustle of the struggle for existence, men take refuge in a
far-off world, a world where everything is fair and graceful, and all
emotions tender and noble, a world where no rudeness, no discord, and
nothing fierce or brutal disturbs the harmony of ideal perfection. These
artists become revellers in a land of fantasy, and flee from reality to
an inner life which they have created for themselves, wander from
London's railways and fogs to the sunny Italy of Botticelli, take their
rest in the land of poetry, and come back with packing-cases full of
lovely pictures and hearts full of happy emotions.
Moreover, they find in the primitive artists that simplicity which is
most refreshing of all to overstrained spirits. Having produced Byron,
Shelley, and Turner, the English were artistic _gourmets_, sated with
all enjoyments in the realms of the intellect, and they now meditated
works through which yet a new thrill of beauty might pass through the
imagination. In the primitive masters they discovered all the qualities
which had vanished from art since the sixteenth century--inofficious
purity, innocent and touching Naturalism, antiquated austerity, and an
enchanting depth of feeling. Jaded with other experiences, they admired
in those naïve spirits the capacity for ecstatic rapture and vision--in
other words, for the highest gratification. If one could but have in
this nineteenth century such feelings as were known to Dante, the gloomy
Florentine; Botticelli, the great Jeremiah of the Renaissance; or the
tender mystic Fra Angelico! Surfeited with modernity, and endowed with
nerves of acute refinement, artists went back in their fancy to this
luxuriously blissful condition, and finally came to the point at which
modernity was transformed once more into childish babble and the
unbelieving materialism of the present age into a mystical and romantic
union with the old currents of emotion.
Under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti English pre-Raphaelitism
now entered upon a new and entirely different phase.
[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. _Mag. of Art._]
Although Rossetti was the soul of the earlier movement, he was a man
whose temperament was even then essentially different from that of his
comrades Millais and Hunt, who founded the Brotherhood with him in 1848.
Even the two works which he exhibited with them in 1849 and 1850 make
one feel the great gulf which lay between him and them. In the former
year, when Hunt was represented by his "Rienzi," and Millais by his
"Lorenzo and Isabella," Rossetti produced his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin."
In the following, when Hunt painted "The Converted British Family
sheltering a Christian Missionary" and Millais "The Child Jesus in the
Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter," Rossetti came forward with his "Ecce
Ancilla Domini." "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" was a little picture of
austere simplicity and ascetic character; it was intentionally angular
in drawing, and possessed a certain archaic bloom. The Virgin, clad in
grey garments, sits at a curiously shaped frame embroidering a lily with
gold threads upon a red ground. The flower she is copying stands before
her in a vase, and a little angel, with roseate wings, is watering it
with an air of abashed reverence. St. Anne is busy by the side of the
Virgin--both being, respectively, portraits of the artist's mother and
sister--and in the background St. Joachim is binding a vine to a
trellis. And several Latin books are lying upon the floor. The second
work, "Ecce Ancilla Domini," is the familiar picture which is now in the
National Gallery--a harmony of white upon white of indescribable
graciousness and delicacy. Mary, a bashful, meditative, and childlike
maiden, in a white garment, is shown in a half-kneeling attitude upon a
white bed. The walls of the chamber are white, and in front of her there
stands a frame at which she has been working; and a piece of embroidery,
with a lily which she has begun, hangs over it. Before her stands the
angel with flame rising from his feet, in solemn, peaceful gravity, as
he extends towards her the stalk of the lily which he holds. A dove
flies gently in through the window. Now, in spite of their romantic
subjects the work of Hunt and Millais is lucid and temperate, while
Rossetti is dreamily mystical. The two former were straightforward,
true, and natural, whereas the simplicity of the latter was subtilised
and consciously affected. It was due to the vibrating delicacy of his
distempered, seething imagination that he was able to give himself a
deceptive appearance of being a primitive artist. The creative power of
the two former is an earnest power of the understanding, whereas in the
latter there is a vague dreaminess, a tendency to luxuriate in his own
moods, an efflorescence of tones and colours. In the one case there is
an angular but single-minded study of nature; in the other there is the
demureness and embarrassment of the Quattrocento, a demureness breaking
into blossom, and an embarrassment full of charm--a romanticism which
cherished the yearning for repose in the childlike and innocent Middle
Ages, and clothed it with all the attractions of mysticism. Holman Hunt,
Madox Brown, and Millais were realists in their drawing, men who wanted
to represent objects with all possible accuracy, to be faithful in
rendering the finest fibre of a petal and every thread in a fabric.
Rossetti's picture was a symphonic ode in pigments, and he himself was
one of the earliest of the modern lyricists of colour. This distinction
became wider and wider with the course of time, and as early as 1858 he
found himself deserted by his earlier comrades. Madox Brown, Holman
Hunt, and especially Millais, in their further development, tended more
and more to become Naturalists, and were finally led to completely
realistic subjects from the immediate present by the inviolable fidelity
with which they studied nature. On the other hand, Rossetti became the
centre of a new circle of artists, who directed the current of what was
originally Naturalism more and more into mysticism and refined archaism.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
ROSSETTI. BEATA BEATRIX.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
In 1856 _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_ was founded as a monthly
periodical. There were several contributions by Rossetti, and in this
way he became so well known in Oxford that the Union accepted an offer
from him to execute a series of wall-paintings. Accordingly he painted
several pictures from the Arthurian legends, making the sketches for
them himself, and employing for their elaboration a number of young men,
some of them amateur artists and students at the University. In this way
he came into connection with Arthur Hughes, William Morris, and Edward
Burne-Jones. These artists, afterwards joined by Spencer Stanhope and
Walter Crane, both of them younger men, became--with George Frederick
Watts at their flank--the leading members of the new brotherhood, the
representatives of that New pre-Raphaelitism in which interest is still
centred in England.
[Illustration: _Pageant._
ROSSETTI. MONNA ROSA.
(_By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti._)]
Their art is a kind of Italian Renaissance upon English soil. The
romantic chord which vibrates in old English poetry is united to the
grace and purity of Italian taste, the classical lucidity of the Pagan
mythology with Catholic mysticism, and the most modern riot of emotion
with the demure vesture of the primitive Florentines. Through this
mixture of heterogeneous elements English New Idealism is probably the
most remarkable form of art upon which the sun has ever shone: borrowed
and yet in the highest degree personal, it is an art combining an almost
childlike simplicity of feeling with a morbid _hautgoût_, the most
attentive and intelligent study of the old masters with free, creative,
modern imagination, the most graceful sureness of drawing and the most
sparkling individuality of colour with a helpless, stammering accent
introduced of set purpose. The old Quattrocentisti wander amongst the
real Italian flowers; but with the New pre-Raphaelites one enters a
hot-house: one is met by a soft damp heat, bright exotic flowers exhale
an overpowering fragrance, juicy fruits catch the eye, and slender
palms, through the branches of which no rough wind may bluster, gently
sway their long, broad fans.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
ROSSETTI. ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI.
(_By permission of Messrs. T. Agnew & Sons, the owners of the
copyright._)]
Professor Lombroso would certainly find the material for ingenious
disquisition in Rossetti, who introduced this Italian phase, and himself
came of an Italian stock. And it might almost seem as if a soul from
those old times had found its reincarnation in the lonely painter who
lived at Chelsea, though it was a soul who no longer bore heaven in his
heart like Fra Angelico. In his whole being he seems like a phenomenon
of atavism, like a citizen of that long-buried Italy who, after many
transmigrations, had strayed into the misty North, to the bank of the
Thames, and from thence looked in his home-sickness ever towards the
South, enveloped in poetry and glowing in the sun.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a Catholic and an Italian. Amid his English
surroundings he kept the feelings of one of Latin race. His father, the
patriot and commentator upon Dante, had originally lived in Naples, and
inflamed the popular party there by his passionate writings. In
consequence of the active part which he took in political agitation he
lost his post at the Bourbon Museum, escaped from Italy upon a warship,
disguised as an English officer, settled in London in 1824, and married
Francesca Polidori, the daughter of a secretary of Count Alfieri. Here
he became Professor of the Italian language at King's College, and
published several works on Dante, the most important of which, _Dante's
Beatrice_, written in 1852, once more supported the theory that Beatrice
was not a real person. Dante Gabriel, the son of this Dante student
Gabriele Rossetti, was born in London on 12th May 1828. The whole family
actively contributed to scholarship and poetry. His elder sister, Maria
Francesca, was the authoress of _A Shadow of Dante_, a work which gives
a most valuable explanation of the scheme of _The Divine Comedy_; his
younger sister, Christina, was one of the most eminent poetesses of
England; and his brother, William Michael Rossetti, is well known as an
art-critic and a student of Shelley. Even from early youth Dante Gabriel
Rossetti was familiar with the world of Dante, and brought up in the
worship of Dante's wonderful age and an enthusiasm for his mystic and
transcendental poetry. He knew Dante by heart, and Guido Cavalcanti. The
mystical poet became his guide through life, and led him to Fra
Angelico, the mystic of painting. Indeed, the world of Dante and of the
painters antecedent to Raphael is his spiritual home.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
ROSSETTI. SANCTA LILIAS.]
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
ROSSETTI. ASTARTE SYRIACA.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
[Illustration: _Mansell & Co._
ROSSETTI. THE DAY DREAM.]
He was barely eighteen when he became a pupil at the Royal Academy,
studying a couple of years later under Madox Brown, who was not many
years older than himself. Even then Rossetti had an almost mesmeric
influence upon his friends. He was a pale, tall, thin young man, who
always walked with a slight stoop; reserved, dry in his manner, and
careless in dress, there was nothing captivating about him at a
transitory meeting. But his pale face was lit up by his unusually
reflective, deeply clouded, contemplative eyes; and about his defiant
mouth there played that contempt of the profane crowd which is natural
to a superior mind, while the laurel of fame was already twined about
his youthful forehead. In 1849, when he was exhibiting his earliest
picture, he had published in _The Germ_, to say nothing of his numerous
poems, a mystical, visionary, sketch in prose named _Hand and Soul_,
which was much praised by men of the highest intellect in London. Soon
afterwards he published a volume entitled _Dante and his Circle_, in
which he translated a number of old Italian poems, and rendered Dante's
_Vita Nuova_ into strictly archaic English prose. Reserved as he was
towards strangers, he was irresistibly attractive to his friends, and
his brilliant, genial conversation won him the goodwill of every one. A
man of gifted and delicate nature, sensitive to an extreme degree, a
sedentary student who had yet an enthusiasm for knightly deeds, a jaded
spirit capable of morbidly heightened, exotic sensibility and soft,
melting reverie, one whose overstrained nerves only vibrated if he slept
in the daytime and worked at night, it seemed as though Rossetti was
born to be the father of the _décadence_, of that state of spirit which
every one now perceives to be flooding Europe.
[Illustration: ROSSETTI. STUDY FOR ASTARTE SYRIACA.]
His later career was as quiet as its opening had been brilliant. After
that graciously sentimental little picture, "Ecce Ancilla Domini,"
Rossetti exhibited in public only once again; this was in 1856. From
that date the public saw no more of his painting. He worked only for his
friends and the friends of his friends. He was famous only in private,
and looked up to like a god within a narrow circle of admirers. One of
his acquaintances, the painter Deverell, had introduced him in 1850 to
the woman who became for him what Saskia Uylenburgh had been for
Rembrandt and Helene Fourment for Rubens--his type of feminine beauty.
She was a young dressmaker's assistant, Miss Eleanor Siddal. Her thick,
heavy hair was fair, with that faint reddish tint in it which Titian
painted; it grew in two tapering bands deep down into the neck, being
there somewhat fairer than it was above, and it curled thickly. Her eyes
had something indefinite in their expression; nothing, however, that was
dreamy, mobile, and changeable, for they seemed rather to be
insuperable, fathomless, and unnaturally vivid. All the play of her
countenance lay in the lower part of her face, in the nostrils, mouth,
and chin. The mouth, indeed, with its deep corners, sharply chiselled
outlines, and lips triumphantly curved, was particularly expressive. And
her tall, slender figure had a refined distinction of line. In 1860 they
married. Some of his most beautiful works were painted during this
epoch--the "Beata Beatrix," the "Sibylla Palmifera," "Monna Vanna,"
"Venus Verticordia," "Lady Lilith," and "The Beloved"--pictures which he
painted without a thought of exhibition or success. After a union of
barely two years this passionately loved woman died, shortly after the
birth of a still-born child. He laid a whole volume of manuscript
poems--many of them inspired by her--in the coffin, and they were buried
with her. From that time he lived solitary and secluded from the world,
surrounded by mediæval antiques, in his old-fashioned house at Chelsea,
entirely given up to his dreams, a stranger in a world without light. He
suffered much from ill-health, and was sensitive and hypochondriacal,
and, indeed, undermined his health by an immoderate use of chloral. His
friends entreated him to bring out his poems, and all England was
expectant when Rossetti at length yielded to pressure, opened the grave
of his wife, and took out the manuscript. The poems appeared in the
April of 1870. The first edition was bought up in ten days, and there
followed six others. Wherever he appeared he was honoured like a god.
But the attacks directed against the first pictures of the
pre-Raphaelites were repeated, although now transferred to another
region. A pseudonymous article by Robert Buchanan in the _Contemporary
Review_, and published afterwards as a pamphlet, entitled _The Fleshly
School of Poetry_, accused Rossetti of immorality and imitation of
Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade. Rossetti stepped once more into the
arena, and replied by a letter in the _Athenæum_ headed _The Stealthy
School of Criticism_. From that time he shut himself up completely,
never went out, and led "the hole-and-cornerest existence."
In 1881 he published a second volume of poems, chiefly composed of
ballads and sonnets. A year afterwards, on 10th April 1882, he died,
honoured, even in the academical circles in which he never mingled, as
one of the greatest men in England. The exhibition of his works which
was opened a couple of months after his death created an immense
sensation. Those of his pictures which had not been already sold
straight from the easel were paid for with their weight in gold, and are
now scattered in great English country mansions and certain private
galleries in Florence. The only very rich collection in London is that
of an intimate friend of the artist, the late Mr. Leyland, who had
gathered together, in his splendid house in the West End, probably the
most beautiful work of which the East can boast in carpets and vases, or
the early Renaissance in intaglios, small bronzes, and ornaments. Here,
surrounded by the quaint and delicate pictures of Carlo Crivelli and
Botticelli, Rossetti was in the society of his contemporaries.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
ROSSETTI. DANTE'S DREAM.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Liverpool, the owners of the
picture._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
ROSSETTI. ROSA TRIPLEX.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
His range of subject was not wide. In his earliest period he had a fancy
for painting small biblical pictures, of which "Ecce Ancilla Domini" is
the best known, and the delightfully archaic "Girlhood of Mary Virgin"
one of the most beautiful. But this austerely biblical tendency was not
of long continuance. It soon gave way to a brilliant, imaginative
Romanticism, to which he was prompted by Dante. "Giotto painting the
Portrait of Dante," "The Salutation of Beatrice on Earth and in Eden"
(from the _Vita Nuova_), "La Pia" (from the _Purgatorio_), the "Beata
Beatrix," and "Dante's Dream," in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool,
are the leading works which arose under the influence of the great
Italian. The head of his wife, with her heavily veiled eyes, and
Giotto's well-known picture of Dante, sufficed him for the creation of
the most tender, mystical poems, which, at the same time, show him in
all the splendour of his wealth of colour. He revels in the most
brilliant hues; his pictures have the appearance of being bathed in a
glow; and there is something deeply sensuous in his vivid and lustrous
green, red, and violet tones. In the picture "Dante on the Anniversary
of Beatrice's Death" the poet kneels at the open window which looks out
upon Florence; he has been drawing, and a tablet is in his hand. The
room is quite simple, a frieze with angels' heads being its only
ornament. Visitors of rank have come to see him--an elderly magnate and
his daughter--and have stood long behind him without his noticing their
presence; for he has been thinking of Beatrice, and it is only when his
attention is attracted to them by a friend that he turns round at last.
The "Beata Beatrix," in the National Gallery in London--a picture begun
in 1863 and ended in the August of 1866--treats of the death of Beatrice
"under the semblance of a trance, in which Beatrice, seated in a balcony
overlooking the city, is suddenly rapt from earth to heaven." In
accordance with the description in the _Vita Nuova_, Beatrice sits in
the balcony of her father's palace in strange ecstasy. Across the
parapet of the balcony there is a view of the Arno and of that other
palace where Dante passed his youth close to his adored mistress, until
the unforgotten 9th of June 1290, when death robbed him of her. A
peaceful evening light is shed upon the bank of the Arno, and plays upon
the parapet with warm silvery beams. Beatrice is dressed in a garment
belonging to no definite epoch, of green and rosy red, the colours of
Love and Hope. Her head rises against a little patch of yellow sky
between the two palaces, and seems to be surrounded by it as by a halo.
She is in a trance, has the foreknowledge of her approaching death, and
already lives through the spirit in another world, whilst her body is
still upon the earth. Her hands are touched by a heavenly light. A dove
of deep rose-coloured plumage alights upon her knees, bringing her a
white poppy; whilst opposite, before the palace of Dante, the figure of
Love stands, holding a flaming heart, and announcing to the poet that
Beatrice has passed to a life beyond the earth.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
ROSSETTI. SIR GALAHAD.]
[Illustration: _Pageant._
ROSSETTI. MARY MAGDALENE AT THE HOUSE OF SIMON THE PHARISEE.
(_By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti._)]
"La Donna Finestra," painted in 1879, and to be counted amongst his
ripest creations, has connection with that passage in the _Vita Nuova_
where Dante sinks to the ground overcome with sorrow for Beatrice's
death, and is regarded with sympathy by a lady looking down from a
window, the Lady of Pity, the human embodiment of compassion. "Dante's
Dream" is probably the work which shows the painter at his zenith. The
expression of the heads is profound and lofty, the composition severely
mediæval and admirably complete; and although the painting is laboured,
the total impression is nevertheless so cogent that it is impossible to
forget it. "The scene," in Rossetti's own description, "is a chamber of
dreams, strewn with poppies, where Beatrice is seen lying on a couch, as
if just fallen back in death; the winged figure of Love carries his
arrow pointed at the dreamer's heart, and with it a branch of
apple-blossom; as he reaches the bier, Love bends for a moment over
Beatrice with the kiss which her lover has never given her; while the
two green-clad dream-ladies hold the pall full of May-blossom suspended
for an instant before it covers her face for ever." The expression of
ecstasy in Dante's face, and the still, angelical sweetness of Beatrice,
are rendered with astonishing intensity. She lies upon the bier, pale as
a flower, wrapped in a white shroud, with her lips parted as though she
were gently breathing, and seems not dead but fallen asleep. Her fair
hair floats round her in golden waves. In its vague folds the covering
of the couch displays the marble outlines of the body: and a look of
bliss rests upon the pure and clear-cut features of her lovely face.
[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. CHANT D'AMOUR.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. THE DAYS OF CREATION.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
This "painting of the soul" occupied Rossetti almost exclusively in the
third and most fruitful period of his life, when he painted hardly any
pictures upon the larger scale, but separate feminine figures furnished
with various poetic attributes, the deeper meaning of which is
interpreted in his poems. "The Sphinx," in which he busied himself with
the great riddle of life, is the only one containing several figures.
Three persons--a youth, a man of ripe years, and a grey-beard--visit the
secret dwelling of the Sphinx to inquire their destiny of this
omniscient being. It is only the man who really puts the question; the
grey-beard stumbles painfully towards her cavern, while the young man,
wearied with his journey, falls dying to the earth before the very
object of his quest. The Sphinx remains in impenetrable silence, with
her green, inscrutable, mysterious eyes coldly and pitilessly fixed upon
infinity. "The Blessed Damozel," "Proserpina," "Fiammetta," "The
Daydream," "La Bella Mano," "La Ghirlandata," "Veronica Veronese," "Dis
Manibus," "Astarte Syriaca" are all separate figures dedicated to the
memory of his wife. As Dante immortalised his Beatrice, Rossetti
honoured his wife, who died so early, in his poems and his pictures. He
painted her as "The Blessed Damozel," with her gentle, saint-like face,
her quiet mouth, her flowing golden hair and peaceful lids. He
represents her as an angel of God standing at the gate of Heaven,
looking down upon the earth. She is thinking of her lover, and of the
time when she will see him again in heaven, and of the sacred songs that
will be sung to him. Lilies rest upon her arm, and lovers once more
united hover around.
There is no action or rhetoric of gesture in Rossetti. His tall Gothic
figures are motionless and silent, having almost the floating appearance
of visionary figures which stand long before the gaze of the dreamer
without taking bodily form. They glide along like phantoms and shadows,
like the undulations of a blossom-laden tree or a field of corn waving
in the wind. They neither talk nor weep nor laugh, and are only eloquent
through their quiet hands, the most sensuous and the most spiritual
hands ever painted, or with their eyes, the most dreamy and fascinating
eyes which have been rendered in art since Leonardo da Vinci. In the
pictures which Rossetti devoted to her, Eleanor Siddal is a marvellously
lofty woman, glorified in the mysticism of a rare beauty. Rossetti
drapes his idol in Venetian fashion, with rich garments which recall
Giorgione in the character of their colour, and, like Botticelli, he
strews flowers of deep fragrance around her, especially roses, which he
painted with wonderful perfection and hyacinths, for which he had a
great love, and the intoxicating perfume of which affected him greatly.
[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. CIRCE.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
This taste for beautiful and deeply lustrous colours and rich
accessories is, indeed, the one purely pictorial quality which this
painter-poet has, if one understands by pictorial qualities the capacity
for intoxicating one's self with the beauty of the visible world. His
drawing is often faulty; and his bodies, enveloped in rich and heavy
garments, are, perhaps, not invariably in accordance with anatomy. What
explains Rossetti's fabulous success is purely the condition of spirit
which went to the making of his works--that nervous vibration, that
ecstasy of opium, that combination of suffering and sensuousness, and
that romanticism drunk with beauty, which pervade his paintings. When
they appeared they seemed like a revelation of a beautiful land, only
one could not say where it existed--a revelation, indeed, for it
revealed for the first time a world of story which was in no sense
fabulous: there came a romanticism which was something real; a style
arose which seemed as though it were woven of tones and colours, a style
rioting in an everlasting exhilaration of spirit, breaking out sometimes
in a glow of flame and sometimes in delicate, tremulous longing. Even
where he paints a Madonna she is merely a woman in his eyes, and he
endows her with the glowing fire of passionate fervour, with a trace of
the joy of the earth, which no painter has ever given her before; and
through this union of refined modern sensuousness and Catholic mysticism
he has created a new thrill of beauty. His painting was a drop of a
most precious essence, in its hues enchanting and intoxicating, the
strongest spiritual potion ever brewed in English art. The intensity of
his overstrained sensibility, and the wonderful Southern mosaic of form
into which he poured this sensibility with elaborate refinement, make
him seem own brother to Baudelaire.
[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. PYGMALION (THE SOUL ATTAINS).
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Pageant._
BURNE-JONES. PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.]
This tendency of spirit was so novel, this plunge in the tide of
mysticism so enchanting, this delicate, archaic fragrance so
overwhelming, that a new stage in the culture of modern England dates
from the appearance of Rossetti. He borrowed nothing from his
contemporaries, and all borrowed from him. There came a time when
budding girls in London attired themselves like early Italians from
Dante's _Inferno_, when Jellaby Postlethwaite, in Du Maurier's mocking
skit, entered a restaurant at luncheon-time, and ordered a glass of
water and placed in it a lily which he had brought with him. "What else
can I bring?" asked the waiter. "Nothing," he sighed; "that is all I
need." There began that æstheticism, that yearning for the lily and that
cult of the sunflower, which Gilbert and Sullivan parodied in
_Patience_. Swinburne, who has tasted of emotions of the most various
realms of spirit, and in his poems set them before the world as though
in marvellously chiselled goblets, represents this æsthetic phase of
English art in literature. As a painter, Edward Burne-Jones--the
greatest of that Oxford circle which gathered round Rossetti in
1856--began to work at the point where Rossetti left off.
[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. THE ANNUNCIATION.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
BURNE-JONES. THE MILL.]
_Sir Edward Burne-Jones_, who must now be spoken of, was born in
Birmingham in August 1833, and was reading theology in Oxford when
Rossetti was there painting the mural pictures for the Union. Rossetti
attracted him as a flame attracts the moth. As yet he had not had any
artistic training, but some of his drawings which were shown to Rossetti
by a mutual friend revealed so much poetic force, in spite of their
embarrassed method of expression, that the painter-poet entered into
communication with him, and allowed him to paint in the Debating Room of
the Union a subject from the Arthurian legends, "The Death of Merlin."
The picture met with approval, and Burne-Jones abandoned theology,
became an intimate friend of Rossetti and the companion of his studies,
and went with him to London. There he designed a number of church
windows for Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and in 1864 exhibited his
first picture, "The Merciful Knight." Later there followed the triptych
"Pyramus and Thisbe" and a picture called "The Evening Star," a
glimmering landscape through which a gentle spirit in a bronze-green
garment is seen to float. But none of these works excited much
attention. The small picture exhibited in 1870, "Phyllis and Demophoön,"
was even thought offensive on account of the "sensuous expression" of
the nymph. So Burne-Jones withdrew it, and for many years from that time
held aloof from all the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. For seven
years his name was never seen in a catalogue. It was only on 1st May
1877, at the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery--founded by Sir Coutts
Lindsay, likewise a painter, to afford himself and his comrades a place
of exhibition independent of the Academy--that Burne-Jones once more
made his appearance before the eyes of the world. But his pictures, like
those of Rossetti, had found their way in secrecy and by their own
merit, and of a sudden he saw himself regarded as one of the most
eminent painters in the country.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BURNE-JONES. THE ENCHANTMENT OF MERLIN.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
His art is the flower of most potent fragrance in English æstheticism,
and the admiration accorded to him in England is almost greater than
that which had been previously paid to Rossetti. The Grosvenor Gallery,
where he exhibited his pictures at this period, was for a long time a
kind of temple for the æsthetes. On the opening day men and women of the
greatest refinement crowded before his works. There was a cult of
Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery, as there is a cult of Wagner at
Bayreuth. One had to work one's way very gradually through the crowd to
see his pictures, which always occupied the place of honour in the
principal room of the gallery, and I remember how helplessly I stood in
1884 before the first of his pictures which I saw there.
In a kind of vestibule of early Gothic architecture there was seated in
the foreground an armed man, who, in his dark, gleaming harness and his
hard and bold profile, was like a Lombard warrior, say Mantegna's Duke
of Mantua, and as he mused he held in his hand an iron crown studded
with jewels; farther in the background, upon a high marble throne, a
maiden was seated, a young girl with reddish hair and a pale worn face,
looking with steadfast eyes far out into another world, as though in a
hypnotic trance. Two youths, apparently pages, sang, leaning upon a
balustrade; while all manner of costly accessories, brilliant stuffs,
lustrous marble, grey granite, and mosaic pavement, shining in green and
red tones, lent the whole picture an air of exquisite richness. The
title in the catalogue was "King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid," and any
one acquainted with Provençal poetry knew that King Cophetua, the hero
of an old ballad, fell in love with a beggar-girl, offered her his
crown, and married her. But this was not to be gathered from the picture
itself, where all palpable illustration of the story was avoided.
Nevertheless a vague sense of emotional disquietude was revealed in it.
The two leading persons of the strange idyll, the earnest knight and the
pallid maiden, are not yet able themselves to understand how all has
come to pass--how she, the beggar-maid, should be upon the marble
throne, and he, the king, kneeling on the steps before her whom he has
exalted to be a queen. They remain motionless and profoundly silent, but
their hearts are alive and throbbing. They have feeling which they
cannot comprehend themselves, and the past and present surge through one
another: life is a dream, and the dream is life.
[Illustration: _Pageant._
BURNE-JONES. THE SEA NYMPH.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
Everything that Burne-Jones has created is at once fragrant, mystical,
and austere, like this picture. His range of subject is most extensive.
In his _Princess_ Alfred Tennyson had quickened into new life the
legends of chivalry, and in his _Idylls of the King_ the tales of the
Knights of the Holy Grail. Swinburne published his _Atalanta in
Calydon_, in which he exercised once more the mysterious spell of the
ancient drama, while he created in _Chastelard_, _Bothwell_, and _Mary
Stuart_ a trilogy of the finest historical tragedies ever written, and
showed in _Tristram of Lyonesse_ that even Tennyson had not exhausted
all the beauty in old legends of the time of King Arthur; while, as
early as 1866, he had given to the world his _Poems and Ballads_,
dedicated to Burne-Jones. In these works lie the ideas to which the
painter has given form and colour.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
BURNE-JONES. THE GOLDEN STAIRS.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, owner of the copyright._)]
He paints Circe in a saffron robe, preparing the potion to enchant the
companions of Ulysses, with a strange light in her orbs, while two
panthers fawn at her feet. He represents the goddess of Discord at the
marriage-feast of Thetis, a ghastly, pallid figure, entering amongst the
gods who are celebrating the occasion, and holding the fateful apple in
her hand. He depicts Pygmalion, the artist King of Cyprus, supplicating
Aphrodite to breathe life into the sculptured image of a maiden, the
work of his own hands.
Apart from classical antiquity, he owes some of his inspiration to the
Bible and Christian legends, the sublimity of their grave tragedies, and
the troubled sadness of their yearning and exaltation. One of his
leading works devotes six pictures to the days of creation. An
angel--accompanied in every case by the angels of the previous
days--carries a sphere, in which may be seen the stars, the waters, the
trees, the animals, and the first man and woman, in their proper
sequence. The scene of the "Adoration of the Kings" is a landscape where
fragrant roses bloom in the shadow of the slender stems of trees, which
rise straight as a bolt. The Virgin sits in their midst calm and
unapproachable, and in her lap the Child, who is more slender than in
the pictures of Cimabue. The three Wise Men--tall, gigantic figures,
clad in rich mediæval garments--approach softly, whilst an angel floats
perpendicularly in the air as a silent witness.
In his picture "The Annunciation" Mary is standing motionless beside the
great basin of a well-spring, at the portico of her house. To the left
the messenger of God appears in the air. He has floated solemnly down,
and it seems as if the folds of his robes, which fall straight from the
body, had hardly been ruffled in his flight, as if his wings had
scarcely moved; with the extremities of his feet he touches the branches
of a laurel. Mary does not shrink, and makes no gesture. There they
stand, gravely, and as still as statues. The robe of the angel is white,
and white that of the Virgin, and white the marble floor and the
wainscoting of the house; and it is only the pinions of the heavenly
messenger that gleam in a golden brightness. A picture called "Sponsa
die Libano" bore as a motto the words from _The Song of Solomon_:
"Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that
the spices thereof may flow out." The bride, in an ample blue robe,
walks musing beside a stream, upon the bank of which white lilies grow,
whilst the vehement figures of the North and South Winds rush through
the air in grey, fluttering garments.
In addition to his love for Homer and the Bible, Burne-Jones has a
passion for the old Trouvères of the _Chansons de Geste_, the great and
fanciful adventures of vanished chivalry, Provençal courts of love, and
the legends of Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. His
"Chant d'Amour" is like a page torn out of an old English or Provençal
tale. On the meadow before a mediæval town a lady is kneeling, a sort of
St. Cecilia, in a white upper-garment and a gleaming skirt, playing upon
an organ, the full chords of which echo softly through the evening
landscape. To the left a young knight is sitting upon the ground, and
silently listens, lost in the music, while a strange figure, clad in
red, is pressing upon the bellows of the instrument. "The Enchantment of
Merlin," with which he made his first appearance in 1877, illustrated
the passage in the old legend of Merlin and Vivien, relating how it came
to pass one day that she and Merlin entered a forest, which was called
the forest of Broceliande, and found a glorious wood of whitethorn, very
high and all in blossom, and seated themselves in the shadow: and Merlin
fell asleep, and when she saw that he slept she raised herself softly,
and began the spell, exactly according to the teaching of Merlin,
drawing the magic circle nine times and uttering the spell nine times.
And Merlin looked around him, and it seemed to him as though he were
imprisoned in a tower, the highest in the world, and he felt his
strength leave him as if the blood were streaming from his veins.
In other pictures he abandons all attempt to introduce ideas, confining
himself to the simple grouping of tender girlish figures, by means of
which he makes a beautiful composition of the most subtle lines, forms,
colours, and gestures. The "Golden Stairs" of 1878 was a picture of
this description: a train of girls, beautiful as angels, descended the
steps without aim or object, most of them with musical instruments, and
all with the same delicate feet and the same robes falling in beautiful
folds. In this year he also produced "Venus' Looking-glass": a number of
nymphs assembled by the side of a clear pool at sunset, in the midst of
a sad and solemn landscape, are kneeling by the water's edge together,
reflected in its surface.
[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. THE WOOD NYMPH.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
Besides these numerous canvases, mention must be made of the decorative
works of the master. For the English church in Rome, Burne-Jones has
designed decorations in a rich and grave Byzantine style, and in
England, where mural decoration has little space accorded to it in
churches, there is all the more comprehensive scope for painting upon
glass. Until the sixties church windows of this kind were almost
exclusively ordered from Germany. The court depôt of glass-painting in
Munich provided for the adornment of Glasgow Cathedral from drawings by
Schwind, Heinrich Hess, and Schraudolph, and for the windows of St.
Paul's from designs by Schnorr, while Kaulbach was employed for a public
building in Edinburgh. In these days Burne-Jones reigns over this whole
province. Where the German masters handled glass-painting by modernising
it like a Nazarene fresco, Burne-Jones, who has penetrated deeply into
the mediæval treatment of form, created a new style in glass-painting,
and one exquisitely in keeping with the Neo-Gothic architecture of
England. His most important works of this description are probably the
glass windows which he designed for St. Martin's Church and St. Philip's
Church in Birmingham, his native town. These labours of his in the
province of Gothic window-painting explain how he came to his style of
painting at the easel: he habituated himself to compose his pictures
with the architectonical sentiment of a Gothic artist. Forced to satisfy
the requisitions of the slender, soaring Gothic style, he came to paint
his tall, straight-lined figures, the composition of which is not
triangular in the old fashion, but formed in long lines as in vertical
church windows.
It is not difficult to find prototypes for every one of these works of
his. His sibyls recall Pompeii. His church decoration would never have
arisen but for the mosaics of Ravenna. And those angels in golden
drapery with grave, hieratical gestures in the pictures of the
Trecentisti influenced him in his "Days of Creation." Other works of his
suggest the Etruscan vases or the suavity of Duccio. "Laus Veneris" has
the severe classicality of Mantegna saturated with Bellini's warmth of
hue. The "Chant d'Amour," in its deep splendour of colour, is like an
idyll by Giorgione. And often he heaps together costly work in gold and
ivory like the Florentine goldsmith painters Pollajuolo and Verrochio.
Many of his young girls are of lineal descent from those slender,
flexible, feminine saints of Perugino, painted in sweeping lines and
planted upon small flat feet. Often, too, when he exaggerates his Gothic
principles and gives them eight-and-a-half or nine times the proportion
of their heads, they seem, with their lengthy necks and slim hands fit
for princesses, like younger sisters of Parmigianino's lithe-limbed
women; while sometimes their movements have a more ample grace, a more
majestic nobility, and their lips are moved by the mystical inward smile
of Luini, so unfathomably subtle in its silent reserve. But it is
Botticelli who is most often brought to mind. Burne-Jones has borrowed
from him the fine transparent gauze draperies, clinging to the limbs and
betraying clearly the girlish forms in his pictures; the splendid
mantles, flowered and adorned with dainty patterns of gold; the taste
for Southern vegetation, for flowers and fruits, and artificial bowers
of thick palm leaves or delicate boughs of cypress, which he delights in
using as a refined and significant embellishment; from Botticelli he has
borrowed all the attributes with which he has endowed his
angels--rose-garlands and vases, tapers and tall lilies; even his type
of womanhood has an outward resemblance to that of the Florentine, with
its long, delicate, oval face framed in wavy hair, its dreamy eyes and
finely arched brows, its dainty and rather tip-tilted nose, and its
ripe, delicately curving mouth slightly opened. Indeed, Burne-Jones's
painting is like one of those gilded flower-tables where plants of all
latitudes mingle their tendrils and their foliage, their bells and their
clusters, their perfume and their marvellous glory of colour, in a
harmony artificially arranged. In its strained archaism his art is an
affected, artificial art, and would perish as swiftly as a luxuriant
exotic plant, had not this pupil of the Italians been born a
thoroughbred Englishman, and this Botticelli risen from the grave become
a true Briton on the banks of the Thames.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
STANHOPE. THE WATERS OF LETHE.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
[Illustration: STRUDWICK. ELAINE.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
Burne-Jones stands to Botticelli as Botticelli himself stood to the
antique, or as Swinburne to his literary models. As a graceful scholar,
Swinburne has reproduced all styles: the language of the Old Testament,
the forms of Greek literature, and the naïve lisp of the poets of
chivalry. He decorates his verses with all manner of strange metaphors
drawn from the literatures of all periods. His _Atalanta in Calydon_ is,
down to the choruses, an imitation of the Sophoclean tragedies. In his
_Ballad of Life_ he follows the model of the singers who made canzonets,
the writers who followed Dante and the earliest lyric poets of Italy. In
_Laus Veneris_ he tells the story of Tannhäuser and Dame Venus in the
manner of the French romantic poets of the sixteenth century; _Saint
Dorothy_ is a faithful echo of Chaucer's narrative style; and the
_Christmas Carol_ is modelled upon the Provençal Ballades. Even the
earliest lyrical mysteries are reproduced in some poems so precisely
that, so far as form goes, they might be mistaken for originals. But the
thought of Swinburne's verse is what no earlier poet would have ever
expressed. It is inconceivable that a Greek chorus would have chanted
any song of the weariness of man, and of the gifts of grief and tears
brought to him at his creation; nor would a Greek have written that
Hymn to Aphrodite, the deadly flower born of the foam of blood and the
froth of the sea. And in _Hesperia_, where he describes a man who has
loved beyond measure and suffered over-much amid the mad pleasures of
Rome, and now sets out, pale and exhausted, to sail the golden sea of
the West until he reach the "Fortunate Islands" and find peace before
his death, the mood does not reflect the thoughts of the old world, but
those of the close of the nineteenth century; and so it is, too, in his
"Hendecasyllabics," where he complains in classically chiselled diction
of the swift decay of beauty and the hidden ills which of a sudden
consume the inward force of life. And Burne-Jones treats old myths with
the same freedom and independence. He takes them up and recasts them,
discovers modern passions lying in the very heart of them, enriches them
with a wealth of delicate shades, borrowed without the smallest ceremony
from a new conception of the world and from the life of his own time.
The human soul grown old looks back, as it were, upon the path which it
has travelled, and sees the spirit of its own ripe age latent in its
infancy, recognising that "the child is father of the man." All the
figures in his pictures are surrounded by a dusk which has nothing in
common with the broad daylight in which the Renaissance artists placed
the antique world. There remains what may be called a residue of modern
feeling which has not been assimilated to the old myth, a breath of
magic floating round these figures on their career, something
mysterious, an elusive air of fable. This, indeed, is the pervasive
temperament and sentiment of our own age. It is our own inward spirit
that gazes upon us as though from an enchanted mirror with the mien of a
phantom.
[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
STRUDWICK. THY TUNEFUL STRINGS WAKE MEMORIES.
(_By permission of W. Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
And just as he remodels the entire spirit of old myths, he converts the
figures which he has borrowed into an artistic form of his own, and,
without hesitation, subordinates them in type and physical build and
bearing to the new part they have to play.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
STRUDWICK. GENTLE MUSIC OF A BYGONE DAY.
(_By permission of John Dixon, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
STRUDWICK. THE RAMPARTS OF GOD'S HOUSE.
(_By permission of Wm. Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
His pictures differ in their whole character from those of the masters
of the Quattrocento. In Botticelli, also, the young foliage grows green
and flaunts in its exuberant abundance; but in Burne-Jones the
vegetation suggests one of those immense forests in Sumatra or Java. All
the plants are luxuriant and resplendent in colour, and seem to swoon in
their own opulent, plethoric life. Every tree creates an impression of
having shot up in swift and wanton growth under a tropical sun. Rank
parasitic plants trail from stem to stem, and garlands of climbers grow
in a luxuriant tangle round the branches.
And in proportion as the vegetation is luxuriant and sensuous the human
figures are wasted and languishing. The severe charm, rigidity, and
demureness of the Quattrocento is weakened into lackadaisical
melancholy. The dreamy bliss of Botticelli is transposed into sanctified
solemnity, delicate fragility, a voluptuous lassitude, a gentle
weariness of the world. When he paints ancient sibyls, they are touched
at once by the unearthly asceticism of the Middle Ages seeking refuge
from the world, and the melancholy, anæmic lassitude of the close of the
nineteenth century. If he paints a Venus she does not stand out
victorious in her nudity, but wears a heavy brocaded robe, and around
her lie the symbols of Christian martyrdom, palms, and perhaps a lyre.
It is not the fairness of her body that makes her goddess of love, but
only the dim mystery of her radiant eyes. She is not the Olympian who
entered into frolicsome adventure with the war-god Mars amid the
laughter of the heavenly gods, for in her conventional humiliation she
is rather like the beautiful dæmon of the Middle Ages who, upon her
journey into exile, passed by the cross where the Son of Man was
hanging, and tasted all the bitterness of the years. In their delicate
features his Madonnas have a gentle sadness rarely found in the Italian
masters. Even the angels, who were roguish and wayward in the
Quattrocento, do their spiriting with ceremonious gravity, and a subdued
melancholy underlies their devotional reverence. In Botticelli they are
fresh, youthful figures, lightly girdled, and with fluttering locks and
swelling robes and limber bodies, whether they float around the Madonna
in blissful revelry or look up to the Child Christ in their rapt
ecstasy. But in Burne-Jones they are devout, sombre, deeply earnest
beings, gazing as thoughtfully and dreamily as though they had already
known all the affliction of the world. Their limbs seem paralysed, and
their gesture weary. It is not possible to look at one of his pictures
without being reminded of the Florentines of the fifteenth century, and
yet the spectator at once recognises that they are the work of
Burne-Jones. He is even opposed to Rossetti, his lord and master,
through this element of melancholy: the intoxication of opium is
followed by the sober awakening.
Rossetti's women are dazzling and glorious figures of a modern and
deliberately cruel beauty--sisters of Messalina, Phædra, and Faustina.
He delineates them as luxuriant beings with supple and splendid bodies,
long white necks, and snowily gleaming breasts; with full and fragrant
hair, ardent, yearning eyes, and demoniacally passionate lips. Their
mother is the Venus Verticordia whom Rossetti so often painted. Cruel in
their love as one of the blind forces of nature, they are like that
water-sprite with her song and her red coral mouth dragged from the sea
in a fishing-net, as an old French _fabliau_ tells, and so fair that
every man who beheld her was seized by the love of her, but died when he
clasped her in his arms. What they love in man is his physical strength,
his face and sinews of bronze. Only the strong man who loves them with
overpowering madness, like a stormy wind, can bend them to his will.
Swinburne has sung of "the lips intertwisted and bitten, where the foam
is as blood," of
"The heavy white limbs and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower."
[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
STRUDWICK. THE TEN VIRGINS.
(_By permission of William Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
But the women of Burne-Jones know that this fervour is no longer to be
found upon the earth. The blood has been sapped, and the fire burns low,
and the glorious, ancient might of love has disappeared. For these women
life has lost its sunshine, and love its passion, and the world its
hopes. The hue of their cheeks is pallid, their eyes are dim, their
bodies sickly and without flesh and blood, and their hips are spare.
With pale, quivering lips, and a melancholy smile or a strangely
resigned, intensely grieved look flickering at the corners of their
mouths, they live consumed by sterile longing, and pine in silent
dejection, gazing into vacant space like imprisoned goldfish, or
luxuriate in the vague Fata Morgana of an over-delicate, over-refined,
and bashfully tremulous eroticism--
"And the chaplets of old are above us,
And the oyster-bed teems out of reach;
Old poets outsing and outlove us,
And Catullus makes mouths at our speech.
Who shall kiss in the father's own city,
With such lips as he sang with again?
Intercede with us all of thy pity,
Our Lady of Pain."
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
CRANE. THE CHARIOTS OF THE FLEETING HOURS.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
Swinburne's first ardent and sensuous volume of lyrics contains a poem,
_The Garden of Proserpine_: it tells how a man weary of all things human
and divine, and no longer able to support the intoxicating fragrance of
the roses of Aphrodite, draws near with wavering steps to the throne
where calm Proserpine sits silent, crowned with cold white flowers. And
in the same way Rossetti's flaming and quivering passion and his
volcanic desire end in Burne-Jones with sad resignation.
Whilst Christianity and Hellenism mingle in the figures of Burne-Jones,
a division of labour is noticeable amongst the following artists: some
addressed themselves exclusively to the treatment of ancient subjects,
others to ecclesiastical romantic painting in the style of the
Quattrocento, and others again recognised their chief vocation in
initiating a reformation in kindred provinces of industrial art.
