the strict literal truth as he saw it, marks all the work of
Bastien-Lepage. As far as it was possible for an artist nowadays, he
appears to have been uninfluenced by the old masters. The only lesson
he seems to have learnt from them was that nature, which sufficed for
them, should suffice for him also. It is this attitude of mind which
brings him into kinship with the early painters, and which led to his
being styled “the primitive.” He did not set out to form his art on
the methods of the older painters, but going as they did, direct to
nature, he resolutely put on one side (as far as was possible to one
familiar with them) the accepted pictorial artifices. He seems to have
set himself the task of going over the ground from the beginning;
and the fact that his uncompromising and unconventional presentment
of his subjects should be expressed by means of a most highly
accomplished, very modern, and very elegant technique, was one of the
things which, while it greatly charmed, at the same time puzzled and
surprised people. It was so different from what had been seen, or might
reasonably have been expected; and one can understand some critics
feeling that a man so thoroughly master of his art, so consummate a
painter, must be wilfully affected in the treatment of his subjects,
his simple acceptance of nature appearing to them as a pose. But it
was not long before he was understood; and one has only to read the
very interesting memoir of M. Theuriet to see how mistaken this view
was, and how simply and naturally his art developed from his early
life and associations. It is seldom indeed that one finds an artist so
completely adjusted to his surroundings――so much so that he is able to
go back for his mature inspiration not only to his first impressions,
but to the very scenes and, in some cases no doubt, the individuals who
awakened them. As a rule an artist nowadays is led in many directions
before he finds himself. Bastien-Lepage had his doubts and hesitations,
of course, but they were soon over, and almost from the start he seems
to have decided on his path.
The advantage of this to him in his work must have been enormous,
as any one who has painted in the country will know; for villages
contain no surplus population――every one has his work to do; and
the peasant is slow to understand, and distrustful of all that lies
outside his own experience: so that it is difficult, and in many cases
impossible, for an artist to get models in a village. But one can
imagine Lepage to have been friends with all his models, and that his
pictures excited as lively an interest (though, of course, on different
grounds) in Damvillers as in Paris; and it was, I think, due to some
extent to this, as well as to his own untiring energy, that he was
enabled to complete so much. As far as I am aware, he was unique among
contemporary artists in being so happily circumstanced; and it is
evidence of the simple sincerity of the man that he found his ideal in
the ordinary realities of his own experience: feeling, no doubt, that
beauty exists everywhere waiting for him who has eyes to see.
It has been frequently said of Bastien-Lepage that he had no feeling
for beauty――or, at any rate, that he was indifferent to it; but as it
is impossible to arrive at any satisfactory definition of beauty, this
point cannot be discussed. Taking the word, however, in its obvious
and generally accepted meaning, that of personal beauty, it seems to
me that there is no fair ground for the charge; for such works as the
“First Communion,” the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, and “Joan of Arc,”
all show a most refined and delicate appreciation of personal beauty,
and should surely have led his critics to consider whether the man who
painted them had not very good reasons for painting people who were
not beautiful, too. For all work cannot be judged from one point of
view; we recognize that a work of art is the outcome of a personal
impression, and that the artist’s aim is to give expression to his
views; and the deeper his insight into nature, the greater the result.
And yet, curiously enough, the fact that Bastien-Lepage’s insight into
nature was exceptionally deep and wide renders it difficult to form
a clear judgment, as his work appeals equally from different points
of view. His love of beauty, for instance, seems to go hand-in-hand
with a psychological, or even pathological interest: and this equal
prominence of different tendencies is a very puzzling element in his
work. We expect an artist to give us a strongly personal view; but
here is one who gives us something very like an analysis, and whose
personal view it is impossible to define――and the premature ending of
his career leaves it now for ever doubtful which was the strongest bias
of his mind. It seems to me that his sympathies were so wide as to try
and include everything, and that he has helped to widen the bounds of
beauty, by showing its limitless possibilities. The words of Blake, “To
see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” suggest,
I think, his general feeling towards nature.
