CHAPTER XXVI

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

Whence has _Millet_ come?

It was the time when art, still blind to the life around, could find no

subjects worthy of it except in the past and in the distance. Then

Millet came and overthrew an art vegetating in museums or astray in

tropical countries. It was the time when Leopold Robert in Italy tested

the noble pose of the school of David upon the peasant, and when the

German painters of rustics recognised in the labourer an object for

pleasantries and pathetic little scenes. Then Millet stepped forward and

painted, with profound simplicity, the people at work in the field, or

in their distress, without sentimentality and without beautifying or

idealising them. That great utterance, "I work," the utterance of the

nineteenth century, is here spoken aloud for the first time. Rousseau

and his fellow-artists were the painters of the country. Millet became

the painter of the labourer. He, the great peasant, is the creator of

that painting of peasants which is entwined with the deepest roots of

intimate landscape. Misunderstood in the beginning, it proclaimed for

the first time the new gospel of art before which the people of all

nations bow at the present date. What others did later was merely to

advance on the path opened by Millet. And as time passes the figure of

this powerful man shines more and more brilliantly. The form of Jean

François Millet rises so powerfully, so imperiously, and so suddenly

that one might almost imagine him to have come from Ibsen's third

kingdom; for he is without forerunners in art. An attempt has been made

to bring him into relation with the social and political movement of

ideas in the forties, but certainly this is unjust. Millet was in no

sense revolutionary. During his whole life he repudiated the designs

which some of the democratic party imputed to him, as well as the

conclusions which they drew from his works.

Millet's life in itself explains his art. Never have heart and hand, a

man and his work, tallied with each other as they did in him. He does

not belong to those painters who, even when one admires them, give one

nevertheless a sense that they could just as easily have produced

something different. Let any one consider his works and read the letters

published in Sensier's book: the man whom one knows from the letters

lives in his works, and these works are the natural illustration of the

book in which the man has depicted himself. In the unity of man and

artist lies the source of his strength, the secret of his greatness.

[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]

Even the circumstances over which he triumphed necessitated his being

the painter that he actually was, if he became one at all. He was not

born in a city where a child's eyes are everywhere met by works of

art--pictures which no doubt early awaken the feeling for art, but which

just as easily disturb a free outlook into nature. Moreover, he did not

spring from one of those families where art is itself practised, or

where art is discussed and taste early guided upon definite lines. He

was a peasant, whose father and grandfather were peasants before him,

and whose brothers were farm labourers. He was born in 1814, far away

from Paris, in a little Norman village hard by the sea, and there he

grew up. The regular and majestic plunge of the waves against the

granite rocks of the coast, the solemn murmurs of the ebb and flow of

the sea, the moaning of the wind in the apple trees and the old oaks of

his father's garden, were the first sounds which struck upon the ear in

Gruchy, near Cherbourg. It has been adduced that his father loved music,

and had had success as the leader of the village choir. But though there

may have always been a dim capacity for art in the youngster's blood,

there was nothing calculated to strengthen it in his education. Millet's

sturdy father had no idea of making an artist of his son; the boy saw no

artist at work in the neighbourhood; nature and instinct guided him

alone.

For a man brought up in a city and trained at an academy all things

become hackneyed. Many centuries of artistic usage have dimmed their

original freshness; and he finds a ready-made phrase coined for

everything. Millet stood before the world like the first man in the day

of creation. Everything seemed new to him; he was charmed and

astonished, and a wild flood of impressions burst in upon him. He did

not come under the influence of any tradition, but approached art like

the man in the age of stone who first scratched the outline of a mammoth

on a piece of ivory, or like the primæval Greek who, according to the

legend, invented painting by making a likeness of his beloved with a

charred stick upon a wall. No one encouraged him in his first attempts.

No one dreamt that this young man was destined to any life other than

that of a peasant. From the time he was fourteen until he was eighteen

he did every kind of field labour upon his father's land in the same way

as his brothers--hoeing, digging, ploughing, mowing, threshing, sowing

the seed, and dressing the ground. But he always had his eyes about him;

he drew upon a white patch of wall, without guidance, the picture of a

tree, an orchard, or a peasant whom he had chanced to meet on a Sunday

when going to church. And he drew so correctly that every one recognised

the likenesses. A family council was held upon the matter. His father

brought one of his son's drawings to a certain M. Mouchel in Cherbourg,

a strange personage who had once been a painter and had the reputation

of being a connoisseur; and he was to decide whether François "had

really enough talent for painting to gain his bread by it." So Millet,

the farm-hand, was twenty when he received his first lessons in drawing.

He was learning the A B C of art, but humanly speaking he was already

Millet. What had roused his talent and induced him to take a stump of

charcoal in his hand was not the study of any work of art, but the sight

of nature--nature, the great mother of all, who had embraced him, nature

with whom and through whom he lived. Through her, visions and emotions

were quickened in him, and he felt the secret impulse to give them

expression.

[Illustration: MILLET. THE HOUSE AT GRUCHY.]

Of what concerned the manual part of his art he understood nothing, and

his two teachers in Cherbourg, Mouchel and Langlois, who were

half-barbarians themselves, gave him the less knowledge, as only two

months later, in 1835, his father died, and the young man returned to

his own people as a farm-labourer once more. And it was only after an

interruption of three years that a subsidy from the community of

Cherbourg, which was collected by his teacher Langlois, and a small sum

saved by his parents--six hundred francs all told--enabled him to

journey up to Paris. He was twenty-three years of age, a broad-chested

Hercules in stature, for till that time he had breathed nothing but the

pure, sharp sea air; his handsome face was framed in long fair locks,

which fell wildly about his shoulders. What had this peasant to do in

the capital! In Delaroche's school he was called _l'homme des bois_. He

had all the awkwardness of a provincial, and the artist was only to be

surmised from the fire in the glance of his large dark blue eyes. At

first Delaroche took peculiar pains with his new pupil. But to submit to

training is to follow the lead of another person. A man like Millet, who

knew what he wanted, was no longer to be guided upon set lines. The

pictures of Delaroche made no appeal to him. They struck him as being

"huge vignettes, theatrical effects without any real sentiment." And

Delaroche soon lost patience with the clumsy peasant, whom he--most

unfairly--regarded as stiff-necked and obstinate.

Other aims floated before Millet, and he _could_ not now learn to

produce academical compositions, so, as these were alone demanded in the

school of Delaroche, he never cleared himself from a reputation for

mediocrity. It was the period of the war between the Classicists and the

Romanticists. "An Ingres, a Delacroix!" was the battle-cry that rang

through the Parisian studios. For Millet neither of these movements had

any existence. His memory only clung to the plains of Normandy, and the

labourers, shepherds, and fishermen of his home, with whom he mingled in

spirit once more. Incessantly he believed himself to hear what he has

called "_le cri de la terre_," and neither Romanticists nor Classicists

caught anything of this cry of the earth. He lived alone with his own

thoughts, associating with none of his fellow-artists, and indeed

keeping out of their way. Always prepared for some scornful attempt at

witticism, he turned his easel round whenever he was approached, or

gruffly cut all criticism short with the remark: "What does my painting

matter to you? I don't trouble my head about your bread and grease."

Thus it was that Delaroche certainly taught him very little of the

technique of painting, though, at the same time, he taught him no

mannerism. He did not learn to paint pretty pictures with beautiful

poses, flattering colour, and faces inspired with intellect. He left the

studio as he had entered it in 1837, painting with an awkward, thick,

heavy, and laborious brush, though with the fresh, untroubled vision

which he had had in earlier days. He was still the stranger, the

incorrigible Norman peasant.

For a time he exerted himself to make concessions to the public. At

seven-and-twenty he had married a Cherbourg girl, who died of

consumption three years afterwards. Without acquaintances in Paris, and

habituated to domestic life from his youth upwards, he married a second

time in 1845. He had to earn his bread, to please, to paint what would

sell. So he toiled over pretty pictures of nude women, like those which

Diaz had painted with such great success--fair shepherdesses and gallant

herdsmen, and bathing girls, in the _genre_ of Boucher and Fragonard.

And he who did this spoke of both of them afterwards as pornographists.

But the attempt was vain, for he satisfied neither others nor himself.

The peasant of Gruchy could not be piquant, easy, and charming; on the

contrary, he remained helpless, awkward, and crude. "Your women bathing

come from the cow-house" was the appropriate remark of Diaz in reference

to these pictures. When Burger-Thoré, who was the first to take notice

of Millet, declared, on the occasion of "The Milkmaid" being exhibited

in 1844, that Boucher himself was surpassed in this picture, the critic

took a literary licence, because he had a human pity for the poor

painter. How little the picture has of the fragrance of the old masters!

how laboured it seems! how obvious it is that it was painted without

pleasure! Millet was not long at pains to conceal his personality. An

"Oedipus" and "The Jewish Captives in Babylon" were his last rhetorical

exercises. In 1848 he came forward with a manifesto--"The Winnower," a

peasant in movement and bearing, in his whole character and in the work

on which he is employed. Millet returns here to the thoughts and

feelings of his youth; for the future he will paint nothing but peasants

in all the situations of their rude and simple life. In 1849 he made a

great resolve.

[Illustration: F. JACQUE. MILLET AT WORK IN HIS STUDIO.

(_By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]

The sale of his "Winnower" had brought him five hundred francs, and

these five hundred francs gave him courage to defy the world. "Better

turn bricklayer than paint against conviction." Charles Jacque, the

painter of animals, who lived opposite to him in the Rue Rochechouard,

wanted to quit Paris in 1849 on account of the outbreak of cholera. He

proposed that Millet should go with him into the country for a short

time; he did so, and the peasant's son of former times became once more

a peasant, to end his days amongst peasants. "In the middle of the

forest of Fontainebleau," said Jacque, "there is a little nest, with a

name ending in 'zon'--not far off and cheap,--Diaz has been telling me a

great deal about it." Millet consented. One fine June day they got into

a heavy, rumbling omnibus, with their wives and their five children, and

they arrived in Fontainebleau that evening after two hours' journey.

"To-morrow we are going in search of our 'zon.'" And the next day they

went forward on foot to Barbizon, Millet with his two little girls upon

his shoulders, and his wife carrying in her arms the youngest child, a

boy of five months old, having her skirt drawn over her head as a

protection against the rain.

[Illustration: F. JACQUE. MILLET'S HOUSE AT BARBIZON.

(_By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]

As yet the forest had no walks laid out as it has to-day; it was virgin

nature, which had never been disturbed. "_Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, que c'est

beau!_" cried Millet, exulting. Once more he stood in the presence of

nature, the old love of his youth. The impressions of childhood rushed

over him. Born in the country, he had to return to the country to be

himself once again. He arrived at Ganne's inn just as the dinner-hour

had assembled twenty persons at the table, artists with their wives and

children. "New painters! The pipe, the pipe!" was the cry which greeted

the fresh arrivals. Diaz rose, and, in spite of his wooden leg, did the

honours of the establishment to the two women with the dignity of a

Spanish nobleman, and then turned gravely to Millet and Jacque, saying:

"Citizens, you are invited to smoke the pipe of peace." Whenever the

colony of Barbizon received an addition this was always taken down from

its sacred place above the door. An expressly appointed jury had then to

decide from the ascending rings of smoke whether the new-comer was to be

reckoned amongst the "Classicists" or the "Colourists." Jacque was with

one voice declared to be a "Colourist." As to Millet's relation to the

schools, there was a discrepancy of opinion. "_Eh bien_," said Millet,

"_si vous êtes embarrassés, placez-moi dans la mienne_." Whereupon

Diaz, as the others would not let this pass, cried: "Be quiet; it is a

good retort, and the fellow looks powerful enough to found a school

which will bury us all." He was right, even though it was late before

his prophecy was fulfilled.

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

MILLET. THE WINNOWER.

(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]

Millet was thirty-five when he settled in Barbizon; he had reached the

age which Dante calls the middle point of life. He had no further tie

with the outward world; he had broken all the bridges behind him, and

relied upon himself. He only went back to Paris on business, and he

always did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. He lived

at Barbizon in the midst of nature and in the midst of his models, and

to his last day unreservedly gave himself up to the work which in youth

he had felt himself called to fulfil. Neither criticism, mockery, nor

contempt could lead him any more astray; even if he had wished it, he

would have been incapable of following the paths of official art. "_Mes

critiques_," said he as though by way of excuse, "_sont gens instruits

et de goût, mais je ne peux me mettre dans leur peau, et comme je n'ai

jamais vu de ma vie autre chose que les champs, je tâche de dire comme

je peux ce que j'y ai éprouvé quand j'y travaillais_." When such a man

triumphs, when he succeeds in forcing upon the world his absolutely

personal art, it is not Mahomet who has come to the mountain, but the

mountain to Mahomet.