_R. Spencer Stanhope_, who was at Oxford, like Burne-Jones, and, indeed,
received his first artistic impulses while employed on the elaboration
of Rossetti's mural pictures for the Union, worked even in later days
chiefly in the field of decorative painting, and is, with Burne-Jones,
the principal designer for the interior decoration of churches in
England. His oil-paintings are few, and in their gracious Quattrocento
build they are in outward appearance scarcely different from those of
Burne-Jones. In a picture belonging to the Manchester Gallery there is a
maiden seated amid a flowery meadow, while a small Cupid with red
pinions draws near to her; the landscape has an air of peace and
happiness. Another picture--probably inspired by Catullus' _Lament for
Lesbia's Sparrow_--displays a girl sitting upon an old town wall with a
little dead bird. "The Temptation of Eve" is like a brilliantly coloured
mediæval miniature, painted with the greatest _finesse_. As in the
woodcut in the Cologne Bible, Paradise is enclosed with a circular red
wall. Eve is like a slim, twisted Gothic statue. Like Burne-Jones,
Stanhope is always delicate and poetic, but he is less successful in
setting upon old forms of art the stamp of his individuality, and thus
giving them new life and a character of their own. In their severe,
archæological character his pictures have little beyond the affectation
of a style which has been arrived at through imitation.
[Illustration: WALTER CRANE. FROM _THE TEMPEST_.]
The third member of this Oxford Circle, the poet _William Morris_, has
exercised great influence over English taste by the institution of an
industrial establishment for embroidery, painting upon glass, and
household decoration. Keeping in mind that close union which existed in
the fifteenth century between art and the manual crafts, he and certain
of his disciples did not hesitate to provide designs for decorative
stuffs, wall-papers, furniture, and household embellishments of every
description. They were largely indebted to the Japanese, to say nothing
of the old Italians, though they succeeded in creating a thoroughly
modern and independent style, in spite of all they borrowed. The whole
range of industrial art in England received a new lease of life, and
household decoration became blither and more cheerful in its
appearance. Only light, delicate, and finely graduated colours were
allowed to predominate, and they were combined with slender, graceful,
and vivacious form. The heavy panelling which was popular in the sixties
gave way to bright papers ornamented with flowers; narrow panes made way
for large plate-glass windows with light curtains, in which long-stemmed
flowers were entwined in the pattern. Slim pillars supported cabinets
painted in exquisite hues or gleaming with lacquer-work and enamel.
Seats were ornamented with soft cushions shining in all the delicate
splendour of Indian silks. And the pre-Raphaelite style of ornamentation
was even extended to the embellishment of books, so that England created
the modern book, at a time when other nations adhered altogether to the
imitation of old models.
[Illustration: WALTER CRANE. FROM _THE TEMPEST_.]
In his early years _Arthur Hughes_ attracted much attention by an
Ophelia, a delicate, thoroughly English figure of soft pre-Raphaelite
grace; but in later years he rarely got beyond sentimental Renaissance
maidens suggestive of Julius Wolff, and humorous work in the style of
_genre_.
_J. N. Strudwick_, who worked first under Spencer Stanhope and then
under Burne-Jones, was more consistent in his fidelity to the
pre-Raphaelite principles. His pictures have the same delicate,
enervated mysticism, and the same thoughtful, dreamy poetry, as those of
his elders in the school. By preference he paints slender, pensive
girlish figures, with the sentiment of Burne-Jones, taking his motive
from some passage in a poet. In a picture called "Elaine" the heroine is
mournfully seated in a lofty room of a mediæval palace. Another of his
works reveals three girls occupied with music. Or a knight strewn with
roses lies asleep in a maiden's lap. Or again, there is St. Cecilia
standing with her Seraphina before a Roman building. Strudwick does not
possess the spontaneity of his master. The childlike, angular effect at
which he aims often seems slightly weak and mawkish; and occasionally
his painting is somewhat diffident, especially when he paints in the
architectural detail and rich artistic accessories, and stipples with a
very fine brush. But his works are so exquisite and delicate, so
precious and æsthetic, that they must be reckoned amongst the most
characteristic performances of the New pre-Raphaelitism. One of his
larger compositions he has named "Bygone Days." There is a man musing
over the memories of his life, as he sits upon a white marble throne in
front of a long white marble wall, amid an evening landscape. He
stretches out his arms after the vanished years of his youth, the years
when love smiled upon him; but Time, a winged figure like Orcagna's
_Morte_, divides him from the goddess of love, swinging his scythe with
a threatening gesture. "The Past," a slender matron in a black robe,
covers her face lamenting. In Strudwick's most celebrated picture, "The
Ramparts of God's House," there is a man standing at the threshold of
heaven, naked as a Greek athlete. His earthly fetters lie shattered at
his feet. Angels receive him, marvellously spiritual beings filled with
a lovely simplicity and revealing ineffable profundity of soul, beings
who partake of Fra Angelico almost as much as of Ellen Terry. Their
expression is quiet and peaceful. Instead of marvelling at the
new-comer, they gaze with their eyes green as a water-sprite's
meditatively into illimitable space. The architecture in the background
is entirely symbolical, as in the pictures of Giotto. A little house
with a golden roof and gilded mediæval reliefs is inhabited by a dense
throng of little angels, as if it were a Noah's-ark. The colour is rich
and sonorous, as in the youthful works of Carlo Crivelli.
[Illustration: G. F. WATTS IN HIS GARDEN.
(_By permission, from a photograph by A. Frazer-Tytler, Esq._)]
_Henry Holliday_, who has of late devoted himself largely to decorative
tasks, seems in these works to be the _juste-milieu_ between Burne-Jones
and Leighton. And the youngest representative of this group tinged with
religious and romantic feelings is _Marie Spartali-Stillman_, who lives
in Rome and paints as a rule pictures from Dante, Boccaccio, and
Petrarch, after the fashion of Rossetti.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
WATTS. LADY LINDSAY.
(_By permission of Lady Lindsay, the owner of the picture._)]
Others, who turned to the treatment of antique subjects, were led by
these themes more towards the Idealism of the Cinquecento as regards the
form of their work; and in this way they lost the severe stamp of the
pre-Raphaelites.
In these days _William Blake Richmond_, in particular, no longer shows
any trace of having once belonged to the mystic circle of Oxonians. The
Ariadne which he painted in the old days was a lean and tall woman with
fluttering black mantle, casting up her arms in lamentation and gazing
out of those deep, gazelle-like eyes which Burne-Jones gave his Vivien.
Even the scheme of colour was harmonised in the bronze, olive tone which
marked the earliest works of Burne-Jones. But soon afterwards his views
underwent a complete revolution in Italy. Influenced by Alma Tadema in
form, and by the French in colour, he drew nearer to the academic
manner, until he became, at length, a Classicist without any salient
peculiarity. The allegory "Amor Vincit Omnia" is characteristic of this
phase of his art. Aphrodite, risen from her bath, is standing naked in a
Grecian portico, through which a purple sea is visible. Her maidens are
busied in dressing her; and they are, one and all, chaste and noble
figures of that classic grace and elegant fluency of line which Leighton
usually lends to his ideal forms. In a picture which became known in
Germany through the International Exhibition of 1891, Venus, a clear and
white figure, floats down with stately motion towards Anchises. It is
only in the delicate pictures of children which have been his chief
successes of late years that he is still fresh and direct. Girls with
thick hair of a _blonde cendrée_, finely moulded lips, and large
gazelle-like eyes full of sensibility, are seen in these works dreamily
seated in white or blue dresses against a red or a blue curtain. And the
æsthetic method of painting, which almost suggests pastel work in its
delicacy, is in keeping with the ethereal figures and the bloom of
colour.
_Walter Crane_ has been far more successful in uniting the
pre-Raphaelite conception with a sentiment for beauty formed upon the
antique, Burne-Jones's "paucity of flesh and plenitude of feeling" with
a measured nobility of form. Born in Liverpool in 1845, he received his
first impressions of art at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1857, where
he saw Millais' "Sir Isumbras at the Ford." The chivalrous poetry of
this master became the ideal of his youth, and it rings clearly
throughout his first pictures, exhibited in 1862. One of these has as
its subject "The Lady of Shalott" approaching the shore of her
mysterious island in a boat, and the other St. George slaying the
dragon. Meanwhile, however, he had come to know Walker, through W. J.
Linton, the wood-engraver, for whom he worked from 1859 to 1862, and the
former led him to admire the beauty of the sculptures of the Parthenon.
After this he passed from romantic to antique subjects, and there is
something notably youthful, a fresh bloom as of old legends, in these
compositions, which recall the sculpture of Phidias. "The Bridge of
Life," belonging to the year 1875, was like an antique gem or a Grecian
bas-relief. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 he had a "Birth of
Venus," noble and antique in composition, and of a severity of form
which suggested Mantegna. The suave and poetic single figures which he
delights in painting are at once Greek and English: girls, with branches
of blossom, in white drapery falling into folds, and enveloping their
whole form while indicating every line of the body. His "Pegasus" might
have come straight from the frieze of the Parthenon. "The Fleeting
Hours" at once recalls Guido Reni's "Aurora" and Dürer's apocalyptic
riders.
[Illustration: _Cameron, photo._
WATTS. HOPE.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
[Illustration: _Pageant._
WATTS. PAOLO AND FRANCESCA.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
[Illustration: _Cameron, photo._
WATTS. LOVE AND DEATH.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
Later he turned to decorative painting, like all the representatives of
the pre-Raphaelite group. He is one of the most original designers for
industrial work in tapestry, next to Morris the most influential leader
of the English arts and crafts, and he has collaborated in founding that
modern naturalistic tendency of style which will be the art of the
future. His designs are always based upon naturalistic motives--the
English type of womanhood and the English splendour of flowers. There
always predominates a sensitive relationship between the æsthetic
character of the forms and their symbolical significance. He always
adapts an object of nature so that it may correspond in style with the
material in which he works. The way in which he makes use of the noblest
models of antiquity and of the Renaissance, and yet immediately
transposes them into an English key of sentiment and into available
modern forms, is entirely peculiar. And last, but not least, he is a
marvellous illustrator. Every one went wild with delight at the close of
the sixties over the appearance of his first children's books, _The
Faerie Queene_, _The Little Pig who went to Market_, and _King
Luckiboy_, the pictures of which were soon displayed upon all patterns
for embroidery. And they were followed by others: after 1875 he
published _Tell me a Story_, _The First of May--a Fairy Masque_, _The
Sirens Three_, _Echoes of Hellas_, and so forth. The two albums _The
Baby's Bouquet_ and _The Baby's Opera_ of 1879 are probably the finest
of them all.
In spite of their childish subjects, the drawings of Walter Crane have
such a monumental air that they have the effect of "grand painting."
Without imitation he reproduces spontaneously the grace and character of
the primitive Florentines. Some of his plates recall "The Dream of
Polifilo," and might bear the monogram of Giovanni Bellini. They owe
their origin to a profound Germanic sentiment mingled with pagan
reminiscences; they are an almost Grecian and yet English art, where
fancy like a foolish, dreamy child plays with a brilliant skein of forms
and colours.
That great artist _George Frederick Watts_ stands quite apart as a
personality in himself. In point of substance he is divided from others
by not leaning upon poets, but by inventing independent allegories for
himself; and in point of form by courting neither the Quattrocento nor
the Roman Cinquecento, but rather following the Venice of the later
Renaissance. Instead of the marble precision of Squarcione or Mantegna,
what predominates in his work is something soft and melting, which might
recall Correggio, Tintoretto, or Giorgione, were it not that there is a
cooler grey, a subdued light fresco tone in Watts, in place of the
Venetian glory of colour.
As a man, Watts was one of those artists who are only to be found in
England--an artist who, from his youth upwards, has been able to live
for his art without regard to profit. Born in London in the year 1820,
he left the Academy after being a pupil there for a brief period, and
began to visit the Elgin Room in the British Museum. The impression made
upon him by the sculptures of the Parthenon was decisive for his whole
life. Not merely are numerous plastic works due to his study of them,
but several of his finest paintings. When he was seventeen he exhibited
his first pictures, which were painted very delicately and with
scrupulous pains; and in 1843 he took part in the competition for the
frescoes of the Houses of Parliament, amongst which the representation
of St. George and the Dragon was from his hand. With the proceeds of the
prize which he received at the competition he went to Italy, and there
he came to regard the great Venetians Titian and Giorgione as his kin
and his contemporaries. The pupil of Phidias became the worshipper of
Tintoretto. In Italy he produced "Fata Morgana," a picture of a warrior
vainly catching at the airy white veil of a nude female figure which
floats past. This work already displays him as an accomplished artist,
though it is wanting in the large, Classical tranquillity of his later
paintings. He returned home with plans demanding more than human energy.
Like the Frenchman Chenavard, he cherished the purpose of representing
the history of the world in a series of frescoes, which were to adorn
the walls of a building specially adapted for the purpose. "Chaos," "The
Creation," "The Temptation of Man," "The Penitence," "The Death of
Abel," and "The Death of Cain" were the earliest pictures which he
designed for the series. It was through fresco painting alone, as he
believed, that it was possible to school English art to monumental
grandeur, nobleness, and simplicity. But it was not possible for him to
remain long upon this path in England, where painting has but little
space accorded to it upon the walls of churches, while in other public
buildings decoration is not in demand. Moreover, it is doubtful whether
Watts would have achieved anything great in this province of art. At any
rate, a work which he executed for the dining-hall at Lincoln's Inn--an
assembly of the lawgivers of all times from Moses down to Edward I--is
scarcely more than a mixture of Raphael's "School of Athens" and the
"Hemicycle" of Delaroche. In magnificent allegories in the form of
oil-paintings he first found the expression of his individuality. Like
Turner, Watts did not paint pictures for sale. Yet he has lent one or
other of his pictures to almost every public exhibition. A whole room is
devoted to him in the Tate Gallery. But to know his work thoroughly one
had to go to his house. His studio in Little Holland House contained
almost all his important creations, and was visited by the public upon
Saturday and Sunday afternoons as freely as if it were a museum.
[Illustration: _Pageant._
WATTS. ARIADNE.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
WATTS. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
As a landscape painter Watts is a visionary like Turner, though in
addition to the purely artistic effect of his pictures he always
endeavoured to awaken remoter feelings and ideas of some kind or
another. His landscape "Corsica" reveals a grey expanse, with very
slight vibrations of tone which suggest that out to sea a distant island
is emerging from the mist. His "Mount Ararat," a picture entirely filled
with the play of light blue tones, represents a number of barren rocky
cones bathed in the intense blue of a pure transparent starry night.
Above the highest peak there is one star sparkling more brilliantly than
the others. In his "Deluge: the Forty-first Day," he attempted to
depict, after an interpretation of his own, the power "with which light
and heat, dissipating the darkness and dissolving the multitude of the
waters into mist and vapour, give new life to perished nature." What is
actually placed before the eye is a delicate symphony of colours which
would have delighted Turner: wild, agitated sea, clouds gleaming like
liquid gold, and mist behind which the sun rises in a magical glow, like
a red ball of fire.
In his portraits he is earnest and sincere. Just as fifty years ago
David d'Angers devoted half a lifetime to getting together a portrait
gallery of famous contemporaries, so to Watts belongs the glory of
having really been the historian of his time. The collection of
portraits, many of which are to be seen in the National Portrait
Gallery, comprises about forty likenesses, all of them half-length
pictures, all of them upon the same scale of size, all of them
representing very famous men. Amongst the poets comprised in this
gallery of genius are Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold,
Swinburne, William Morris, and Sir Henry Taylor; amongst prose-writers,
Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Lecky, Motley, and Leslie Stephen; amongst
statesmen, Gladstone, Sir Charles Dilke, the Duke of Argyll, Lord
Salisbury, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Sherbrooke;
amongst the leaders of the clergy, Dean Stanley, Dean Milman, Cardinal
Manning, and Dr. Martineau; amongst painters, Rossetti, Millais,
Leighton, Burne-Jones, and Calderon; and amongst notable foreigners,
Guizot, Thiers, Joachim the violinist, and many others. In the matter of
technique Watts is excelled by many of the French. His portraits have
something heavy, nor are they eminent either for softness of modelling,
or for that momentary and animated effect peculiar to Lenbach. But few
portraits belonging to the nineteenth century have the same force of
expression, the same straightforward sureness of aim, the same grandeur
and simplicity. Before each of the persons represented one is able to
say, That is a painter, that a poet, and that a scholar. All the
self-conscious dignity of a President of the Royal Academy is expressed
in the picture of Leighton, and his look is as cold as marble; while the
eyes of Burne-Jones seem mystically veiled, as though they were gazing
into the past. Indeed, the way in which Watts grasps his characters is
masterly beyond conception. Amongst the old painters Tintoretto and
Moroni might be compared with him most readily, while Van Dyck is the
least like him of all.
In opposition to the poetic fantasy of Burne-Jones dallying with
legendary lore, an element of brooding thought is characteristic of the
large compositions of Watts, a meditative absorption in ideas which
provoke the intellect to further activity by their mysterious
allegorical suggestions. Just as he makes an approach to the old
Venetians in external form, he is divided from them in the inward burden
of his work by a severity and hardiness characteristic of the Northern
spirit, a predominance of idea seldom met with amongst Southern masters,
and a profoundly sad way of thought in which one sees the stamp of the
nineteenth century. Apart from the purely artistic effect of his work,
he tried to make his pictures serve as a stimulus to deeper thought and
meditation: "The end of art," he writes, "must be the exposition of some
weighty principle of spiritual significance, the illustration of a great
truth."
"The Spirit of Christianity," the only one of his works which has a
religious tone, displays a youth throned upon the clouds, with children
nestling at his feet. His powerful head is bent upwards, and his right
hand opened wide. In "Orpheus and Eurydice" he has chosen the moment
when Orpheus turns round to behold Eurydice turning pale and sinking to
the earth, to be once more swallowed by Hades. The lyre drops from his
hands, and with a gesture of despair he draws the form of his wife to
his heart in a last, eternal embrace. "Artemis and Endymion" is a scene
in which a tall female figure in silvery shining vesture bends over the
sleeping shepherd, throwing herself into the curve of a sickle.
But, as a rule, he neither makes use of Christian nor of ancient ideas,
but embodies his own thoughts. In "The Illusions of Life," a picture
belonging to the year 1847, beautiful, dreamy figures hover over a gulf,
spreading at the verge of existence. At their feet lie the shattered
emblems of greatness and power, and upon a small strip of the earth
hanging over an abyss those illusions are visible which have not yet
been destroyed: Glory, in the shape of a knight in harness, chases the
bubble of resounding fame; Love is symbolised by a pair who are tenderly
embracing; Learning, by an old man poring over manuscripts in the dusk;
Innocence, by a child grasping at a butterfly. "The Angel of Death" is a
picture of a winged and mighty woman throned at the entrance of a way
which leads to eternity. Upon her knees there rests, covered with a
white cloth, the corpse of a new-born child. Men and women of every
station lay reverently down at the feet of the angel the symbols of
their dignity and the implements of their earthly toil.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
WATTS. ARTEMIS AND ENDYMION.
(_By permission of Mr. Robert Dunthorne, the owner of the copyright._)]
"Love and Death" represents the two great sovereigns of the world
wrestling together for a human life. With steps which have a mysterious
majesty, pallid Death draws near, demanding entrance at the door of a
house, whilst Love, a slight, boyish figure with bright wings, places
himself in the way; but with one great, irresistible gesture the mighty
genius of Death sweeps the shrinking child to one side. In another
picture, "Love and Life," the genius of Love, in the form of a slim,
powerful youth, helps poor, weak, clinging Life, a half-grown, timid,
faltering girl, to clamber up the stony path of a mountain, over which
the sun rises golden. "Hope" is a picture in which a tender spirit,
bathed in the blue mist, sits upon the globe, blindfold, listening in
bliss to the low sound vibrating from the last string of her harp.
"Mammon" is embodied by Watts in a coarse and bloated satyr brutally
setting his heel upon a youth and a young girl, as upon a footstool.
In 1893, when the committee of the Munich Exhibition were moved by the
writings of Cornelius Gurlitt to have some of these works sent over to
Germany, a certain disappointment was felt in artistic circles. And any
one who is accustomed to gauge pictures by their technique is justified
in missing the genuine pictorial temperament in Watts. The sobriety of
his scheme of colour, his preference for subdued tones, his distaste for
all "dexterity" and freedom from all calculated refinement, are not in
accord with the desires of our time. Even his sentiment is altogether
opposed to that which predominates in the other New Idealists.
Burne-Jones and Rossetti found sympathy because their repining lyricism,
their psychopathic subtlety, their wonderful mixture of archaic
simplicity and _décadent hautgoût_, stand in direct touch with the
present. Watts' pictures seem cold and wanting in temperament because he
made no appeal to the vibrating life of the nerves.
But the same sort of criticism was written by the younger generation in
Germany, seventy years ago, on the works of Goethe, which have, none the
less, remained fresher than those of Schlegel and Tieck. What is modern
is not always the same as what is eternally young. And if one
endeavours, disregarding the current of the age, to approach Watts as
though he were an old master, one feels an increasing sense of the
probability that amongst all the New Idealists of the present he has,
next to Boecklin, the best prospect of becoming one. In spite of all its
independence of spirit, the art of Burne-Jones has an affected mannerism
in its outward garb. The sentiment of it is free, but the form is
confined in the old limits. And it is not impossible that later
generations, to whom his specifically modern sentiment will appeal more
and more faintly, may one day rank him, on account of his archaism in
drawing, as much amongst the eclectics as Overbeck and Führich are held
to be at the present time. But that can never happen to Watts. His works
are the expression of an artist who is as little dependent upon the past
as upon the momentary tendencies of the present. His articulation of
form has nothing in common with the lines of beauty of the antique, or
the Quattrocento, or the Cinquecento. It is a thing created by himself
and to himself peculiar. He needs no erudition, and no attributes and
symbols borrowed from the Renaissance, to body forth his allegories.
With him there begins a new power of creating types; and his figure of
Death--that tall woman, clad in white, with hollow cheeks, livid face,
and lifeless sunken eyes--is no less cogent than the genius with the
torch reversed or the burlesque skeleton of the Middle Ages. Moreover,
there is in his works a trace of profundity and simple grandeur which
stands alone in our own period. It is precisely our more sensitive
nervous system which divides us from the old painters, and has generally
given the artistic productions of our day a disturbed, capricious,
restless, and overstrained character, making them inferior to those of
the old masters.
Watts is, perhaps, the only painter who can bear comparison with them in
every respect. Here is a man who has been able to live in himself far
away from the bustle of exhibitions, a man who worked when he was old as
soundly and freshly as when he was young, a man, also, who is always
simple in his art, lucid, earnest, grandiose, impressive, and of
monumental sublimity. Though he shows no trace of imitation he might
have come straight from the Renaissance, so deep is his sense of beauty,
so direct and so condensed his power of giving form to his ideas. And
amongst living painters I should find it impossible to name a single one
who could embody such a scene as that of "Love and Death" so calmly, so
entirely without rhetorical gestures and all the tricks of theatrical
management. There is the mark of style about everything in Watts, and it
is no external and borrowed style, but one which is his own, a style
which a notable man, a thinker and a poet, has fashioned for the
expression of his own ideas. That is what makes him a master of
contemporary painting and of the painting of all times. And that is what
will, perhaps, render him, in the eyes of later generations, one of the
greatest men of our time.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
A similar change of taste occurred in France. Just as the Impressionists
had held modernity alone in high honour, so now awoke the longing after
the faded lustre of a bygone age of beauty. The younger generation in
literature began to do homage to their spiritual ancestors not in Zola
but in Charles Baudelaire, that abstracter of the quintessence; and
similarly in the province of art there came to the fore two of the older
masters who until then had been relegated to the background.
In pictorial art _Gustave Moreau_ is equivalent to Charles Baudelaire.
Certain of the strange and fascinating poems in the _Fleurs du Mal_
strike alone the same note of sentiment as the tortured, subtilised,
morbid, but mysterious and captivating creations of Moreau; and his
figures, like those of Baudelaire, live in a mysterious world, and
stimulate the spirit like eternal riddles. Every one of his works stands
in need of a commentary; every one of them bears witness to a profound
and peculiar activity of mind, and every one of them is full of intimate
reveries. Every agitation of his inward spirit takes shape in myths of
hieratical strangeness, in mysterious hallucinations, which he sets in
his pictures like jewels. He gives ear to dying strains, rising faintly,
inaudible to the majority of men. Marvellous beings pass before him,
fantastic and yet earnest; forms of legendary story hover through space
upon strange animals; a fabulous hippogriff bears him far away to Greece
and the East, to vanished worlds of beauty. Upon the journey he beholds
Utopias, beholds the Fortunate Islands, and visits all lands, borne upon
the pinions of a dream. An age which went wild over Cabanel and
Bouguereau could not possibly be in sympathy with him. The Naturalists,
also, looked upon him as a singular being; it was much as if an Indian
magician whose robe shone in all the hues of the rainbow had suddenly
made his appearance at a ball, amongst men in black evening dress. It is
only since the mysterious smile of Leonardo's feminine figures has once
more drawn the world beneath its spell that the spirit of Moreau's
pictures has become a familiar thing. Even his schooling was different
from that of his contemporaries. He was the only pupil of that strange
artist Théodore Chassériau, and Chassériau had directed him to the study
of Bellini, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, and all those enchanting
primitive artists whose enchanting female figures are seen to move
through mysterious black and blue landscapes. He was then seized with an
enthusiasm for the hieratical art of India. And he was also affected by
old German copper-engraving, old Venetian pottery, painting upon vases
and enamel, mosaics and niello work, tapestries and old Oriental
miniatures. His exquisite and expressive style, which, at a time when
the flowing Cinquecento manner was in vogue, made an unpleasant effect
by its archaic angularity, was the result of the fusion of these
elements.
When he appeared, the special characteristic of French art was its
seeking after violent agitations of the spirit, _émotions fortes_. The
spirit was to be roused by stormy vehemence, as a relaxed system is
braced by massage. But the generation at the close of the nineteenth
century wanted to be soothed rather than stirred by painting. It could
not endure shrill cries, loud, emphatic speech, or vehement gestures. It
desired subdued and refined emotions, and Moreau's distinction is that
he was the first to give expression to this weary _décadent_ humour. In
his work a complete absence of motion has taken the place of the
striding legs, the attitudes of the fencing-master, the arms
everlastingly raised to heaven, and the passionately distorted faces
which had reigned in French painting since David. He makes spiritual
expression his starting-point, and not scenic effect; he keeps, as it
were, within the laws which rule over classical sculpture, where
vehemence was only permitted to intrude from the period of decline, from
the Pergamene reliefs, the Laocoön, and the Farnese Bull. Everything
bears the seal of sublime peace; everything is inspired by inward life
and suppressed passion. Even when the gods fight there are no mighty
gestures; with a mere frown they can shake the earth like Zeus.
His spiritual conception of the old myths is just as peculiar as his
grave articulation of form; it is a conception such as earlier
generations could not have, one which alone befits the spiritual
condition of the close of the nineteenth century. During the most recent
decades archæological excavations and scientific researches have widened
and deepened our conceptions of the old mythology in a most unexpected
manner. Beside the laughter of the Grecian Pan we hear the sighs and
behold the convulsions of Asia, in her anguish bearing gods, who perish
young like spring flowers, in the loving arms of Oriental goddesses. We
have heard of chryselephantine statues covered with precious stones from
top to bottom; and we know the graceful terra-cotta figures of Tanagra.
Before there was a knowledge of the Tanagra statuettes no archæologist
could have believed that the Eros of Hesiod was such a charming, wayward
little rascal. Before the discovery of the Cyprus statues no artist
would have ventured to adorn a Grecian goddess with flowers, pins for
the head, and a heavy tiara. Prompted by these discoveries, Moreau has
been swayed by strangely rich inspirations. He is said to have worked in
his studio as in a tower opulent with ivory and jewels. He has a delight
in arraying the figures of his legends in the most costly materials, as
the discoveries at Cyprus give him warrant for doing, in painting their
robes in the deepest and most lustrous hues, and in being almost too
lavish in his manner of adorning their arms and breasts. Every figure
of his is a glittering idol, enveloped in a dress of gold brocade
embroidered with precious stones. His love of ornamentation is even
extended to his landscapes. They are improbable, far too fair, far too
rich, far too strange to exist in the actual world, but they are in
close harmony with the character of these sumptuously clad figures which
wander in them like the mystic and melancholy shapes of a dream. The
capricious generation that lived in the Renaissance occasionally handled
classical subjects in this manner, but there is the same difference
between Filippino Lippi and Gustave Moreau as there is between
Botticelli and Burne-Jones: the former, like Shakespeare in the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, transformed the antique into a blithe and
fantastic fairy world, whereas that fire of yearning romance which once
flamed from poor Hölderlin's poet heart burns in the pictures of Moreau.
His "Orpheus" is one of his most characteristic and beautiful works. He
has not borrowed the composition from antique tragedy. The drama is
over. Orpheus has been torn asunder by the Mænads, and the limbs of the
poet lie scattered over the icy fields of the hyperborean lands. His
head, borne upon his lyre now for ever mute, has been cast upon the
shore of Erebus. Nature seems to sleep in mysterious peace. Around there
is nothing to be seen but still waters and pallid light, nothing to be
heard but the tone of a small shrill flute, played by a barbarian
shepherd sitting on the cliff. A Thracian girl, whose hair is adorned
with a garland, and whose look is earnest, has taken up the head of the
singer and regards it long and quietly. Is it merely pity that is in her
eyes? A romantic Hellenism, a profound melancholy underlies the picture,
and the old story closes with a cry of love. In his "Oedipus and the
Sphinx" of 1864, and his "Heracles" of 1878, he treated battle scenes,
the heroic struggle between man and beast, and in these pictures, also,
there is no violence, no vehemence, no movement. In a terrible silence
the two antagonists exchange looks in his "Oedipus and the Sphinx,"
while their breath mingles. Like a living riddle, the winged creature
gazes upon the stranger, but the youth with his long locks stands so
composedly before her that the spectator feels that he must know the
decisive word.
In "Helen upon the Walls of Troy" the figure of the enchantress, as she
stands there motionless, clad in a robe glittering with brilliant stones
and diamonds like a shrine, is seen to rise against the blood-red
horizon as though it were a statue of gold and ivory. Like a queen of
spades, she holds in her hand a large flower. Heaps of bodies pierced
with arrows lie at her feet. But she has no glance of pity for the dying
whose death-rattle greets her. Her wide, apathetic eyes are fixed upon
vacancy. She sees in the gold of the sunset the smoke ascending from the
Grecian camp. She will embark in the fair ship of Menelaus, and return
in triumph to Hellas, where new love shall be her portion. And the looks
of the old men fasten upon her in admiration. "It is fitting that the
Trojans and the Achæans fight for such a woman." Helen in her blond
voluptuous beauty is transformed beneath the hands of Moreau into
Destiny stalking over ground saturated with blood, into the Divinity of
Mischief--a divinity that, without knowing it, poisons everything that
comes near her, or that she sees or touches.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
MOREAU. THE YOUNG MAN AND DEATH.]
In his "Galatea" Moreau's love of jewels and enamel finds its highest
triumph. Galatea's grotto is one large, glittering casket. Flowers made
from the sun, and leaves from the stars, and branches of coral stretch
forth their boughs and open their cups. And as the most brilliant jewel
of all, there rests in the holy of holies the radiant form of the
sleeping Galatea, a kind of Greek Susanna, watched by the staring,
adamantine eye of Polyphemus.
And just as he bathes these Grecian forms in the dusk of a profound
romantic melancholy, so in Moreau's pictures the figures of the Bible
are tinged with a shade of Indian Buddhism, a pantheistic mysticism
which places them in a strange modern light. In his "David" he
represents in a quiet and peaceful way the entry of a human soul into
Nirvana. The aged king sits dreaming upon his gorgeous throne, and an
angel watches in shining beauty beside this phantom, the flame of whose
life is slowly sinking. A curious light falls upon him from the sky. The
light of the evening horizon shines faint between the pillars, and the
spectator feels that it is the end of a long day. His pictures of 1878
dealing with Salome, in their strange sentiment--suggestive of an opium
vision--are like a paraphrase of Heine's poem in _Atta Troll_. In a
sombre hall supported by mighty pillars, through which coloured lamps
and stupefying pastil-burners shed a blue and red light, sits Herod the
king, half asleep with hasheesh, wrapped in silk, and motionless as a
Hindu idol. His face is pale and gloomy, and his throne is like a
crystal confessional chair, fashioned with all the riches of the world.
Two women lean at the foot of a pillar. One of them touches the strings
of a lute, and a small panther yawns near a vessel of incense. Upon the
floor of variegated mosaics flowers lie strewn. Salome advances.
Tripping upon her toes as lightly as a figure in a dream, she begins to
dance, holding a tremulous lotus-flower in her hand. A shining tiara is
upon her head; her body is adorned with all the jewels which the dragons
guard in the veins of the earth. Faster and faster and with a more
voluptuous grace she twists and stretches her splendid limbs; but of a
sudden she starts and presses her hand to her heart: she has seen the
executioner as he smote the head of John from the body.--In the midst of
an Oriental paradise, the body of the Baptist lies in the grass; the
head has been set upon a charger, and Salome, like a bloodthirsty
tigress, watches it with looks of ardent, famished love.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MOREAU. ORPHEUS.]
Different as they seem in technique, there are many points of contact
between the visionary Gustave Moreau and _Puvis de Chavannes_, the
original and fascinating creator of the decorative painting of the
nineteenth century. Where one indulges in detail, the other resorts to
simplification; where the former is opulent the latter is ascetic; and
yet they are associated through inward sympathy.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MOREAU. DESIGN FOR ENAMEL.]
Puvis de Chavannes is the Domenico Ghirlandajo of the nineteenth
century. The most eminent mural works which have been achieved in France
owe their existence to him. Wall-paintings from his hand may be found
above the staircase of the museums of Amiens, Marseilles, and Lyons, in
the Paris Panthéon and the new Sorbonne, in the town-halls of Poitiers
and many other French towns--pictures which it is difficult to describe
in detail, through the medium of pedestrian prose. The two works with
which he opened the decorative series in the museum of Amiens in 1861
are entitled "Bellum" and "Concordia." In the former warriors are riding
over a monotonous plain. Two smoking pillars, the gloomy witnesses to
sorrow and devastation, cast their dark shadows over the still fields,
whilst here and there burning mills rise into the sombre sky like
torches. In "Concordia," the counterpart to this work, there are women
plucking flowers, and naked youths urging on their horses amid a
luxuriant grove of laurel. In the Paris Panthéon he painted, between
1876 and 1878, "The Girlhood of St. Geneviève." A laughing spring
landscape, filled with the blitheness of May, spreads beneath the bright
sky of the Isle de France. Calm figures move in it, men and women,
children and greybeards. A bishop lays his hand upon the head of a young
shepherdess; sailors are coming ashore from their barks. "The Grove
sacred to the Arts and Muses" comes first in the decoration of the Lyons
Museum. Upon one side is a thick forest, dark and profound, and upon the
other the horizon is fringed by violet-blue hills and a large lake
reflecting the bluish atmosphere; in the foreground are green meadows,
where the flowers gleam like stars, and trees standing apart, oaks and
firs, their strong, straight stems rising stiffly into the sky. At the
foot of a pillared porch strange figures lie by the shore or stand erect
amid the pale grass, one with her arm pointing upwards, another musing
with her hand resting upon her chin, a third unrolling a parchment.
Athletic youths are bringing flowers and winding garlands. The "Vision
of Antiquity" and "Christian Inspiration" complete the series. The
former of these pictures brings the spectator into Attica. Locked by a
simple landscape of hills the blue sea is rippling, and bright islands
rise from its bosom, while a clear sky sheds its full light from above.
Trees and shrubs are growing here and there. A shepherd is playing upon
the pan-pipes, goats are grazing, and five female figures, some of them
nude, the others clothed, caress tame peacocks in the tall grass or lean
against a parapet, breathing in the fresh, cool air. Farther back, at
the foot of a height, is a young woman, holding herself erect like a
statue, as she talks with a youth, whilst in the distance at the verge
of the sea a spectral cavalcade, like that in Phidias' frieze of the
Parthenon, gallops swiftly by. In the counterpart, "Christian
Inspiration," a number of friars who are devoted to art are gathered
together in the portico of an abbey church. The walls are embellished
with naïve frescoes in the style of the Siennese school. One of the
monks who is working on the pictures has alighted from the ladder and
regards the result of his toil with a critical air. Lilies are blooming
in a vase upon the ground. Outside, beyond the cloister wall, the flush
of evening sheds its parting light over a lonely landscape, whence dark
cypresses rise into the air, straight as a lance. In the decoration of
the Sorbonne the object was to suggest all the lofty purposes to which
the place has been dedicated upon the wall of the great amphitheatre
used for the solemn sessions of the faculty, and facing the statues of
the founders. Puvis de Chavannes did this by displaying a throne in a
sacred grove, a throne upon which a grave matron arrayed in sombre
garments is sitting in meditation. This is the old Sorbonne. Two genii
at her side bring palm-branches and crowns as offerings in honour of the
famous minds of the past. Around are standing manifold figures arrayed
in the costumes which were assigned to the arts and sciences in Florence
at the time of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. From the rock upon which
they are set there bursts the living spring from which youth derives
knowledge and new power. A thick wood divides this quiet haunt,
consecrated to the Muses, from the rush and the petty trifles of life.
In a painting entitled "Inter Artes et Naturam," over the staircase of
the museum of Rouen, artists musing over the ruins of mediæval buildings
are seen lying in the midst of a Norman landscape, beneath apple-trees
whose branches are weighed down by their burden of fruit; upon the other
side of the picture there is a woman holding a child upon her knees,
whilst another woman is trying to reach a bough laden with fruit, and a
group of painters look on enchanted with the grace of her simple,
harmonious movement.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MOREAU. THE PLAINT OF THE POET.]
Puvis de Chavannes is not a virtuoso in technique; for a Frenchman,
indeed, he is almost clumsy, and is sure in very little of the work of
his hand,--in fact, it is quite possible that a later age will not
reckon him among the great painters. But what it can never forget is
that after a period of lengthy aberrations he restored decorative art
in general to its proper vocation.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MOREAU. THE APPARITION.]
Before his time what was good in the so-called monumental painting of
the nineteenth century was usually not new, but borrowed from more
fortunate ages, and what was new in it, the narrative element, was not
good, or at least not in good taste. When Paolo Veronese produced his
pictures in the Doge's Palace or Giulio Romano his frescoes in the Sala
dei Giganti in Mantua, neither of them thought of the great mission of
instructing the people or of patriotic sentiments; they wanted to
achieve an effect which should be pictorial, festal, and harmonious in
feeling. The task of painters who were entrusted with the embellishment
of the walls of a building was to waken dreams and strike chords of
feeling, to summon a mood of solemnity, to delight the eye, to uplift
the spirit. What they created was decorative music, filling the mansion
with its august sound as the solemn notes of an organ roll through a
church. Their pictures stood in need of no commentary, no exertion of
the mind, no historical learning. But the painting which in the
nineteenth century did duty upon official occasions and was encouraged
by governments for the sake of its pedagogical efficiency was not
permitted to content itself with this general range of sentiment; it had
to lay on the colours more thickly, and to appeal to the understanding
rather than to sentiment. Descriptive prose took the place of lyricism.
Puvis de Chavannes went back to the true principle of the old painters
by renouncing any kind of didactic intention in his art. In the Panthéon
of Paris, when the eye turns to the works of Puvis de Chavannes after
beholding all the admirable panels with which the recognised masters of
the flowing line have illustrated the temple of St. Geneviève, when it
turns from St. Louis, Clovis, Jeanne d'Arc, and Dionysius Sanctus to
"The Girlhood of St. Geneviève," it is as if one laid aside a prosy
history of the world to read the _Eclogues_ of Virgil.
[Illustration: _Graphische Künste._ PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.]
In the one case there are archæological lectures, stage scenery, and
histrionic art; in the other, simple poetry and lyrical magic, a
marvellous evocation from the distant past of that atmosphere of legend
which banishes the commonplace. His art would express nothing, would
represent nothing; it would only charm and attune the spirit, like music
heard faintly from the distance. His figures perform no significant
actions; nor are any learned attributes employed in their
characterisation, such as were introduced in Greece and at the
Renaissance. He does not paint Mars, Vulcan, and Minerva, but war, work,
and peace. In translating the word _bellum_ into the language of
painting in the Museum of Amiens he did not need academical Bellonas,
nor sword-cuts, nor knightly suits of armour, nor fluttering standards.
A group of mourning and stricken women, warlike horsemen, and a simple
landscape sufficed him to conjure up the drama of war in all its
terrible majesty. And he is as far from gross material heaviness as from
academical sterility. The reapers toiling in his painting entitled
"Summer" are modern in their movements and in their whole appearance,
and yet they belong to no special time and seem to have been wafted into
a world beyond; they are beings who might have lived yesterday, or, for
the matter of that, a thousand years ago. The whole of existence seems
in Puvis de Chavannes like a day without beginning or end, a day of
Paradise, unchangeable and eternal. And very simple means sufficed him
to attain this transcendental effect: like Millet, he generalises what
is individual, and tempers what is presented in nature; antique nudity
is associated in an unforced manner with modern costume; a designed
simplicity, which has nothing of the academical painting of the nude,
is expressed in the handling of form. Even his landscape he constructs
upon its elementary forms, and by means of its essential, expressive
features. But by a certain concordance of lines, by a distinct rhythm of
form, he compasses a sentiment which is grave and solemn or idyllic.
[Illustration: PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. A VISION OF ANTIQUITY.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
The Quattrocentisti, especially Ghirlandajo, were his models in this
epical simplicity, and beside Baudry, the deft and spirited decorator of
the most modernised High Renaissance style, he has the effect of a
primitive artist risen from the grave. His pictures have an archaic
bloom--something sacerdotal, if you will, something seraphic and holy.
Often one fancies that one recognises the influence of old tapestries,
to say nothing of Fra Angelico, but one is at a loss to give the model
copied. And what places him like Moreau in sharp opposition to the old
masters is that, instead of their sunny, smiling blitheness, he too is
under the sway of that heavy melancholy spirit which the close of the
nineteenth century first brought into the world.
When he, a countryman of Flandrin and Chenavard, began his career under
Couture over half a century ago, the world did not understand his
pictures. People blamed the poverty of his palette, asserted that he was
too simple and restricted in his methods of colouring, and he was called
a Lenten painter, _un peintre de carême_, whose dull eye noted nothing
in nature except ungainly lines and uniformly grey tones. Women were
especially unfavourable to him, taking his lean figures as a personal
insult to themselves. Moreover, the calm and immobility of his figures
were censured, and when he exhibited his earliest pictures in 1854, at
the same time as those of Courbet, he was called _un fou tranquille_,
just as the latter was christened _un fou furieux_. In later years it
was precisely through these two qualities, his grandiose quietude and
his "anæmic" painting, that he brought the world beneath his spell, and
diverted French art into a new course.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. THE BEHEADING OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
As his landscapes know nothing of agitated clouds, nor abruptness nor
the strife of the elements, so his figures avoid all oratorical
vehemence. They are eternally young, free from brutal passions, lost in
oblivion. Let him conjure up old Hellas or the quiet life of the
cloister, over figures and landscapes there always rests a tender
sentiment of consecration and dreamy peace; no violent gesture and no
loud tone disturb that harmony of feeling by any vehement action.
[Illustration: PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. THE THREADSPINNER.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the picture._)]
[Illustration: _Neurdein frères, photo._
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. THE POOR FISHERMAN.]
Nor does the colour admit any discord in the large harmony. It is
exceedingly soft and light, although subdued; it has that faint,
deadened indecisiveness to be seen in faded tapestries or vanishing
frescoes. Tender and delicate in its chalky grey unity, which banishes
reality and creates a world of dreams, it is spread around the shadowy
figures. It is impossible to imagine his pictures without this light so
pure and yet veiled, this silvery, transparent air, impregnated with the
breath of the Divine, as Plato would say; it is impossible to imagine
them without the delicate tones of these pale green, pale rose-coloured,
and pale violet dresses, which are as delicate as fading flowers, and
without this flesh-tint, which lends a phantomlike and unearthly
appearance to his figures. It is all like a melody pitched in the high,
finely touched, and tremulous tones of a violin; it invites a mood which
is at once blithe and sentimental, happy and sad, banishes all earthly
things into oblivion, and carries one into a distant, peaceful, and holy
world.
"Mon coeur est en repos, mon âme est en silence,
Le bruit lointain du monde expire en arrivant,
Comme un son éloigné qu'affaiblit la distance,
À l'oreille incertaine apporté par le vent.
J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie;
Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé:
Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l'on oublie;
L'oubli seul désormais est ma félicité.
D'ici je vois la vie, à travers un nuage,
S'évanouir pour moi dans l'ombre du passé...
L'amitié me trahit, la pitié m'abandonne,
Et, seul, je descends le sentier de tombeaux.
Mais la nature est là qui t'invite et qui t'aime;
Plonge-toi dans son sein qu'elle t'ouvre toujours;
Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même,
Est le même soleil se lève sur tes jours."
[Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. SUMMER.]
It was not long before the doctrine of the two souls in _Faust_ was
exemplified in Germany also: from the fertile manure of Naturalism there
sprang the blue flower of a new Romanticism. In Germany there had once
lived Albrecht Dürer, the greatest and most profound painter-poet of all
time; and there, too, even in an unpropitious age that genial visionary
Moritz Schwind succeeded in flourishing. When the period of eclectic
imitation had been overcome by Naturalism, was it not fitting that
artists should once more attempt to embody the world of dreams beside
that of actual existence, and beside tangible reality to give shape to
the unearthly foreboding which fills the human heart with the visions
and the cravings of fancy? In that age of hope arose the cult of
_Boecklin_, and Germany began to honour in him who had been so long
blasphemed the founder of a new and ardently desired art.
Burne-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Boecklin
make up the four-leaved clover of modern Idealism. To future generations
they will bear witness to the sentiment of Europe at the close of the
nineteenth century. All four are more or less of the same age; they all
four began their work in the beginning of the fifties; and they were all
different from their contemporaries and from those who had gone before
them. They embodied the spirit of the future. Boecklin had gone through
a process of change as little as the others. His spirit was so rich that
it comprised a century in itself, and leads us now towards the century
to come. He was the contemporary of Schwind, he is our own contemporary,
and he will be the contemporary of those who come after us. And it were
as impossible to derive his art from that of any previous movement as to
explain how he, our greatest visionary, came to be born in Basle, the
most prosaic town in Europe.
[Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. AUTUMN.]
His father was a merchant there, and he was born in the year 1827. In
1846 he went to Schirmer in Düsseldorf, and upon Schirmer's advice
repaired to Brussels, where he copied the old Dutch masters in the
gallery. By the sale of some of his works he acquired the means of
travelling to Paris. He passed through the days of the Revolution of
June in 1848, studied the pictures in the Louvre, and returned home
after a brief stay to perform his military duties. In the March of 1850,
when he was three-and-twenty, he went to Rome, where he entered the
circle of Anselm Feuerbach; and in 1853 he married a Roman lady. In the
following year he produced the decorative pictures in which he
represented the relations of man to fire; these had been ordered for the
house of a certain Consul Wedekind in Hanover, but were sent back as
being "bizarre." In 1856 he betook himself--rather hard up for money--to
Munich, where he exhibited in the Art Union "The Great Pan," which was
bought by the Pinakothek. Paul Heyse was the medium of his making the
acquaintance of Schack. And in 1858 he was appointed a teacher at the
Academy of Weimar, by the influence of Lenbach and Begas. During this
time he produced "Pan startling a Goat-herd" in the Schack Gallery, and
"Diana Hunting." After three years he was again in Rome, and painted
there "The Old Roman Tavern," "The Shepherd's Plaint of Love," and "The
Villa by the Sea." In 1866 he went to Basle to complete the frescoes
over the staircase of the museum, and in 1871 he was in Munich, where
"The Idyll of the Sea" was exhibited amongst other things. In 1876 he
settled in Florence, in 1886 at Zürich. From 1895 until the day of his
death, January 16, 1901, he lived like a patriarch of art in his country
house on the ridge of Fiesole.
Any one who would interpret a theory based upon the idea that an artist
is the result of influences might, while he is about it, speak of
Boecklin's apprentice period in Düsseldorf and Schirmer's biblical
landscapes. That "harmonious blending of figures with landscape," which
is the leading note in Boecklin's work, was of course from the days of
Claude Lorraine and Poussin the essence of the so-called historical
landscape which found its principal representatives at a later period in
Koch, Preller, Rottmann, Lessing, and Schirmer. Yet Boecklin is not the
disciple of these masters, but stands at the very opposite pole of art.
The art of all these men was merely a species of historical painting.
Old Koch read the Bible, Æschylus, Ossian, Dante, and Shakespeare; found
in them such scenes as Noah's thank-offering, Macbeth and the witches,
or Fingal's battle with the spirit of Loda; and sought amid the Sabine
hills, in Olevano and Subiaco, for sites where these incidents might
have taken place. Preller made the _Odyssey_ the basis of his artistic
creation, chose out of it moments where the scene might be laid in some
landscape, and found in Rügen, Norway, Sorrento, and the coast of Capri
the elements of nature necessary to his epic. Rottmann worked upon
hexameters composed by King Ludwig, and adhered in the views he painted
to the historical memories attached to the towns of Italy. Lessing
sought inspiration in Sir Walter Scott, for whose monks and nuns he
devised an appropriately sombre and mysterious background. Schirmer
illustrated the Books of Moses by placing the figures in Schnorr's
Picture Bible in Preller's Odyssean landscape. Whether they were
Classicists appealing to the eye by the architecture of form, or
Romanticists addressing the spirit by the "mood" in their landscapes, it
was common to all these painters that they set out from a literary or
historical subject. They gave an exact interpretation of the actions
prescribed by their authors, surrounding the figures with fictitious
landscapes, corresponding in general conception to one's notion of the
surroundings of heroes, patriarchs, or hermits. Their pictures are
historical incidents with a stage-setting of landscape.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
ARNOLD BOECKLIN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
In Boecklin all this is reversed. Landscape painter he is in his very
essence, and he is, moreover, the greatest landscape painter of the
nineteenth century, at whose side even the Fontainebleau group seem
one-sided specialists. Every one of the latter had a peculiar type of
landscape, and a special hour in the day which appealed to his feelings
more distinctly than any other. One loved spring and dewy morning,
another the clear, cold day, another the threatening majesty of the
storm, the flashing effects of sportive sunbeams, or the evening after
sunset, when colours fade from view. But Boecklin is as inexhaustible as
infinite nature herself. In one place he celebrates the festival of
spring with its burden of beauty: it is ushered in by snowdrops, and
greeted with joy by the veined cups of the crocus; yellow primroses and
blue violets merrily nod their heads, and a hundred tiny mountain
streams leap precipitately into the valley to announce the coming of
spring. In another, nature shines and blooms and chimes, and breathes
her balm in all the colours of summer. Tulips freaked with purple rise
at the side of paths; flowers in rows of blue, white, and
yellow--hyacinths, daisies, gentians, anemones, and snapdragon--fill the
sward in hordes; and down in the valley blow the narcissus in dazzling
myriads, loading the air with an overpowering perfume. But, beside such
lovely idylls, he has painted with puissant sublimity as many
complaining elegies and tempestuous tragedies. Here, the sombre autumnal
landscapes, with their tall black cypresses, are lashed by the rain and
the howling storm. There, lonely islands or grave, half-ruined towers,
tangled with creepers, rise dreamily from a lake, mournfully hearkening
to the repining murmur of the waves; and there, in the midst of a narrow
rocky glen, a rotten bridge hangs over a fearful abyss. Or a raging
storm, beneath the might of which the forests bow, blusters round a wild
mountain land which rises from a blue-black lake. Boecklin has painted
everything: the graceful and heroic, the solitude and the waste, the
solemnly sublime and the darkly tragic, passionate agitation and
demoniacal fancy, the strife of foaming waves and the eternal rest of
rigid masses of rock, the wild uproar of the sky and the still peace of
flowery fields. The compass of his moods is as much greater than that of
the French Classicists as Italy is greater than Fontainebleau.
For Italy is Boecklin's home as a landscape painter, and the moods of
nature there are more in number than Poussin ever painted. Grave and sad
and grandiose is the Roman Campagna, with the ruins of the street of
sepulchres, and the grey and black herds of cattle looking mournfully
over the brown pastures. Hidden like the Sleeping Beauty lie the Roman
villas in his pictures, in their sad combination of splendour and decay,
of life and death, of youth and age. Behind weather-beaten grotto-wells
and dark green nooks of yew, white busts and statues gleam like
phantoms. From lofty terraces the water in decaying aqueducts trickles
down with a monotonous murmur into still pools, where bracken and
withered shrubs overgrown with ivy are reflected. Huge cypresses of the
growth of centuries stand gravely in the air, tossing their heads
mournfully when the wind blows. Then at a bound we are at Tivoli, and
the whole scenery is changed. Great fantastic rocks rise straight into
the air, luxuriantly mantled by ivy and parasitic growths; trees and
shrubs take root in the clefts; the floods of the Anio plunge
headforemost into the depths with a roar of sound, like a legion of
demons thunder-stricken by some higher power. Then comes Naples, with
its glory of flowers and its moods of evening glowing in deep ruby. Blue
creepers twine round the balustrades of castles; hedges of monthly roses
veil the roads, and oranges grow large amid the dark foliage. Farther
away he paints the Homeric world of Sicily, with its crags caressed or
storm-beaten by the wave, its blue grottoes, and its deep glowing
splendours of changing colour. Or he represents the inland landscape of
Florence with its soft graceful lines of hill, its fields and flowers,
buds and blossoms, and its numbers of white dreaming villas hidden amid
rosy oleanders and standing against the blue sky with a brightness
almost dazzling.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
BOECKLIN. A VILLA BY THE SEA.]
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
BOECKLIN. A ROCKY CHASM.]
Boecklin has no more rendered an exact portrait of the scenery of Italy
than the Classic masters of France sought to represent in a photographic
way districts in the forest of Fontainebleau. His whole life, like
theirs, was a renewed and perpetual wooing of nature. As a boy he looked
down from his attic in Basle upon the heaving waters of the Rhine. When
he was in Rome, in 1850, he wandered daily in the Campagna to feast his
eyes upon its grave lines and colours. After a few years in Weimar he
gave up his post to gather fresh impressions in Italy. And the moods
with which he was inspired by nature and the phenomena he observed were
stored in his mind as though in a great emporium. Then his imagination
went through another stage. That "organic union of figures and
landscape" which the representatives of "heroic landscape" had surmised
and endeavoured to attain by a reasoned method through the illustration
of passages in poetry took place in Boecklin by the force of intuitive
conception. The mood excited in him by a landscape is translated into an
intuition of life.
In many pictures, particularly those of his earlier period, the
ground-tone given by the landscape finds merely a faint echo in small
accessory figures. In such pictures he stands more or less on a level
with _Dreber_, that master who died in Rome in 1875, and was forgotten
in the history of German art more swiftly than ought to have been the
case. Franz Dreber was not one of those Classicists dispersed over the
face of Europe, men who were content with setting heroic actions in the
midst of noble landscapes in the fashion of Preller; on the contrary, he
was the lyricist of this movement, the first man who did not touch the
epical material of old myths in a manner that was merely scholarly and
illustrative, but developed his picture from the original note of
landscape. In his pictures nature laughs with those who are glad, mourns
with those who weep, sheds her light upon the joyful, and envelops
tortured spirits in storm and the terror of thunder. If the golden age
is to be represented, the scene is a soft summer landscape, where
everything breathes peace and innocence and bliss. And the life of those
who inhabit this happy region runs by in blissful peace also. Fair women
and children rest upon the meadow, and gather fruits and pluck roses. If
he paints Ulysses upon the shore of the sea, looking with yearning
towards his distant home, a dull, sultry haze of noon broods over the
district, wide and grey like the hero's yearning. A spring landscape of
sunny blitheness, with butterflies sipping at the blossoms of the trees
and sunbeams sportively dallying on the sea, are the surroundings of the
picture where Psyche is crowned by Eros. And if Prometheus is
represented chained to the rock and striving to burst his fetters, all
nature fights the fight of the Titan. Lurid clouds move swiftly through
the sky, ghostly flashes of lightning quiver, and a wild tempest rakes
the mountains.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
BOECKLIN. THE PENITENT.]
In Boecklin's earlier pictures the accessory figures are placed in close
relation with the landscape in a manner entirely similar. The mysterious
keynote of sentiment in nature gives the theme of the scene represented.
In the picture called "The Penitent," in the Schack Gallery, a hermit is
kneeling half-naked before the cross of the Saviour upon the slope of a
steep mountain. Troops of ravens fly screaming above his head, and a
strip of blue sky shines with an unearthly aspect between the trees,
which are bent into wild shapes. The character of the scene is terribly
severe, and severe and heavy is the misery in the heart of the man
chastising himself with the scourge in his hand as he kneels there in
prayer. A deep melancholy rests over the picture named "The Villa by the
Sea." The failing waves break gently on the shore with a mournful
whisper, the wind utters its complaint blowing through the cypresses,
and a few sunbeams wander coyly over the deep grey of the sky. At the
socle of a niche a young woman dressed in black stands, and, with her
head resting upon her hand, looks out of deeply veiled eyes over the
moving tide. In "The Spring of Love" the landscape vibrates in lyrically
soft and flattering chords. The budding splendour of blossoms covers the
trees luxuriantly, and a rivulet ripples over the laughing grassy balk.
A young man touches the strings of a lyre and sings; and, joining in his
song, a maiden stands beside him leaning against a bush laden with
blossom. In "The Walk to Emmaus" the ground-tone is given by a grave
evening landscape. The storm ruffles the tops of the great trees, and
chases across the sky the heavy clouds, over which strange evening
lights are flitting. All nature trembles in shivering apprehension.
"Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent."
But Boecklin's great creations reach a higher level. Having begun by
extending the lyrical mood of a landscape to his figures, he finally
succeeded in peopling nature with beings which seem the final
condensation of the life of nature itself, the tangible embodiment of
that spirit of nature whose cosmic action in the water, the earth, and
the air, he had glorified in one of his youthful works, the frescoes of
the Basle Museum. In such pictures he has no forerunners whatever in the
more recent history of art. His principle of creation rests, it might be
said, upon the same overwhelming feeling for nature which brought forth
the figures of Greek myth. When the ancient Greek stood before a
waterfall he gave human form to what he saw. His eye beheld the outlines
of beautiful nude women, nymphs of the spot, in the descending volume of
the cascade; its foam was their fluttering hair, and in the rippling of
the water and spattering froth he heard their bold splashing and their
laughter. The elemental sway of nature, the secret interweaving of her
forces took shape in plastic forms--
"Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken,
Alles eines Gottes Spur ...
Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden,
Eine Dryas lebt in jedem Baum,
Aus dem Urnen lieblicher Najaden
Sprang der Ströme Silberschaum.
Jener Lorbeer wand sich einst um Hilfe,
Tantals Tochter schweigt in diesem Stein,
Syrinx Klage tönt aus jenem Schilfe,
Philomelas Schmerz aus diesem Hain."
The beings which live in Boecklin's pictures owe their origin to a
similar action of the spirit. He hears trees, rivers, mountains, and
universal nature whisper as with human speech. Every flower, every bush,
every flame, the rocks, the waves, and the meadows, dead and without
feeling as they are to the ordinary eye, have to his mind a vivid
existence of their own; and in the same way the old poet conceived the
lightning as a fiery bird and the clouds as the flocks of heaven. The
stones have a voice, white walls lengthen like huge phantoms, the bright
lights of the houses upon a mountain declivity at night change into the
great eyes with which the spirit of the fell glares fixedly down;
legions of strange beings circle and whir round in the fantastic region.
In his imagination every impression of nature condenses itself into
figures that may be seen. As a dragon issues from his lair to terrify
travellers in the gloom of a mountain ravine, and as the avenging Furies
rise in the waste before a murderer, so in the still brooding noon, when
a shrill tone is heard suddenly and without a cause, the Grecian Pan
lives once again for Boecklin--Pan, who startles the goat-herd from his
dream by an eerie shout, and then whinnies in mockery at the terrified
fugitive. The cool, wayward splashing element of water takes shape as a
graceful nymph, shrouded in a transparent water-blue veil, leaning upon
her welling urn as she listens dreamily to the song of a bird. The fine
mists which rise from the fountain-head become embodied as a row of
merry children, whose vaporous figures float hazily through the shining
clouds of spring. The secret voices that live amid the silence of the
wood press round him, and the phantom born of the excited senses becomes
a ghostly unicorn advancing with noiseless step, and bearing upon his
back a maiden of legendary story dressed in a white garment. In the
thundercloud lying over the broad summit of a mountain and abundant in
blessing rain he sees the huge body of the giant Prometheus, who brought
fire from heaven and lies fettered to the mountain top, spreading over
the landscape like a cloud. The form of Death stumbling past cloven
trees in rain and tempest, as he rides his pale horse, appears to him in
a waste and chill autumnal region, where stands a ruined castle in lurid
illumination. A sacred grove, lying in insular seclusion and fringed
with venerable old trees that rise straight into the air, rustling as
they bend their heads towards each other, is peopled, as at a word of
enchantment, with grave priestly figures robed in white, which approach
in solemn procession and fling themselves down in prayer before the
sacrificial fire. The lonely waste of the sea is not brought home to him
with sufficient force by a wide floor of waves, with gulls indolently
flying beneath a low and leaden sky; so he paints a flat crag emerging
from the waves, and upon its crest, over which the billows sweep, the
shy dwellers of the sea bathe in the light. Naiads and Tritons assembled
for a gamesome ride over the sea typify the sportive hide-and-seek of
the waves. Yet there is nothing forced, nothing merely ingenious,
nothing literary in these inventions. The figures are not placed in
nature with deliberate calculation: they are an embodied mood of nature;
they are children of the landscape, and no mere accessories.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
BOECKLIN. PAN STARTLING A GOAT-HERD.]
Boecklin's power of creating types in embodying these beings of his
imagination is a thing unheard of in the whole history of art. He has
represented his Centaurs and Satyrs, and Fauns and Sirens and Cupids, so
vividly and impressively that they have become ideas as currently
acceptable as if they were simple incomposite beings. He has seen the
awfulness of the sea at moments when the secret beings of the deep
emerge, and he allows a glimpse into the fabulous reality of their
heretofore unexplored existence. For all beings which hover swarming in
the atmosphere around have their dwelling in the trees or their haunts
in rocky deserts, he has found new and convincing figures. Everything
which was created in this field before his time--the works of Dürer,
Mantegna, and Salvator Rosa not excepted--was an adroit sport with forms
already established by the Greeks, and a transposition of Greek statues
into a pictorial medium. With Boecklin, who instead of illustrating
mythology himself creates it, a new power of inventing myths was
introduced. His creations are not the distant issue of nature, but
corporeal beings, full of ebullient energy, individualised through and
through, and stout, lusty, and natural; and in creating them he has been
even more consistent than the Greeks. In their work there is something
inorganic in the combination of a horse's body with the head of Zeus or
Laocoön grafted upon it. But in the presence of Boecklin's Centaurs
heaving great boulders around them and biting and worrying each other's
manes, the spectator has really the feeling which prompts him to
exclaim, "Every inch a steed!" In him the nature of the sea is expressed
through his cold, slimy women with the dripping hair clinging to their
heads far more powerfully than it was by the sea-gods of Greece. How
merciless is the look in their cold, black, soulless eyes! They are as
terrible as the destroying sea that yesterday in its bellowing fury
engulfed a hundred human creatures despairing in the anguish of death,
and to-day stretches still and joyous in its blue infinity and its
callous oblivion of all the evils it has wrought.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
BOECKLIN. THE HERD.]
And only a slight alteration in the truths of nature has sufficed him
for the creation of such chimerical beings. As a landscape painter he
stands with all his fibres rooted in the earth, although he seems quite
alienated from this world of ours, and his fabulous creatures make the
same convincing impression because they have been created with all the
inner logical congruity of nature, and delineated under close
relationship to actual fact with the same numerous details as the real
animals of the earth. For his Tritons, Sirens, and Mermaids, with their
awkward bodies covered with bristly hair and their prominent eyes, he
may have made studies from seals and walruses. As they stretch
themselves upon a rocky coast, fondling and playing with their young,
they have the look of sea-cows in human form, though, like men, they
have around them all manner of beasts of prey and domestic pets which
they caress,--in one place a sea-serpent, in another a seal. His obese
and short-winded Tritons, with shining red faces and flaxen hair
dripping with moisture, are good-humoured old gentlemen with a quantity
of warm blood in their veins, who love and laugh and drink new wine. His
Fauns may be met with amongst the shepherds of the Campagna, swarthy
strapping fellows dressed in goat-skins after the fashion of Pan--lads
with glowing eyes and two rows of white teeth gleaming like ivory. It is
chiefly the colour lavished upon them which turns them into children of
an unearthly world, where other suns are shining and other stars.
In the matter of colour also the endeavours of Romanticists of the
nineteenth century reach a climax in Boecklin. When Schwind and his
comrades set themselves to represent the romantic world of fairyland an
interdict was still laid upon colour, and it was lightly washed over the
drawing, which counted as the thing of prime importance. But Boecklin
was the first Romanticist in Germany to reveal the marvellous power in
colour for rendering moods of feeling and its inner depth of musical
sentiment. Even in those years when the brown tone of the galleries
prevailed everywhere, colour was allowed in his pictures to have its own
independent existence, apart from its office of being a merely
subordinate characteristic of form. For him green was thoroughly green,
blue was divinely blue, and red was jubilantly red. At the very time
when Richard Wagner lured the colours of sound from music, with a glow
and light such as no master had kindled before, Boecklin's symphonies of
colour streamed forth like a crashing orchestra. The whole scale, from
the most sombre depth to the most chromatic light, was at his command.
In his pictures of spring the colour laughs, rejoices, and exults. In
"The Isle of the Dead" it seems as though a veil of crape were spread
over the sea, the sky, and the trees. And since that time Boecklin has
grown even greater. His splendid sea-green, his transparent blue sky,
his sunset flush tinged with violet haze, his yellow-brown rocks, his
gleaming red sea-mosses, and the white bodies of his girls are always
arranged in new glowing, sensuous harmonies. Many of his pictures have
such an ensnaring brilliancy that the eye is never weary of feasting
upon their floating splendour.
A master who died in Rome some nineteen years ago might have been in the
province of mural painting for German art what Puvis de Chavannes has
become for French. In the earlier histories of art his name is not
mentioned. Seldom alluded to in life, dead as a German painter ten years
before his death, he was summoned from the grave by the enthusiasm of a
friend who was a refined connoisseur four years after the earth had
closed over him. Such was _Hans von Marées'_ destiny as an artist.
[Illustration: BOECKLIN. VENUS DESPATCHING CUPID.]
Marées was born in Elberfeld in 1837. In beginning his studies he had
first betaken himself to Berlin, and then went for eight years to
Munich, where he paid his tribute to the historical tendency by a "Death
of Schill." But in 1864 he migrated to Rome, where he secluded himself
with a few pupils, and passed his time in working and teaching. Only
once did he receive an order. He was entrusted in 1873 with the
execution of some mural paintings in the library of the Zoological
Museum in Naples, and lamented afterwards that he had not received the
commission in riper years. When he had sufficient confidence in himself
to execute such tasks he had no similar opportunity, and thus he lost
the capacity for the rapid completion of a work. He began to doubt his
own powers, sent no more pictures to any exhibition, and when he died in
the summer of 1887, at the age of fifty, his funeral was that of a man
almost unknown. It was only when his best works were brought together at
the annual exhibition of 1891 at Munich that he became known in wider
circles, and these pictures, now preserved in the Castle of
Schleissheim, will show to future years who Hans von Marées was, and
what he aimed at.
"An artist rarely confines himself to what he has the power of doing,"
said Goethe once to Eckermann; "most artists want to do more than they
can, and are only too ready to go beyond the limits which nature has set
to their talent." Setting out from this tenet, there would be little
cause for rescuing Marées from oblivion. Some portraits and a few
drawings are his only performances which satisfy the demands of the
studio--the portraits being large in conception and fine in taste, the
drawings sketched with a swifter and surer hand. His large works have
neither in drawing nor colour any one of those advantages which are
expected in a good picture; they are sometimes incomplete, sometimes
tortured, and sometimes positively childish. "He is ambitious, but he
achieves nothing," was the verdict passed upon him in Rome. Upon
principle Marées was an opponent of all painting from the model. He
scoffed at those who would only reproduce existing fact, and thus, in a
certain sense, reduplicate nature, according to Goethe's saying: "If I
paint my mistress's pug true to nature, I have two pugs, but never a
work of art." For this reason he never used models for the purpose of
detailed pictorial studies; and just as little was he at pains to fix
situations in his mind by pencil sketches to serve as notes; for,
according to his view, the direct use of motives, as they are called, is
only a hindrance to free artistic creation. And, of course, creation of
this kind is only possible to a man who can always command a rich store
of vivid memories of what he has seen and studied and profoundly grasped
in earlier days. This treasury of artistic forms was not large enough in
Marées. If one buries oneself in Marées' works--and there are some of
them in which the trace of great genius has altogether vanished beneath
the unsteady hand of a restless brooder--it seems as if there thrilled
within them the cry of a human heart. Sometimes through his method of
painting them over and over again he produced spectral beings with
grimacing faces. Their bodies have been so painted and repainted that
whole layers of colour lie upon separate parts, and ruin the impression
in a ghastly fashion. Only too often his high purpose was wrecked by the
inadequacy of his technical ability; and his poetic dream of beauty
almost always evaporated because his hand was too weak to give it shape.
If his pictures, in spite of all this, made a great effect in the Munich
exhibition, it was because they formulated a principle. It was felt that
notes had been touched of which the echo would be long in dying. When
Marées appeared there was no "grand painting" for painting's sake in
Germany, but mural decoration after the fashion of the historical
picture--works in which the aim of decorative art was completely
misunderstood, since they merely gave a rendering of arid and
instructive stories, where they should have simply aimed at expressing
"a mood." Like his contemporary Puvis de Chavannes in France, Marées
restored to this "grand painting" the principle of its life, its joyous
impulse, and did so not by painting anecdote, but because he aimed at
nothing but pictorial decorative effect. A sumptuous festal impression
might be gained from his pictures; it was as though beautiful and
subdued music filled the air; they made the appeal of quiet hymns to the
beauty of nature, and were, at the same time, grave and monumental in
effect.
In one, St. Martin rides through a desolate wintry landscape upon a
slow-trotting nag, and holds his outspread mantle towards the half-naked
beggar, shivering with the cold. In another, St. Hubert has alighted
from his horse, and kneels in adoration before the cross which he sees
between the antlers of the stag. In another, St. George, upon a powerful
rearing horse, thrusts his lance through the body of the dragon with
solemn and earnest mien. But as a rule even the relationship with
antique, mythological, and mediæval legendary ideas is wanting in his
art. Landscapes which seem to have been studied in another world he
peoples with beings who pass their lives lost in contemplation of the
divine. Women and children, men and grey-beards live, and love, and
labour as though in an age that knows nothing of the stroke of the
clock, and which might be yesterday or a hundred thousand years ago.
They repose upon the luxuriant sward shadowed by apple-trees laden with
fruit, abandoning themselves to a thousand reveries and meditations.
They do not pose, and they aim at being nothing except children of
nature, nature in her innocence and simplicity. Nude women stand
motionless under the trees, or youths are seen reflected in the pools.
The motive of gathering oranges is several times repeated: a youth
snatches at the fruit, an old man bends to pick up those which have
dropped, and a child searches for those which have rolled away in the
grass. Sometimes the steed, the Homeric comrade of man, is introduced:
the nude youth rides his steed in the training-school, or the commander
of an army gallops upon his splendid warhorse. Everything that Marées
painted belongs to the golden age. And when it was borne in mind that
these pictures had been produced twenty years back or more, they came to
have the significance of works that opened out a new path; there was
poetry in the place of didactic formula; in the place of historical
anecdote the joy of plastic beauty; in the place of theatrical vehemence
an absence of gesticulation and a perfect simplicity of line. At a time
when others rendered dramas and historical episodes by colours and
gestures, Marées composed idylls. He came as a man of great and austere
talent, Virgilian in his sense of infinite repose on the breast of
nature, monastic in his abnegation of petty superficial allurements,
despite special attempts which he made at chromatic effect. Something
dreamy and architectonic, lofty and yet familiar, intimate in feeling
and yet monumental holds sway in his works. Intimacy of effect he
achieved by the stress he laid upon landscape; monumental dignity by his
grandiose and earnest art, and his calm and sense of style in line. All
abrupt turns and movements were avoided in his work. And he displayed a
refinement entirely peculiar to himself through the manner in which he
brought into accord the leading lines of landscape and the leading lines
in his figures. A feeling for style, in the sense in which it was
understood by the old painters, is everywhere dominant in his work, and
a handling of line and composition in the grand manner which placed him
upon a level with the masters of art. A new and simple beauty was
revealed. And if it is true that it is only in the field of plastic art
that he has had, up to the present, any pupil of importance--and he had
one in Adolf Hildebrandt--it is, nevertheless, beyond question that the
monumental painting of the future is alone capable of being developed
upon the ground prepared by Marées.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
BOECKLIN. FLORA.]
In this more than anything, it seems to me, lies the significance of all
these masters. We must not lay too much stress upon the fact that they
dealt with ideal and universal themes; a healthy art cannot be nourished
on bloodless ideals, but only on the living essence of its own epoch.
We must bear in mind, however, that a sound artistic principle has been
formulated. A glance at the productions of classic art shows us that the
old masters carefully considered the relation of a picture to its
environment. Take, for instance, the Ravenna mosaics or Giotto's
frescoes. They must needs resound in solemn harmony the whole church
through; looked at from any point of view they must make their presence
felt right away in the farthest distance: so both Giotto and the mosaic
artists worked only in broad expressive lines, their forcible
colour-schemes were fitted together in accordance with strict decorative
laws. All naturalistic effects are avoided, all petty detail is left out
in the flow of the drapery as well as in the structure of the landscape.
Then the clear outlines tell out. The pictures must, when viewed from a
distance, simultaneously, in all their lines, carry on the lines of the
building.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
BOECKLIN. IN THE TROUGH OF THE WAVES.]
Later on, in the Netherlands, there arose another style of painting. In
abrupt contrast to the monumental works of the Italian school we have
Jan van Eyck's tiny little pictures painted with a fine point, stroke by
stroke, with the most minute exactitude. Every hair in the head, every
vein in the hands, every ornament in the costume is drawn true to life.
Jan van Eyck knew what he was about with this fine-point style of art,
for his pictures did not lay claim to any effect from a distance; they
were meant to be looked at, like miniatures in the prayer-books, from
the closest point of view possible. They were little domestic
altar-pieces: when anyone wanted to look at them, he drew the curtain
aside and knelt or stood just in front of them. The style of painting of
the later Dutch cabinet pictures is accounted for in the same way. These
paintings were generally placed on an easel, as if to give the spectator
a gentle hint, "If you wish to fully appreciate the beauties of this
little picture, please stand right in front." Even when the pictures
were meant to adorn the walls, the minute and dainty style of a Don or a
Mieris was appropriate, for the narrowness of the old Dutch rooms
precluded all possibility of the spectator's being able to stand far
away from the picture.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
BOECKLIN. THE SHEPHERD'S PLAINT.]
If by chance one of these Dutch artists, Weenix for instance, had to do
work for a Flemish palace, he changed his style forthwith. He recognised
the fact that a picture, to be effective in a large state-room, must
differ not only in size, but in composition and style of painting from
one that is meant for a small parlour. It is undoubtedly this lack of
appreciation of the fact that a picture must be suitable to its
surroundings that has robbed the nineteenth century of any claim to
style. What abominable daubs mural painters have foisted upon us in our
public buildings! The literary trend of the time drew away people's
attention from the beauty of form and colour, and centred it upon the
didactic value of the works. Instead of starting from the idea that a
picture should "adorn," they covered the walls with historical genre
painting, never troubling themselves about decorative effect, and
offered the beholder instructive stories in picture cards. As to art in
the home, well, we can all of us remember the time when small
photographs and etchings, instead of being kept in an album or a
portfolio, were put on the wall, where they looked like mere spots of
dead black and white. It was the same sort of thing in galleries and
exhibitions, confusion worse confounded. On one and the same wall you
got the most heterogeneous collection, cabinet pictures by Brouwer or
Ostade next to an enormous altar-piece by Rubens, a gigantic Delacroix
flanked by neat little Meissoniers. In this way the power of
appreciating the significance of a work of art as part of the
decoration of a room was totally lost. Surely it is not to be wondered
at that a picture seen close to in an exhibition, bought, taken home,
hung on the wall and looked at from a distance, turns out a meaningless
chaos of dirty-brown.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
BOECKLIN. AN IDYLL OF THE SEA.]
In the province of mural painting the tendency towards an improvement
set in earliest. In England, France, and Germany, almost simultaneously
efforts began to be made with the object of restoring to mural painting
once more its decorative element. In England Burne-Jones was the first
to pay attention to harmony of style between picture and building.
Before his time English churches were provided with stained-glass
windows in a spurious sort of Cinquecento style that was absolutely
unsuited to the building, but Burne-Jones satisfied the most exacting
demands of the English Neo-Gothic architecture. All his subjects are
brought into style with the slender pillars, the curves of the landscape
as well as of the figures harmonise with the pointed arches of the
building. Everything, colour as well as line, is so simplified that the
pictures retain the clearness of their composition when seen from the
farthest possible standpoint. In France, Puvis de Chavannes travelled by
another road to the same goal. The decoration of the Pantheon was placed
in his hands. Before him many artists had done work there, but the
policy of all of them had been to adopt the old style of oil-painting to
mural decoration, and so they adorned the Pantheon as well, though it
was called a Grecian temple, with oil-paintings founded on Raphael or
Caravaggio, mural pictures that would have been far better suited to a
church of the Cinquecento or the _baroque_ period. Puvis was the first
to realise that in the decoration of a building the artist must be
strictly controlled by the style of the architecture; so in his frescoes
he avoided all projections, all roundness, all wavy lines, bends, and
curves, and dealt exclusively with groups of vertical and horizontal
lines, that followed the characteristic lines of pillar and architrave.
Similarly in the colours as well as the lines he excluded all detail
that would distract the attention, all confusion of colours that would
disturb the eye, and thereby gave his works the stately and dominant
effect that they produce. Had Fate been kind, poor Hans von Marées might
have won the same significance for Germany as Puvis did for France.
Though individually his works are faulty, they are all informed with a
marvellous feeling for style; one observes how beautifully the lines of
the landscape are made to harmonise with the lines of the figures, and
with what a finely decorative quality the colours are combined.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
BOECKLIN. VITA SOMNIUM BREVE.]
In a similar manner we must bring our minds to bear upon the problem of
the framed picture in connection with the decoration of a room. Our
rooms are not only lighter but more spacious than the old-fashioned
Dutch parlours, with their leaded panes; so it was merely a hereditary
taint in our painters that made them cling so long to the ancestral
style of painting, in spite of the altered conditions of the lighting
and size of modern rooms. Impressionism did at any rate bring colour
more into harmony with the improved lighting of our rooms; yet in every
art the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. The
Impressionists discovered atmosphere, and so they denied the existence
of lines, and the outlines vanished into thin air; they discovered
light, and therefore they likewise denied the existence of colours. Then
by means of light the colours were analysed, and patches of colour were
decomposed into a heterogeneous conglomeration of luminous points. The
Impressionists simply revelled in the most delicate nuances of vague
tones of indefinite colour, and as they eliminated from their work all
significant lines and all strong and frank colours, they spoilt to a
great extent the decorative effect of their pictures when viewed at a
distance: their paintings from that standpoint are often nothing more
than a daub of violet and yellow, without form and void.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
BOECKLIN. THE ISLE OF THE DEAD.]
Thus towards the close of the nineteenth century there came under
discussion a new problem again in the matter of picture painting. The
question arose as to how decorative qualities might be arrived at in
painting pure and simple. The way seems to be pointed out in the works
of Moreau and Boecklin; the way in which they placed side by side
beautiful strong colours in broad masses, and invariably so as to avoid
all discord, and combined the most conflicting tones into a harmonious
whole in a manner which words fail one to describe. It was delightful,
after having looked so long at nothing but the subtle, delicate nuances
of the Impressionists, to turn again to these full-toned colours ringing
out their deep and mighty harmonies.
It is scarcely to be wondered at that the younger generation of the
present day refused to be bound by the principles of art laid down by
their predecessors, notwithstanding the fact that Moreau, as well as
Boecklin, was indebted to the Quattrocento for the mosaic-like
brilliancy of his colours. Impressionism has discovered a whole range of
new colour values by careful and intelligent study of the influence of
light upon colour, and where formerly we saw ten we now find a hundred.
Red, green, blue have lost their meaning in the category of complex and
infinitely differentiated tones. So, as we advance from a realistic
transcript of impressions taken direct from nature to free, symphonic
compositions of the colours to which Impressionism has opened our eyes,
we shall evolve harmonies richer than were ever imagined before, more
melting than we ever dreamed of. This is the goal to which the efforts
of the younger generation are primarily tending. Building upon the
foundations laid by the Impressionists, they seek to ensure for their
pictures both clearness and harmony, by simplification of form, by
beauty of technique, and by subordination of colour to the decorative
scheme. Their confession of faith is comprised in the words of Paterson:
"A picture must be something more than garbled Nature: it must please
the educated eye; and only so far as nature gives the painter his
material can he or dare he follow her."
BOOK V
A SURVEY OF EUROPEAN ART AT THE PRESENT TIME
INTRODUCTION
By what means was the further development of painting in Europe brought
about under the influence of the principles of the two schools, the
Impressionists and the Decorative-Stylists? The following may supply the
answer.
"Realism" having led painting from the past to the present, and
"Impressionism" having broken the jurisdiction of the galleries by
establishing an independent conception of colour for a new class of
subjects, the flood of modern life, which had been artificially dammed,
began to pour into art in all its volume. A whole series of new problems
emerged, and a vigorous band of modern spirits were ready to lay hold
upon them and give them artistic shape, each according to his nature,
his ability, and his individual knowledge and power. After
nineteenth-century painting had found its proper field of activity they
were no longer under the necessity of seeking remote subjects. The fresh
conquest of a personal impression of nature took the place of that
retrospective taste which employed the ready-made language of form and
colour belonging to the old masters, as a vocabulary for the preparation
of fresh works of art. Nature herself had become a gallery of splendid
pictures. Artists were dazzled as if by a new light, overcome as though
by a revelation of tones and strains from which the painter was to
compose his symphonies. They learnt how to find what was pictorial and
poetic in the narrowest family circle and amongst the beds of the
simplest vegetable garden; and for the first time they felt more wonder
in the presence of reality, the joy of gradual discovery and of a
leisurely conquest of the world.
Of course, _plein-air_ painting was at first the chief object of their
endeavours. Having painted so long only in brown tones, the radiant
magic world of free and flowing light was something so ravishingly novel
that for several years all their efforts were exclusively directed to
possessing themselves once more of the sun, and substituting the clear
daylight for the clare-obscure which had reigned alone, void of
atmosphere. In this sunny brightness, flooded with light and air, they
found a crowd of problems, and turned to the perpetual discovery of new
chords of colour. Sunbeams sparkling as they rippled through the leaves,
and greyish-green meadows flecked with dust and basking under light,
were the first and most simple themes.
The complete programme, however, did not consist of painting in bright
hues, but, generally speaking, in seizing truth of colour and altogether
renouncing artificial harmony in a generally accepted tone. Thus, after
the painting of daylight and sunlight was learnt, a further claim had
still to be asserted: the ideal of truth in painting had to be made the
keynote in every other task. For in the sun, light is no doubt white,
but in the recesses of the forest, in the moonshine, or in a dim place,
it shines and is at the same time charged with colour. Night, or mist,
with its hovering and pervasive secrets, is quite as rich in beauties as
the radiant world of glistening sunshine. After seeing the summer sun on
wood and water, it was a relief for the eye to behold the subdued, soft,
and quiet light of a room. Upon the older and rougher painting of free
light there followed a preference for dusk, which has a softness more
picturesque, a more tender harmony of colours, and more geniality than
the broad light of day. Artists studied clare-obscure, and sought for an
enhancement of colour in it; they looked into the veil of night, and
addressed themselves to a painting of darkness such as could only have
proceeded from the _plein-air_ school. For this darkness of theirs is
likewise full of atmosphere, a darkness in which there is life and
breath and palpitation. In earlier days, when a night was painted,
everything was thick and opaque, covered with black verging into yellow;
to this latter error artists were seduced by the crusts of varnish upon
old pictures. Now they learnt to interpret the mysterious life of the
night, and to render the bluish-grey atmosphere of twilight. Or if
figures were to be painted in a room, artists rendered the circulation
of the air amid groups of people, which Correggio called "the ambient"
and Velasquez "respiration." And there came also the study of artificial
illumination--of the delicate coloured charm of many-coloured lanterns,
of the flaring gas or lamp-light which streams through the glass windows
of shops, flaring and radiating through the night and reflected in a
blazing glow upon the faces of men and women. Under these purely
pictorial points of view the gradual widening of the range of subject
was completed.
So long as the acquisition of sunlight was the point in question,
representations from the life of artisans in town and country stood at
the centre itself of artistic efforts, because the conception and
technical methods of the new art could be tested upon them with peculiar
success. And through these pictures painting came into closer sympathy
with the heart-beat of the age. At an epoch when the labouring man as
such, and the political and social movement in civilisation, had become
matters of absorbing interest, the picture of artisans necessarily
claimed an important place in art; and one of the best sides of the
moral value of modern painting lies in its no longer holding itself in
indifference aloof from these themes. When the century began, Hector and
Agamemnon alone were qualified for artistic treatment, but in the
natural course of development the disinherited, the weary and
heavy-laden likewise acquired rights of citizenship. In the passage
where Vasari speaks of the Madonnas of Cimabue, comparing them with the
older Byzantine Virgins, he says finely that the Florentine master
brought more "goodness of heart" into painting. And perhaps the
historians of the future will say the same about the art of the present.
The predilection for the disinherited was in the beginning to such an
extent identified with the plain, straightforward painting of the
proletariat that Naturalism could not be conceived at all except in so
far as it dealt with poverty: in making its first great successes it had
sought after the miserable and the outcast, and serious critics
recognised its chief importance in the discovery of the fourth estate.
Of course, the painting of paupers, as a sole field of activity for the
new art, would have been an exceedingly one-sided acquisition. It is not
merely the working-man who should be painted, because the age must
strive to compass in a large and full spirit the purport of its own
complicated conditions of life. So there began, in general, the
representation, so long needed, of the man of to-day and of society
agitated, as it is, by the stream of existence. As Zola wrote in the
very beginning of the movement: "Naturalism does not depend upon the
choice of subject. The whole of society is its domain, from the
drawing-room to the drinking-booth. It is only idiots who would make
Naturalism the rhetoric of the gutter. We claim for ourselves the whole
world." Everything is to be painted,--forges, railway-stations,
machine-rooms, the workrooms of manual labourers, the glowing ovens of
smelting-works, official fêtes, drawing-rooms, scenes of domestic life,
_cafés_, storehouses and markets, the races and the Exchange, the clubs
and the watering-places, the expensive restaurants and the dismal
eating-houses for the people, the _cabinets particuliers_ and _chic des
premières_, the return from the Bois and the promenades on the seashore,
the banks and the gambling-halls, casinos, boudoirs, studios, and
sleeping-cars, overcoats, eyeglasses and red dress-coats, balls,
_soirées_, sport, Monte Carlo and Trouville, the lecture-rooms of
universities and the fascination of the crowded streets in the evening,
the whole of humanity in all classes of society and following every
occupation, at home and in the hospitals, at the theatre, upon the
squares, in poverty-stricken slums and upon the broad boulevards lit
with electric light. Thus the new art flung aside the blouse, and soon
displayed itself in the most various costumes, down to the frock-coat
and the smoking-jacket. The rude and remorseless traits which it had at
first, and which found expression in numbers of peasant, artisan, and
hospital pictures, were subdued and softened until they even became
idyllic. Moreover, the scale of painting over life-size, favoured in the
early years of the movement, could be abandoned, since it arose
essentially from competition with the works of the historical school. So
long as those huge pictures covered the walls at exhibitions, artists
who obeyed a new tendency were forced from the beginning--if they wished
to prevail--to produce pictures of the same size. But since historical
painting was finally dead and buried, there was no need to set up such a
standard any longer, and a transition could be made to a smaller scale,
better fitted for works of an intimate character. The dazzling tones in
which the Impressionists revelled were replaced by those which were dim
and soft, energy and force by subdued and tender treatment, largeness of
size by a scale which was small and intimate.
That was more or less the course of evolution run through in all
European countries in a similar way between the years 1875 and 1885.
Just in the same way from this time onwards the Decorative-Stylists'
tendency set in universally. Hitherto everything was focused on the
"picture as such." Tasteless novelty or methodless imitation held sway
over the applied arts. The endeavours of the next decade aimed at
freeing the picture from its isolation and making the room itself a
harmonious work of art. A long line of eminent artists took in hand the
hitherto neglected subject of art in decoration; and as thereby new
blood was infused into the applied arts, so on the other hand pictorial
art in one way renounced its freedom to fit itself into its new frame.
Colour, which formerly was determined principally by the lighting, now
became subordinate to a decorative scheme. Truth is no longer the end
and aim of art, but fitness, harmony of form and colour values. It is,
however, obviously impossible to give verse and chapter to the history
of this development, just as it would be impossible to fix a boundary
line between the two roads, the Impressionistic on the one hand and the
Decorative on the other. We will wander free from one country to
another, and try to assign to each its proper place in the general chart
of modern painting.
