model,--for the human being changes constantly, and my time was
infinitely precious and infinitely short. I was never able to bring to
satisfactory termination very much during these _séances_. It was in the
paid week, it was during the days of others, that I really produced. I
permitted myself then a careful mental study of what Sunday had
suggested and had failed to achieve. As I thus meditated, fleeting
thoughts and inspirations came to me, and I would hold them, force them
to remain, until at the following _séance_ with my model I could mould
their likeness in clay. I consider that this training of my memory was
of inestimable advantage.”
In 1877 “L’Age d’Airain” was sent to the Salon, and accepted. The
extraordinary criticism it evoked is sufficient praise. It was said to
be “too perfect,” and the sculptor was accused of having “cast the
statue from life”! When these insulting suspicions had been disproved to
the eminent jury’s satisfaction, Rodin’s statue--a strong, beautiful
male form of Greek purity and classical simplicity of outline--received,
in 1880, a third-class medal. This was bought by the State, and can be
seen in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Thus, successively accused first of too great originality, second of too
faithful realism, Rodin was received by his censors; but ridicule
reached its dizzy height when at the Salon of 1898 was exhibited the
statue of Balzac, ordered by the Société des Gens de Lettres, and
refused by them.
Above the _éclat_ of that time, when Paris made rendezvous before the
rejected monument to laugh and
[Illustration: ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST]
immoderately jeer, it is hard even now to raise a reasonable voice.
The august Société, which claimed that it “failed to recognise Balzac in
the statue,” should have been put to the blush by a commercial man, a
Monsieur Pellerin, who pleaded to purchase the Balzac. The sculptor
refused, and took the offending plaster back to his own workshop. “I was
cruelly hurt and made ill,” Rodin said, “and it did me great harm.” A
brilliant pamphlet was forthcoming, however, by Arsène Alexandre, which
suggested to at least part of the intelligent spectators that “they may
have laughed too soon.” The Balzac has held, during the Exposition,
chief place in the Pavilion Rodin, where those who still seek it for its
stimulus to laughter may find it, and where others may study it to calm
advantage. France’s greatest novelist, the writer of the _Comédie
Humaine_, as conceived and made to exist in sculptured form by a man
like Rodin, is a combination in itself not without interest. There is in
this work a tremendous, almost savage force, a virility and power, an
abandonment to subject above form, characteristic of Rodin. Balzac is
posed as a spectator, his arms folded across the chest under the flowing
monk’s robe which the novelist assumed when at work. His body is rested
on one backward-drawn foot, whilst the other, a little advanced, throws
out the line of leg and knee. The head, superb and massive, is lifted
and backward inclined; the lips are parted, the eyes, deep-set, caverns
of thought under heavy brows, look out at the defile of humanity which
the romancer so keenly studied to immortal results. This Balzac is
_moqueur_, _rêveur_, student, analyst; and the genius which has--roughly
if you will--mightily modelled the Titian of literature, has finely
comprehended, with the kinship of greatness, the type of the immortal
Parisian. The stupendous figure has nothing in common with the approved
style of statues to great men that mark the public places and squares of
our cities and towns, and there is everything in the _outrance_ of
presentation, the novel, daring, crude handling, to bewilder the crowd
who distrust what they fail to understand. But it is sufficient for the
serious, unprejudiced observer to come once and look, to return and
gaze, in order to recognise that he is before a masterpiece--the effigy
of a human being appearing as in life from a flowing garment, symbol of
the art of the romancer, the robe of imagination with which he enveloped
his analyses. It becomes thus impossible not to feel the power of
Rodin’s Balzac as one studies the gigantic head emerging from the
[Illustration: INTERIÉUR D’ATELIER AVEC LE GROUPE DES “BOURGEOIS DE
CALAIS”]
drapery as the author lifts his eyes on the comedy of life.
In 1882 appeared simultaneously “St. Jean préchant” (“St. John the
Baptist preaching”) and “The Creation of Man”; and down till 1885 the
busts of Jean Paul Laurens, Carrier-Belleuse, Victor Hugo, Antonin
Proust, Dalou, were exhibited at the Champs de Mars. To subsequent
exhibitions were sent busts of Puvis de Chavannes, “Le Cariatide,” “La
Danaïde,” “La Pensée,” monument to Victor Hugo, the “Balzac,” “Le
Baiser,” “L’Ève,” and the busts of Falguière and Rochefort.