Millet's life has been, in consequence, a continuous series of

renunciations. It is melancholy to read in Sensier's biography that such

a master, even during his Paris days, was forced to turn out copies at

twenty francs and portraits at five, and to paint tavern signs or

placards for the booths of rope-dancers and horse-dealers, each one of

which brought him in a roll of thick sous. When the Revolution of June

broke out his capital consisted of thirty francs, which the owner of a

small shop had paid him for a sign, and on this he and his family lived

for a fortnight. In Barbizon he boarded with a peasant and lived with

his family in a tiny room where wheat was stored and where bread was

baked twice in the week; then he took a little house at a hundred and

sixty francs a year. In winter he sat in a workroom without a fire, in

thick straw shoes and with an old horse-cloth over his shoulders. Living

like this he painted "The Sower," that marvellous strophe in his great

poem on the earth. By the produce of a vegetable garden he endeavoured

to increase his income, lived on credit with grocer and butcher, and at

last had creditors in every direction--in particular Gobillot, the baker

of Chailly, from whom he often hid at his friend Jacque's.

He was forced to accept a loaf from Rousseau for his famishing family,

and small sums with which he was subsidised by Diaz. "I have received

the hundred francs," he writes in a letter to Sensier, "and they came

just at the right time; neither my wife nor I had tasted food for

four-and-twenty hours. It is a blessing that the little ones, at any

rate, have not been in want."

[Illustration: _Neurdein Frères, photo._

MILLET. A MAN MAKING FAGGOTS.]

[Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._

MILLET. THE GLEANERS.]

All his efforts to exhibit in Paris were vain. Even in 1859 "Death and

the Woodcutter" was rejected by the Salon. The public laughed, being

accustomed to peasants in a comic opera, and, at best, his pictures were

honoured by a caricature in a humorous paper. Even the most delicate

connoisseurs had not the right historical perspective to appreciate the

greatness of Millet, so far was it in advance of the age. And all this

is so much the sadder when one thinks of the price which his works

fetched at a later period, when one reads that drawings for which he

could get with difficulty from twenty to forty francs are the works for

which as many thousands are now offered. It was only from the middle of

the fifties that he began to sell at the rate of from two hundred and

fifty to three hundred francs a picture. Rousseau was the first to offer

him a large sum, buying his "Woodcutter" for four thousand francs, on

the pretext that an American was the purchaser. Dupré helped him to

dispose of "The Gleaners" for two thousand francs. An agreement which

the picture-dealer Arthur Stevens, brother of Stevens the painter,

concluded with him had to be dissolved six months afterwards, since

Millet's time had not yet come. At last, in 1863, when he painted four

large decorative pictures--"The Four Seasons," which are, by the way,

his weakest works--for the dining-room of the architect Feydau,

superfluity came in place of need. He was then in a position, like

Rousseau and Jacque, to buy himself a little house in Barbizon, close to

the road by which the place is entered and opposite Ganne's inn. Wild

vine, ivy, and jessamine clambered round it, and two bushes of white

roses twisted their branches around the window. It was surrounded by a

large garden, in which field-flowers bloomed amongst vegetables and

fruit-trees, whilst a border of white roses and elders led to another

little house which he used as a studio. Behind was a poultry-yard, and

behind that again a thickly grown little shrubbery. Here he lived,

simple and upright, with his art and his own belongings, as a peasant

and a father of a family, like an Old Testament patriarch. His father

had had nine children, and he himself had nine. While he painted the

little ones played in the garden, the elder daughters worked, and when

the younger children made too much noise, Jeanne, who was seven years

old, would say with gravity, "_Chut! Papa travaille._" After the

evening meal he danced his youngest boy upon his knee and told Norman

tales, or they all went out together into the forest, which the children

called _la forêt noire_, because it was so wild, gloomy, and

magnificent.

Millet's poverty was not quite so great as might be supposed from

Sensier's book. Chintreuil, Théodore Rousseau, and many others were

acquainted with poverty likewise, and bore it with courage. It may even

be said that, all things considered, success came to Millet early. The

real misfortune for an artist is to have had success, to have been rich,

and later to see himself forgotten when he is stricken with poverty.

Millet's course was the opposite. From the beginning of the sixties his

reputation was no longer in question. At the World Exhibition of 1867 he

was showered with all outward honours. He was represented by nine

pictures and received the great medal. The whole world knew his name,

subsistence was abundantly assured to him, and all the younger class of

artists honoured him like a god. In the Salon of 1869 he was on the

hanging committee. The picture-dealers, who had passed him by in earlier

days, now beset his doors; he lived to see his "Woman with the Lamp" for

which he had received a hundred and fifty francs, sold for thirty-eight

thousand five hundred at Richard's sale. "_Allons, ils commencent à

comprendre que c'est de la peinture serieuse._" M. de Chennevières

commissioned him to take part in the paintings in the Panthéon, and he

began the work. But strength was denied him; he was prostrated by a

violent fever, and on 20th January 1875, at six o'clock in the morning,

Millet was dead. He was then sixty.

[Illustration: _Mansell & Co._

MILLET. THE WOOD SAWYERS.]

His funeral, indeed, was celebrated with no great parade, for it took

place far from Paris. It was a cold, dull morning, and there was mist

and rain. Not many friends had come, only a few painters and critics. At

eleven o'clock the procession was set in order. And it moved in the rain

quickly over the two _centimètres_ from Barbizon to Chailly. Even those

who had hastened from various villages, drawn by curiosity, could not

half fill the church. But in Paris the announcement of death raised all

the greater stir. When forty newspapers were displayed in a

picture-dealer's shop on the morning after his demise, all Paris

assembled and the excitement was universal. In the critical notices he

was named in the same breath with Watteau, Leonardo, Raphael, and

Michael Angelo. The auction which was held soon afterwards in the Hôtel

Drouot for the disposal of the sketches which he had left behind him

brought his family three hundred and twenty-one thousand francs. And in

these days, the very drawings and pastels which were bought for six

thousand francs immediately after his death have on the average risen in

value to thirty thousand, while the greater number of his pictures rose

to a figure beyond the reach of European purchasers, and passed across

the ocean to the happy land of dollars. Under such circumstances to

speak any longer of Millet being misunderstood, or to sing hymns of

praise upon him as a counterblast to the undervaluation of Millet in the

beginning, would be knocking at an open door. It is merely necessary

to inquire in an entirely objective spirit what position he occupies in

the history of modern painting, and what future generations will say of

him.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

MILLET. VINE-DRESSER RESTING.

(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]

Millet's importance is to some extent ethical; he is not the first who

painted peasants, but he is the first who has represented them

truthfully, in all their ruggedness, and likewise in their

greatness--not for the amusement of others, but as they claim a right to

their own existence. The spirit of the rustic is naturally grave and

heavy, and the number of his ideas and emotions is small. He has neither

wit nor sentimentalism. And when in his leisure moments he sometimes

gives way to a broad, noisy merriment, his gaiety often resembles

intoxication, and is not infrequently its consequence. His life, which

forces him to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, always reminds

him of the hard fundamental conditions of existence. He looks at

everything in a spirit of calculation and strict economy. Even the earth

he stands on wakens in him a mood of seriousness. It is gravely sublime,

this nature with its wide horizon and its boundless sky. At certain

seasons it wears a friendly smile, especially for those who have escaped

for a few hours from town. But for him who always lives in its midst it

is not the good, tender mother that the townsman fancies. It has its

oppressive heats in summer and its bitter winter frosts; its majesty is

austere. And nowhere more austere than in Millet's home, amid those

plains of Normandy, swept by the rude wind, where he spent his youth as

a farm labourer.

From this peasant life, painting, before his time, had collected merely

trivial anecdotes with a conventional optimism. It was through no very

adequate conception of man that peasants, in those earlier pictures, had

always to be celebrating marriages, golden weddings, and baptisms,

dancing rustic dances, making comic proposals, behaving themselves

awkwardly with advocates, or scuffling in the tavern for the amusement

of those who frequent exhibitions. They had really won their right to

existence by their labour. "The most joyful thing I know," writes Millet

in a celebrated letter to Sensier in 1851, "is the peace, the silence,

that one enjoys in the woods or on the tilled lands. One sees a poor,

heavily laden creature with a bundle of faggots advancing from a narrow

path in the fields. The manner in which this figure comes suddenly

before one is a momentary reminder of the fundamental condition of human

life, toil. On the tilled land around one watches figures hoeing and

digging. One sees how this or that one rises and wipes away the sweat

with the back of his hand. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat

bread.' Is that merry, enlivening work, as some people would like to

persuade us? And yet it is here that I find the true humanity, the great

poetry."

Perhaps in his conception of peasant life Millet has been even a little

too serious; perhaps his melancholy spirit has looked too much on the

sad side of the peasant's life. For Millet was altogether a man of

temperament and feelings. His family life had made him so even as a boy.

To see this, one needs only to read in Sensier's book of his old

grandmother, who was his godmother likewise, to hear how he felt in

after-years the news of his father's death and of his mother's, and how

he burst into tears because he had not given his last embrace to the

departed. Of course, a man who was so sad and dreamy might be expected

to lay special stress on the dark side of rustic life, its toil and

trouble and exhaustion. He had not that easy spirit which _amara lento

temperat risu_. The passage beneath the peasant-picture in Holbein's

"Dance of Death" might stand as motto for his whole work--

"À la sueur de ton visage

Tu gagneras ta pauvre vie;

Après travail et long usage

Voici la mort qui te convie."

[Illustration: _Mansell, photo._

MILLET. AT THE WELL.]

[Illustration: _Neudein Frères, photo._

MILLET. BURNING WEEDS.]

This grave and sad trait in Millet's character sets him, for example, in

abrupt contrast with Corot. Corot had a cheerful temperament, which

noticed what was kindly in nature everywhere. His favourite hour was

morning, when the sun rises and the lark exults, when the mists are

dissipated and the shining dew lies upon the grass like pearls. His

favourite season was spring, bringing with the new leaves life and joy

upon the earth. And if he sometimes peopled this laughing world with

peasant lads and maidens in place of the joyous creatures of his fancy,

they were only those for whom life is a feast rather than a round of

hard toil. Compared with so sanguine a man as Corot, Millet is

melancholy all through; whilst the former renders the spring, the latter

chooses the oppressive and enervating sultriness of summer. From

experience he knew that hard toil which makes men old before their time,

which kills body and spirit, and turns the image of God into an ugly,

misshapen, and rheumatic thing; and perhaps he has been one-sided in

seeing only this in the life of the peasant. Nevertheless, it is

inapposite to cite as a parallel to Millet's paintings of the peasant

that cruel description of the rustic made in the time of Louis XIV by

Labruyère: "One sees scattered over the field dwarfed creatures that

look like some strange kind of animal, black, withered, and sun-burnt,

fastened to the earth, in which they grub with invincible stubbornness;

they have something resembling articulate language, and when they raise

themselves they show a human countenance,--as a matter of fact they are

men. At night they retire to their holes, where they live on black

bread, water, and roots. They save other men the trouble of sowing,

ploughing, and gathering in the harvest, and so gain the advantage of

not themselves being in want of the bread that they have sown." Yes,

Millet's peasants toil, and they toil hard, but in bowing over the earth

at their work they are, in a sense, proudly raised by their whole

peasant nature. Millet has made human beings out of the manikins of

illustrated humour, and in this lies his ethical greatness.

As his whole life passed without untruth or artificiality, so his whole

endeavour as an artist was to keep artificiality and untruth at a

distance. After a period of _genre_ painting which disposed of things in

an arbitrary manner, he opened a way for the new movement with its

unconditional devotion to reality. The "historical painters" having

conjured up the past with the assistance of old masterpieces, it was

something to the credit of the _genre_ painters that, instead of looking

back, they began to look around them. Fragments of reality were

arranged--in correspondence with the principle of Classical landscape

painting--according to the rules of composition known to history to make

_tableaux vivants_ crowded with figures; and such pictures related a

cheerful or a moving episode of the painter's invention. Millet's virtue

is to have set emotion in the place of invention, to have set a part of

nature grasped in its totality with spontaneous freshness in the place

of composition pieced together from scattered observation and forcing

life into inconsistent relations--to have set painting in the place of

history and anecdote. As Rousseau and his fellows discovered the poetry

of work-a-day nature, Millet discovered that of ordinary life. The

foundation of modern art could only be laid on painting which no longer

subjected the world to one-sided rules of beauty, but set itself piously

to watch for the beauty of things as they were, and renounced all

literary episodes. Millet does not appear to think that any one is

listening to him; he communes with himself alone. He does not care to

make his ideas thoroughly distinct and salient by repetitions and

antitheses; he renders his emotion, and that is all. And thus painting

receives new life from him: his pictures are not compositions that one

sees, but emotions that one feels; it is not a painter who speaks

through them, but, a man. From the first he had the faculty of seeing

things simply, directly, and naturally; and to exercise himself in this

faculty he began with the plainest things: a labourer in the field,

resting upon his spade and looking straight before him; a sower amid the

furrows, on which flights of birds are settling down; a man standing in

a ploughed field, putting on his coat; a woman stitching in a room; a

girl at the window behind a pot of marguerites. He is never weary of

drawing land broken up for cultivation, and oftener still he draws

huddled flocks of sheep upon a heath, their woolly backs stretching with

an undulatory motion, and a shepherd lad or a girl in their midst.

