Although in his small drawings and details he exhibits a genuine feeling
for volume, as his Lion Dechirant un Cadavre shows, his constant
refinements of reasoning nearly always resulted in his form being
flattened out until it sometimes became commonplace. Simple balance of
line defined the limits of his ability for organisation. If he had
carried out in other pictures the compositional elements of his Pieta,
which had distinct movement, his work would have taken a higher place in
the history of art. In many canvases his seeming fullness of form is
only a richness of line--a richness, however, which had seldom been found
in painting since Masaccio. This voluptuousness in Delacroix (analogous
to Wagner's music) results from the balance of large dark and light
masses--the fullness of chiaroscuro. It is particularly appreciable in La
Justice de Trajan, La Captivite de Babylone, Repos (reminiscent of
Goya's La Maja Desnuda) and his animal compositions.
Delacroix's greatest deficiency lay in his inability to recognise the
difference between the inventive intelligence and the imaginative
instinct. Had he understood this he could have seen that his limitless
ambition was incommensurate with his comparatively small capabilities.
But his mind was not sufficiently open. In fact his viewpoint at times
was a petty one. Even his patriotism was chauvinistic. He was rabidly
anti-Teutonic and attempted to compress all the great masters of art
into the French mould. He inveighed against style in painting because
France had always been barren of it. He pretended to detest Wagner, his
musical prototype, and ignoring the latter's dramatic undulations,
criticised him severely for his methods. Beethoven was too long for
Delacroix, and Il Trovatore too complicated. However, he had a profound
admiration for Titian and Mozart; and in these preferences we have the
man's psychology. Both were great classicists, but both lacked that
genuine and magistral fullness which was the _propre_ of Beethoven and
Michelangelo.
Delacroix's thoughts were on deep things rather than deep in themselves.
Among the romanticists he was at home: all his life Byron and Walter
Scott provided him with themes. And though he had sufficient foresight
to see the hopeless trend of the painting of his day, and combated it,
he did not advance. His muse was the corpse of Venetian art. He was the
brake which put an end to the reactionary tendencies of art. His
discoveries did not reach fruition until Impressionism, twenty years
after his death.
In all his struggles destiny seemed to conspire to bring about his fame.
In 1824, the very year he brought colour into his painting, Gericault,
who gave promise of outstripping him, died. Constable and Turner came
forward with their achievements. David's influence had died out, and the
painter himself was an exile in Brussels. Fromentin tells us that
Gericault helped paint Delacroix's first canvas. Certain it is that
several of the great Englishmen painted some of his second. This, no
doubt, taught Delacroix much. In 1827 the government ordered Justinien
Composant les Institutes. All France rallied round his standard. He was
decorated by Louis Philippe; and at the age of thirty he was proclaimed
a great master by one of the leading critics of the day.
From the first he had had the backing of men respected as authorities.
But though they helped make his position tenable, they obfuscated his
true significance by their purely literary appreciations. Gautier,
Dumas, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Merimee--there was none whose temperament
was not either romantic or idealistic. They could not see that, though
he strove with them for modernity of expression, his language was
unmodern. However, Ernest Chesneau, Theophile Silvestre, Eugene Veron
and C. P. Landon have all given us side-lights on his methods, and, in
this, their expositions are of value.
But, though the men of letters did not understand him thoroughly,
several of his fellow painters recognised his eclecticism. Among them
was Thomas Couture who, in his highly instructive booklet, Methodes et
Entretiens d'Atelier, had the audacity to point out the painter's
selective habits. In the main his charge was just. Delacroix's first
canvas contains influences of both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second
picture echoes Rubens, the Venetians and Goya. Later came more prominent
evidences of Titian and Veronese. Delacroix was museum-bred. He absorbed
impressions avidly, and did his best work only after he had undergone an
intellectual experience. Had his art been truly expressive of all that
was within him, he would have been in turn--diluted, to be sure--a Giotto,
a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt. He felt the call of these men, but
instead of halting at appreciation, he tried to use them. But the old
masters, like the lords of the earth, are not amenable to high-handed
demands.