In the Salon of 1889 was exhibited the group known as _Les Bourgeois de
Calais_, ordered by Calais, and which, cast in bronze, stands to-day on
the marketplace of that town. This piece, which has not its compeer,
commemorates the heroism of six of the city’s citizens in the days when
England was France’s conqueror. Froissart with characteristically simple
pathos tells the story. Calais, taken by the English, was destined to
destruction, but King Edward offered to spare the populace on the
condition that six notable bourgeois should come forth to him
bare-headed, bare-footed, ropes round their necks, and the city’s keys
in their hands. “I shall do with them according to my good
pleasure”--which good pleasure, as the world knows, was to grant pardon
and safe _convoi_, at the plea of the gracious Queen Philippa. But they
have no dream of pardon, these men, who one after another seem again to
pursue their expiatory way for us across the ages. The grateful people
of the town have bathed their naked feet with tears of adoration and
farewell, and, devoted to probable death and to sure humiliation, they
are before us. History has kept the names of four: Eustache de St.
Pierre, Jean d’Aire, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant. On their faces are
depicted all things save the sense of defeat. In the drawn visages,
convulsed hands, in the bent and defiant attitude, are pride, hauteur,
grief, resolution. The wasted forms bear the marks of siege, privation,
hunger, and anxiety, but there is no trace of submission in the mediæval
vicarious offering. Old age is here, passive in a moment of sublime
renunciation; youth, rebellious at this demand of Fate; middle life,
desperate in tense despair. These figures are real and human; this is
modern realism with classic delineation. Verse or prose, brush or
pencil, could not, line for line, have caught the story better and told
it more expressively. The mass loves a work of art that tells a tale,
and here
[Illustration: “LE PENSEUR”]
the layman and the most difficult symbolist may alike enjoy. A narrative
is told, and Art, in the mode of recount, is elevated.
[Illustration: BEAU TORSE]
Rodin’s busts are strikingly _ressemblant_--not always flattering to the
subject, but remarkable revelations of the character of the individuals
themselves. His busts of Victor Hugo and Henri Rochefort and Jean Paul
Laurens are especially fine.
“In making a portrait, for example,” Rodin says, “it requires several
_séances_ for me to get into the spirit of my model. I am seeking always
the distinguishing trait that makes this man or woman an individual
different from the rest of his kind. When I discover this _trait
marquant_ I dwell upon it, I insist on it--I caricature it, if you
like--until my bust has likeness; then I know _that I know_ my model.”
The sculptor has been at work for fifteen years on the famous “Porte de
l’Enfer” (“Door of Hades”), ordered by the Museum of Decorative Art in
Paris. Of this stupendous undertaking, as yet incomplete, only the most
inadequate idea can be given. The portal measures six mètres in height;
the panels and borders are filled with countless figures in _bas_ and
high relief. Above the doors is a nude male figure in a sitting posture,
elbows on the knees, head sunk on the hands. This is _Dante_, dreamer,
meditator, before whose eyes passes the vision of the condemned. The
groups, couples, and single figures represent everything that a fertile
talent can conceive of dread and grief; there are visible
[Illustration: LE JARDIN DES OLIVIERS DE L’HOMME DE GÉNIE]
Greed, Lust, Crime, Despair--in short, all the worst of the World, the
Flesh, and the Triumphant Fiend. At the lower corners are masks of Pain,
and around and about them Satyrs, Centaurs, Nymphs male and female,
human forms of all ages and nations, run their terrible race. These
remarkably modelled figures are entwined, interlaced, leaning the one on
the other, seeking to escape, pursuing, haunting, and fleeing,
repelling, clasping in eternal desire, eternal horror, eternal despair.
Here are Paola and Francesca in their own forms, and their symbols in
many another; here, even, are tiny bodies of infants, “who seek with
sightless eyes to penetrate limbo and the shades.” No one but Rodin
since the days of the Ghibellines could have ventured upon this subject,
and of the tremendous result there has as yet been one general verdict
of praise. It is Rodin’s _chef-d’œuvre_. The doors are to be cast in
bronze, and are all but in the hands of the casters.
