Of the thirty or more great artists who made the artistic movement at
the beginning of the century in France, five will, I think, exercise a
prolonged influence on the art of the future--Ingres, Corot, Millet,
Manet, and Degas.
The omission of the name of Delacroix will surprise many; but though
Delacroix will engage the attention of artists as they walk through
the Louvre, I do not think that they will turn to him for counsel in
their difficulty, or that they will learn from him any secrets of
their craft. In the great masters of pictorial composition--Michael
Angelo, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Rubens--the passion and tumult of
the work resides solely in the conception; the execution is always
calculated, and the result is perfectly predetermined and accurately
foreseen. To explain myself I will tell an anecdote which is always
told whenever Delacroix's name is mentioned, without, however, the
true significance of the anecdote being perceived. After seeing
Constable's pictures, Delacroix repainted one of his most important
works from end to end.
Of Degas [Footnote: See essay on Degas In "Impressions and Opinions".]
and Manet I have spoken elsewhere. Millet seems to me to be a sort of
nineteenth century Greuze. The subject-matter is different, but at
bottom the art of these two painters is more alike than is generally
supposed. Neither was a painter in any true sense of the word, and if
the future learns anything from Millet, it will be how to separate the
scene from the environment which absorbs it, how to sacrifice the
background, how to suggest rather than to point out, and how by a
series of ellipses to lead the spectator to imagine what is not there.
The student may learn from Millet that it was by sometimes servilely
copying nature, sometimes by neglecting nature, that the old masters
succeeded in conveying not an illusion but an impression of life.
But of all nineteenth century painters Ingres and Corot seem most sure
of future life; their claim upon the attention and the admiration of
future artists seems the most securely founded. Looked at from a
certain side Ingres seems for sheer perfection to challenge antiquity.
Of Michael Angelo there can never be any question; he stands alone in
a solitude of greatness. Phidias himself is not so much alone. For the
art of Apelles could not have differed from that of Phidias; and the
intention of many a drawing by Apelles must have been identical with
that of "La Source". It is difficult to imagine what further beauty he
may have introduced into a face, or what further word he might have
had to say on the beauty of a virgin body.
The legs alone suggest the possibility of censure. Ingres repainted
the legs when the picture was finished and the model was not before
him, so the idea obtains among artists that the legs are what are
least perfect in the picture. In repainting the legs his object was
omission of detail with a view to concentration of attention on the
upper part of the figure. It must not however be supposed that the
legs are what is known among painters as empty; they have been
simplified; their synthetic expression has been found; and if the
teaching at the Beaux Arts forbids the present generation to
understand such drawing, the fault lies with the state that permits
the Beaux Arts, and not with Ingres, whose genius was not crushed by
it. The suggestion that Ingres spoilt the legs of "La Source" by
repainting them when the model was not before him could come from
nowhere but the Beaux Arts.
That Ingres was not so great an artist as Raphael I am aware. That
Ingres' drawings show none of the dramatic inventiveness of Raphael's
drawings is so obvious that I must apologise for such a commonplace.
Raphael's drawings were done with a different intention from Ingres';
Raphael's drawings were no more than rough memoranda, and in no
instance did he attempt to carry a drawing to the extreme limit that
Ingres did. Ingres' drawing is one thing, Raphael's is another; still
I would ask if any one thinks that Raphael could have carried a
drawing as far as Ingres? I would ask if any of Raphael's drawings are
as beautiful, as perfect, or as instructive as Ingres'. Take, for
example, the pencil drawing in the Louvre, the study for the
odalisque: who except a Greek could have produced so perfect a
drawing? I can imagine Apelles doing something like it, but no one
else.
When you go to the Louvre examine that line of back, return the next
day and the next, and consider its infinite perfection before you
conclude that my appreciation is exaggerated. Think of the learning
and the love that were necessary for the accomplishment of such
exquisite simplifications. Never did pencil follow an outline with
such penetrating and unwearying passion, or clasp and enfold it with
such simple and sufficient modelling. Nowhere can you detect a
starting-point or a measurement taken; it seems to have grown as a
beautiful tendril grows, and every curve sways as mysteriously, and
the perfection seems as divine. Beside it Dürer would seem crabbed and
puzzle-headed; Holbein would seem angular and geometrical; Da Vinci
would seem vague: and I hope that no critic by partial quotation will
endeavour to prove me guilty of having said that Ingres was a greater
artist than Da Vinci. I have not said any such thing; I have merely
striven by aid of comparison to bring before the reader some sense of
the miraculous beauty of one of Ingres' finest pencil drawings.
