most important of the decorations now under the city’s
consideration--the ceiling of the Théâtre Français and the cupola of the
Petit Palais. Let the amateur of art, whose list is already long, add
these mural decorations which are now in process of construction, and it
will be seen that the art of interior painting is not extinct in France,
and that these tasks have been happily consigned to the man best fitted
at present to perform them.
Besnard is at present engaged upon the ceiling of the Théâtre Français.
Its dimensions are vast, covering a surface of 273 metres. His subject,
already composed in miniature, is as follows:
The god Apollo, in his chariot, draws his horses back on their haunches
whilst he salutes the great masters of drama--Corneille, Racine,
Molière, Victor Hugo, all of whom are seated at the top of a flight of
temple steps. Behind the god are a group of the Hours, and in front, the
Muses. On the last step of the temple is a charming group and
distinctive of Besnard. The female figure of Time reposes against
[Illustration: DEATH]
another figure representing Truth--a most subtle and agreeable image.
The cupola of the Petit Palais is divided into four panels, and
Besnard’s intention is to represent in his paintings the city of Paris
in four different conceptions--“Paris Hospitalière,” “Paris dans son
Art,” “Paris dans le Commerce,” and “Paris dans les Industries.”
For the St. Louis Exposition in the United States Besnard has sent a
frieze covering 760 metres, entirely surrounding the walls of the
Exposition Française. In this building will also be seen by the tourists
there “l’Ile heureuse.”
For the more minute consideration of Besnard’s works it is well to begin
with the decorations in the Ecole de Pharmacie where the walls of the
corridor entrance to this School are entirely covered with his
decorations. The order was given in 1883 and fulfilled in 1888. Here
Besnard has given a series of fresh and delicate _plein air_
frescoes done upon the walls themselves. As they are without
protection--regrettably--they are being marked by the vandal pencils of
the sightseer and the students. To the right, the first panel represents
the open fields where peasants and women gather the medical herbs. In
another panel follows the sorting of the herbs in the laboratory; the
third is the laboratory itself with the distillation of the medicines.
Then comes a line of landscapes just above over the woodwork of the wall
like a dado. The first is the serious, meditative scientist in the
balcony of his house, overlooking the river and the city. Alongside this
are several landscapes of a peculiarly gentle and attractive charm. At
the end of the hall are again four large frescoes, the forest where the
chemists and the botanists are engaged in their researches--the lecture
room and the geologist amongst the rocks. On the opposite wall is the
companion series of oblong panels whose subjects have become so well
known to the connoisseur: Dawn on a primæval sea where up from the waves
prehistoric creatures rise weird and appalling; a group of sea-horses
emerging from the waters; a troop of mastodons, and lastly primitive man
and woman disporting on the shores of an ancient sea whose waves to-day
are confined in some strata of rock to be found by the geologist’s tool.
On the left, at the entrance door, are the most beautiful of the series
of decorations. These are life size. One is “La Malade,” a sick girl in
her bed, surrounded by the mother, the nurse and the physician.
[Illustration: A PORTRAIT IN YELLOW AND BLUE]
The companion piece is “The Convalescence,” and is undoubtedly one of
Besnard’s _chefs d’œuvre_. The invalid, after her long and weary
confinement, is being supported by tender arms into the sunlight; and it
would be difficult to imagine a more expressive and suggestive subject
for these walls. The picture is full of sunlight and mysterious
half-tones, and is expressive of tenderness and sympathy and
encouragement. In fact, these frescoes possess in a large degree the
essentials of good decoration--simplicity of line--bold and correct
drawing--impressive human sentiment and impressive subject.
Again and notably, in the decorations of the Salle des Mariages in the
Mairie du Louvre the subtlety of Besnard’s treatment of his task, the
upleading and inspiring effect he has produced makes well worth a
special description of these pictures. It will appear impossible to the
dogmatic mind that a secular room, in a Republican Mayor’s office, can
suggest an atmosphere of sacred beauty. This, however, has been rendered
the case by the decorations with which Besnard has beautified this
square, dark, conservative apartment. As one enters the apartment where
civil marriages are performed in this particular quarter of Paris the
eyes find on the wall opposite the door a graceful and agreeable picture
of youthful love. The girl--an exquisite figure--is surrounded by flying
birds and young doves. She is seated on a bank of flowers and above her
a youth of age as tender as her own waves a branch of spring flowers.