"The Sower" (1850), "The Peasants going to their Work," "The

Hay-trussers," "The Reapers," "A Sheep-shearer," "The Labourer grafting

a Tree" (1855), "A Shepherd," and "The Gleaners" (1857) are his

principal works in the fifties. And what a deep intuition of nature is

to be found in "The Gleaners"! They have no impassioned countenances,

and their movements aim at no declamatory effect of contrast. They do

not seek compassion, but merely do their work. It is this which gives

them loftiness and dignity. They are themselves products of nature,

plants of which the commonest is not without a certain pure and simple

beauty. Look at their hands. They are not hands to be kissed, but to be

cordially pressed. They are brave hands, which have done hard work from

youth upwards--reddened with frost, chapped by soda, swollen with toil,

or burnt by the sun.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

MILLET. THE ANGELUS.

(_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)]

"The Labourer grafting a Tree" of 1855 is entirely idyllic. In the midst

of one of those walled-in spaces which are half courtyard and half

garden, separating in villages the barns from the house, there is

standing a man who has cut a tree and is grafting a fresh twig. His wife

is looking on, with their youngest child in her arms. Everything around

bears the mark of order, cleanliness, and content. Their clothes have

neither spot nor hole, and wear well under the anxious care of the wife.

Here is the old French peasant, true to the soil, and living and dying

in the place of his birth: it is a picture of patriarchal simplicity. In

1859 appeared "The Angelus," that work which chimes like a low-toned and

far-off peal of bells. "I mean," he said--"I mean the bells to be heard

sounding, and only natural truth of expression can produce the effect."

Nothing is wanting in these creations, neither simplicity nor truth. The

longer they are looked at, the more something is seen in them which goes

beyond reality. "The Man with the Mattock," the celebrated picture of

1863, is altogether a work of great style; it recalls antique statues

and the figures of Michael Angelo, without in any way resembling them.

In his daring veracity Millet despised all the artificial grace and

arbitrary beatification which others introduced into rustic life; and

while, in turning from it, he rested only on the most conscientious

reverence for nature, his profound draughtsmanlike knowledge of the

human form has given a dignity and a large style to the motions of the

peasant which no one discovered before his time. There is a simplicity,

a harmony, and a largeness in the lines of his pictures such as only the

greatest artists have had. He reached it in the same way as Rousseau and

Corot reached their style in landscape: absorbed and saturated by

reality, he was able, in the moment of creation, to dispense with the

model without suffering for it, and to attain truth and condensation

without being hindered by petty detail.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

MILLET. THE SHEPHERDESS AND HER SHEEP.

(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]

He himself went about in Barbizon like a peasant. And he might have been

seen wandering over the woods and fields with an old, red cloak, wooden

shoes, and a weather-beaten straw hat. He rose at sunrise, and wandered

about the country as his parents had done. He guarded no flocks, drove

no cows, and no yokes of oxen or horses; he carried neither mattock nor

spade, but rested on his stick; he was equipped only with the faculty of

observation and poetic intuition. He went about like the people he met,

roamed round the houses, entered the courtyards, looked over the hedges,

knew the gleaners and reapers, the girls who took care of the geese, and

the shepherds in their big cloaks, as they stood motionless amongst

their flocks, resting on a staff. He entered the wash-house, the

bake-house, and the dairies where the butter was being churned. He

witnessed the birth of a calf or the death of a pig, or leant with

folded arms on the garden wall and looked into the setting sun, as it

threw a rosy veil over field and forest. He heard the chime of vesper

bells, watched the people pray and then return home. And he returned

also, and read the Bible by lamplight, while his wife sewed and the

children slept. When all was quiet he closed the book and began to

dream. Once more he saw all that he had come across in the course of the

day. He had gone out without canvas or colours; he had merely noted down

in passing a few motives in his sketch-book: as a rule he never took his

pencil from his pocket, but merely meditated, his mind being compelled

to notice all that his eye saw. Then he went through it again in his

memory. On the morrow he painted.

[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._

MILLET. THE SHEPHERD AT THE PEN AT NIGHTFALL.

(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]

His study seems to have been an incessant exercise of the eye to see and

to retain the essential, the great lines in nature as in the human body.

Advancing upon Daumier's path, he divested figures of all that is merely

accidental, and simplified them, to bring the character and ground-note

more into relief. This simplification, this marvellous way of expressing

forcibly as much as possible with the smallest means, no one has ever

understood like Millet. There is nothing superfluous, nothing petty, and

everything bears witness to an epic spirit attracted by what is great

and heroic. His drawing was never encumbered by what was subsidiary and

anecdotic; his mind was fixed on the decisive lines which characterise a

movement, and give it rhythm. It was just this feeling for rhythm which

his harmonious nature possessed in the very highest degree. He did not

give his peasants Grecian noses, and he never lost himself in arid and

trivial observation; he simplified and sublimated their outlines, making

them the heroes and martyrs of toil. His figures have a majesty of

style, an august grandeur; and something almost resembling the antique

style of relief is found in his pictures. It is no doubt characteristic

that the only works of art which he had in his studio were plaster casts

of the metopes of the Parthenon. He himself was like a man of antique

times, both in the simplicity of his life and in his outward

appearance--a peasant in wooden shoes who had, set upon his shoulders,

the head of the Zeus of Otricoli. And as his biography reads like an

Homeric poem, so his great and simple art sought for what was primitive,

aboriginal, and heroic. Note the Michelangelesque motions of "The

Sower." The peasant, striding on with a firm tread, seems to show by his

large movements his consciousness of the grandeur of his daily toil: he

is the heroic embodiment of man, swaying the earth, making it fruitful

and subservient to his own purposes.

"Il marche dans la plaine immense,

Va, vient, lance la graine au loin,

Rouvre sa main et recommence;

Et je médite, obscur témoin,

Pendant que déployant ses voiles

L'ombre où se mêle une rumeur

Semble élargir jusqu'aux étoiles

Le geste auguste du semeur."

Note the epical quietude of "The Gleaners," the three Fates of poverty,

as Gautier called them, the priestly dignity of "The Woodcutter," the

almost Indian solemnity of "The Woman leading her Cow to Grass." She

stands in her wooden shoes as if on a pedestal, her dress falls into

sculpturesque folds, and a grave and melancholy hebetude is imprinted on

her countenance. Millet is the Michael Angelo of peasants. In their

large simplicity his pictures make the appeal of religious painting, at

once plastic and mystical.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

MILLET. A WOMAN FEEDING CHICKENS.]

But it is in no sense merely through instinct that Millet has attained

this altitude of style. Although the son of a peasant, and himself a

peasant and the painter of peasants, he knew thoroughly well what he

wanted to do; and this aim of his he has not only formulated practically

in his pictures, but has made theoretically clear in his letters and

treatises. For Millet was not simply a man who had a turn for dreaming;

he had, at the same time, a brooding, philosophic mind, in which the

ideas of a thinker were harboured beside the emotions of a poet. In the

portrait of himself, given on the title-page of Sensier's book, a

portrait in which he has something sickly, something ethereal and tinged

with romance, only one side of his nature is expressed. The great

medallion of Chappu reveals the other side: the keen, consecutive

thinker, to be found in the luminous and remorselessly logical letters.

In this respect he is the true representative of his race. In opposition

to the _esprit_ and graceful levity of the Parisian, a quieter and more

healthy human understanding counts as the chief characteristic of the

Norman; and this clear and precise capacity for thought was intensified

in Millet by incessant intellectual training.

[Illustration: _Mansell, photo._

MILLET. THE SHEPHERDESS.]

Even as a child he had received a good education from his uncle, who was

an ecclesiastic, and he learnt enough Latin to read the _Georgics_ of

Virgil and other ancient authors in the original text. He knows them

almost by heart, and cites them continually in his letters. When he came

to Paris he spent long hours in the galleries, not copying this or that

portion of a picture, but fathoming works of art to their inmost core

with a clear eye. In Cherbourg he devoured the whole of Vasari in the

library, and read all he could find about Dürer, Leonardo, Michael

Angelo, and Poussin. Even in Barbizon he remained throughout his whole

life an eager reader. Shakespeare fills him with admiration; Theocritus

and Burns are his favourite poets. "Theocritus makes it evident to me,"

he says, "that one is never more Greek than when one simply renders

one's own impressions, let them come whence they may." When not painting

or studying nature he had always a book in his hand, and knew no more

cordial pleasure than when a friend increased his little library by the

present of a fresh one. Though in his youth he tilled the ground and

ploughed, and in later days lived like a peasant, he was better

instructed than most painters; he was a philosopher, a scholar. His

manner in speaking was leisurely, quiet, persuasive, full of conviction,

and impregnated by his own peculiar ideas, which he had thoroughly

thought out.

"My dear Millet," wrote a critic, "you must sometimes see good-looking

peasants and pretty country girls." To which Millet replied: "No doubt;

but beauty does not lie in the face. It lies in the harmony between man

and his industry. Your pretty country girls prefer to go up to town; it

does not suit them to glean and gather faggots and pump water. Beauty is

expression. When I paint a mother I try to render her beautiful by the

mere look she gives her child." He goes on to say that what has been

once clearly seen is beautiful if it is simply and sincerely

interpreted. Everything is beautiful which is in its place, and nothing

is beautiful which appears out of place. Therefore no emasculation of

characters is ever beautiful. Apollo is Apollo and Socrates is Socrates.

Mingle them and they both lose, and become a mixture which is neither

fish nor flesh. This was what brought about the decadence of modern art.

"_Au lieu de naturaliser l'art, ils artialisent la nature._" The

Luxembourg Gallery had shown him that he ought not to go to the theatre

to create true art. "_Je voudrais que les êtres que je représente aient

l'air voués à leur position; et qu'il soit impossible d'imaginer qu'il

leur puisse venir à l'idée d'être autre chose que ce qu'ils sont. On est

dans un milieu d'un caractère ou d'un autre, mais celui qu'on adopte

doit primer. On devrait être habitué à ne recevoir de la nature ses

impressions de quelque sorte qu'elles soient et quelque temperament

qu'on ait. Il faut être imprégné et saturé d'elle, et ne penser que ce

qu'elle vous fait penser. Il faut croire qu'elle est assez riche pour

fournir à tout. Et où puiserait-on, sinon à la source? Pourquoi donc à

perpétuité proposer aux gens, comme but suprême à atteindre, ce que de

hautes intelligences ont découvert en elle. Voila donc qu'on rendrait

les productions de quelques-uns le type et le but de toutes les

productions à venir. Les gens de génie sont comme doués de la baguette

divinatoire; les uns découvrent que, dans la nature, ici se trouve cela,

les autres autre chose ailleurs, selon le temperament de leur flair.

Leurs productions vous assurent dans cette idée que celui-là trouve qui

est fait pour trouver, mais il est plaisant de voir, quand le trésor est

déterré et enlevé, que des gens viennent à perpétuité gratter à cette

place-là. Il faut savoir découvrir où il y a des truffes. Un chien qui

n'a pas de flair ne peut que faire triste chasse, puisqu'il ne va qu'en

voyant chasser celui qui sent la bête et qui naturellement va le

premier.... Un immense orgueil ou une immense sottise seulement peut

faire croire à certains hommes qu'ils sont de force à redresser les

prétendus manques de goût et les erreurs de la nature. Les oeuvres que

nous aimons, ce n'est qu'à cause qu'elles procèdent d'elle. Les autres

ne sont que des oeuvres pédantes et vides. On peut partir de tous les

points pour arriver au sublime, et tout est propre à l'exprimer, si on a

une assez haute visée. Alors ce que vous aimez avec le plus

d'emportement et de passion devient votre beau à vous et qui s'impose

aux autres. Que chacun apporte le sien. L'impression force l'expression.

Tout l'arsenal de la nature est à la disposition des hommes. Qui oserait

décider qu'une pomme de terre est inférieure à une grenade._"

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

MILLET. THE LABOURER GRAFTING A TREE.

(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]

Thus he maintains that when a stunted tree grows upon sterile soil it is

more beautiful in this particular place, because more natural, than a

slender tree artificially transplanted. "The beautiful is that which is

in keeping. Whether this is to be called realism or idealism I do not

know. For me, there is only one manner of painting, and that is to paint

with fidelity." In what concerns poetry old Boileau has already

expressed this in the phrase: "Nothing is beautiful except truth"; and

Schiller has thrown it into the phrase, "Let us, ultimately, set up

truth for beauty." For the art of the nineteenth century Millet's words

mean the erection of a new principle, of a principle that had the effect

of a novel force, that gave the consciousness of a new energy of

artistic endeavour, that was a return to that which the earth was to

Antæus. And by formulating this principle--the principle that

everything is beautiful so far as it is true, and nothing beautiful so

far as it is untrue, that beauty is the blossom, but truth the tree--by

clearly formulating this principle for the first time, Millet has become

the father of the new French and, indeed, of European art, almost more

than by his own pictures.

