KARL SOHN, THE PORTRAIT-PAINTER
If ever a face on this earth may be said to have been irradiated and
illumined by the light of genuine kindliness--of the pure goodness of
heart that transcends all other human qualities--it was the countenance
of our beloved friend, Karl Sohn, the Düsseldorf artist. His features
were not regular, but were refined and spiritualised by the beauty of
the soul that shone through, the gentleness of his physiognomy being
only enhanced by the commanding character of the lofty, well-chiselled
brow, shaded as this was by soft masses of thick fair hair. He was tall
of stature, well proportioned and of dignified bearing, his step light
and easy, in spite of his great height, and with something almost
willowy in his gait; every movement was impregnated with grace and
harmony. There was a peculiar charm in his conversation, and this may
probably have been in great measure due to the soft deep tones of his
finely modulated voice, as clear and caressing as the sound of a silver
bell, wrapt in velvet. But much of the fascination doubtless lay in the
graceful and appropriate gestures with which he accompanied his words,
and which lent singular force to his graphic descriptions. Thus, in
expatiating on the beauties of some landscape, words and action seemed
to go together to call it up before our eyes, one broad sweep of his
well-shaped hand making the undulating line of the distant
mountain-range visible to everyone.
What a pleasure it was to listen to that mellow voice, and to the low
laugh with which he sometimes interrupted his own stories. Sohn was one
of those exceptional, happily constituted beings, themselves so
perfectly harmonious, that their presence seems to diffuse an atmosphere
of peace and contentment, into which as each one enters he feels on
better terms with himself and others. The world was full of beauty for
him, as it is for few of us, and the joy he felt in every aspect of the
beautiful--in Nature, in children, in the human form divine, and in
pleasant companionship--was, like the whole nature of the man, at once
ingenuous and profound. He had laid out for himself a little garden
round his house in Düsseldorf, with so much skill, that the small space
really looked like a miniature park. The effect was charming; but the
proprietor seemed almost to find it necessary to apologise for such a
display of luxury, saying deprecatingly,--“The beautiful is a necessary
condition of existence to us poor artists! So indispensable is it to us,
that we would willingly make every other sacrifice, just to be able to
surround ourselves with things of beauty!”
It was through his pupil, my great-uncle Charles, that we first became
acquainted with Sohn. My uncle, who had been a musical dilettante for
the first fifty years of his life, attaining I believe a certain
proficiency on the French horn, had recently turned his attention to
painting, in which art he was still a mere tyro at the time of my
parents’ marriage. At first he was always sending for Sohn, to ask his
criticism and advice, and by sheer hard work and perseverance he
succeeded in the end in painting very good portraits. There was one of
my mother, for which she declared she sat to him no less than
seventy-five times. To beguile the tedium of those long sittings, she
learned by heart the parts she was going to play in private theatricals,
repeating the lines aloud without fear of disturbing the artist, who was
quite absorbed in his work, and very hard of hearing into the bargain.
But in the one play occurred a phrase so singularly appropriate, that
she could not resist raising her voice for it to reach the ears of the
deaf old man, who peeped out astonished from behind his easel and shook
his finger at her, as she exclaimed:--“Dear Uncle! must I then really be
bored to death!” And her subsequent assurance that this was only in her
part only half mollified him. In spite of the long sittings, the
portrait was not a success; it however brought Sohn to our house, and
two admirable pictures of my mother by him represent her in all her
youthful bloom at that period. The one is in a red velvet dress, her
face framed in a mass of fair curls; the other in her riding-habit, just
as he had seen her jump down from her horse, flushed with the exercise
of a long ride.
These were the first two pictures Sohn painted in our family, but he was
henceforth every year a welcome visitor, often making a stay of many
weeks among us, and painting more than one portrait of each member of
the family. He was inspired to his finest work, one of his many
portraits of my mother--by seeing her in the ecstatic trance. So deeply
had this impressed him, that it was almost under similar conditions that
he worked, altogether removed from this earthly plane, blind and deaf to
all that went on around him, and entirely absorbed in the contemplation
of the radiant, transfigured countenance of his model, and in the
feverish effort to transfer to his canvas some faint reflection of the
wondrous radiance diffused over her whole person. In his despair of
obtaining this effect from the ordinary resources of his palette, he was
forever seeking some new means, devising some new combination of colour,
he would fain have dipped his brush in pure light, have steeped the
whole picture in unclouded sunshine! Something of this has been felt by
all those who have striven, with like fidelity and with the same gross
materials, to copy the dazzling hues even of some simple flower; has one
but tried, with such poor pigments, with our muddy bismuths and dingy
ochres, to reproduce the lily’s transparent whiteness or the rich gold
of the humble buttercup, we can the better appreciate the vanity of all
attempts at imitating on so feeble and limited a scale, the radiant
tints and subtle, endless gradations of Nature’s colour-box, employed by
the Divine Artist! We must needs perforce, for lack of the clear strong
light, throw up our dim half-lights and faded colours by deeper shadows.
