ITALY AND THE EAST
In the beginning of the century the man who did not wear a uniform was
not a proper subject for art unless he lived in Italy as a peasant or a
robber. That is to say, painters were either archæologists or tourists;
when they did not dive into the past they sought their romantic ideal in
the distance. Italy, where monumental painting had first seen the light,
was the earliest goal for travellers, and satisfied the desire of
artists, since, for the rest of the world, it was still enveloped in
poetic mystery. Only in Rome, in Naples, and in Tuscany was it thought
possible to meet with human beings who had not become vulgar and hideous
under the influence of civilisation. There they still preserved
something of the beauty of Grecian statues. There artists were less
afraid of being diverted from absolute beauty by the study of nature,
and thus an important principle was carried. Instead of copying directly
from antique statues, as David and Mengs had done before them, painters
began to study the descendants of those who had been the models of the
old Roman sculptors; and so it was that, almost against their will, they
turned from museums to look rather more closely into nature, and from
the past to cast a glance into the present.
To _Leopold Robert_ belongs the credit of having opened out this new
province to an art which was enclosed in the narrow bounds of
Classicism. He owes his success with the public of the twenties and his
place in the history of art entirely to the fact that in spite of his
strict classical training he was one of the first to interest himself,
however little, in contemporary life. Hundreds of artists had wandered
into Italy and seen nothing but the antique until this young man set out
from Neufchâtel in 1818 and became the painter of the Italian people.
What struck him at the first glance was the character of the people,
together with their curious habits and usages, and their rude and
picturesque garb. "He wished to render this with all fidelity," and
especially "to do honour to the absolute nobility of that people which
still bore a trace of the heroic greatness of their forefathers." Above
all, he fancied that he could find this phenomenon of atavism amongst
the bandits; and as Sonnino, an old brigand nest, had been taken and the
inhabitants removed to Engelsburg shortly after his arrival, a
convenient opportunity was offered to him for making his studies in this
place. The pictures of brigand life which he painted in the beginning of
the twenties soon found a most profitable market. "Dear M. Robert,"
said the fashionable guests who visited his studio by the dozen, "could
you paint a little brigand, if it is not asking too much?" Robbers with
sentimental qualms were particularly prized: for instance, at the moment
when they were fondling their wives, or praying remorsefully to God, or
watching over the bed of a sick child.
From brigands he made a transition to the girls of Sorrento, Frascati,
Capri, and Procida, and to shepherd lads, fishers, pilgrims, hermits,
and _pifferari_. Early in the twenties, when he made an exhibition of a
number of these little pictures in Rome, it effectually prepared the way
for his fame; and when he sent a succession of larger pictures to the
Paris Salon in 1824-31 he was held as one of the most brilliant masters
of the French school, to whom Romanticists and Classicists paid the same
honour. In the first of these pictures, painted in 1824, he had
represented a number of peasants listening to a Neapolitan fisherman
improvising to the accompaniment of a harmonica. "The Return from a
Pilgrimage to the Madonna dell' Arco" of 1827 is the painting of a
triumphal waggon yoked with oxen. Upon it are seated lads and maidens
adorned with foliage, and in their gay Sunday best. An old _lazzarone_
is playing the mandolin, and girls are dancing with tambourines, whilst
a young man springs round clattering his castanets, and a couple of
boys, to complete the seasons of life, head the procession. His third
picture, "The Coming of the Reapers to the Pontine Marshes," was the
chief work in the Salon of 1831 after the "Freedom" of Delacroix. Heine
accorded him a classical passage of description, and the orthodox
academical critics were liberal with most unmerited praise, treating the
painter as a dangerous revolutionary who was seducing art into the
undignified naturalism of Ribera and Caravaggio. Robert, the honest,
lamblike man, who strikes us now as being a conscientious follower of
the school of David!
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
LEOPOLD ROBERT.]