For--and here we come to the limitations of his talent--has Millet as a

painter really achieved what he aimed at? No less a person than

Fromentin has put this question in his _Maîtres d'autrefois_. On his

visit to Holland he chances for a moment to speak of Millet, and he

writes:--

[Illustration: _L'Art._

MILLET. A WOMAN KNITTING.

(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]

"An entirely original painter, high-minded and disposed to brooding,

kind-hearted and genuinely rustic in nature, he has expressed things

about the country and its inhabitants, about their toil, their

melancholy, and the nobleness of their labour, which a Dutchman would

never have discovered. He has represented them in a somewhat barbaric

fashion, in a manner to which his ideas gave a more expressive force

than his hand possessed. The world has been grateful for his intentions;

it has recognised in his method something of the sensibility of a Burns

who was a little awkward in expression. But has he left good pictures

behind him or not? Has his articulation of form, his method of

expression, I mean the envelopment without which his ideas could not

exist, the qualities of a good style of painting, and does it afford an

enduring testimony? He stands out as a deep thinker if he is compared

with Potter and Cuyp; he is an enthralling dreamer if he is opposed to

Terborch and Metsu, and he has something peculiarly noble compared with

the trivialities of Steen, Ostade, and Brouwer. As a man he puts them

all to the blush. Does he outweigh them as a painter?"

[Illustration: _Neurdein Frères, photo._

MILLET. THE RAINBOW.]

If any one thinks of Millet as a draughtsman he will answer this

question without hesitation in the affirmative. His power is firmly

rooted in the drawings which constitute half his work. And he has not

merely drawn to make sketches or preparations for pictures, like

Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Watteau, or Delacroix; his drawings

were for him real works of art complete in themselves; and his enduring

and firmly grounded fame rests upon them. Michael Angelo, Raphael,

Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Prudhon, Millet; that is, more or less, the

roll of the greatest draughtsmen in the history of art. His pastels and

etchings, his drawings in chalk, pencil, and charcoal, are astonishing

through their eminent delicacy of technique. The simpler the medium the

greater is the effect achieved. "The Woman Churning" in the Louvre; the

quietude of his men reaping, and of his woman-reaper beside the heaps of

corn; "The Water Carriers," who are like Greek kanephoræ; the peasant

upon the potato-field, lighting his pipe with a flint and a piece of

tinder; the woman sewing by the lamp beside her sleeping child; the

vine-dresser resting; the little shepherdess sitting dreamily on a

bundle of straw near her flock at pasture,--in all these works in black

and white he is as great as he is as a colourist and as a painter in

open air. There are no sportive and capricious sunbeams, as in Diaz.

Millet's sun is too serious merely to play over the fields; it is the

austere day-star, ripening the harvest, forcing men to sweat over their

toil and with no time to waste in jest. And as a landscape painter he

differs from Corot in the same vital manner.

Corot, the old bachelor, dallies with nature; Millet, nine times a

father, knows her only as the fertile mother, nourishing all her

children. The temperament of the brooding, melancholy man breaks out in

his very conception of nature: "Oh, if they knew how beautiful the

forest is! I stroll into it sometimes of an evening, and always return

with a sense of being overwhelmed. It has a quiet and majesty which are

terrible, so that I have often a feeling of actual fear. I do not know

what the trees talk about amongst themselves, but they say to each other

something which we do not understand, because we do not speak the same

language. That they are not making bad jokes seems certain." He loved

what Corot has never painted--the sod, the sod as sod, the sod which

steams beneath the rays of the fertilising sun. And yet, despite all

difference of temperament, he stands beside Corot as perhaps the

greatest landscape painter of the century. His landscapes are vacant and

devoid of charm; they smell of the earth rather than of jessamine, yet

it is as if the Earth-Spirit itself were invisibly brooding over them. A

few colours enable him to attain that great harmony which is elsewhere

peculiar to Corot alone, and which, when his work was over, he so often

discussed with his neighbour Rousseau. With a few brilliant and easily

executed shadings he gives expression to the vibration of the

atmosphere, the lustre of the sky at sunset, the massive structure of

the ground, the blissful tremor upon the plain at sunrise. At one time

he renders the morning mist lying over the fields, at another the haze

of sultry noon, veiling and as it were absorbing the outlines and

colours of all objects, the light of sunset streaming over field and

woodland with a tender, tremulous glimmering, the delicate silver tone

which veils the landscape on clear moonlight nights.

There is not another artist of the century who renders night as Millet

does in his pastels. One of the most charming and poetic works is the

biblical and mystical night-piece "The Flight into Egypt." As he strides

forward Saint Joseph holds upon his arm the Child, whose head is

surrounded by a shining halo, whilst the Mother moves slowly along the

banks of the Nile riding upon an ass. The stars twinkle, the moon throws

its tremulous light uncertainly over the plain. Joseph and Mary are

Barbizon peasants, and yet these great figures breathe of the Sistine

Chapel and of Michael Angelo. And which of the old masters has so

eloquently rendered the sacred silence of night as Millet has done in

his "Shepherd at the Pen"? The landscapes which he has drawn awaken the

impression of spaciousness as only Rembrandt's etchings have done, and

that of fine atmosphere as only Corot's pictures. A marvellously

transparent and tender evening sky rests over his picture of cows coming

down to drink at the lake, and a liquid moonlight washes over the crests

of the waves around "The Sailing Boat." The garden in stormy light with

a high-lying avenue spanned by a rainbow--the motive which he developed

for the well-known picture in the Louvre--is found again and again in

several pastels, which progress from a simple to a more complicated

treatment of the theme. Everything is transparent and delicate, full of

air and light, and the air and light are themselves full of magic and

melting charm.

[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ THE BARBIZON STONE.]

But it is a different matter when one attempts to answer Fromentin's

question in the form in which it is put. For without in any way

detracting from Millet's importance, one may quietly make the

declaration: No, Millet was _not_ a good painter. Later generations,

with which he will no longer be in touch through his ethical greatness,

if they consider his paintings alone, will scarcely understand the high

estimation in which he is held at present. For although many works which

have come into private collections in Boston, New York, and Baltimore

are, in their original form, withdrawn from judgment, they are certainly

not better than the many works brought together in the Millet Exhibition

of 1886 or the World Exhibition of 1889. And these had collectively a

clumsiness, and a dry and heavy colouring, which are not merely

old-fashioned, primitive, and antediluvian in comparison with the works

of modern painters, but which fall far below the level of their own time

in the quality of colour. The conception in Millet's paintings is always

admirable, but never the technique; he makes his appeal as a poet only,

and never as a painter. His painting is often anxiously careful, heavy,

and thick, and looks as if it had been filled in with masonry; it is

dirty and dismal, and wanting in free and airy tones. Sometimes it is

brutal and hard, and occasionally it is curiously indecisive in effect.

Even his best pictures--"The Angelus" not excepted--give no æsthetic

pleasure to the eye. The most ordinary fault in his painting is that it

is soft, greasy, and woolly. He is not light enough with what should be

light, nor fleeting enough with what is fleeting. And this defect is

especially felt in his treatment of clothes. They are of a massive,

distressing solidity, as if moulded in brass, and not woven from flax

and wool. The same is true of his air, which has an oily and material

effect. Even in "The Gleaners" the aspect is cold and gloomy; it is

without the intensity of light which is shed through the atmosphere, and

streams ever changing over the earth.

And this is a declaration of what was left for later artists to achieve.

The problem of putting real human beings in their true surroundings was

stated by Millet, solved in his pastels, and left unsolved in his oil

paintings. This same problem had to be taken up afresh by his

successors, and followed to its furthest consequences. At the same time,

it was necessary to widen the choice of subject.

For it is characteristic of Millet, the great peasant, that his art is

exclusively concerned with peasants. His sensitive spirit, which from

youth upwards had compassion for the hard toil and misery of the country

folk, was blind to the sufferings of the artisans of the city, amid whom

he had lived in Paris in his student days. The _ouvrier_, too, has his

poetry and his grandeur. As there is a cry of the earth, so is there

also a cry, as loud and as eloquent, which goes up from the pavement of

great cities. Millet lived in Paris during a critical and terrible time.

He was there during the years of ferment at the close of the reign of

Louis Philippe. Around him there muttered all the terrors of Socialism

and Communism. He was there during the February Revolution and during

the days of June. While the artisans fought on the barricades he was

painting "The Winnower." The misery of Paris and the sufferings of the

populace did not move him. Millet, the peasant, had a heart only for the

peasantry. He was blind to the sufferings, blind to the charms of modern

city life. Paris seemed to him a "miserable, dirty nest." There was no

picturesque aspect of the great town that fascinated him. He felt

neither its grace, its elegance and charming frivolity, nor remarked the

mighty modern movement of ideas and the noble humanity which set their

seal upon that humanitarian century. The development of French art had

to move in both of these directions. It was partly necessary to take up

afresh with improved instruments the problem of the modern conception of

colour, touched on by Millet; it was partly necessary to extend from the

painting of peasants to modern life the principle formulated by Millet,

"_Le beau c'est le vrai_," to transfer it from the forest of

Fontainebleau to Paris, from the solitude to life, from the evening

gloom to sunlight, from the softness of romance to hard reality.

* * * * *

The fourth book of this work will be devoted to the consideration of

those masters who, acting on this principle, extended beyond the range

of Millet and brought the art which he had created to fuller fruition.

BOOK IV

THE REALISTIC PAINTERS AND THE MODERN IDEALISTS

CHAPTER XXVII

REALISM IN FRANCE

To continue in Paris what Millet had begun in the solitude of the forest

of Fontainebleau there was need of a man of the unscrupulous animal

power of _Gustave Courbet_. The task assigned to him was similar to that

which fell to Caravaggio in the seventeenth century. In that age, when

the eclectic imitation of the Cinquecento had reached the acme of

mannerism, when Carlo Dolci and Sassoferato devoted themselves in

mythological pictures to watering down the types of Raphael by

idealising, Caravaggio painted scenes amongst dregs of the people and

the unbridled soldiery of his age. At a period when these artists

indulged in false, artificial, and doctrinaire compositions, which, on a

barren system, merely traced the performances of classic masters back to

certain rules of art, Caravaggio created works which may have been

coarse, but which had an earnest and fruitful veracity, and gave the

entire art of the seventeenth century another direction by their healthy

and powerful naturalism.

When Courbet appeared the situation was similar: Ingres, in whose frigid

works the whole Cinquecento had been crystallised, was at the zenith of

his fame. Couture had painted his "Decadent Romans" and Cabanel had

recorded his first successes. Beside these stood that little Neo-Grecian

school with Louis Hamon at its head--a school whose prim style of china

painting had the peculiar admiration of the public. Courbet, with all

his brutal weight, pushed between the large symmetrical figures of the

thoroughbred Classicists and the pretty confectionery of the Neo-Grecian

painters of beauty. But the old panacea is never without effect: in all

periods when art has overlived its bloom and falls into mannerism it is

met by a strong cross-current of realism pouring into it new life-blood.

In painting, nature had been made artificial, and it was time for art to

be made natural. Painters still strayed in the past, seeking to awaken

the dead, and give life once more to history. The time had come for

accentuating the claims of the present more sharply than before, and for

setting art amid the seething life of modern cities: it was a

development naturally and logically following that of political life; it

is historically united with the unintermittent struggle for universal

suffrage. Courbet merely fought the decisive battle in the great fight

which Jeanron, Leleux, Octave Tassaert, and others had begun as

skirmishing outposts. As a painter he towered over these elder artists,

whose sentimental pictures had not been taken seriously as works of

art, and challenged attention all the more by painting life-size. In

this manner the last obstacle was removed which had stood in the way of

the treatment of modern subjects. Scanty notice had been taken of

Millet's little peasant figures, which were merely reckoned as

accessories to the landscape. But Courbet's pictures first taught the

Academy that the "picture of manners," which had seemed so harmless, had

begun to usurp the place of historical painting in all its pride.