From this, one seeks the side wall and a large panel of bright and
glowing colour. The subject is harvest time, and the fields are heavy
with their burden of grain. On a sheaf of golden wheat is the figure of
a woman, mature now although still young, and at her breast a child. Two
other children play about her, and alongside the husband’s strong,
vigorous figure wrestles with his refractory horse. This decoration,
purely pastellic in impression, is so soft and plastic that the clear
colour seems ready to come off at the touch. It is peculiarly
velvet-like in quality and very high in tone. Already this square,
unbeautiful room with its green-covered benches has altered in
character. The greatest forces of the world, the greatest beauty of the
world, have penetrated it through these interpretations of a master. But
it is not to the exuberant and lovely expressions of life that the man
and woman who come here to the Maire’s office
[Illustration: THE FISHERMAN’S DAUGHTER]
to be joined in wedlock, turn, or on which--from the very position of
the picture--their eyes are forced to rest. Directly over the official
desk--directly over the entrance door--is the third decoration of the
suite. In the frailest tone, if this word may be employed, in the most
mysterious medium, he has painted a winter scene. To the left a little
row of skeleton trees range in nude, chaste bareness; in the far
distance is the lonely outline of a ruined tower. Close together--at the
top of a long line of stone steps--are seated a man and woman. Age has
claimed them; they are old. But the woman still leans upon the man. What
this fresco portrays of union, of inseparableness, of devotion, is not
easy to express in words. There is no hint of melancholy in this winter
scene, in this study of old age which Besnard has seen fit to
accentuate, which he has chosen for his principal panel, and on which
the newly married couple must meditate. It is the beautiful apotheosis
of wedded love daringly looking beyond youth to the serene beauty of
life’s decline. The frescoes were done in 1898. They are drawn at once
with freedom and precision, and are excellent examples of the best
modern mural art.
The subject painted on the arch of the Amphithéatre de Chimie, La
Sorbonne, is highly imaginative. Besnard has called it “La Vie
renaissante de la Mort.” It consists of three large panels. In the
centre panel, thrown on a bank of yellow herbage, is the body of a
woman, at her breast a nursing infant. From the other breast a stream of
milk flows forth, gaining in dimensions until it swells to a river of
life. Around her mouth cluster a horde of butterflies, the disseminators
of germs. A serpent, symbolising generation, makes his way slowly toward
the woman. The right panel represents figures of Adam and Eve. Adam
carries the young and lovely figure of the mother of life downward
toward a river flowing past the portals of Eden. Her hand is
outstretched toward the golden apples of an overhanging tree. Together
the couple descend toward the river which supposedly carries on its
breast the _débris_ of plants and offscum of the earth, and loses itself
in the earth again. At the left a mighty chasm charged with fire
represents a crucible purifying and revivifying and reconstructing. Thus
Besnard has chosen to symbolise the forces of nature--Water, Air, Earth,
Fire. The principles of organic chemistry--creatures of flora, fauna and
animal life under the solar influence.
[Illustration: SUNSET, ALGERIA]
It is a singular and bold conception, magnificently drawn and
pastel-like in treatment.
The Musée du Luxembourg is especially rich in the artist’s works, and
the buyers for the State have shown wisdom and penetration in their
choice. In one of the rooms is a small canvas not over 18 by 6 inches.
It recalls in character and distinction the little picture of Gambetta’s
room done by Cazin, and it is only the great masters who thus
wonderfully fill small bits of canvas with whole histories of life.
Besnard has called his study “La Mort”--a miserable little mansard room
_au sixième_ in a third-class hotel--the meagre furnishings are a chair,
table, and iron bed on which lies the dead figure of a woman. At the
door the voluble _concierge_, half curious and half touched, ushers in a
young man, no doubt the lover of the wretched creature beyond all the
questions of life; the man is in evening dress, hat in his hand. Here we
have poverty, misery, debauch, disgrace and despair in a medallion, as
it were. The composition and the treatment recall no one but Besnard
himself, but the literary quality of the picture suggests Hogarth
series, and Tolstoi and Balzac. This affinity with a sister art is now
and then interestingly observed in the narrative pictures of the great
masters.
