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MODERN FRENCH MASTERS
MODERN FRENCH
MASTERS
BY
MARIE VAN VORST
WITH PREFACE BY
ALEXANDER HARRISON
PARIS
BRENTANO’S
37 AVENUE DE L’OPERA
AND UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK
1904
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION
OF THE HOSPITALITY
OF
THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE
I INSCRIBE THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS WHICH
HAVE ALREADY APPEARED IN ITS PAGES
TO MY FRIEND
GEORGE R. HALKETT
PARIS, 1904
90 RUE DE VARENNE
PREFACE
The source of art is the fountain of Love: the winged spirits, Painting,
Sculpture, and Poetry, spring from it hand in hand. With affectionate
leave-takings and cries of joy at their liberation, they soar into
space, the angel of Music out-winging the rest because of more lambent
fibre, but she is no more vital nor pulsating than her sisters.
Genius is Love, Talent is the sure perception of essentials combined
with the power of expression. Talent, coupled with genius, produces the
Love-Child that men call a Masterpiece.
The love-child in Art is the most perfect of all human creations,
whether the artist lover be conventional or academic, or rebellious
against form and schools, or capricious and eccentric. Emerson said:
“Write above your door the word, ‘_Whim_.’” This, Alfred Stevens,
Besnard, Dégas, and the great sculptor Carries would have applauded,
and above all--Whistler!
Whether the lover be brutal and aggressive (Courbet and at times
Besnard), shy and distinguished (Puvis de Chavannes), dreamy and
caressing (Corot and Cazin), alert and pulsating (Sargent, Zorn),
retiring and retrospective (Millet-Lobre), nobly dominating (like Rodin,
who says “_il faut planer_”)--or varied in impulse--one might say
capricious--like Whistler, Bastien Lepage and Monticeli--the obsession
of the _motif_ will infallibly assert itself in convincing form, the
vital impulse of loyal desire will in every case assume masterly shape,
and if sequent be great. And as all the world loves a lover, so all the
world sooner or later will love the lover’s work.
It is extremely difficult to justly decide how potent for good or evil
upon the individuality of genius is the influence of the so-called
“_Schools_.” The influences of early education and distant ideals often
impede true progress. Youth submits naturally to an instruction which
may or may not be misdirected. Broad cultivation of general, vital, and
æsthetic force, and encouragement of impulse, are advantageous, whereas
the domination of the pupil by the master-teacher may be detrimental.
The valiant and revered old soldier-artist Gérome constantly asserted:
_Le dessin c’est la probité de l’art_.
Puvis de Chavannes would have formulated that Art is the expression of
love, not of military probity! None the less, however, are those wrong
who cavil against the Schools purely from a spirit of adverse criticism.
Great Bastien Lepage, the year before his death, told me that it was his
constant struggle to overcome bad habits formed in the École des Beaux
Arts, whilst on the other hand, other temperaments have profited
normally by the codes of the École.
Jules Breton is said to have left the School a failure, and to have
afterwards wrought out his real success in the loneliness of his native
fastnesses.
Besnard, in spite of being Prix de Rome, has had a sufficiently broad
grasp and requisite assertive audacity to benefit by the Schools. He
quickly assimilated such influences as served his purpose, intelligently
discarding what might otherwise have hampered him. Besnard’s
temperamental confidence, and at times his lack even of reverence, while
possibly weakening to his inspiration from the point of view of poetical
reserve and distinction assured his freedom and strengthened his
audacious fecundity. He at times lacks _tenderness_, but he loves hard!
and his are _les défauts des grandes qualités_.
Puvis de Chavannes, gentle, distinguished, noble and shy, was both
personally and professionally the Grand Seigneur of modern art. He is
full of restraint; thoughtful, reserved, a lover of style. There is no
audacity in this painter’s work, which is at times wavering and even
clumsy in expression, nevertheless Puvis de Chavannes is _un dieu_!
Rodin and Besnard are both masterly, constructive draughtsmen: the
former invariably synthetic in execution and generally so in conception.
Besnard reaches his apotheosis in La Fée. In the art of both men there
is marvellous variety--both of _motif_ and treatment. Rodin’s gigantic
force is calm and sure; Besnard’s nervous--sometimes even boisterous as
though he were naïvely rebelling against a moment of bashfulness!
If Rodin can be said to possess a fault, it is _an occasional dominance
of the grotesque_: a probable result of an intense personality, too
great originality. Besnard’s over-desire is similar; and he is more
frequently garish, over-audacious in his experiments and his
expression. A striking contrast to these painters is Cazin. His art is
timid, caressing, poetic and tender. He lacks the nobility of aim of
Puvis de Chavannes. He is intimate, domestic, directly in _liaison_ with
his painting.
He treats his art as something dear to his heart, peculiarly personal.
He loved to fondle nature in her _purring_ moments; in the soft hours of
twilight, when the spirit of the landscape is moody, fleeting, gently
sad submissive and persuasive.
ALEXANDER HARRISON.