At the same time--and this made Courbet's appearance of still more

consequence than that of his predecessors--a most effective literary

propaganda went hand in hand with that which was artistic. Millet had

been silent and was known only by his friends. He had never arranged for

an exhibition of his works, and quietly suffered the rejections of the

hanging committee and the derision of the public. Courbet blustered,

beat the big drum, threw himself into forcible postures like a strong

man juggling with cannon-balls, and announced in the press that he was

the only serious artist of the century. No one could ever _embêter le

bourgeois_ with such success, no one has called forth such a howl of

passion, no one so complacently surrendered his private life to the

curiosity of the great public, with the swaggering attitude of an

athlete displaying his muscles in the circus. As regards this method of

making an appearance--a method by which he became at times almost

grotesque--one may take whatever view one pleases; but when he came he

was necessary. In art revolutions are made with the same brutality as in

life. People shout and sing, and break the windows of those who have

windows to break. For every revolution has a character of inflexible

harshness. Wisdom and reason have no part in the passions necessary for

the work of destruction and rebuilding. Caravaggio was obliged to take

to his weapons, and make sanguinary onslaughts. In our civilised

nineteenth century everything was accomplished according to law, but not

with less passion. One has to make great demands to receive even a

little; this has been true in all times, and this is precisely what

Courbet did. He was a remarkable character striving for high aims, an

eccentric man of genius, a modern Narcissus for ever contemplating

himself in his vanity, and yet he was the truest friend, the readiest to

sacrifice himself; for the crowd a cynic and a reckless talker; at home

an earnest and mighty toiler, bursting out like a child and appeased the

very next moment; outwardly as brutal as he was inwardly sensitive, as

egotistic as he was proud and independent; and being what he was, he

formulated his purposes as incisively by his words as in his works. Full

of fire and enthusiasm, destroying and inciting to fresh creation--a

nature like Lorenz Gedon, whom he also resembled in appearance--he

became the soul and motive power of the great realistic movement which

flooded Europe from the beginning of the fifties. Altogether he was the

man of whom art had need at that time: a doctor who brought health with

him, shed it abroad, and poured blood into the veins of art. Both as man

and artist his entry upon the arena is in some degree like the breaking

in of an elemental force of nature. He comes from the country in wooden

shoes, with the self-reliance of a peasant who is afraid of nothing. He

is a great and powerful man, as sound and natural as the oxen of his

birthplace. He had broad shoulders, with which he pushed aside

everything standing in his way. His was an instinct rather than a

reflecting brain, a _peintre-animal_, as he was called by a Frenchman.

And such a plebeian was wanted to beat down the academic Olympus. In

making him great and strong, nature had herself predestined him for the

part he had to play: a man makes a breach the more easily for having big

muscles. Furnished with the strength of a Samson wrecking the temple of

the Philistines, he was himself "The Stone-breaker" of his art, and,

like the men he painted, he has done a serviceable day's work.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ GUSTAVE COURBET.]

Gustave Courbet, the strong son of Franche-Comté, was born in 1819, in

Ornans, a little town near Besançon. Like his friend and

fellow-countryman Proudhon, the socialist, he had a strain of German

blood in his veins, and in their outward appearance it gave them both

something Teutonic, rugged, and heavy, contrasting with French ease and

elegance. On his massive frame was set a thick, athletic neck, and a

broad countenance with black hair, and big, strong eyes like those of a

lion-tamer, which sparkled like black diamonds. A strong man, who had

never been stinted, he was of medium height, broad-shouldered, bluff,

ruddy like a slaughterman, and, as the years passed, disposed to acquire

a more liberal circumference of body. He went about working like

Sisyphus, and never without a short pipe in his mouth, the classic

_brûle-gueule_, loaded with strong caporal. His movements were broad and

heavy, and, being a little short in his breathing, he wheezed when he

was excited, and perspired over his painting. His dress was comfortable,

but not elegant; and his head was formed for a cap rather than the

official tall hat. In speech he was cynical, and often broke into a

contemptuous laugh. Both in his studio and at his tavern he moved more

freely in his shirt-sleeves, and at the Munich Exhibition of 1869 he

seemed to the German painters like a thorough old Bavarian, when he sat

down to drink with them at the _Deutsches Haus_ in his jovial way, and,

by a rather Teutonic than Latin capacity for disposing of beer, threw

the most inveterate of the men of Munich into the shade.

Originally destined for the law, he determined in 1837 to become a

painter, and began his artistic studies under Flageoulot, a mediocre

artist of the school of David, who had drifted into the provinces, and

boastfully called himself _le roi du dessin_. In 1839 he came to Paris,

already full of self-reliance, fire and strength. On his first turn

through the Luxembourg Gallery he paused before Delacroix's "Massacre of

Chios," glowing as it is in colour, and said it was not bad, but that he

could do that style of thing whenever he liked. After a short time he

acquired a power of execution full of bravura by studying the old

masters in the Louvre. Self-taught in art, he was in life a democrat and

in politics a republican. In 1848, during a battle in June, he had a

fair prospect of being shot with a party of insurgents whom he had

joined, if certain "right-minded" citizens had not interceded for their

neighbour, who was popular as a man and already much talked about as a

painter. In the beginning of the fifties he was to be found every

evening at a _brasserie_ much frequented by artists and students in the

Rue Hautefeuille in the _Quartier Latin_, in the society of young

authors of the school of Balzac. He had his studio at the end of the

street, and is said to have been at the time a strong, fine, spirited

young man, who made free use of the drastic slang of the studios.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COURBET. THE MAN WITH A LEATHER BELT.

PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AS A YOUTH.]

"His notable features," writes Théophile Silvestre of Courbet at this

time,--"his notable features seem as though they had been modelled from

an Assyrian bas-relief. His well-shaped and brilliant dark eyes,

shadowed by long silken lashes, have the soft quiet light of an

antelope's. The moustache, scarcely traceable beneath his slightly

curved aquiline nose, is joined by a fan-shaped beard, and borders his

thick, sensuous lips; his complexion is olive-brown, but of a changing,

sensitive tone. The round, curiously shaped head and prominent

cheek-bones denote stubbornness, and the flexible nostrils passion."

A great dispute over realism usually took the place of dessert at

meal-times. Courbet never allowed himself to be drawn into controversy.

He threw his opinion bluntly out, and when he was opposed cut the

conversation short in an exceedingly forcible manner. It was another

murder of the innocents when he spoke of the celebrities of his time. He

designated historical painting as nonsense, style as humbug, and blew

away all ideals, declaring that it was the greatest impudence to wish to

paint things which one has never seen, and of the appearance of which

one cannot have the faintest conception. Fancy was rubbish, and reality

the one true muse.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

COURBET. A FUNERAL AT ORNANS.]

"Our century," he says, "will not recover from the fever of imitation by

which it has been laid low. Phidias and Raphael have hooked themselves

on to us. The galleries should remain closed for twenty years, so that

the moderns might at last begin to see with their own eyes. For what can

the old masters offer us? It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez

that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein, I

feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has

painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him.

And the artistic kin, the heirs, or more properly the slaves of this

great man, are really preceptors of the lowest art. What do they teach

us? Nothing. A good picture will never come from their _École des

Beaux-Arts_. The most precious thing is the originality, the

independence of an artist. Schools have no right to exist; there are

only painters. Independently of system and without attaching myself to

any party, I have studied the art of the old masters and of the more

modern. I have tried to imitate the one as little as I have tried to

copy the other, but out of the total knowledge of tradition I have

wished to draw a firm and independent sense of my own individuality. My

object was by gaining knowledge to gain in ability; to have the power of

expressing the ideas, the manners, and the aspect of our epoch

according to an appreciation of my own, not merely to be a painter, but

a man also--in a word, to practise living art is the compass of my

design. I am not only a socialist, but also a democrat and a

republican--that is to say, a supporter of every revolution; and

moreover, a sheer realist, which means a loyal adherent to the _vérité

vraie_. But the principle of realism is the negation of the ideal. And

following all that comes from this negation of the ideal, I shall arrive

at the emancipation of the individual, and, finally, at democracy.

Realism, in its essence, is democratic art. It can only exist by the

representation of things which the artist can see and handle. For

painting is an entirely physical language, and an abstract, invisible,

non-existent object does not come within its province. The grand

painting which we have stands in contradiction with our social

conditions, and ecclesiastical painting in contradiction with the spirit

of the century. It is nonsensical for painters of more or less talent to

dish up themes in which they have no belief, themes which could only

have flourished in some epoch other than our own. Better paint railway

stations with views of the places through which one travels, with

likenesses of great men through whose birthplace one passes, with

engine-houses, mines, and manufactories; for these are the saints and

miracles of the nineteenth century."

These doctrines fundamentally tallied with those which the Neapolitan

and Spanish naturalists vindicated in the seventeenth century against

the eclectics. For men like Poussin, Leseur, and Sassoferato, Raphael

was "an angel and not a man," and the Vatican "the academy of painters."

But Velasquez when he came to Rome found it wearisome. "What do you say

of our Raphael? Do you not think him best of all, now that you have seen

everything that is fair and beautiful in Italy?" Don Diego inclined his

head ceremoniously, and observed: "To confess the truth, for I like to

be candid and open, I must acknowledge that I do not care about Raphael

at all." There are reported utterances of Caravaggio which correspond

almost word for word with those of Courbet. He, too, declaimed against

the antique and Raphael, in whose shadow he saw so many shallow

imitators sitting at their ease, and he declared, in a spirit of sharp

opposition, that the objects of daily life were the only true teachers.

He would owe all to nature and nothing to art. He held painting without

the model to be absurd. So long as the model was out of sight, his hands

and his spirit were idle. Moreover, he called himself a democratic

painter, who brought the fourth estate into honour; he "would rather be

the first of vulgar painters than second amongst the superfine." And

just as these naturalists in the seventeenth century were treated by the

academical artists as rhyparographists, Courbet's programme did not on

the whole facilitate his acceptance in formal exhibitions as he desired

that it should. A play must be acted, a manuscript printed, and a

picture viewed. So Courbet had no desire to remain an outsider. When the

picture committee of the World Exhibition of 1855 gave his pictures an

unfavourable position, he withdrew them and offered them to public

inspection separately in a wooden hut in the vicinity of the Pont de

Jena, just at the entry of the exhibition. Upon the hut was written in

big letters: REALISM--G. COURBET. And in the interior the theories which

he had urged hitherto by his tongue and his pen, at the tavern and in

his pamphlets, were demonstrated by thirty-eight large pictures, which

elucidate his whole artistic development.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

COURBET. THE STONE-BREAKERS.]

"Lot's Daughters" and "Love in the Country" were followed in 1844 by the

portrait of himself and the picture of his dog, in 1845 by "A

Guitarrero," in 1846 by the "Portrait of M. M----," and in 1847 by "The

Walpurgisnacht"; all works in which he was still groping his way. "The

Sleeping Bathers," "The Violoncello Player," and a landscape from his

native province, belonging to the year 1848, made a nearer approach to

his realistic aim, and with the date 1849 there are seven portraits,

landscapes, and pictures from popular national life: "The Painter," "M.

H. T---- looking over Engravings," "The Vintage in Ornans below the

Roche du Mont," "The Valley of the Bue seen from the Roche du Mont,"

"View of the Château of Saint-Denis," "Evening in the Village of

Scey-en-Varay," and "Peasants returning from Mass near Flagey." All

these works had passed the doors of the Salon without demur.

The first picture which brought about a collision of opinion was "A Fire

in Paris," and, according to the account given by contemporaries, it

must have been one of his finest works. Firemen, soldiers, artisans in

jacket and blouse, were exerting themselves, according to Paul d'Abrest

who describes the picture, around a burning house; even women helped in

the work of rescue, and formed part of the chain handing buckets from

the pump. Opposite stood a group of young dandies with girls upon their

arms looking inactively upon the scene. An artillery captain, who was

amongst Courbet's acquaintances, had through several nights sounded the

alarm for his men and exercised them on the scaffolding of a wall, so

that the painter could make his studies. Courbet transferred his studio

to the barracks and made sketches by torch-light. But he had reckoned

without the police; scarcely was the picture finished before it was

seized, as the Government recognised in it, for reasons which did not

appear, "an incitement to the people of the town." This was after the

_coup d'état_ of 1851.

So Courbet's manifesto was not "The Fire in Paris." "The

Stone-breakers," two men in the dress of artisans, in a plain evening

landscape, occupied once more the first place in the exhibition of 1855,

having already made the effect, amongst its classical surroundings in

the Salon of 1851, of a rough, true, and honest word, spoken amid

elaborate society phrases. There was also to be seen "Afternoon at

Ornans,"--a gathering of humble folk sitting after meal-time at a table

laid out in a rustic kitchen. A picture which became celebrated under

the title of "Bonjour, M. Courbet" dealt with a scene from Courbet's

native town. Courbet, just arrived, is alighting from a carriage in his

travelling costume, looking composedly about him with a pipe in his

mouth. A respectable prosperous gentleman, accompanied by a servant in

livery, who is carrying his overcoat, is stretching out his hand to him.

This gentleman is M. Bryas, the Mæcenas of Ornans, who for long was

Courbet's only patron, and who had a whim for having his portrait taken

by forty Parisian painters in order to learn the "manners" of the

various artists. And there was further to be seen the "Demoiselles de

Village" of 1852, three country beauties giving a piece of cake to a

peasant-girl. Finally, as masterpieces, there were "The Funeral at

Ornans," which now hangs in the Louvre, and that great canvas,

designated in the catalogue as "a true allegory," "My Studio after Seven

Years of Artistic Life," the master himself painting a landscape. Behind

him is a nude model, and in front of him a beggar-woman with her child.

Around are portrait figures of his friends, and the heroes of his

pictures, a poacher, a parson, a sexton, labourers, and artisans.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

COURBET. THE RETURN FROM MARKET.]