But Sohn for this once would none of such artifice. Disdaining every
expedient of contrast, he laid on the colours simply and boldly, after
the manner of the Early Masters, painting with the pious enthusiasm, the
sacred fire that was theirs, and borrowing something of their technical
methods to impart the expression of holy rapture to the face, a
diaphanous delicacy to the folded hands, to give to the kneeling figure
the semblance of a martyr at the stake, a saint to whose beatific vision
the gates of Heaven are flung open wide!
Sohn made a picture of my brother Wilhelm and myself, at four and five
years of age, hand in hand; such a speaking likeness, that as we stood
beside it holding a big wreath of flowers, when it was given to my
father on his birthday, he kept looking from the painting to us, and
then back again to the picture--quite puzzled for a moment, he assured
us, as to which were the real children and which their portrait! Such
restless beings as small children can never be very easy to paint; but
Sohn succeeded wonderfully in catching the expression on each little
face,--my brother’s serious and dreamy, with an almost stolid
determination to keep quiet, and mine, all life and movement, with
sparkling eyes and a dancing smile, that betokened anything but the
requisite immobility of _pose_. It was an amusing contrast; Wilhelm
stood firm as a rock, whilst all my efforts to keep still as I was
bidden only made me tremble from head to foot with impatience, and at
one sitting resulted in my fainting away after I had actually
accomplished the feat of keeping in the same position for five
consecutive minutes! I remember how alarmed the artist was, when I
suddenly fell from my chair to the floor, in a dead faint, and how
concerned he was about me, reproaching himself with the unnatural
constraint imposed on my mercurial nature by the sittings. But what
surprised him most of all, was to witness the means employed to bring me
round; as I recovered consciousness, a sip of cold water, a little piece
of black bread were given me by my mother to revive me, and Sohn, who
was not then so well acquainted with the Spartan simplicity of our
bringing up, felt amazed, as he afterwards told us, at the homeliness of
the measures. Little princesses, he thought, were always fed on
dainties, and would not condescend to eat anything less appetising than
cake!
The torture those sittings were to me, I hope he never knew. He was so
good and kind, and did so much to make them bearable, whiling away the
time by talking to us and telling us amusing stories, or getting someone
else to read an entertaining book aloud to us while he painted. But it
was all no good. Outside I could see the sun shining, and hear the birds
singing and the wind whistling through the trees, and I--who longed to
be out there in the sunshine, singing with the birds, and running races
with the wind,--I must be cooped up within four walls, in a room that
instead of the fragrance of the flowers, smelt of nasty oil-colours! It
was not to be borne. As well try to imprison the wild west wind, or stop
the dancing mountain-stream in its course! I was just as wild and free,
and my mother sometimes asked if any power on earth could be found to
tame me. Had she but known! All too soon a spell would be worked,
transforming the wayward child into a quiet gentle maiden, grave-eyed
and serious. It was by the discipline of sorrow that the change should
be wrought--in the sick-room that the lesson must be learnt; there I
could sit for hours, silent and motionless, dreading lest a movement, a
whisper should disturb the dear sufferer beside whose pillow I watched.
But already then, in my wildest, most reckless mood, and however my
spirit might chafe at the enforced immobility of the lengthy sittings, I
felt the soothing influence of the artist’s gentle voice, and the deep
full tones could lull my feverish impatience. Nor did the impression
wear off as time went on; echoes of that sympathetic voice live in my
memory, calling up many a bygone scene--long talks as we rambled through
the forest, dreams and aspirations, hopes and fears, all the joys and
sorrows of those vanished days,--Sohn’s memory is inseparably associated
with all of these. The portraits he painted extend over a long series of
years. One of Otto was done just before the poor boy’s death--my
father’s also, at a time when we knew that he had not long to live among
us--my mother he depicted at all times and seasons, and under all
possible circumstances, from ecstasy to the deepest mourning. He used to
say, that he hoped to live long enough to make one more portrait of her
with snow-white hair. But this wish remained unfulfilled, for my
mother’s hair had not yet turned grey, when he was called away from us.