How little did the artistic principles which he laid down in his letters
accord with his own paintings! "I try," he wrote to a friend in 1819,
"to follow Nature in everything. Nature is the only teacher who should
be heard. She alone inspires and moves me, she alone appeals to me: it
is Nature that I seek to fathom, and in her I ever hope to find the
special impulse for work." She is a miracle to him, and one that is
greater than any other, a book in which "the simple may read as well as
the great." He could not understand "how painters could take the old
masters as their model instead of Nature, who is the only great
exemplar!" What is to be seen in his pictures is merely an awkward
transference of David's manner of conception and representation to the
painting of Italian peasants--a scrupulously careful adaptation of
classical rules to romantic subjects. He looked at modern Italians
solely through the medium of antique statuary, and conducts us to an
Italy which can only be called Leopold Robert's Italy, since it never
existed anywhere except in Robert's map. All his figures have the
movement of some familiar work of antique sculpture, and that expression
of cherished melancholy which went out of fashion after the time of Ary
Scheffer. Never does one see in his pictures a casual and unhackneyed
gesture in harmony with the situation. It seems as if he had dressed up
antique statues or David's Horatii and his Sabine women in the costume
of the Italian peasantry, and grouped them for a _tableau vivant_ in
front of stage scenery, and in accordance with Parisian rules of
composition. His peasants and fishers make beautiful, noble, and often
magnificent groups. But one can always give the exact academic rules for
any particular figure standing here and not there, or in one position
and not in another. His pictures are much too official, and obtrusively
affect the favourite pyramid form of composition.
[Illustration: L. ROBERT. FISHERS OF THE ADRIATIC.]
But as they are supposed to be pictures of Italian manners, the contrast
between nature and the artificial construction is almost more irritating
than it is in David's mythological representations. It is as if Robert
had really never seen any Italian peasants, though he maintains all the
while that he is depicting their life. The hard outlines and the sharp
bronze tone of his works are a ghastly evidence of the extent to which
the sense of colour had become extinct in the school of David. It was
merely form that attracted him; the sun of Italy left him indifferent.
The absence of atmosphere gives his figures an appearance of having been
cut out of picture sheets. O great artists of Holland, masters of
atmospheric effect and of contour bathed in light, what would you have
said to such heartless silhouettes! In his youth Robert had been a line
engraver, and he adapted the prosaic technique of line engraving to
painting. However, he was a transitional painter, and as such he has an
historical interest. He was a modern Tasso, too, and on the strength of
the adventurous relationship to Princess Charlotte Napoleon, which
ultimately drove him to suicide, he could be used with effect as the
hero of a novel. Through the downfall of the school of David his star
has paled--one more proof that only Nature is eternal, and that
conventional painting falls into oblivion with the age that saw it rise.
"I wished to find a _genre_ which was not yet known, and this _genre_
has had the fortune to please. It is always an advantage to be the
first." With these words he has himself indicated, in a way which is as
modest as it is accurate, the ground of his reputation amongst
contemporaries, and why it is that the history of art cannot quite
afford to forget him.
[Illustration: L. ROBERT. THE COMING OF THE REAPERS TO THE PONTINE
MARSHES.]
Amongst the multitude of those who, incited by Robert's brilliant
successes, made the Spanish staircase in Rome the basis of their art,
_Victor Schnetz_, by his "Vow to the Madonna" of 1831, specially
succeeded in winning public favour. At a later time his favourite themes
were the funerals of children, inundations, and the like; but his arid
method of painting contrasts with the sentimental melancholy of these
subjects in a fashion which is not particularly agreeable.
[Illustration: SCHNETZ. AN ITALIAN SHEPHERD.]
It was _Ernest Hébert_ who first saw Italy with the eyes of a painter.
He might be called the Perugino of this group. He was the most romantic
of the pupils of Delaroche, and owed his conception of colour to that
painter. His spiritual father was Ary Scheffer. The latter has
discovered the poetry of sentimentality; Hébert the poetry of disease.
His pictures are invariably of great technical delicacy. His style has
something femininely gracious, almost languishing: his colouring is
delicately fragrant and tenderly melting. He is, indeed, a refined
artist who occupies a place by himself, however mannered the melancholy
and sickliness of his figures may be. In "The Malaria" of 1850 they were
influenced by the subject itself. The barge gliding over the waters of
the Pontine Marshes, with its freight of men, women, and children, seems
like a gloomy symbol of the voyage of life; the sorrow of the passengers
is that of resignation: dying they droop their heads like withering
flowers. But later the fever became chronic in Hébert. The interesting
disease returned even where it was out of place, as it does still in the
pictures of his followers. The same fate befell the painters of Italy
which befalls tourists. What Robert had seen in the country as the first
comer whole generations saw after him, neither more nor less than that.
