slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also
proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater
complexity. Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst
tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction
of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a
cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river,
or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun. All
this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or
fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in
the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped
with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain
distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented
with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has
dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the
secret order which has presided over this accumulation of spots which
seem projected in a furious shower. It is a veritable orchestral piece,
where every colour is an instrument with a distinct part, and where the
hours with their different tints represent the successive themes. Monet
is the equal of the greatest landscape painters as regards the
comprehension of the true character of every soil he has studied, which
is the supreme quality of his art. Though absorbed beyond all by study
of the sunlight, he has thought it useless to go to Morocco or Algeria.
He has found Brittany, Holland, the _Ile de France_, the _Cote d'Azur_
and England sufficient sources of inspiration for his symphonies, which
cover from end to end the scale of perceptible colours. He has
expressed, for instance, the mild and vaporous softness of the
Mediterranean, the luxuriant vegetation of the gardens of Cannes and
Antibes, with a truthfulness and knowledge of the psychology of land and
water which can only be properly appreciated by those who live in this
enchanted region. This has not prevented him from understanding better
than anybody the wildness, the grand austereness of the rocks of
_Belle-Isle en mer_, to express it in pictures in which one really feels
the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking
against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of
_Water-lilies_ expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet
basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has
painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of
bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at
twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, tulip-fields in Holland,
bouquets, effects of snow and hoar frost of exquisite softness, and
sailing boats passing in the sun. He has painted some views of the banks
of the Seine which are quite wonderful in their power of conjuring up
these scenes, and over all this has roved his splendid vision of a
great, amorous and radiant colourist. The _Cathedrals_ are even more of
a _tour de force_ of his talent. They consist of seventeen studies of
Rouen Cathedral, the towers of which fill the whole of the picture,
leaving barely a little space, a little corner of the square, at the
foot of the enormous stone-shafts which mount to the very top of the
picture. Here he has no proper means to express the play of the
reflections, no changeful waters or foliage: the grey stone, worn by
time and blackened by centuries, is for seventeen times the monochrome,
the thankless theme upon which the painter is about to exercise his
vision. But Monet finds means of making the most dazzling atmospheric
harmonies sparkle upon this stone. Pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at
midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun,
standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist,
the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with
its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without
minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the
composite, bold and rich tone of Oriental carpets.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
POPLARS ON THE EPTE IN AUTUMN]
Monet excels also in suggesting the _drawing of light_, if I may venture
to use this expression. He makes us understand the movement of the
vibrations of heat, the movement of the luminous waves; he also
understands how to paint the sensation of strong wind. "Before one of
Manet's pictures," said Mme. Morisot, "I always know which way to
incline my umbrella." Monet is also an incomparable painter of water.
Pond, river, or sea--he knows how to differentiate their colouring,
their consistency, and their currents, and he transfixes a moment of
their fleeting life. He is intuitive to an exceptional degree in the
intimate composition of matter, water, earth, stone or air, and this
intuition serves him in place of intellectuality in his art. He is a
painter _par excellence_, a man born for painting, and this power of
penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a
kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate
truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is
the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist,
Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.
His work is immense. He produces with astonishing rapidity, and he has
yet another characteristic of the great painters: that of having put his
hand to every kind of subject. His recent studies of the Thames are, at
the decline of his energetic maturity, as beautiful and as spontaneous
as the _Hay-ricks_ of seventeen years back. They are thrillingly
truthful visions of fairy mists, where showers of silver and gold
sparkle through rosy vapours; and at the same time Monet combines in
this series the dream-landscapes of Turner with Monticelli's
accumulation of precious stones. Thus interpreted by this intense
faculty of synthesis, nature, simplified in detail and contemplated in
its grand lines, becomes truly a living dream.