The diversity of his pursuits, which sprang from a desire to compete
with Leonardo da Vinci, smacks of the dilettante. His great mistake was
that he did not separate his capabilities from his desires. Had he done
so he would have produced small figure pieces of gem-like richness and
voluminous composition. Enthusiasm is not the proper equipment for
extended labour. It burns out too soon, and is kept alive only by quick
and brilliant results. For this reason his pictures are viewed to better
effect framed and in galleries than as mural decorations. In trying to
paint monumental subjects on extensive canvases he lost that spirit of
organisation which would have been his on more limited surfaces. One of
his finest expositions of colour, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange, in a
chapel at Saint Sulpice, is ineffective because its surface is too large
for his treatment of the theme. Delacroix in reality was a painter of
still-life in the broad meaning of the term, just as Rembrandt and
Cezanne were still-life painters. He failed in the accomplishment of his
larger programme because his vision was too restricted to permit him to
weld his details into great ensembles, as Rubens did. His ambition
outstripped his power, and strive as he might, he could not make up the
discrepancy by reasoning. Undoubtedly he sensed his own weakness, for
all his days he was in continual pursuit of system. System was to him
what law was to the old masters. Herein he was reflecting the
rationalistic philosophers of his day who substituted theory for
observation.
Were all Delacroix's paintings destroyed and his Journal and drawings
saved, his _apport_ to art would be but imperceptibly decreased. We
should still possess his linear compositions and his colour theories--his
two significant gifts to modern art. Without the liberation of
draughtsmanship expressed in the former, Courbet's struggle would have
been more difficult, and rhythm in drawing would have had to wait for
another resuscitator. Without his colour theories Impressionism would
have been postponed for half a century; Van Gogh could not have done his
best pictures; and the Pointillists, with their system of
complementaries, might never have existed. Delacroix was the first to
speak of simultaneity in painting, on which phrase has recently been
founded a school; and he sketched a dictionary of art terms and
definitions which even now, after fifty years, is far more intelligent
than present-day academic precepts.
Let us regard Delacroix as a great pioneer who fought against the
zymotic formalism of his day and by so doing opened up a new era of
expression. He is the link in the chain which holds the brilliant gems
of painting. If he himself fell short of genius, he nevertheless
fulfilled a destiny which intrinsically is in many ways more fine: he
made genius possible for those who were to come after him.
The other man who contributed vitally to modern colour theories was J.
M. W. Turner, born in 1775, one year before Constable. Like Delacroix he
had ardent and influential defenders; and the coincidence is emphasised
by the fact that between these two great colour innovators there existed
a striking thematic similarity. Ruskin took care that Turner should
taste those beneficent honours which the world generally withholds from
a painter during his lifetime. He accomplished this feat by praise which
was largely enthusiasm and by criticism which spelled partiality. But a
panegyric not founded on accuracy and authenticity defeats its own
object in the end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskin discovered
recondite points in his painting of which he, as the artist, was
ignorant. This might have been true, or it might have been sarcasm. But
whether Ruskin or Turner knew more about the latter's art, the fact
remains that the author of Modern Painters overestimated the painter for
a reason totally inapposite to aesthetic consideration:--the almost
photographic perfection of his canvases. Later, when the _spirituel_
Whistler tarnished this English didactician's reputation for
infallibility, the latter's pronunciamentos were questioned, in some
quarters ridiculed. And Turner, accepted because of Ruskin's assurances,
became suspect.
But no amount of effulgent literary criticism can obscure the authentic
accomplishments of this poor barber's son. Turner's contributions to the
colour methods of the eighties were too large, and his imitators too
bold, for the fact to be longer ignored. In his Ulysses Deriding
Polyphemus, The Fighting Temeraire and especially in Rain, Steam and
Speed, he had begun to divide the surfaces of his objects into minute
_touches_ of different colours--not, perhaps, for the purpose of
heightening the emotional qualities of the paintings as a whole, but for
the primitive reason that the device gave accuracy to them as
representations of nature. These pictures Monet and Pissarro studied
closely during the Franco-Prussian War, and there is no doubt that the
result of this study determined the direction taken by the
Impressionists. Turner's earlier pictures had been too sombre to meet
the demand for brilliancy in that first great modern school, and the
canvases in which his vision of sunlight began to take form had not yet
been painted. These later pictures, with their light tonality and their
full use of misty blue and gold, had a further influence on the
Impressionists' conception of colour.