CONCARNEAU, _April 1904_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES 1
JEAN CHARLES CAZIN 31
RODIN 61
PAUL ALBERT BESNARD 105
STEINLEN 157
ILLUSTRATIONS
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES:
PAGE
Puvis de Chavannes (_From a portrait by Léon
Bonnat_) 4
Rhône et Saône (Lyons) 7
Ste. Geneviève Series (Panthéon) 11
Ste. Geneviève Series (Panthéon) 15
Ste. Geneviève Series (Panthéon) 16
Sorbonne Series, No. 1 19
Sorbonne Series, No. 2 20
“Le Repos” (Amiens) 23
“La Rivière” 24
“L’Hiver” (Salon d’Arrivée, Hôtel de Ville,
Paris) 27
JEAN CHARLES CAZIN:
The Windmill 35
A Picardy Village 39
The Death Chamber of Gambetta 43
Moonlight 47
The Village Street 51
The Holy Family 55
The End of the Village 57
RODIN:
Rodin 64
“Le Frère et la Sœur” 67
Intérieur d’Atelier 71
Le Désespoir 75
La Porte de l’Enfer 77
St. John the Baptist 79
Intérieur d’atelier avec le groupe des “Bourgeois
de Calais” 83
“Le Penseur” 87
Beau Torse 89
Le Jardin des Oliviers de l’Homme de Génie 91
La Tempête 95
Sirènes Chantant 97
Buste de Mons. Rodin, par Falguière 99
PAUL ALBERT BESNARD:
Paul Albert Besnard in his Studio 108
Convalescence 111
The Sick Woman 115
La Femme qui se Chauffe 119
Death 123
A Portrait in Yellow and Blue 127
The Fisherman’s Daughter 131
Sunset, Algeria 135
Horses tormented by Flies 139
Love 143
The Flirtation 147
A Woman of Biarritz 151
STEINLEN:
Street Children 161
Mother’s Love 165
A Steinlen Poster 169
Work-Girls 173
Dry-Point Etching 177
A Steinlen Poster 181
A Steinlen Poster 185
En Attendant 189
A Study 193
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
[Illustration: PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
(From a Portrait by Léon Bonnat)]
In the midst of the most stormy period that France has seen for ten
years, in the turbulence of political and national tumult, Puvis de
Chavannes passed from his country’s life into its history. During the
week that saw the fall of the Brisson Ministry, when Paris was a sea of
frantic demonstration and safety assured by military law, he died: his
life a gospel of serenity and peace, his genius and its expressions a
glory to his people, an inspiration to present and future Art. At once
his character stands out with the marvellous distinctness all things
assume when they first become the past, on the first morrow in which we
look back to them as yesterday.
The death of this great frescoist and painter leaves a place unfilled.
He has had no equal, no predecessor, and his successor is not easy to
name. To produce this original genius, whose grandiose, sublime, yet
simple productions appeal not only to the artist and the critic, but to
the peasant, who stands long and enthralled before the Ste. Geneviève of
the Panthéon, is the creation of half a century, and due to peculiar
circumstances of time and race. He was a great man as well as a great
painter; his temperament full of sun and humour, his soul calm and of
crystalline clearness.
Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyons in 1824, of an old Bourguignonne
family, the warmth and glory of Burgundy in his veins; he was of
vigorous physique, of gay and sanguine temperament, attached by a subtle
lien to the school which for six centuries has produced great painters,
great sculptors and dreamers.
Puvis de Chavannes went to school as a boy at the Lycée of Lyons, later
to the Lycée Henri Quatre in Paris. He was a painter by selection; had
partially fitted himself for a scientific profession, when after careful
consideration he deliberately chose the career of a painter. From the
moment of his decision he never wavered, but gave to the province of art
he had made his own the absolute devotion of the enthusiast, the fierce
unremitting toil of which only great genius is capable. His student life
began in the studio of
[Illustration: RHÔNE ET SAÔNE
(Lyons)]
Couture, and lasted but three months. The methods in the atelier were
uncongenial to him.
“Is _that_ the way you see the model?” he asked of Couture, whose
formula of _blanc d’argent_, _jaune de Naples_, vermilion and cobalt
produced on the canvas a very different effect to that which Puvis de
Chavannes recognised. He left the place and never returned, but
continued to paint for several years under Henri Schaffer.
There was no school for the unfolding of this spirit, unlike its times,
greater than the masters, and lonely. For as it proved for thirty years,
the path of Puvis de Chavannes was to be a solitary way. He walked in it
with front serene, and proud stoicism and a savage devotion, looking
neither to the right hand nor to the left, for who should observe or
follow, making unerringly toward the brilliant goal and the immortal
fame hidden from those who scoffed at him, and which even his vision but
dimly saw.
In 1850 a Pietà was accepted at the Salon; in 1861 “La Paix et la
Guerre” received the second medal; one of the decorations was bought by
the State, and the painter, in a glow of enthusiasm over this first
recognition after eleven years of waiting, presented the other picture
to the Musée at Amiens. These pictures, however, failed to win him
general appreciation; he was the object of constant adverse criticism
for thirty years, and it was sufficient for him to complete a work to
awaken a perfect hubbub of abuse; he was the sport of the wit and the
cartoonist, the artistic joke of the time. During this period he bent to
his labour, his ears closed, his eyes open to all of beauty, and his
mind free to receive impressions. To the heavenly vision alone he was
obedient, and when, in 1892, public favour burst forth in a storm of
applause, he seemed to hear it scarcely more than he had heard the noise
of dispraise. In his atelier at Neuilly, an immense building full of
scaffolding and apparatus for sustaining and elevating his pictures, he
shut himself from the world and stood before his canvas from morning
until night, never breaking his fast until he had completed nine hours
of work. Infinitely apart, removed from critics and admirers, he was the
absorbed dreamer, seeking ever to transmit, to make visible his dream.