Or let us choose the well-known drawing of the Italian lady sitting in
the Louis XV. arm-chair, her long curved and jewelled hand lying in
her lap and a coiffure of laces pinned down with a long jewelled
hair-pin. How her head-dress of large laces decorates the paper, and
the elaborate working out of the pattern, is it not a miracle of
handicraft? How exquisite the black curls on the forehead, and how
they balance the dark eyes which are the depth and centre of the
composition! The necklace, how well the stones are heaped, how well
they lie together! How well their weight and beauty are expressed! And
the earrings, how enticing in their intricate workmanship. Then the
movement of the face, how full it is of the indolent south, and the
oval of the face is composed to harmonise and enhance the lace
head-dress; and its outline, though full of classical simplifications,
tells the character with Holbein-like fidelity; it falls away into a
soft, weak chin in which resides a soft sensual lassitude. The black
eyes are set like languid stars in the face, and the flesh rounds off
softly, like a sky, modelled with a little shadow, part of the
outline, and expressing its beauty. And then there are the marvels of
the dress to consider: the perfect and spontaneous creation of the
glitter of the long silk arms, and the muslin of the wrists, soft as
foliage, and then the hardness of the bodice stitched with jewellery
and set so romantically on the almost epicene bosom.
It is the essentially Greek quality of perfection that brings Corot
and Ingres together. They are perfect, as none other since the Greek
sculptors has been perfect. Other painters have desired beauty at
intervals as passionately as they, none save the Greeks so
continuously; and the desire to be merely beautiful seemed, if
possible, to absorb the art of Corot even more completely than it did
that of Ingres. Among the numerous pictures, sketches, and drawings
which he left you will find weakness, repetitions, even commonplace,
but ugliness never. An ugly set of lines is not to be found in Corot;
the rhythm may sometimes be weak, but his lines never run out of
metre. For the rhythm of line as well as of sound the artist must seek
in his own soul; he will never find it in the inchoate and discordant
jumble which we call nature.
And, after all, what is art but rhythm? Corot knew that art is nature
made rhythmical, and so he was never known to take out a six-foot
canvas to copy nature on. Being an artist, he preferred to observe
nature, and he lay down and dreamed his fields and trees, and he
walked about in his landscape, selecting his point of view,
determining the rhythm of his lines. That sense of rhythm which I have
defined as art was remarkable in him even from his first pictures. In
the "Castle of St. Angelo, Rome", for instance, the placing of the
buildings, one low down, the other high up in the picture, the bridge
between, and behind the bridge the dome of St. Peter's, is as
faultless a composition as his maturest work. As faultless, and yet
not so exquisite. For it took many long and pensive years to attain
the more subtle and delicate rhythms of "The Lake" in the collection
of J. S. Forbes, Esq., or the landscape in the collection of G. N.
Stevens, Esq., or the "Ravine" in the collection of Sir John Day.
Corot's style changed; but it changed gradually, as nature changes,
waxing like the moon from a thin, pure crescent to a full circle of
light. Guided by a perfect instinct, he progressed, fulfilling the
course of his artistic destiny. We notice change, but each change
brings fuller beauty. And through the long and beautiful year of
Corot's genius--full as the year itself of months and seasons--we
notice that the change that comes over his art is always in the
direction of purer and more spiritual beauty. We find him more and
more absorbed in the emotion that the landscape conveys, more willing
to sacrifice the superfluous and circumstantial for the sake of the
immortal beauty of things.
Look at the "Lac de Garde" and say if you can that the old Greek
melody is not audible in the line which bends and floats to the lake's
edge, in the massing and the placing of those trees, in the fragile
grace of the broken birch which sweeps the "pale complexioned sky".
Are we not looking into the heart of nature, and do we not hear the
silence that is the soul of evening? In this, his perfect period, he
is content to leave his foreground rubbed over with some expressive
grey, knowing well that the eye rests not there, and upon his middle
distance he will lavish his entire art, concentrating his picture on
some one thing in which for him resides the true reality of the place;
be this the evening ripples on the lake or the shimmering of the
willow leaves as the last light dies out of the sky.
