DIDIER-POUGET
“TOUT HOMME QUI NE RESSEMBLE PAS AUX AUTRES, DEVIENT
PAR LA MÊME UN OBJET DE DÉFIANCE. DÈS QUE LA FOULE
NE COMPREND PLUS, ELLE RIT. IL FAUT TOUTE UNE
ÉDUCATION POUR FAIRE ACCEPTER LE GÉNIE”
_ZOLA_
THE work of Emile Claus is a manifestation in quite another direction of
the Impressionist idea. Born in Western Flanders in 1849, he was the
sixteenth child of parents in very humble circumstances. Their business
in life was to supply with provisions the boatmen who passed along on
the river Lys. By various means the boy, who had very early displayed a
yearning for the painter’s career, managed to evade all attempts to
harness him in the drudgery of the home life. A pastrycook, a railway
watchman, a linendraper’s assistant, these were a few of the vocations
he was condemned to try, yet from which he escaped. At last he set out
for Antwerp, with £7 in his pocket, and the warning that he need not
expect a penny more. In the city of Rubens he became a free pupil of
Professor de Keyser. All day long he studied in the Academy. When night
came he earned a livelihood by giving drawing-lessons, acting as a
sculptor’s “devil,” and colouring pictures of the Stations of the Cross.
At last, after many struggles, he became a popular portrait-painter in
the city, particularly of children in fancy costume. In 1879 he
travelled through Spain and Morocco, painting the conventional
compositions of an Iberian tour, and much influenced by the style of
Charles Verlat. Despite his great success in Antwerp, in 1883 Emile
Claus changed his manner entirely. He shook off the dust of the city for
ever, renounced portrait-painting, and became “paysagiste.” Impelled by
an intense love of nature he returned to his native village on the banks
of the Lys, and recommenced his life as a landscape painter “en plein
air.” He has never returned to the distracting turmoil of town, and, in
his quaint white and green shuttered house at Astene between Ghent and
Courtrai, has buried himself in the heart of the country. Although some
distance from the larger cities of Belgium, Emile Claus does not
vegetate in his obscurity. On wheel or a-foot he is equally active,
visiting his friends and working on his canvases, of which he has always
some six or eight in progress. It may be noted that he works entirely in
the open air, and finishes in front of nature. One might judge of this
from the strength and completeness of his pictures.
It is years since the writer first saw a landscape by Claus, and he
remembers vividly the pleasure it gave. The painting was in the
well-known collection of Mr. John Maddocks, of Bradford. Upon a huge
canvas the artist had depicted a cornfield ripe for the sickle, and in
the midst of the wheat red poppies grew. Across the foreground, emerging
from the wheat, wandered a few white ducks. Over the whole was the
fierce glare of a noon-day sun. The work was convincing, naturalistic,
yet poetic, inasmuch as it seemed to chant the universal hymn of nature.
It was a revelation to those artists who found themselves in Bradford at
that period. Unknown and a stranger, Claus received in spirit silent
congratulations for his splendid achievement, which aroused in several
breasts a keen feeling of emulation. The artist writes: “Mr. Maddocks
has always strongly encouraged me, and had the courage to buy my work at
a time when everybody in Belgium found me by far too audacious, because,
as you may know, the leaders, the standard-bearers as it were, of the
young Belgian school of painting are not at all in sympathy with the
beautiful art of Monet and his school.” Since that day Emile Claus has
greatly increased his following throughout the world, being least
appreciated in his own country.
Emile Claus is a painter whose brush is charged with the sweetness of
life, courageous, healthful, and buoyant. His pictures breathe of
sunlight and fresh air, and it is easy to see with what sheer delight he
throws himself into his work. When one seeks for the reason which so
suddenly changed this prosaic painter of the Antwerp bourgeois into an
Impressionist of the most modern school, one discovers the usual cause,
the Englishmen of the commencement of the last century. In a recent
letter to the writer, Emile Claus says that in England, above all other
countries, were born light and life in painting. “I have all too quickly
glanced at the Turners and Constables of London, nevertheless it was a
revelation to me, and those great artists Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro
continue simply what that giant Turner discovered; just as the grand
epoch of Rousseau, Millet, Dupré, and Corot, passed over Belgium to find
their inspiration in the marvellous works of the Dutch school.”