After his work-day was over he gave himself freely to his friends. To
the struggling unknown he was most sympathetic, and the fact that a
young artist was
[Illustration: STE. GENEVIÈVE SERIES
(Panthéon)]
unpopular and misunderstood would win for him at once an interest from
Puvis de Chavannes.
They say of him that he was absolutely indifferent to public opinion;
but once, indeed, criticism touched his spirit to bitterness. “When
Hades wants to lay new paving-stones, it will not fail to consign the
commission to Puvis de Chavannes, a man of good intentions and vast
ideas who has promised for twenty years to give us a masterpiece. This
he will never do, for he can neither draw nor paint.” This was from the
pen of Edmond About, a professed admirer and friend of the painter. Of
the defection Puvis never spoke without bitterness. Alexandre Dumas,
too, shot his barbs. “Puvis knows so little of drawing that he should
scarcely permit himself the luxury of not painting.” But Théophile
Gautier and Théodore de Banville, the poet who wrote Gringoire, were
amongst the few who appreciated Puvis de Chavannes. In the stupid
blindness of the time it needed a poet’s eye to discern this peculiar
ethereal form of beauty to which his own perceptions and productions
were kin.
Puvis de Chavannes was surrounded by an atmosphere of unbroken calm
through which jarring contact with the world never penetrated to trouble
the spirit. This separation enabled him to give from a height, from the
impenetrable distance into which he withdrew, his ennobling inspiring
creations.
Hitherto, in mural decorations and in frescoes, landscape formed an
inferior part; it was a subordinate background, complementary to the
figures, unreal, exaggerated, brilliant, glaring. It remained for Puvis
de Chavannes to introduce into his frescoes the country of France with
its exquisite atmospheric effects; to make rivers, trees, fields, and
woods dignified, expressive parts of his composition; as a landscape
painter he occupies a place with Corot, Rousseau, Troyon.
There could not be a greater distance between schools than that of this
master and the men of his period.
The loves of the shepherds, the follies of Olympus, Greek myths, with
little logical bearing on place or object decorated, had been the
subjects chosen for the walls and ceilings of public monuments and
public buildings. From these uninspired conceptions to the creations of
Puvis de Chavannes is a decided transition. His compositions, never
fantastic or impossible, are the highest conceptions of the real, as
well as visions of
[Illustration: STE. GENEVIÈVE SERIES
(Panthéon)]
[Illustration: STE. GENEVIÈVE SERIES
(Panthéon)]
the most exalted flight of a beautiful imagination. He chose his
subjects himself always, and never permitted a suggestion. Ceilings he
did not like to decorate; it seemed to him an unnatural form. “I seek,”
he said, “to open a window on to the real,” and it has been said that he
opened one into the soul.
In his work there is “a union of the mind of the antique and the spirit
of Christian art.” He was a great believer, as one of his friends
said--_un immense croyant_.
Of his faith or dogma his art, however, tells us nothing definite. The
legends of saints are no less breathing evidences of a distinct _credo_,
than the mythical figures in the Vision Antique and other works of the
same character are expressions of harmony with the Greek pagan spirit.
It is the expansive, all-embracing province of highest art the faith in,
the love for Beauty which is the creed of Puvis de Chavannes; and it is
the manner in which this inspired genius conceived and presented the
forms of Beauty that separated him so vastly from his materialistic
forerunners and contemporaries in France.
Hitherto the human form had been presented, for the most part, for the
delectation of the sense alone. Corporeal, physical beauty absorbed the
painter, and awakened in return such admiration as this form of art
expressed with greater or less refinement and power will always evoke.
The artist, for the most part not believing in soul, scarcely suggested
its existence. Not since the early Italians has any one painted as Puvis
de Chavannes. Meditation, indifference to the world, absorption in his
work, aided his development, “his genius unfolded in solitude.” The
human form was to him the shadow, and the soul the reality; he made
earthly beauty a veil for his idea of the eternal; form he subordinated
to his thought. “I try,” he said, “through the shade to suggest the
essence.” Nor let it be advanced that over his incapacity to draw Puvis
de Chavannes threw concealing mistiness. His pastels, his drawings, the
figures he has seen fit to leave nude, or semi-nude, disprove this.
In 1872 he was made a member of the jury of the first Salon instituted
by the State. A vivid remembrance of his own disappointment made him
seek to introduce leniency into the judgments. He could not avail, and
he resigned. On the next day, all his own canvases (which, no longer
being a member of the jury, he had a right to exhibit) were refused.
What the
[Illustration: SORBONNE SERIES, No. 1]
[Illustration: SORBONNE SERIES, No. 2]
criterion of public taste in Art was at this time, certain pictures in
the Luxembourg and the Louvre attest! The jurors and the judges are
forgotten. Puvis de Chavannes, however, is remembered, with the
distinguished company of the Refused--Courbet, Dupré, Baryé, Troyon,
Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, Corot. It was not until he had produced a great
number of his masterpieces that his success was determined--his genius
recognised. He then ceased to be the individual, the sport of vulgar pen
and brush, and became the symbol of his work as the flag is of
patriotism. He became a gift, a force, a glory, which France before his
death revered, and which she justly honours. He was made President of
the Academy of Fine Arts at the new Salon, Champs de Mars, and wore the
cross of the Legion of Honour.