I only saw Corot once. It was in some woods near Paris, where I had
gone to paint, and I came across the old gentleman unexpectedly,
seated in front of his easel in a pleasant glade. After admiring his
work I ventured to say: "Master, what you are doing is lovely, but I
cannot find your composition in the landscape before us." He said: "My
foreground is a long way ahead," and sure enough, nearly two hundred
yards away, his picture rose out of the dimness of the dell,
stretching a little beyond the vista into the meadow.
The anecdote seems to me to be a real lesson in the art of painting,
for it shows us the painter in his very employment of nature, and we
divine easily the transposition in the tones and in the aspect of
things that he was engaged in bringing into that picture. And to speak
of transpositions leads us inevitably into consideration of the great
secret of Corot's art, his employment of what is known in studios as
values.
By values is meant the amount of light and shadow contained in a tone.
The relation of a half-tint to the highest light, which is represented
by the white paper, the relation of a shadow to the deepest black,
which is represented by the chalk pencil, is easy enough to perceive
in a drawing; but when the work is in colour the values, although not
less real, are more difficult to estimate. For a colour can be
considered from two points of view: either as so much colouring
matter, or as so much light and shade. Violet, for instance, contains
not only red and blue in proportions which may be indefinitely varied,
but also certain proportions of light and shade; the former tending
towards the highest light, represented on the palette by flake white;
the latter tending towards the deepest dark, represented on the
palette by ivory black.
Similar to a note in music, no colour can be said to be in itself
either false or true, ugly or beautiful. A note and a colour acquire
beauty and ugliness according to their associations; therefore to
colour well depends, in the first instance, on the painter's knowledge
and intimate sense of the laws of contrast and similitude. But there
is still another factor in the art of colouring well; for, just as the
musician obtains richness and novelty of expression by means of a
distribution of sound through the instruments of the orchestra, so
does the painter obtain depth and richness through a judicious
distribution of values. If we were to disturb the distribution of
values in the pictures of Titian, Rubens, Veronese, their colour would
at once seem crude, superficial, without cohesion or rarity. But some
will aver that if the colour is right the values must be right too.
However plausible this theory may seem, the practice of those who hold
it amply demonstrates its untruth. It is interesting and instructive
to notice how those who seek the colour without regard for the values
inherent in the colouring matter never succeed in producing more than
a certain shallow superficial brilliancy; the colour of such painters
is never rich or profound, and although it may be beautiful, it is
always wanting in the element of romantic charm and mystery.
The colour is the melody, the values are the orchestration of the
melody; and as the orchestration serves to enrich the melody, so do
the values enrich the colour. And as melody may--nay, must--exist, if
the orchestration be really beautiful, so colour must inhere wherever
the values have been finely observed. In Rembrandt, the colour is
brown and a white faintly tinted with bitumen; in Claude, the colour
is blue, faintly flushed with yellow in the middle sky, and yet none
has denied the right of these painters to be considered colourists.
They painted with the values--that is to say, with what remains on the
palette when abstraction has been made of the colouring matter--a
delicate neutral tint of infinite subtlety and charm; and it is with
this, the evanescent and impalpable soul of the vanished colours, that
the most beautiful pictures are painted. Corot, too, is a conspicuous
example of this mode of painting. His right to stand among the world's
colourists has never, so far as I know, been seriously contested, his
pictures are almost void of colouring matter--a blending of grey and
green, and yet the result is of a richly coloured evening.
Corot and Rembrandt, as Dutilleux pointed out, arrived at the same
goal by absolutely different ends. He saw clearly, although he could
not express himself quite clearly, that, above all painters, Rembrandt
and Corot excelled in that mode of pictorial expression known as
values, or shall I say chiaroscuro, for in truth he who has said
values has hinted chiaroscuro. Rembrandt told all that a golden ray
falling through a darkened room awakens in a visionary brain; Corot
told all that the grey light of morning and evening whispers in the
pensive mind of the elegiac poet. The story told was widely different,
but the manner of telling was the same: one attenuated in the light,
the other attenuated in the shadow: both sacrificed the corners with a
view to fixing the attention on the one spot in which the soul of the
picture lives.