The exhibition was, at all events, a success with young painters, and

Courbet set up a teaching studio, at the opening of which he again

issued a kind of manifesto in the _Courrier du Dimanche_. "Beauty," he

wrote, "lies in nature, and it is to be met with under the most various

forms. As soon as it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the

artist who discovers it. But the painter has no right to add to this

expression of nature, to alter the form of it and thereby weaken it. The

beauty offered by nature stands high above all artistic convention. That

is the basis of my views of art." It is said that his first model was an

ox. When his pupils wanted another, Courbet said: "Very well, gentlemen,

next time let us study a courtier." The break-up of the school is

supposed to have taken place when one day the ox ran away and was not to

be recaptured.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COURBET. THE BATTLE OF THE STAGS.]

Courbet did not trouble himself over such ridicule, but painted quietly

on, the many-sidedness of his talent soon giving him a firm seat in

every saddle. After the scandal of the separate exhibition of 1855 he

was excluded from the Salon until 1861, and during this time exhibited

in Paris and Besançon upon his own account. "The Funeral at Ornans" was

followed by "The Return from Market," a party of peasants on the

high-road, and in 1860 by "The Return from the Conference," in which a

number of French country priests have celebrated their meeting with a

hearty lunch and set out on the way back in a condition which is far too

jovial. In 1861, when the gates of the Champs Elysées were thrown open

to him once more, he received the medal for his "Battle of the Stags,"

and regularly contributed to the Salon until 1870. In these years he

attempted pictures with many figures less frequently, and painted by

preference hunting and animal pieces, landscapes, and the nude figures

of women. "The Woman with the Parrot," a female figure mantled with

long hair, lying undressed amid the cushions of a couch playing with her

gaudily feathered favourite, "The Fox Hunt," a coast scene in Provence,

the portrait of Proudhon and his family, "The Valley of the Puits-Noir,"

"Roche Pagnan," "The Roe Hunt," "The Charity of a Beggar," the picture

of women bathing in the gloom of the forest, and "The Wave," afterwards

acquired by the Luxembourg, belong to his principal works in the

sixties.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COURBET. A WOMAN BATHING.

(_By permission of M. Sainctelette, of Brussels, the owner of the

picture._)]

These works gradually made him so well known that after 1866 his

pictures came to have a considerable sale. The critics began to take him

seriously. Castagnary made his début in the _Siècle_ with a study of

Courbet; Champfleury, the apostle of literary realism, devoted to him a

whole series of _feuilletons_ in the _Messager de l'Assemblée_, and from

his intercourse with him Proudhon derived the fundamental principles of

his book on Realism. The son of Franche-Comté triumphed, and there was a

beam in his laughing eyes, always like those of a deer. His talent began

more and more to unfold its wings in the sun of success, and his power

of production seemed inexhaustible. When the custom arose of publishing

in the Parisian papers accounts of the budget of painters, he took care

to communicate that in six months he had made a hundred and twenty-three

thousand francs. Incessantly busy, he had in his hand at one moment the

brush and at another the chisel. And when he gave another special

exhibition of his works in 1867, at the time of the great World

Exhibition--he had a mania for wooden booths--he was able to put on view

no less than a hundred and thirty-two pictures in addition to numerous

pieces of sculpture. In 1869 the committee of the Munich Exhibition set

apart a whole room for his works. With a self-satisfied smile he put on

the Order of Michael, and was the hero of the day whom all eyes followed

upon the boulevards.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COURBET. DEER IN COVERT.]

The nature of the bullfighter was developed in him more strongly than

before, and he stretched his powerful limbs, prepared to do battle

against all existing opinions. Naturally the events of the following

years found no idle spectator in such a firebrand as Courbet; and

accordingly he rushed into those follies which embittered the evening of

his life. The _maître peintre d'Ornans_ became Courbet _le colonnard_.

First came the sensational protest with which he returned to the Emperor

Napoleon the Order of the Legion of Honour. Four weeks after Courbet had

plunged into this affair the war broke out. Eight weeks later came Sedan

and the proclamation of the Republic, and shortly afterwards the siege

of Paris and the insurrection. On 4th September 1870 the Provisional

Government appointed him Director of the Fine Arts. Afterwards he became

a member of the Commune, and dominated everywhere, with the

_brûle-gueule_ in his mouth, by the power of his voice; and France has

to thank him for the rescue of a large number of her most famous

treasures of art. He had the rich collections of Thiers placed in the

Louvre, to protect them from the rough and ready violence of the

populace. But to save the Luxembourg he sacrificed the column of the

Vendôme. When the Commune fell, however, Courbet alone was held

responsible for the destruction of the column. He was brought before the

court-martial of Versailles, and, although Thiers undertook his

defence, he was condemned to six months' imprisonment. Having undergone

this punishment he received his freedom once more, but the artist had

still to suffer a mortal blow. The pictures which he had destined for

the Salon of 1873 were rejected by the committee, because Courbet was

held morally unworthy to take part in the exhibition.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

COURBET. GIRLS LYING ON THE BANK OF THE SEINE.]

Soon after this an action was brought against him, on the initiative of

certain reactionary papers, for the payment of damages connected with

the overthrow of the Vendôme column, and the painter lost his case. For

the recovery of these damages, which were assessed at three hundred and

thirty-four thousand francs, the Government brought to the hammer his

furniture and the pictures that were in his studio, at a compulsory sale

at the Hôtel Drouot, where they fetched the absurdly trifling figure of

twelve thousand one hundred and eighteen francs fifty centimes. The loss

of his case drove him from France to Switzerland. He gave the town of

Vevay, where he settled, a bust of Helvetia, as a mark of his gratitude

for the hospitality it had extended towards him. But the artist was

crushed in him. "They have killed me," he said; "I feel that I shall

never do anything good again." And thus the jovial, laughing Courbet,

that honoured leader of a brilliant pleiad of disciples, the friend and

companion of Corot, Decamps, Gustave Planché, Baudelaire, Théophile

Gautier, Silvestre, Proudhon, and Champfleury; the enthusiastic patriot

and idol of the fickle Parisians, passed his last years in melancholy

solitude, forgotten by his adherents and scorned by his adversaries. He

was attacked by a disease of the liver, and privation, disillusionment,

and depression came all at once. Moreover, the French Government began

again to make claims for indemnification. His heart broke in a prolonged

mortal struggle. Shortly before his death he said to a friend: "What am

I to live upon, and how am I to pay for the column? I have saved Thiers

more than a million francs, and the State more than ten millions, and

now they are at my heels--they are baiting me to death. I can do no

more. To work one must have peace of spirit, and I am a ruined man." And

Champfleury writes, referring to the last visit which he paid to the

dying exile on 19th December 1877: "His beard and hair were white, and

all that remained of the handsome, all-powerful Courbet whom I had known

was that notable Assyrian profile, which he raised to the snow of the

Alps, as I sat beside him and saw it for the last time. The sight of

such pain and misery as this premature wreck of the whole man was

overwhelming."

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COURBET. A RECUMBENT WOMAN.]

The Lake of Geneva, over which he looked from his window in Vevay, was

the subject of the last picture that he painted in Switzerland. Far from

home and amid indifferent strangers he closed his eyes, which had once

been so brilliant, in endless grief of spirit. The apostle of Realism

died of a broken heart, the herculean son of Franche-Comté could not

suffer disillusionment. Courbet passed away, more or less forgotten,

upon New Year's Eve in 1877, in that chilly hour of morning when the

lake which he had learnt to love trembles beneath the first beams of the

sun. It was only in Belgium, where he had often stayed and where his

influence was considerable, that the intelligence of his death woke a

painful echo. In Paris it met with no word of sympathy. Courbetism was

extinguished; as impressionists and independents his adherents had

gathered round new flags. Zola has done him honour in _L'Oeuvre_ in the

person of old Bongrand, that half-perished veteran who is only mentioned

now and then with veneration.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COURBET. BERLIOZ.]

And the course of development has indeed been so rapid since Courbet's

appearance that in these days one almost fails to understand, apart from

historical reasons, the grounds which in 1855 made his separate

exhibition of his works an event of epoch-making importance. It was not

Cham alone who at that time devoted a large cartoon to Courbet, as he

did in "The Opening of Courbet's Studio and Concentrated Realism." All

the comic journals of Paris were as much occupied with him as with the

crinoline, the noiseless pavement, the new tramways, or the balloon.

Haussard, the principal representative of criticism, in discussing "The

Funeral at Ornans," spoke of "these burlesque masks with their fuddled

red noses, this village priest who seems to be a tippler, and the

harlequin of a veteran who is putting on a hat which is too big for

him." All this, he continued, suggested a masquerade funeral, six metres

long, in which there was more to laugh at than to weep over. Even Paul

Mantz declared that the most extravagant fancy could not descend to such

a degree of jejune triviality and repulsive hideousness. In a _revue

d'année_ produced at the Odéon, the authors, Philoxène Hoyer and

Théodore de Banville, make "a realist" say--

"Faire vrai ce n'est rien pour être réaliste,

C'est faire laid qu'il faut! Or, monsieur, s'il vous plait,

Tout ce que je dessine est horriblement laid!

Ma peinture est affreuse, et, pour qu'elle soit vraie,

J'en arrache le beau comme on fait de l'ivraie.

J'aime les teints terreux et les nez de carton,

Les fillettes avec de la barbe au menton,

Les trognes de Varasque et de coquecigrues,

Les dorillons, les cors aux pieds et les verrues!

Voilà le vrai!"

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COURBET. THE HIND ON THE SNOW.]

So it went on through the sixties also. When the Empress Eugénie passed

through the exhibition on the opening day of the Salon of 1866, with an

elegant walking-stick in her hand, she was so indignant at Courbet's

"Naked Women" that the picture had to be immediately removed. In the

beginning of the seventies, when he exhibited in Germany, a few young

Munich painters recognised in his pictures something like the cry of a

conscience. But otherwise "artists and laymen shook their heads, not

knowing what to make of them. Some smiled and went indifferently on,

while others were indignant in their condemnation of this degradation of

art." For "Courbet went to the lowest depths of society, and took his

themes from a class where man really ceases to be man, and the image of

God prolongs a miserable existence as a moving mass of flesh. Living

bodies with dead souls, which exist only for the sake of their animal

needs; in one place sunk in misery and wretchedness, and in another

having never risen from their brutal savagery--that is the society from

which Courbet chooses his motives, to gloss over the debility of his

imagination and his want of any kind of training. Had he possessed the

talent for composition, then perhaps his lifeless technique would have

become interesting; as it is he offers a merely arbitrary succession of

figures in which coherence is entirely wanting." In "The Stone-breakers"

it was an offence that he should have treated such "an excessively

commonplace subject" at all as mere artisans in ragged and dirty

clothes. And by "The Funeral at Ornans" it was said that he meant to

sneer at the religious ceremony, since the picture had a defiant and

directly brutal vulgarity. The painter was alleged to have taken pains

to expose the repulsive, ludicrous, and grotesque elements in the

members of the funeral party, and to have softened no feature which

could excite an unseasonable merriment. In the "Demoiselles de Village"

the design had been to contrast the stilted, provincial nature of these

village misses with the healthy simplicity of a peasant child. In the

picture, painted in 1857, of the two grisettes lying in the grass on the

bank of the Seine he had "intentionally placed the girls in the most

unrefined attitudes, that they might appear as trivial as possible." And

umbrage was taken at his two naked wrestlers because he "had not painted

wrestlers more or less like those of classic times, but the persons who

exhibit the strength of their herculean frames at the Hippodrome," and

therefore given "the most vulgar rendering of nudity that was at all

possible." And in his naked women it was said that this love of ugly and

brutal forms became actually base.

All these judgments are characteristic symptoms of the same sort of

taste which rose in the seventeenth century against Caravaggio. Even his

principal work, the altar-piece to St. Matthew, which now hangs in the

Berlin Museum, excited so much indignation that it had to be removed

from the Church of St. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Annibale Carracci has

a scornful caricature in which the Neapolitan master appears as a hairy

savage, with a dwarf at his side and two apes upon his knees, and, in

this fashion, intended to brand the hideousness of his rival's art and

his ape-like imitation of misshapen nature. Francesco Albani called him

the "Antichrist of Painting," and "a ruination to art." And Baglione

adds: "Now a number of young men sit down to copy a head after nature;

they study neither the foundations of drawing, nor concern themselves

about the more profound conditions of art, merely contenting themselves

with a crude reproduction of nature, and therefore they do not even know

how to group two figures appropriately, nor to bring any theme into an

artistic composition. No one any longer visits the temples of art, but

every one finds his masters and his models for a servile imitation of

nature in the streets and open places." The nineteenth century formed a

different estimate of Caravaggio. In opposing his fortune-telling

gipsies, his tipplers, gamblers, musicians, and dicing mercenaries to

the noble figures of the academical artists, with their generalised and

carefully balanced forms, their trivial, nugatory countenances, and

their jejune colouring, he accomplished the legitimate and necessary

reaction against a shallow and empty idealistic mannerism. No one is

grateful to the eclectic artists for the learned efforts which it cost

them to paint so tediously: in Caravaggio there is the fascination of a

strong personality and a virile emphasis in form, colour, and light. The

Carracci and Albani were the issue of their predecessors; Caravaggio is

honoured as a fearless pioneer who opened a new chapter in the history

of art.