It would take volumes to speak in detail of the works of Puvis de
Chavannes. A list of them is as follows. Thus far I think it can be said
that there are no volumes that deal with him or his works technically.
The technique of painting can only be interesting to painters when
discussed by the profession; and such books are almost unknown.
“The Pietà” (1850); “La Paix et la Guerre” (1861); “Travail et Repos”
(1865), in the Musée of Amiens; “Ave Picardia Nutrix” (1865); “Ludus,”
“Pro Patria,” “Doux Pays,” all in the gallery of Picardie (1879);
“Marseille, Porte d’Orient,” and “Marseille, Colonie
Grecque”--Marseilles Museum (1867); “St. Radegonde and Charles
Martel”--Hôtel de Ville at Poitiers (1872); “Ste. Geneviève of the
Panthéon, Paris” (1877); “Bois Sacré,” “La Rhône et La Saône,”
“L’Inspiration Chrétienne,”--Musée at Lyons (1883); “L’Art Céramique,”
“Inter Artes et Naturam,” and “Groupe”--Musée at Rouen (1890-92);
“L’Hiver,” “L’Eté,” “Victor Hugo offrant son Lyre à la Ville de
Paris”--Hôtel de Ville, Paris (1893); “Lettres, Arts et Muses”--Sorbonne
Paris (1894). Lastly, another continent called his genius to create
something for its generations to hand down to fame, and for the Boston
Library Puvis de Chavannes painted “Le Génie Messager de Lumière.”
“The Childhood of Ste. Geneviève,” four panels to the glory of the
patron saint of Paris, covers a portion of the right wall of the
Panthéon. This was the first decoration given at the close of the war of
the Commune. The subjects are the pious Childhood, the
[Illustration: “LE REPOS”
(Amiens)]
[Illustration: “LA RIVIÈRE”]
Consecration, and the Miracles of the Saint; and there are no more
beautiful expressions of religious art in the contemporaneous French
school.
The figures are strong, simple, natural. The background is a summer
landscape, of exquisite loveliness. In the foreground are the rugged,
rustic peasants, the pastoral life, and the pure figure of the child
Geneviève. The atmosphere is tender, the composition dignified and
impressive, and the scenes are pervaded with peace. These pastoral
paintings were a new era in the school of _plein air_. One does not ask
if the setting is an anachronism. Puvis de Chavannes, to aid him in the
production of this masterpiece, read no histories, studied no text-books
regarding the costumes and manners of the times of the saint. He went to
the plain of Nanterre, absorbed himself in the atmosphere of the country
around Paris. The Seine and Mont Valérien became his background and
setting. Then he shut himself in his studio at Neuilly, where Ste.
Geneviève and her people appeared to him as he painted them on the
Panthéon walls. If these pictures suggest the Florentine renaissance, it
is because the monastic religious, the naive simplicity, are sympathetic
with the spirit of the Italian painters. The frescoes are full of a
fine effulgence, animated by a flame as mysterious as that in a virgin’s
lamp before a dim mediæval shrine. He received the order in 1883 to
decorate the staircase in the Palais des Arts at Lyons. He painted the
Bois Sacré and the symbolic figures of the Rhône and the Saône. For this
work he received the sum of 40,000 francs. His expenses were 10,000, and
the fresco took him three years to paint, making about 6000 francs that
he was paid for these splendid works of art--the price that a modern
portrait-painter of distinction would refuse for a picture of one of the
_beau-monde_. This order completed, the painter looked and waited in
vain for new walls and decorations. “For me,” he said, “the horizon
seems to close down upon the future: there remains nothing for me to do
but to battle against indolence; but if I can inspire youth with the
example of a life of labour, not altogether fruitless, I shall have
lived to some purpose.” And again: “They come slowly,” he said, “these
vast spaces whereon I may express myself with broad, free sweep.” When
he first received the order to decorate the hemicycle of the
Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne at a price of 35,000 francs, he refused,
and the committee received a letter of acceptance from him the next
day.
[Illustration: “L’HIVER”
(Salon d’Arrivée, Hôtel de Ville, Paris)]
In the meantime he had found his subject; as for the question of the
ridiculous price offered him, he did not even refer to it.
His production was enormous, his energy untiring. After months of labour
he would go to the seaside, and give himself up to rest and indolence.
“In these times I am in despair,” he said, “and feel as though I should
never work again. Delightful as is this repose, it is to the days of
labour that I look back with the greatest pleasure. It seems as though
my power were gone for ever.” This he wrote from Dieppe, where he was
digging shrimps in the sand like a boy. He began his studies for the
career of an artist late. What other men accomplished and put by he saw
fulfilled in his own day. And because of his unusual vigour and fecund
power of production he realised in mature years what to others are the
dreams of youth. It is this juvenance carried into ripe age that gives a
virginal freshness to his painting. His fresco in the Boston Library, as
well as the work upon which he was engaged at the time of his
death--“The Old Age of Ste. Geneviève,” a new series for the
Panthéon--far from suggesting declining power, possess the fresh bloom
by which only the young spirit can make beautiful its creations. The
painter had reached an apotheosis of power. He had been the product of a
country whose times are strange and complex. His land, his race, its
blood and tradition generated his genius, and he leaves to it in turn
his glory, and the stirring example of his life, at the time of his
country’s need, it may be well said; and the relics of his beautiful art
will remain, when political crusade, when exaggerated types and schools
are past and forgotten.