All schools have not set great store on values, although all schools
have set great store on drawing and colour. Values seem to have come
and gone in and out of painting like a fashion. One generation hardly
gives the matter a thought, the succeeding generation finds the whole
charm of its art in values. It would be difficult to imagine a more
interesting and instructive history than the history of values in
painting. It is far from my scheme to write such a history, but I wish
that such a history were written, for then we should see clearly how
unwise were they who neglected the principle, and how much they lost.
I would only call attention to how the principle came to be
reintroduced into French art in the beginning of this century. It came
from Holland _viâ_, England through the pictures of Turner and
Constable. It was an Anglo-Dutch influence that roused French art,
then slumbering in the pseudo-classicisms of the First Empire; and,
half-awakened, French art turned its eyes to Holland for inspiration;
and values, the foundation and corner-stone of Dutch art, became
almost at a bound a first article of faith in the artistic creed. In
1830 values came upon France like a religion. Rembrandt was the new
Messiah, Holland was the Holy Land, and disciples were busy dispensing
the propaganda in every studio.
Since the bad example of Greuze, literature had wound round every
branch of painting until painting seemed to disappear in the parasite
like an oak under a cloud of ivy. The excess had been great--a
reaction was inevitable--and Rembrandt, with his Biblical legends,
furnished the necessary transition. But when a taste for painting had
been reacquired, one after the other the Dutch painters became the
fashion. It is almost unnecessary to point out the influence of
Hobbema on the art of Rousseau. Corot was less affected by the
Dutchmen, or, to speak more exactly, he assimilated more completely
what he had learnt from them than his rival was able to do. Moreover,
what he took from Holland came to him through Ruysdael rather than
through Hobbema.
The great morose dreamer, contemplative and grave as Wordsworth, must
have made more direct and intimate appeal to Corot's soul than the
charm and the gaiety of Hobbema's water-mills. Be this as it may, it
was Holland that revived the long-forgotten science of values in the
Barbizon painters. They sought their art in the direction of values,
and very easily Corot took the lead as chief exponent of the new
principle; and he succeeded in applying the principle of values to
landscape painting as fully as Rembrandt had to figure painting.
But at the moment when the new means of expression seemed most
distinctly established and understood, it was put aside and lost sight
of by a new generation of painters, and, curiously enough, by the men
who had most vigorously proclaimed the beauty and perfection of the
art which was to be henceforth, at least in practice, their mission to
repudiate. For I take it that the art of the impressionists has
nothing whatever in common with the art of Corot. True, that Corot's
aim was to render his impression of his subject, no matter whether it
was a landscape or a figure; in this aim he differed in no wise from
Giotto and Van Eyck; but we are not considering Corot's aims but his
means of expression, and his means of expression were the very
opposite to those employed by Monet and the school of Monet. Not with
half-tints in which colour disappears are Monet and his school
concerned, but with the brilliant vibration of colour in the full
light, with open spaces where the light is reflected back and forward,
and nature is but a prism filled with dazzling and iridescent tints.
I remember once writing about one of Monet's innumerable snow effects:
"This picture is in his most radiant manner. A line of snow-enchanted
architecture passes through the picture--only poor houses with a
single square church tower, but they are beautiful as Greek temples in
the supernatural whiteness of the great immaculate snow. Below the
village, but not quite in the foreground, a few yellow bushes, bare
and crippled by the frost, and around and above a marvellous glitter
in pale blue and pale rose tints." I asked if the touch was not more
precious than intimate; and I spoke, too, of a shallow and brilliant
appearance. But if I had asked why the picture, notwithstanding its
incontestable merits, was so much on the surface, why it so
irresistibly suggested _un décor de théâtre_, why one did not enter
into it as one does into a picture by Wilson or Corot, my criticism
would have gone to the root of the evil. And the reason of this is
because Monet has never known how to organise and control his values.
The relation of a wall to the sky which he observes so finely seem as
if deliberately contrived for the suppression of all atmosphere; and
we miss in Monet the delicacy and the mystery which are the charm of
Corot. The bath of air being withdrawn, a landscape becomes a mosaic,
flat surface takes the place of round: the next step is some form or
other of pre-Raphaelitism.