CHAPTER XXXIV
FRANCE
Paris, which for a hundred years had given the signal for all novel
tactics in European art, still remained at the head of the movement; the
artistic temperament of the French people themselves, and the
superlatively excellent training which the painter enjoys in Paris,
enable him at once to follow every change of taste with confidence and
ease. In 1883 Manet died, on the varnishing day of the Salon, and in the
preface which Zola wrote to the catalogue of the exhibition held after
the death of the master he was well able to say: "His influence is an
accomplished fact, undeniable, and making itself more deeply felt with
every fresh Salon. Look back for twenty years, recall those black
Salons, in which even studies from the nude seemed as dark as if they
had been covered with mouldering dust. In huge frames history and
mythology were smothered in layers of bitumen; never was there an
excursion into the province of the real world, into life and into
perfect light; scarcely here or there a tiny landscape, where a patch of
blue sky ventured bashfully to shine down. But little by little the
Salons were seen to brighten, and the Romans and Greeks of mahogany to
vanish in company with the nymphs of porcelain, whilst the stream of
modern representations taken from ordinary life increased year by year,
and flooded the walls, bathing them with vivid tones in the fullest
sunlight. It was not merely a new period; it was a new painting bent
upon reaching the perfect light, respecting the law of colour values,
setting every figure in full light and in its proper place, instead of
adapting it in an ideal fashion according to established tradition."
When the way had been paved for this change, when the new principles had
been transferred from the chamber of experiments to full publicity, from
the _Salon des Refusés_ to the Salon which was official, it was chiefly
_Bastien-Lepage_ who gained the first adherents to them amongst the
public. But because he does not belong to the pioneers of art, and
merely adapted for the great public elements that had been won by Manet,
the immoderate praise which was accorded him in earlier days has been
recently brought within more legitimate limits. It has been urged, by
way of restriction, that he stands in relation to Manet as Breton to
Millet, and that, admitting all differences, he has nevertheless a
certain resemblance to his teacher, Cabanel. As the latter rendered
Classicism elegant, Bastien-Lepage, it has been said, softened the
ruggedness of Naturalism, cut and polished the nails of his peasants,
and made their rusticity a pretty thing, qualifying it for the
drawing-room. Degas was in the habit of calling him the Bouguereau of
Naturalism. As a matter of fact, Naturalism was bound to make certain
concessions if it were ever to prevail, and such critics forget that it
was just these amiable concessions which helped the principles of Manet
to prevail more swiftly than would have been otherwise possible. All the
forms and ideas of the Impressionists, with which no one, outside the
circle of artists, had been able to reconcile himself, were to be found
in Bastien-Lepage, purified, mitigated, and set in a golden style. He
followed the _eclaireurs_, as the leader of the main body of the army
which has gained the decisive battle, and in this way he has fulfilled
an important mission in the history of art.
[Illustration: _Baschet._ JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.]
Bastien-Lepage was born in ancient Damvillers--once a small stronghold
of Lorraine--in a pleasant, roomy house that told a tale of even
prosperity rather than of wealth. As a boy he played amongst the
venerable moats which had been converted into orchards. Thus in his
youth he received the freshest impressions, being brought up in the
heart of nature. His father drew a good deal himself, and kept his son
at work with the pencil, without any æsthetic theories, without any
vague ideal, and without ever uttering the word "academy" or "museum."
Having left school in Verdun, Bastien-Lepage went to Paris to become an
official in the post-office. Of an afternoon, however, he drew and
painted with Cabanel. But he was Cabanel's pupil much as Voltaire was a
pupil of the Jesuits. "My handicraft," as he said afterwards, "I learnt
at the Academy, but not my art. You want to paint what exists, and you
are invited to represent the unknown ideal, and to dish up the pictures
of the old masters. In old days I scrawled drawings of gods and
goddesses, Greeks and Romans, beings I didn't know, and didn't
understand, and regarded with supreme indifference. To keep up my
courage, I repeated to myself that this was possibly 'grand art,' and I
ask myself sometimes whether anything academical still remains in my
composition. I do not say that one should only paint everyday life; but
I do assert that when one paints the past it should, at any rate, be
made to look like something human, and correspond with what one sees
around one. It would be so easy to teach the mere craft of painting at
the academies, without incessantly talking about Michael Angelo, and
Raphael, and Murillo, and Domenichino. Then one would go home afterwards
to Brittany, Gascony, Lorraine, or Normandy, and paint what lies around;
and any morning, after reading, if one had a fancy to represent the
Prodigal Son, or Priam at the feet of Achilles, or anything of the kind,
one would paint such scenes in one's own fashion, without reminiscences
of the galleries--paint them in the surroundings of the country, with
the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken
place yesterday evening. It is only in that way that art can be living
and beautiful."
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. PORTRAIT OF HIS GRANDFATHER.
(_By permission of M. E. Bastien-Lepage, the owner of the picture._)]
The outbreak of the war fortunately prevented him from remaining long at
the Academy. He entered a company of Franc-Tireurs, took part in the
defence of Paris, and returned ill to Damvillers. Here he came to know
himself and his peculiar talent. At once a poet and a realist, he looked
at nature with that simple frankness which those alone possess who have
learnt from youth upwards to see with their own eyes instead of trusting
to other people's. His friends called him "primitive," and there was
some truth in what they said, for Bastien-Lepage came to art free from
all trace of mannerism; he knew nothing of academical rules, and merely
relied upon his eyes, which were always open and trustworthy.
Looking back as far as he could, he was able to remember nothing except
gleaners bowed over the stubble-fields, vintagers scattered amid the
furrows of the vineyards, mowers whose robust figures rose brightly from
the green meadows, shepherdesses seeking shelter beneath tall trees
from the blazing rays of the midday sun, shepherds shivering in their
ragged cloaks in winter, pedlars hurrying with great strides across the
plain raked by a storm, laundresses laughing as they stood at their tubs
beneath the blossoming apple-trees. He was impressionable to everything:
the dangerous-looking tramp who hung about one day near his father's
house; the wood-cutter groaning beneath the weight of his burden; the
passer-by trampling the fresh grass of the meadows and leaving his trace
behind him; the little sickly girl minding her lean cow upon a wretched
field; the fire which broke out in the night and set the whole village
in commotion. That was what he wanted to paint, and that is what he has
painted. The life of the peasants of Lorraine is the theme of all his
pictures, the landscape of Lorraine is their setting. He painted what he
loved, and he loved what he painted.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE FLOWER GIRL.]
It was in Damvillers that he felt at home as an artist. He had his
studio in the second storey of his father's house, though he usually
painted in the open air, either in the field or the orchard, whilst his
grandfather, an old man of eighty, was near him clipping the trees,
watering the flowers, and weeding the grass. His mother, a genuine
peasant, was always busy with the thousand cares of housekeeping. Of an
evening the whole family sat together round the lamp, his mother sewing,
his father reading the paper, his grandfather with the great cat on his
lap, and Jules working. It was at this time that he produced those
familiar domestic scenes, thrown off with a few strokes, which were to
be seen at the exhibition of the works which he left behind him. He knew
no greater pleasure than that of drawing again and again the portraits
of his father and mother, the old lamp, or the velvet cap of his
grandfather. At ten o'clock sharp his father gave the signal for going
to bed.
In Paris, indeed, other demands were made. In 1872 he painted, with the
object of being represented in the Salon, that remarkable picture "In
the Spring," the only one of his works which is slightly hampered by
conventionality in conception. The pupil of Cabanel is making an effort
at truth, and has not yet the courage to be true altogether. Here, as in
the "Spring Song" which followed, there is a mixture of borrowed
sentiment, work in the old style and fresh Naturalism. The landscape is
painted from nature, and the peasant woman is real, but the Cupids are
taken from the old masters.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. SARAH BERNHARDT.]
The next years were devoted to competitive labours. To please his father
and mother Bastien-Lepage twice contested the _Prix de Rome_. In 1873 he
painted as a prize exercise a "Priam before Achilles," and in 1875 an
"Annunciation of the Angel to the Shepherds," that now famous picture
which received the medal at the World Exhibition of 1878. And he who
afterwards revelled in the clearest _plein-air_ painting here celebrates
the secret wonders of the night, though the influences of Impressionism
are here already visible. In his picture the night is as dark as in
Rembrandt's visions; yet the colours are not harmonised in gold-brown,
but in a cool grey silver tone. And how simple the effect of the
heavenly appearance upon the shepherds lying round the fire of coals!
The place of the curly ideal heads of the old sacred painting has been
taken by those of bristly, unwashed men who, nurtured amid the wind and
the weather, know nothing of those arts of toilette so much in favour
with the imitators of Raphael, and who receive the miracle with the
simplicity of elemental natures. Fear and abashed astonishment at the
angelic appearance are reflected in their faces, and the plain and
homely gestures of their hands are in correspondence with their inward
excitement. Even the angel turning towards the shepherds was conceived
in an entirely human and simple way. In spite of this, or just because
of it, Bastien failed with his "Annunciation to the Shepherds," as he
had done previously with his "Priam." Once the prize was taken by Léon
Comerre, a pupil of Cabanel, and on the other occasion by Josef Wencker,
the pupil of Gérôme. It was written in the stars that Bastien-Lepage was
not to go to Rome, and it did him as little harm as it had done to
Watteau a hundred and sixty years before. In Italy Bastien-Lepage would
only have been spoilt for art. The model for him was not one of the old
Classic painters, but nature as she is in Damvillers,--Nature, the great
mother. When the works sent in for the competition were exhibited a
sensation was made when one day a branch of laurel was laid on the frame
of Bastien-Lepage's "Annunciation to the Shepherds" by Sarah Bernhardt.
And Sarah Bernhardt's portrait became the most celebrated of the small
likenesses which soon laid the foundation of the painter's fame.
The portrait of his grandfather, that marvellous work of a young man of
five-and-twenty, is the first picture in which he was completely
himself. The old man sits in a corner of the garden, just as usual, in a
brown cap, his spectacles upon his nose, his arms crossed upon his lap,
with a horn snuff-box and a check handkerchief lying upon his knees. How
perfectly easy and natural is the pose, how thoughtful the physiognomy,
what a personal note there is in the dress! Nor are there in that
garden, bathed in light, any of those black shadows which only fall in
the studio. Everything bore witness to a simplicity and sincerity which
justified the greatest hopes. After that first work the world knew that
Bastien-Lepage was a preeminent portrait painter, and he did not betray
the promise of his youth. His succeeding pictures showed that he had not
merely rusticity and nature to rely upon, but that he was a _charmeur_
in the best sense of the word.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. MME. DROUET.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAY HARVEST.]
This ingenuous artist, who knew nothing of the history of painting, and
felt more at home in the open air than in museums, was not ignorant, at
any rate, of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and had chosen for
his likenesses a scale as small as that which Clouet and his school
preferred. The representation here reaches a depth of characterisation
which recalls Jan van Eyck's little pearls of portrait painting. In
these works also he mostly confined himself to bright lights. Portraits
of this type are those of his brother, of Madame Drouet, the aged
friend of Victor Hugo, with her weary, gentle, benevolent face--a
masterpiece of intimate feeling and refinement; of his friend and
biographer André Theuriet, of Andrieux the prefect of the police, and,
above all, the famous and signal work of inexorable truth and marvellous
delicacy, Sarah Bernhardt in profile, with her tangled chestnut hair,
sitting upon a white fur, arrayed in a white China-silk dress with
yellowish lights in it, and carefully examining a Japanese bronze. The
bizarre grace of the tragic actress, her slender figure, fashioned, as
it were, for Donatello, the nervous intensity with which she sits there,
her weird Chinese method of wearing the hair, and the profile of which
she is so proud, have been rendered in none of her many likenesses with
such an irresistible force of attraction as in this little masterpiece.
In some of his other portraits Bastien-Lepage has not disdained the
charm of obscure light; he has not done so, for example, in the little
portrait of Albert Wolff, the art-critic, as he sits at his writing-desk
amongst his artistic treasures, with a cigarette in his hand. Only
Clouet and Holbein painted miniature portraits of such refinement.
Amongst moderns, probably Ingres alone has reached such a depth of
characterisation upon the smallest scale, and in general he is the most
closely allied to Bastien-Lepage as a portrait painter in profound study
of physiognomy, and in the broad and, one might say, chased technique of
his little drawings. Comparison with Gaillard would be greatly to the
disadvantage of this great engraver, for Bastien-Lepage is at once more
seductive and many-sided. It is curious how seldom his portraits have
that family likeness which is elsewhere to be found amongst almost all
portrait painters. In his effort at penetrative characterisation he
alters, on every occasion, his entire method of painting according to
the personality, so that it leaves at one time an effect that is
bizarre, coquettish, and full of intellectual power and spirit, at
another one which is plain and large, at another one which is bashful,
sparing, and _bourgeois_.
As a painter of peasant life he made his first appearance in 1878.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. LE PÈRE JACQUES.]
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. JOAN OF ARC.]
In the Salon of this year a sensation was made by a work of such truth
and poetry as had not been seen since Millet; this was the "Hay
Harvest." It is noon. The June sun throws its sultry beams over the mown
meadows. The ground rises slowly to a boundless horizon, where a tree
emerges here and there, standing motionless against the brilliant sky.
The grey and the green of these great plains--it is as if the weariness
of many toilsome miles rose out of them--weighed heavily upon one, and
created a sense of forsaken loneliness. Only two beings, a pair of
day-labourers, break the wide level scorched by a quivering, continuous
blaze of light. They have had their midday meal, and their basket is
lying near them upon the ground. The man has now lain down to sleep upon
a heap of hay, with his hat tilted over his eyes. But the woman sits
dreaming, tired with the long hours of work, dazzled with the glare of
the sun, and overpowered by the odour of the hay and the sultriness of
noon. She does not know the drift of her thoughts; nature is working
upon her, and she has feelings which she scarcely understands herself.
She is sunburnt and ugly, and her head is square and heavy, and yet
there lies a world of sublime and mystical poetry in her dull, dreamy
eyes gazing into a mysterious horizon. By this picture and "The Potato
Harvest," which succeeded it in 1879, Bastien-Lepage, the splendid,
placed himself in the first line of modern French painters. This time he
renders the sentiment of October. The sandy fields, impregnated with
dust, rest in a white, subdued light of noon; pale brown are the potato
stalks, pale brown the blades of grass, and the roads are bright with
dust; and through this landscape, with its wide horizon, where the
tree-tops, half despoiled already, shiver in the wind, there blows _le
grand air_, a breeze strong as only Millet in his water-colours had the
secret of painting. With Millet he shares likewise the breath of tender
melancholy which broods so sadly over his pictures. "The Girl with the
Cow," the little Fauvette, that child of social misery--misery that lies
sorrowful and despairing in the gaze of her eyes--is perhaps the most
touching example of his brooding devotion to truth. Her brown dress is
torn and dirty, while a grey kerchief borders her famished, sickly face.
A waste, disconsolate landscape, with a frozen tree and withered
thistles, stretches round like a boundless Nirvana. Above there is a
whitish, clear, tremulous sky, making everything paler, more arid and
wearily bright; there is no gleam of rich luxuriant tints, but only dry,
stinted colours; and not a sound is there in the air, not a scythe
driving through the grass, not a cart clattering over the road. There is
something overwhelming in this union between man and nature. One thinks
of the famous words of Taine: "Man is as little to be divided from the
earth as an animal or a plant. Body and soul are influenced in the same
way by the environment of nature, and from this influence the destinies
of men arise." As an insect draws its entire nature, even its form and
colour, from the plant on which it lives, so is the child the natural
product of the earth upon which it stands, and all the impulses of its
spirit are reflected in the landscape.
In 1879 Bastien-Lepage went a step further. In that year appeared "Joan
of Arc," his masterpiece in point of spiritual expression. Here he has
realised the method of treating historical pictures which floated before
him as an idea at the Academy, and has, at the same time, solved a
problem which beset him from his youth--the penetration of mysticism and
the world of dreams into the reality of life. "The Annunciation to the
Shepherds," "In Spring," and "The Spring Song" were merely stages on a
course of which he reached the destination in "Joan of Arc." His ideal
was "to paint historical themes without reminiscences of the
galleries--paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the
models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place
yesterday evening."
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE BEGGAR.]
The scene of the picture is a garden of Damvillers painted exactly from
nature, with its grey soil, its apple and pear-trees clothed with small
leaves, its vegetable beds, and its flowers growing wild. Joan herself
is a pious, careworn, dreamy country girl. Every Sunday she has been to
church, lost herself in long mystic reveries before the old sacred
pictures, heard the misery of France spoken of; and the painted statues
of the parish church and its tutelary saints pursue her thoughts. And
just to-day, as she sat winding yarn in the shadow of the apple-trees,
murmuring a prayer, she heard of a sudden the heavenly voices speaking.
The spirits of St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catharine, before
whose statues she has prayed so often, have freed themselves from the
wooden images and float as light phantoms, as pallid shapes of mist,
which will as suddenly vanish into air before the eyes of the dreaming
girl. Joan rises trembling, throwing her stool over, and steps forward.
She stands in motionless ecstasy stretching out her left arm, and gazing
into vacancy with her pupils morbidly dilated. Of all human phases of
expression which painting can approach, such mystical delirium is
perhaps the hardest to render; and probably it was only by the aid of
hypnotism, to which the attention of the painter was directed just then
by the experiments of Charcot, that Bastien-Lepage was enabled to
produce in his model that look of religious rapture, oblivious to the
whole world, which is expressed in the vague glance of her eyes, blue as
the sea.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE POND AT DAMVILLERS.]
"Joan of Arc" was succeeded by "The Beggar," that life-size figure of
the haggard old tramp who, with a thick stick under his arm--of which he
would make use upon any suitable occasion--picks up what he can in the
villages, saying a paternoster before the doors while he begs. This time
he has been ringing at the porch of an ordinary middle-class dwelling,
and he is sulkily thrusting into the wallet slung round his shoulders a
great hunch of bread which a little girl has just given to him. There is
a mixture of spite and contempt in his eyes as he shuffles off in his
heavy wooden shoes. And behind the doorpost the little girl, who, in her
pretty blue frock, has such a trim air of wearing her Sunday best, looks
rather alarmed and glances timidly at the mysterious old man.
"Un brave Homme," or "Le Père Jacques," as the master afterwards called
the picture, was to some extent a pendant to "The Beggar." He comes out
of the wood wheezing, with a pointed cap upon his head and a heavy
bundle of wood upon his shoulders, whilst at his side his little
grandchild is plucking the last flowers. It is November; the leaves have
turned yellow and cover the ground. Père Jacques is providing against
the Winter. And the Winter is drawing near--death.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAYMAKER.]
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
L'HERMITTE. THE PARDON OF PLOURIN.]
Bastien-Lepage's health had never been good, nor was Parisian life
calculated to make it better. Slender and delicate, blond with blue eyes
and a sharply chiselled profile--_tout petit, tout blond, les cheveux à
la bretonne, le nez retroussé et une barbe d'adolescent_, as Marie
Baskirtscheff describes him--he was just the type which _Parisiennes_
adore. His studio was besieged; there was no entertainment to which he
was not invited, no committee, no meeting to hold judgment over pictures
at which he was not present. Amateurs fought for his works and asked for
his advice when they made purchases. Pupils flocked to him in numbers.
He was intoxicated with the Parisian world, enchanted with its modern
elegance; he loved the vibration of life, and rejoiced in masked balls
like a child. Consumptive people are invariably sensuous, drinking in
the pleasures of life with more swift and hasty draughts. He then left
Paris and plunged into the whirlpool of other great cities. From
Switzerland, Venice, and London he came back with pictures and
landscapes. In London, indeed, he painted that beautiful picture "The
Flower-Girl," the pale, delicate child upon whose faded countenance the
tragedy of life has so early left its traces. Through the whole summer
of 1882 he worked incessantly in Damvillers. Once more he painted his
native place in a landscape of the utmost refinement. Here, as in his
portraits, everything has been rendered with a positive trenchancy, with
a severe, scientific effort after truth, in which there lies what is
almost a touch of aridness. And yet an indescribable magic is thrown
over the fragrant green of the meadows, the young, quivering trees, and
the still pond which lies rippling in the cloudless summer day.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
L'HERMITTE. PAY TIME IN HARVEST.]
In 1883 there appeared in the Salon that wonderful picture "Love in the
Village." The girl has hung up her washing on the paling, and the
neighbour's son has run down with a flower in his hand; she has taken
the flower, and in confusion they have suddenly turned their backs upon
each other, and stand there without saying a word. They love each other,
and wish to marry, but how hard is the first confession. Note how the
lad is turning his fingers about in his embarrassment; note the
confusion of the girl, which may be seen, although she is looking
towards the background of the picture; note the spring landscape, which
is as fair as the figures it surrounds.
It is a tender dreamer who gives himself expression here--and love came
to him also.
Enthusiastically adored by the women in his school of painting, he had
found a dear friend in _Marie Baskirtscheff_, the distinguished young
Russian girl who had become his pupil just as his fame began to rise. It
is charming to see the enthusiasm with which Marie speaks of him in her
diary. "_Je peins sur la propre palette du vrai Bastien, avec des
couleurs à lui, son pinceau, son atelier, et son frère pour modèle._"
And how the others envy her because of it! "_La petite Suédoise voulait
toucher à sa palette._" With Marie he sketched his plans for the future,
and in the midst of this restless activity he was summoned hence
together with her, for she also died young, at the age of twenty-four,
just as her pictures began to create a sensation. A touching idyll in
her diary tells how the girl learnt, when she was dying of consumption,
that young Bastien had also fallen ill, and been given up as hopeless.
So long as Marie could go out of doors she went with her mother and her
aunt to visit her sick friend; and when she was no longer allowed to
leave the house he had himself carried up the steps to her drawing-room
by his brother, and there they both sat beside each other in armchairs,
and saw the end draw near, merciless and inevitable, the end of their
young lives, their talents, their ambition, and their hopes. "At last!
Here it is then, the end of all my sufferings! So many efforts, so many
wishes, so many plans, so many ---- ----, and then to die at
four-and-twenty upon the threshold of them all!"
[Illustration: _L'Art._ LÉON L'HERMITTE.]
Her last picture was one of six schoolboys, sons of the people, who are
standing at a street corner chattering; and it makes a curiously virile
impression, when one considers that it was painted by a blond young
girl, who slept under dull blue silken bed-curtains, dressed almost
entirely in white, was rubbed with perfumes after a walk in hard
weather, and wore on her shoulders furs which cost two thousand francs.
It hangs in the Luxembourg, and for a long time a lady dressed in
mourning used to come there every week and cry before the picture
painted by the daughter whom she had lost so early. Marie died on 31st
October 1884, and Bastien barely a month afterwards. "The Funeral of a
Young Girl," in which he wished to immortalise the funeral of Marie, was
his last sketch, his farewell to the world, to the living, alluring,
ever splendid nature which he loved so much, grasped and comprehended so
intimately, and to the hopes which built up their deceptive castles in
the air before his dying gaze. He died before he reached Raphael's age,
for he was barely thirty-six. The final collapse came on 10th December
1884, upon a sad, rainy evening, after he had lain several months upon a
bed of sickness. His frame was emaciated, and as light as that of a
child; his face was shrivelled--the eyes alone had their old brilliancy.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
ROLL. THE WOMAN WITH A BULL.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
On 14th December his body was brought up to the Eastern railway station.
The coffin was covered with roses, white elder blossoms, and
immortelles. And now he lies buried in Lorraine, in the little
churchyard of Damvillers, where his father and grandfather rest beneath
an old apple-tree. Red apple-blossoms he too loved so dearly. His
importance Marie Baskirtscheff has summarised simply and gracefully in
the words: "_C'est un artiste puissant, originel, c'est un poète, c'est
un philosophe; les autres ne sont que des fabricants de n'importe quoi à
côté de lui.... On ne peut plus rien regarder quand on voit sa
peinture, parce que c'est beau comme la nature, comme la vie...._"
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
ROLL. MANDA LAMÉTRIE, FERMIÈRE.]
This tender poetic trait which runs through his works is what
principally distinguishes him from _L'hermitte_, the most sterling
representative of the picture of peasant life at the present time.
L'hermitte, also, like most of these painters of peasants, was himself
the son of a peasant. He came from Mont-Saint-Père, near
Château-Thierry, a quiet old town, where from the great "Hill of
Calvary" one sees a dilapidated Gothic church and the moss-grown roofs
of thatched houses. His grandfather was a vine-grower and his father a
schoolmaster. He worked in the field himself, and, like Millet, he
painted afterwards the things which he had done himself in youth. His
principal works were pictures of reapers in the field, peasant women in
church, young wives nursing their children, rustics at work, here and
there masterly water-colours, pastels and charcoal drawings, in 1888 the
pretty illustrations to André Theuriet's _Vie Rustique_, the decoration
of a hall at the Sorbonne with representations of rustic life, in his
later period occasionally pictures from other circles of life, such as
"The Fish-market of St. Malo," "The Lecture in the Sorbonne," "The
Musical Soirée," and finally, as a concession to the religious tendency
of recent years, a "Christ visiting the House of a Peasant." He has his
studio in the Rue Vaquelin in Paris, though he spends most of his time
in the village where he was born, and where he now lives quietly and
simply with the peasants. Most of his works, which are to be ranked
throughout amongst the most robust productions of modern Naturalism, are
painted in the great glass studio which he built in the garden of his
father's house. Whilst Bastien-Lepage, through a certain softness of
temperament, was moved to paint the weak rather than the strong, and
less often men in the prime of life than patriarchs, women, and
children, L'hermitte displays the peasant in all his rusticity. He knows
the country and the labours of the field which make the hands horny and
the face brown, and he has rendered them in a strictly objective manner,
in a great sculptural style. Bastien-Lepage is inclined to refinement
and poetic tenderness; in L'hermitte everything is clear, precise, and
sober as pale, bright daylight.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
RAFFAELLI. PLACE ST. SULPICE.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
_Alfred Roll_ was born in Paris, and the artisan of the Parisian streets
is the chief hero of his pictures. Like Zola in his Rougon-Macquart
series, he set before himself the aim of depicting the social life of
the present age in a great sequence of pictures--the workmen's strike,
war, and toil. His pictures give one the impression that one is looking
down from the window upon an agitated scene in the street. And his
broad, plebeian workmanship is in keeping with his rough and democratic
subjects. He made a beginning in 1875 with the colossal picture of the
"Flood at Toulouse." The roofs of little peasants' houses rise out of
the expanse of water. Upon one of them a group of country people have
taken refuge, and are awaiting a boat which is coming from the
distance. A young mother summons her last remnant of strength to save
her trembling child. Beside her an old woman is sitting, sunk in the
stupor of indifference, while in front a bull is swimming, bellowing
wildly in the water. The influence of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa"
is indeed obvious; but how much more plainly and actually has the
struggle for existence been represented here, than by the great
Romanticist still hampered by Classicism. The devastating effect of the
masses of water in all their elemental force could not have been more
impressively rendered than has been done through this bull struggling
for life with all its enormous strength.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
RAFFAELLI. THE MIDDAY SOUP.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
In technique this picture belongs to the painter's earlier phase. Even
in the colouring of the naked figures it has still the dirty heaviness
of the Bolognese. This bond which united him to the school of Courbet
was broken when--probably under the influence of Zola's _Germinal_--he
painted "The Strike," in 1880. The stern reality which goes through
Zola's accounts of the life of pit-men is likewise to be found in these
ragged and starving figures, clotted with coal dust, assembling in
savage desperation before the manufactory walls, prepared for a rising.
The dull grey of a rainy November morning spreads above. In 1887 he
painted war, war in the new age, in which one man is not pitted against
another, but great masses of men, who kill without seeing one another,
are made to manoeuvre with scientific accuracy--war in which the
balloon, distant signalling, and all the discoveries of science are
turned to account. "Work" was the last picture of the series. There are
men toiling in the hot, dusty air of Paris with sandstones of all sizes.
Life-size, upon life-size figures, the drops of sweat were seen upon the
apathetic faces, and the patches upon the blouses and breeches. Any one
who only reckons as art what is fine and delicate will necessarily find
these pictures brutal; but whoever delights in seeing art in close
connection with the age, as it really is, cannot deny to Alfred Roll's
great epics of labour the value of artistic documents of the first rank.
[Illustration: _Studio._
RAFFAELLI. THE CARRIER'S CART.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
He devoted himself to the more delicate problems of light, especially in
certain idyllic summer scenes, in which he delighted in painting
life-size bulls and cows upon the meadow, and beside them a girl,
sometimes intended as a milkmaid and sometimes as a nymph. Of this type
was the picture of 1888, A Woman returning from Milking, "Manda
Lamétrie, Fermière." With a full pail she is going home across the sunny
meadow. Around there is a gentle play of light, a soft atmosphere
transmitting faint reflections, lightly resting upon all forms, and
mildly shed around them. A yet more subtle study of light in 1889 was
named "The Woman with a Bull." Pale sunbeams are rippling through the
fluttering leaves, causing a delicious play of fine tones upon the nude
body of the young woman and the shining hide of the bull.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
RAFFAELLI. PARIS 4K. 1.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
On a strip of ground in the suburbs of Paris, where the town has come to
an end and the country has not yet begun, _Raffaelli_, perhaps the most
spirited of the Naturalists, has taken up his abode. He has painted the
workman, the vagabond, the restlessness of the man who does not know
where he is going to eat and sleep; the small householder, who has all
he wants; the ruined man, overtaken by misfortune, whose only remaining
passion is the brandy-bottle,--he has painted them all amid the
melancholy landscape around Paris, with its meagre region still in
embryo, and its great straight roads losing themselves disconsolately in
the horizon. Théophile Gautier has written somewhere that the
geometricians are the ruination of landscapes. If he lived in these days
he would find, on the contrary, that those monotonous roads running
straight as a die give landscape a strange and melancholy grandeur. One
thinks of the passage in Zola's _Germinal_, where the two socialists,
Étienne and Suwarin, walk in the evening silently along the edge of a
canal, which, with the perpendicular stems of trees at its side,
stretches for miles, as if measured with a pair of compasses, through a
monotonous flat landscape. Only a few low houses standing apart break
the straight line of the horizon; only here and there, in the distance,
does there emerge a human being, whose diminished figure is scarcely
perceptible above the ground. Raffaelli was the first to understand the
virginal beauty of these localities, the dumb complaining language of
poverty-stricken regions spreading languidly beneath a dreary sky. He is
the painter of poor people and of wide horizons, the poet and historian
of humanity living in the neighbourhood of great cities. There sits a
house-owner, or the proprietor of a shop, in front of his own door;
there a pedlar, or a man delivering parcels, hurries across the field;
there a rag-picker's dog strays hungry about a lonely farmyard.
Sometimes the wide landscapes are relieved by the manufactories, water
and gas-works which feed the huge crater of Paris. At other times the
snow lies on the ground, the skeletons of trees stand along the
high-road, and a driver shouts to his team; the heavy cart-horses
covered with worsted cloths, shiver, and an impression of intense cold
strikes through you to your very bones. Indeed, Raffaelli's austerity
was first subdued a little when he came to make a lengthy residence in
England. Then he acquired a preference for the light-coloured atmosphere
and the gracious verdure of nature in England. He began to take pleasure
in tender spring landscapes, in place of rigid scenes of snow. The poor
soil no longer seems so hard and inhospitable, but becomes attractive
beneath the soft, peaceful, bluish atmosphere. Even the uncivilised
beings, with famine in their eyes, who wandered about in his earliest
pictures, become milder and more resigned. The grandfather, in his
blouse and wooden shoes, leads his grandchild by the hand amid the first
shyly budding verdure. Old men sit quietly in the grounds of the
alms-house, with the sun shining upon them. People no longer stand in
the mist of November evenings with their teeth chattering from the
frost, but breathe with delight the soft air of bright spring mornings.
[Illustration: RAFFAELLI. THE HIGHROAD TO ARGENTEUIL.]
[Illustration: _Studio._
RAFFAELLI. LE CHIFFONIER.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
Raffaelli, for fifteen years the master of this narrowly circumscribed
region, has recorded his impressions of it in an entirely personal
manner, in a style which in one of his _brochures_ he has himself
designated "caractérisme." And by comparing the costumed models in the
pictures of the previous generation with the figures of Raffaelli, the
happiness of this phrase is at once understood. In fact, Raffaelli is a
great master of characterisation, and perhaps nowhere more trenchant
than in the illustrations which he drew for the _Revue Illustrée_.
Spirited caricatures of theatrical representations alternate with the
grotesque figures of the Salvation Army. Yet he feels most in his
element when he dives into the horrors of Paris by night. The types
which he has created live; they meet you at every step, wander about
the boulevards in the cafés and outside the barriers, and they haunt you
with their looks of misery, vice, and menace.
_Giuseppe de Nittis_, an Italian turned a Parisian, a bold, searching,
nervously excitable spirit, was the first _gentilhomme_ of
Impressionism, the first who made a transition from the rugged painting
of the proletariat to coquettish pictures from the fashionable quarters
of the city, and reconciled even the wider public to the principles of
Impressionism by the delicate flavouring of his works.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DE NITTIS. PARIS RACES.]
"It was a cold November morning. Cold it was certainly, but in
compensation the morning vapour was as fine as snow turned into mist.
Yonder in the crowded, populous, sooty quarters of the city, in Paris
busy with trade and industry, this early vapour which settles in the
broad streets is not to be found; the hurry of awakening life, and the
confused movement of country carts, omnibuses, and heavy, rattling
freight-waggons, have scattered, divided, and dispersed it too quickly.
Every passer-by bears it away on his shabby overcoat, on his threadbare
comforter, or disperses it with his baggy gloves. It dribbles down the
shivering blouses and the waterproofs of toiling poverty, it dissolves
before the hot breath of the many who have passed a sleepless or
dissipated night, it is absorbed by the hungry, it penetrates into shops
which have just been opened, into gloomy backyards, and it floats up the
staircases, dripping on the walls and banisters, right up to the frozen
attics. And that is the reason why so little of it remains outside. But
in the spacious and stately quarter of Paris, upon the broad boulevards
planted with trees and the empty quays the mist lay undisturbed, section
over section, like an undulating mass of transparent wool in which one
felt isolated, hidden, almost imbedded in splendour, for the sun rising
lazily on the distant horizon already shed a mild purple glow, and in
this light the mist level with the tops of the houses shone like a piece
of muslin spread over scarlet."
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
HEILBUTH. FINE WEATHER.]
This opening passage in Daudet's _Le Nabab_ most readily gives the mood
awakened by Giuseppe do Nittis' Parisian landscapes. De Nittis was born
in 1846 at Barletta, near Naples, in poor circumstances. In 1868, when
he was two-and-twenty years of age, he came to Paris, where Gérôme and
Meissonier interested themselves in him. Intercourse with Manet led him
to his range of subject. He became the painter of Parisian street-life
as it is to be seen in the neighbourhood of the quays, the painter of
mist, smoke, and air. The Salons of 1875 and 1876 contained his first
pictures, the "Place des Pyramides" and the view of the Pont Royal, fine
studies of mist with a tremulous grey atmosphere, out of which graceful
little figures raise their faint, vanishing outlines. From that time he
has stood at the centre of artistic life in Paris. He observed
everything, saw everything, painted everything--a strip of the
boulevards, the Place du Carrousel, the Bois de Boulogne, the races, the
Champs Elysées, in the daytime with the budding chestnuts, the
flower-beds blooming in all colours, the playing fountains, the women of
grace and beauty, and the light carriages which crowd between the Arc de
Triomphe, the Obelisk, and the Gardens of the Tuileries, and in the
evening when chains of white and coloured lights flash among the dark
trees. De Nittis has interpreted all atmospheric phases. He seized the
intangible, the vibration of vapour, the dust of summer, and the rains
of December days. He breathed the atmosphere, as it were, with his eyes,
and felt with accuracy its greater or its diminished density. The great
public he gained by his exquisite sense of feminine elegance. Of
marvellous charm are the figures which give animation to the Place des
Pyramides, the Place du Carrousel, the Quai du Pont Neuf--women in the
most coquettish toilettes, men chatting together as they lean against a
newspaper kiosk, flower-girls offering bouquets, loiterers carelessly
turning over the books exposed for sale upon a stall, _bonnes_ with
short petticoats and broad ribbons, smart-looking boys with hoops, and
little girls with the air of great ladies. Since Gabriel de Saint
Aubin, Paris has had no more faithful observer. "De Nittis," said
Claretie in 1876, "paints modern French life for us as that brilliant
Italian, the Abbé Galliani, spoke the French language--that is to say,
better than we do it ourselves."
The summit of his ability was reached in his last pictures from England.
One knows the London fogs of November, which hover over the town as
black as night, so that the gas has to be lit at noon, fogs which are
suffocating and shroud the nearest houses in a veil of crape. Scenes
like this were made for de Nittis' brush. He roamed about in the smoke
of the city, observed the fashion of the season, the confusion of cabs
and drays upon London Bridge, the surge and hurry of the human stream in
Cannon Street, the vast panorama of the port of London veiled with smoke
and fog, the fashionable West End with its magnificent clubs, the green,
quiet squares and great, plainly built mansions; he studied the dense
smoky atmosphere of fog compressed into floating phantom shapes, the
remarkable effects of light seen when a fresh breeze suddenly drives the
black clouds away. And again his eye adapted itself at once to the novel
environment. It was not merely the blithe splendour of Paris that found
an incomparable painter in Giuseppe de Nittis, but London also with its
thick atmosphere and that mixture of damp, tawny fog and grey smoke.
Piccadilly, the National Gallery, the railway bridge at Charing Cross,
the Green Park, the Bank, and Trafalgar Square are varied samples of
these English studies, which showed British painters themselves that not
one of them had understood the foggy atmosphere of London as this
tourist who was merely travelling through the town. "Westminster" and
"Cannon Street," a pair of dreary, sombre symphonies in ash-grey,
perhaps display the highest of what De Nittis has achieved in the
painting of air.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ ULYSSE BUTIN.]
Born in Hamburg, though a naturalised Frenchman, _Ferdinand Heilbuth_
took up again the _cult_ of the _Parisienne_ in the wake of Stevens, and
as he turned the acquisitions of Impressionism to account in an
exceedingly pleasing manner he seems, in comparison with Stevens,
lighter and more vaporous and gracious. He painted water-scenes, scenes
on the greensward or in the entrance squares of châteaux, placing in
these landscapes girls in fashionable summer toilette. He was
particularly fond of representing them in a white hat, a white or
pearl-grey dress with a black belt and long black gloves, in front of a
bright grey stream, seated upon a fallen trunk, with a parasol resting
against it. The bloom of the atmosphere is harmonised in the very finest
chords with the virginal white of their dresses and the fresh verdure of
the landscapes. His pictures are little Watteaus of the nineteenth
century, as discreet in effect as they are piquant.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BUTIN. THE DEPARTURE.]
After Heilbuth's death _Albert Aublet_, who in earlier days depicted
sanguinary historical pieces, became the popular painter of girls, whose
beauties are gracefully interpreted in his pictures. When he paints the
composer Massenet, sitting at the piano surrounded by flowers and
beautiful women,--when he represents the doings of the fashionable world
on the shore at a popular watering-place, or young ladies plucking
roses, or wandering meditatively in bright dresses amid green shrubs and
yellow flowers, or going into the sea in white bathing-gowns, there may
be nothing profound or particularly artistic in it all, but it is none
the less charming, attractive, bright, joyous, and fresh.
_Jean Béraud_, another interpreter of Parisian elegance, has found
material for numerous pictures in the blaze of the theatres, the naked
shoulders of ballet-girls, the dress-coats of old gentlemen, the
evening humour of the boulevards, the mysteries of the Café Anglais, the
bustle of Monte Carlo, and the footlights of the Café-Concert. But
absolute painter he is not. One would prefer to have a less oily
heaviness in his works, a bolder and freer execution more in keeping
with the lightness of the subject, and for this one would willingly
surrender the touches of _genre_ which Béraud cannot let alone even in
these days. But his illustrations are exceedingly spirited.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
DANTAN. A PLASTER CAST FROM NATURE.]
It would be impossible to classify painters according to further
specialties. In fact, it is as little possible to bring individuals into
categories as it was at the time of the Renaissance, when the painter
busied himself at the same time with sculpture, architecture, and the
artistic crafts. Great artists do not wall themselves up in a narrow
space to be studied. Liberated from the studio and restored to nature,
they endeavour, as in the best periods of art, to encompass life as
widely as possible. A mere enumeration, such as chance offers, and such
as will preserve a sense for the individuality of every man's talent
without attempting comparisons, seems therefore a better method to
pursue than a systematic grouping which could only be attained
artificially and by ambiguities.
The late _Ulysse Butin_ settled down on the shore of the Channel and
painted the life of the fishermen of Villerville, a little spot upon the
coast near Honfleur. Sturdy, large-boned fellows drag their nets across
the strand, carry heavy anchors ashore, or lie smoking upon the dunes.
The rays of the evening sun play upon their clothes; the night falls,
and a profound silence rests upon the landscape.
By preference _Édouard Dantan_ has painted the interiors of sculptors'
studios--men turning pots, casting plaster, or working on marble, with
grey blouses, contrasting delicately with the light grey walls of
workrooms which are themselves flooded with bright and tender light.
Very charming was "A Plaster Cast from Nature," painted in 1887: in the
centre was a nude female figure most naturally posed, whilst a fine,
even atmosphere, which lay softly upon the girl's form, streaming gently
over it, was shed around.
Having cultivated in the beginning the province of feminine nudity with
little success, in such pictures as "The Bacchante" of the Luxembourg,
"The Woman with the Mask," and "Rolla," _Henri Gervex_, the spoilt child
of contemporary French painting, turned to the lecture-rooms of the
universities, and by his picture of Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière gave the
impulse to the many hospital pictures, surgical operations, and so forth
which have since inundated the Salon. With the upper part of her body
laid bare and her lips half opened, the patient lies under the influence
of narcotics, whilst Péan's assistant is counting her pulse. His
audience have gathered round. The light falls clear and peacefully into
the room. Everything is rendered simply, without diffidence, and with
confidence and quietude.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
GERVEX. DR. PÉAN AT LA SALPÉTRIÈRE.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
_Duez_, when he had had his first success in 1879 with a large religious
picture--the triptych of Saint Cuthbert in the Luxembourg--appeared with
animal pictures, landscapes, portraits, or fashionable representations
of life in the streets and cafés. In the hands of such mild and
complacent spirits as _Friant_ and _Goeneutte_, Naturalism fell into a
mincing, lachrymose condition; but in a series of quiet, unpretentious
pictures _Dagnan-Bouveret_ was more successful in meeting the growing
inclination of recent years for contemplative repose, just as in the
province of literature Ohnet, Malot, and Claretie, with their spirit of
compromise, came after those stern naturalists Flaubert and Zola.
According to the drawing of Paul Renouard, Dagnan-Bouveret is a little,
black-haired man with a dark complexion and deep-set eyes, a short blunt
nose, and a black pointed beard. There is nothing in him which betrays
spirit, caprice, and audacity, but everything which is an indication of
patience and endurance; and, as a matter of fact, such are the qualities
by which he has gained his high position. He is a man of poetic talent,
though rather tame, and stands to Bastien-Lepage and Roll as Breton to
Millet. One often fancies that it is possible to observe in him that
German _Gemüth_, that genial temper, for the satisfaction of which Frau
Marlitt provided in fiction. A pupil of Gérôme, he made his first great
success in the Salon of 1879 with the picture "A Wedding at the
Photographer's." This was succeeded in 1882 by "The Nuptial
Benediction"; in 1883 by "The Vaccination"; in 1884 by "The Horse-pond"
of the Musée Luxembourg; in 1885 by a "Blessed Virgin," a homely,
thoughtful, and delicately coloured picture which gained him many
admirers in Germany; and in 1886 by "The Consecrated Bread," in which he
was one of the first to take up the study of light in interiors. In a
Catholic church there are sitting devout women--most of them old, but
also one who is young--and children, while an acolyte is handing them
consecrated bread. This simple scene in the damp village church, filled
with a tender gloom, is rendered with a winning homely plainness, and
with that touch of compassionate sentimentality which is the peculiar
note of Dagnan-Bouveret. The "Bretonnes au Pardon" of 1889 thoroughly
displayed this definitive Dagnan: a soft, peaceful picture, full of
simple and cordial poetry. In the grass behind the church, the plain
spire of which rises at the end of a wall, women are sitting, both young
and old, in black dresses and white caps. One of them is reading a
prayer from a devotional book. The rest are listening. Two men stand at
the side. Everything is at peace; the scheme of colour is soft and
quiet, while in the execution there is something recalling Holbein, and
the effect is idyllically moving like the chime of a village bell when
the sun is going down.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DUEZ. ON THE CLIFF.]