JEAN CHARLES CAZIN
In the month of March 1901, the French painter Jean Charles Cazin died
at Lavandou, a little nook in Southern France on the borders of the
Mediterranean. He was in the plenitude of his talent, in the rich and
mellow prime of his life. He had gone to Lavandou on one of his frequent
voyages in search of change and refreshment; he died there alone.
It is an ancient prayer--“Lord, may I die in my bed,” but rather an
original idea to seek to pass out of life in the very bed where one was
born! This, however, was Cazin’s dream. He had carefully preserved every
beloved detail in the home of his childhood and youth in Samer
(Pas-de-Calais); thither he planned to return and pass his last days. He
longed to inhabit again his boyhood’s room; to go forth for ever
surrounded by all that had welcomed him into a world he was to leave
richer for his existence. Fate disposed otherwise.
He was born in 1846, near Samer, a little town in the neighbourhood of
Boulogne. His parents were well-to-do, his father a doctor of some
renown. Cazin attended the college at Boulogne, and received later his
baccalaureate at Lille.
In order to facilitate his artistic studies his parents sent him to
Paris, where he joined the art class of the beloved Boiscaudron. This
teacher’s influence on his pupils has been enormous. It must be
remembered that he also instructed Rodin and Lhermitte. The tuition was
free in the little class near the École de Médecine, and this studio
made hot war against the more conservative Beaux-Arts.
Cazin never seems to have considered his student days at an end. He was
perpetually learning; for ever pursuing his art as an inexhaustible
classic; seeking to discover and develop new technique; to test to the
uttermost his capacity. Later in life, when long past the student age,
he studied in Antwerp, and his fine figure, with noble head on which the
hair was already turning grey, was constantly seen in the museums, where
he wandered--enjoying the masterpieces he admired and understood.
He married, early, a woman who shared his artistic
[Illustration: THE WINDMILL]
tastes, and who herself has added to modern art. He exhibited his first
pictures in the salon of ’65-66, and was also among those men who were
in later years proscribed by the jury, and with his colleagues reaped
the singular benefit of popularity because of adverse criticism, and
became a founder of the new salon, known as the Champ de Mars. He had
apparently no feverish desire to rush before the public, to present
creations of his youth for criticism. Possessed of that rare patience
which can wait for fame, he did not choose to force a future, and put
off rather than sought a definite introduction to the world.
Meanwhile he matured his work, labouring at his canvases during that
fruitful period when hope is most sanguine and talent freshest; he
himself was only timidly appreciative of the work done in the interval
between his appearance in the salon of 1876 and that of 1887.
In 1887, a space of more than ten years from his début, he exhibited “Le
Chantier,” and from this time, with slight interruptions, down to the
date of his death, his abundant work never ceased to delight the public,
which accorded to Cazin the unusual mark of instantaneous favour. His
work has been seen constantly in England; it is very popular in
Holland, on the Continent everywhere, and he has enjoyed a marked
success in America.
Later followed “La Fuite en Egypte” (1877), “Le Voyage de Tobie” (1878),
“Le Départ” (1879), “Ismaël” (first medal, 1880), “Tobie” (1880),
“Souvenir de Fate” (1881), “Judith,” “Agar and Ismaël” (1883).
Then followed an interval when the public looked in vain for Cazin’s
name amongst exhibitors. Modern life failed to inoculate this meditative
artist with the fatal haste, the febrile, nervous desire to do
everything in a moment. Nothing disturbed his habits of study and the
slow working out of his ideas. He retired again from public notice to
mature his conceptions before showing them. Art and art alone took Cazin
hither and thither on his frequent capricious voyages.
It was as though, suddenly, in a dream, some landscape beckoned him--an
Italian evening or a moonlit dyke it might be summoned him; for with
little warning he was in Paris to-day, in Tuscany to-morrow. Fortunately
he had a family who not only understood his brusque departures, but who
enjoyed the journeys
[Illustration: A PICARDY VILLAGE]
as well as did the master himself. He was in every land a student; in
the Pays Bas he was an ardent painter, in Italy a constant visitor at
the galleries and museums, in England a potter. The art of ceramics
always strongly interested him, and he has proved himself a clever
exponent of it.
For a Frenchman he travelled widely, making many trips to Holland and
Flanders, Italy and England. He was keenly appreciative of the art with
which these countries teemed, and studied with benefit to his own
methods the Flemish and Dutch masters as seen in the Pays Bas--his
imagination impressed by the sober stretches of Netherland landscapes,
by the velvet seductiveness of Italian hillsides and golden towns, and
the misty loveliness of English country. Of Holland he has left us
numerous admirable studies, etchings, pictures--the mills and the flat
meadows, melancholy dyke lines, scenes on the Zuyder Zee and in
Amsterdam. All these are familiar and delightful to his admirers.
Possibly he has produced no more perfect piece of work than the picture
called “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.”
Holland, so long a school and educator and inspirer of landscape
painters, has found no modern more quick to represent her country or
more appreciative of its native art than Cazin. There is in his work a
suggestion of the spirit of the masters of Holland and Flanders far away
and removed as he is by his mysticism and the ephemeral handling of
colour from the frank colourists of the Dutch School. There is the
minute attention to detail, the clever value given to scheme, the
massing of much in small compass, the master art of concentrating on the
important point. When the painting is analysed the critic discovers that
every detail is scrupulously studied.