When Monet and Pissarro went to London in 1871 they had been habituated
to the use of broad flat tones, and were astonished at Turner's
extraordinary snow and ice effects which were obtained by juxtaposing
little spots of diverse colour and by the gradating of tones. On their
return to France they both made use of this striking artifice, and
developed it, in conjunction with Delacroix's theories, into what later
an unknown humorist of the _Charivari_ named Impressionism. This process
was given further impetus by another Frenchman, Jongkind, called the
European Hiroshige. There is more than a superficial analogy between
Jongkind and Turner; and the Impressionists, first under the influence
of Corot and Courbet, found the effects they sought by using the purity
of Turner with the _facture_ of Jongkind. It was thus they were brought
back to the theories of Delacroix which they had partially abandoned.
This return had a profound _raison d'etre_, for between the last phase
of Delacroix and the later sketches of Turner there is a similarity
which was apparent even to their contemporaries. But though the
resemblance was as pronounced as that between Turner and the
Impressionists, the eulogists of that movement chose to ignore and, in
some cases, to deny it.
This new method of using colour did not constitute the only debt the
Impressionists owed Turner. They also found in him an added inspiration
toward freedom of arrangement and unconventionality of design. The
landscape painters before Turner's day conceived their out-of-door
pictures in more or less definite moulds. A tree in one man's canvas,
being an idealistic conception, was difficult of differentiation from a
tree in another's. All their pictures were permeated by the same motif.
But Turner, along with Constable and Bonington, began putting character
into landscapes. As a consequence their pictures exuded a new freedom of
arrangement.
To appreciate Turner fully we must overlook his astonishing ability for
transcription--a heritage from his architectural days--and consider him as
a man who loved nature so ardently that it was impossible for him to
approach it intellectually. His sketches, both in water-colour and oil,
were, unlike those of the Impressionists, rarely done in the open. He
conceived them in pencil, wrote upon his clouds, trees and stones the
colours he saw in them, and later, in the solitude of his studio,
"worked them up." Had the Impressionists, after their frenzied _seances_
before models, taken their canvases home, organised and modified them,
they would no doubt have produced greater net results artistically.
Organisation, in its finest sense, comes only through contemplation and
reflection; and while Turner did not possess the genius for rhythm in
any of its manifestations, he nevertheless realised that mere truth does
not make a picture. The Sun of Venice Going to Sea is as excellent as
anything Monet or Sisley has ever done. In Turner there is a feeling
for the grandiose such as few moderns possess. Did this gift come from
Claude whom he delighted in imitating? Even Constable spoke of a Turner
canvas as the most complete work of genius he ever saw. But this was the
_beau geste_ of a contemporary who wished to appear broad-minded. The
truth lay further down the slope. Turner undoubtedly showed genius in
his competent copying of even the most insignificant of nature's
accidents. The composition of The Devil's Bridge is the foundation on
which are built many of Monet's pictures; and the Rain, Steam and Speed
canvas can hang beside La Gare St. Lazare without loss to either.
Delacroix re-established an Italian mode of expression and tried to make
of it a modern language. Turner, in a new language, spoke of ancient
things. But Courbet ignored all method, and withal became the father of
latter-day art. In him was the embryo of that distinctly modern spirit
which demands visible proof before believing. Like William of Orange, he
arose triumphant above every opposition. His art stemmed temperamentally
from the Dutch and Spaniards, for while he imitated no one, he was
unconsciously influenced by many. So complete was his assimilation of
great men that in his expression they all had a place. He himself says
that he studied antiquity as a swimmer crosses a river. The academicians
were drowned there. So was Delacroix. Courbet learned in his passage
that in adaptation is the confession of sterility. But though he avoided
paraphrasing and copying the old masters, we find throughout his life
recurring traces of Van Dyke, Zurbaran, Delacroix, Rembrandt, El Greco,
Gericault, Ribera, Velazquez and that little known Valencian master,
Juan de Juanes.