Since the _Hay-ricks_ one can say that the work of Claude Monet is
glorious. It has been made sacred to the admiring love of the
connoisseurs on the day when Monet joined Rodin in an exhibition which
is famous in the annals of modern art. Yet no official distinction has
intervened to recognise one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth
century. The influence of Monet has been enormous all over Europe and
America. The _process of colour spots_[1] (let us adhere to this
rudimentary name which has become current) has been adopted by a whole
crowd of painters. I shall have to say a few words about it at the end
of this book. But it is befitting to terminate this all too short study
by explaining that the most lyrical of the Impressionists has also been
the theorist _par excellence_. His work connects easel painting with
mural painting. No Minister of Fine Arts has been found, who would
surmount the systematic opposition of the official painters, and give
Manet a commission for grand mural compositions, for which his method is
admirably suited. It has taken long years before such works were
entrusted to Besnard, who, with Puvis de Chavannes, has given Paris
her most beautiful modern decorations, but Besnard's work is the direct
outcome of Claude Monet's harmonies. The principle of the division of
tones and of the study of complementary colours has been full of
revelations, and one of the most fruitful theories. It has probably been
the principle which will designate most clearly the originality of the
painting of the future. To have invented it, is enough to secure
permanent glory for a man. And without wishing to put again the question
of the antagonism of realism and idealism, one may well say that a
painter who invents a method and shows such power, is highly
intellectual and gifted with a pictorial intelligence. Whatever the
subjects he treats, he creates an aesthetic emotion equivalent, if not
similar, to those engendered by the most complex symbolism. In his
ardent love of nature Monet has found his greatness; he suggests the
secrets by stating the evident facts. That is the law common to all the
arts.
[Footnote 1: _Procédé de la tache._]
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL]
VI
AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK
The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of
forty years. It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist
art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general
destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art
movement. It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy
magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the
technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite. Like
Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has
treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes
and still-life, all with equal beauty.
His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.
His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses
the same technique as Boucher: fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy,
laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the principal
values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those
of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the
opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious attitudes and an
effort towards decorative convention. Nevertheless, his _Bathers_, of
which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern
and personal. Renoir's nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas,
whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in
the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally
looked for in the features of the clothed being. Nor is Renoir's nude
that of the academicians, that poetised nude arranged according to a
pseudo-Greek ideal, which has nothing in common with contemporary women.
What Renoir sees in the nude is less the line, than the brilliancy of
the epidermis, the luminous, nacreous substance of the flesh: it is the
"ideal clay"; and in this he shows the vision of a poet; he transfigures
reality, but in a very different sense from that of the School.
Renoir's woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless,
wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub. He sets her in backgrounds of
foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents. She is a luxuriant, firm,
healthy and naïve woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes
wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and
her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti,
born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where
entire ingenuousness is a guarantee against all indecency. One cannot
but be astonished at this mixture of "Japanism," savagism and eighteenth
century taste, which constitutes inimitably the nude of Renoir.
[Illustration: RENOIR
DÉJEUNER]
[Illustration: RENOIR
IN THE BOX]
M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist
methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits.
Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet.
These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the
objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are
frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in
the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of
depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as
interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the
interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the
essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He
knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time;
how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate,
behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches
which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is
now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the _Déjeûner des
Canotiers_, the _Bal au Moulin de la Galette_, the _Box_, the _Terrace_,
the _First Step_, the _Sleeping Woman with a Cat_, and his most
beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied
with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent
of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the _Woman with the broken neck_ is related
to Manet; the portrait of _Sisley_ invents pointillism fifteen years
before the pointillists; _La Pensée_, this masterpiece, evokes
Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the
_Jeune Fille au panier_ is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the
delightful _Jeune Fille à la promenade_ is connected with Fragonard; the
_Box_, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole
worldliness of 1875. The portrait of _Jeanne Samary_ is an evocation of
the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white
satin and golden hair.
[Illustration: RENOIR
YOUNG GIRL PROMENADING]
Renoir's realism bears in spite of all, the imprint of the lyric spirit
and of sweetness. It has neither the nervous veracity of Manet, nor the
bitterness of Degas, who both love their epoch and find it interesting
without idealising it and who have the vision of psychologist novelists.
Before everything else he is a painter. What he sees in the _Bal au
Moulin de la Galette_, are not the stigmata of vice and impudence, the
ridiculous and the sad sides of the doubtful types of this low resort.