Italy inflamed him with a love for symbolic subjects. The spirituality
of the old masters was an evident inspiration to him. But, in
considering Cazin, while interested to trace the different elements he
found sympathetic and appealing, one fails to discover anything to
detract from Cazin’s own absolute originality.
England, eminently _connoisseur_ of landscape painting, has seen fit to
approve Cazin. His exhibition in London was received with the most
flattering appreciation. England knew Cazin for one of those foreigners
who had adopted London as a dwelling-place, and who was in sympathetic
touch with the English people.
[Illustration: THE DEATH CHAMBER OF GAMBETTA]
There exists therefore for him a feeling of personal friendship.
He came with his family to England in 1871, and remained there for three
years. His original project was to form a school of art of which he
should be master. This plan failing, he went instead to Fulham, where he
personally directed the management of a pottery, and was thus enabled to
carry out his desire to experiment in this plastic art. In this he was
successful. His exhibition in 1882 at the Central Union placed him
amongst the first masters in modern ceramics, and after his artistic
display of clays, France gave him a decoration. There is a case of
Cazin’s pottery in the Luxembourg Museum.
He was received at first with a certain wonder. His drawing, intensely
delicate, was forceful and striking because of its frank ingenuousness,
its primitive simplicity. In his colouring harmonious and extraordinary
tones ineffably soft, lights and shades indefinitely blended until at
first the picture appeared through a haze, whilst under the eyes it
slowly took form out of the mist; lines disengaged themselves, shapes
grew distinct, and the perfect little picture fully declared itself. A
good example of this is “Nuit d’Etè” (Seine et Marne).
It will be readily understood that this novel technique, at the time of
its appearance, did not pass unchallenged. It was evidently a manner, an
eccentricity--a trick of colour, a playing with the public vision! Many
endeavoured to understand and reproduce the “Cazin effects.” How was it
done? And it was bruited by the baffled that M. Cazin painted behind
locked doors! The sorcery of the master was not to be discovered, nor
was there an élite who, behind the curtain out of gaping sight, learned
the power that created “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.”
Will amateurs learn one day that rules of rhetoric cannot teach the
scribbler how to write a lyric?--that the atelier cannot impart the sign
to make brush and palette create that which is none other than the
_individuality_ of the painter? Cazin’s tender, mysterious treatment,
Corot’s profound tranquillity, Turner’s golden flame, the genius of the
masters, _are_ their technique.
Cazin knew nothing of the common struggle of those artists who are
obliged to ingratiate themselves into the public favour. He was accepted
at once, and soon beloved--an uncommon biography. And his agreeable
relations with the public, the atmosphere of
[Illustration: MOONLIGHT]
welcome and liking with which his work was met, his own family relations
(of the most happy and genial kind), all is evident in his art. His
pictures are full of the influence of the repose--“_la douceur infinie
qui répand les âmes qui sont en paix_.”
Cazin possessed a strongly developed decorative sense. His
contemporaries appreciated it when they gave him the supervision of the
hanging of pictures at the different exhibitions and made him
conservateur of the Musée du Luxembourg itself. This special sense is
evident in his work, as, for example, the grouping in “L’Ours et
l’Amateur des Jardins,” “La Parole de Socrate,” in the drawings and
studies for his various pictures, designs which in many instances
strongly suggest fresco and are Italian in their _genre_.
Until 1888 his subjects had been chiefly symbolic, chosen from Biblical
scenes; figures predominated in these canvases. After this period the
character of his work changed, and he devoted himself to landscape
painting, and as a landscapist he will pass down to fame. For Cazin
chose to surround his conception of figure-painting with the very acme
of his art; with the fruit of years of patience, the mystery of labour
and all that his poetic soul knew of the seasons and of changing nights
and days. For even in the most important canvases, where figures fill
the foreground, the value of the paintings is in their backgrounds and
surroundings.
Take, for example, “Agar and Ismaël in the Desert.” In the picture the
eye leaves the group of desolate mother and child for the country’s
desolation, the arid sand world, dangerous, sinister--the parching sky,
the pitiful scrub growth. The thought of the narrative is lost in
Cazin’s delineation of the landscape, in the atmosphere and painting of
the picture, and in its subtle composition.
As a rule, for the human drama the scene is the setting, whereas with
Cazin humanity _illustrates_ the text of his creation. His landscapes,
his fields, meadows, dunes, deserts, are the picture, and the figures
become subordinate, suggestive, taking their character from the
character of the soil and country.
The streets of the rustic villages have spoken to Cazin, and told him
their secrets at evening time. His studies of the little town near his
native village are especially lovely. These French parishes have
whispered their mysteries, as twilight, slipping from gold to grey,
steals down the twisting lanes. Cazin has caught
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE STREET]
the sadness of the country, its monotonous desolation, as well as its
repose. The pictures in themselves are almost narrative; the wide slopes
of bare meadow after harvesting, the sombre note of little pine-clusters
on a sandy hill, and the melancholy of the dyke lands, his own country
has spoken to him as a mother to a son who understood and who will
interpret her well. See the “Ruisseau en Picardie,” “Lac en Picardie,”
“Route près d’Equihen,” “Moonlight at Equihen.” It is into these
sympathetic surroundings that he introduced the studies he cared to make
of human life, Biblical subjects and a few classic themes. These are not
anachronisms, strictly speaking, but show a modern spirit, which places
his conception of Christ amongst men and women of to-day, as Rembrandt
placed his religious pictures in the land of his birth, which makes the
divine legend suddenly appear in the centre of the Norman wheat-field,
or sends Mary and Joseph with the Holy Child by moonlight from a little
provincial farm in Picardy. Tobias by a French riverside walks with a
celestial visitor. Judith is a woman of the people, and nothing but the
essence of tradition may be read in Cazin’s popularising of Bible story,
in his introduction of Hebraic legend to the scenes and actors of
humble, everyday peasant life. His painting of “Judith” was originally
intended for the Gobelin manufactories.