[Illustration: _L'Art_
DUEZ. THE END OF OCTOBER.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
The zeal with which painters took up the study of contemporary life, so
long neglected, did not, however, prevent the quality of French
landscape painting from being exceedingly high. New parts of the world
were no longer to be conquered. For fifteen years none of the nobler,
nor of the less noble, landscapes of France had been neglected, nor any
strip of field; there were no flowers that were not plucked, whether
they were cultivated in forcing-houses or had sprung pallid in a dark
garden of old Paris. It was only the joy in brightness and the newly
discovered beauty of sunshine that brought with them any change of
material. Following the Impressionists, the landscape painters deserted
their forests. Those "woodland depths," such as Diaz and Rousseau
painted, seldom appear in the works of the most modern artists. In the
severest opposition to such once popular scenes there lies the plain,
the wide expanse stretching forth like a carpet in bright, shining tones
under the play of tremulous sunbeams, and scarcely do a few trees break
the quiet line of the distant horizon. At first the poorest and most
humble corners were preferred. The painting of the poor brought even the
most forlorn regions into fashion. Later, in landscape also, a bent
towards the most tender lyricism corresponded with that inclination to
idyllic sentiment which was on the increase in figure painting. These
painters have a peculiar joy in the fresh mood of morning, when a light
vapour hovers over the meadows and the waters, before it is dissolved
into shining dew. They love the bloom of fruit-trees and the first smile
of spring, or revel in the gradations of the dusk, rich as they are in
shades of tint, mistily wan and grey, pale lilac, delicate green, and
milky blue. The perspective is broad and fine; objects are entirely
absorbed by the harmony of colour, and the older and coarser treatment
of free light heightened to the most refined play by the most delicate
shades of hue. And these colourists deriving from Corot, with their soft
grey enveloping all, are opposed by others who strike novel and higher
chords upon the keyboard of Manet--landscape painters whom such simple
and intimate things do not satisfy, but who search after unexpected,
fleeting, and extraordinary impressions, analysing fantastically
combined effects of light.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DAGNAN-BOUVERET. CONSECRATED BREAD.]
A group of New-Impressionists, who might be called prismatic painters,
stand in this respect at the extreme left. Starting from the conviction
that the traditional mixing of colours upon the palette results after
all only in palette tones, and can never fully express the intensity and
pulsating vividness of tone-values, they founded the theory of the
resolution of tones,--in other words, they break up all compound colours
into their primary hues, set these directly upon the canvas, and leave
it to the eye of the spectator to undertake the mixture for itself. In
particular _George Seurat_ was an energetic disseminator of this
painting in points which excited new discussions amongst artists and new
polemics in the newspapers. His pictures were entirely composed of
flaming, glowing, and shining patches. Close to these pictures nothing
was to be seen but a confusion of blotches, but at the proper distance
they took shape as wild sea-studies in the brilliant hues of noon, with
rocks and stones standing out in relief, orgies of blue, red, and
violet. Such was Seurat's manner of seeing nature. That such a course
brings with it a good deal of monotony, that it will hardly ever be
possible to quicken art to this extent with science, is incontestable.
But it is just as certain that Seurat was a painter of distinction who
shows in many of his pictures a fine sense for delicate, pale
atmosphere. Many of his landscapes, which at close quarters look like
mosaics of small, smooth, variously coloured stones, acquire a vibrating
light, such as Monet himself did not attain, when looked at from a
proper distance. _Signac_, _Anquetin_, _Angrand_, _Lucien Pissarro_,
_Coss_, _Luèc_, _Rysselberghe_, and _Valtat_ are the names of the other
representatives of this scientific painting, and their method has not
seldom enabled them to give expression in an overpowering manner to the
quiet of water and sky, the green of the meadows, and the softness of
tender light shifting over the sea.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DAGNAN-BOUVERET. BRETONNES AU PARDON.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
When these "spotted" pictures hang in a room where they are fewer in
number than ordinary paintings they are difficult to understand. Only
the disadvantages of such a method of painting are noticed; the
disagreeable spottiness of the little points of colour ranged
unpleasantly side by side, and putting one in mind of a piece of
embroidery work, does not exactly appeal to the artist who looks for
beautiful lines and _belle pâte_ in a picture. Nevertheless, the method
would scarcely have found so many exponents did it not afford an
opportunity to get certain effects which are scarcely obtainable in any
other way. As a matter of fact, one finds in these pictures a sense of
life, such shimmering, glimmering effects, such tremulous, vibrating
light, as could not be arrived at without this disintegration of colour
into separate points. Moreover, they have at a distance a decorative
effect that leaves other pictures far behind.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DAGNAN-BOUVERET. THE NUPTIAL BENEDICTION.
(_By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
The importance of Neo-Impressionism, therefore, depends on two
particulars. First, in the analysis of light it has carried the
principles of Impressionism to their furthest limit; secondly, in the
matter of decorative effect it has laid aside one great fault of
Impressionism, and has given us pictures which, seen from a distance,
take on a definite form instead of a blur of indistinct tones.
Amongst the younger painters exhibiting in the Salon,
_Pointelin_--without any trace of imitation--perhaps comes nearest to
the tender poetry of Corot, and has with most subtlety interpreted the
delicate charm of cold moods of morning, the deep feeling of still
solitude in a wide expanse. _Jan Monchablon_ views the meadow and the
grass, the blades and variegated flowers of the field, with the eyes of
a primitive artist. Wide stretches of rolling ground upon radiant spring
days are usually to be seen in his pictures. The sun shines, the grass
sparkles, and the horizon spreads boundless around. In the background
cows are grazing, or there move small figures bathed in air, whilst a
dreamy rivulet murmurs in the foreground. The bright, soft light of
Provence is the delight of _Montenard_, and he depicts with delicacy
this landscape with its bright, rosy hills, its azure sky, and its pale
underwood. Light, as he sees it, has neither motes nor shadows; its
vibration is so intense and fine that it fills the air with liquid gold,
and absorbs the tints of objects, wrapping them in a soft and mystic
golden veil.
_Dauphin_, who is nearly allied with him, always remains a colourist.
His painting is more animated, provocative, and blooming, especially in
those sea-pieces with their bright harbours, glittering waves, and
rocking ships with their sails shimmering and coquetting in the
sunshine. The name of _Rosset-Granget_ recalls festal evenings, houses
all aglow with lights and fireworks, or red lanterns shedding forth
their gleam into the dark blue firmament, and reflected with a thousand
fine tints in the sea.
[Illustration: _Dial._
LUCIEN PISSARRO. SOLITUDE (WOODCUT).]
The melancholy art of _Émile Barau_, a thoroughly rustic painter, who
renders picturesque corners of little villages with an extremely
personal accent, stands in contrast with the blithe painting of the
devotees of light; it is not the splendour of colour that attracts him,
but the dun hues of dying nature. He has come to a halt immediately in
front of Paris, in the square before the church of Creile. He knows the
loneliness of village streets when the people are at work in the fields,
and the houses give a feeling that their inhabitants are not far off and
may return at any moment. His pictures are harmonies in grey. The
leading elements in his works are the pale light lying upon colourless
autumn sward, the mournful outlines of leafless trees stretching their
naked boughs into the air as though complaining, small still ponds where
ducks are paddling, the scanty green of meagre gardens, the muddy waters
of old canals, reddish-grey roofs and narrow little streets amid
moss-covered hills, tall poplars and willows by the side of swampy
ditches, and in the background the old village steeple, which is
scarcely ever absent. _Damoye_, likewise, is fond of twilight, and
autumn and winter evenings. He is the poet of the great plains and dunes
and the sombre heaven, where isolated sunbeams break shyly from behind
white clouds. A fine sea-painter, _Boudin_, studies in Etretat,
Trouville, Saint Valery, Crotoy, and Berck the dunes and the misty sky,
spreading in cold northern grey across the silent sea. _Dumoulin_ paints
night landscapes with deep blue shadows and bright blue lights, while
_Albert Lebourg_ has a passion for the grey of rain and the glittering
snow which gleams in the light, blue in one place, violet and rosy in
another. _Victor Binet_ and _Réné Billotte_ have devoted themselves to
the study of that poor region, still in embryo, which lies around Paris,
a region where a delicate observer finds so much that is pictorial and
so much hidden poetry. Binet is so delicate that everything grows nobler
beneath his brush. He specially loves to paint the poetry of twilight,
which softens forms and tinges the trees with a greyish-green, the
quiet, monotonous plains where tiny footpaths lose themselves in
mysterious horizons, the expiring light of the autumn sun playing with
the fallen yellow leaves upon dusty highways. Réné Billotte's life is
exceedingly many-sided. In the forenoon he is an important ministerial
official, in the evening the polished man of society in dress-clothes
and white tie whom Carolus Duran painted. Of an afternoon, in the hours
of dusk and moonrise, he roams as a landscape painter in the suburbs of
Paris; he is an exceedingly accomplished man of the world, who only
speaks in a low tone, and what he specially loves in nature, too, is the
hour when moonlight lies gently and delicately over all forms. The
scenes he usually chooses are a quarry with light mist settling over it,
a light-coloured cornfield in a bluish dusk, a meadow bathed in pale
light, or a strip of the seashore where the delicate air is impregnated
with moisture.
[Illustration: LUCIEN PISSARRO. RUTH (WOODCUT).
(_By permission of Messrs. Hacon & Ricketts, the owners of the
copyright._)]
To be at once refined and true is the goal which portrait painting in
recent years has also specially set itself to reach. In the years of
_chic_ it started with the endeavour to win from every personality its
beauties, to paint men and women "to advantage"; but later, when the
Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage stood at its zenith, it strove at all costs
to seize the actual human being, to catch, as it were, the work-a-day
character of the personality as it is in involuntary moments when people
believe themselves to be unobserved and give up posing. The place of
those pompous arrangements of the painters of material was taken by a
soul, and temperament interpreted by an intelligence. And corresponding
with the universal principle of conceiving man and nature as an
indivisible whole, it became imperative in portrait painting no longer
to place persons before an arbitrary background, but in their real
surroundings--to paint the man of science in his laboratory, the
painter in his studio, the author at his work-table--and to observe with
accuracy the atmospheric influences of this environment.
[Illustration: BOUDIN. THE PORT OF TROUVILLE.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
The ready master-worker of this plain and sincere naturalism in portrait
painting was peculiarly _Fantin-Latour_, who ought not merely to be
judged by his latest paintings, which have something petrified, rigid,
gloomy, and professorial. In his younger days he was a solid and
powerful artist, one of the soundest and simplest of whom France could
boast. His pictures were dark in tone and harmonious, and had a
puritanic charm. The portrait of Manet, and that of the engraver Edwin
Edwards and his wife, in particular, will always preserve their
historical value.
Later, when the whole bias of art tended away from the poorer classes,
and once more approached this fashionable world, portrait painting also
showed a tendency to become exquisite and over-refined, and to exhibit a
preference for symphonic arrangements of colour and subtilised effects
of light. White, light yellow, and light blue silks were harmonised upon
very delicate scales with pearly-grey backgrounds. Ladies in mantles of
light grey fur and rosy dresses stand amid dark-green shrubs, in which
rose-coloured lanterns are burning, or they sit in a ball-dress near a
lamp which produces manifold and tender transformations of light upon
the white of the silk.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BOLDINI. GIUSEPPE VERDI.]
The work of _Jacques Émile Blanche_, the son of the celebrated
mad-doctor, is peculiarly characteristic of these tendencies of French
portrait painting. It is well known that English fashion was at this
time regarded in Paris as the height of elegance, while Anglicisms were
entering more and more into the French language; and this tendency of
taste gave Blanche the occasion for most æsthetic pictures. The English
Miss, in her attractive mixture of affectation and naïveté, in all her
slim and long-footed grace, has found a delicate interpreter in him.
Tall ladies clad in white, bitten with the Anglomania, drink tea most
æsthetically, and sit there bored, or are grouped round the piano;
_gommeux_, neat, straight, _chic_, from their tall hats to their
patent-leather boots, look wearily about the world, with an eyeglass
fixed, a yellow rose in their buttonhole, and a thick stick in the
gloved hand. Amongst his portraits of well-known personalities, much
notice was attracted by that of his father in 1890--a modern Bertin the
Elder, and in 1891 by that of Maurice Barrès, a portrait in which he has
analysed the author of _Le Jardin de Bérénice_ in a very simple and
convincing fashion.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
WILLETTE. THE GOLDEN AGE.]
The brilliant Italian _Boldini_ brought to this English _chic_ the
manual volubility of a Southerner: sometimes he was microscopic _à la_
Meissonier, sometimes a juggler of the brush _à la_ Fortuny, and
sometimes he gave the most seductive mannerism and the most diverting
elegance to his portraits of ladies. Born in 1845, the son of a painter
of saints, Boldini had begun as a Romanticist with pictures for Scott's
_Ivanhoe_. From Ferrara he went to Florence, where he remained six
years. At the end of the sixties he emerged in London, and, after he had
painted Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster there, he soon
became a popular portrait painter. But since 1872 his home has been
Paris, where the fine Anglo-Saxon aroma, the "æsthetic" originality of
his pictures, soon became an object of universal admiration. In his
portraits of women Boldini always renders what is most novel. It is as
if he knew in advance the new fashion which the coming season would
bring. His trenchantly cut figures of ladies in white dresses and with
black gloves have a defiant and insolent effect, and yet one which is
captivating through their ultra-modern _chic_. The portraits of Carolus
Duran have nothing of that charm which makes such an appeal to the
nerves, nothing of that discomposing indefinable quality which lies in
the expression and gestures of a fashionable woman, whose eccentricity
reveals every day fresh _nuances_ of beauty. He had not the faculty of
seizing movement, the most difficult element in the world. But Boldini's
pictures seem like bold and sudden sketches which clinch the conception
with spirit and swiftness in liberal, pointed crayon strokes controlled
by keen observation. There is no ornament, no bracelet, no pillars and
drapery. One hears the silken bodice rustle over the tightly laced
corset, sees the mobile foot, and the long train swept to the side with
a bold movement. Sometimes his creations are full and luxuriant, nude
even in their clothes, excited and full of movement; sometimes they are
bodiless, as if compact of the air, pallid and half-dead with the strain
of nights of festivity, "living with hardly any blood in their veins, in
which the pulse beats almost entirely out of complaisance."
[Illustration: FORAIN. AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRES.
(_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
His pictures of children are just as subtle: there is an elasticity in
these little girls with their widely opened velvet eyes, their rosy
young lips, and their poses calculated with so much coquetry. Boldini
has an indescribable method of seizing a motion of the head, a mien, or
a passing flash of the eyes, of arranging the hair, of indicating
coquettish lace underclothing beneath bright silk dresses, or of showing
the grace and fineness of the slender leg of a girl, encased in a black
silk stocking, and dangling in delicate lines from a light grey sofa.
There is French _esprit_, something piquant and with a double meaning in
his art, which borders on the indecorous and is yet charming. These
portraits of ladies, however, form but a small portion of his work. He
paints in oils, in water-colour, and pastel, and is equally marvellous
in handling the portraits of men, the street picture and the landscape.
His portrait of the painter John Lewis Brown, crossing the street with
his wife and daughter, looked as though it had been painted in one jet.
In his little pictures of horses there is an astonishing animation and
nervous energy. M. Faure, the singer, possesses some small _rococo_
pictures from his brush, scenes in the Garden of the Tuileries, which
might have come from Fortuny. His pictures from the street life of
Paris--the Place Pigalle, the Place Clichy--recall De Nittis, and some
illustrations--scenes from the great Paris races--might have been drawn
by Caran D'Ache.
There is no need to treat illustration in greater detail, because,
naturally, it could no longer play the initiative part which fell to it
in earlier days, now that the whole of life had been drawn within the
compass of pictorial representation. Besides, in an epoch like our own,
which is determined to know and see and feel everything, illustration
has been so extended that it would be quite impossible even to select
the most important work. Entirely apart from the many painters who
occasionally illustrated novels or other books, such as Bastien-Lepage,
Gervex, Dantan, Détaille, Dagnan-Bouveret, Ribot, Benjamin Constant,
Jean Paul Laurens, and others, there are a number of professional
draughtsmen in Paris, most of whom are really distinguished artists.
In particular, _Chéret_, one of the most original artists of our
time--Chéret, the great king of posters, the monarch of a fabulously
charming world, in which everything gleams in blue and red and orange,
cannot be passed over in a history of painting. The flowers which he
carelessly strews on all sides with his spendthrift hand are not
destined for preservation in an historical herbarium; his works are
transient flashes of spirit, brilliantly shining, ephemera, but a bold
and subtle Parisian art is concealed amid this improvisation. Settled
for many years in London, Jules Chéret had there already drawn admirable
placards, which are now much sought after by collectors.
In 1866 he introduced this novel branch of industry into France, and
gave it--thanks to the invention of machines which admit of the
employment of the largest lithographic stones--an artistic development
which could not have been anticipated. He has created many thousands of
posters. The book-trade, the great shops, and almost all branches of
industry owe their success to him. His theatrical posters alone are
amongst the most graceful products of modern art: La Fête des Mitrons,
La Salle de Frascati, Les Mongolis, Le Chat Botté, L'Athénée Comique,
Fantaisies Music-Hall, La Fée Cocotte, Les Tsiganes, Les Folies-Bergères
en Voyage, Spectacle Concert de l'Horloge, Skating Rink, Les Pillules du
Diable, La Chatte Blanche, Le Petit Faust, La Vie Parisienne, Le Droit
du Seigneur, Cendrillon, Orphée aux Enfers, Éden Théâtre, etc. These are
mere posters, destined to hang for a few days at the street corners, and
yet in graceful ease, sparkling life, and coquettish bloom of colour
they surpass many oil paintings which flaunt upon the walls of the Musée
Luxembourg.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
CAZIN. JUDITH.]
Amongst the illustrators _Willette_ is perhaps the most charming, the
most brilliant in grace, fancy, and spirit. A drawing by him is
something living, light, and fresh. Only amongst the Japanese, or the
great draughtsmen of the _rococo_ period, does one find plates of a
charm similar to Willette's tender poems of the "Chevalier Printemps" or
the "Baiser de la Rose." At the same time there is something curiously
innocent, something primitive, naïve, something like the song of a bird,
in his charming art. No one can laugh with such youthful freshness. No
one has such a childlike fancy. Willette possesses the curious gift of
looking at the world like a boy of sixteen with eyes that are not jaded
for all the beauty of things, with the eyes of a schoolboy in love for
the first time. He has drawn angels for Gothic windows, battles, and
everything imaginable; nevertheless, woman is supreme over his whole
work, ruined and pure as an angel, cursed and adored, and yet always
enchanting. She is Manon Lescaut, with her soft eyes and angelically
pure sins. She has something of the lovely piquancy of the woman of
Brantôme, when she disdainfully laughs out of countenance poor Pierrot,
who sings his serenades to her plaintively in the moonlight. One might
say that Willette is himself his Pierrot, dazzled with the young bosoms
and rosy lips: at one time graceful and laughing, wild as a young fellow
who has just escaped from school; at another earnest and angry, like an
archangel driving away the sinful; to-day fiery, and to-morrow
melancholy; now in love, teasing, blithe, and tender, now gloomy and in
mortal trouble. He laughs amid tears and weeps amid laughter, singing
the _Dies Iræ_ after a couplet of Offenbach; himself wears a
black-and-white garment, and is, at the same time, mystic and sensuous.
His plates are as exhilarating as sparkling champagne, and breathe the
soft, plaintive spirit of old ballads.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
CAZIN. HAGAR AND ISHMAEL.]
Beside this amiable Pierrot _Forain_ is like the modern Satyr, the true
outcome of the Goncourts and Gavarni, the product of the most modern
decadence. All the vice and grace of Paris, all the luxury of the world,
and all the _chic_ of the _demi-monde_ he has drawn with spirit, with
bold stenographical execution, and the elegance of a sure-handed expert.
Every stroke is made with trenchant energy and ultimate grace. Adultery,
gambling, _chambres séparées_, carriages, horses, villas in the Bois de
Boulogne; and then the reverse side--degradation, theft, hunger, the
filth of the streets, pistols, suicide,--such are the principal stages
of the modern epic which Forain composed; and over all the _Parisienne_,
the dancing-girl, floats with smiling grace like a breath of beauty. His
chief field of study is the promenade of the Folies-Bergères--the
delicate profiles of anæmic girls singing, the heavy masses of flesh of
gluttonising _gourmets_, the impudent laughter and lifeless eyes of
prostitutes, the thin waists, lean arms, and demon hips of fading bodies
laced in silk. Little dancing-girls and fat _roués_, snobs with short,
wide overcoats, huge collars, and long, pointed shoes--they all move,
live, and exhale the odour of their own peculiar atmosphere. There is
spirit in the line of an overcoat which Forain draws, in the furniture
of a room, in the hang of a fur or a silk dress. He is the master of the
light, fleeting seizure of the definitive line. Every one of his plates
is like a spirited _causerie_, which is to be understood through nods
and winks.
[Illustration: CARRIÈRE. MOTHERHOOD.]
The name of _Paul Renouard_ is inseparable from the opera. Degas had
already painted the opera and the ballet-dancers with wonderful reality,
fine irony, or in the weird humour of a dance of death. But Renouard did
not imitate Degas. As a pupil of Pils he was one of the many who, in
1871, were occupied with the decoration of the staircase of the new
opera house, and through this opportunity he obtained his first glance
into this capricious and mysterious world made up of contrasts,--a world
which henceforward became his domain. All his ballet-dancers are
accurately drawn at their rehearsals, but the charm of their smile, of
their figures, their silk tights, their gracious movements, has
something which almost goes beyond nature. Renouard is a realist with
very great taste. Girls practising at standing on the tips of their
toes, dancing, curtseying, and throwing kisses to the audience are
broadly and surely drawn with a few strokes. The opera is for him a
universe in a nutshell--a _résumé_ of Paris, where all the oddities, all
the wildness, and all the sadness of modern life are to be found.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BESNARD. EVENING.]
Mention must also be made of _Daniel Vierge_, torn prematurely from his
art by a cruel disease, but not before he had been able to complete his
masterpiece, the edition of Don Pablo de Segovia. _Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec_ too must be named, the grim historian of absinthe
dens, music halls and dancing saloons; and we must give a passing glance
to _Léandre_ and _Steinlen_, in whose drawings also the whole of
Parisian life breathes and pulsates, with all the glitter of
over-civilisation, with all its ultra-refinement of pleasure. But a
detailed appreciation of these draughtsmen is obviously out of place in
a history of painting.
If we turn back to those who have done good work in the province of
painting pure and simple, we must tarry for a while with that refined
painter of elegiac landscape, _Charles Cazin_. He awaits us as the
evening gathers, and tells with a vibrating voice of things which induce
a mood of gentle melancholy. He has his own hour, his own world, his own
men and women. His hour is that secret and mystic time when the sun has
gone down and the moon is rising, when soft shadows repose upon the
earth and bring forgetfulness. The land he enters is a damp, misty land
with dunes and pale foliage, one that lies beneath a heavy sky and is
seldom irradiated by a beam of hope, a land of Lethe and oblivion of
self, a land created to yield to the tender colour of infinite
weariness. The motives of his landscapes are always exceedingly simple,
though they have a simplicity which is perhaps forced, instead of being
entirely naïve. He represents, it may be, the entrance into a village
with a few cottages, a few thin poplars, and reddish tiled roofs, bathed
in the pale shadows of evening. Upon the broad street lined with
irregular houses, in a provincial town, the rain comes splashing down.
Or it is night, and in the sky there are black clouds, with the moon
softly peering between them. Lamps are gleaming in the windows of the
houses, and an old post-chaise rolling heavily over the slippery
pavement. Or dun-green shadows repose upon a solitary green field with a
windmill and a sluggish stream. The earth is wrapt in mysterious
silence, and there is movement only in the sky, where a flash of
lightning quivers--not one that blazes into intensely vivid light, but
rather a silvery white electric spark lambent in the dark firmament.
Corot alone has painted such things, but where he is joyous Cazin is
elegiac. The little solitary houses are of a ghostly grey. The trees
sway towards each other as if in tremulous fear. And the mist hangs damp
in the brown boughs. Faint evening shadows flit around. A Northern
malaria seems to prevail. At times a sea-bird utters a wailing
complaint. One thinks of Russian novels, Nihilism, and Raskolnikoff,
though I know not through what association of ideas. One is disposed to
sit by the wayside and dream, as Verlaine sings:--
"La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois;
De chaque branche
Part une voix.
L'étang reflète,
Profond miroir,
La silhouette
Du saule noir
Où le vent pleure:
Rêvons c'est l'heure.
Un vaste et tendre
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
Que l'astre irise:
C'est l'heure exquise."
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BESNARD. PORTRAIT OF MLLES. D.]
Sometimes the humour of the landscape is associated with the memory of
kindred feelings which passages in the Bible or in old legends have
awakened in him. In such cases he creates the biblical or mythological
pictures which have principally occupied him in recent years. Grey-green
dusk rests upon the earth; the shadows of evening drive away the last
rays of the sun. A mother with her child is sitting upon a bundle of
straw in front of a thatched cottage with a ladder leaning against its
roof, and a poverty-stricken yard bordered by an old paling, while a man
in a brown mantle stands beside her, leaning upon a stick: this picture
is "The Birth of Christ." Two solitary people, a man and a woman, are
walking through a soft, undulating country. The sun is sinking. No house
will give the weary wanderers shelter in the night, but the shade of
evening, which is gradually descending, envelops them with its
melancholy peace: this is "The Flight into Egypt." An arid waste of
sand, with a meagre bush rising here and there, and the parching summer
sun brooding sultry overhead, forms the landscape of the picture "Hagar
and Ishmael." Or the fortifications of a mediæval town are represented.
Night is drawing on, watch-fires are burning, brawny figures stand at
the anvil fashioning weapons, and the sentinels pace gravely along the
moat. The besieged town is Bethulia, and the woman who issues with a
wild glance from the town gateway is Judith, going forth followed by her
handmaid to slay Holofernes. Through such works Cazin has become the
creator of the landscape of religious sentiment, which has since
occupied so much space in French and German painting. The costume
belongs to no time in particular, though it is almost more appropriate
to the present than to bygone ages; but something so biblical, so
patriarchal, such a remote and mystical poetry is expressed in the great
lines of the landscape that the figures seem like visions from a far-off
past.
The continuation of this movement is marked by that charming artist who
delighted in mystery, _Eugène Carrière_, "the modern painter of
Madonnas," as he has been called by Edmond de Goncourt. Probably no one
before him has painted the unconscious spiritual life of children with
the same tender, absorbed feeling: little hands grasping at something,
stammering lips of little ones who would kiss their mother, dreamy eyes
gazing into infinity. But although young children at the beginning of
life, whose eyes open wide as they turn towards the future, look out of
his pictures, a profound sadness rests over them. His figures move
gravely and silently in a soft, mysterious dusk, as though divided from
the world of realities by a veil of gauze. All forms seem to melt, and
fading flowers shed a sleepy fragrance around; it is as though there
were bats flitting invisible through the air. Even as a portrait painter
he is still a poet dreaming in eternal haze and a twilight of mystery.
In his portraits, Alphonse Daudet, Geffroy, Dolent, and Edmond de
Goncourt looked as though they had been resolved into vapour, although
the delineation of character was of astonishing power, and marked firmly
with a penetrative insight into spiritual life such as was shared by
Ribot alone.
At the very opposite pole of art stands _Paul Albert Besnard_: amongst
the worshippers of light he is, perhaps, the most subtle and forcible
poet, a luminist who cannot find tones high enough when he would play
upon the fibres of the spirit. Having issued from the École des
Beaux-Arts, and gained the _Prix de Rome_ with a work which attracted
much notice, he had long moved upon strictly official lines; and he only
broke from his academical strait-waistcoat about a dozen years ago, to
become the refined artist to whom the younger generation do honour in
these days, a seeker whose works vary widely in point of merit, though
they always strike one afresh from the bold confidence with which he
attacks and solves the most difficult problems of light. In Puvis de
Chavannes, Cazin, and Carrière a reaction towards sombre effect and
pale, vaporous beauty of tone followed the brightness of Manet; but
Besnard, pushing forward upon Manet's course, revels in the most subtle
effects of illumination--effects not ventured upon even by the boldest
Impressionists--endeavours to arrest the most unexpected and unforeseen
phases of light, and the most hazardous combinations of colour. The
ruddy glow of the fire glances upon faded flowers. Chandeliers and
tapers outshine the soft radiance of the lamp; artificial light
struggles with the sudden burst of daylight; and lanterns, standing out
against the night sky like golden lights with a purple border, send
their glistening rays into the blue gloom. It is only in the field of
literature that a parallel may be found in Jens Pieter Jacobsen, who in
his novels occasionally describes with a similar finesse of perception
the reflection of fire upon gold and silver, upon silk and satin, upon
red and yellow and blue, or enumerates the hundred tints in which the
September sun pours into a room.
The portrait group of his children is a harmony in red. A boy and two
girls are standing, with the most delightful absence of all constraint,
in a country room, which looks out upon a mountainous landscape. The
wall of the background is red, and red the costume of the little ones,
yet all these conflicting _nuances_ of red tones are brought into
harmonious unity with inherent taste. Rubens would have rejoiced over a
second landscape exhibited in the same year. A nude woman is seated upon
a divan drinking tea, with her feet tucked under her and her back to the
spectator. Upon her back are cast the warm and the more subdued
reflections of a fire which lies out of sight and of the daylight
quivering in yellowish stripes, like a glowing aureole upon her soft
skin.
[Illustration: _Studio._
AMAN-JEAN. SOUS LA GUERLANDA.]
In a third picture, called "Vision de Femme," a young woman with the
upper part of her form unclothed appears upon a terrace, surrounded by
red blooming flowers and the glowing yellow light of the moon. Under
this symbol Besnard imagined Lutetia, the eternally young, hovering over
the rhododendrons of the Champs Elysées and looking down upon the blaze
of lights in the Café des Ambassadeurs. In 1889 he produced "The Siren,"
a symphony in red. A _petite femme_ of Montmartre stands wearily in a
half-antique morning toilette before a billowing lake, which glows
beneath the rays of the setting sun in fiery red and dull mallow colour.
In his "Autumn" of 1890 he made the same experiment in green. The moon
casts its silvery light upon the changeful greenish mirror of a lake,
and at the same time plays in a thousand reflections upon the green silk
dress of a lady sitting upon the shore; while, in a picture of 1891, a
young lady in an elegant _négligé_ is seated at the piano, with her
husband beside her turning over the music. The light of the candles is
shed over hands, faces, and clothes. Another picture, called "Clouds of
Evening," represented a woman with delicate profile amid a violet
landscape over which the clouds were lightly hovering, touched with
orange-red by the setting sun. The double portrait, executed in 1892, of
the "Mlles. D----," one of whom is leisurely placing a scarf over her
shoulders with a movement almost recalling Leighton, while the other
stoops to pick a blossom from a rhododendron bush, is exceedingly soft
in its green, red, and blue harmony.
The French Government recognised the eminent decorative talent displayed
in these pictures, and gave Besnard the opportunity of achieving further
triumphs as a mural painter. Here, too, he is modern to his fingertips,
knowing nothing of stately gestures, nothing of old-world naïveté; but
merely through his appetising and sparkling play of colour he has the
art of converting great blank spaces into a marvellous storied realm.
In 1890 he had to represent "Astronomy" as a ceiling-piece for the Salon
des Sciences in the Hôtel de Ville. Ten years before there would have
been no artist who would not have executed this task by the introduction
of nude figures provided with instructive attributes. One would have
held a globe, the second a pair of compasses, and the third a telescope
in one hand, and in the other branches of laurel wherewith to crown
Galileo, Columbus, or Kepler. Besnard made a clean sweep of all this. He
did not forget that a ceiling is a kind of sky, and accordingly he
painted the planets themselves, the stars which run their course through
the firmament of blue. The figures of the constellations are arranged in
a gracious interplay of light bodies floating softly past. Amongst the
pictures of the École de Pharmacie a like effect is produced by
Besnard's great composition "Evening," a work treated with august
simplicity. The atmosphere is of a grey-bluish white: stars are
glittering here and there, and two very ancient beings, a man and a
woman, sit upon the threshold of their house, grave, weather-beaten
forms of quiet grandeur, executed with expressive lines. The old man
casts a searching glance at the stars, as if yearning after immortality,
while the woman leans weary and yet contented upon his shoulder. In the
room behind a kettle hangs bubbling over the fire, and a young woman
with a child upon her arm steps through the door: man and the starry
world, the finite and the infinite, presented under plain symbols.
[Illustration: CARRIÈRE. SCHOOLWORK.]
Such are, more or less, the representative minds of contemporary France,
the centres from which other minds issue like rays. _Alfred Agache_
devotes himself with great dexterity to an allegorical style after the
fashion of Barroccio. Inspired by the pre-Raphaelites, _Aman-Jean_ has
found the model for his allegorical compositions in Botticelli, and is a
neurasthenic in colour, which is exceptionally striking, in his delicate
portraits of women. _Maurice Denis_, who drew the illustrations to
Verlaine's _Sagesse_ in a style full of archaic bloom, as a painter
takes delight in the intoxicating fragrance of incense, the gliding
steps and slow, quiet movements of nuns, in men and women kneeling
before the altar in prayer, and priests crossing themselves before the
golden statue of the Virgin. The Spaniard _Gandara_, who lives in Paris,
displays in his grey and melting portraits much feeling for the
decorative swing of lines. That spirited "pointillist" _Henri Martin_
seems for the present to have reached a climax in his "Cain and Abel,"
one of the most powerful creations of the younger generation in France.
_Louis Picard's_ work has a tincture of literature, and he delights in
Edgar Allan Poe, mysticism and psychology. _Ary Renan_, the son of
Ernest Renan and the grandson of Ary Scheffer, has given the soft
subdued tones of Puvis de Chavannes a tender Anglo-Saxon fragrance in
the manner of Walter Crane. And that spirited artist in lithograph,
_Odilon Redon_, has visions of distorted faces, flowers that no mortal
eye has seen, and huge white sea-birds screaming as they fly across a
black world. Forebodings like those we read of in the verse of Poe take
shape in his works, ghosts roam in the broad daylight, and the sea-green
eyes of Medusa-heads dripping with blood shine in the darkness of night
with a mesmeric effect. _Carlos Schwabe_ drew the illustrations for the
_Évangile de l'Enfance_ of Catulle Mendès with the charming naïveté of
Hans Memlinc, and afterwards attracted attention by his delicate,
archaic pictures.
_Bonnard_, _Vuillard_, _Valloton_ and _Roussel_ are others whose names
have in the last few years become well known. Their art is built up on
the foundation laid by the Impressionists only so far as they use the
new colour-values discovered by the "bright painters," in a free,
harmonious manner, and place them at the service of a new decorative
purpose. In exhibitions one is often at a loss how to view these
decorative paintings, such, for instance, as those of Bonnard and
Vuillard; the eye is astounded for a moment when, after looking at the
usual array of good pictures, it suddenly comes upon works that look
more like pieces of Gobelin tapestry than paintings. Then one's mind
reverts to rooms such as Olbrich, Van de Velde, or Josef Hoffmann
designed with some particular purpose in view, and one understands the
object of these pictures. "We can hang in our rooms any picture which is
beautiful in itself and by itself." That is the old familiar story, but
that feeling never enters our minds when we stand in a mediæval room in
which there are no pictures that can be taken away from their
surroundings. It is a difficult task to arrange things that are
individually beautiful into a harmonious whole. The realisation of the
old-time principle is for obvious reasons well-nigh impracticable--the
modern man is a restless, fickle creature; he must always be at liberty
to pitch his tent anywhere--but we can surely make some approach to it.
One may imagine in every dwelling a room in which furniture and pictures
are made to fit into some conception of harmony, and the works of
Bonnard and Vuillard may be conceived as parts of such a scheme for the
decoration of a room, and indeed--though we must not forget similar
attempts which have been made in other directions--as parts of a scheme
which, though thoroughly modern and by no means a mere external copy,
reverts to the style of bygone centuries.
From the historian's standpoint these young artists scarcely come into
question; they are still too much in the embryonic stage for any
conclusion to be arrived at with respect to either of them. But the art
lover who looks to the future rather than the past feels bound to follow
with care their creations, in which the wealth of beauty that is already
indicated in their first prints, the certainty of purpose with which
they direct their efforts towards the point at which Impressionism has
left the widest gap, seems to give a guarantee that in the future France
will maintain in the province of art the position she has held during
the nineteenth century as the leading artistic nation.
CHAPTER XXXV
SPAIN
Just as France to-day shows such a wealth of talent, Spain,
correspondingly, can scarcely be said to come into the question of
modern endeavour in art; in fact, it is quite impossible to treat of a
history of Spanish art, one can only consider individual artists, for
they each go their own way, working in different directions and without
any concerted plan.
It was in the spring of 1870 that a little picture called "La Vicaria"
was exhibited in Paris at the dealer Goupil's. A marriage is taking
place in the sacristy of a _rococo_ church in Madrid. The walls are
covered with faded Cordova leather hangings figured in gold and dull
colours, and a magnificent _rococo_ screen separates the sacristy from
the middle aisle. Venetian lustres are suspended from the ceiling;
pictures of martyrs, Venetian glasses in carved oval frames hang on the
wall, richly ornamented wooden benches, and a library of missals and
gospels in sparkling silver clasps, and shining marble tables and
glistening braziers form part of the scene in which the marriage
contract is being signed. The costumes are those of the time of Goya. As
a matter of fact, an old beau is marrying a young and beautiful girl.
With affected grace and a skipping minuet step, holding a modish
three-cornered hat under his arm, he approaches the table to put his
signature in the place which the _escribano_ points out with an
obsequious bow. He is arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is
wearing a white silk dress trimmed with flowered lace, and has a wreath
of orange blossoms in her luxuriant black hair. As a girl-friend is
talking to her she examines with abstracted attention the pretty little
pictures upon her fan, the finest she has ever possessed. A very piquant
little head she has, with her long lashes and her black eyes. Then, in
the background, follow the witnesses, and first of all a young lady in a
swelling silk dress of the brightest rose-colour. Beside her is one of
the bridegroom's friends in a cabbage-green coat with long flaps, and a
shining belt from which a gleaming sabre hangs. The whole picture is a
marvellous assemblage of colours, in which tones of Venetian glow and
strength, the tender pearly grey beloved of the Japanese, and a melting
neutral brown, each sets off the other and give a shimmering effect to
the whole.
The painter, who was barely thirty, bore the name of _Mariano Fortuny_,
and was born in Reus, a little town in the province of Tarragona, on
11th June 1838. Five years after he had completed this work he died, at
the age of thirty-six, on 21st November 1874. Short as his career was,
it was, nevertheless, so brilliant, his success so immense, his
influence so great, that his place in the history of modern painting
remains assured to him.
Like French art, Spanish art, after Goya's death, had borne the yoke of
Classicism, Romanticism, and academical influence by turns. In the grave
of Goya there was buried for ever, as it seemed, the world of torreros,
majas, manolas, monks, smugglers, knaves, and witches, and all the local
colour of the Spanish Peninsula. As late as the Paris World Exhibition
of 1867, Spain was merely represented by a few carefully composed, and
just as carefully painted, but tame and tedious, historical pictures of
the David or the Delaroche stamp--works such as had been painted for
whole decades by José Madrazo, J. Ribera y Fernandez, Federigo Madrazo,
Carlo Luis Ribera, Eduardo Rosales, and many others whose names there is
no reason for rescuing from oblivion. They laboured, meditating an art
which was not their own, and could not waken any echo in themselves.
Their painting was body without soul, empty histrionic skill. As
complete darkness had rested for a century over Spanish art, from the
death of Claudio Coellos in 1693 to the appearance of Goya, rising like
a meteor, so the first half of the nineteenth century produced no single
original artist until Fortuny came forward in the sixties.
He grew up amid poor surroundings, and when he was twelve years of age
he lost his father and mother. His grandfather, an enterprising and
adventurous joiner, had made for himself a cabinet of wax figures, which
he exhibited from town to town in the province of Tarragona. With his
grandson he went on foot through all the towns of Catalonia, the old man
showing the wax figures which the boy had painted. Whenever he had a
moment free the latter was drawing, carving in wood, or modelling in
wax. It chanced, however, that a sculptor saw his attempts, spoke of
them in Fortuny's birthplace, and succeeded in inducing the town to make
an allowance of forty-two francs a month to a lad whose talent had so
much promise. By these means Fortuny was enabled to attend the Academy
of Barcelona for four years. In 1857, when he was nineteen years of age,
he received the _Prix de Rome_, and set out for Rome itself in the same
year. But whilst he was copying the pictures of the old masters there a
circumstance occurred which set him upon another course. The war between
Spain and the Emperor of Morocco determined his future career. Fortuny
was then a young man of three-and-twenty, very strong, rather thick-set,
quick to resent an injury, taciturn, resolute, and accustomed to hard
work. His residence in the East, which lasted from five to six months,
was a discovery for him--a feast of delight. He found the opportunity of
studying in the immediate neighbourhood a people whose life was opulent
in colour and wild in movement; and he beheld with wonder the gleaming
pictorial episodes so variously enacted before him, and the rich
costumes upon which the radiance of the South glanced in a hundred
reflections. And, in particular, when the Emperor of Morocco came with
his brilliant suite to sign the treaty of peace, Fortuny developed a
feverish activity. The great battle-piece which he should have executed
on the commission of the Academy of Barcelona remained unfinished. On
the other hand, he painted a series of Oriental pictures, in which his
astonishing dexterity and his marvellously sensitive eye were already to
be clearly discerned: the stalls of Moorish carpet-sellers, with little
figures swarming about them, and the rich display of woven stuffs of the
East; the weary attitude of old Arabs sitting in the sun; the sombre,
brooding faces of strange snake-charmers and magicians. This is no
Parisian East, like Fromentin's; every one here speaks Arabic.
Guillaumet alone, who afterwards interpreted the fakir world of the
East, dreamy and contemplative in the sunshine, has been equally
convincing.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ MARIANO FORTUNY.]
Yet Fortuny first discovered his peculiar province when he began, after
his return, to paint those brilliant kaleidoscopic _rococo_ pictures
with their charming play of colour, the pictures which founded his
reputation in Paris. Even in the earliest, representing gentlemen of the
_rococo_ period examining engravings in a richly appointed interior, the
Japanese weapons, Renaissance chests, gilded frames of carved wood, and
all the delightful _petit-riens_ from the treasury of the past which he
had heaped together in it, were so wonderfully painted that Goupil began
a connection with him and ordered further works. This commission
occasioned his journey, in the autumn of 1866, to Paris, where he
entered into Meissonier's circle, and worked sometimes at Gérôme's. Yet
neither of them exerted any influence upon him at all worth mentioning.
The French painter in miniature is probably the father of the department
of art to which Fortuny belongs; but the latter united to the delicate
execution of the Frenchman the flashing, gleaming spirit of the Latin
races of the South. He is a Meissonier with _esprit_ recalling Goya. In
his picture "The Spanish Marriage" (La Vicaria) all the vivid,
throbbing, _rococo_ world, buried with Goya, revived once more. While in
his Oriental pieces--"The Praying Arab," "The Arabian Fantasia," and
"The Snake Charmers"--he still aimed at concentration and unity of
effect, this picture had something gleaming, iridescent and pearly,
which soon became the delight of all collectors. Fortuny's successes,
his celebrity, and his fortune dated from that time. His fame flashed
forth like a meteor. After fighting long years in vain, not for
recognition, but for his very bread, he suddenly became the most honored
painter of the day, and began to exert upon a whole generation of young
artists that powerful influence which survives even at this very day.
[Illustration: FORTUNY. THE SPANISH MARRIAGE (LA VICARIA).
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
The studio which he built for himself after his marriage with the
daughter of Federigo Madrazo in Rome was a little museum of the most
exquisite products of the artistic crafts of the West and the East: the
walls were decorated with brilliant oriental stuffs, and great glass
cabinets with Moorish and Arabian weapons, and old tankards and glasses
from Murano stood around. He sought and collected everything that shines
and gleams in varying colour. That was his world, and the basis of his
art.
Pillars of marble and porphyry, groups of ivory and bronze, lustres of
Venetian glass, gilded consoles with small busts, great tables supported
by gilded satyrs and inlaid with variegated mosaics, form the
surroundings of that astonishing work "The Trial of the Model." Upon a
marble table a young girl is standing naked, posing before a row of
academicians in the costume of the Louis XV period, while each one of
them gives his judgment by a movement or an expression of the face. One
of them has approached quite close, and is examining the little woman
through his lorgnette. All the costumes gleam in a thousand hues, which
the marble reflects. By his picture "The Poet" or "The Rehearsal" he
reached his highest point in the capricious analysis of light. In an old
_rococo_ garden, with the brilliant façade of the Alhambra as its
background, there is a gathering of gentlemen assembled to witness the
rehearsal of a tragedy. The heroine, a tall, charming, luxuriant beauty,
has just fallen into a faint. On the other hand, the hero, holding the
lady on his right arm, is reading the verses of his part from a large
manuscript. The gentlemen are listening, and exchanging remarks with the
air of connoisseurs; one of them closes his eyes to listen with thorough
attention. Here the entire painting flashes like a rocket, and is as
iridescent and brilliant as a peacock's tail. Fortuny splits the rays of
the sun into endless _nuances_ which are scarcely perceptible to the
eye, and gives expression to their flashing glitter with astonishing
delicacy. Henri Regnault, who visited him at that time in Rome, wrote to
a Parisian friend: "The time I spent with Fortuny yesterday is haunting
me still. What a magnificent fellow he is! He paints the most marvellous
things, and is the master of us all. I wish I could show you the two or
three pictures that he has in hand, or his etchings and water-colours.