Courbet was considered an ignorant, vulgar and brutal peasant. But this
judgment was the outgrowth of public miscomprehension rather than of any
authentic evidence in the man himself. Courbet was the epitome of that
unstudied naturalism which is antipodal to the hypocrisies of society.
France, during his day, was governed by the dictates of theatricalism.
Its ideals were those of Renaissance Italy, and its artistic attitude
reflected a refinement of vision approaching decadence. Courbet's
deportmental crudities alone were a source of antagonism, and when to
these were added scorn and indifference the hostility against him became
violent. But temperamentally he was aristocratic. The peasant mind is
fundamentally traditional: Courbet was violently revolutionary. Nor did
he lack fineness of mind. His early portraits embodied the subtleties of
modelling in Rembrandt as well as the extraordinary niceties of
characterisation in El Greco. The compositions of his pictures alone
belie any coarseness of fibre in the man. They are founded on a weakened
S which, since the decay of Byzantine art, had done valiant service for
the most exalted painters such as Rubens and Tintoretto. This
compositional figure appears, either exact or varied, in his Le Combat
de Cerfs, Le Retour de la Conference, Chien et Lievres, and
L'Enterrement a Ornans.
Courbet's reputation for vulgarity was derived more from his lack of
facile fluency, so common in the French tradition, than from a basic
understanding of the structural synthesis of his work. And this
misconception of him was aggravated by his being the first painter
unwilling to accept praise as the public chose to dole it out. He was a
self-advertiser, and such men as George Bernard Shaw are but echoes of
his methods. He pushed his way to the front unceasingly, and continually
theorised as a means of silencing his adversaries. He regarded all
public demonstration as _blague_, and later in life carried this
attitude into politics. Whistler, his pupil, was quick to sense the
advantage of his teacher's methods; and it is the irony of fate that
this ineffectual American was believed and respected while Courbet was
abused and ridiculed and forced to die in exile. He had carried his
assaults too far. "To be not only a painter but a man," he wrote at one
time. "To create a living art--this is my aim." It is a masterly
statement of his real ambitions. He was intensely interested in life, as
were Rubens and Cellini. "You want me to paint a goddess?" he exclaimed.
"Show me one!" In this _mot_ he summed up the very spirit of modern
times. It expressed the new realism found in such widely separated men
as Dostoievsky, Zola, George Moore, Conrad, Andreiev, Theodore Dreiser,
Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Korngold, Sibelius, Manet,
Renoir, Sorolla and Zorn.
It is strange how Courbet, so far removed from the French temperament,
should, at the crucial period of his life, have reverted to a French
gesture by refusing the cross of the Legion of Honor. But in that famous
letter of rejection, written in a cafe and mailed with a grandiloquent
toss in the presence of Fantin-Latour, he summed up aptly the man of
genius who, though avid for honour, throws it away at the moment of
attainment. Not even Napoleon was more concerned with the thoughts of
posterity than Courbet, and some of the artist's letters are not
dissimilar in tone to the bombastic _manifestos_ of certain ultra-modern
schools. At the time of his first exhibition he wrote to Bruyas: "I
stupefy the entire world. I am triumphant not only over the moderns but
the ancients as well. Here is the Louvre gallery. The Champs Elysees
does not exist, nor the Luxembourg. There is no more Champs de Mars. I
have thrown consternation into the world of art." This spirit of
monumental self-confidence, so startling to a generation whose taste was
measured by the decadent poetry of Beaudelaire, brought frantic sarcasm
hurtling about his head. This troubled Courbet little. He valued
friendships only in so far as they were useful. It was Meissonier who
said in a Paris _salon_, when standing before the famous Femme de Munich
which Courbet had painted in a few hours for Baron Remberg: "It is no
longer a question of art, but of dignity. From now on Courbet must be as
one dead to us."