Despite the fact that his mind was full of his historic and epic legend,
and that dramatic subjects constantly presented themselves to his
attention as schemes for pictures, his trend towards landscape was too
strong, and it is extremely interesting to observe this impassioned
hero-worshipper carried toward his dreamy, peaceful current which became
his inevitable course. As the painter of lovely landscapes, Cazin is
known chiefly as the portrayer of moon-setting and falling rain on a
far, unknown country side.
Some one has said, “Turn a hundred painters loose in France before their
respective bents have been decided--and ninety-nine will be landscape
painters.”
So paintable is the French country, so seductive to the senses and
imagination, that the land germinates and brings forth the very finest
fruit of open-air painting: witness Troyon, Daubigny, Corot, Lorrain,
Poussin, Puvis de Chavannes, Cazin.
Cazin had a magnificent head. His eyes were blue, his features finely
chiselled and strong. His manners were most charming, and he was widely
beloved.
[Illustration: THE HOLY FAMILY]
Properly speaking, no school perishes with the death of Cazin, although,
strangely enough, no master displayed greater avidity to inculcate
principles of art. Despite his pedagogic passion Cazin leaves behind him
no disciples who menace his fame. His art was too personal and varied to
permit of a school’s foundation.
[Illustration: THE END OF THE VILLAGE]
His pictures have been purchased widely on the Continent and in England
and America. Time and space do not permit a catalogue of the canvases
which have appeared in public and private collections. When Cazin died
he was at work on two pictures destined for the State. They are symbolic
subjects, and were intended for the walls of the Sorbonne. They go by
the titles of “L’Ours et l’Amateur de Jardins,” and “La Maison de
Socrate.”
In the Luxembourg Museum are to be seen several good examples of Cazin’s
work: “Agar et Ismaël,” “La Chambre de Gambetta,” a tragic
representation of the room in which Gambetta died, two landscapes, a
case of pottery, and a bust in bronze.
Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago possesses the “Judith”; “Tobie” is in the
gallery at Lille; “La Journée Faite” in the Lyons Museum; “Souvenir de
Fête” in the Museum of the City of Paris; “Le Chantier” belongs to
Monsieur May.
Alexander Harrison, the American painter, said, in speaking of Cazin:
“He is a striking contrast to _Courbet_, for example, whose manner of
painting is insistent; whereas Cazin conceals, rather than displays, his
technique. His qualities are subtle and elusive. He avoids realistic
brutality; his delicacy is a semi-fastidiousness in contrast to the
almost _féroce_ realism of Courbet, and the robust Troyon.
“His attitude towards his ideal is reserved, caressing. Suavity, a
certain suggestion of concealment distinguish his work. Sometimes the
unvaried tone is monotony.
“His subjects were not chosen from the great solitudes; and although
figures are often absent from his canvases, the pictures always suggest
the human element and are full of associations.
“His townsfolk in the Norman village where he lived seldom saw Cazin at
work during daylight; but belated fishermen, returning in the small
hours of late night, would find him wandering along-shore, or pondering
as he paced the high sand-dunes.
“These reveries were part of Cazin’s science and art; he applied and
developed the accumulated science of long study, and created the medium
best fitted to express his ideas and the especial times of day he cared
to paint.
“His use of a _wax medium_ accounts for some of the quality of his
work.”
RODIN
[Illustration: RODIN]
In the vast presentation of subject, in the numberless examples of cause
and effect, demand and supply, representative of the tide reached by
commerce, industries, and arts in this nervous, intense modern
civilisation, there is nothing worthier of note than the work of Rodin,
the sculptor, to whom France at last has seen fit to give general
recognition.
Without the walls proper of the Exposition, at the Pont de l’Alma, a
building known as the Pavillon Rodin was constructed, wherein a
collection, although incomplete, divulged Rodin to a world who did not
know him, and delighted his admirers. The concession of the site for the
little gallery marks the history of yet another struggle between artist
and prejudice. “In spite of my efforts,” Rodin said, “and a widespread
cordial feeling toward me in other countries, Paris was so loth to grant
me this place, that had it not been for two of my friends--a Minister,
and a Conseiller Municipal--I should have pleaded in vain!”