They inspired me with a real disgust of my own. Ah! Fortuny, you spoil
my sleep."
[Illustration: FORTUNY. THE TRIAL OF THE MODEL.
(_By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
Even as an etcher he caught all the technical finesses and appetising
piquancies of his great forerunner Goya. It is only with very light and
spirited strokes that the outlines of his figures are drawn; then, as in
Goya, comes the aquatint, the colour which covers the background and
gives locality, depth, and light. A few scratches with a needle, a black
spot, a light made by a judiciously inserted patch of white, and he
gives his figures life and character, causing them to emerge from the
black depth of the background like mysterious visions. "The Dead Arab,"
covered with his black cloak, and lying on the ground with his musket on
his arm, "The Shepherd" on the stump of a pillar, "The Serenade," "The
Reader," "The Tambourine Player," "The Pensioner," the picture of the
gentleman with a pig-tail bending over his flowers, "The Anchorite," and
"The Arab mourning over the Body of his Friend," are the most important
of his plates, which are sometimes pungent and spirited, and sometimes
sombre and fantastic.
In the picture "The Strand of Portici" he attempted to strike out a new
path. He was tired of the gay rags of the eighteenth century, as he said
himself, and meant to paint for the future only subjects from
surrounding life in an entirely modern manner like that of Manet. But he
was not destined to carry out this change any further. He passed away in
Rome on 21st November 1874. When the unsold works which he left were put
up to auction the smallest sketches fetched high figures, and even his
etchings were bought at marvellous prices.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
FORTUNY. THE SNAKE CHARMERS.]
In these days the enthusiasm for Fortuny is no longer so glowing. The
capacity to paint became so ordinary in the course of years that it was
presupposed as a matter of course; it was a necessary acquirement for an
artist to have before approaching his pictures in a psychological
fashion. And in this later respect there is a deficiency in Fortuny. He
is a _charmeur_ who dazzles the eyes, but rather creates a sense of
astonishment than holds the spectator in his grip. Beneath his hands
painting has become a matter of pure virtuosity, a marvellous, flaring
firework that amazes and--leaves us cold after all. With enchanting
delicacy he runs through the brilliant gamut of radiant colours upon the
small keyboard of his little pictures painted with a pocket-lens, and
everything glitters golden, like the dress of a fairy. He united to the
patience of Meissonier a delicacy of colour, a wealth of pictorial
point, and a crowd of delightful trifles, which combine to make him a
most exquisite and fascinating juggler of the palette--an amazing
colourist, a wonderful clown, an original and subtle painter with
vibrating nerves, but not a truly great and moving artist. His pictures
are dainties in gold frames, jewels delicately set, astonishing efforts
of patience lit up by a flashing, rocket-like _esprit_; but beneath the
glittering surface one is conscious of there being neither heart nor
soul. His art might have been French or Italian, just as appropriately
as Spanish. It is the art of virtuosi of the brush, and Fortuny himself
is the initiator of a religion which found its enthusiastic followers,
not in Madrid alone, but in Naples, Paris, and Rome.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
FORTUNY. MOORS PLAYING WITH A VULTURE.]
Yet Spanish painting, so far as it is individual, works even now upon
the lines of Fortuny. After his death it divided into two streams. The
official endeavour of the academies was to keep the grand historical
painting in flower, in accord with the proud programme announced by
Francisco Tubino in his brochure, _The Renaissance of Spanish Art_. "Our
contemporary artists," he writes, "fill all civilised Europe with their
fame, and are the object of admiration on the far side of the Atlantic.
We have a peculiar school of our own with a hundred teachers, and it
shuns comparison with no school in any other country. At home the
Academy of the Fine Arts watches over the progress of painting; it has
perfected the laws by which our Academy in Rome is guided, the Academy
in the proud possession of Spain, and situated so splendidly upon the
Janiculum. In Madrid there is a succession of biennial exhibitions, and
there is no deficiency in prizes nor in purchases. Spanish painting does
not merely adorn the citizen's house or the boudoir of the fair sex
with easel-pieces; by its productions it recalls the great episodes of
popular history, which are able to excite men to glorious deeds.
Austere, like our national character, it forbids fine taste to descend
to the painting of anything indecorous. Before everything we want grand
paintings for our galleries; the commercial spirit is no master of ours.
In such a way the glory of Zurburan, Murillo, and Velasquez lives once
more in a new sense."
[Illustration: _L'Art._
FORTUNY. THE CHINA VASE.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
FORTUNY. AT THE GATE OF THE SERAGLIO.]
The results of such efforts were those historical pictures which at the
Paris World Exhibition of 1878, the Munich International Exhibition of
1883, and at every large exhibition since have been so exceedingly
refreshing to all admirers of the illustration of history upon ground
that was genuinely Spanish. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1878
_Pradilla's_ "Joan the Mad" received the large gold medal, and was,
indeed, a good picture in the manner of Laurens. Philip the Fair is
dead. The funeral train, paying him the last honours, has come to a halt
upon a high-road, and the unhappy princess rushes up with floating hair
and staring eyes fixed upon the bier which hides the remains of her
husband. The priests and women kneeling around regard the unfortunate
mad woman with mournful pity. To the right the members of the Court are
grouped near a little chapel where a priest is celebrating a mass for
the dead; to the left the peasantry are crowding round to witness the
ceremony. Great wax candles are burning, and the chapel is lit up with
the sombre glow of torches. This was all exceedingly well painted,
carefully balanced in composition, and graceful in drawing. At the
Munich Exhibition of 1883 he received a gold medal for his "Surrender of
Granada, 1492," a picture which made a great impression at the time upon
the German historical painters, as Pradilla had made a transition from
the brown bituminous painting of Laurens to a "modern" painting in grey,
which did more justice to the illumination of objects beneath the open
sky. In the same year _Casado's_ large painting, "The Bells of Huesca,"
with the ground streaming with blood, fifteen decapitated bodies, and
as many bodiless heads, was a creation which was widely admired. _Vera_
had exhibited his picture, filled with wild fire and pathos, "The
Defence of Numantia," and _Manuel Ramirez_ his "Execution of Don Alvaro
de Luna," with the pallid head which has rolled from the steps and
stares at the spectator in such a ghastly manner. In his "Conversion of
the Duke of Gandia," _Moreno Carbonero_ displayed an open coffin _à la_
Laurens: as Grand Equerry to the Empress Isabella at the Court of
Charles V, the Duke of Gandia, after the death of his mistress, has to
superintend the burial of her corpse in the vault at Granada, and as the
coffin is opened there, to confirm the identity of the person, the
distorted features of the dead make such a powerful impression upon the
careless noble that he takes a vow to devote himself to God. _Ricardo
Villodas_ in his picture "Victoribus Gloria" represents the beginning of
one of those sea-battles which Augustus made gladiators fight for the
amusement of the Roman people. By _Antonio Casanova y Estorach_ there
was a picture of King Ferdinand the Holy, who upon Maundy Thursday is
washing the feet of eleven poor old men and giving them food. And a
special sensation was made by the great ghost picture of _Benliure y
Gil_, which he named "A Vision in the Colosseum." Saint Almaquio, who
was slain, according to tradition, by gladiators in the Colosseum, is
seen floating in the air, as he swings in fanatical ecstasy a crucifix
from which light is streaming. Upon one side men who have borne witness
to Christianity with their blood chant their hymns of praise; upon the
other, troops of female martyrs clothed in white and holding tapers in
their hands move by; but below, the earth has opened, and the dead rise
for the celebration of this midnight service, praying from their graves,
while the full moon shines through the apertures of the ruins and pours
its pale light upon the phantom congregation. There was exhibited by
_Checa_ "A Barbarian Onset," a Gallic horde of riders thundering past a
Roman temple, from which the priestesses are flying in desperation.
_Francisco Amerigo_ treated upon a huge canvas a scene from the sacking
of Rome in 1527, when the despoiling troops of Charles V plundered the
Eternal City. "Soldiers intoxicated with wine and lust, tricked out with
bishops' mitres and wrapped in the robes of priests, are desecrating the
temples of God. Nunneries are violated, and fathers kill their daughters
to save them from shame." So ran the historical explanation set upon the
broad gold frame.
But, after all, these historical pictures, in spite of their great
spaces of canvas, are of no consequence when one comes to characterise
the efforts of modern art. Explanations could be given showing that in
the land of bull-fights this painting of horrors maintained itself
longer than elsewhere, but the hopes of those who prophesied from it a
new golden period for historical painting were entirely disappointed.
For Spanish art, as in earlier days for French art, the historical
picture has merely the importance implied by the _Prix de Rome_. A
method of colouring which is often dazzling in result, and a vigorous
study of nature, preserved from the danger of "beautiful" tinting, make
the Spanish works different from the older ones. Their very passion
often has an effect which is genuine, brutal, and of telling power. In
the best of these pictures one believes that a wild temperament really
does burst into flame through the accepted convention that the painters
have delight in the horrible, which the older French artists resorted to
merely for the purpose of preparing veritable _tableaux_. But in the
rank and file, in place of the Southern vividness of expression which
has been sincerely felt, histrionic pose is the predominant element, the
petty situation of the stage set upon a gigantic canvas, and in addition
to this a straining after effect which grazes the boundary line where
the horrible degenerates into the ridiculous. Through their
extraordinary ability they all compel respect, but they have not
enriched the treasury of modern emotion, nor have they transformed the
older historical painting in the essence of its being. And the man who
handles again and again motives derived from what happens to be the mode
in colours renders no service to art. Delaroche is dead; but though he
may be disinterred he cannot be brought to life, and the Spaniards
merely dug out of the earth mummies in which the breath of life was
wanting. Their works are not directing-posts to the future, but the last
_revenants_ of that histrionic spirit which wandered like a ghost
through the art of all nations. Even the composition, the shining
colours, the settles and carpets picturesquely spread upon the ground,
are the same as in Gallait. How often have these precious stage
properties done duty in tragic funereal service since Delaroche's
"Murder of the Duke of Guise" and Piloty's "Seni"!
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
PRADILLA. THE SURRENDER OF GRANADA.]
[Illustration: _Kunst unserer Zeit._
PRADILLA. ON THE BEACH.]
And these conceptions, nourished upon historical painting, had an
injurious influence upon the handling of the modern picture of the
period. Even here there is an endeavour to make a compromise with the
traditional historic picture, since artists painted scenes from modern
popular life upon great spaces of canvas, transforming them into
pageants or pictures of tragical ceremonies, and sought too much after
subjects with which the splendid and motley colours of historical
painting would accord. _Viniegra y Lasso_ and _Mas y Fondevilla_ execute
great processions filing past, with bishops, monks, priests, and
choristers. All the figures stand beaming in brightness against the sky,
but the light glances from the oily mantles of the figures without real
effect. _Alcazar Tejedor_ paints a young priest reading his "First Mass"
in the presence of his parents, and merely renders a theatrical scene in
modern costume, merely transfers to an event of the present that
familiar "moment of highest excitement" so popular since the time of
Delaroche. By his "Death of the Matador," and "The Christening," bought
by Vanderbilt for a hundred and fifty thousand francs, _José Villegas_,
in ability the most striking of them all, acquired a European name;
whilst a hospital scene by _Luis Jimenez_ of Seville is the single
picture in which something of the seriousness of French Naturalism is
perceptible, but it is an isolated example from a province of interest
which is otherwise not to be found in Spain.
[Illustration: VILLEGAS. DEATH OF THE MATADOR.]
Indeed, the Spaniards are by no means most attractive in gravely
ceremonial and stiffly dignified pictures, but rather when they indulge
in unpretentious "little painting" in the manner of Fortuny. Yet even
these wayward "little painters," with their varied glancing colour, are
not to be properly reckoned amongst the moderns. Their painting is an
art dependent on deftness of hand, and knows no higher aim than to bring
together in a picture as many brilliant things as possible, to make a
charming bouquet with glistening effects of costume, and the play, the
reflections, and the caprices of sunbeams. The earnest modern art which
sprang from Manet and the Fontainebleau painters avoids this
kaleidoscopic sport with varied spots of colour. All these little folds
and mouldings, these prismatic arts of blending, and these curious
reflections are what the moderns have no desire to see: they half close
their eyes to gain a clearer conception of the chief values; they
simplify; they refuse to be led from the main point by a thousand
trifles. Their pictures are works of art, while those of the disciples
of Fortuny are sleights of artifice. In all this _bric-à-brac_ art there
is no question of any earnest analysis of light. The motley spots of
colour yield, no doubt, a certain concord of their own; but there is a
want of tone and air, a want of all finer sentiment: everything seems to
have been dyed, instead of giving the effect of colour. Nevertheless
those who were independent enough not to let themselves be entirely
bewitched by the deceptive adroitness of a conjurer have painted little
pictures of talent and refinement; taking Fortuny's _rococo_ works as
their starting-point, they have represented the fashionable world and
the highly coloured and warm-blooded life of the people of modern Spain
with a bold and spirited facility. But they have not gone beyond the
observation of the external sides of life. They can show guitarreros
clattering with castanets and pandarets, majas dancing, and ribboned
heroes conquering bulls instead of Jews and Moors. Yet their pictures
are at any rate blithe, full of colour, flashing with sensuous
brilliancy, and at times they are executed with stupendous skill.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
BENLIURE Y GIL. A VISION IN THE COLOSSEUM.]
_Martin Rico_ was for the longest period in Italy with Fortuny, and his
pictures also have the glitter of a casket of jewels, the pungency of
sparkling champagne. Some of his sea-pieces in particular--for instance,
those of the canal in Venice and the Bay of Fontarabia--might have been
painted by Fortuny. In others he seems quieter and more harmonious than
the latter. His execution is more powerful, less marked by spirited
stippling, and his light gains in intensity and atmospheric refinement
what it loses in mocking caprices, while his little figures have a more
animated effect, notwithstanding the less piquant manner in which they
are painted. Their outlines are scarcely perceptible, and yet they are
seen walking, jostling, and pressing against each other; whereas those
of Fortuny, precisely through the more subtle and microscopic method in
which they have been executed, often seem as though they were benumbed
in movement. Certain market scenes, with a dense crowd of buyers and
sellers, are peculiarly spirited, rapid sketches, with a gleaming charm
of colour.
_Zamacois_, _Casanova_, and _Raimundo de Madrazo_, Fortuny's
brother-in-law, show no less virtuosity of the palette. Sea-pieces and
little landscapes alternate with scenes from Spanish popular life, where
they revel, like Fortuny, in a scintillating medley of colour. Later, in
Paris, Madrazo was likewise much sought after as a painter of ladies'
portraits, as he lavished on his pictures sometimes a fine _hautgoût_ of
fragrant _rococo_ grace _a la_ Chaplin, and sometimes devoted himself
with taste and deftness to symphonic _tours de force à la_ Carolus
Duran. Particularly memorable is the portrait of a graceful young girl
in red, exhibited in the Munich Exhibition of 1883. She is seated upon a
sofa of crimson silk, and her feet rest upon a dark red carpet. Equally
memorable in the Paris World Exhibition of 1889 was a pierrette, whose
costume ran through the whole gamut from white to rose-colour. Her skirt
was of a darker, her bodice of a brighter red, and a light rose-coloured
stocking peeped from beneath a grey silk petticoat; over her shoulders
lay a white swansdown cape, and white gloves and white silk shoes with
rose-coloured bows completed her toilette. His greatest picture
represented "The End of a Masked Ball." Before the Paris Opera cabs are
waiting with coachmen sleeping or smoking, whilst a troop of pierrots
and pierrettes, harlequins, Japanese girls, _rococo_ gentlemen, and
Turkish women are streaming out, sparkling with the most glittering
colours in the grey light of a winter morning, in which the gas lamps
cast a warm yellow glimmer.
[Illustration: CASADO. THE BELLS OF HUESCA.]
Even those who made their chief success as historical painters became
new beings when they came forward with such piquant "little paintings."
_Francisco Domingo_ in Valencia is the Spanish Meissonier, who has
painted little horsemen before an inn, mercenary soldiers, newspaper
readers, and philosophers of the time of Louis XV, with all the
daintiness in colour associated with the French patriarch--although a
huge canvas, "The Last Day of Sagunt," has the reputation of being his
chief performance. In the year in which he exhibited his "Vision in the
Colosseum," _Benliure y Gil_ made a success with two little pictures
stippled in varied colours, the "Month of Mary" and the "Distribution
of Prizes in Valencia," in which children, smartened and dressed in
white frocks, are moving in the ante-chambers of a church, decorated for
the occasion. _Casado_, painter of the sanguinary tragedy of Huesca,
showed himself an admirable little master full of elegance and grace in
"The Bull-Fighter's Reward," a small eighteenth-century picture. The
master of the great hospital picture, _Jimenez_, took the world by
surprise at the very same time by a "Capuchin Friar's Sermon before the
Cathedral of Seville," which flashed with colour. _Emilio Sala y
Francés_, whose historical masterpiece was the "Expulsion of the Jews
from Spain in 1493," delights elsewhere in spring, Southern gardens with
luxuriant vegetation, and delicate _rococo_ ladies, holding up their
skirts filled with blooming roses, or gathering wild flowers among the
grass. _Antonio Fabrés_ was led to the East by the influence of
Regnault, and excited attention by his aquarelles and studies in pen and
ink, in which he represented Oriental and Roman street figures with
astonishing adroitness. But the _ne plus ultra_ is attained by the bold
and winning art of _Pradilla_, which is like a thing shot out of a
pistol. He is the greatest product of contemporary Spain, a man with a
talent for improvisation as ingenious as it was free, who treated with
equal facility the most varied subjects. In the bold and spirited
decorations with which he embellished Spanish palaces he sported with
nymphs and Loves and floating genii _à la_ Tiepolo. All the grace of the
_rococo_ period is cast over his works in the Palais Murga in Madrid.
The figures join each other with ease--coquettish nymphs swaying upon
boughs, and audacious "Putti" tumbling over backwards in quaint games.
Nowhere is there academic sobriety, and everywhere life, pictorial
inspiration, the intoxicating joyousness of a fancy creating without
effort and revelling in the festal delight of the senses. In the
accompanying wall pictures he revived the age of the troubadours, of
languishing love-song and knightly romance free from the burden of
thought, in tenderly graceful and fluent figures. And this same painter,
who filled these huge spaces of wall, lightly dallying with subjects
from the world of fable, seems another man when he grasps fragments from
the life of our own age in pithy inspirations sure in achievement. His
historical pictures are works which compel respect; but those paintings
on the most diminutive scale, in which he represented scenes from the
Roman carnival and the life in Spanish camps, the shore of the sea and
the joy of a popular merry-making with countless figures of the most
intense vividness, carried out with an unrivalled execution of detail
which is yet free from anything laboured, and full of splendour and
glowing colour,--these, indeed, are performances of painting beside
which as a musical counterpart at best Paganini's variations on the G
string are comparable--sleights of art of which only Pradilla was
capable, and such as only Fortuny painted forty years ago.
Two masters who do not live at home, but in France, have followed still
further the modern development of art with great power. The first is
_Zuloaga_. The pictures of this artist have something truly Spanish,
something that one as an admirer of Goya looks for eagerly in Spanish
pictures. At the first glance the eye receives rather a shock. One seeks
in vain for delicate painting of light in Zuloaga, or exquisite
harmonies of colour. He places the crudest reds and yellows next to each
other, strong, almost brutal, like a poster. With an uncompromising love
of truth he paints the rouge-smeared cheeks and blackened eyebrows of
his women-about-town, does not even try to make their movements graceful
or give their costumes a touch of modish smartness. But what a breadth
of conception! With what daring he sweeps his bold strokes over the
picture! It is just because he avoids all flattery, because he brings
nothing foreign, nothing cosmopolitan into his exclusive world, that the
characteristics of Spanish life are mirrored with such truth in his
works. Especially in his portrait of the popular poet, Don Miguel de
Segovia, the whole picture is suffused with a rare Don Quixote feeling.
Velasquez' Pablillas stands before you reincarnated. It is interesting,
too, that Zuloaga, though in France, remains still a Spaniard. Even when
he paints Parisiennes he translates toilette and gesture into grandiose
Spanish style.
The influence of the French school is much more marked in the second of
these Spanish masters, _Hermen Anglada_. He has come to the front in
the exhibitions of the last few years. Besnard has given him much of
his refined epicurism, and this French _hautgoût_ lends his pictures a
charm which is altogether their own. If you are seeking for unusual and
quaint effects you will find them in this Spaniard, who paints pale,
colourless women in the most astonishing costumes, places them in the
midst of sensuous, misty landscapes, and gives you a glistening
potpourri of colours. But Anglada's work is in itself the best testimony
to the fact that the Spain of to-day is getting worn-out and bloodless.
There is something senile and sapless in this over-refined art that
takes pleasure in nothing but the most extraordinary nuances, and that
needs something very unusual to tickle its nerves.
CHAPTER XXXVI
ITALY
Italy has played a very different part from that of Spain in the
development of modern art. Even at the World Exhibition of 1855 Edmond
About called Italy "the grave of painting" in his _Voyage à travers
l'Exposition des Beaux-Arts_. He mentions a few Piedmontese professors,
but about Florence, Naples, and Rome he found nothing to say. The Great
Exhibition of 1862 in England was productive of no more favourable
criticism, for W. Bürger's account is as little consolatory as About's.
"Renowned Italy and proud Spain," writes Burger, "have no longer any
painters who can rival those of other schools. There is nothing to be
said about the rooms where the Italians, Spanish, and Swiss are
exhibited." To-day there are in Italy a great number of vigorous
painters. In Angelo de Gubernati's lexicon of artists there are over two
thousand names, some of which are favourably known in other countries
also. But the mass dwindles to a tiny heap if those only are included
who have risen from the level of dexterous picture-makers to that of
painters of real importance in the world of art.
Whether it be from direct influence or similarity of origin, Fortuny has
found his ablest successors amongst the Neapolitan artists. As early as
the seventeenth century the school of painting there was very different
from those in the rest of Italy; the Greek blood of the population and
the wild, romantic scenery of the Abruzzi gave it a peculiar stamp.
Southern _brio_, the joy of life, colour, and warmth, in contrast with
the noble Roman ideal of form, were the qualities of Salvator Rosa, Luca
Giordano, and Ribera, bold and fiery spirits. And a breath of such power
seems to live in their descendants still. Even now Neapolitan painting
sings, dances, and laughs in a bacchanal of colour, pleasure, delight in
life, and glowing sunshine.
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
MORELLI. THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY.]
A wild and restless spirit, _Domenico Morelli_, whose biography is like
a chapter from _Rinaldo Rinaldini_, is the head of this Neapolitan
school. He was born on 4th August, 1826, and in his youth he is said to
have been, first a pupil in a seminary of priests, then an apprentice
with a mechanician, and for some time even _facchino_. He never saw such
a thing as an academy. Indeed, it was a Bohemian life that he led,
making his meals of bread and cheese, wandering for weeks together with
Byron's poems in his pocket upon the seashore between Posilippo and
Baiæ. In 1848 he fought against King Ferdinand, and was left severely
wounded on the battle-field. After these episodes of youth he first
became a painter, beginning his career in 1855 with the large picture
"The Iconoclasts," followed in 1857 by a "Tasso," and in 1858 by a "Saul
and David." Biblical pictures remained his province even later, and he
was the only artist in Italy who handled these subjects from an entirely
novel point of view, pouring into them a peculiarly exalted and
imaginative spirit. A Madonna rocking her sleeping Child, whilst her
song is accompanied by a legion of cherubs playing upon instruments,
"The Reviling of Christ," "The Ascension," "The Descent from the Cross,"
"Christ walking on the Sea," "The Raising of the Daughter of Jairus,"
"The Expulsion of the Money-Changers from the Temple," "The Marys at the
Grave," "Salve Regina," and "Mary Magdalene meeting Christ risen from
the Grave," are the principal stages of his great Christian epic, and in
their imaginative naturalism a new revolutionary language finds
utterance through all these pictures. There is in them at times
something of the mystical quietude of the East, and at times something
of the passionate breath of Eugène Delacroix. In these pictures he
revealed himself as a true child of the land of the sun, a lover of
painting which scintillates and flickers. As yet hard, ponderous, dark,
and plastic in "The Iconoclasts," he was a worshipper of light and
resplendent in colour in the "Mary Magdalene." "The Temptation of St.
Anthony" probably marks the summit of his creative power in the matter
of colour. Morelli has conceived the whole temptation as a
hallucination. The saint squats upon the ground, claws with his fingers,
and with fixed gaze tries to stifle thoughts, full of craving
sensuality, which are flaming in him. Yet they throng ever more
thickly, take shape ever more distinctly, are transformed into
red-haired women who detach themselves from corners upon all sides. They
rise from beneath the matting, wind nearer from the depth of the cavern;
even the breeze that caresses the fevered brow of the tormented man
changes into the head of a girl pressing her kisses upon him. Only
Naples could produce an artist at once so bizarre, so many-sided and
incoherent, so opulent and strange. Younger men of talent trooped around
him. A fiery spirit, haughty and independent, he became the teacher of
all the younger generation. He led them to behold the sun and the sea,
to marvel at nature in her radiant brightness. Through him the joy in
light and colour came into Neapolitan painting, that rejoicing in colour
which touches such laughing concords in the works of his pupil _Paolo
Michetti_.
A man of bold and magnificent talent, the genuine product of the wild
Abruzzi, Michetti was the son of a day-labourer, like Morelli. However,
a man of position became the protector of the boy, who was early left an
orphan. But neither at the Academy at Naples nor in Paris and London did
this continue long. As early as 1876 he was back in Naples, and settled
amid the Abruzzi, close to the Adriatic, in Francavilla à Mare, near
Ostona, a little nest which the traveller passes just before he goes on
board the Oriental steamer at Brindisi. Here he lives out of touch with
old pictures, in the thick of the vigorous life of the Italian people.
In 1877 he painted the work which laid the foundation of his celebrity,
"The Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti," a picture which rose like a
firework in its boisterous, exhilarating medley of bright colours. The
procession is seen just coming out of church: men, women, naked
children, monks, priests, a canopy, choristers with censers, old men and
youths, people who kneel and people who laugh, the mist of incense, the
beams of the sun, flowers scattered on the ground, a band of musicians,
and a church façade with rich and many-coloured ornaments. There is the
play of variously hued silk, and colours sparkle in all the tints of the
prism. Everything laughs, the faces and the costumes, the flowers and
the sunbeams. Following upon this came a picture which he called "Spring
and the Loves." It represented a desolate promontory in the blue sea,
and upon it a troop of Cupids, playing round a hawthorn bush in full
flower, are scuffling, buffeting each other, and leaping as riotously as
Neapolitan street-boys. Some were arrayed like little Japanese, some
like Grecian terra-cotta figures, whilst a marble bridge in the
neighbourhood shone in indigo blue. The whole picture gleamed with red,
blue, green, and yellow patches of colour: a serpentine dance painted
twelve years before the appearance of Loie Fuller. Then again he painted
the sea. It is noon, and the sultry heat broods over the azure tide.
Naked fishermen are standing in it, and on the shore gaily dressed women
are searching for mussels; whilst, in the background, vessels with the
sun playing on their sails are mirrored brightly in the water. Or the
moon rises casting greenish reflections upon the body of Christ, which
shines like phosphorus as it is being taken from the cross: or there is
a flowery landscape upon a summer evening; birds are settling down for
the night, and little angels are kissing each other and laughing. In all
these pictures Michetti showed himself an improviser of astonishing
dexterity, solving every difficulty as though it were child's play, and
shedding a brilliant colour over everything--a man to whom "painting"
was as much a matter of course as orthography is to ourselves. Even the
Paris World Exhibition of 1878 made him celebrated as an artist, and
from that time his name was to the Italian ear a symbol for something
new, unexpected, wild, and extravagant. The word "Michetti" means
splendid materials, dazzling flesh-tones, conflicting hues set with
intention beside each other, the luxuriant bodies of women basking in
heat and sun, fantastic landscapes created in the mad brain of the
artist, strange and curious frames, and village idylls in the glowing
blaze of the sun. There are no lifeless spots in his works; every whim
of his takes shape, as if by sorcery, in splendid figures.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MICHETTI. GOING TO CHURCH.]
Another pupil of Morelli, _Edoardo Dalbono_, completed his duty to
history by a scene of horror _à la_ Laurens, "The Excommunication of
King Manfred," and then became the painter of the Bay of Naples. "The
Isle of Sirens" was the first production of his able, appetising, and
nervously vibrating brush. There is a steep cliff dropping sheer into
the blue sea. Two antique craft are drawing near, the crews taking no
heed of the reefs and sandbanks. With phantomlike gesture the naked
women stretch out their arms beckoning, embodiments as they are of the
deadly beautiful and voluptuously cruel ocean. By degrees the sea
betrayed to him all its secrets--its strangest combinations of colour
and atmospheric effects, its transparency, and its eternally shifting
phases of ebb and flow. He has painted the Bay of Naples under bright,
hot noon and the gloom of night, in the purple light of the sinking sun
and in the strange and many-coloured mood of twilight. At one moment it
shines and plays variegated and joyous in blue, grass-green, and violet
tones; at another it seems to glitter with millions of phosphorescent
sparks: the rosy clouds of the sky are glassed in it, and the lights of
the houses irregularly dotted over abrupt mountain-chains or the
dark-red glow of lava luridly shining from Vesuvius. Now and then he
painted scenes from Neapolitan street-life--old, weather-beaten seamen,
young sailors with features as sharply cut as if cast in bronze,
beautiful, fiery, brown women, shooting the hot Southern flame from
their eyes, houses painted white or orange-yellow, with the sun
glittering on the windows. The "Voto alla Madonna del Carmine" was the
most comprehensive of these Southern pictures. Everything shines in
joyous blue, yellowish-green, and red colours. Warmth, life, light,
brilliancy, and laughter are the elements on which his art is based.
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
MICHETTI. THE CORPUS DOMINI PROCESSION AT CHIETI.]
_Alceste Campriani_, _Giacomo di Chirico_, _Rubens Santoro_, _Federigo
Cortese_, _Francesco Netti_, _Edoardo Toffano_, _Giuseppe de Nigris_
have, all of them, this kaleidoscopic sparkle, this method of painting
which gives pictures the appearance of being mosaics of precious stones.
As in the days of the Renaissance, the Church is usually the scene of
action, though not any longer as the house of God, but as the background
of a many-coloured throng. As a rule these pictures contain a crowd of
canopies, priests, and choristers, and country-folk, bowing or kneeling
when the host is carried by, or weddings, horse-races, and country
festivals; and everything is vivid and joyous in colour, saturated with
the glowing sun of Naples. Alceste Campriani's chief work was entitled
"The Return from Montevergine." Carriages and open rack-waggons are
dashing along, the horses snorting and the drivers smacking their whips,
while the peasants, who have had their fill of sweet wine, are shouting
and singing, and the orange-sellers in the street are crying their
goods. A coquettish glancing light plays over the gay costumes, and the
white dust sparkles like fluid silver, as it rises beneath the hoofs of
the horses wildly plunging forward. The leading work of _Giacomo di
Chirico_, who became mad in 1883, was "A Wedding in the Basilicata." It
represents a motley crowd. The entire village has set out to see the
ceremony. The wedding guests are descending the church steps to the
square, which is decked out with coloured carpets and strewn with
flowers. Triumphal arches have been set up, and the pictures of the
Madonna are hung with garlands. Meanwhile the _sindaco_ gives his arm to
the bride, beneath whose gay costume a charmingly graceful little foot
is peeping out. Then the bridegroom follows with the _sindaco's_ wife.
All the village girls are looking on with curiosity, and the musicians
are playing. Winter has covered the square with a white cloak of snow;
yet the sunbeams sport over it, making it shine vividly with a thousand
reflections.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
FAVRETTO. ON THE PIAZZETTA.]
Of course, the derivation of all these pictures is easily recognisable.
Almost all the Neapolitan painters studied at Fortuny's in the seventies
in Rome, and when they came home again they perceived that the life of
the people offered themes which had a coquettish fitness in Fortuny's
scale of tones. From the variously coloured magnificence of old
churches, the red robes of ecclesiastics, the gaudy splendour of the
country-people's clothes, and the gay glory of rags amongst the
Neapolitan children, they composed a modern _rococo_, rejoicing in
colour, whilst the Spaniard had fled to the past to attain his gleaming
effects.
A great number of the Italians do the same even now. In numerous costume
pictures, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flashing with
silk and velvet, the Southerner's bright pleasure in colour still loves
to celebrate its orgies. Gay trains rustle, rosy Loves laugh down from
the walls, Venetian chandeliers shed their radiance; no other epoch in
history enables the painter with so much ease to produce such an
efflorescence of full-toned chords of colour. With his shining glow of
hue the delectable and spirited _Favretto_ (who, like Fortuny, entered
the world of art as a victor, and, like him again, was snatched from it
when barely thirty-seven, after a brief and brilliant career) stands at
the head of this group. The child of poor parents, indeed the son of a
joiner, he was born in Venice in 1849, and, like the Spaniard, passed a
youth which was full of privations. But all the cares of existence, even
the loss of an eye, did not hinder him from seeing objects under a
laughing brightness of colour. Through his studies and the bent of his
fancy he had come to be no less at home in the Venice of the eighteenth
century than in that of his own time. This Venice of Francesco Guardi,
this city of enchantment surrounded with the gleam of olden splendour,
the scene of rich and brilliantly coloured banquets and a graceful and
modish society, rose once more under Favretto's hands in fabulous
beauty. What _brio_ of technique, what harmony of colours, were to be
found in the picture "Un Incontro," the charming scene upon the Rialto
Bridge, with the bowing cavalier and the lady coquettishly making her
acknowledgments! This was the first picture which gave him a name in the
world. What fanfares of colour were in the two next pictures, "Banco
Lotto" and "Erbajuolo Veneziano"! At the Exhibition in Turin in 1883 he
was represented by "The Bath" and "Susanna and the Elders"; at that in
Venice in 1887 he celebrated his last and greatest triumph. The three
pictures "The Friday Market upon the Rialto Bridge," "The Canal Ferry
near Santa Margherita," and "On the Piazzetta" were the subject of
enthusiastic admiration. All the Venetian society of the age of Goldoni,
Gozzi, and Casanova had become vivid in this last picture, and moved
over the smooth brick pavement of the Piazzetta at the hour of the
promenade, from the Doge's palace to the library, and from the Square of
St. Mark to the pillar of the lions and Theodore, to and fro in surging
life. Men put up their glasses and chivalrously greeted the queens of
beauty. The enchanting magic building of Sansovino, the _loggetta_ with
their bright marble pillars, bronze statues of blackish-grey, and
magnificent lattice doors, formed the background of the standing and
sauntering groups, whose variegated costumes united with the tones of
marble and bronze to make a most beautiful combination of colours.
Favretto had a manner of his own, and, although a member of the school
of Fortuny, he was stronger and healthier than the latter. He drew like
a genuine painter, without having too much of the Fortuny fireworks. His
soft, rich painting was that of a colourist of distinction, always
tasteful, exquisite in tone, and light and pleasing in technique.
By the other Italian costume painters the scale run through by Fortuny
was not enriched by new notes. Most of their pictures are nugatory,
coquettishly sportive toys, masterly in technique no doubt, but so empty
of substance that they vanish from memory like novels read upon a
railway journey. Many have no greater import than dresses, cloaks, and
hats worn by ladies during a few weeks of the season. Sometimes their
significance is not even so great, since there are modistes and
dressmakers who have more skill in making ruches and giving the right
_nuance_ to colours. Some small part of Favretto's refined taste seems
to have been communicated to the Venetian _Antonio Lonza_, who delights
in mingling the gleaming splendour of Oriental carpets, fans, and
screens amid the motley, picturesque costumes of the _rococo_
period--Japanese who perform as jugglers and knife-throwers in quaint
_rococo_ gardens before the old Venetian nobility. But the centre of
this costume painting is Florence, and the great mart for it the
_Società artistica_, where there are yearly exhibitions.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
FAVRETTO. SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS.]
Francesco Vinea, Tito Conti, Federigo Andreotti, and Edoardo Gelli are
in Italy the special manufacturers who have devoted themselves, with the
assistance of Meissonier, Gérôme, and Fortuny, to scenes from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to plumed hats, Wallenstein boots,
and horsemen's capes, to Renaissance lords and laughing Renaissance
ladies, and they have thereby won great recognition in Germany. Pretty,
languishing women in richly coloured costumes, tippling soldiers and
gallant cavaliers, laughing peasant women and trim serving-girls drawing
wine in the cellar vaults and setting it before a trooper, who in
gratitude affectionately puts his arm round their waist, beautiful and
still more languishing noble ladies, who laugh with a parrot or a dog,
instead of a trooper, in apartments richly furnished with Gobelins--such
for the most part are the subjects treated by _Francesco Vinea_ with
great virtuosity bordering on the routine of a typewriter. His technique
is neither refined nor fascinating; the colours are so crude that they
affect the eye as a false note the ear. But the mechanical power of his
painting is great. He has much ability, far more, indeed, than Sichel,
and possesses the secret of painting, in an astonishing manner, the
famous lace kerchiefs wound round the heads of his fair ones.
_Andreotti_ and _Tito Conti_ work in the same fashion, except that the
ballad-singers and rustic idylls of Andreotti are the smoother and more
mawkish, whereas the pictures of Conti make a somewhat more refined and
artistic effect. His colour is superior and more transparent, and his
tapestry backgrounds are warmer.
And, so far as one can judge from their pictures, life runs as merrily
for the Italians of the present as it did for those _rococo_ cavaliers.
Hanging here and there beside the serious art of other nations, these
little picture-people enjoy their careless tinsel pomp; art is a gay
thing for them, as gay as a Sunday afternoon with a procession and
fireworks, walks and sips of sherbet, to an Italian woman. By the side
of the blue-plush and red-velvet costume-picture comic _genre_ still
holds its sway: barbaric in colour and with materials which are merrier
than is appropriate in tasteful pictures, _Gaetano Chierici_ represents
children, both good and naughty, making their appearance upon a tiny
theatre. _Antonio Rotta_ renders comic episodes from the life of
Venetian cobblers and the menders of nets. _Scipione Vannuttelli_ paints
young girls in white dresses arrayed as nuns or being confirmed in
church. _Francesco Monteverde_ rejoices in comical _intermezzi_ in the
style of Grützner--for instance, an ecclesiastical gentleman observing,
to his horror, that his pretty young servant-girl is being kissed by a
smart lad in the yard. This is more or less his style of subject.
_Ettore Tito_ paints the pretty Venetian laundresses whom Passini, Cecil
van Haanen, Charles Ulrich, Eugène Blaas, and others introduced into
art. Only a very few struck deeper notes. _Luigi Nono_, in Venice,
painted his beautiful picture "Refugium Peccatorum"; _Ferragutti_, the
Milanese, his "Workers in the Turnip Field," a vivid study of sunlight
of serious veracity; and after these _Giovanni Segantini_ came forward
with his forcible creations, in which he has demonstrated that it is
possible for a man to be an Italian and yet a serious artist.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
TITO. THE SLIPPER SELLER.]
Segantini's biography is like a novel. Born the child of poor parents,
in Arco, in 1858, he was left, after the death of his parents, to the
care of a relative in Milan with whom he passed a most unhappy time. He
then wanted to make his fortune in France, and set out upon foot; but he
did not get very far, in fact he managed to hire himself out as a
swine-herd. After this he lived for a whole year alone in the wild
mountains, worked in the field, the stable, the barn. Then came the
well-known discovery, which one could not believe were it not to be read
in Gubernati. One day he drew the finest of his pigs with a piece of
charcoal upon a mass of rock. The peasants ran in a crowd and took the
block of stone, together with the young Giotto, in triumph to the
village. He was given assistance, visited the School of Art in Milan,
and now paints the things he did in his youth. In a secluded village of
the Alps, Val d'Albola in Switzerland, a thousand metres above the sea,
amid the grand and lofty mountains, he settled down, surrounded only by
the peasants who make a precarious living from the soil. Out of touch
with the world of artists the whole year round, observing great nature
at every season and every hour of the day, fresh and straightforward in
character, he is one of those natures of the type of Millet, in whom
heart and hand, man and artist, are one and the same thing. His shepherd
and peasant scenes from the valleys of the high Alps are free from all
flavour of _genre_. The life of these poor and humble beings passes
without contrasts and passions, being spent altogether in work, which
fills the long course of the day in monotonous regularity. The sky
sparkles with a sharp brilliancy. The spiky yellow and tender green of
the fields forces its way modestly from the rocky ground. In front is
something like a hedge where a cow is grazing, or there is a shepherdess
pasturing her sheep. Something majestic there is in this cold nature,
where the sunshine is so sharp, the air so thin. And the primitive, it
might almost be said antique, execution of these pictures is in accord
with the primitive simplicity of the subjects. In fact, Segantini's
pictures, with their cold silvery colours, and their contours so sharp
in outline, standing out hard against the rarefied air, make an
impression like encaustic paintings or mosaics. They have nothing
alluring or pleasing, and there is, perhaps, even a touch of mannerism
in this mosaic painting; but they are nevertheless exceedingly true,
rugged, austere, and yet sunny. Segantini opened up to painting an
entirely new world of beauty, the poetry of the highlands. His
appearance dates from the Impressionistic period when preference was
given to damp, misty atmospheres which toned down all colour and melted
away all lines, and artists made a specialty of flat, monotonous plains.
At that time the mountains were in bad repute, thanks to the
old-fashioned painters of views, the masters of the "picture-postcard
style." Segantini led the way again up to the heights; but he did not
paint the mountain-tops that, like the Titans of old, strive to reach
the sky; he painted the plateaus, not the plains of the lowlands, but of
the highlands, lonely, weird, sublime, where man draws near to the heart
of Nature, far from the noise and struggle of everyday life. The air of
the heights is there, the colours and lines speak with no uncertain
voice. Thus Segantini learnt from the locale of his pictures to become
the first master of line among the Impressionists. How he mirrors in his
pictures the stillness, the might and grandeur of these lofty heights!
With what astounding truth his cold, clear colours make us feel the
coldness and clearness of these regions. Like a dome of steel, the sky
stretches over the steel-blue lakes, clear as crystal, over the
pale-green meadows in the grip of the frost; the tender foliage rustles
and freezes in the quivering ice-cold air: there glaciers gleam, there
glitters the snow, there the sun pours down his beams upon the earth
like plumes of fire. A thunder cloud draws near, calm and majestic as
destiny in its relentless course. There is something Northern and
virginal, something earnest and grandiose, which stands in strange
contrast with the joyful, conventional smile which is otherwise spread
over the countenance of Italian painting. Though he died so young,
Giovanni Segantini will live for all time in the history of art.
With the exception of Segantini, not one of these painters will own that
there are poverty-stricken and miserable people in his native land. An
everlasting blue sky still laughs over Italy, sunshine and the joy of
life still hold undisputed sway over Italian pictures. There is no work
in sunny Italy, and in spite of that there is no hunger. Even where work
is being done there are assembled only the fairest girls of Lombardy,
who kneel laughing and jesting on the strand, while the wind dallies
with their clothes. They have a special delight for showing themselves
while engaged at their toilette, in a bodice, their little feet in neat
little slippers, their naked arms raised to arrange their red-gold hair.
As a rule, however, they do nothing whatever but smile at you with their
most seductive smile, which shows their pearl-white teeth, and ensnares
every poor devil who does not suspect that they have smiled for years in
the same way, and most of all with him who pays highest: "_j'aime les
hommes parse que j'aime les truffes_." These pictures are almost
invariably works which are well able to give pleasure to their
possessor, only they seldom suggest discussion on the course of art.
_Trop de marchandise_ is the phrase generally used in the Paris Salon
when the Italians come under consideration. Few there are amongst them
who are real pioneers, spirits pressing seriously forward and having a
quickening influence on others. The vital questions of the painting of
free light, Impressionism, and Naturalism do not interest them in the
least. A naïve, pleasant, lively, and self-complacent technique is in
most cases the solitary charm of their works. One feels scarcely any
inclination to search the catalogue for the painter's name, and whether
the beauty--for she is not the first of her kind--who was called Ninetta
last year has now become Lisa. Most of these modern Italians execute
their pictures in the way in which gold pieces are minted, or in the way
in which plastic works, which run through so many editions, are produced
in Italy. Nowhere are more beautiful laces chiselled, and in the same
manner painters render the shining splendour of satin and velvet, the
glittering brilliancy of ornaments, and the starry radiance of the
beautiful eyes of women. Only, as soon as one has once seen them one
knows the pictures by heart, as one knows the works in marble, and this
is so because the painters had them by heart first. Everywhere there are
the evidences of talent, industry, ability, and spirit, but there is no
soul in the spirit and no life in the colours. So many brilliant tones
stand beside each other, and yet there is neither a refined tone nor the
impression of truth to nature.
[Illustration: SEGANTINI. MATERNITY.]