In spite of the wide range of his work and the extraordinary
versatility of his execution, he kept, as a rule, within certain
limitations of treatment. He did not care for the strong opposition of
light and shadow, and he seems almost to have avoided those aspects of
nature which depend for their beauty on the changes and contrasts of
atmosphere and light. All that side of nature which depends on memory
for its realization was left almost untouched by him, and yet it is
idle to suppose that so richly gifted a man could not have been keenly
sensible to all nature’s beauty; but I think he found himself hedged
in by the conditions necessary to the realization of the qualities he
sought. For in painting a large figure-picture in the open air, the
painter must almost of necessity limit himself to the effect of grey
open daylight. This he realized splendidly: at the same time it may be
said that he sought elaboration of detail perhaps at the expense of
effect, approaching nature at times too much from the point of view of
still-life. This is not felt in his small pictures, in which the point
of view is so close that the detail and general effect can be seen at
the same time; but in his large works much that is charming in the
highest degree when examined in detail, fails to carry its full value
to the eye at a distance necessary to take in the whole work. This
was the case with “Joan of Arc” in the Paris Exhibition of two years
ago; and it was instructive to compare this picture with Courbet’s
“Stone-breakers,” which hung near it on the same wall. Courbet had
generalized as much as possible――everything was cleared away but the
essentials; and at a little distance Courbet showed in full power and
completeness, while the delicate and beautiful work in “Joan of Arc”
was lost, and the picture flat and unintelligible in comparison. No
doubt Bastien-Lepage worked for truth of impression and of detail too,
but it is apparently impossible to get both; and this seems to show
that the building-up or combining a number of facts, each of which may
be true of itself and to the others, does not in its sum total give
the general impression of truth. It is but a number of isolated truths.
Bastien-Lepage has carried his endeavour in this direction farther than
any of his predecessors――in fact it may be said that he has carried
literal representation to its extreme limit: so much so as to leave
clearly discernible to us the question which was doubtless before him,
but which has at any rate developed itself from his work, whether it
is possible to attain literal truth without leaving on one side much
of that which is most beautiful in nature? And further, the question
arises, whether literal truth is the highest truth. For realism, as an
end in art, leads nowhere; it is an _impasse_. Surely it is but the
means to whatever the artist has it in him to express.
I feel convinced that realism was not the end with Bastien-Lepage. I
believe that his contribution to art, great as it was, and covering as
it does an amount of work which might well represent a whole life’s
work instead of the work of a few short years, was but the promise of
his full power, and that, had he lived, his work would have shown a
wider range of nature than that of any other artist, except perhaps
Rembrandt. But it was not to be.
He gave his best, and the world is richer for his work; his name will
not die.
“Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave.”
GEORGE CLAUSEN.
MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.
[Illustration: THE LITTLE SWEEP.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.
Much has been written about Jean François Millet, and mostly from two
points of view. The picturesque surroundings of the plain of Barbizon
and the peasant’s blouse have tempted the sentimental biographer to
dwell on the personal note of poverty, which we now know was not the
dominant one in Millet’s life. The picturesque writer has amplified,
with more or less intelligence, reflections suggested by the subjects
of his pictures. In all this, the painter’s point of view, which is,
after all, the only one that matters, has, so far as its expression in
print is concerned, been overlooked and omitted.
The important fact about Millet is not that he struggled with poverty,
or that he expressed on canvas the dignity of labour, but that he was
a great artist. As corollaries, he was a great draughtsman and a great
colourist. He was gifted with the comprehension in its entirety of the
import of any scene in nature which he wished to render. An unerring
analysis enabled him to select what were the vital constituents of
such a scene, and exquisite perceptions, trained by incessant labour,
to render them in fitting terms in accordance with the tradition which
governs the use of each material.
It may seem that the process here summarized is after all only that
which governs all art production, and that the work of the second-rate
and the ordinary differs only from that of the master in the degree of
capacity exercised. But this is not so. It differs totally in kind.
The conception, conscious or unconscious, of the nature and aim of art
is in the two cases different, and, as a consequence, the practice is
different.
It would be affectation to ignore that, for good or for evil, Paris is
the art-centre of European painting, and that the most serious training
in drawing and painting that is procurable on European lines is
procurable in Paris. I should therefore consider it a service of great
utility to serious art if it were possible to make clear the reasons
for my conviction that the tendency of the mass of exhibition painting
in France, and, by reflection, in England, has been in an inartistic
direction, and has led inevitably to the sterile ideal of the
instantaneous camera. And, on the other hand, that the narrow stream of
purely artistic painting, that has trickled its more sequestered course
parallel with the broad flood of exhibition work, owes its vitality to
a profound and convinced reverence for tradition. For the illustration
of that tradition I can find no more convenient source than the work of
Jean François Millet, and for a typical monument of its disregard, the
more fair to cite in that it is respectable in achievement, the work
of Bastien-Lepage affords me a timely and perhaps the most appropriate
example possible.