The pictures were always variations on the old theme, until in the
sixties Bonnat came with his individual and realistic vision.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
HÉBERT. THE MALARIA.]
In Germany, where "the yearning for Italy" had been ventilated in an
immoderate quantity of lyrical poems ever since the time of
Wackenroder's _Herzensergiessungen_, _August Riedel_ represented this
phase of modern painting; and as Leopold Robert is still celebrated,
Riedel ought not to be forgotten. Riedel lived too long (1800-1883),
and, as he painted nothing but bad pictures during the last thirty
years of his life, what he had done in his youth was forgotten. At that
time he was the first apostle of Leopold Robert in Germany, and as such
he has his importance as an innovator. When he began his career in the
Munich Academy in 1819 Peter Langer, a Classicist of the order of Mengs,
was still director there. Riedel also painted classical subjects and
church pictures--"Christ on the Mount of Olives," "The Resurrection of
Lazarus," and "Peter and Paul healing the Lame." But when he returned
from Italy in 1823 he reversed the route which others had taken: the
classic land set him free from Classicism, and opened his eyes to the
beauty of life. Instead of working on saints in the style of Langer, he
painted beautiful women in the costume of modern Italy. His "Neapolitan
Fisherman's Family" was for Germany a revelation similar to that which
Robert's "Neapolitan Improvisator" had been for France. The fisherman,
rather theatrically draped, is sitting on the shore, while his wife and
his little daughter listen to him playing the zither. The blue sea,
dotted with white sails, and distant Ischia and Cape Missene, form the
background; and a blue heaven, dappled with white clouds, arches above.
Everything was of an exceedingly conventional beauty, but denoted
progress in comparison with Robert. It already announced that search for
brilliant effects of light which henceforward became a characteristic of
Riedel, and gave him a peculiar position in his own day. "Even hardened
connoisseurs," wrote Emil Braun from Rome about this time, "stand
helpless before this magic of colouring. It is often long before they
are able to persuade themselves that such glory of colour can be
produced by the familiar medium of oil painting, and with materials that
any one can buy at a shop where pigments are sold." Riedel touched a
problem--diffidently, no doubt--which was only taken up much later in
its full extent. And if Cornelius said to him, "You have fully attained
what I have avoided with the greatest effort during the course of my
whole life," it is none the less true that Riedel's Italian girls in the
full glow of sunlight have remained, in spite of their stereotyped
smile, so reminiscent of Sichel, better able to stand the test of
galleries than the pictures of the Michael-Angelo of Munich. Before his
"Neapolitan Fisherman's Family," which went the world over like a melody
from Auber's _Masaniello_, before his "Judith" carrying the head of
Holofernes in the brightest light of morning, before his "Girls Bathing"
in the dimness of the forest, and before his "Sakuntala," painted "with
refined effects of light," the cartoon painters mumbled and grumbled,
and raised hue and cry over the desecration of German art; but Riedel's
friends were just as loud in proclaiming the witchery of his colour, and
"the Southern sunlight which he had conjured on to his palette," to be
splendid beyond the powers of comprehension. It is difficult at the
present day to understand the fame that he once had as "a pyrotechnist
in pigments." But the results which he achieved by himself in colouring,
long before the influence of the Belgians in Germany, will always give
him a sure place in the history of German art. And these qualities were
unconsciously inherited by his successors, who troubled their heads no
further about the pioneer and founder.
[Illustration: RIEDEL. THE NEAPOLITAN FISHERMAN'S FAMILY.]
[Illustration: RIEDEL. JUDITH.]