[Illustration:
EMILE CLAUS
]
[Illustration:
THE VILLAGE STREET · EMILE CLAUS
]
In the country of the Lys the artist continues to work, producing a
series of pictures as beautiful as they are uncommon. One may mention
his magnificent _Flemish Farm_ of 1883, the _Old Gardener_ of 1887 now
in the Liége gallery, the canvas in the Antwerp gallery, and the fine
work by which he is represented in the Luxembourg. Charming in colour,
they will be found broad in manner, and perfectly original in sentiment.
[Illustration:
RETURNING FROM MARKET · EMILE CLAUS
]
[Illustration:
GOLDEN AUTUMN · EMILE CLAUS
]
In 1891, Claus exhibited for the first time in the Champ de Mars, and
has contributed each year from that date. His technical skill grows
steadily. M. Gabriel Mourey, staunch supporter of “La peinture claire,”
contributed a most sympathetic article to the “Studio,” in which he
wrote, “In the old days, Claus was accused of being an ‘Impressionist,’
and such he is to a certain degree just as any one may be without
disrespect to the glorious traditions of the painter’s art. He is an
Impressionist to this extent—that he possesses the gift of _feeling_
with the utmost keenness the true meaning of Nature in all her
manifestations; while he is bound by no rule, subject to no formula, in
his endeavour to interpret that meaning on his canvas. But, unlike most
Impressionists, he has the rare capacity to know how to choose his
impressions, to test them to the uttermost, and never to rest until he
has translated them to his full satisfaction, disdaining the haphazard
attempts which are sufficient for the majority of modern landscapists.
Impressionist! One need feel no surprise that the superficial observer
dubs him thus; for nowadays every painter whose work is luminous and
bright, and devoid of bitumen, earns and deserves the title! The truth
is that Claus, without adapting his style to any special method, is
mainly concerned that his works shall be as full of atmosphere as
possible, that his touch shall be as free and his colour as pure as he
can make them. Thus he achieves that remarkable freshness of tint, that
brightness of colouring, which constitute one of the chief charms of his
art.”
The little house near Astene is called in Flemish
“Zonnenschyn”—“Sunshine,” and it is indeed sunshine which is predominant
in the work of Emile Claus.
Le Sidaner is an artist, who, after having passed through several
antagonistic stages, has developed a style entirely his own. He may be
described as a mystic who views the world with an air of detachment,
standing aloof from the distractions of its inhabitants. He prefers an
environment breathing some vague and undefined sorrow. The joy of life
does not course through his veins. The subjects which appeal most to
him suggest renunciation and world-weariness, the solemn peace of a
Flemish _béguinage_, a cobbled street in Bruges recalling dead
glories, a deserted canal with a solitary swan. When he designs a
figure-composition the subject belongs to the same _genre_, a priest
administering extreme unction to a dying girl, orphans under the care
of a nun, old women waiting with the patience of extreme old age for
Death to release them from their suffering senility. He instils into
his canvases the very essence of Keats’ line, “Sorrow more beautiful
than beauty’s self.”
The only biographical account of Le Sidaner is to be found in one of M.
Gabriel Mourey’s penetrating articles in the “Studio.” Le Sidaner was
the son of fisherfolk from St. Malo and the Ile Bréhat. He was born in
1862, and spent the first ten years of his life in his native place, the
Ile Maurice. “While quite young,” says the writer of the preface to the
catalogue of an exhibition held in 1897, “he came to live in Dunkirk,
beside the murmuring North Sea, with its melancholy mists. The shock he
felt at the change made him absolutely pensive. It was as though, half
alarmed, he was taking refuge within himself the better to express the
flame of Creole tenderness which burned within him.” His father, who
practised painting and sculpture as an amateur, gave the boy every
encouragement. At fifteen he was taken away from school, and sent to the
local École des Beaux-Arts. Here he studied under a master who was slave
to the doctrines of the Antwerp school.