Rodin, together with his architect, constructed, arranged, and decorated
this hall. It is a circular _salon_, with a succession of smaller rooms
surrounding the main rotunda like a gallery; the walls are covered with
pale yellow stuff; and a splendid flood of sun pours in from skylight
and sides, all of which are of glass. Within this limited space are
gathered many of the most important statues, bronzes, and busts, and the
casts of several originals which it was impossible to secure for this
exhibition. “Les Bourgeois de Calais,” the “Balzac,” the incompleted
group of “Victor Hugo,” “Porte de l’Enfer” (“Door of Hell”), “L’Age
d’Airain” (“The Age of Bronze”), “L’Homme au Nez Cassé” (“The Man with
the Broken Nose”), “L’Eve” (Eve), “L’Éternelle Idole” (“The Eternal
Idol”), “La Guerre” (“War”), “La Pensée” (“Thought” or “Reverie”),
“Psyche,” “The Moon bids Adieu to Earth in order to ascend to the
Zenith,” “Amor Fugit” (“Love Flees”), “Le Printemps” (“Spring”), L’Homme
qui s’Eveille” (“The Awakening of Man”), the busts of Jean Paul Laurens,
of Dalou, of Mirabeau, Falguière, Mme. M. V. Besides these
[Illustration: “LE FRÈRE ET LA SŒUR”]
there are countless figurines, little groups, _ébauches_, studies,
schemes for old and new work, heads, torsos in plaster, marble, bronze,
iron, and stone; whilst about the walls are hung the photographs of
works not exhibited and the drawings of the sculptor.
The acknowledgment and recognition by Paris of her great son has not
come too late. In spite of the fact that he has been for forty years an
object of intense, displayed hatred (“so keen a hate,” he says, “that if
Paris had been Italy in the time of the Borgia, I should have been
poisoned”), in spite of the enmity of artists and populace, this tardy
reception finds him unembittered, his temper warm and human, and with
hand quick and outstretched to the tardy greeting. The man himself is so
simple, so great, that he is even touched by the long-denied meed of
praise.
Standing before the head of “L’Homme au Nez Cassé” (curiously enough the
milestone of his first defeat, refused by the Salon in 1864), his
masterpieces all around him, in the mellow light of the autumn sun
falling on exquisite marble or dark bronze, Rodin said: “It is good to
be alive. I find existence marvellous, glorious. These effigies of human
pain” (and he indicated a bronze representing an emaciated poet dying on
the knees of the Muse) “no longer make me suffer as they used. I am
happy. To me nature is so beautiful, the truths of humanity are so
thrilling, that I have grown to adore life and the world. _Je trouve que
la vie est tellement belle!_” His face was fairly luminous. This
apotheosis of _bien-être_ that the sculptor has reached in late middle
age is perhaps Nature’s gift, her reward to him who, in spite of
discouragement and the world’s scorn, has for forty years been her
faithful, adoring disciple. France is true to her traditions in her
treatment of her celebrated men. She has slaughtered a king, dethroned
an emperor, sold a deliverer (Jeanne d’Arc), and to her immortal artists
offers as a stirrup-cup at starting such draughts of bitterness that if
the very divinity within them did not preserve them for posterity’s
good, who can tell whether Carpeaux, Delacroix, Manet, Rude, Berlioz,
Garnier, Baryé, Puvis de Chavannes, and Rodin would not have fallen by
the way?--and all the names are not here! Prejudice and schools in every
country and age have their scores to level. (Shades of Shelley, Keats,
Chatterton, will bid England hold her peace.) Puvis de Chavannes
(Rodin’s mighty brother amongst France’s great artists) stretched toward
his laurels in old age a hand that stiffened in
[Illustration: INTERIEUR D’ATELIER]
death before it could hold the wreaths of fame. One and all of the
illustrious ones were misapprehended; and Auguste Rodin, when he made
his first appeal to public judgment, stepped into this rank, and
awakened “the idiot risibles of a gaping stupidity,” instead of the
grave appreciation that was his due.
Rodin is of the people, and was born in Paris in 1840. His parents were
poor, and during the long years--apparently fruitless, and heaping
disappointment on disappointment--urged him to take to a trade which
would bring him immediate results. “I have no history,” he says; “my
life is simply the story of constant struggle and unchanged poverty. I
was poor, but I was strong; and in the moments when I was not bitterly
discouraged I felt a certain stimulus in setting myself against the
world. Over by the École de Médecine, in Paris, is the little school
where I went as a boy, and where I first took simple lessons in
drawing.”
He acknowledges the influence of no directed instruction on his art. In
his young manhood he was a workman in the _atelier_ of Baryé, and the
models of twisted cobras, lithe tigers, crouching panthers, maddened
lions--their graceful contours and curves, the attitude of savage
grace--may have impressed their images on the keen memory of the young
journeyman. At all events, in his types of the animal triumphant in man,
in the pose and gesture of _abandon_, there is much that suggests
kinship between the human being and the uncivilised beast--the barbarous
grace and beauty of both. But Rodin is not conscious of the effect of
any school: in the _ateliers_ of both Baryé or Carrier-Belleuse he sold
his skill for his daily bread.
In 1864 he sent the head of “The Man with the Broken Nose” to the Salon.
This mask, perfectly modelled, worthy the seal of antiquity, was refused
“because of its originality.” The refusal was a bitter blow to Rodin;
and whether or not the verdict appeared to him just, it had the effect
of intimidating him, and he waited thirteen years before again appearing
before his adverse jury.
At this period (1864-70), on the edge of his own doorstep, as it were,
with no power to franchise the threshold, he worked, a paid daily
labourer, for Baryé, Carrier-Belleuse, and in 1871-77 for Van Rasbourg
in Brussels. “During the long time,” he says, “when I gave what power I
possessed to others, my thoughts were keen and alive toward my own
creations. On Sunday I was free, and that day I afforded a model for
myself and worked in my little room from the life. I
[Illustration: LE DÉSESPOIR]
[Illustration: LA PORTE DE L’ENFER]