Those who painted the East with its clear radiance, its interesting
people, and its picturesque localities, stand in opposition to the
Italian enthusiasts. They are the second group of travellers. Gros had
given French art a vision of that distant magic land, but he had had no
direct disciples. Painters were as yet in too close bondage to their
classical proclivities to receive inspiration from Napoleon's expedition
into Egypt. But the travels of Chateaubriand and the verse of Byron, and
then the Greek war of liberation, and, above all, the conquest of
Algiers, once more aroused an interest in these regions, and, when the
revolution of the Romanticists had once taken place, taught art a way
into the East. Authors, journalists, and painters found their place in
this army of travellers. The first view of men and women standing on the
shore in splendid costume, with turbans or high sheepskin hats, and
surrounded by black slaves, or mounted upon horses richly caparisoned,
or listening to the roll of drums and the muezzin resounding from the
minarets, was like a scene from _The Arabian Nights_. The bazaars and
the harems, the quarters of the Janizaries and gloomy dungeons were
visited in turn. Veiled women were seen, and mysterious houses where
every sound was hushed. At first the Moors, obedient to the stern laws
of the Koran, fled before the painters as if before evil spirits, but
the Moorish women were all the more ready to receive these conquerors
with open arms. Artists plunged with rapture into a new world; they
anointed themselves with the oil of roses, and tasted all the sweets of
Oriental life. The East was for the Byronic enthusiasts of 1830 what
Italy had been for the Classicists. Could anything be imagined more
romantic? You went on board a steamer provided with all modern comforts
and all the appliances of the nineteenth century, and it carried you
thousands of years back in the history of the world; you set foot on a
soil where the word progress did not exist--in a land where the
inhabitants still sat in the sun as if cemented to the ground, and wore
the same costumes in which their forefathers had sat there two thousand
years ago. Here the Romanticists not only found nature decked in the
rich hues which satisfied their passion for colour, but discovered a
race of people possessed of that beauty which, according to the
Classicists, was only to be seen in the Italian peasants. They beheld
"men of innate dignity and remarkable distinction of pose and gesture."
Thus a new experience was added to life. There was the East, where
splendour and simplicity, cruelty and beauty, softness of temper and
savage austerity, and brilliant colour and blinding light are more
completely mingled than anywhere else in the world; there was the East,
where rich tints laugh in the midst of squalor and misery, the
brightness of earlier days in the midst of outworn usages, and the pride
of art in the midst of ruined villages. It was so great, so
unfathomable, and so like a fairy tale that it gave every one the chance
of discovering in it some new qualities.
For _Delacroix_, the Byron of painting, it was a splendid setting for
passion in its unfettered wildness and its unscrupulous daring. He, who
had lived exclusively in the past, now turned to the observation of
living beings, as may be seen in his "Algerian Women," his "Jewish
Wedding," his "Emperor of Morocco," and his "Convulsionaries of
Tangier." Amongst the Orientals he also found the hotly flaming
sensuousness and primitive wildness which beset his imagination with its
craving for everything impassioned.
The great _charmeur_, the master of pictorial caprice, _Decamps_, found
his province in the East, because its sun was so lustrous, its costume
so bright, and its human figures so picturesque. If Delacroix was a
powerful artist, Decamps was no more than a painter,--but painter he was
to his finger-tips. He was indifferent to nothing in nature or history:
he showed as much enthusiasm for a pair of tanned beggar-boys playing in
the sunshine at the corner of a wall as for Biblical figures and
old-world epics. He has painted hens pecking on a dung-heap, dogs on the
chase and in the kennel, monkeys as scholars, and musicians in all the
situations which Teniers and Chardin loved. His "Battle of Tailleborg"
of 1837 has been aptly termed the only picture of a battle in the
Versailles Museum. He looked on everything as material for painting, and
never troubled as to how another artist would have treated the subject.
There is an individuality in every one of his works; not an
individuality of the first order, but one that is decidedly charming and
that assures him a very high place amongst his contemporaries.
Having made a success in 1829 with an imaginary picture of the East, he
had a wish to see how far the reality corresponded with his ideas of
Turkey, and in the same year--therefore before Delacroix--he went on
that journey to the Greek Archipelago, Constantinople, and Asia Minor
which became a voyage of discovery for French painting. In the Salon of
1831 was exhibited his "Patrol of Smyrna," which at once made him one of
the favourite French painters of the time. Soon afterwards came the
picture of the "Pasha on his Rounds," accompanied by a lean troop of
running and panting guards, that of the great "Turkish Bazaar," in which
he gave such a charming representation of the gay and noisy bustle of an
Oriental fair, those of the "Turkish School," the "Turkish Café," "The
Halt of the Arab Horsemen," and "The Turkish Butcher's Shop." In
everything which he painted from this time forward--even in his Biblical
pictures--he had before his eyes the East as it is in modern times. Like
Horace Vernet, he painted his figures in the costume of modern Arabs and
Egyptians, and placed them in landscapes with modern Arab buildings. But
the largeness of line in these landscapes is expressive of something so
patriarchal and Biblical, and of such a dreamy, mystical poetry, that,
in spite of their modern garb, the figures seem like visions from a far
distance.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DECAMPS. THE SWINEHERD.]