One autumn Sohn came to us accompanied by his friend, the great artist,
Lessing. The latter, a very handsome man, like so many of the followers
of Art, was extremely taciturn. He was a good sportsman, shooting his
deer almost daily. Much as I dislike all sport, my admiration of the
artist induced me to bring him the proverbial good luck, by meeting him
as if by chance when he set out in the early morn with his gun. As I
passed with a smiling though silent greeting, I thought to myself that
had he but known my horror of the slaughter of innocent dumb creatures,
the great painter would have been still more flattered by this attention
on the part of the daughter of the house. This was after Otto’s death,
and Lessing made a sketch of the grave for my mother, with the wonderful
precision in rendering every detail that characterised him. Every branch
of the trees overshadowing the tomb was portrayed with lifelike
fidelity; Lessing’s scrupulous exactitude refusing to sanction the
slightest deviation from the original. Every bough, every twig must be
in its place; even in a landscape his veracity would not tolerate any
suppression or addition. His realism, his close copying of Nature, was
coupled with a fear of accepting any other teacher; and he had always
been afraid to visit Italy, lest he should sacrifice something of his
own originality to the involuntary imitation of the Old Masters.
When I grew up, Sohn wished to make a portrait of me, as he often saw
me, sitting in the shadow of a tree, a straw hat on my head, in my
simple morning attire. But it was unfortunately quite another picture
that was wanted--in evening dress, in the drawing-room--just something
that I hated, and that seemed to me so little like myself. Sohn, who had
known me from a child, understood this, and his idea was the true one. I
shall always regret that picture that never was painted, it would have
shown me exactly as I was, at that period of my life. I was the child of
the forest, the forest-song, and have never wished to be aught else. The
untamed and untamable in my nature, from which some good folk shrank in
alarm, was just what pleased our kind artist-friend. Others might find
my high spirits fatiguing, they were never so to him. My spontaneity, my
frankness, refreshed him, and his heart melted towards this poor little
child of Nature, who was to be forced against her will to become
conventional--and even, without her knowing it, was being already
educated to fit her for a throne! Anything rather than that, I should
have said--for choice, a cottage, a little house hidden away in a
wood--for I was not ambitious, at least my ambition took quite another
direction. What could all worldly pomp mean to me, who had revelled in
the forest-splendours, in the glories of Nature! The beeches of our
lofty avenues would dwarf the finest columns ever reared to support a
roof, and how poor and insignificant the hubbub of the crowd must sound,
to ears accustomed to the mighty music of the storm-wind, making the
tall trees bend and quiver in its path! In all this Sohn was of my way
of thinking, and he had quick perceptions of the quieter beauties of
Nature too, and never missed pointing out to me a single blossom
sprouting, or an effect of sunlight through the intertwining branches.
And he led me on to talk and pour out my confidences to him, and often
broke into a hearty laugh at some unexpected sally. I was well willing,
I told him, to devote myself to the service of my fellow-creatures, but
not from a throne; I would live in their midst, to tend and comfort
them. And the thought of marriage was hateful to me, for a husband, it
seemed to me, must be a master, a sort of tyrant, but children I loved,
and wished that I might have a dozen!
How heartily Sohn would laugh at all this, and then grow serious again,
and crown my hair with glow-worms, as we strolled home through the
twilight. I sang like the birds in those days, in the truest sense of
the word, for every verse I made I sang to myself, in the joy of my
heart. My life was full of poetry indeed--of poetry fostered by the
surroundings. I have always thought that the happiest lot on earth is
that of the mediatised princes. They are like little kings, but without
the cares of government, enjoying the same liberty as people in private
life, yet with a patriarchal interest in the weal and woe of all their
people. Such happy mortals are generally beloved from their birth, their
fortune suffices for their needs without awakening envy in others, and
they have opportunities for indulging intellectual and artistic tastes,
such as few others possess. Their country seat is generally some old
castle, to which historic memories attach, probably with a fine library
or picture gallery, and archeological treasures perhaps beneath the
soil. As patrons of Art, as hosts to a company of well-chosen guests,
as friends of scholars and men of letters, as descendants of forefathers
renowned for talents and virtues, they are privileged beyond all others.
And friends like Sohn must be counted among their best treasures!
A portrait-painter, worthy of the name, must generally be a good
psychologist, for he must study his models well, and learn their
character through the physiognomy.
I shall never forget a day Sohn spent with us at Altwied, the lovely old
ruined castle, which was the cradle of our family. It stands shut in by
high hills on a little peninsula formed by the meanderings of the
Wiedbach, the mountain stream. Many a dream have I dreamt within those
crumbling walls, of which much more was standing then, but on the day in
question we came, I know not how, to speak of the opera, “la Dame
Blanche,” and as we all lay stretched on the grass, Sohn related the
story. So poetically, so touchingly did he tell of the young man’s
return to the castle of his ancestors, and of the long-forgotten song
that stirs in his memory as he crosses the threshold--I was carried away
by it, and the actual performance of the opera, which I witnessed some
years later, fell very flat in comparison. The glare of the foot-lights,
the painted scenery, the stiffness of the acting, destroyed the beauty
of the story as first revealed to me through the medium of an artist’s
soul, and on the picturesque site to which it seemed naturally to
belong.