Charles Beaudelaire, who helped fight the battle for Wagner, Poe,
Delacroix, Manet and Monet, tentatively praised him at first, but later
allied himself with the public and became his bitterest assailant. It
was not surprising. A poet so superficial as to call Delacroix "a
haunted lake of blood" could not be expected to appreciate the _terre a
terre_ qualities of this master of Ornans. And Courbet was so little
French that he was incomprehensible to his national contemporaries. He
disclaimed all tradition, swore he had no forerunners, and struck
blindly into the unknown. For a man without genius this would have been
fatal, but, after all, only a genius would attempt such things.
Courbet was disgusted with the allegory and romance of his time. His
nature cried aloud for a pose that was natural, for a landscape that
resembled the out-of-doors, for objects in which life was discernible.
Consequently the critics and painters of his day put him aside either
indifferently or insolently. They could not understand a work of art
which did not delineate a literary episode or in which the postures were
not taken direct from the theatre. Courbet needed no literature to paint
great pictures. He went straight to nature, and his compositions grew
out of his sheer enjoyment in visible objects, whether they were
dramatic or not. To the public his pictures appeared ugly, even
repellent. Here was a man who painted a funeral realistically--_Dieu m'en
garde!_ With only the example of canvases filled with familiar gods and
goddesses and melting nudes in golden pink, he dared set forth, in a
sacred theme, peasants' faces and peasants' shoes, cloudy skies, and
holes in the brown earth. To those who had come to look upon art as
something ethereal and evanescent, L'Enterrement a Ornans was more than
blasphemy. It was this picture, falling like a bomb into the midst of
the vagaries of his time, that sounded the death knell of romanticism.
It was the last spade of earth on the graves of the classicists. The
mere picture was sensation enough, but Courbet was not content to let
the matter rest there. At the time of his exhibition in 1855, held in a
barrack of his own building on the Rond Point de l'Alma, he wrote a
defensive and provocative preface to his catalogue. In it he proclaimed
himself not only the first realist, but realism itself.
[Illustration: L'ENTERREMENT A ORNANS by COURBET]
Gericault's Radeau de la Meduse and Delacroix's Dante et Virgile aux
Enfers were acceptable to the public, the one because of its dramatic
interest, the other because of its literature. But L'Enterrement a
Ornans entirely lacked the popular qualities of these two other
pictures. It was full of rugged and hardy precision. Its insolent
ugliness of subject-matter and its implied indifference to all
tradition, seemed to express the quintessence of artistic degradation
and sordidness. At first view the picture appears to have been inspired
by El Greco's Obsequies of the Count of Orgaz, but it is more likely
that these peasants of Ornans, each a notable of the town, with their
indifferent expressions and awkward gestures, were attributable to The
Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of Ribera and La Folle of Gericault,
rather than to the master of Toledo. But that the Spanish helped paint
it is evident: some parts of the landscape are taken bodily from their
canvases. Meier-Graefe states that this funeral picture, like most of
the representative pictures of the nineteenth century, is not
representative of the artist himself. But did Meier-Graefe understand
more profoundly the synthesis of composition found in individual
painters, he would have seen that here was the famous S composition
which was used throughout the painter's life. Instead of being set on
end, as was the practice of the Italians, it is used laterally and
extends from left to right in depth.
In colour also this picture is representative of Courbet, for it shows
his limitations in that medium. Delacroix brought a new palette to
painting, but could not use it. Courbet contented himself with a palette
as meagre as that of Caravaggio and Guercino. And yet, though colour has
come latterly to mean tactile form in its highest sense, this black
canvas, when placed beside either an Ingres, a David, a Delacroix or a
Gerard, appears less flat and inconsequential than the latter. The form
is even suggestive of Rembrandt, Giotto, Cezanne and Renoir.