Decamps' painting never became trivial. All his pictures soothe and
captivate the eye, however much they disappoint, on the first glance,
the expectations which the older descriptions of them may have excited.
Fifty years ago it was said that Delacroix painted with colour and
Decamps with light; that his works were steeped in a bath of sunshine.
This vibrating light, this transparent atmosphere, which contemporaries
admired, is not to be found in Decamps' pictures. Their brilliancy of
technique is admirable, but he was no painter of light. The world of
sunshine in which everything is dipped, the glow and lustre of objects
in shining, liquid, and tremulous air, is what Gustave Guillaumet first
learnt to paint a generation later. Decamps attained the effect of
light in his pictures by the darkening of shadows, precisely in the
manner of the old school. To make the sky bright, he threw the
foreground into opaque and heavy shade. And as, in consequence of the
ground of bole used to produce his beautiful red tones, the dark parts
of his pictures gradually became as black as pitch, and the light parts
dead and spotty, he will rather seem to be a contemporary of Albert Cuyp
than of Manet.
As draughtsman to a German baron making a scientific tour in the East,
_Prosper Marilhat_, the third of the painters of Oriental life, was
early in following this career. He visited Greece, Asia Minor, and
Egypt, and returned to Paris in 1833 intoxicated with the beauties of
these lands. Especially dear to him was Egypt, and in his pictures he
called himself, "Marilhat the Egyptian." Decamps had been blinded by the
sharp contrast between light and shadow in Oriental nature, by the vivid
blaze of colour in its vegetation, and by the tropical glow of the
Southern sky. Marilhat took novelties with a more quiet eye, and kept
close to pure reality. He has not so much virtuosity as Decamps, and in
colour he is less daring, but he is perhaps more poetic, and on that
account, in the years 1833-44, he was prized almost more. The exhibition
of 1844, in which eight of his pictures appeared, closed his career. He
had expected the Cross of the Legion of Honour, but did not get it, and
this disappointment affected him so deeply that he became first
hypochondriacal and then mad. His early death at thirty-six set Decamps
free from a powerful rival.
_Eugène Fromentin_ went further in the same direction as Marilhat. He
knew nothing of the preference for the glowing hues of the tropics nor
of the fantastic colouring of the Romanticists. He painted in the spirit
of a refined social period in which no loud voice is tolerated, but only
light and familiar talk. The East gave him his grace; the proud and
fiery nature of the Arab horse was revealed to him. In his portraits
Fromentin looks like a cavalry officer. In his youth he had studied law,
but that was before his acquaintance with the landscape painter Cabat
brought him to his true calling, and a sojourn made on three different
occasions--in 1845, 1848, and 1852--on the borders of Morocco decided
for him his specialty. By his descriptions of travels, _A Year in
Sahel_, which appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, he became known
as a writer: it was only after 1857, however, that he became famous as a
painter. Fromentin's East is Algiers. While Marilhat tried to render the
marvellous clearness of the Southern light, and Decamps depicted the
glowing heat of the East, its dark brooding sky in the sultry hours of
summer and the grand outlines of its landscape, Fromentin has tried--and
perhaps with too much system--to express the grace and brilliant spirit
of the East. Taste, refinement, ductility, distinction of colouring, and
grace of line are his special qualities. His Arabs galloping on their
beautiful white horses have an inimitable chivalry; they are true
princes in every pose and movement. The execution of his pictures is
always spirited, easy, and in keeping with their high-bred tone.
Whatever he does has the nervous vigour of a sketch, with that degree of
finish which satisfies the connoisseur. There is always a coquetry in
his arrangement of colour, and his tones are light and delicate if they
are not deep. In the landscape his little Arab riders have the effect of
flowers upon a carpet.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DECAMPS. COMING OUT FROM A TURKISH SCHOOL.
(_By permission of Mme. Moreau-Nélaton, the owner of the picture._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DECAMPS. THE WATERING PLACE.]
Afterwards, when naturalism was at its zenith, Fromentin was much
attacked for this wayward grace. He was accused of making a superficial
appeal to the eye, and of offering everything except truth. And for its
substantive fidelity Fromentin's "East" cannot certainly be taken very
seriously. He was a man of fine culture, and in his youth he had studied
the old Dutch masters more than nature; he even saw the light of the
East through the Dutch _chiaroscuro_. His pictures are subtle works of
art, nervous in drawing and dazzling in brilliancy of construction, but
they are washed in rather than painted, and stained rather than
coloured. In his book he speaks himself of the cool, grey shadows of the
East. But in his pictures they turn to a reddish hue or to brown. An
effort after beauty of tone in many ways weakened his Arab scenes. He
looked at the people of the East too much with the eyes of a Parisian.