The artist, when telling his early experiences, deplored these evil
influences. He admits that they were not worse than those forced upon
him in Paris, where, at the École des Beaux-Arts, he studied under
Cabanel. Five years he spent under that master, making sketches of the
animals at the Jardin des Plantes, and copying Delacroix and Jordaens at
the Louvre. Then he passed under the influence of Impressionism. He
says: “It was in this year (1881) that Manet displayed his portraits of
_Pertuiset, le tueur de lions_, and of _Rochefort_. The first of these
pleased me infinitely, but the second gradually filled me with alarm; it
was so different from that which I had hitherto seen. Nevertheless, I
remember well that the famous _Bar des Folies-Bergère_ by this same
Manet made the profoundest impression on me. Yet the rules of the school
forbade me to consider all this as beautiful as I could have wished to
consider it. When I look back on those days it really seems as though I
was poisoned. Etaples, that is to say Nature, revived me, and drove the
drug from my system.”
[Illustration:
APPLE GATHERING · EMILE CLAUS
]
Le Sidaner goes on to tell how by chance he spent a holiday at Etaples
in 1881. He settled there, and remained in the little coast town from
1884 to 1893, where he made friendships with Eugène Vail, Thaulow, Henri
Duhem, Alexander Harrison, and others. He refers to a visit to Holland,
where Rembrandt, Peter de Hoogh, and Vermeer enchanted him. Having
gained a third medal at the Salon des Champs-Élysées he was able to
travel to Italy. “Italy simply turned my head, particularly Florence.
Oh! the delicious hours I spent in the Convent of San Marco copying the
face of the Virgin in Fra Angelico’s _Annunciation_. How much I
preferred the simple grace of Fra Angelico and Giotto to the cleverness
and skill of Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto.” It was hardly necessary
to have avowed these influences, they are so evident in the work of Le
Sidaner.
[Illustration:
A SUNLIT HOUSE · EMILE CLAUS
]
He is a man who avoids crowds and the distracting clamour of humanity,
loving to work in such dead cities as Bruges, or the peaceful
countryside in the neighbourhood of Beauvais. No modern artist has
better expressed on canvas the words of the great Millet. “When you
paint a picture, whether the subject be a house, a plain, the ocean, or
the sky, remember always the presence of man. Think how his joys and
sorrows have been intermixed in these landscapes. An inner voice speaks
of his inquietude and turmoils. Humanity’s whole existence is conjured
up. In painting a landscape think of man.”
Le Sidaner has many affinities to Pointelin, Carrière, and Whistler.
They each have sought harmonies of line and colour, and though distinct
in personality and unlike in methods, they have produced wonderfully
similar effects. One of the most impressive of Le Sidaner’s works is _La
Table_ in the Luxembourg. Here is the unmistakable Impressionist
technique. In the courtyard of a country house is spread a table, white
with napery, upon which stands a glowing opalescent lamp. A calm summer
moon diffuses a gentle light over the whole scene. No human figures
disturb the peaceful atmosphere, yet the sentiment of their presence
pervades the place. The painting is a little masterpiece of its kind.
The first canvas exhibited at the Champs-Élysées in 1887 was entitled
_After Church_. Since that time he has exhibited year after year, the
subjects of his pictures being well explained by their French titles:
_La Promenade des Orphelines_, _Communion in Extremis_, _Benediction de
la Mer_ (1891), _Jeune fille Hollandaise_ (1892), _L’autel des
Orphelines_ (1893), _Départ de Tobie_ (1894), _Les Promis_, and _Les
Vieilles_ (1895). In 1900 he exhibited a notable collection of pictures
of Bruges.
Le Sidaner paints a world of dreams. No better description of his work
can be found than in the words of Moore:
One of those passing rainbow dreams,
Half light, half shade, which fancy’s beams
Paint on the fleeting mists that roll,
In trance or slumber, round the soul.
English readers and artists have hardly yet made the acquaintance of
Besnard. To continental art-lovers he has long been known as the
strongest and most audacious of the young men in the movement, and is
thoroughly Impressionist in his ideas and methods. Few living artists
have had the good fortune to be so much discussed as M. Besnard. Each
Salon brings its chorus of admiration, its storm of disapprobation. The
height of the argument was reached a few years ago, when, at the New
Salon, the artist exhibited his _Ponies worried by Flies_. A startling
piece of colour, it created a strong impression upon those who saw it.