What, then, is the main difference? How did Millet work, and with what
objects? How did Lepage work, and what is it he strove to attain?
To begin with, Millet, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, had seen
his picture happen somewhere in nature. Its treatment generally
involved complex difficulties of suggestion of movement, or at least
of energy, to say nothing of those created by the variety of lighting
and atmospheric effect; the management of sunlight, of twilight, of
the lighting of interiors. All these elements he was enabled, by
means of a highly-trained artistic memory, to retain and render in
the summary method which we call inspiration, and which has nothing
in common with the piecemeal and futile copying of nature of a later
school. Dealing with materials in their essential nature living and
fleeting, his execution was in the main separated from his observation.
His observation was thus uninterrupted by the exigencies of execution,
and his execution untrammelled by the fortuitous inconveniences
incident on the moment of observation, and undisturbed, moreover, by
the kaleidoscopic shifting of the pictorial elements which bewilder
and mislead the mere _plein-airiste_. He did not say to the woman at
the washtub, “Do as if you were washing, and stay like that for me
for four or five hours a day, while I paint a picture from you.” Or
to the reaper, “Stay like that with the scythe drawn back, pretending
to reap.” “_La nature ne pose pas_”――to quote his own words. He knew
that if figures in movement were to be painted so as to be convincing,
it must be by a process of cumulative observation. This truth one of
the greatest heirs of the great school of 1830 has not been slow to
understand, and it is to its further and more exquisite development
that we owe the profoundly learned and beautiful work of Degas. His
field of observation is shifted from the life of the village and
the labour of the plains, to the sordid toil of the greenroom and
the hectic mysteries of stage illumination; but the artistic problem
remains the same, and its solution is worked out on the same lines.
Millet observed and observed again, making little in the way of studies
on the spot, a note sometimes of movement on a cigarette-paper. And
when he held his picture he knew it, and the execution was the singing
of a song learned by heart, and not the painful performance in public
of a meritorious feat of sight-reading. The result of this was that his
work has style――style which is at the same time in the best traditions
and strictly personal. No one has been more imitated than Millet, and
no one is more inimitable.
Holding in the hollow of his hand the secrets of light and life and
movement, the secrets of form and colour, learnt from the visible
world, he was equipped, like the great masters of old, for the
treatment of purely fanciful themes; and, when he painted a reluctant
nymph being dragged through the woods by a turbulent crowd of cupids,
he was as much at home as when he rendered the recurring monotone of
the peasant’s daily labours. My quarrel with the gentlemen who escape
from the laws of anatomy and perspective by painting full-length
portraits of souls, and family groups of abstractions, is, not that
they paint these things, but that they have not first learnt something
about the laws which govern the incidence of light on concrete bodies.
It might be well if they would discover whether they can paint their
brother, whom they have seen, before they elect to flounder perennially
in Olympus.
Let it also be noted here that the work of Jean François Millet was,
with scarcely an exception, free from a preoccupation with the walls of
an exhibition. The scale of his pictures and their key were dictated by
the artistic requirements of the subject, and not by the necessities or
allurements of what I may call for brevity, competitive painting. It
was never a question with him of the preparation within twelve months
of an annual poster, which was to occupy so much linespace, and send
the betting on him up or down as the case might be.
What, on the other hand, were the essential ideas of Bastien-Lepage’s
work? To begin with, he was a painter of exhibition pictures, of what
are called in Paris _machins_. He was an inveterate _salonnier_,
with the ideals and the limitations of the typical uncultured Paris
art-student, the _fort_ of his _atelier_. _Faire vrai_ is the sum
and aim of his intention. Realists he and his like have been jauntily
labelled by the hasty journalist. But the truth in their work is truth
of unessentials, and their elaborate and unlovely realities serve only
to cover themes that are profoundly unreal.
To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive of
truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take
a large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture
in hourly _tête-à-tête_ with nature. This practice at once restricts
the limits of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too
quickly. You find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never
working in any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is
found to be almost impossible. You find that you had better confine
your compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the
photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better
be in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of
a model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of
a north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of
a Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own
natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is
he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it.
That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again.
The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the sack, and
never a breath of air circulates around that painful rendering in the
flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real peasant. What
are the truths you have gained, a handful of tiresome little facts,
compared to the truths you have lost? To life and spirit, light and air?