And the more his recollections faded, the more did he begin to create
for himself an imaginary Africa. He painted grey skies simply because he
was tired of blue; he tinted white horses with rosy reflections,
chestnuts with lilac, and dappled-greys with violet. The grace of his
works became more and more an affair of affectation, until at last,
instead of being Oriental pictures, they became Parisian fancy goods,
which merely recalled the fact that Algiers had become a French town.
[Illustration: MARILHAT. A HALT.]
But after all what does it matter whether pictures of the East are true
to nature or not? Other people whose names are not Fromentin can provide
such documents. In his works Fromentin has expressed himself, and that
is enough. Take up his first book, _L'été dans la Sahara_: by its grace
of style it claims a place in French literature. Or read his classic
masterpiece, _Les maîtres d'autrefois_, published in 1876 after a tour
through Belgium and Holland: it will remain for ever one of the finest
works ever written on art. A connoisseur of such refinement, a critic
who gauged the artistic works of Belgium and Holland with such subtlety,
necessarily became in his own painting an epicure of beautiful tones.
This man, who never made an awkward movement nor uttered a brutal word,
this sensitive, distinguished spirit could be no more than a subtle
artist who had eyes for nothing but the aristocratic side of Eastern
life. As a painter, however, he might wish to be true to nature; he
could be no more than this. His art, compact of grace and distinction,
was the outcome of his own nature. He is a descendant of those
delicately feminine, seductively brilliant, facile and spontaneous,
sparkling and charming painters who were known in the eighteenth century
as _peintres des fêtes galantes_. He is the Watteau of the East, and in
this capacity one of the most winning and captivating products of French
art.
[Illustration: E. FROMENTIN. ARABIAN FALCONERS.]
Finally, _Guillaumet_, the youngest and last of the group, found in the
East peace: a scion of the Romanticists, there is none the less a
whole world of difference between him and them. While the Romanticists,
as sons of a flaccid, inactive period, lashed themselves into enthusiasm
for the passion and wild life of the East, Guillaumet, the child of a
hurried and neurotic epoch, sought here an opiate for his nerves. Where
they saw contrasts he found harmony; and he did not find it, like
Fromentin, in what is understood as _chic_. Manet's conception of colour
had taught him that nature is everywhere in accord and harmoniously
delicate.
He writes: "_Je commence à distinguer quelques formes: des silhouettes
indécises bougent le long des murs enfumés sous des poutres luisantes de
sui. Les détails sortent du demi-jour, s'animent graduellement avec la
magie des Rembrandt. Même mystère des ombres, mêmes ors dans les
reflets--c'est l'aube.... Des terrains poudreux inondés de soleil; un
amoncellement de murailles grises sous un ciel sans nuage; une cité
somnolente baignée d'une lumière égale, et dans le frémissement visible
des atomes aériens quelques ombres venant ça et là détacher une forme,
accuser un geste parmi les groupes en burnous qui se meuvent sur les
places ... tel m'apparait le ksar, vers dix heures du matin...._
"_L'oeil interroge: rien ne bouge. L'oreille écoute: aucun bruit. Pas un
souffle, si ce n'est le frémissement presque imperceptible de l'air
au-dessus du sol embrasé. La vie semble avoir disparu, absorbée par la
lumière. C'est le milieu du jour.... Mais le soir approche.... Les
troupeaux rentrent dans les douars; ils se pressent autour des tentes, à
peine visibles, confondus sous cette teinte neutre du crépuscule, faite
avec les gris de la nuit qui vient et les violets tendres du soir qui
s'en va. C'est l'heure mystérieuse, où les couleurs se mèlent, où les
contours se noient, où toute chose s'assombrit, où toute voix se tait,
où l'homme, à la fin du jour, laisse flotter sa pensée devant ce qui
s'éteint, s'efface et s'evanouit._"
[Illustration: _L'Art._ EUGÈNE FROMENTIN.]