“Entre Deux Rayons” is the so-called portrait of a woman. Again the
effect of two lights is here accentuated. The canvas is full of light
and seems positively to radiate. The tones are red and yellow, warm and
iridescent, and the flesh of the arms and neck melt into the scheme of
the drapery. The picture is a marvel of delicate beauty and technique.
(1893.)
But surpassing all the pictures in this Museum, in the same room, on a
considerably larger canvas, is “La Femme qui se chauffe,” the nude
figure of a woman crouching before a fire whose existence is only
evinced by the play of its reflections upon her flesh. From a little cup
of blue and white china she is drinking a draught, evidently warm and
delicious, to judge from her attitude, which is expressive of entire
comfort and _bien être_. The work, in point of view of modelling and
drawing, is absolute perfection. This treatment of the nude has the
strength and power of marble with the addition of colour. In none of
Besnard’s paintings is the luminous quality more striking. There is in
it an opalescence and vibration, it possesses the softness of old
paintings, and alone in a gallery of masterpieces would give Besnard the
right to first rank. The scheme of “La Femme qui se chauffe” is blue and
yellow, the
[Illustration: HORSES TORMENTED BY FLIES]
background a penumbra of azure, from which the brilliant figure of the
woman comes dazzlingly forth.
The pictures in the possession of Monsieur Martignac deserve note. “Le
Sourire,” painted in 1895, is a portrait of merit and perhaps
particularly interesting because uncharacteristic of Besnard. It is
successful as a study of dark, more sombre tones, and has many of the
characteristics of Dutch painting.
“L’Automne,” again, is a study low in tone, and Besnard has left his
type (distinctly the blonde woman) to paint a dark creature through
whose loosened hair fall a shower of autumn leaves. This picture is a
veritable phantom of a season past. There is an Algerienne in this
collection, interesting because it is yet another treatment of Besnard’s
famous “Deux Rayons.” The Eastern woman is seated in the window of the
booth, and blending with the room’s light is that light from the long
Eastern street which seems actually to enter her room at the threshold
of her booth.
In 1893, Mr. James Sutton, of New York, ordered from Martignac forty
Besnards to be sent to America. His name was then scarcely known in the
United States. Many of the canvases found instant appreciation. One
beautiful portrait called “La Pensive,” in the possession of Monsieur
Martignac, is especially worthy of mention. Here Besnard is faithful to
his type--a blonde woman with brilliant head of copper-coloured hair.
She leans a little forward with her chin on her clasped hands. Her dress
is of yellow satin and old lace, in her hands two great pink roses. The
scheme of the picture is yellow with a single delicate pink note. The
hair, the flesh, and the texture of the satin and the lace are all
repetitions and repetitions, all insistences of the yellow tone.
“La Femme de Biarritz”--Martignac--one of Besnard’s late paintings, is
very beautiful indeed. The model is a woman of warm, voluptuous type,
revealing the characteristics of the Basque. This picture was painted
when Besnard was in Biarritz, where he had gone for the health of one of
his children.
Monsieur Martignac has several examples of Besnard’s pastels, and
curiously enough the more delicate treatment that his canvases in oil
display is absent in these pastels, whose colours are so vivid as to be
almost blatant; but they are splendid achievements, and Besnard is the
first pastellist in France. Some of his most successful works in this
medium are in the possession of Dr. Delbet, of Paris.
[Illustration: LOVE]
Besnard’s personality recalls that of his distinguished countryman,
Rodin. He has the same strong, vigorous physique, the same air of power,
but these two great masters in temperament and in life and experience
are the antipodes. Besnard is not a recluse; he is, on the contrary, a
man of the world, very domestic too, and absorbed in his family and his
home. His hotel and studios are a little removed from the centre of
Parisian turmoil. He entertains and receives a great deal and has a
large circle of acquaintances and friends. In order to control as much
land as possible and to construct larger workshops, he has bought
extensively around his house. In one studio are the projected designs
for the Théâtre Français, in another the new portrait of his wife, a
full-sized figure of a woman of middle age, her hair is snow white, her
dress sumptuous black velvet, and she holds a yellow-covered novel in
her hands. This was exhibited at last year’s Salon and is the most
realistic of all Besnard’s paintings.