At that moment the existence of the violet tints in nature, which had
been so beautifully demonstrated by Monet in his series of _Les
Cathédrales_ and by Sisley in his charming river studies, was much under
discussion in the studios. In some of the works of Monet and Sisley the
whole picture is saturated in a glow of violet, which is frequently to
be found in nature, particularly in northern France. Those who had not
seen this natural effect disbelieved in its existence and charged the
artists with painting “de chic.” Those who had seen it and essayed the
difficult task of reproducing it upon canvas, loudly proclaimed its
truths. Then came the _Ponies worried by Flies_. Besnard had heard of
the heated discussion raging round the violet tints, and, having
observed the truth of the effect, determined to demonstrate it in paint.
Never had been seen in any Salon such a blaze of colour as this. The
composition seemed to be but a peg upon which to hang a sermon in
technique. Violet, violent in colour, pure hot impasto as shadow,
juxtaposed directly to its natural complement of light in the shape of
orange and citron colours, brilliantly loud and unadulterated. A
sensation was created, and disbelief in the existence of violet tints in
nature for ever silenced. M. Besnard has followed this success with many
other surprising themes, for it is his pleasure to amaze. He seeks
incessantly the new and incongruous.
[Illustration:
THE QUAY AT VEERE · EMILE CLAUS
]
[Illustration:
THE BARRIER · EMILE CLAUS
]
Besnard’s talent has been, and continues to be, publicly recognised. The
municipality of Paris yearly expends large sums of money in securing the
best available skill for decorating the public buildings in its charge.
In this laudable custom it is followed by every town of any importance
throughout the country. Lavishly patronised by the Government, the
municipalities, wealthy private collectors, and the sentiment of the
people generally, artists thrive in France and multiply. In whatever
respect—if any—in which France may be found lagging behind the nations,
in Art she must by the very reason of things remain supreme, for Art is
a part of her daily life. Besnard has been lucky with his commissions.
He was called upon to assist in the decoration of the magnificent Hôtel
de Ville of Paris, in the Town Hall of the First Arrondissement, in the
lecture hall of the Sorbonne, and with the frescoes in the School of
Pharmacy. In all these decorations one finds colour and composition as
original as bizarre, harmonious yet forcible. All students of modern
painting should not fail to see these works, the most striking in
execution of the last few years. The artist’s atelier is also always
open to connoisseurs, and it will be found to be crowded with sketches
and pictures in progress, each one unmistakably the handiwork of a
master craftsman.
[Illustration:
AN ALLEY · HENRI LE SIDANER
]
[Illustration:
THE TABLE · HENRI LE SIDANER
]
Five of Besnard’s canvases have been bought by the Government, and all
are now to be found in the Luxembourg, an honour few artists can boast
of. A list is given for reference. The first of the series is a portrait
of the artist, the others being entitled _Femme qui se chauffe_, _La
Morte_, _Port d’Alger au Crépuscule_, and _Entre deux Rayons_. The
second and third are excellent examples of a branch of art in which
Besnard is supreme. His nudes and portraits are wonderfully fine in
drawing, and bewitching in colour. They will form his greatest claim to
future immortality.
Besnard is a particularly sympathetic lover of horses, and no one can
more naturally reproduce them in paint than he. His chief recreation is
driving, and he is often to be seen “tooling” along the roads of the
Bois de Boulogne and other suburbs of Paris. There is little to add
personally about Albert Paul Besnard. He was born in Paris, married
Mdlle. Dubray, a sculptor of much talent, and resides in the Rue
Guillaume Tell. His career has been a continued series of success upon
success, and at the present moment he is one of the shining stars of
contemporary art in France.
Allied to the later phase of the Impressionist movement, although not
actually identified with the group of artists known as the typical
Impressionists, is Didier-Pouget. His habitual manner of regarding
Nature, his pure and cheerful colours, and his natural temperament,
include him in this survey of workers in “la peinture claire.” He has a
special gift of composition, “mise en plan,” as the French say, a strong
feeling for balance and form. He is at his best when depicting morning
and sunset effects. His scenes of heather bathed in sunshine or
glistening with the dew of an autumnal sunrise are rendered with an
exceptional verisimilitude, strength, and truth.