This description of a day in Algiers in Guillaumet's _Tableaux
algériens_ interprets the painter Guillaumet better than any critical
appreciation could possibly do. For him the East is the land of dreams
and melting softness, a far-off health-resort for neurotic patients,
where one lies at ease in the sun and forgets the excitements of Paris.
It was not what was brilliant and pictorial in sparkling jewels and
bright costume that attracted him at all, but the silence, the mesmeric
spell of the East, the vastness of the infinite horizon, the imposing
majesty of the desert, and the sublime and profound peace of the nights
of Africa. "The Evening Prayer in the Desert" was the name of the first
picture that he brought back with him in 1863. There is a wide and
boundless plain; the straight line of the horizon is broken by a few
mountain forms and by the figures of a party belonging to a caravan;
but, bowed as they are in prayer, these figures are scarcely to be
distinguished. The smoke of the camp ascends like a pillar into the air.
The monotony of the wilderness seems to stretch endlessly to the right
and to the left, like a grand and solemn Nirvana smiting the human
spirit with religious delirium.
[Illustration: FROMENTIN. ARABIAN WOMEN RETURNING FROM DRAWING WATER.]
For Decamps and Marilhat the East was a great, red copper-block beneath
a blue dome of steel; a beautiful monster, bright and glittering.
Guillaumet has no wish to dazzle. His pictures give one the impression
of intense and sultry heat. His light is really "_le frémissement
visible des atomes aériens_." Moreover, he did not see the chivalry of
the East like Fromentin. The latter was fascinated by the nomad, the
pure Arab living in tent or saddle, the true aristocrat of the desert,
mounted on his white palfrey, hunting wild beasts through fair blue and
green landscapes. Poor folk who never owned a horse are the models of
Guillaumet. With their dogs--wild creatures who need nothing--they squat
in the sun as if with their own kin: they are the lower, primitive
population, the pariahs of the wilderness; tattered men whose life-long
siesta is only interrupted by the anguish of death, animal women whose
existence flows by as idly as in the trance of opium.
After the French Romanticists had shown the way, other nations
contributed their contingent to the painters of Oriental subjects. In
Germany poetry had discovered the East. Rückert imitated the measure and
the ideas of the Oriental lyric, and the Greek war of liberation
quickened all that passionate love for the soil of old Hellas which
lives in the German soul. _Wilhelm Müller_ sang his songs of the Greeks,
and in 1825 _Leopold Schefer_ brought out his tale _Die Persierin_. But
just as the Oriental tale was a mere episode in German literature, an
exotic grafted on the native stem, so the Oriental painting produced no
leading mind in the country, but merely a number of good soldiers who
dutifully served in the troops of foreign commanders.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
FROMENTIN. THE CENTAURS.]
_Kretszchmer_ of Berlin led the way with ethnographical representations,
and was joined at a later time by Wilhelm Gentz and Adolf Schreyer of
Frankfort. _Gentz_, a dexterous painter, and, as a colourist, perhaps
the most gifted of the Berlin school in the sixties, is, in comparison
with the great Frenchmen who portrayed the East, a thoroughly arid
realist. He brought to his task a certain amount of rough vigour and
restless diversity, together with North German sobriety and Berlin
humour. _Schreyer_, who lived in Paris, belonged to the following of
Fromentin. The Arab and his steed interested him also. His pictures are
bouquets of colour, dazzling the eye. Arabs in rich and picturesque
costume repose on the ground or are mounted on their milk-white steeds,
which rear and prance with tossing manes and wide-stretched nostrils.
The desert undulates away to the far horizon, now pale and now caressed
by the softened rays of the setting sun, which tip the waves of sand
with burnished gold. Schreyer was--for a German--a man with an
extraordinary gift for technique and a brilliantly effective sense of
life. The latter remark is specially true of his sketches. At a later
date--in 1875, after being with Lembach and Makart in Cairo--the
Viennese _Leopold Müller_ found the domain of his art beneath the clear
sky, in the brightly coloured land of the Nile. Even his sketches are
often of great delicacy of colour, and the ethnographical accuracy which
he also possessed has long made him the most highly valued delineator of
Oriental life and a popular illustrator of works on Egypt. The learned
and slightly pedantic vein in his works he shares with Gérôme, but by
his greater charm of colour he comes still nearer to Fromentin.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
GUILLAUMET. THE SÉGUIA, NEAR BISKRA.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
GUILLAUMET. A DWELLING IN THE SAHARA.]