He sees the gaiety of Sundays, the flashes of the sun, the oddity of a
crowd carried away by the rhythm of the valses, the laughter, the
clinking of glasses, the vibrating and hot atmosphere; and he applies
to this spectacle of joyous vulgarity his gifts as a sumptuous
colourist, the arabesque of the lines, the gracefulness of his bathers,
and the happy eurythmy of his soul. The straw hats are changed into
gold, the blue jackets are sapphires, and out of a still exact realism
is born a poem of light. The _Déjeûner des Canotiers_ is a subject which
has been painted a hundred times, either for the purpose of studying
popular types, or of painting white table-cloths amidst sunny foliage.
Yet Renoir is the only painter who has raised this small subject to the
proportions and the style of a large canvas, through the pictorial charm
and the masterly richness of the arrangement. The _Box_, conceived in a
low harmony, in a golden twilight, is a work worthy of Reynolds. The
pale and attentive face of the lady makes one think of the great English
master's best works; the necklace, the flesh, the flounce of lace and
the hands are marvels of skill and of taste, which the greatest modern
virtuosos, Sargent and Besnard, have not surpassed, and, as far as the
man in the background is concerned, his white waistcoat, his
dress-coat, his gloved hand would suffice to secure the fame of a
painter. The _Sleeping Woman_, the _First Step_, the _Terrace_, and the
decorative _Dance_ panels reveal Renoir as an _intimiste_ and as an
admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of
grasping nature and of ingenuity--strangers to all decadent
complexity--have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have
expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with
over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of
dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with
inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.
[Illustration: RENOIR
WOMAN'S BUST]
His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It
seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the
palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches
for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical
dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to
take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and
conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in assembling those tones
which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed
strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded
colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he
can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One
feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian
shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one
refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional
virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It
is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the
most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his
generation. The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques
according to their own character: the gladioles and roses in pasty
paint, the poor flowers of the field are defined by a cross-hatching of
little touches. Influenced by the purple shadow of the large
flower-decked hats, the heads of young girls are painted on coarse
canvas, sketched in broad strokes, with the hair in one colour only.
Some little study appears like wool, some other has the air of agate,
or is marbled and veined according to his inexplicable whim. We have
here an incessant confusion of methods, a complete emancipation of the
virtuoso who listens only to his fancy. Now and then the harmonies are
false and the drawing incorrect, but these weaknesses do at least no
harm to the values, the character and the general movement of the work,
which are rather accentuated by them.
[Illustration: RENOIR
YOUNG WOMAN IN EMPIRE COSTUME]
Surely, it would be false to exclude ideologist painting which has
produced wonders, and not less iniquitous to reproach Impressionism with
not having taken any interest in it! One has to avoid the kind of
criticism which consists in reproaching one movement with not having had
the qualities of the others whilst maintaining its own, and we have
abandoned the idea of Beauty divided into a certain number of clauses
and programmes, towards the sum total of which the efforts of the
eclectic candidates are directed. M. Renoir is probably the most
representative figure of a movement where he seems to have united all
the qualities of his friends. To criticise him means to criticise
Impressionism itself. Having spent half of its strength in proving to
its adversaries that they were wrong, and the other half in inventing
technical methods, it is not surprising to find that Impressionism has
been wanting in intellectual depth and has left to its successors the
care of realising works of great thought. But it has brought us a sunny
smile, a breath of pure air. It is so fascinating, that one cannot but
love its very mistakes which make it more human and more accessible.
Renoir is the most lyrical, the most musical, the most subtle of the
masters of this art. Some of his landscapes are as beautiful as those of
Claude Monet. His nudes are as masterly in painting as Manet's, and more
supple. Not having attained the scientific drawing which one finds in
Degas's, they have a grace and a brilliancy which Degas's nudes have
never known. If his rare portraits of men are inferior to those of his
rivals, his women's portraits have a frequently superior distinction.
His great modern compositions are equal to the most beautiful works by
Manet and Degas. His inequalities are also more striking than theirs.
Being a fantastic, nervous improvisator he is more exposed to radical
mistakes. But he is a profoundly sincere and conscientious artist.