In all this art of theirs there is scarcely a question of any serious
landscape. Apart from the works of some of the younger men--for
instance, _Belloni_, _Serra_, _Gola_, _Filippini_, and others, who
display an intimacy of observation which is worthy of honour--a really
close connection with the efforts made across the Alps is not achieved
in these days. As a rule the landscapes are mere products of
handicraft, which are striking for the moment by their technical
routine, but seldom waken any finer feelings, whether the Milanese paint
the dazzling Alpine effects or the Venetian lagunes steeped in light,
with gondolas and gondola-poles glowing in the sunshine, or the
Neapolitans set glittering upon the canvas their beautiful bay like a
brilliant firework. Most of them continue to pursue with complete
self-satisfaction the flagged gondola of Ziem; the conquests of the
Fontainebleau painters and of the Impressionists are unnoticed by them.
And this industrial characteristic of Italian painting is sufficiently
explained by the entire character of the country. The Italian painter is
not properly in a position to seek effects of his own and to make
experiments. Hardly anything is bought for the galleries, and there are
few collectors of superior taste. He labours chiefly for the traveller,
and this gives his performances the stamp of attractive mercantile
wares. The Italian is too much a man of business to undertake great
trials of strength _pour le roi de Prusse_. He paints no great pictures,
which would be still-born children in his home, nor does he paint severe
studies of _plein-air_, preferring a specious, exuberant, flickering,
and glaring revel in colour. In general he produces nothing which will
not easily sell, and has a fine instinct for the taste of the rich
travelling public, who wish to see nothing which does not excite
cheerful and superficial emotions.
But it is possible that this decline of the Latin races is connected
with the nature of modern art itself. Of late the words "Germanic" and
"Latin" have been much abused. It has been proclaimed that the new art
meant the victory of the German depth of feeling over the Latin sense of
form, the onset of German cordiality against the empty exaggeration in
which the imitation of the Cinquecento resulted. Such assertions are
always hard to maintain, because every century shows similar reactions
of truth to nature against mannerism. Nevertheless is it true that
modern art, with its heartfelt devotion to everyday life and the
mysteries of light, has an essentially Germanic character, finding its
ancestors not in Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, but in the English
of the eighteenth, the Dutch of the seventeenth, and the Germans of the
sixteenth century. The Italians and Spaniards, whose entire intellectual
culture rests upon a Latin foundation, may therefore find it difficult
to follow this change of taste. They either adhere to the old bombastic
and theatrical painting of history, or they recast the new painting in
an external drawing-room art draped with gaudy tinsel. Even in France
the rise of the new art meant, as it were, the victory of the Frankish
element over the Gallic. Millet the Norman, Courbet the Frank,
Bastien-Lepage of Lorraine, drove back the Latins--Ingres and Couture,
Cabanel and Bouguereau--just as in the eighteenth century the
Netherlander Watteau broke the yoke of the rigid Latin Classicism.
It is perhaps no mere chance that the threads of the Germanic aim in art
were drawn out with such zeal by the Germanic nations. With the Latins
a striking effect is made by brilliant technique, mastery of the manual
art of painting, and careless sway over all the enchantments of the
craft; with the Teutons one stands in the presence of an art which is so
natural and simple that one scarcely thinks of the means by which it was
called into being. In one case there is virtuosity, ductility, and
grace; in the other, health, intrinsic feeling, and temperament.
CHAPTER XXXVII
ENGLAND
To English painting the acquisitions of the French could now give little
that was radically novel, for the epoch-making labours of the
pre-Raphaelites were already in existence. Apart from certain cases of
direct borrowing, it has either completely preserved its autonomy, or
recast everything assimilated from France in a specifically English
fashion. It is in art, indeed, as it is with men themselves. The English
travel more than any other people, for travel is a part of their
education. They are to be met in every quarter of the globe--in Africa,
Asia, America, or the European Continent; and they scarcely need to open
their mouths, even from a distance, to betray that they are English. In
the same way there is no need of a catalogue at exhibitions to recognise
all English pictures at the first glance. English painting is too
English not to be fond of travel. The painter delights in reconnoitring
all other schools and studying all styles; he is as much at home in the
past as in the present. But as the English tourist, let him go to the
world's end, retains everywhere his own customs, tastes, and habits, so
English painting, even on its most adventurous journeys, remains
unwaveringly true to its national spirit, and returns from all its
wanderings more English than before; it adapts what is alien with the
same delicious abnegation of all scruple with which the English tongue
brings foreign words into harmony with its own sense of convenience. A
certain softness of feeling and tenderness of spirit induce the English
even in these days to avoid hard contact with reality. Their art rejects
everything in nature which is harsh, rude, and brutal; it is an art
which polishes and renders the reality poetic at the risk of
debilitating its power. It considers matters from the standpoint of what
is pretty, touching, or intelligible, and by no means holds that
everything true is necessarily beautiful. And just as little does the
English eye--so much occupied with detail--see light in its most
exquisite subtleties. Indeed, it rather sees the isolated fact than the
total harmony, and is clearer than it is fine.
For this reason _plein-air_ painting has very few adepts, and the
atmospheric influences which blunt the lines of objects, efface colours,
and bring them nearer to each other, meet with little consideration.
Things are given all the sharpness of their outlines, and the harmony,
which in the French follows naturally from the observation of light and
air saturating form and colour, is the more artificially attained by
everything being brought into concord in a bright and delicate tone,
which is almost too fine. The audacities of Impressionism are excluded,
because painting which starts from a masterly seizure of total effect
would seem too sketchy to English taste, which has been formed by
Ruskin. Painting must be highly finished and highly elaborated; that is
a _conditio sine qua non_ which English taste refuses to renounce in
oil-painting as little as in water-colour, and in England they are more
closely related than elsewhere, and have mutually influenced each other
in the matter of technique. In fact, English water-colours seek to rival
oil-painting in force and precision, and have therefore forfeited the
charm of improvisation, the _verve_ of the first sketch, and the
freshness and ease which they should have by their very character.
Through a curious change of parts oil-painting has a fancy for borrowing
from water-colours their effects and their processes. English pictures
have no longer anything heavy or oily, but they likewise show nothing of
the manipulation of the brush, rather resembling large water-colours,
perhaps even pastels or wax-painting. The colours are chosen with
reserve, and everything is subdued and softened like the quiet step of
the footman in the mansion of a nobleman. The special quality in all
English pictures--putting aside a preference for bright yellow and vivid
red in the older period--consists in a bluish or greenish luminous
general tone, to which every English painter seems to conform as though
it were a binding social convention, and it even recurs in English
landscapes. In fact, English painting differs from French as England
from France.
France is a great city, and the name of this city is Paris. Here, and
not in the provinces, lives that fashionable, thinking world which has
become the guide of the nation and the censor of beauty, by the
refinement of its taste and its preeminent intellect. The ideas which
fly throughout the land upon invisible wires are born in Paris.
Painting, likewise, receives them at first hand. It stands amid the
seething whirlpool of the age, the heart's-blood of the present streams
through all its veins, and there is nothing human that is alien to it,
neither the filth nor the splendour of life, its laughter nor its
misery. All the nerves of the great city are vibrating in it. Paris has
made her people refined and, at the same time, insatiate in enjoyment.
Every day they have need of new impressions and new theories to ward off
tedium. And thus is explained the universally comprehensive sphere of
subject in French painting, and its feverish versatility in technique.
But London has, in no sense, the importance for England which Paris has
for France. It is a centre of attraction for business; but the more
refined classes of society live in the country. As soon as one is off in
the Dover express country houses fly past on either side of the train.
They are all over England--upon the shores of the lakes, upon the strand
of the sea, upon the tops of the hills. And how pleasant they are, how
well appointed, how delightful to look at, with their gabled roofs and
their gleaming brickwork overgrown with ivy! Around them stretches a
fresh lawn which is rolled every morning, as soft as velvet. Fat oxen,
and sheep as white as if they had been just washed, lie upon the grass.
Thus all rustic England is like a great summer resort, where there is
heard no sound of the ringing and throbbing strokes of life. Nor is
painting allowed to disturb this idyllic harmony. No one wishes that
anything should remind him of the prose of life when his work is done
and the town has vanished. Schiller's assertion, "Life is earnest,
blithe is art," is here the first law of æesthetics.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.]
English painting is exclusively an art based on luxury, optimism, and
aristocracy; in its neatness, cleanliness, and good-breeding it is
exclusively designed to ingratiate itself with English ideas of comfort.
Yet the pictures have to satisfy very different tastes--the taste of a
wealthy middle class which wishes to have substantial nourishment, and
the æesthetic taste of an _élite_ class, which will only tolerate the
quintessence of art, the most subtle art that can be given. But all
these works are not created for galleries, but for the drawing-room of a
private house, and in subject and treatment they have all to reckon with
the ascendant view that a picture ought, in the first place, to be an
attractive article of furniture for the sitting-room. The traveller, the
lover of antiquity, is pleased by imitation of the ancient style; the
sportsman, the lover of country life, has a delight in little rustic
scenes; and the women are enchanted with feminine types. And everything
must be kept within the bounds of what is charming, temperate, and
prosperous, without in any degree suggesting the struggle for existence.
The pictures have themselves the grace of that mundane refinement from
the midst of which they are beheld.
England is the country of the sculptures of the Parthenon, the country
where Bulwer Lytton wrote his _Last Days of Pompeii_, and where the most
Grecian female figures in the world may be seen to move. Thus painters
of antique subjects still play an important part in the pursuit of
English art--probably the pursuit of art rather than its development.
For they have never enriched the treasury of modern sentiment. Trained,
all of them, in Paris or Belgium, they are equipped with finer taste,
and have acquired abroad a more solid ability than James Barry, Haydon,
and Hinton, the half-barbaric English Classicists of the beginning of
the century. But at bottom--like Cabanel and Bouguereau--they represent
rigid conservatism in opposition to progress, and the way in which they
set about the reconstruction of an august or domestic antiquity is only
distinguished by an English _nuance_ of race from that of Couture and
Gérôme.
_Lord Leighton_, the late highly cultured President of the Royal
Academy, was the most dignified representative of this tendency. He was
a Classicist through and through--in the balance of composition, the
rhythmical flow of lines, and the confession of faith that the highest
aim of art is the representation of men and women of immaculate build.
In the picture galleries of Paris, Rome, Dresden, and Berlin he received
his youthful impressions; his artistic discipline he received under
Zanetti in Florence, under Wiertz and Gallait in Brussels, under Steinle
in Frankfort, and under Ingres and Ary Scheffer in Paris. Back in
England once more, he translated Couture into English as Anselm
Feuerbach translated him into German with greater independence.
Undoubtedly there has never been anything upon his canvas which could be
supposed ungentlemanlike. And as a nation is usually apt to prize most
the very thing which has been denied it, and for which it has no talent,
Leighton was soon an object of admiration to the refined world. As early
as 1864 he became an associate, and in November 1879 President of the
Royal Academy. For sixteen years he sat like a Jupiter upon his throne
in London. An accomplished man of the world and a good speaker, a
scholar who spoke many languages and had seen many countries, he
possessed every quality which the president of an academy needs to have;
he had an exceedingly imposing presence in his red gown, and did the
honours of his house with admirable tact.
But one stands before his works with a certain feeling of indifference.
There are few artists with so little temperament as Lord Leighton, few
in the same degree wanting in the magic of individuality. The purest
academical art, as the phrase is understood of Ingres, together with
academical severity of form, is united with a softness of feeling
recalling Hofmann of Dresden; and the result is a placid classicality
adapted _ad usum Delphini_, a classicality foregoing the applause of
artists, but all the more in accordance with the taste of a refined
circle of ladies. His chief works, "The Star of Bethlehem," "Orpheus and
Eurydice," "Jonathan's Token to David," "Electra at the Tomb of
Agamemnon," "The Daphnephoria," "Venus disrobing for the Bath," and the
like, are amongst the most refined although the most frigid creations of
contemporary English art.
[Illustration: LEIGHTON. CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
LEIGHTON. SIR RICHARD BURTON.]
Perhaps the "Captive Andromache" of 1888 is the quintessence of what he
aimed at. The background is the court of an ancient palace, where female
slaves are gathered together fetching water. In the centre of the stage,
as the leading actress, stands Andromache, who has placed her pitcher on
the ground before her, and waits with dignity until the slaves have
finished their work. This business of water-drawing has given Leighton
an opportunity for combining an assemblage of beautiful poses. The widow
of Hector expresses a queenly sorrow with decorum, while the
amphora-bearers are standing or walking hither and thither, in the
manner demanded by the pictures upon Grecian vases, but without that
sureness of line which comes of the real observation of life. In its
dignity of style, in the noble composition and purity of the lines which
circumscribe the forms with so much distinction and in so impersonal a
manner, the picture is an arid and measured work, cold as marble and
smooth as porcelain. "Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of
Alcestis" might be a Grecian relief upon a sarcophagus, so carefully
balanced are the masses and the lines. The pose of Alcestis is that of
the nymphs of the Parthenon; only, it would not have been so fine were
these not in existence. His "Music Lesson" of 1877 is charming, and his
"Elijah in the Wilderness" is a work of style. And in his frescoes in
the South Kensington Museum there is a perfect compendium of beautiful
motives of gesture. The eye delights to linger over these feminine
forms, half nude, half enveloped with drapery, yet it notes, too, that
these creations are composed out of the painter's knowledge and artistic
reminiscences; there is a want of life in them, because the master has
surrendered himself to feeling with the organs of a dead Greek.
Leighton's colour is always carefully considered, scrupulously polished,
and endowed with the utmost finish, but it never has the magical charm
by which one recognises the work of a true colourist. It is rather the
result of painstaking study and cultivated taste than of personal
feeling. The grace of form is always carefully prepared--a thing which
has the consciousness of its own existence. Beautiful and spontaneous as
the movements undoubtedly are, one has always a sense that the artist
is present, anxiously watching lest any of his actors offend against a
law of art.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
LEIGHTON. THE LAST WATCH OF HERO.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
Lord Leighton's pupils, Poynter and Prinsep, followed him with a good
deal of determination. _Val Prinsep_ shares with Leighton the smooth
forms of a polished painting, whereas _Edward Poynter_ by his more
earnest severity and metallic precision verges more on that union of
aridness and style characteristic of Ingres. His masterpiece, "A Visit
to Æsculapius," is in point of technique one of the best products of
English Classicism. To the left Æsculapius is sitting beneath a pillared
porch overgrown with foliage, while, like Raphael's Jupiter in the
Farnesina, he supports his bearded chin thoughtfully with his left hand.
A nymph who has hurt her foot appears, accompanied by three companions,
before the throne of the god, begging him for a remedy. To say nothing
of many other nude or nobly draped female figures, numerous decorative
paintings in the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's, and St. Stephen's
Church in Dulwich owe their existence to this most industrious artist.
_Alma Tadema_, the famous Dutchman who has called to life amid the
London fog the sacrifices of Pompeii and Herculaneum, stands to this
grave academical group as Gérôme to Couture. As Bulwer Lytton, in the
field of literature, created a picture of ancient civilisation so
successful that it has not been surpassed by his followers, Alma Tadema
has solved the problem of the picture of antique manners in the most
authentic fashion in the province of painting. He has peopled the past,
rebuilt its towns and refurnished its houses, rekindled the flame upon
the sacrificial altars and awakened the echo of the dithyrambs to new
life. Poynter tells old fables, while Alma Tadema takes us in his
company, and, like the best-informed cicerone, leads us through the
streets of old Athens, reconstructing the temples, altars, and
dwellings, the shops of the butchers, bakers, and fishmongers, just as
they once were.
[Illustration: LEIGHTON. THE BATH OF PSYCHE.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
This power of making himself believed Alma Tadema owes in the first
place to his great archæological learning. By Leys in Brussels this side
of his talent was first awakened, and in 1863, when he went to Italy for
the first time, he discovered his archæological mission. How the old
Romans dressed, how their army was equipped and attired, became as well
known to him as the appearance of the citizens' houses, the artizans'
workshops, the market and the bath. He explored the ruins of temples,
and he grew familiar with the privileges of the priests, the method of
worship, of the sacrifices, and of the festal processions. There was no
monument of brass or marble, no wall-painting, no pictured vase nor
mosaic, no sample of ancient arts, of pottery, stone-cutting, or work in
gold, that he did not study. His brain soon became a complete
encyclopædia of antiquity. He knew the forms of architecture as well as
he knew the old myths, and all the domestic appointments and robes as
exactly as the usages of ritual. In Brussels, as early as the sixties,
this complete power of living in the period he chose to represent gave
Alma Tadema's pictures from antiquity their remarkable _cachet_ of
striking truthfulness to life. And London, whither he migrated in 1870,
offered even a more favourable soil for his art. Whereas the French
painters of the antique picture of manners often fell into a diluted
idealism and a lifeless traffic with old curiosities, with Alma Tadema
one stands in the presence of a veritable fragment of life; he simply
paints the people amongst whom he lives and their world. The Pompeian
house which he has built in London, with its dreamy vividarium, its
great golden hall, its Egyptian decorations, its Ionic pillars, its
mosaic floor, and its Oriental carpets, contains everything one needs to
conjure up the times of Nero and the Byzantine emperors. It is
surrounded by a garden in the old Roman style, and a large conservatory
adjoining is planted with plane-trees and cypresses. All the celebrated
marble benches and basins, the figures of stone and bronze, the
tiger-skins and antique vessels and garments of his pictures, may be
found in this notable house in the midst of London. Whether he paints
the baths, the amphitheatre, or the atrium, the scenes of his pictures
are no other than parts of his own house which he has faithfully
painted.
[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
POYNTER. IDLE FEARS.
(_By permission of Lord Hillingdon, the owner of the picture._)]
And the figures moving in them are Englishwomen. Among all the beautiful
things in the world there are few so beautiful as English girls. Those
tall, slender, vigorous figures that one sees upon the beach at Brighton
are really like Greek women, and even the garb which they wear in
playing tennis is as free and graceful as that of the Grecian people.
Alma Tadema was able to introduce into his works these women of lofty
and noble figure with golden hair, these forms made for sculpture--to
use the phrase of Winckelmann--without any kind of beautifying idealism.
In their still-life his pictures are the fruit of enormous archæological
learning which has become intuitive vision, but his figures are the
result of a healthy rendering of life. In this way the unrivalled
classical local colour of his interiors is to be explained, as well as
the lifelike character of his figures. By his works a remarkable problem
is solved: an intense feeling for modern reality has called the ancient
world into being in a credible fashion, whilst it has remained
barricaded against all others who have approached it by the road of
idealism.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
POYNTER. THE IDES OF MARCH.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
It is only in this method of execution that he still stands upon the
same ground as Gérôme, with whom he shares a taste for anecdote, and a
pedantic, neat, and correct style of painting. His ancient comedies
played by English actors are an excellent archæological lecture; they
rise above the older picture of antique manners by a more striking
fidelity to nature, very different from the generalisation of the
Classicists' ideal; yet as a painter he is wanting in every quality. His
marble shines, his bronze gleams, and everything is harmonised with the
green of the cypresses and delicate rose-colour of the oleander blossoms
in a cool marble tone; but there is also something marble in the figures
themselves. He draws and stipples, works like a copper engraver, and
goes over his work again and again with a fine and feeble brush. His
pictures have the effect of porcelain, his colours are hard and
lifeless. One remembers the anecdotes, but one cannot speak of any idea
of colour.
[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
POYNTER. A VISIT TO ÆSCULAPIUS.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
ALMA TADEMA. SAPPHO.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
_Albert Moore_ is to be noted as the solitary "painter" of the group: a
very delicate artist, with a style peculiar to himself; one who is not
so well known upon the Continent as he deserves to be. His province,
also, is ancient Greece, yet he never attempted to reconstruct classical
antiquity as a learned archæologist. Merely as a painter did he love to
dream amid the imperishable world of beauty known to ancient times. His
figures are ethereal visions, and move in dreamland. He was influenced,
indeed, by the sculptures of the Parthenon, but the Japanese have also
penetrated his spirit. From the Greeks he learnt the combination of
noble lines, the charm of dignity and quietude, while the Japanese gave
him the feeling for harmonies of colour, for soft, delicate, blended
tones. By a capricious union of both these elements he formed his
refined and exquisite style. The world which he has called into being is
made up of white marble pillars; in its gardens are cool fountains and
marble pavements; but it is also full of white birds, soft colours, and
rosy blossoms from Kioto, and peopled with graceful and mysterious
maidens, clothed in ideal draperies, who love rest, enjoy an eternal
youth, and are altogether contented with themselves and with one
another. It might be said that the old figures of Tanagra had received
new life, were it not felt, at the same time, that these beings must
have drunk a good deal of tea. Not that they are entirely modern, for
their figures are more plastic and symmetrical than those of the actual
daughters of Albion; but in all their movements they have a certain
_chic_, and in all their shades of expression a weary modernity, through
which they deviate from the conventional woman of Classicism. Otherwise
the pictures of Albert Moore are indescribable. Frail, ethereal beings,
blond as corn, lounge in æesthetically graduated grey and blue,
salmon-coloured, or pale purple draperies upon bright-hued couches
decorated by Japanese artists with most æsthetic materials; or are
standing in violet robes with white mantles embroidered with gold, by a
grey-blue sea which has a play of greenish tones where it breaks upon
the shore. They stand out with their rosy garments from the light grey
background and the delicate arabesques of a gleaming silvery gobelin, or
in a graceful pose occupy themselves with their rich draperies. They do
as little as they possibly can, but they are living and seductive, and
the stuffs which they wear and have around them are delicately and
charmingly painted. It is harmonies of tone and colour that exclusively
form the subject of every work. The figures, accessories, and detail
first take shape when the scheme of colour has been found; and then
Albert Moore takes a delight in naming his pictures "Apricots,"
"Oranges," "Shells," etc., according as the robes are apricot or orange
colour or adorned with light ornaments of shell. Everything which comes
from his hands is delightful in the charm of delicate simplicity, and
for any one who loves painting as painting it has something soothing in
the midst of the surrounding art, which still confuses painting with
poetry more than is fitting.
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
ALMA TADEMA. A VISIT.]
[Illustration: _Scribner._ ALBERT MOORE.]
Such a painter-poet of the specifically English type is
_Briton-Rivière_. He is a painter of animals, and as such one of the
greatest of the century. Lions and geese, royal tigers and golden
eagles, stags, dogs, foxes, Highland cattle, he has painted them all,
and with a mastery which has nothing like it except in Landseer. Amongst
the painters of animals he stands alone through his power of conception
and his fine poetic vein, while in all his pictures he unites the
greatest simplicity with enormous dramatic force. Accessory work is
everywhere kept within the narrowest limits, and everywhere the
character of the animals is magnificently grasped. He does not alone
paint great tragic scenes as Barye chiselled them, for he knows that
beasts of prey are usually quiet and peaceable, and only now and then
obey their savage nature. Moreover, he never attempts to represent
animals performing a masquerade of humanity in their gestures and
expression, as Landseer did, nor does he transform them into comic
actors. He paints them as what they are, a symbol of what humanity was
once itself, with its elemental passions and its natural virtues and
failings. Amongst all animal painters he is almost alone in resisting
the temptation to give the lion a consciousness of his own dignity, the
tiger a consciousness of his own savageness, the dog a consciousness of
his own understanding. They neither pose nor think about themselves. In
addition to this he has a powerful and impressive method, and a deep and
earnest scheme of colour. In the beginning of his career he learnt most
from James Ward. Later he felt the influence of the refined, chivalrous,
and piquant Scotchmen Orchardson and Pettie. But the point in which
Briton-Rivière is altogether peculiar is that in which he joins issue
with the painters influenced by Greece: he introduces his animals into a
scene where there are men of the ancient world.
Briton-Rivière is descended from a French family which found its way
into England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and he is one
of those painters--so frequent in English art--whose nature has
developed early: when he was fourteen he left school, exhibited in the
Academy when he was eighteen, painted as a pre-Raphaelite between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and graduated at Oxford at
seven-and-twenty. In his youth he divided his time between art and
scholarship--painting pictures and studying Greek and Latin literature.
Thus he became a painter of animals, having also an enthusiasm for the
Greek poets, and he has stood for a generation as an uncontested lord
and master on his own peculiar ground. In his first important picture,
of 1871, the comrades of Ulysses, changed into swine, troop grunting
round the enchantress Circe. In the masterpiece of 1872 the Prophet
Daniel stands unmoved and submissive to the will of God amid the lions
roaring and showing their teeth, ready to spring upon him in their
hunger, yet regarding him with a mysterious fear, spellbound by the
power of his eye; while his great picture "Persepolis" makes the appeal
of a page from the philosophy of history, with its lions roaming
majestically amid the ruins of human grandeur and human civilisation,
which are flooded with moonlight. The picture "In Manus Tuas, Domine,"
showed St. George riding solitary through the lonely and silent recesses
of a primitive forest upon a pale white horse. He is armed in mail and
has a mighty sword; a deep seriousness is imprinted on his features, for
he has gone forth to slay the dragon. In yet another picture, "An
Old-World Wanderer," a man of the early ages has come ashore upon an
untrodden island, and is encompassed by flocks of great white birds,
fluttering round him with curiosity and confidence, as yet ignorant of
the fear of human beings. The picture of 1891, "A Mighty Hunter before
the Lord," is one of his most poetic night-pieces: Nimrod is returning
home, and beneath the silvery silence of the moon the dead and dying
creatures which he has laid low upon the wide Assyrian plain are tended
and bemoaned by their mates.
[Illustration: _Scribner._
ALBERT MOORE. MIDSUMMER.
(_By permission of Messrs. Cadbury, Jones & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: ALBERT MOORE. COMPANIONS.
(_By permission of Messrs. Dowdeswell & Dowdeswells, the owners of the
copyright._)]
Between whiles he painted subjects which were not borrowed from ancient
history, illustrating the friendship between man and dog, as Landseer
had done before him. For instance, in "His Only Friend" there is a poor
lad who has broken down at the last milestone before the town and is
guarded by his dog. In "Old Playfellows," again, one of the playmates is
a child, who is sick and leans back quietly in an armchair covered with
cushions. His friend the great dog has one paw resting on the child's
lap, and looks up with a pensive expression, such as Landseer alone had
previously painted. But in this style he reached his highest point in
"Sympathy." No work of Briton-Rivière's has become more popular than
this picture of the little maiden who has forgotten her key and is
sitting helpless before the house-door, consoled by the dog who has laid
his head upon her shoulder.
[Illustration: _Scribner._
ALBERT MOORE. YELLOW MARGUERITES.
(_By permission of W. Connal, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
Since the days of Reynolds English art has shown a most vivid
originality in such representations of children. English picture-books
for children are in these days the most beautiful in the world, and the
marvellous fairy-tales and fireside stories of _Randolph Caldecott_ and
_Kate Greenaway_ have made their way throughout the whole Continent. How
well these English draughtsmen know the secret of combining truth with
the most exquisite grace! How touching are these pretty babies, how
angelically innocent these little maidens! Frank eyes, blue as the
flowers of the periwinkle, gaze at you with no thought of their being
looked at in return. The naïve astonishment of the little ones, their
frightened mien, their earnest look absently fixed upon the sky, the
first tottering steps of a tiny child and the mobile grace of a
schoolgirl, all are rendered in these prints with the most tender
intimacy of feeling. And united with this there is a delicate and
entirely modern sentiment for scenery, for the fascination of bare
autumn landscapes robbed of their foliage, for sunbeams and the budding
fragrance of spring. Everything is idyllic, poetic, and touched by a
congenial breath of tender melancholy.
[Illustration: _Scribner._
ALBERT MOORE. WAITING TO CROSS.
(_By permission of Lord Davey, the owner of the picture._)]
And this aerial quality, this delicacy and innocent grace and
tenderness, is not confined alone to such representations of children,
but is peculiar to English painting. Even when perfectly ordinary
subjects from modern life are in question the basis of this art is, as
in the first half of the century, by no means the sense for what is
purely pictorial, by no means that naturalistic pantheism which inspires
the modern French, but rather a sense for what is moral or ethical. The
painter seldom paints merely for the joy of painting, and the numberless
technical questions which play such an important part in French art are
here only of secondary importance. It accords with the character and
taste of the people that their artists have rather a poetic design than
one which is properly pictorial. The conception is sometimes allegorical
and subtle to the most exquisite fineness of point, sometimes it is
vitiated by sentimentality, but it is never purely naturalistic; and
this qualified realism, this realism with a poetic strain to keep it
ladylike, set English art, especially in the years when Bastien-Lepage
and Roll were at their zenith, in sharp opposition to the art of France.
In those days the life-size artisan picture, the prose of life, and the
struggle for existence reigned almost exclusively in the Parisian Salon,
whereas in the Royal Academy everything was quiet and cordial; an
intimate, inoffensive, and heartfelt cheerfulness was to be found in the
pictures upon its walls, as if none of these painters knew of the
existence of such a place as Whitechapel. A connection between pictures
and poems is still popular, and some touching trait, some tender
episode, some expression of softness, is given to subjects drawn from
the ordinary life of the people. Painters seek in every direction after
pretty rustic scenes, moving incidents, or pure emotions. Instead of
being harsh and rugged in their sense of truth and passion, they glide
lightly away from anything ugly, bringing together the loveliest and
most beautiful things in nature, and creating elegies, pastorals, and
idylls from the passing events of life. Their method of expression is
fastidious and finished to a nicety; their vision of life is smiling and
kindly, though it must not be supposed that their optimism has now
anything in common with the _genre_ picture of 1850. The _genre_
painters from Wilkie to Collins epitomised the actual manners of the
present in prosaic compositions. But here the most splendid poetry
breaks out, as indeed it actually does in the midst of ordinary life. If
in that earlier period English painting was awkward in narration,
vulgar, and didactic, it is now tasteful, refined, beautiful, and of
distinction. The philistinism of the pictures of those days has been
finally stripped away, and the humorously anecdotic _genre_ entirely
overcome. The generation of tiresome narrative artists has been followed
by painter-poets of delicacy and exquisite tenderness of feeling.
[Illustration: _Scribner._
ALBERT MOORE. READING ALOUD.
(_By permission of W. Connal, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
Two masters who died young and have a peculiarly captivating
individuality, George Mason and Fred Walker, stand at the head of this,
the most novel phase of English painting. Alike in the misfortune of
premature death, they are also united by a bond of sympathy in their
taste and sentiment. If there be truth in what Théophile Gautier once
said in a beautiful poem, "_Tout passe, l'art robuste seul a
l'éternité_," neither of them will enter the kingdom of immortality.
That might be applied to them which Heine said of Leopold Robert: they
have purified the peasant in the purgatory of their art, so that nothing
but a glorified body remains. As the pre-Raphaelites wished to give
exquisite precision to the world of dream, Walker and Mason have taken
this precision from the world of reality, endowing it with a refined
subtlety which in truth it does not possess. Their pictures breathe only
of the bloom and essence of things, and in them nature is deprived of
her strength and marrow, and painting of her peculiar qualities, which
are changed into coloured breath and tinted dream. They may be
reproached with an excess of nervous sensibility, an effort after style
by which modern truth is recast, a morbid tendency towards suave
mysticism. Nevertheless their works are the most original products of
English painting during the last thirty years, and by a strange union of
realism and poetic feeling they have exercised a deeply penetrative
influence upon Continental art.
"_Æquam semper in rebus arduis servare mentem_" might be chosen as a
motto for _George Mason's_ biography. Brought up in prosperous
circumstances, he first became a doctor, but when he was
seven-and-twenty he went to Italy to devote himself to painting; here he
received the news that he was ruined. His father had lost everything,
and he found himself entirely deprived of means, so that his life became
a long struggle against hunger. He bound himself to dealers, and
provided animal pieces by the dozen for the smallest sums. In a freezing
room he sat with his pockets empty, worked until it was dark, and crept
into bed when Rome went to feast. After two years, however, he had at
last saved the money necessary for taking him back to England, and he
settled with his young wife in Wetley Abbey. This little village, where
he lived his simple life in the deepest seclusion, became for him what
Barbizon had been for Millet. He wandered by himself amongst the fields,
and painted the valleys of Wetley with the tenderness of feeling with
which Corot painted the outskirts of Fontainebleau. He saw the ghostly
mists lying upon the moors, saw the peasants returning from the plough
and the reapers from the field, noted the children, in their life so
closely connected with the change of nature. And yet his peasant
pictures more resemble the works of Perugino than those of
Bastien-Lepage. The character of their landscape is to some extent
responsible for this. For the region he paints, in its lyrical charm,
has kinship with the hills in the pictures of Perugino. Here there grow
the same slender trees upon a delicate, undulating soil. But the silent,
peaceful, and resigned human beings who move across it have also the
tender melancholy of Umbrian Madonnas. Mason's realism is merely
specious; it consists in the external point of costume. There are really
no peasants of such slender growth, no English village maidens with such
rosy faces and such coquettish Holland caps. Mason divests them of all
the heaviness of earth, takes, as it were, only the flower-dust from
reality. The poetic grace of Jules Breton might be recalled, were it not
that Mason works with more refinement and subtlety, for his idealism was
unconscious, and never resulted in an empty, professional painting of
beauty.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
CALDECOTT. THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
When he painted his finest pictures he suffered from very bad health,
and his works have themselves the witchery of disease, the fascinating
beauty of consumption. He painted with such delicacy and refinement,
because sickness had made him weak and delicate; he divested his peasant
men and women of everything fleshly, so that nothing but a shadow of
them remained, a spirit vibrating in fine, elusive, dying chords. In his
"Evening Hymn" girls are singing in the meadow; to judge from their
dresses, they should be the daughters of the peasantry, but one fancies
them religious enthusiasts, brought together upon this mysterious and
sequestered corner of the earth by a melancholy world-weariness, by a
yearning after the mystical. Fragile as glass, sensitive to the ends of
their fingers, and, one might say, morbidly spiritual, they breathe out
their souls in song, encompassed by the soft shadows of the evening
twilight, and uttering all the exquisite tenderness of their subtle
temperament in the hymn they chant. Another of his pastoral symphonies
is "The Harvest Moon." Farm labourers are plodding homewards after their
day's work. The moon is rising, and casts its soft, subdued light upon
the dark hills and the slender trees, in the silvery leaves of which the
evening wind is playing. "The Gander," "The Young Anglers," and "The
Cast Shoe" are captivating through the same delicacy and the same mood
of peaceful resignation. George Mason is an astonishing artist, almost
always guilty of exaggeration, but always seductive. Life passes in his
pictures like a beautiful summer's day, and with the accompaniment of
soft music. A peaceful, delicate feeling, something mystical,
bitter-sweet, and suffering, lives beneath the light and tender veil of
his pictures. They affect the nerves like a harmonica, and lull one with
low and softly veiled harmonies. Many of the melancholy works of Israels
have a similar effect, only Israels is less refined, has less of
distinction and--more of truth.
[Illustration: MASON. THE END OF THE DAY.
(_By gracious permission of H.M. Queen Victoria, the owner of the
picture._)]
This suavity of feeling is characteristic in an almost higher degree of
_Fred Walker_, a sensitive artist never satisfied with himself. Every
one of his pictures gives the impression of deep and quiet reverie;
everywhere a kind of mood, like that in a fairy tale, colours the
ordinary events of life in his works, an effect produced by his refined
composition of forms and colours. In his classically simple art Mason
was influenced by the Italians, and especially the Umbrians. Walker drew
a similar inspiration from the works of Millet. Both the Englishman and
the Frenchman died in the same year, the former on 20th January 1875, in
Barbizon, the latter on 5th June, in Scotland; and yet in a certain
sense they stand at the very opposite poles of art. Walker is graceful,
delicate, and tender; Millet forceful, healthy, and powerful. "To draw
sublimity from what is trivial" was the aim of both, and they both
reached it by the same path. All their predecessors had held truth as
the foe of beauty, and had qualified shepherds and shepherdesses,
ploughmen and labourers, for artistic treatment by forcing upon them the
smiling grace and the strained humour of _genre_ painting. Millet and
Fred Walker broke with the frivolity of this elder school of painting,
which had seen matter for jesting, and only that, in the life of the
rustic; they asserted that in the life of the toiler nothing was more
deserving of artistic representation than his toil. They always began by
reproducing life as they saw it, and by disdaining, in their effort
after truth, all artificial embellishment; they came to recognise, both
of them at the same time, a dignity in the human frame, and grandiose
forms and classic lines in human movement, which no one had discovered
before. With the most pious reverence for the exact facts of life, there
was united that greatness of conception which is known as style.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
WALKER. THE BATHERS.
(_By permission of Messrs. Thomas Agnew & Sons, the owners of the
copyright._)]
Fred Walker, the Tennyson of painting, was born in London in 1840, and
had scarcely left school before the galleries of ancient art in the
British Museum became his favourite place of resort. Drawings for
wood-engraving were his first works, and with Millet in France he has
the chief merit of having put fresh life into the traditional style of
English wood engraving, so that he is honoured by the young school of
wood-engravers as their lord and master. His first, and as yet
unimportant, drawings appeared in 1860 in a periodical called _Once a
Week_, for which Leech, Millais, and others also made drawings. Shortly
after this _début_ he was introduced to Thackeray, then the editor of
_Cornhill_, and he undertook the illustrations with Millais. In these
plates he is already seen in his charm, grace, and simplicity. His
favourite season is the tender spring, when the earth is clothed with
young verdure, and the sunlight glances over the naked branches, and
the children pluck the first flowers which have shot up beneath their
covering of snow.
His pictures give pleasure by virtue of the same qualities--delicacy of
drawing, bloom of colouring, and a grace which is not affected in spite
of its Grecian rhythm.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BOUGHTON. GREEN LEAVES AMONG THE SERE.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
Walker was the first to introduce that delicate rosy red which has since
been popular in English painting. His method of vision is as widely
removed from that of Manet as from Couture's brown sauce. The surface of
every one of his pictures resembles a rare jewel in its delicate finish:
it is soft, and gives the sense of colour and of refined and soothing
harmony. His first important work, "Bathers," was exhibited in 1867 at
the Royal Academy, where works of his appeared regularly during the next
five years. About a score of young people are standing on the verge of a
deep and quiet English river, and are just about to refresh themselves
in the tide after a hot August day. Some, indeed, are already in the
water, while others are sitting upon the grass and others undressing.
The frieze of the Parthenon is recalled, so plastic is the grace of
these young frames, and the style and repose of the treatment of lines,
which are such as may only be found in Puvis de Chavannes. In his next
picture, "The Vagrants," he represented a group of gipsies camping round
a fire in the midst of an English landscape. A mother is nursing her
child, while to the left a woman is standing plunged in thought, and to
the right a lad is throwing wood upon the faintly blazing fire. Here,
too, the figures are all drawn severely after nature and yet have the
air of Greek statues. There is no modern artist who has united in so
unforced a manner actuality and fidelity to nature with "the noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the antique. In a succeeding picture
of 1870, "The Plough," a labourer is striding over the ground behind the
plough. The long day is approaching its end, and the moon stands silvery
in the sky. Far into the distance the field stretches away, and the
heavy tread of the horses mingles in the stillness of evening with the
murmur of the stream which flows round the grassy ridge, making its soft
complaint. "Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the
evening" is its thoroughly English motto. The same still mournfulness of
sunset he painted in that work of marvellous tenderness, "The Old Gate."
The peace of dusk is resting upon a soft and gentle landscape. A lady
who is the owner of a country mansion and is dressed like a widow has
just stepped out from the garden gate, accompanied by her maid, who is
in the act of shutting it; children are playing on the steps, and a
couple of labourers are going past in front and look towards the lady of
the house. It is nothing except the meeting of certain persons, a scene
such as takes place every day, and yet even here there is a subtlety and
tenderness which raise the event from the prose of ordinary life into a
mysterious world of poetry.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BOUGHTON. SNOW IN SPRING.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
In his later period he deviated more and more towards a fragrant
lyricism. In his great picture of 1872, "The Harbour of Refuge," the
background is formed by one of those peaceful buildings where the aged
poor pass the remainder of their days in meditative rest. The sun is
sinking, and there is a rising moon. The red-tiled roof stands out clear
against the quiet evening sky, while upon the terrace in front, over
which the tremulous yellow rays of the setting sun are shed, an old
woman with a bowed figure is walking, guided by a graceful girl who
steps lightly forward. It is the old contrast between day and night,
youth and age, strength and decay. Yet in Walker there is no opposition
after all. For as light mingles with the shadows in the twilight, this
young and vigorous woman who paces in the evening, holding the arm of
the aged in mysterious silence, has at the moment no sense of her youth,
but is rather filled with that melancholy thought underlying Goethe's
"_Warte nur balde_," "Wait awhile and thou shalt rest too." Her eyes
have a strange gaze, as though she were looking into vacancy in mere
absence of mind. And upon the other side of the picture this theme of
the transient life of humanity is still further developed. Upon a bench
in the midst of a verdant lawn covered with daisies a group of old men
are sitting meditatively near a hedge of hawthorn luxuriant in blossom.
Above the bench there stands an old statue casting a clearly defined
shadow upon the gravel path, as if to point to the contrast between
imperishable stone and the unstable race of men, fading away like the
autumn leaves. Well in the foreground a labourer is mowing down the
tender spring grass with a scythe--a strange, wild, and rugged figure, a
reaper whose name is Death.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BOUGHTON. A BREATH OF WIND.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
It was not long before evening drew on for the painter, and Death, the
mighty reaper, laid him low.
Of a nervous and sensitive temperament, Walker had one of those natures
which find their way with difficulty through this rude world of fact.
Those little things which he had the art of painting so beautifully, and
which occupy such an important place in his work, had, in another sense,
more influence upon his life than ought to have been the case. While
Mason faced all unpleasantnesses with stoical indifference, Walker
allowed himself to be disturbed and hindered in his work by every
failure and every sharp wind of criticism. In addition to that he was,
like Mason, a victim of consumption. A residence in Algiers merely
banished the insidious disease for a short time. Amongst the last works,
which he exhibited in 1875, a considerable stir was made by a drawing
called "The Unknown Land": a vessel with naked men is drawing near the
shores of a wide and peaceful island bathed in a magical light. Soon
afterwards Walker had himself departed to that unknown land: he died in
Scotland when he was five-and-thirty. His body was brought to the little
churchyard at Cookham on the banks of the Thames. In this village Fred
Walker is buried amid the fair river landscape which he so loved and so
often painted.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BOUGHTON. THE BEARERS OF THE BURDEN.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
After the pre-Raphaelite revolution, the foundation of the school of
Walker indicated the last stage of English art. His influence was far
greater than might be supposed from the small number of his works, and
fifty per cent. of the English pictures in every exhibition would
perhaps never have been painted if he had not been born. A national
element long renounced, that old English sentiment which once inspired
the landscapes of Gainsborough and the scenes of Morland, and was lost
in the hands of Wilkie and the _genre_ painters, lives once more in Fred
Walker. He adapted it to the age by adding something of Tennyson's
passion for nature. There is a touch of symbolism in that old gate which
he painted in the beautiful picture of 1870. He and Mason opened it so
that English art might pass into this new domain, where musical
sentiment is everything, where one is buried in sweet reveries at the
sight of a flock of geese driven by a young girl, or a labourer stepping
behind his plough, or a child playing, free from care, with pebbles at
the water's edge. Their disciples are perhaps healthier, or, should one
say, "less refined,"--in other words, not quite so sensitive and
hyper-æsthetic as those who opened the old gate. They seem physically
more robust, and can better face the sharp air of reality. They no
longer dissolve painting altogether into music and poetry; they live
more in the world at every hour, not merely when the sun is setting, but
also when the prosaic daylight exposes objects in their material
heaviness. But the tender ground-tone, the effort to seize nature in
soft phases, is the same in all. Like bees, they suck from reality only
its sweets. The earnest, tender, and deeply heartfelt art of Walker has
influenced them all.
Evening when work is over, the end of summer, twilight, autumn, the pale
and golden sky, and the dead leaves are the things which have probably
made the most profound impression on the English spirit. The hour when
toil is laid aside, and rest begins and people seek their homes, and the
season when fires are first lighted are the hour and the season most
beloved by this people, which, with all its rude energy, is yet so
tender and full of feeling. Repose to the point of enervation and the
stage where it passes into gentle melancholy is the theme of their
pictures--this, and not toil.
How many have been painted in the last forty years in which people are
returning from their work of an evening across the country! The people
in the big towns look upon the country with the eyes of a lover,
especially those parts of it which lie near the town; not the scenes
painted by Raffaelli, but the parks and public gardens. Soft, undulating
valleys and gently swelling hills are spread around, the flowers are in
bloom, and the leaves glance in the sunshine. And over this country,
with its trim gravel paths and its green, luxuriant lawns, there comes a
well-to-do people. Even the labourers seem in good case as they go home
across the flowery meadows.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
J. R. REID. TOIL AND PLEASURE.]
_George H. Boughton_ was one of the most graceful and refined amongst
Walker's followers. By birth and descent a countryman of Crome and
Cotman, he passed his youth in America, worked several years in Paris
from 1853, and in 1863 settled in London, where he was exceedingly
active as a draughtsman, a writer, and a painter. His charming
illustrations for _Harper's Magazine_, where he also published his
delicate story _The Return of the Mayflower_, are well known. As a
painter, too, his brush was only occupied by pleasant things, whether
belonging to the past or the present. There is something in him both of
the delicacy of Gainsborough and of the poetry of Memlinc. He delights
in the murmur of brooks and the rustle of leaves, in fresh children and
pretty young women in æesthetically fantastic costume; he loves
everything delicate, quiet, and fragrant. And for this reason he also
takes delight in old legends entwined with blossoms, and attains a most
harmonious effect when he places shepherds and kings' daughters of
story, and steel-clad knights and squires in his charming and entirely
modern landscapes. Almost always it is autumn, winter, or at most the
early spring in his pictures. The boughs of the trees are generally
bare, though sometimes a tender pointed yellowish verdure is budding
upon them. At times the mist of November hovers over the country like a
delicate veil; at times the snowflakes fall softly, or the October sun
gleams through the leafless branches.