[Illustration: COURBET. MY STUDIO AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF ARTISTIC LIFE.]

Courbet met with a similar fate.

If one approaches him after reading the criticisms of his pictures

already cited, a great disillusionment is inevitable. Having imagined a

grotesque monster, one finds to one's astonishment that there is not the

slightest occasion either for indignation or laughter in the presence of

these powerful, sincere, and energetic pictures. One has expected

caricatures and a repulsive hideousness, and one finds a broad and

masterly style of painting. The heads are real without being vulgar, and

the flesh firm and soft and throbbing with powerful life. Courbet is a

personality. He began by imitating the Flemish painters and the

Neapolitans. But far more did he feel himself attracted by the actual

world, by massive women and strong men, and wide fertile fields smelling

of rich, rank earth. As a healthy and sensuously vigorous man he felt a

voluptuous satisfaction in clasping actual nature in his herculean arms.

Of course, by the side of his admirable pictures there are others which

are heavy and uncouth. But if one is honest one paints according to

one's inherent nature, as old Navez, the pupil of David, was in the

habit of saying. Courbet was honest, and he was also a somewhat unwieldy

being, and therefore his painting too has something bluff and cumbrous.

But where in all French art is there such a sound painter, so sure of

his effects and with such a large bravura, a _maître peintre_ who was so

many-sided, extending his dominion as much over figure-painting as

landscape, over the nude as over _nature morte_? There is no artist so

many of whose pictures may be seen together without surfeit, for he is

novel in almost every work. He has painted not a few pictures of which

it may be said that each one is _sui generis_, and on the variations of

which elsewhere entire reputations might have been founded. With the

exception of Millet, no one had observed man and nature with such

sincere and open eyes. With the great realists of the past Courbet

shares the characteristic of being everywhere and exclusively a portrait

painter. A pair of stone-breakers, kneeling as they do in his picture,

with their faces protected by wire-masks, were figures which every one

saw working at the street corner, and Courbet represented the scene as

faithfully as he could, as sincerely and positively as was at all

possible. "Afternoon in Ornans" is a pleasant picture, in which he took

up again the good tradition of Lenain. And in "The Funeral at Ornans" he

has painted exactly the manner in which such ceremonies take place in

the country. The peasants and dignitaries of a little country

town--portrait figures such as the masters of the fifteenth century

brought into their religious pictures--have followed the funeral train,

and behave themselves at the grave just as peasants would. They make no

impassioned gesticulations, and form themselves into no fine groups, but

stand there like true rustics, sturdy and indifferent. They are men of

flesh and blood, they are like the people of real life, and they have

been subjected to no alteration: on the one side are the women tearfully

affected by the words of the preacher, on the other are the men bored by

the ceremony or discussing their own affairs. In the "Demoiselles de

Village" he gives a portrait of his own sisters, as they went to a dance

of a Sunday afternoon. The "Girls lying on the Bank of the Seine" are

grisettes of 1850, such as Gavarni often drew; they are both dressed in

doubtful taste, one asleep, the other lost in a vacant reverie. His

naked women make a very tame effect compared with the colossal masses of

human flesh in that cascade of nude women of the plumpest description

who in Rubens' "Last Judgment" plunge in confusion into hell, like fish

poured out from a bucket. But they are amongst the best nude female

figures which have been created in the nineteenth century. Courbet was a

painter of the family of Rubens and Jordaens. He had the preference

shown by the old Flemish artists for healthy, plump, soft flesh, for

fair, fat, and forty, the three F's of feminine beauty, and in his

works he gave the academicians a lesson well worth taking to heart; he

showed them that it was possible to attain a powerful effect, and even

grace itself, by strict fidelity to the forms of reality.

[Illustration: _Neuerdein, photo._

COURBET. THE WAVE.]

His portraits--and he had the advantage of painting Berlioz and

Baudelaire, Champfleury and Proudhon--are possibly not of conspicuous

eminence as likenesses. As Caravaggio, according to Bellori, "had only

spirit, eyes and diligence for flesh-tints, skin, blood, and the natural

surface of objects," a head was merely a _morceau_ like anything else

for Courbet too, and not the central point of a thinking and sensitive

being. The physical man, Taine's human animal, was more important in his

eyes than the psychical. He painted the epidermis without giving much

suggestion of what was beneath. But he painted this surface in such a

broad and impressive manner that the pictures are interesting as

pictorial masterpieces if not as analyses of character.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

STEVENS. THE LADY IN PINK.]

[Illustration: _L'Art._

STEVENS. LA BÊTE À BON DIEU.]

To these his landscapes and animal pieces must be added as the works on

which his talent displayed itself in the greatest purity and most

inherent vigour: "The Battle of the Stags," that most admirable picture

"The Hind on the Snow," "Deer in Covert," views of the moss-grown rocks

and sunlit woods of Ornans and the green valleys of the Franche-Comté.

He had the special secret of painting with a beautiful tone and a broad,

sure stroke dead plumage and hunting-gear, the bristling hide of

wild-boars, and the more delicate coat of deer and of dogs. As a

landscape painter he does not belong to the family of Corot and Dupré.

His landscapes are green no doubt, but they have limitations; the leaves

hang motionless on the branches, undisturbed by a breath of wind.

Courbet has forgotten the most important thing, the air. Whatever the

time of the year or the day may be, winter or summer, evening or

morning, he sees nothing but the form of things, regarding the sun as a

machine which has no other purpose than to mark the relief of objects by

light and shade. Moreover, the lyricism of the Fontainebleau painters

was not in him. He paints without reverie, and knows nothing of that

tender faltering of the landscape painter in which the poet awakes, but

has merely the equanimity of a good and sure worker. In regard to

nature, he has the sentiments of a peasant who tills his land, is never

elegiac or bucolic, and would be most indignant if a nymph were to tread

on the furrows of his fields. He paints with a pipe in his mouth and a

spade in his hand, the plain and the hills, potatoes and cabbages, rich

turf and slimy rushes, oxen with steaming nostrils heavily ploughing the

clods, cows lying down and breathing at ease the damp air of the meadows

drenched with rain. He delights in fertile patches of country, and in

the healthy odour of the cow-house. A material heaviness and a prosaic

sincerity are stamped upon all. But his painting has a solidity

delightful to the eye. It is inspiriting to meet a man who has such a

resolute and simple love of nature, and can interpret her afresh in

powerful and sound colour without racking his brains. His attachment to

the spot of earth where he was born is a leading characteristic of his

art. He borrowed from Ornans the motives of his most successful

creations, and was always glad to return to his parents' house. The

patriotism of the church-spire, provincialism, and a touching and vivid

sense of home are peculiar to all his landscapes. But in his sea-pieces,

to which he was incited by a residence in Trouville in the summer of

1865, he has opened an altogether new province to French art. _Eugène Le

Poittevin_, who exhibited a good deal in Berlin in the forties, and

therefore became very well known in Germany, cannot count as a painter.

_Théodore Gudin_, whose signature is likewise highly valued in the

market, was a frigid and rough-and-ready scenical painter. His little

sea-pieces have a professional manner, and the large naval battles and

fires at sea which he executed by the commission of Louis Philippe for

the Museum of Versailles are frigid, pompous, and spectacular sea-pieces

parallel with Vernet's battle-pieces. _Ziem_, who gave up his time to

Venice and the Adriatic, is the progenitor of Eduard Hildebrandt. His

water and sky take all the colours of the prism, and the objects

grouped between these luminous elements, houses, ships, and men, equally

receive a share of these flattering and iridescent tones. This gives

something seductive and dazzling to his sketches, until it is at last

perceived that he has only painted one picture, repeating it

mechanically in all dimensions. Courbet was the first French painter of

sea-pieces who had a feeling for the sombre majesty of the sea. The

ocean of Gudin and Ziem inspires neither wonder nor veneration; that of

Courbet does both. His very quietude is expressive of majesty; his peace

is imposing, his smile grave; and his caress is not without a menace.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

STEVENS. THE JAPANESE MASK.]

Courbet has positively realised the programme which he issued in that

pamphlet of 1855. When he began his activity, eclectic idealism had

overgrown the tree of art. But Courbet stripped off the parasitic

vegetation to reach the firm and serviceable timber. And having once

grasped it he showed the muscles of an athlete in making its power felt.

Something of the old Flemish sturdiness lived once more in his bold

creations. If he and Delacroix were united, the result would be Rubens.

Delacroix had the fervour and passionate tamelessness, while Courbet

contributed the Flemish weight. Each made use of blood, purple, thrones,

and Golgothas in composing the dramas they had imagined. The latter

pictured creation with the absolutism of complete objectivity. Delacroix

rose on the horizon like a brilliant meteor catching flame from the

light of vanished suns; he reflected their radiance, had almost their

magnitude, and followed the same course amid the same coruscation and

blaze of light. Courbet stands firm and steady upon the earth. The

former had the second sight known to visionaries, the latter opened his

eyes to the world that can be felt and handled. Neurotic and

distempered, Delacroix worked feverishly. As a sound, full-blooded being

Courbet painted, as a man drinks, digests, and talks, with an activity

that knows no exertion, a force that knows no weariness. Delacroix was a

small, weakly man, and his whole power rested in his huge head. That of

Courbet, as in animals of beauty and power, was dispersed through his

whole frame; his big arms and athletic hands render the same service to

his art as his eyes and his brain. And as, like all sincere artists, he

rendered himself, he was the creator of an art which has an

irrepressible health and overflows with an exuberant opulence. His

pictures brought a savour of the butcher's shop into French painting,

which had become anæmic. He delighted in plump shoulders and sinewy

necks, broad breasts heaving over the corset, the glow of the skin

dripping with warm drops of water in the bath, the hide of deer and the

coat of hares, the iridescent shining of carp and cod-fish. Delacroix,

all brain, caught fire from his inward visions; Courbet, all eye and

maw, with the sensuousness of an epicure and the satisfaction of a

_gourmet_, gloats over the shining vision of things which can be

devoured--a Gargantua with a monstrous appetite, he buried himself in

the navel of the generous earth. Plants, fruit, and vegetables take

voluptuous life beneath his brush. He triumphs when he has to paint a

_déjeuner_ with oysters, lemons, turkeys, fish, and pheasants. His mouth

waters when he heaps into a picture of still-life all manner of

delicious eatables. The only drama that he has painted is "The Battle of

the Stags," and this will end in brown sauce amid a cheerful clatter of

knives and forks.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

STEVENS. THE VISITORS.

(_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)]

Even as a landscape painter he is luxurious and phlegmatic. In his

pictures the earth is a corpulent nurse, the trees fine and well-fed

children, and all nature healthy and contented. His art is like a

powerful body fed with rich nourishment. In such organisms the capacity

for enthusiasm and delicacy of sentiment are too easily sacrificed to

their physical satisfaction, but their robust health ensures them the

longer life. Here is neither the routine and external technique and the

correct, academic articulation of form belonging to mannerists, nor the

strained, neurotic, sickly refinement of the decadents, but the

powerful utterance of inborn, instinctive talent, and the strong cries

of nature which rise out of it will be understood at all times, even the

most distant. It is hardly necessary to add that the appearance of a

genius of this kind was fraught with untold consequences to the further

development of French painting.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

RICARD. MADAME DE CALONNE.]

What is held beautiful in nature must likewise be beautiful in pictorial

art when it is faithfully represented, and nature is beautiful

everywhere. In announcing this and demonstrating it in pictures of

life-size, Courbet won for art all the wide dominion of modern life

which had hitherto been so studiously avoided--the dominion in which it

had to revel if it was to learn to see with its own eyes. One fragment

of reality after another would then be drawn into the sphere of

representation, and no longer in the form of laboriously composed

_genre_ pictures, but after the fashion of really pictorial works of

art.

What Millet had done for the peasant, and Courbet for the artisan,

_Alfred Stevens_ did for "society": he discovered the _Parisienne_.

Until 1850 the graceful life of the refined classes, which Gavarni,

Marcellin, and Cham had so admirably drawn, found no adequate

representation in the province of painting. The _Parisienne_, who is so

_chic_ and piquant, and can hate and kiss with such fervour, fascinated

every one, but Grecian profile was a matter of prescription. _Auguste

Toulmouche_ painted little women in fashionable toilette, but less from

any taste he had for the graceful vision than from delight in _genre_

painting. They were forced to find forbidden books in the library, to

resist worldly marriages, or behave in some such interesting fashion, to

enter into the kingdom of art. It was reserved for a foreigner to reveal

this world of beauty, _chic_, and grace.

Alfred Stevens was a child of Brussels. He was born in the land of

Flemish matrons on 11th May 1828, and was the second of three children.