[Illustration: RENOIR
ON THE TERRACE]
The race speaks in him. It is inexplicable that he should not have met
with startling success, since he is voluptuous, bright, happy and
learned without heaviness. One has to attribute his relative isolation
to the violence of the controversies, and particularly to the dignity of
a poet gently disdainful of public opinion and paying attention solely
to painting, his great and only love. Manet has been a fighter whose
works have created scandal. Renoir has neither shown, nor hidden
himself: he has painted according to his dream, spreading his works,
without mixing up his name or his personality with the tumult that raged
around his friends. And now, for that very reason, his work appears
fresher and younger, more primitive and candid, more intoxicated with
flowers, flesh and sunlight.
VII
THE SECONDARY PAINTERS OF IMPRESSIONISM--CAMILLE PISSARRO, ALFRED
SISLEY, PAUL CÉZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MISS MARY CASSATT, EVA GONZALÈS,
GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE, BAZILLE, ALBERT LEBOURG, EUGÈNE BOUDIN.
Manet, Degas, Monet and Renoir will present themselves as a glorious
quartet of masters, in the history of painting. We must now speak of
some personalities who have grown up by their side and who, without
being great, offer nevertheless a rich and beautiful series of works.
Of these personalities the most considerable is certainly that of M.
Camille Pissarro. He painted according to some wise and somewhat timid
formulas, when Manet's example won him over to Impressionism to which he
has remained faithful. M. Pissarro has been enormously productive. His
work is composed of landscapes, rustic scenes, and studies of streets
and markets. His first landscapes are in the manner of Corot, but bathed
in blond colour: vast cornfields, sunny woods, skies with big, flocking
clouds, effects of soft light--these are the motifs of some charming
canvases which have a solid, classic quality. Later the artist adopted
the method of the dissociation of tones, from which he obtained some
happy effects. His harvest and market scenes are luminous and alive. The
figures in these recall those of Millet. They bear witness to high
qualities of sincere observation, and are the work of a man profoundly
enamoured of rustic life. M. Pissarro excels in grouping the figures, in
correctly catching their attitudes and in rendering the medley of a
crowd in the sun. Certain fans in particular will always remain
delightful caprices of fresh colour, but it would be vain to look in
this attractive, animated and clear painting for the psychologic gifts,
the profound feeling for grand silhouettes, and the intuition of the
worn and gloomy soul of the men of the soil, which have made Millet's
noble glory. At the time when, about 1885, the neo-Impressionists whom
we shall study later on invented the Pointillist method, M. Pissarro
tried it and applied it judiciously, with the patient, serious and
slightly anxious talent, by which he is distinguished. Recently, in a
series of pictures representing views of Paris (the boulevards and the
Avenue de l'Opéra) M. Pissarro has shewn rare vision and skill and has
perhaps signed his most beautiful and personal paintings. The
perspective, the lighting, the tones of the houses and of the crowds,
the reflections of rain or sunshine are intensely true; they make one
feel the atmosphere, the charm and the soul of Paris. One can say of
Pissarro that he lacks none of the gifts of his profession. He is a
learned, fruitful and upright artist. But he has lacked originality; he
always recalls those whom he admires and whose ideas he applies boldly
and tastefully. It is probable that his conscientious nature has
contributed not little towards keeping him in the second rank.
Incapable, certainly, of voluntarily imitating, this excellent and
diligent painter has not had the sparks of genius of his friends, but
all that can be given to a man through conscientious study, striving
after truth and love of art, has been acquired by M. Pissarro. The rest
depended on destiny only. There is no character more worthy of respect
and no effort more meritorious than his, and there can be no better
proof of his disinterestedness and his modesty, than the fact that,
although he has thirty years of work behind him, an honoured name and
white hair, M. Pissarro did not hesitate to adopt, quite frankly, the
technique of the young Pointillist painters, his juniors, because it
appeared to him better than his own. He is, if not a great painter, at
least one of the most interesting rustic landscape painters of our
epoch. His visions of the country are quite his own, and are a
harmonious mixture of Classicism and Impressionism which will secure one
of the most honourable places to his work.
[Illustration: PISSARRO
RUE DE L'EPICERIE, ROUEN]
[Illustration: PISSARRO
BOULEVARDE MONTMARTRE]
[Illustration: PISSARRO
THE BOILDIEAUX BRIDGE AT ROUEN]
[Illustration: PISSARO
THE AVENUE DE L'OPÉRA]