There is an interesting portrait in this same studio of the Princess
Mathilde Bonaparte, who died this winter, and whose salons have been
famous for the last half-century. The Princess is seated at a table by
a green lamp, in the position and environment so well known to men and
women of letters.
On these walls also hang the celebrated picture of the painter’s family,
painted about twenty years ago, a group of red-cheeked children and
their mother.
In this large, agreeable room, Besnard paints from models and statues,
makes his designs and drawings, his etchings, his sketches and his
pastels. But upstairs at the top of his house (whose walls are rich with
their friezes of designs) is an elaborate studio particularly designed
for posers for portraits. This sumptuous apartment--furnished in the
most luxurious manner--suggests a drawing-room and not a studio at all.
Rich screens of Chinese and Japanese workmanship, paintings by the old
masters (none of his work is here), objects and _bibelots_ and treasures
of art adorn the apartment. The chimney-piece is interesting as an
example of Besnard’s taste for plastic art. It is set in panels of
stained glass, and around the fender are coiled a pair of gigantic
boa-constrictors made in plaster and afterwards painted. The effect is
picturesque, terrifying and peculiar, and is the work of the artist
himself.
This room boasts the black-and-gold cabinet which
[Illustration: THE FLIRTATION]
figured in “La Féerie intime.” The picture, as will be remembered, is
the nude figure of a young woman ensconced in a great armchair. The
garments she has just quitted softly surround her. The brilliant and
dazzling effect of the painting is in the meshes of her spangled dress
blazing with reflected light, and from the gold that gleams and glitters
is the lacquer of the Chinese cabinet. The whole picture is a glow of
gold and fire, and in this luscent envelope the woman muses and dreams.
This picture is in Russia, as are many of Besnard’s canvases. Many
critics and painters class this picture as the finest example of modern
art.
It would not be complete to close the study of Besnard without mention
of his etchings. Here and there a dealer may have a complete set of the
few produced, but they are few indeed, and difficult to obtain. The most
celebrated is known as “La Femme.” In this series Besnard has drawn
woman in every stage of her existence. We have the flirt, the mistress,
the wife, the happy mother with her children, the miserable mother, who
to cover the form of her freezing child denudes herself, and at length
casts her body over her son; the woman of the ball-room, the woman of
the streets, and, in short, he has seen fit to display every state and
condition of femininity in this study of black and white.
There also is a weird and eccentric suite, designated as “La Mort.” In
these studies Besnard has indeed played with his conception, ringing its
changes to endless and infinite variety. Death, the skeleton, pursues
his prey in every imaginable state of society--in the streets, in the
crowd, to the lonely individual, to the lovers’ embrace, to the man and
wife before the altar, he lurks behind a pillar to seize the solitary
passer-by, he appears in the ball-room, jogging elbows with the
_débutante_, he rescues the beggar and menaces the rich man. Here in
these drawings the painter displays his first and only hint of
morbidness. The idea of death, he says, has always been with him an
obsession. Whistler’s etchings are alone to be mentioned in class with
these admirable _eaux-fortes_.
Besnard himself explains the absence of the melancholy strain which is,
as a rule, strongly underlying the work of all great genius.
“I never work when I am unhappy. Unhappiness has a most depressing
effect upon my execution and my conception. Never in times of anxiety
have I said, ‘I will turn to my work, I will lose myself in my
[Illustration: A WOMAN OF BIARRITZ]
creations. When my child was ill I was utterly incapable of producing,
and only when its recovery was certain could I undertake my work again.
(And it is at the hospital for sick children at Berck, when he was there
for the health of his child, that he painted his frescoes.)
“My best work is that which I enjoy when I am doing it; it is the work
which brings me pleasure, the work that I do when I am cheerful, which
is my best. This is, of course, according to temperament, but such is
mine! I produce a great deal, I work very hard, of course I am
ambitious, and at times know discouragement, when my conception is so
far behind my power of expression. I take often two months to do a
picture and work and correct my canvases enormously. There are days when
the mystery that should surround an idea is absent. Those are the days
that I say one sees too clearly, and at that time I do not paint. _Je ne
pioche pas_, which means ‘I do not dig away at my work.’ I have produced
enormously and I owe my success to myself and my work alone. I have
never had patronage and have never been part of a coterie.”