Carpeaux, Rude, Chapu, have given to France splendid monuments. The
sculpture of these men is powerful, virile, telling,--their technique
that of the schools, their expression at once comprehensible. This art,
picturesque, decorative, ends with the production, and suggests as a
whole nothing beyond that which is before the eyes. Rodin’s art, by
reason of his more complex, subtle temperament, his more artistic
sympathy and profounder insight into nature and humanity, has been a
renaissance to modern sculpture, and is to plastic art what Puvis de
Chavannes was to decorative painting. He calls himself a student of
human life, a disciple of nature, from which he inspires himself, and in
an original, individual manner expresses in tangible form his
conceptions of the mysteries of life. He has caught the ineffable moment
of passion, and dared to transfix the embrace of love in stone. He has
dared to portray by his art that which poet, musician, painter, have not
waited to confess is an inspiration to all creation; and is it not
possible that those who are so hasty to malign and criticise Rodin do
not understand him? At all events in his latest productions he shows no
sign of temporising, and chooses unflinchingly to be an expositor in
stone of the passions, the sensations, and crises of humanity as he
apprehends them.
Alongside of the high spirituality reached in the apotheosis of
renunciation in the group of “Les Bourgeois de Calais,” alongside of the
intellectuality of the “Victor Hugo,” are examples of the grossly
material. Here is the exquisite roundness of youth in “Brother and
[Illustration: LA TEMPÊTE]
[Illustration: SIRÈNES CHANTANT]
Sister” (“Frère et Sœur”), a group of charming, innocent loveliness.
Touching it is the lankness of shrivelled age (Statue of an Old Woman).
Here are expressed the violence of all sensation, the legitimate
happiness of love, the languor of satiety, the wantonness of riot, the
solemnity of death, the hopeless horror of the damned (“La Porte de
l’Enfer”).
Rodin the man is unassuming, and his manners are almost naïve. In his
_accueil_ he is courteous and charming, extending a gracious reception
to the world he generously permits to freely seek him. Below medium
height, strongly, powerfully built, his head lionesque, his eyes keen,
deep-set, and very brilliant, we see him when at work in the white long
blouse he wears in his _atelier_, Rue de l’Université. The vast room is
filled with groups completed and others in different stages of
advancement, chiefly innumerable casts for the “Porte de l’Enfer.”
Around Rodin are his stone-cutters, achieving from blocks of marble the
contours of the models in clay before their eyes. A fine, clinking
sound, a “tin-tin,” fills the place to echo as the penetrating
instruments tap the hard surface. Rodin’s hands are covered with wet and
drying clay; the metallic sound is an accompaniment to his thoughts. “My
_métier_ is to express my ideas in plastic form; and, curiously, it is
of form I think the least.” (His enemies will find here a _point
d’appui_ and fresh impetus to mirth!) “To me all expression should be
subordinate to the
[Illustration: BUSTE DE MONS. RODIN, PAR FALGUIÈRE]
idea; and for the elusive, fleeting ideals I am on an eternal search. I
may imagine that under my hands, as I mould a faun possibly, or a satyr,
I have caught the ineffable conception fast at last; when, under my very
touch, I see the being change. My inspiration becomes another, and lo!
the clay is a faun no longer, but a Sappho--head thrown back, lips
parted, plunging into a sea!”
And to this man, the eternal search is for beauty, which, according to
his creed, exists in everything that lives, moves, or has its being.
“Nothing is ugly that has life,” Rodin says. “Age has its own
loveliness, as youth has its especial charm. Whatever suggests human
emotion, whether of grief or pain, goodness or anger, hate or love, has
its individual seal of beauty. Therefore,” he exclaims, “since I hold
all existence to be beautiful, and all beauty to be truth, _on a bien le
droit de choisir parmi les choses vraies_” (one has the right to choose
amongst truths). And although to Rodin has been attributed mastery in
all arts save that in which he is absolutely _maître_, of his drawings,
his designs, his ceramics, bear the touch of genius,--he is _par
excellence_ the sculptor. No critic can observe certain groups without
conceding mastery to him in his art. It is claimed that there exist in
antiquity no more perfect examples of the human form than “L’Age
d’Airain,” “Le Printemps,” and “Le Baiser.” Had these marbles been
unearthed at Samothrace or disinterred at Athens, antiquarians (if
puzzled to trace the Grecian spirit) would scarcely have hesitated to
assign these figures their places amongst the remnants of the dust and
ashes of the Golden Age. But between Phidias and Rodin, between pure
Greek and the complex modern, there is a great gulf fixed. The times
demand, crave, insist upon and generate, another spirit. The ancients
portrayed divinity in the mystic ideal clothed in ideal form; this
modern portrays humanity, with its warring desires, its breath, span,
happiness of love.