[Illustration: FRANK HOLL.]
Moreover, a feeling for the articulation of lines, for a balance of
composition, unforced, and yet giving a character of distinction, is
peculiar to him in a high degree. In 1877 he had in the Royal Academy
the charming picture "A Breath of Wind." Amid a soft landscape with
slender trees move the thoroughly Grecian figures of the shapely English
peasants, whilst the tender evening light is shed over the gently rising
hills. His picture of 1878 he named "Green Leaves among the Sere": a
group of children, in the midst of whom the young mother herself looks
like a child, are seated amid an autumn landscape, where the leaves
fall, and the sky is shrouded in wintry grey. In the picture "Snow in
Spring" may be seen a party of charming girls--little modern Tanagra
figures--whom the sun has tempted into the air to search for the
earliest woodland snowdrops under the guidance of a damsel still in her
'teens. Having just reached a secret corner of the wood, they are
standing with their flowers in their hands surrounded by tremulous
boughs, when a sudden snowstorm overtakes them. Thick white flakes
alight upon the slender boughs, and combine with the light green leaves
and pale reddish dresses of the children in making a delicate harmony of
colour. Among his legendary pictures the poetic "Love Conquers all
Things," in particular is known in Germany: a wild shepherd's daughter
sits near her flock, and the son of a king gazes into her eyes lost in
dream.
[Illustration: HOLL. "THE LORD GAVE, THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY; BLESSED
BE THE NAME OF THE LORD."
(_By permission of E. C. Pawle, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
Boughton is not the only painter of budding girlhood. All English
literature has a tender feminine trait. Tennyson is the poet most widely
read, and he has won all hearts chiefly through his portraits of women:
Adeline, Eleänore, Lilian, and the May Queen--that delightful gallery of
pure and noble figures. In English painting, too, it is seldom men who
are represented, but more frequently women and children, especially
little maidens in their fresh pure witchery.
Belonging still to the older period there is _Philip H. Calderon_, an
exceedingly fertile although lukewarm and academical artist, in whose
blood is a good deal of effeminate Classicism. When his name appears in
a catalogue it means that the spectator will be led into an artificial
region peopled with pretty girls--beings who are neither sad nor gay,
and who belong neither to the present nor to ancient times, to no age in
particular and to no clime. Whenever such ethereal girlish figures wear
the costume of the Directoire period, _Marcus Stone_ is their father. He
is likewise one of the older men whose first appearance was made before
the time of Walker. His young ladies part broken-hearted from a beloved
suitor, turned away by their father, and save the honour of their
family by giving their hand to a wealthy but unloved aspirant, or else
they are solitary and lost in tender reveries. In his earliest period
Marcus Stone had a preference for interiors; rich Directoire furniture
and objects of art indicate with exactness the year in which the
narrative takes place. Later, he took a delight in placing his _rococo_
ladies and gentlemen in the open air, upon the terraces of old gardens
or in sheltered alleys. All his pictures are pretty, the faces, the
figures, and the accessories; in relation to them one may use the
adjective "pretty" in its positive, comparative, or superlative degree.
In England Marcus Stone is the favourite painter of "sweethearts," and
it cannot be easy to go so near the boundaries of candied _genre_
painting and yet always to preserve a certain _noblesse_.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
HOLL. LEAVING HOME.]
Amongst later artists _G. D. Leslie_, the son of Charles Leslie, has
specially the secret of interpreting innocent feminine beauty, that
somewhat predetermined but charming grace derived from Gainsborough and
the eighteenth century. A young lady who has lately been married is
paying a visit to her earlier school friends, and is gazed upon as
though she were an angel by these charming girls. Or his pretty maidens
have ensconced themselves beneath the trees, or stand on the shore
watching a boat at sunset, or amuse themselves from a bridge in a park
by throwing flowers into the water and looking dreamily after them as
they float away. Leslie's pictures, too, are very pretty and poetic, and
have much silk in them and much sun, while the soft pale method of
painting, so highly æsthetic in its delicate attenuation of colour,
corresponds with the delicacy of their purport.
[Illustration: HOLL. ORDERED TO THE FRONT.]
_P. G. Morris_, not less delicate in feeling and execution, became
specially known by a "Communion in Dieppe." Directly facing the
spectator a train of pretty communicants move upon the seashore,
assuming an air of dignified superiority, like young ladies from
Brighton or Folkestone. A bluish light plays over the white dresses of
the girls and over the blue jackets of the sailors lounging about the
quay; it fills the pale blue sky with a misty vibration and glances
sportively upon the green waves of the sea. "The Reaper and the Flowers"
was a thoroughly English picture, a graceful allegory after the fashion
of Fred Walker. On their way from school a party of children meet at the
verge of a meadow an old peasant going home from his day's work with a
scythe upon his shoulder. In the dancing step of the little ones may be
seen the influence of Greek statues; they float along as if borne by the
zephyr, with a rhythmical motion which is seldom found in real
school-children. But the old peasant coming towards them is intended to
recall the contrast between youth and age as in Fred Walker's "Harbour
of Refuge"; while the scythe glittering in the last rays of the setting
sun signifies the scythe of Fate, the scythe of death which does not
even spare the child.
[Illustration: OULESS. LORD KELVIN.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
And thus the limits of English painting are defined. It always reveals a
certain conflict between fact and poetry, reverie and life. For whenever
the scene does not admit of a directly ethical interpretation, refuge is
invariably taken in lyricism. The wide field which lies between, where
powerful works are nourished, works which have their roots in reality,
and derive their life from it alone, has not been definitely conquered
by English art. England is the greatest producer and consumer in the
world, and her people press the marrow out of things as no other have
ever done: and yet this land of industry knows nothing of pictures in
which work is being accomplished; this country, which is a network of
railway lines, has never seen a railway painted. Even horses are less
and less frequently represented in English art, and sport finds no
expression there whatever. Much as the Englishman loves it from a sense
of its wholesomeness, he does not consider it sufficiently æsthetic to
be painted, a matter upon which Wilkie Collins enlarges in an amusing
way in his book _Man and Wife_.
And in English pictures there are no poor, or, at any rate, none who are
wretched in the extreme. For although the Chelsea Pensioners were a
favoured theme in painting, there were none of them miserable and
heavy-laden; they were rather types of the happy poor who were carefully
tended. If English painters are otherwise induced to represent the poor,
they depict a room kept in exemplary order, and endeavour to display
some touching or admirable trait in honest and admirable people. In
fact, people seem to be good and honourable wherever they are found.
Everywhere there is content and humility, even in misfortune. Even where
actual need is represented, it is only done in the effort to give
expression to what is moving in certain dispensations of fate, and to
create a lofty and conciliating effect by the contrast between
misfortune and man's noble trust in God.
_John R. Reid_, a Scotchman by birth, but residing in London, has
treated scenes from life upon the seacoast in this manner. How different
his works are from the tragedies of Joseph Israels, or the grim
naturalism of Michael Ancher! He occupies himself only with the bright
side of life with its colour and sunshine, not with the dark side with
its toils. He paints the inhabitants of the country in their Sunday
best, as they sit telling stories, or as they go a-hunting, or regale
themselves in the garden of an inn. The old rustics who sit happy with
their pipes and beer in his "Cricket Match" are typical of everything
that he has painted.
And even when, once in a way, a more gloomy trait appears in his
pictures, it is there only that the light may shine the more brightly.
The poor old flute-player who sits homeless upon a bench near the house
is placed there merely to show how well off are the children who are
hurrying merrily home after school. His picture of 1890, indeed, treated
a scene of shipwreck, but a passage from a poet stood beneath; there was
not a lost sailor to be seen, and all the tenderness of the artist is
devoted to the pretty children and the young women gazing with anxiety
and compassion across the sea.
_Frank Holl_ was in the habit of giving his pictures a more lachrymose
touch, together with a more sombre and ascetic harmony of colour. He
borrowed his subjects from the life of the humble classes, always
searching, moreover, for melancholy features; he took delight in
representing human virtue in misfortune, and for the sake of greater
effect he frequently chose a verse from the Bible as the title. Thus the
work with which he first won the English public was a picture exhibited
in 1869: "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name
of the Lord." A family of five brothers and sisters, who have just lost
their mother, are assembled round the breakfast-table in a poorly
furnished room. One sister is crying, another is sadly looking straight
before her, whilst a third is praying with folded hands. The younger
brother, a sailor, has just reached home from a voyage, to close his
dying mother's eyes, and the eldest of all, a young and earnest curate,
is endeavouring to console his brothers and sisters with the words of
Job.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
SANT. THE MUSIC LESSON.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
The next picture, exhibited in 1871, he called "No Tidings from the
Sea," and represented in it a fisherman's family--grandmother, mother,
and child--who in a cheerless room are anxiously expecting the return of
a sailor. "Leaving Home" showed four people sitting on a bench outside a
waiting-room at a railway station. To awaken the spectator's pity "Third
Class" is written in large letters upon the window just above their
heads. The principal figure is a lady dressed in black, who is counting,
in a somewhat obtrusive manner, the little money which she still has
left.
In the picture "Necessity knows no Law" a poor woman with a child in her
arms has entered a pawnshop to borrow money on her wedding-ring; in
another, women of the poorer class are to be seen walking along with
their soldier sons and husbands, who have been called out on active
service. One of them clasps tightly to her breast her little child, the
only one still remaining to her in life, whilst an aged widow presses
the hand of her son with the sad presentiment that, even if he comes
back to her, she will probably not have long to live after his return.
Not only did Frank Holl paint stories for his countrymen, but he also
painted them big in majuscule characters which were legible without
spectacles, and he partially owed his splendid successes to this cheap
sentimentality.
Almost everywhere the interest of subject still plays the first part,
and this slightly lachrymose trait bordering on _genre_, this lyrically
tender or allegorically subtle element, which runs through English
figure pictures, would easily degenerate into vaporous enervation in
another country. In England portrait painting, which now, as in the days
of Reynolds, is the greatest title to honour possessed by English art,
invariably maintains its union with direct reality. By acknowledgment
portrait painting in the present day is exceedingly earnest: it admits
of no decorative luxuriousness, no sport with hangings and draperies, no
pose; and English likenesses have this severe actuality in the highest
degree. Stiff-necked obstinacy, sanguine resolution, and muscular force
of will are often spoken of as an Englishman's national characteristics,
and a trace of these qualities is also betrayed in English portrait
painting. The self-reliance of the English is far too great to suffer or
demand any servile habit of flattery: everything is free from pose,
plain and simple. Let the subject be the weather-beaten figure of an old
sailor or the dazzling freshness of English youth, there is a remarkable
energy and force of life in all their works, even in the pictures of
children with their broad open brow, finely chiselled nose, and assured
and penetrative glance. And as portrait painting in England, to its own
advantage and the benefit of all art, has never been considered as an
isolated province, such pictures may be specified among the works of the
most frigid academician as well as amongst those of the most vigorous
naturalist. Frank Holl, who had such a Düsseldorfian tinge in his more
elaborate pictures, showed at the close of his life, in his likenesses
of the engraver Samuel Cousins, Lord Dufferin, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,
Lord Wolseley, Mr. Gladstone, the Duke of Cleveland, Sir George
Trevelyan, and Lord Spencer, a simple virility altogether wanting in his
earlier works. They had a trenchant characterisation and an unforced
pose which were striking even in England. It is scarcely possible to
exhibit people more naturally, or more completely to banish from their
expression that concentrated air of attentiveness which suggests
photography and so easily intrudes into a portrait. Even Leighton, so
devoid of temperament, so entirely devoted to the measured art of the
ancients, became at once nervous and almost brutal in his power when he
painted a portrait in place of ideal Grecian figures. His vivid and
forcible portrait of Sir Richard Burton, the celebrated African
traveller, would do honour to the greatest portrait painter of the
Continent.
[Illustration: FURSE. FRONTISPIECE TO "STORIES AND INTERLUDES."]
Amongst portrait painters by profession _Walter Ouless_ will probably
merit the place of honour immediately after Watts as an impressive
exponent of character. He has assimilated much from his master
Millais--not merely the heaviness of colour, which often has a
disturbing effect in the latter, but also Millais' powerful flight of
style, always so free from false rhetoric. The chemical expert Pochin,
as Ouless painted him in 1865, does not pose in the picture nor allow
himself to be disturbed in his researches. It is a thoroughly
contemporary portrait, one of those brilliant successes which later
occurred in France also. The Recorder of London, Mr. Russell Gurney, he
likewise painted in his professional character and in his robes of
office. In its inflexible graveness and earnest dignity the likeness is
almost more than the portrait of an individual; it seems the embodiment
of the proud English Bench resting upon the most ancient traditions. His
portrait of Cardinal Manning had the same convincing power of
observation, the same large and sure technique. The soft light plays
upon the ermine and the red stole, and falls full upon the fine,
austere, and noble face.
Besides Ouless mention may be made from among the great number of
portrait painters of _J. J. Shannon_, with his powerful and firmly
painted likenesses; of _James Sant_, with his sincere and energetic
portraits of women; of _Mouat Loudan_, with his pretty pictures of
children, and of the many-sided _Charles W. Furse_. Hubert Herkomer was
the most celebrated in Germany, and is probably the most skilful of the
young men whom _The Graphic_ brought into eminence in the seventies.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
HERKOMER. JOHN RUSKIN.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
HERKOMER. CHARTERHOUSE CHAPEL.]
The career of _Hubert Herkomer_ is amongst those adventurous ones which
become less and less frequent in the nineteenth century; there are not
many who have risen so rapidly to fame and fortune from such modest
circumstances. His father was a carver of sacred images in the little
Bavarian village of Waal, where Hubert was born in 1849. In 1851 the
enterprising Bavarian tried his fortune in the New World. But there he
did not succeed in making progress, and in 1857 the family appeared in
England, at Southampton. Here he fought his way honestly at the bench
where he carved, and as a journeyman worker, whilst his wife gave
lessons in music. A commission to carve Peter Vischer's four evangelists
in wood brought him with his son to Munich, where they occupied room in
the back buildings of a master-carpenter's house, in which they slept,
cooked, and worked. In the preparatory class of the Munich Academy the
younger Herkomer received his first teaching, and began to draw from the
nude, the antique serving as model. At a frame-maker's in Southampton he
gave his first exhibition, and drew illustrations for a comic paper.
With the few pence which he saved from these earnings he went to London,
where he lived from hand to mouth with a companion as poor as himself.
He cooked, and his friend scoured the pans; meanwhile he worked as a
mason on the frieze of the South Kensington Museum, and hired himself
out for the evenings as a zither-player. Then _The Graphic_ became his
salvation, and after his drawings had made him known he soon had success
with his paintings. "After the Toil of the Day," a picture which he
exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1873--a thoughtful scene from the
village life of Bavaria, carried out after the manner of Fred
Walker--found a purchaser immediately. He was then able to make a home
for his parents in the village of Bushey, which he afterwards glorified
in the picture "Our Village," and he began his masterpiece "The Last
Muster," which obtained in 1878 the great medal at the World Exhibition
in Paris. Since then he found the eyes of the English public fixed upon
him. There followed at first a series of pictures in which he proceeded
upon the lines of Fred Walker's poetic realism: "Eventide," a scene in
the Westminster Union; "The Gloom of Idwal," a romantic mountain
picture from North Wales; "God's Shrine," a lonely Bavarian hillside
path, with peasants praying at a shrine; "Der Bittgang," a group of
country people praying for harvest; "Contrasts," a picture of English
ladies surrounded by school-children in the Bavarian mountains. At the
same time he became celebrated as a portrait painter, his first
successes in this field being the likenesses of Wagner and Tennyson,
Archibald Forbes, his own father, John Ruskin, Stanley, and the
conductor Hans Richter. And he reached the summit of his international
fame when his portrait of Miss Grant, "The Lady in White," appeared in
1886; all Europe spoke of it at the time, and it called forth entire
bundles of poems, anecdotes, biographies, and romances. From that time
he advanced in his career with rapid strides.
[Illustration: _Art Annual._
HERKOMER. PORTRAIT OF HIS FATHER.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
The University of Oxford appointed him Professor of the Fine Arts. He
opened a School of Art, and had etchings, copper engravings, and
engravings in mezzotint produced by his pupils under his guidance. He
wrote articles in the London papers upon social questions, and political
economy, and all manner of subjects, an article signed with Herkomer's
name being always capable of creating interest. He has his own theatre,
and produces in it operas of which he writes the text and the music, and
manages the rehearsals and the scenery, besides playing the leading
parts.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
HERKOMER. HARD TIMES.
(_By permission of the Manchester Art Gallery, the owners of the
picture._)]
Yet it is just his portraits of women, the foundations of his fame,
which do not seem in general to justify entirely the painter's great
reputation. Miss Grant was certainly a captivating woman, and she broke
men's hearts wherever she made her appearance. People gazed again and
again into the brilliant brown eyes with which she looked so composedly
before her; they were overwhelmed by her austere and lofty virginal
beauty. "The Lady in Black (An American Lady)" made yet a more piquant
and spiritualised effect. There was the unopened bud, and here the
woman who has had experience of the delights and disappointments of
life. There was unapproachable pride, and here a trait of distinction
and of suffering, an almost weary carriage of the body. There would
certainly be an interesting gallery of beauty if Herkomer unite these
"types of women" in a series. But even in the first picture how much of
all the admiration excited was due to the painter and how much to the
model? The portrait of Miss Grant was such a success primarily because
Miss Grant herself was so beautiful. The arrangement of white against
white was nothing new: Whistler, a far greater artist, had already
painted a "White Girl" in 1863, and it was a much greater work of art,
though, on account of the attractiveness of the model being less
powerful, it triumphed only in the narrower circle of artists.
Bastien-Lepage, who set himself the same problem in his "Sara
Bernhardt," had also run through the scale of white with greater
sureness. And Herkomer's later pictures of women--"The Lady in Yellow,"
Lady Helen Fergusson, and others--are even less alluring, considered as
works of art. The reserve and evenness of the execution give his
portraits a somewhat clotted and stiff appearance. Good modelling and
exceedingly vigorous drawing may perhaps ensure great correctness in
the counterfeit of the originals, but the life of the picture vanishes
beneath the greasy technique, the soapy painting through which materials
of drapery and flesh-tints assume quite the same values. There is
nothing in it of the transparency, the rosy delicacy, freshness, and
flower-like bloom of Gainsborough's women and girls. Herkomer appears in
these pictures as a salon painter in whom a tame but tastefully
cultivated temperament is expressed with charm. Even his landscapes with
their trim peasants' cottages and their soft moods of sunset have not
enriched with new notes the scale executed by Walker.
All the more astonishing is the earnest certainty of touch and the
robust energy which are visible in his other works. His portraits of
men, especially the one of his father, that kingly old man with the
long, white beard and the furrowed brow, take their place beside the
best productions of English portraiture, which are chiselled, as it
were, in stone. In "The Last Muster" he showed that it is possible to be
simple and yet strike a profound note and even attain greatness. For
there is something great in these old warriors, who at the end of their
days are praying, having never troubled themselves over prayer during
all their lives, who have travelled so far and staked their lives dozens
of times, and are now drawing their last breath softly upon the seats of
a church. Even his more recent groups--"The Assemblage of the Curators
of the Charterhouse" and "The Session of the Magistrates of
Landsberg"--are magnificent examples of realistic art, full of imposing
strength and soundness. In the representation of these citizens the
genius of the master who in his "Chelsea Pensioners" created one of the
"Doelen pieces" of the nineteenth century, revealed itself afresh in all
its greatness.
Beside portrait painting the painting of landscape stands now as ever in
full bloom amongst the English; not that the artists of to-day are more
consistently faithful to truth than their predecessors, or that they
seem more modern in the study of light. In the province of landscape as
in that of figure painting, far more weight is laid upon subject than on
the moods of atmosphere. If one compares the modern English painters
with Crome and Constable, one finds them wanting in boldness and
creative force; and placed beside Monet, they seem to be diffident
altogether. But a touching reverence for nature gives almost all their
pictures a singularly chaste and fragrant charm.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
HERKOMER. THE LAST MUSTER.
(_By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the
picture._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
HERKOMER. FOUND.]
Of course, all the influences which have affected English art in other
respects are likewise reflected in landscape painting. The epoch-making
activity of the pre-Raphaelites, the passionate earnestness of Ruskin's
love for nature, as well as the influence of foreign art, have all left
their traces. In his own manner Constable had spoken the last word. The
principal thing in him, as in Cox, was the study of atmospheric effects
and of the dramatic life of air. They neither of them troubled
themselves about local colour, but sought to render the tones which are
formed under atmospheric and meteorological influences; they altogether
sacrificed the completion of the details of subject to seizing the
momentary impression. In Turner, generally speaking, it was only the air
that lived. Trees and buildings, rocks and water, are merely
_repoussoirs_ for the atmosphere; they are exclusively ordained to lead
the eye through the mysterious depths of light and shadow. The
intangible absorbed what could be touched and handled. As a natural
reaction there came this pre-Raphaelite landscape, and by a curious
irony of chance the writer who had done most for Turner's fame was also
he who first welcomed this pre-Raphaelite landscape school. Everything
which the old school had neglected now became the essential object of
painting. The landscape painters fell in love with the earth, with the
woods and the fields; and the more autumn resolved the wide green
harmony of nature into a sport of colours multiplied a thousand times,
the more did they love it. Thousands of things were there to be seen.
First, how the foliage turned yellow and red and brown, and then how it
fell away: how it was scattered upon a windy day, whirling in a yellow
drift of leaves; how in still weather leaf after leaf lightly rustled to
the ground from between the wavering brown boughs. And then when the
foliage fell from the trees and bushes the most inviolate secrets of
summer came to light; there lay around quantities of bright seeds and
berries rich in colour, brown nuts, smooth acorns, black and glossy
sloes, and scarlet haws. In the leafless beeches there clustered pointed
beechmast, the mugwort bent beneath its heavy red bunches, late
blackberries lay black and brown amid the damp foliage upon the road,
bilberries grew amid the heather, and wild raspberries bore their dull
red fruit once again. The dying ferns took a hundred colours; the moss
shot up like the ears of a miniature cornfield. Eager as children the
landscape painters roamed here and there across the woodland, to
discover its treasures and its curiosities. They understood how to paint
a bundle of hay with such exactness that a botanist could decide upon
the species of every blade. One of them lived for three months under
canvas, so as thoroughly to know a landscape of heath. Confused through
detail, they lost their view of the whole, and only made a return to
modernity when they came to study the Parisian landscape painters. Thus
English art in this matter made a curious circuit, giving and taking.
First, the English fertilised French art; but at the time when French
artists stood under the influence of the English, the latter swerved in
the opposite direction, until they ultimately received from France the
impulse which led them back into the old way.
In accordance with these different influences, several currents which
cross and mingle with each other are to be found flowing side by side in
English landscape painting: upon one side a spirit of prosaic
reasonableness, a striving after clearness and precision, which does not
know how to sacrifice detail, and is therefore wanting in pictorial
totality of effect; on the other side an artistic pantheism which rises
at times to high lyrical poetry in spite of many dissonances.
The pictures of _Cecil Lawson_ lead to the point where the
pre-Raphaelites begin. The elder painters, with their powerful treatment
and the freedom and boldness of their execution, still keep altogether
on the lines of Constable, whereas in later painters, with their minute
elaboration of all particularities, the influence of the pre-Raphaelites
becomes more and more apparent.
Where Cecil Lawson ended, _James Clarke Hook_ began, the great
master-spirit who opened the eyes of the world fifty years ago to the
depth of colouring and the enchanting life of nature, even in its
individual details. His pictures, especially those sunsets which he
paints with such delight, have something devout and religious in them;
they have the effect of a prayer or a hymn, and often possess a
solemnity which is entirely biblical, in spite of their brusque, pungent
colours. In his later period he principally devoted himself to
sea-pieces, and in doing so receded from the pre-Raphaelite painting of
detail, which is characteristic of his youthful period. His pictures
give one the breath of the sea, and his sailors are old sea-wolves. All
that remains from his pre-Raphaelite period is that, as a rule, they
carry a certain burden of ideas.
_Vicat Cole_, likewise one of the older school, is unequal and less
important. From many of his pictures one receives the impression that he
has directly copied Constable, and others are bathed in dull yellow
tones; nevertheless he has sometimes painted autumn pictures, felicitous
and noble landscapes, in which there is really a reflection of the sun
of Claude Lorrain.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
LAWSON. THE MINISTER'S GARDEN.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
With much greater freedom does _Colin Hunter_ approach nature, and he
has the secret of seizing her boldly in her most impressive moments. The
twilight, with its mysterious, interpenetrating tremor of colours of a
thousand shades, its shine and glimmer of water, with the sky brooding
heavily above, is what fascinates him most of all. Sometimes he
represents the dawn, as in "The Herring Market at Sea"; sometimes the
pale tawny sunset, as in "The Gatherers of Seaweed," in the South
Kensington Museum. His men are always in a state of restless activity,
whether they are making the most of the last moments of light or facing
the daybreak with renewed energies.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
COLIN HUNTER. THE HERRING MARKET AT SEA.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
Although resident in London, he and Hook are the true standard-bearers
of the forcible Scotch school of landscape. _MacCallum_, _MacWhirter_,
and _James Macbeth_, with whom _John Brett_, the landscape painter of
Cornwall, may be associated, are all gnarled, Northern personalities.
Their strong, dark tones stand often beside each other with a little
hardness, but they sum up the great glimpses of nature admirably. Their
brush has no tenderness, their spirit does not lightly yield to
dreaminess, but they stand with both feet firmly planted on the earth,
and they clasp reality in a sound and manly fashion with both arms.
Their deep-toned pictures, with red wooden houses, darkly painted
vessels, veiled skies, and rude fishermen with all their heart in their
work, waken strong and intimate emotions. The difference between these
Scots and the tentative spirits of the younger generation of the
following of Walker and Mason is like that between Rousseau and Dupré as
opposed to Chintreuil and Daubigny. The Scotch painters are sombre and
virile; they have an accent of depth and truth, and a dark, ascetic
harmony of colour. Even as landscape painters the English love what is
delicate in nature, what is refined and tender, familiar and modest:
blossoming apple-trees and budding birches, the odour of the cowshed and
the scent of hay, the chime of sheep-bells and the hum of gnats. They
seek no great emotions, but are merely amiable and kindly, and their
pictures give one the feeling of standing at the window upon a country
excursion, and looking out at the laughing and budding spring. In her
novel _North and South_ Mrs. Gaskell has given charming expression to
the glow of this feeling of having fled from the smoke and dirt of
industrial towns to breathe the fresh air and see the sun go down in the
prosperous country, where the meadows are fresh and well-kept, and where
the flowers are fragrant and the leaves glisten in the sunshine. In the
pictures of the Scotch artists toiling men are moving busily; for the
English, nature merely exists that man may have his pleasure in her. Not
only is everything which renders her the prosaic handmaiden of mankind
scrupulously avoided, but all abruptnesses of landscape, all the chance
incidents of mountain scenery; and, indeed, they are not of frequent
occurrence in nature as she is in England. A familiar corner of the
country is preferred to wide prospects, and some quiet phase to nature
in agitation. Soft, undulating valleys, gently spreading hills
conforming to the Hogarthian line of beauty, are especially favoured.
And should the rainbow, the biblical symbol of atonement, stand in the
sky, the landscape is for English eyes in the zenith of its beauty.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
AUMONIER. THE SILVER LINING TO THE CLOUD.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
COLIN HUNTER. THEIR ONLY HARVEST.]
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
HENRY MOORE. MOUNT'S BAY.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
There is _Birket Forster_, one of the first and most energetic followers
of Walker--Birket Forster, whose charming woodcuts became known in
Germany likewise; _Inchbold_, who with a light hand combines the tender
green of the grasses upon the dunes and the bright blue of the sea into
a whole pervaded with light, and of great refinement; _Leader_, whose
bright evening landscapes, and _Corbet_, whose delicate moods of
morning, are so beautiful. _Mark Fisher_, who in the matter of tones
closely follows the French landscape school, though he remains entirely
English in sentiment, has painted with great artistic power the dreamy
peace of solitary regions as well as the noisy and busy life of the
purlieus of the town. _John White_, in 1882, signalised himself with a
landscape, "Gold and Silver," which was bathed in light and air. The
gold was a waving cornfield threaded by a sandy little yellow path; the
silver was the sea glittering and sparkling in the background. Moved by
Birket Forster, _Ernest Parton_ seeks to combine refinement of tone with
incisiveness in the painting of detail. His motives are usually quite
simple--a stream and a birch wood in the dusk, a range of poplars
stretching dreamily along the side of a ditch. _Marshall_ painted gloomy
London streets enveloped in mist; _Docharty_ blossoming hawthorn bushes
and autumn evening with russet-leaved oaks; while _Alfred East_ became
the painter of spring in all its fragrance, when the meadows are
resplendent in their earliest verdure, and the leaves of the trees which
have just unfolded stand out against the firmament in light green
patches of colour, when the limes are blossoming and the crops begin to
sprout. _M. J. Aumonier_ appears in the harmony of colouring, and in the
softness of his fine, light-hued tones, as the true heir of Walker and
Mason. A discreet and intimate sense of poetry pervades his valleys with
their veiled and golden light, a fertile odour of the earth streams from
his rich meadows, and from all the luxuriant, cultivated, and peacefully
idyllic tracts which he has painted so lovingly and so well. _Gregory_,
_Knight_, _Alfred Parsons_, _David Fulton_, _A. R. Brown_, and _St.
Clair Simmons_ have all something personal in their work, a bashful
tenderness beneath what is seemingly arid. The study of water-colour
would alone claim a chapter for itself. Since water-colour allows of
more breadth and unity than oil-painting, it is precisely here that
there may be found exceedingly charming and discreet concords, softly
chiming tones of delicate blue, greenish, and rosy light, giving the
most refined sensations produced by English colouring.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
LUKE FILDES. VENETIAN WOMEN.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
Of course, England has a great part to play in the painting of the sea.
It is not for nothing that a nation occupies an insular and maritime
position, above all with such a sea and upon such coasts, and the
English painter knows well how to give an heroic and poetic cast to the
weather-beaten features of the sailor. For thirty years _Henry Moore_,
the elder brother of Albert Moore, was the undisputed monarch of this
province of art. Moore began as a landscape painter. From 1853 to 1857
he painted the glistening cliffs and secluded nooks of Cumberland, and
then the green valleys of Switzerland flooded with the summer air and
the clear morning light--quiet scenes of rustic life, the toil of the
wood-cutter and the haymaker, somewhat as Julien Dupré handles such
matters at the present time in Paris. From 1858 he began his conquest of
the sea, and in the succeeding interval he painted it in all the phases
of its changing life,--at times in grey and sombre morning, at other
times when the sun stands high; at times in quietude, at other times
when the wind sweeps heavily across the waves, when the storm rises or
subsides, when the sky is clouded or when it brightens. It is a joy to
follow him in all quarters of the world, to see how he constantly
studies the waves of every zone on fair or stormy days, amid the
clearness and brilliancy of the mirror of the sea, as amid the strife of
the elements; as a painter he is, at the same time, always a student of
nature, and treats the sea as though he had to paint its portrait. In
the presence of his sea-pieces one has the impression of a window
opening suddenly upon the ocean. Henry Moore measures the boundless
expanse quite calmly, like a captain calculating the chances of being
able to make a crossing. Nowhere else does there live any painter who
regards the sea so much with the eyes of a sailor, and who combines such
eminent qualities with this objective and cool, attentive observation,
which seems to behold in the sea merely its navigable capacity.
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
STANHOPE FORBES. THE LIGHTHOUSE.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
The painter of the river-port of London and the arm of the Thames is
_William L. Wyllie_, whose pictures unite so much bizarre grandeur with
so much precision. One knows the port life of the Thames, with its
accumulation of work, which has not its like upon the whole planet.
Everything is colossal. From Greenwich up to London both sides of the
river are a continuous quay: everywhere there are goods being piled,
sacks being raised on pulleys, ships being laid at anchor; everywhere
are fresh storehouses for copper, beer, sails, tar, and chemicals. The
river is of great width, and is like a street populated with ships, a
workshop winding again and again. The steamers and sailing vessels move
up and down stream, or lie in masses, close beside one another, at
anchor. Upon the bank the docks lie athwart like so many streets of
water, sending out ships or taking them in. The ranks of masts and the
slender rigging form a spider's web spreading across the whole horizon;
and a vaporous haze, penetrated by the sun, envelops it with a reddish
veil. Every dock is like a town, filled with huge vats and populated
with a swarm of human beings, that move hither and thither amid
fluttering shadows. This vast panorama, veiled with smoke and mist, only
now and then broken by a ray of sunlight, is the theme of Wyllie's
pictures. Even as a child he ran about in the port of London, clambered
on to the ships, noted the play of the waves, and wandered about the
docks; and so he painted his pictures afterwards with all the technical
knowledge of a sailor. There is no one who knows so well how ships stand
in the water; no one has such an understanding of their details: the
heavy sailing vessels and the great steamers, which lie in the brown
water of the port like mighty monsters, the sailors and the movements of
the dock labourers, the dizzy tide of men, the confusion of cabs and
drays upon the bridges spanning the arm of the Thames; only Vollon in
Paris is to be compared with him as painter of a river-port.
[Illustration: R. ANNING BELL. OBERON AND TITANIA WITH THEIR TRAIN.]
Apart from him, _Clara Montalba_ specially has painted the London port
in delicate water-colours. Yet she is almost more at home in Venice, the
Venice of Francesco Guardi, with its magic gleam, its canals, regattas,
and palaces, the Oriental and dazzling splendour of San Marco, the
austere grace of San Giorgio Maggiore, the spirited and fantastic
_décadence_ of Santa Maria della Salute. Elsewhere English water-colour
often enters into a fruitless rivalry with oil-painting, but Clara
Montalba cleaves to the old form which in other days under Bonington,
David Cox, and Turner was the chief glory of the English school. She
throws lightly upon paper notes and effects which have struck her, and
the memory of which she wishes to retain.
For the English painters of the day, so far as they do not remain in the
country, Venice has become what the East was for the earlier
generations. They no longer study the romantic Venice which Turner
painted and Byron sang in _Childe Harold_, they do not paint the noble
beauty of Venetian architecture or its canals glowing in the sun, but
the Venice of the day, with its narrow alleys and pretty girls, Venice
with its marvellous effects of light and the picturesque figures of its
streets. Nor are they at pains to discover "ideal" traits in the
character of the Italian people. They paint true, everyday scenes from
popular life, but these are glorified by the magic of light. After
Zezzos, Ludwig Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Tito, and Eugène Blaas, the
Englishmen Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, and Henry Woods are the most
skilful painters of Venetian street scenes. In the pictures of _Luke
Fildes_ and _W. Logsdail_ there are usually to be seen in the foreground
beautiful women, painted life-size, washing linen in the canal or seated
knitting at the house door; the heads are bright and animated, the
colours almost glaringly vivid. _Henry Woods_, the brother-in-law of
Luke Fildes, rather followed the paths prescribed by Favretto in such
pictures as "Venetian Trade in the Streets," "The Sale of an Old
Master," "Preparation or the First Communion," "Back from the Rialto,"
and the like; of all the English he has carried out the study of bright
daylight most consistently. The little glass house which he built in
1879 at the back of the Palazzo Vendramin became the model of all the
glass studios now disseminated over the city of the lagunes.
And these labours in Venice contributed in no unessential manner to lead
English painting, in general, away from its one-sided æsthetics and
rather more into the mud of the streets, caused it to break with its
finely accorded tones, and brought it to a more earnest study of light.
Beside his idealised Venetian women, Luke Fildes also painted large
pictures from the life of the English people, such as "The Return of the
Lost One," "The Widower," and the like, which struck tones more earnest
than English painting does elsewhere; and in his picture of 1878, "The
Poor of London," he even recalled certain sketches which Gavarni drew
during his rambles through the poverty-stricken quarter of London. The
poor starving figures in this work were rendered quite realistically and
without embellishment; the general tone was a greenish-grey, making a
forcible change from the customary light blue of English pictures.
_Dudley Hardy's_ huge picture "Homeless," where a crowd of human beings
are sleeping at night in the open air at the foot of a monument in
London, and _Jacomb Hood's_ plain scenes from London street life, are
other works which in recent years were striking, from having a character
rather French than English. _Stott of Oldham_, by his pretty pictures of
the dunes with children playing, powerful portraits, and delicate,
vaporous moonlight landscapes, has won many admirers on the Continent
also. _Stanhope Forbes_ painted "A Philharmonic Society in the Country,"
a representation of an auction, and scenes from the career of the
Salvation Army, in which he restrained himself from all subordinate
ideas of a poetic turn.
In the same way those artists are important who work according to the
demands of decorative painting. A picture in a room should be like a
jewel in its setting, in harmony. It should fit agreeably into the
scheme of decoration, its colour in unison, its lines melodious, its
general effect toning well with the general design.
[Illustration: BRANGWYN. ILLUSTRATION TO THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM.
(_By permission of Messrs. Gibbings & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
These principles, taught by Morris, have had a formative influence on
the work of a large number of artists. There arose a tendency which, by
borrowing characteristic effects from woodwork, carpets, and
stained-glass, and by the application of style to line as well as to
colour, went one step further than Burne-Jones.
The pictures of _John W. Waterhouse_, for instance, are not only
conceived in literary vein, but seen with the eye of a painter. By
smooth, thick lines, by the discordant harmony of blues, greens, and
violet, he gets a carpet-like effect which is highly decorative.
_Byam Shaw_, still a young man, is just such another master of
decorative lines. At the age of twenty-five he painted the picture
"Love's Baubles," which now hangs in the art gallery in Liverpool. The
subject he took from a poem in Rossetti's "House of Life." Beautiful
women snatch after the fruit which a boy carries along on a salver. The
whole is a harmony of melodious lines and rich, quiet colours.
In his next picture, "Truth," he ranges himself with Boutet de Monoel or
Ludwig von Zumbusch: he strives after the monumental effect that the
figures of old Brueghel have.
Next to Byam Shaw, _G. E. Moira_ is the chief representative of this
decorative school. His picture of Pelleas and Melisande is a work quite
out of the ordinary, original in arrangement, incisive, almost bitter in
colour, dull-green, black, lilac, and yellow; fine in the atmosphere of
Maeterlinck that pervades the whole. But he does his best work as a
decorator, not as a painter of pictures that can be taken away from
their setting. In the frieze with which he decorated the Trocadéro
Restaurant in London he, for the first time, made use of polychrome
relief, that since has played such an important part in the art of
decoration, and sought to enhance the colour effect still more by the
use of metal. In the Paris Exhibition he attracted considerable
attention by the pictures with which he decorated the pavilion of the
Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company--simple lines and fantasies of
colour which with their delicate, flowing harmony had an effect like
music. His designs for stained-glass windows have the same qualities,
and in his position as professor in the National College of Art at South
Kensington he is bound to exert a great influence over the younger
generation.
_Anning Bell_, well known by his design for the cover of the _Studio_,
has also done excellent work in coloured relief, especially in his
frieze "Music and Dancing."
_Maurice Greiffenhagen_ surprises one by the ardour of his imagination,
his strong emphatic line, and the tapestry-like beauty of his colour. He
reminds one of Aman-Jean, such a wonderful "old-master-like" beauty is
suffused through the picture "The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters
of Men." No less effective is the "gourmandise" with which he gives his
interpretation the appearance of an old picture. The colours, though
full of sound and movement, are at the same time so etiolated and faint
that one would think the picture had hung for centuries in a dusty
corner of an old church, or that spiders had spun their webs across it;
the frame too is in keeping, and enhances the general effect of
solemnity.
The same style is found in the later work of _Frank Brangwyn_, who began
by painting out-of-door pictures in the spirit of the French
Impressionists, and afterwards, thanks to a visit to the East, was
brought into touch with Nature saturated in colour and massive in
feature.
[Illustration: F. CAYLEY ROBINSON. A WINTER EVENING.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
All his works are imposing through the decisive way in which he builds
up his masses, and the wonderful, rhythmical articulation of forms and
colours combined. The picture "Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh" which has
been given a place in the Luxembourg, and the large mural painting
"Commerce and Navigation" in the Royal Exchange in London, are up to now
his strongest work.
_F. Cayley Robinson_, who arrests one's attention with his austere,
almost heraldic arrangement of line, and his gloomy acerbity of colour;
_Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale_, who awoke high hopes with her
picture "The Deceitfulness of Riches"; and that spirited draughtsman, W.
Nicholson, whose drawings lead the eye to and fro, backwards and
forwards, along heavy decided lines, noting every expressive turn and
movement. Almost all these masters have come to us from the applied
arts. It was the idea of attaining to unity of effect in decorative
ornament that impelled these artists to work in the spirit of to-day,
not that each should bring forward his own work of art and let it stand
by itself, but that the scheme of decorative architecture, modelling,
and painting should work together hand in hand in a homogeneous scheme
of decoration.
With all these artists one cannot help noticing that they owe much in
the way of light and leading to one who in England, the land of
poems-in-paint, proclaimed more outspokenly than anyone else the
principle of "Art for art's sake,"--to the great American, James M'Neill
Whistler.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER XXVIII
In General:
John Ruskin: Letters to "The Times" on the Principal Pre-Raphaelite
Pictures in the Exhibition of 1854. Reprinted for Private Circulation.
London, 1876.
Pre-Raphaelitism: Its Art, Literature, and Professors, "London and
County Review," March 1868.
The Poetic Phase in Modern English Art, "New Quarterly Magazine," June
1879.
William Holman Hunt: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, "Contemporary
Review," April-June 1886.
Edouard Rod: Les Préraphaélites Anglais, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts,"
1887, ii 177, 399.
W. v. Seidlitz: Die englische Malerei auf der Jubiläumsausstellung zu
Manchester im Sommer, 1887, "Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft," 1888,
xi 274, 405.
P. T. Forsyth: Religion in Recent Art. Manchester and London, 1889.
Wilhelm Weigand: Die aesthetische Bewegung in England, "Gegenwart,"
1889 (35), p. 165.
Wilhelm Weigand: Die Praeraphaeliten, in his "Essays." Munich, 1892.
Cornelius Gurlitt: Die Praeraphaeliten, eine britische Malerschule,
"Westermanns Monatshefte," April-June, 1892.
W. Holman Hunt: Pre-Rafaelitism and Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood. London,
1905.
Noël Paton:
J. M. Gray: Sir Noël Paton, "Art Journal," 1881, p. 78.
Holman Hunt:
F. G. Stephens: W. Holman Hunt, "Portfolio," 1871, p. 33.
F. G. Stephens: Holman Hunt's "The Triumph of the Innocents,"
"Portfolio," 1885, p. 80.
J. Beavington-Atkinson: Mr. Holman Hunt, his Work and Career,
"Blackwood's Magazine," April 1886.
Madox Brown:
W. M. Rossetti: Mr. Madox Brown's Exhibition and its Place in our
School of Painting, "Fraser's Magazine," May 1865.
Sidney Colvin: Ford Madox Brown, "Portfolio," 1870, p. 81.
Madox Brown's Mural Painting at Manchester, "Academy," 1879, p. 379.
W. M. Rossetti: Mr. Madox Brown's Frescoes in Manchester, "Art
Journal," 1881, New Series, p. 9.
E. Chesneau: Peintres anglais contemporains: Ford Madox Brown,
"L'Art," 1883, p. 409.
F. G. Stephens: Ford Madox Brown, his early Studies and Motives,
"Portfolio," 1893, pp. 62 and 69.
Millais:
Sidney Colvin: Millais, "Portfolio," 1871, p. 1.
Modern Artists. Illustrated Biographies. 2 vols. 1882-84.
Emilie Isabel Barrington: Why is Mr. Millais our Popular Painter?
"Fortnightly Review," July 1882.
Walter Armstrong: Sir J. E. Millais, his Life and Work. Illustrated
with Engravings and Facsimiles, "The Art Annual." London, 1885.
John Ruskin: Notes on some of the Principal Pictures of Sir John
Millais. London, 1886.
Helen Zimmern: Sir John Millais, "Die Kunst unserer Zeit," Munich,
1891.
M. H. Spielmann: Millais and his Works. London, 1898.
A. L. Baldry: Millais, his Art and his Influence. London, 1899.
Millais: Life and Letters of Millais. 2 vols. London, 1899.