He has the gift of facile labour and his mental and temperamental
characteristics are revealed in the free, breezy, healthful inspirations
of his work. His is a happy, vigorous genius, sane and normal, utterly
devoid of much of the weakness marking modern French art.
* * * * *
As soon as the painter of mural decorations leaves the domain of myth
and contiguity to his subjects, he is on dangerous ground. Pure
imagination is too personal, too largely of the painter’s own
time--dying with his death and needing the very spirit of the age to
interpret it, and when modern subjects become the choice for
decorations, they should have for their principal scheme that which will
appeal to the mass and be of general interest. The poorest man and
woman, the youngest child may understand and enjoy the decorations in
the School of Pharmacy. These are perhaps the most promising for the
continuation of Besnard’s fame. They will live. The same may be said of
the pictures in the Mairie of the Louvre; whereas, those in the School
of Chemistry, delightful as they are, are so personal and subtle that
they require printed cards to make them intelligible to the mass. The
ceiling of the Hôtel de Ville represents the apotheosis of science. A
female figure with the profusion of reddish hair Besnard is fond of
painting, holds in her hands sheaves of light which she casts down into
a darkened world.
“My method of work is not different to that of the other masters,”
Besnard says. “I first make a design in wash and then colour it
liberally, put in all the vibration that I see and feel in nature.” (He
has chosen his definition happily, Vibration is a distinct quality of
his work). “I am really glad you do not think I represent a school! I
feel myself a solitary as far as my art goes.... I love motion, and
action, and variety, and yet withal I am a dreamer, completely lost in
my conception and in my mental preparation for my work. For this reason,
perhaps because I am so constantly absorbed in the world of imagination,
my taste in literature is for modern things--for immediate things, if I
may so say. I rise at seven in the morning, and am at work at nine. I
paint until luncheon, and rarely do good work in the afternoons. I take
my inspirations, the ideas for my pictures, from everything that
surrounds me. I cannot tell from where they come, but I am always
seeking to accurately arrange my ideas and render my conceptions and my
translations of them harmonious.”
In the summer Besnard goes to Savoie, where in the long vacations he
does almost no work, repairing his forces, resting and giving himself to
the enjoyment of his tranquil, domestic life. “I think I may say that I
love light above all things.”
And in no modern paintings is the luminous quality more evident.
Certain of his paintings possess the mellowness of the Dutch school.
There is a likeness to Rubens in his treatment of flesh, in the
exuberance and splendid animalism of his women, whereas in the
half-tones and sombre scheme (take, for instance, “Le Regard”), Franz
Hals and Porbus are recalled. Light is his motive in the ceiling of the
Hôtel de Ville. It radiates in the crucible of fire in the Sorbonne
ceiling, whilst the decoration of the Français, Apollo the Sun god,
again repeats the insistent idea. Besnard’s predilection for prismatic,
dazzling effect is unique; a special sense for colour combined with
magnificent technique and accurate drawing, explain the power of his
painting and his high rank in the criticism of the present.
Besnard is in the vigorous prime of his life and production. His
redundant creative force is enormous and he will, it is to be hoped and
believed, abundantly add to France’s treasures of modern art.
STEINLEN
One cannot think of Steinlen, Willette, Guillaume, Rivière, Léandre, and
their colleagues in the same school, without having before one’s eyes an
image of the multi-populous, seething quarter of Paris wherein these
clever nineteenth-century seers and priests of a certain cult lived and
moved, without remembering Montmartre, and the famous cabaret _Le Chat
Noir_, once on the Boulevard Rochechouart.
The Chat Noir was founded by Rodolphe Salis in 1882. This artistic
tavern saw Caran d’Ache’s _début_: his silhouettes of Napoleon and the
Grand Armée did much to make the place popular. Willette here presented
his fascinating musical stories of _Pierrot_--_Histoires sans Paroles_.
The Shadow Pantomime of Henri Rivière was also a celebrated contribution
to the little Bohemian theatre.