Rodin will be perhaps always misunderstood. He is a pagan, and in his
art has been so varied as to make it difficult to judge him by a
standard or to compare him wisely with his forerunners or his
contemporaries. The same hand that has perfectly carved the lovely
woman’s head in “La Pensée,” rounded the limbs in the delicacy of “The
Eternal Idol,” the same hand tears forth from clay and stone sinister,
terrible conceptions, mighty symbols of desolation as on “La Porte de
l’Enfer,” the inevitable misery in the retribution. From a block of
marble he causes a woman to blossom forth like a flower, until rough
block and figure appear of different materials--the one a cold,
pulseless background, a sheath for a form so instinct with life that the
stone has the texture of flesh, and seems to bloom and glow. Take, for
example, the figure of Psyche holding back the draperies of night that
she may see Eros. Rodin is an absolute expression of his times, a modern
with the subtlety of idea, the suggestive conception that is the
distinguishing mark of nineteenth-century talent, part of the spirit
that has created the schools of symbolism, that has coined the term
“degenerate”; and to this trend of mind, which no civilisation hitherto
could have produced, has been added robust physical strength and an
order of genius akin to that of the ancients, before whose immortal
works Rodin is a humble and devout worshipper, and from whom, in his
modesty, he thinks himself infinitely removed, and to whom he is in
reality divinely allied.
PAUL ALBERT BESNARD
[Illustration: PAUL ALBERT BESNARD IN HIS STUDIO]
Paul Albert Besnard bears no relation to any school. “I have never
formed part of a group,” he says; and in revenge or despair no group has
formed itself around the master. There is, properly speaking, no Sargent
school and no Whistler school, and may these men not be taken to be
masters of the present time? It is a distinguishing peculiarity of
modern art that schools do not form as they did in the old days.
Possibly an explanation of the fact why there is little discipleship is
that we are in the age of individualism and not of intense and imitative
study. Each man and woman intends to be an _arriviste_ without being a
plodder and scholar. There is great pressure toward ultimate success;
desire for originality. Imitation of methods and technique is not
sympathetic. Above all there is a marked absence of the genius which
carries men to the pinnacle Besnard has reached. Apprenticeship is not
to the taste of the modern student! Of people who put paint on canvas
there are legion--of painters few--and in France, _Degas_ and _Besnard_
head the list.
Nothing would be more mistaken than to call Besnard an Impressionist, or
to confound him with that school of art. The word has been too freely
used and misapplied. Besnard’s art, in as far as possible, is the
complete embodiment of his conception; the canvas when it leaves his
hand--in as far as the painter is able to completely transmit his
thought--is finished. Besnard does not pretend to flitting and
intangible effects--to suggestive impressionism--he claims by his work
to have expressed his idea, and does not trust to the public to
interpret him or his inspiration--he has masterfully done so for
himself.
The provinces, the Midi and the North have given to France most of her
famous men; it is unusual for a Parisian born and bred to win
distinction in his own city. It often seems to be a fact that the genius
of the individual demands uprooting from his native soil--and that
transplanting is salutary for development and success. Puvis de
Chavannes was a Lyonnais, Ingres came from Montaubon, Rodin and Besnard
are Parisians. This last named prophet found instantaneous
[Illustration: CONVALESCENCE]
honour in his own country. Besnard is a child of fortune; success came
to him early, and he has no stories to relate of struggle and despair.
Of the rough way to Fame he is ignorant, of the tortures which
stimulated and deepened the experience of Rodin, of the long and painful
route of Puvis de Chavannes to recognition Besnard knows nothing! He has
no hardships to recount: one of the happy ones in the world of art, he
is singularly devoid of history. He takes a calm and cheerful
satisfaction in the facts of his successes, and is delighted to have no
complaint to make of public or critics. “I began with success” (he says)
“and it has never left me.”
Besnard was born of a painting family, his father a pupil of Ingres and
his mother a clever miniaturist. The boy was destined for Diplomacy, but
with his talent for art his distaste for any other career rapidly
declared itself. His parents acknowledged his predilection, and he
entered the Beaux Arts. His master was the celebrated Brémond; and
although Besnard claims never to have been an ardent student, and to
have painted with freedom, following out his individual tastes and
original inclinations, the strict academic influence of the schools, the
system of Brémond, himself a pupil of Ingres, is markedly evident in
Besnard’s technique. His _métier_ has been thoroughly formed, his manner
of painting arrived at through the close and laborious study in the
school of that greatest master of modern painting--Ingres.