Joseph, the elder brother, became afterwards the celebrated painter of

animals; Arthur, the youngest, became an art-critic and a

picture-dealer; he was one of the first who brought home to the public

comprehension the noble art of Rousseau, Corot, and Millet. Stevens'

father fought as an officer in the great army at the battle of Waterloo,

and is said to have been an accomplished critic. Some of the ablest

sketches of Delacroix, Devéria, Charlet, and Roqueplan found their way

into his charming home. Roqueplan, who often came to Brussels, took the

younger Stevens with him to his Parisian studio. He was a tall, graceful

young man, who, with his vigorous upright carriage, his finely chiselled

features, and his dandified moustache, looked like an officer of

dragoons or cuirassiers. He was a pleasure-loving man of the world, and

was soon the lion of Parisian drawing-rooms. The grace of modern life in

great cities became the domain of his art. The _Parisienne_, whom his

French fellow-artists passed by without heed, was a strange, interesting

phenomenon to him, who was a foreigner--an exotic and exquisitely

artistic _bibelot_, which he looked upon with eyes as enraptured as

those with which Decamps had looked upon the East.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

CHAPLIN. THE GOLDEN AGE.

(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the

copyright._)]

His very first picture, exhibited in 1855, was called "At Home." A

charming little woman is warming her feet at the fire; she has returned

from visiting a friend, and it has been raining or snowing outside. Her

delicate hands are frozen in spite of her muff, her cheeks have been

reddened by the wind, and she has a pleasant sense of comfort as her

rosy lips breathe the warm air of the room. From the time of this

picture women took possession of Stevens' easel. His way was prescribed

for him, and he never left it. Robert Fleury, the president of the

judging committee in the Salon, said to him: "You are a good painter,

but alter your subjects; you are stifling in a sphere which is too

small; how wide and grand is that of the past!" Whereon Stevens is said

to have showed him a volume of photographs from Velasquez. "Look here at

Velasquez," he said. "This man never represented anything but what he

had before his eyes--people in the Spanish dress of the seventeenth

century. And as the justification of my _genre_ may be found in this

Spanish painter, it may be found also in Rubens, Raphael, Van Dyck, and

all the great artists. All these masters of the past derived their

strength and the secret of their endurance from the faithful

reproduction of what they had themselves seen: it gives their pictures a

real historical as well as an artistic value. One can only render

successfully what one has felt sincerely and seen vividly before one's

eyes in flesh and blood." In these sentences he is at one with Courbet,

and by not allowing himself to be led astray into doing sacrifice to the

idols of historical painting he continues to live as the historical

painter of the _Parisienne_.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

CHAPLIN. PORTRAIT OF COUNTESS AIMERY DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.]

In his whole work he sounds a pæan to the delicate and all-powerful

mistress of the world, and it is significant that it was through woman

that art joined issue with the interests of the present. Millet, the

first who conquered a province of modern life, was at the same time the

first great painter of women in the century. Stevens shows the other

side of the medal. In Millet woman was a product of nature; in Stevens

she is the product of modern civilisation. The woman of Millet lives a

large animal life, in the sweat of her brow, bowed to the earth. She is

the primæval mother who works, bears children, and gives them

nourishment. She stands in the field like a caryatid, like a symbol of

fertile nature. In Stevens woman does not toil and is seldom a mother.

He paints the woman who loves, enjoys, and knows nothing of the great

pangs of child-birth and hunger. The one woman lives beneath the wide,

open sky, _dans le grand air_; the other is only enveloped in an

atmosphere of perfume. She is ancient Cybele in the pictures of Millet;

in those of Stevens the holy Magdalene of the nineteenth century, to

whom much will be forgiven, because she has loved much. The pictures of

Stevens represent, for the first time, the potent relations of woman to

the century. Whilst most works of this time are silent concerning

ourselves, his art will speak of our weaknesses and our passions. In a

period of archaic painting he upheld the banner of modernity. On this

account posterity will honour him as one of the first historians of the

nineteenth century, and will learn from his pictures all that Greuze has

revealed to the present generation about the civilisation of the

eighteenth century.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

GAILLARD. PORTRAIT.]

And perhaps more, for Stevens never moralised--he merely painted.

Painter to his finger tips, like Delacroix, Roqueplan, and Isabey, he

stood in need of no anecdotic substratum as an adjunct. The key of his

pictures was suggested by no theme of one sort or another, but by his

treatment of colour. The picture was evolved from the first tone he

placed upon the canvas, which was the ground-note of the entire scale.

He delighted in a thick pasty handling, in beautiful hues, and in finely

chased detail. And he was as little inclined to sentimentality as to

pictorial novels. Everything is discreet, piquant, and full of charm. He

was a delicate spirit, avoiding tears and laughter. Subdued joy,

melancholy, and everything delicate and reserved are what he loves; he

will have nothing to do with stereotyped arrangement nor supernumerary

figures, but although a single person dominates the stage he never

repeats himself. He has followed woman through all her metamorphoses--as

mother or in love, weary or excited, proud or humbled, fallen or at the

height of success, in her morning-gown or dressed for visiting or a

promenade, now on the sea-shore, now in the costume of a Japanese, or

dallying with her trinkets as she stands vacantly before the glass. The

surroundings invariably form an accompaniment to the melody. A world of

exquisite things is the environment of the figures. Rich stuffs,

charming _petit-riens_ from China and Japan, the most delicate ivory and

lacquer-work, the finest bronzes, Japanese fire-screens, and great vases

with blossoming sprays, fill the boudoir and drawing-room of the

_Parisienne_. In the pictures of Stevens she is the fairy of a paradise

made up of all the most capricious products of art. A new world was

discovered, a painting which was in touch with life; the symphony of the

salon was developed in a delicate style. A tender feminine perfume,

something at once melancholy and sensuous, was exhaled from the pictures

of Stevens, and by this shade of _demi-monde haut-goût_ he won the great

public. They could not rise to Millet and Courbet, and Stevens was the

first who gave general pleasure without paying toll to the vicious taste

for melodramatic, narrative, and humorous _genre_ painting. Even in the

sixties he was appreciated in England, France, Germany, Russia, and

Belgium, and represented in all public and private collections; and

through the wide reception offered to his pictures he contributed much

to create in the public a comprehension for good painting.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

DUBOIS. PORTRAIT OF MY SONS.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

In the same way _James Tissot_ achieved the representation of the modern

woman. Stevens, a Belgian, painted the _Parisienne_; Tissot, a

Frenchman, the Englishwoman. It was not till they went into foreign

countries that these artists perceived the grace of what was not deemed

suitable to art at home. In Paris from the year 1859 Tissot had painted

scenes from the fifteenth century, to which he was moved by Leys, and he

studied with archæological accuracy the costume and furniture of the

late Gothic period. When he migrated to England in 1871 he gave up the

romantic proclivities of his youth, and devoted himself to the

representation of fashionable society. His oil paintings fascinate us by

their delicate feeling for cool transparent tone values, whilst his

water-colours--restaurant, theatre, and ball scenes--assure him a place

among the pioneers of modernity.

At first Stevens found no successors amongst Parisian painters. A few,

indeed, painted interiors in graceful Paris, but they were only frigid

compositions of dresses and furniture, without a breath of that delicate

aroma which exhales from the works of the Belgian. The portrait painters

alone approached that modern grace which still awaited its historian and

poet.

An exceedingly delicate artist, _Gustave Ricard_, in whose portraits the

art of galleries had a congenial revival, was called the modern Van Dyck

in the sixties. Living nature did not content him; he wished to learn

how it was interpreted by the old masters, and therefore frequented

galleries, where he sought counsel sometimes from the English

portrait-painters, sometimes from Leonardo, Rubens, and Van Dyck. In

this way Ricard became a _gourmet_ of colour, who knew the technique of

the old masters as few others have done, and his works have an

attractive golden gallery-tone of great distinction.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ CAROLUS DURAN.]

In _Charles Chaplin_ Fragonard was revived. He was the specialist of

languishing flesh and _poudre de riz_, the refined interpreter of

aristocratic beauty, one on whose palette there might still be found a

delicate reflection of the _fêtes galantes_ of the eighteenth century.

In Germany he was principally known by those dreamy, frail, and sensual

maidens, well characterised by the phrase of the Empress Eugénie. "M.

Chaplin," she said, "I admire you. Your pictures are not merely

indecorous, they are more." But Chaplin had likewise the other qualities

of the _rococo_ painter. He was a decorative artist of the first rank,

and, like Fragonard, he carelessly scattered round him on all sides

grace and beauty, charm and fascination. In 1857 he decorated the _Salon

des Fleurs_ in the Tuileries, in 1861-65 the bathroom of the Empress in

the _Palais de l'Elysée_, and from 1865 a number of private houses in

Paris, Brussels, and New York; and there is in all these works a refined

_haut-goût_ of modern Parisian elegance and fragrant _rococo_ grace. He

revived no nymphs, and made no pilgrimage to the island of Cythera; he

was more of an epicurean. But Fragonard's fine tones and Fragonard's

sensuousness were peculiar to him. He had a method of treating the hair,

of introducing little patches, of setting a dimple in the chin, and

painting the arms and bosom, which had vanished since the _rococo_

period from the power of French artists. Rosebuds and full-blown roses

blossom like girls _à la_ Greuze, and fading beauties, who are all the

more irresistible, are the elements out of which his refined,

indecorous, and yet fragrant art is constituted.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

BONNAT. ADOLPHE THIERS.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

The great engraver _Gaillard_ brought Hans Holbein once more into

honour. He was the heir of that method of painting, the eternal matrix

of which Jan van Eyck left to the world in unapproachable perfection.

His energetic but conscientiously minute brush noted every wrinkle of

the face, without doing injury to the total impression by this labour of

detail. Indeed, his pictures are as great in conception and as powerful

in characterisation as they are small in size. Gaillard is a profound

physiognomist who attained the most vivid analysis of character by means

of the utmost precision.

_Paul Dubois_ takes us across the Alps; in his portraits he is the same

great quattrocentist that he was from the beginning in his plastic

works. His ground is that of the excellent and subtle period when

Leonardo, who had been in the beginning somewhat arid, grew delicate and

allowed a mysterious sphinx-like smile to play round the lips of his

women. Manifestly he has studied Prudhon and had much intercourse with

Henner in those years when the latter, after his return from Italy,

directed attention once more to the old Lombards. From the time when he

made his début in 1879, with the portrait of his sons, he received great

encouragement, and stands out in these days as the most mature painter

of women that the present age has to show. Only the great English

portrait painters Watts and Millais, who are inferior to him in

technique, have excelled him in the embodiment of personalities.

As the most skilful painter of drapery, the most brilliant decorator of

feminine beauty, _Carolus Duran_ was long celebrated. The studies which

he had made in Italy had not caused him to forget that he took his

origin from across the Flemish border; and when he appeared with his

first portraits, in the beginning of the seventies, it was believed that

an eminent colourist had been born to French painting. At that time he

had a fine feeling for the eternal feminine and its transitory phases of

expression, and he was as dexterous in seizing a fleeting gesture or a

turn of the head as he was in the management of drapery and the play of

its hues. Then, again, he made a gradual transition from delicate and

discreetly coquettish works to the crude arts of upholstery. Yet even in

his last period he has painted some masculine portraits--those of

Pasteur, and of the painters Français, Fritz Thaulow, and René

Billotte--which are striking in their vigorous simplicity and unforced

characterisation after the glaring virtuosity of his pictures of women.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

BONNAT. VICTOR HUGO.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

_Léon Bonnat_, the pupil of Madrazos, brought about the fruitful

connection between French painting and that of the old Spaniards. By

this a large quantity of the fresh blood of naturalism was poured into

it once more. Born in the South of France and educated in Spain, he had

conceived there a special enthusiasm for Ribera, and these youthful

impressions were so powerful that he remained faithful to them in Paris.

As early as his residence in Italy, which included the three years from

1858 to 1860, his individuality had been fortified in a degree which

prevented him from wasting himself on large academical compositions like

the holders of the _Prix de Rome_; on the contrary, he painted scenes

from the varied life of the Roman people. Several religious pictures,

such as "The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew" (1863), "Saint Vincent de Paul"

(1866), and the "Job" of the Luxembourg, showed that he was steadily

progressing on the road paved by Spagnoletto. He had a virtuosity in

conjuring on to the canvas visages furrowed by the injustices of

life--grey hair, waving grey beards, and the starting sinews and muscles

of old weather-beaten frames. In the beginning of the seventies, when he

had to paint a Crucifixion for the jury-chamber in the Paris Palais de

Justice, he executed a virile figure, the muscles and anatomy of which

were as clearly marked as the buttresses in a Gothic cathedral. As in

the paintings of Caravaggio, a sharp, glaring light fell upon certain

parts of the body, whilst others remained dark and colourless in the

gloomy background. He applied the same principles to his portraits. A

French Lenbach, he painted in France a gallery of celebrated men. With

an almost tangible reality he painted Hugo, Madame Pasta, Dumas, Gounod,

Thiers, Grévy, Pasteur, Puvis de Chavannes, Jules Ferry, Carnot,

Cardinal Lavigerie, and others. Over two hundred persons, famous or not,

have sat to him, and he has painted them with an exceedingly intelligent

power, masculine taste, and a learning which never loses itself in

unnecessary detail.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ ANTOINE VOLLON.]