The route to the East was shown to the English by the glowing landscapes
of _William Müller_; but the English were just as unable to find a Byron
amongst their painters. _Frederick Goodall_ has studied the classical
element in the East, and endeavoured to reconstruct the past from the
present. Best known amongst these artists was _J. F. Lewis_, who died in
1876 and was much talked of in earlier days. For long years he wandered
through Asia Minor, filling his portfolios with sketches and his trunks
with Oriental robes and weapons. When he returned there was a perfect
scramble for his pictures. They revealed a new world to the English
then, but no one scrambles for them now. John Lewis was exceedingly
diligent and conscientious; he studied the implements, the costumes, and
the popular types of the East with incredible industry. In his harem
pictures as in his representations of Arabian camp life everything is
painted, down to the patterns of embroidery, the ornaments of turbans,
and the pebbles on the sand. Even his water-colours are triumphs of
endurance; but patience and endurance are not sufficient to make an
interesting artist. John Lewis stands in respect of colour, too, more or
less on a level with Gentz. He has seized neither the dignity of the
Mussulman nor the grace of the Bedouin, but has contented himself with a
faithful though somewhat glaring reproduction of accessories. _Houghton_
was the first who, moving more or less parallel with Guillaumet,
succeeded in delicately interpreting the great peace and the mystic
silence of the East.
[Illustration: W. MÜLLER. PRAYER IN THE DESERT.]
The East was in this way traversed in all directions. The first comers
who beheld it with eager, excited eyes collected a mass of gigantic
legends, with no decided aim or purpose and driven by no passionate
impulse, merely eager to pluck here or there an exotic flower, or
lightly to catch some small part of the glamour that overspread all that
was Eastern, piled up dreams upon dreams, and gave it a gorgeous and
fantastic life. There were deserts shining in the sun, waves lashed by
the storm, the nude forms of women, and all the Asiatic splendour of the
East: dark-red satin, gold, crystal, and marble were heaped in confusion
and executed in terrible fantasies of colour in the midst of darkness
and lightning. After this generation had passed like a thunderstorm the
_chic_ of Fromentin was delicious. He profited by the taste which others
had excited. Painters of all nationalities overran the East. The great
dramas were transformed into elegies, pastorals, and idylls; even
ethnographical representations had their turn. Guillaumet summed up the
aims of that generation. His dreamy and tender painting was like a
beautiful summer evening. The radiance of the blinding sky was
mitigated, and a peaceful sun at the verge of the horizon covered the
steppes of sand, which it had scorched a few hours before, with a
network of rosy beams.
They were all scions of the Romantic movement. The yearning which filled
their spirits and drove them into distant lands was only another symptom
of their dissatisfaction with the present.
Classicism had dealt with Greek and Roman history by the aid of antique
statues, and next used the colours of the Flemish masters to paint
Italian peasantry. Romanticism had touched the motley life of the Middle
Ages and the richly coloured East; but both had anxiously held aloof
from the surroundings of home and the political and social relations of
contemporaries.
It was obvious that art's next task was to bring down to earth again the
ideal that had hovered so long over the domain of ancient history, and
then winged its flight to the realms of the East. "_Ah la vie, la vie!
le monde est là; il rit, crie, souffre, s'amuse, et on ne le rend pas._"
In these words the necessity of the step has been indicated by Fromentin
himself. The successful delivery of modern art was first accomplished,
the problem stated in 1789 was first solved, when the subversive
upheaval of the Third Estate, which had been consummating itself more
and more imperiously ever since the Revolution, found distinct
expression in the art of painting. Art always moves on parallel lines
with religious conceptions, with politics, and with manners. In the
Middle Ages men lived in the world beyond the grave, and so the subjects
of painting were Madonnas and saints. According to Louis XIV, everything
was derived from the King, as light from the sun, and so royalty by the
grace of God was reflected in the art of his epoch. The royal sun
suffered total eclipse in the Revolution, and with this mighty change of
civilisation art had to undergo a new transformation. The 1789 of
painting had to follow on the politics of 1789: the proclamation of the
liberty and equality of all individuals. Only painting which recognised
man in his full freedom, no privileged class of gods and heroes,
Italians and Easterns, could be the true child of the Revolution, the
art of the new age. Belgium and Germany made the first diffident steps
in this direction.