His _début_ before the public was with a portrait called “La Femme Rose”
about the year ’68. This picture created an immediate effect upon the
critic and public, and the artist, scarcely more than a boy, found
himself the success of the moment. The following year he took the Prix
de Rome, which recognition instead of coming to him--as it did to most
of the student world--a stimulus and a reward, broke in--as it
were--success upon success! In order to avail himself of the privilege,
the prize offered, he was obliged to leave behind him the opening of a
career already promising and to journey to Italy. The period of his
Italian sojourn was neither productive nor important; and he afterwards
made a stay in London, where he found himself sympathetic with English
people and their art. He painted several portraits whilst in England,
and amongst them those of Admiral Sir Redmond Cameron and Sir Bartle
Frere.
The pictures exhibited at the Salons following his
[Illustration: THE SICK WOMAN]
success with “La Femme Rose” were “L’homme qui court après la Fortune”
and “Procession des Seigneurs de Voilans,” a decorative bit of painting
done, as is evident, in his extreme youth, full of movement and
sincerity and novelty, and indicative of his power as future decorator.
This picture is to-day on the walls of his studio in Paris.
Then followed “Une Source,” “St. Benoit et Enfant,” and a large canvas
“Après la Défaite.”
In 1883 a portrait called “La Femme jaune et bleue” caused an artistic
furore and recalled the enthusiasm with which his _début_ had been
received a few years before. The picture was not a portrait, it was a
study of lights. Besnard is not, strictly speaking, a portrait painter,
and this production, “La Femme jaune et bleue,” rather than the faithful
transcription of a likeness, is the skilful, masterly treatment of a
scheme. Never was Besnard able to reproduce for the people--who at once
flocked to give him orders for portraits--the effects which had so
strikingly won their notice. In the portrait of “La Femme jaune et
bleue” he has insisted upon the effects of _deux rayons_--the light of
an interior and the delicate illumination of the twilight entering from
without. In this blending of tones, the azure luminescence of twilight
and the yellow lamplight, stands the woman’s figure. The public to whom
the picture was enthralling did not perhaps comprehend it was the
rendering of an idea, the peculiar vision of Besnard, or understand that
therein lay its distinction and that it was not a study of portraiture.
Then may be mentioned Besnard’s celebrated “Poneys harcellés par les
mouches.” No one who has seen the two young horses in their stalls
forgets this live and graceful picture, with its animation and _verve_,
its interesting anatomical study and the treatment of colour and tone.
The animals are admirably drawn and the blue and crimson and violet of
the scheme are Besnard’s own. This bold and eccentric production added
much to the reputation of the painter and was one of the most remarked
pictures at the Chicago Exposition. It is now owned by the Count
Rajinski (Russia) and is a veritable _chef d’œuvre_.
Besnard has also another equine group called “Le Marché des chevaux en
Algérie,” now in the possession of the Baron Franchetti.
A list of the most celebrated of Besnard’s pictures is more or less
complete as follows:
The frescoes in the Sorbonne.
[Illustration: LA FEMME QUI SE CHAUFFE]
“La Vie renaissante et la Mort.”
Fresco in the Hôtel de Ville, “l’Apothéose de la Lumière.”
Fresco in the Ecole de Pharmacie.
Frescoes in the Hospital for Poor Children at Berck.
Portrait of Réjane.
Portrait of the Princess Mathilde.
Portrait of his family.
Portrait of his wife.
The last four are in his own possession.
“Couché du soleil sur le bord d’Algérie.” Luxembourg.
“La Mort.” Luxembourg.
“Femme qui se chauffe.” Luxembourg.
“Entre deux rayons.” Luxembourg.
“La Féerie Intime.” Russia.
“L’Ile heureuse”--in the possession of Mr. Henschel.
At the present date Monsieur Martignac, Paris, possesses several
splendid canvases of Besnard’s, notably “l’Espagnole,” “Le Regard,”
“l’Automne” and “La Femme de Biarritz.”
In America the purchasers of Besnard have been few. One of the most
interesting of his paintings is at Baltimore, in Mr. George Vanderbilt’s
collection.