The tacit assumption on which the theory and practice of the so-called
realist rests, is that if photography, instead of yielding little
proofs on paper in black and white, could yield large proofs on
canvas in oils, the occupation of the painter would be gone. What
a radical misconception of the nature and function of art this is,
becomes evident when we paraphrase the same idea and apply it in the
region of letters. Few would be found to defend the proposition that
a stenographic report of events and words as they occurred would
constitute the highest literary treatment of a given scene in life. A
page of description is distinguished as literature from reporting when
the resources of language are employed with cunning and mastery to
convey, not a catalogue of facts, but the result of the observation
of these facts on an individual temperament. Its value depends on the
degree of mastery with which the language is used, and on the delicacy
and range of the writer’s personality, and in no wise on the accuracy
of the facts recorded.
Richter says somewhere that no artist can replace another, and not
even the same artist himself, at different periods of his life. One
characteristic of the work of the modern photo-realist in painting is
that almost any one of them could have painted a portion of the work of
any other without making any appreciable discord of execution apparent.
They are all equipped from the first at the studios with a _technique_
which serves them equally, once for all. It is known as _la bonne
peinture_. It differs from style in being a thing you can acquire, and
I believe it is even maintained, not only to be perfectible, but to
have been, on several occasions, perfected.
Nothing is more frequently brought home to the student of modern
painting than the truth that the work of the _salonnier_, the picture,
that is, that is born of the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears
its air of novelty and interest strictly for the season. If he meet it
again in a house, or in the holocaust of a retrospective exhibition,
its date is stamped upon it with the accuracy of a page of _Le follet_
or _Le moniteur de la mode_. And whether a picture be asserted at the
date of its exhibition as advanced, or the contrary, as daring or dull,
if it is born of the exhibition, it dies with the exhibition, and the
brood to which it gives birth hold their life on the same tenure.
It was impossible, on seeing Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc at the
Paris Exhibition of 1890, after a lapse of some years since its first
appearance, to resist the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the
heading of “_machin_.” In the composition, or in what modern critics
prefer to call the placing, there is neither grace nor strangeness. The
drawing is without profundity or novelty of observation. The colour is
uninteresting, and the execution is the usual mechanically obtrusive
square-brush-work of the Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the
leading figure is not impressive or even lucid; and the helpless
introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the rapt maid
completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a painter
with the limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and sanctified
legend with commonplace illustration. A faithful copy of so strange
and interesting a subject as Mme. Sarah Bernhardt cannot fail to be a
valuable document, but Lepage’s portrait has surely missed altogether
the delicacy of the exquisitely spiritual profile. The _format_ of the
little panel portrait of the Prince of Wales evoked in the press the
obviously invited reference to Clouet. The ready writer cannot have
looked at so much as a single pearl in the necklace of one of Clouet’s
princesses.
To judge fairly of an artist, however, we must follow him on to his own
ground. In his portrait of his grandfather, at the same exhibition,
it was quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a workmanlike and
photographic copyist of a figure in repose. It was at the same time
possible to turn from this picture straight to Manet’s _fifre_, and
to his _bon bock_, and thus to measure the gulf that separates a
meritorious workman from an inspired executant of the first rank. No
useful end can be gained by obscuring this fact, and if, in league
with the modern gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak
of Bastien-Lepage as a master, what terms are left us for Keene and
Millet, for Whistler and Degas?
WALTER SICKERT.
_Chelsea, 1891._
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
[Illustration:
In Possession of her Mother.] [Engraved by C. State.
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
(_From a Portrait by Herself._)]
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
The brilliant sunshine of a glorious October morning poured through the
tall windows of Marie Bashkirtseff’s studio on my last visit to the Rue
de Prony. This mellow light bathing her canvasses brought them out in
fullest relief, and I had never had such a favourable opportunity of
judging her work in its entirety. I was struck more than ever by the
vigour and vitality of these studies, sketches, pastels, and pictures
struck off at a white heat of mental production between the ages of
seventeen and four and twenty. Hanging above the gallery which runs
along one side of the wall were her first studies from life, which
astonished Julian so much that he pronounced them phenomenal; here were
her numerous sketches showing the sincerity of her efforts to be true
to nature; and her finished pictures full of individuality and power.
As the eye rested on these portraits where the keynote of character
had been so unmistakably struck, on these bits of city life in their
shabbier aspects, on these Paris street children with faces so
prematurely sharpened or saddened, you became at once aware that this
artist was a naturalist of the naturalists. Her chief object was to
seize life――to seize the flying impression as she happened to see
it; to render it with unflinching faithfulness to nature without any
attempt at arrangement, composition, or beauty of treatment.