Didier-Pouget was born at Toulouse in 1864, the son of the editor of one
of the local journals. His father, a great lover of Nature, gave the boy
every encouragement in his ambition to become an artist. It was the
custom of father and son to take long country walks, and the elder would
point out natural beauties and discuss the methods of their pictorial
representation, relating at the same time biographical details of the
great artists, and in every way endeavouring to train the child and
sustain his ideals. After Didier-Pouget had passed through a plain
schooling, professors were engaged, notably MM. Auguin and Baudit. For
the latter (a local artist of genius, who, had he forsaken the quieter
life of the provinces for the glare of Parisian publicity, should have
attained to the highest honours an artist can reach) his old pupil has
still much admiration. Then Didier-Pouget passed into the studio of
Lalanne, the celebrated etcher and illustrator. Under these influences
many profitable years were spent, the seed-time of a most fruitful
career.
Locally the youth was regarded as a prodigy of talent, and great things
were expected of him. Pictures were exhibited in the provinces which
attracted much appreciation, and found many purchasers. Thus encouraged,
the artist sought a wider audience, and went to Paris. It was a wise
step, and Fortune smiled on him from the first. From 1886 he has
exhibited year by year at the Salon, each fresh season showing a marked
advance in his art, bringing to the world of Paris new and delightful
colour-schemes and vivid compositions.
Didier-Pouget achieved his “Mention Honorable” in 1890, won the
“Concours Troyon” the following year, and was awarded the gold medal at
the Salon in 1896 upon the recommendation of Gérôme, hitherto a strong
opponent to the new style. He is now a Chevalier of the Legion of
Honour, his medals, diplomas, and awards from foreign exhibitions and
Governments being almost innumerable. Such a measure of success is
rarely achieved nowadays by a man under forty in the arduous profession
of art. The State and the municipality of Paris are amongst his most
regular patrons. Besides the pictures reserved for Paris, he is
represented in the museums of Lyons, Macon, Toulouse, Tunis, the Embassy
at St. Petersburg, the galleries of Boston, U.S.A., and Leipsic, and the
private collections of the Kings of Italy and Greece.
[Illustration:
A STUDY · ALBERT BESNARD
]
[Illustration:
THE DEATH-BED · ALBERT BESNARD
]
Personally Didier-Pouget is more Spanish than French. Of medium height,
tanned complexion, black hair, dark eyes which tell unmistakably of the
artist, very reserved in manner, and modest to a degree—these are his
characteristics. He leads a solitary life in the Boulevard de Clichy. In
his large studio will probably be found the canvas he is working upon,
about ten feet by six, his favourite size. Innumerable studies are
scattered around, rapid sketches of form and colour, line-drawings,
careful black-and-white work full of detail, in fact every trifle which
will aid him in completing the whole.
[Illustration:
MORNING MISTS IN THE VALLEY OF THE CREUSE · DIDIER POUGET
]
[Illustration:
MORNING IN THE VALLEY OF THE CORRÈZE · DIDIER POUGET
]
If the greatest art is to represent an impression of Nature at her best,
then the work of Didier-Pouget is great. “It is truly worth while being
a painter to have produced any one of these,” writes the critic of “Le
Temps.” The artist loves best to represent Nature in her peaceful moods,
and generally seeks the solitudes of the exquisite hills, valleys, and
rivers of the Tarbes countryside, or the rich watershed of La Creuse.
Here, in the fresh early-morn, charged with dew and mist, he finds his
subjects, overlooking magnificent panoramas of river, hillsides covered
with heather, across valleys and plains from which loom out
sculpturesque masses of foliage, dark and strong against the blue mist
and distant mountain ridge. The painter prefers Nature serene and
undisturbed, and introduces but little incident.
It need hardly be said that his palette is free from all blacks, browns,
ochres, or earth-colours generally, and that his strongest “effects” are
gained by the juxtaposition of pure tints in harmonious contrast. His
favourite colour-scheme seems to be the composition of subtle
arrangements in yellow and blue, or pink and green. He contributes
regularly to the Salon, yearly producing from two to four canvases of
the size mentioned, and in these days of a limited market and unlimited
talent, he invariably finds purchasers. So fortunate has he been that
his numerous friends have but one fear for his future, that his enormous
success may hasten a tendency to stereotype his compositions.
Didier-Pouget is doubtless aware of this danger, and will probably
follow his present aims in a manner which will not disfigure or flaw a
most brilliant career.
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
THE VALLEY OF THE CREUSE · DIDIER POUGET
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
PORTRAIT OF HIS MOTHER · J. A. McN. WHISTLER
]