Martin, on the other hand, who painted with independent touches in the
hope of obtaining flickering sunlight, and who knew his palette fully as
well as Monet, laboured mechanically. His work is more optical than
emotional. He is a realist in the same sense that Roll is a realist; but
both these men present only the husk of reality. Monet, to the contrary,
experienced and expressed nature's ecstasy. He is like a string which
vibrates to any harmony: Martin is little more than an eye. Both
finished their work in the open; and both stippled. But here the
parallelism ends, for where Monet completed the effects of the Japanese,
Martin only took light into the academies. Perhaps this is why Martin
was at once acclaimed by the public, and why Monet, during those first
dark years of struggle and poverty, was compelled to sell his canvases
for practically nothing. Duret confesses to having obtained one for
eighty francs. Martin was early accorded academic honours, and received
numerous government orders.
Monet found himself at home wherever there was light and water. His
canvases describe scenes from all over Europe. But his most famous
pictures are his two series, Les Meules and Les Nympheas. In the first,
a single haystack is set forth in a diversity of illuminations and
seasons; and the second repeats a small pond of water-lilies, in shade
and in sun, ruffled and calm. His La Cathedrale, Venice and London
series are also widely known. These represent acute observation and an
implacable inspiration to work, for they had to be finished
simultaneously. Their accomplishment was a stupendous _tour de force_.
At sunrise Monet would go forth with twenty blank canvases so that the
changes of sunlight and mist might be caught from hour to hour. They
seem infantile to us today--these imitations of the subtleties of light,
these meteorological histories of haystacks and lilies, these
atmospheric personalities of cathedrals and canals. Yet it is by just
such self-burials in data that one exhausts the aesthetic possibilities
of nature's actualities. And not until this probing to the bottom has
been accomplished does the artist possess that complete knowledge which
impels him to push forward to something newer and more vital.
Sisley was the last of the original five to adopt Impressionistic
methods. He had long had an admiration for the exploits of the more
revolutionary painters, but a comfortable income had acted as a
sedative on his ambitions. He did not feel the necessity for difficult
endeavour. But when, at the death of his father, he found himself
penniless and with a family to care for, he joined the ranks of
Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and Bazille. He had talent and an accurate
eye, and his earlier academic work, done in the sixties, served as a
practical foundation. After he had adopted the more modern technique of
Pissarro and Monet, he was prepared for the achievement of new art. If
we had no other proof that Impressionism at its inception was a shallow
craft, Sisley's immediate mastery of it would be conclusive, for his
appropriation of its means was not an aesthetic impulse but a financial
expedient. But more extensive corroboration can be found in a score of
academies where Impressionism is taught and taught conclusively.
There is no more or less actual composition in Sisley than in other of
the Impressionists. He supplied no innovations, and he differed from his
fellows only in so far as his temperament indicated variation. In Monet
and Guillaumin there is a concentration and precision which the
Englishman fell short of. His nature was less akin to these
Impressionists than to the Turner of wide and open skies, of the
softness and dreaminess of summer, of that perfect satisfaction which is
content with inaction. Sisley's very colour preference for which the
public reproached him--light lilac--indicates his penchant for prettiness
and repose. His choice of theme was invariably dictated by a poetical
and sentimental need for the intimate.
In Guillaumin we have a man who gave promise of good work but who, up to
the last, failed in its fulfilment. Indubitably talented, he never
succeeded in reaching that point where talent is only a means to an end.
But nevertheless there was in him a solidity of modelling, a real
feeling for the ponderous hardness of hills and plains. He was a friend
of Cezanne, and undoubtedly learned much from that master of form. At
first he had painted in sombre tones, but later, after meeting Cezanne
and Pissarro in the _Academie Suisse_, he adopted their lighter and more
joyous colour schemes. There is a canvas in the Caillebotte Collection
in the Luxembourg which, in its broadness of treatment and extensive
planes, suggests Gauguin both as to gamut and conception. Guillaumin was
the most masculine talent of the early Impressionist group. He cared
less for the transient views of nature than for its eternal aspect. His
colour, by its liberality of application, counts more forcibly than that
of Pissarro, Monet or Sisley. His contributions to the new idea,
however, were comparatively small. He was not an explorer, but followed
diligently in the path others had marked out. Only after he had won a
fortune in a lottery did he break away from his environment. But this
release came to him too late. His formative period of development had
passed, and his work, from that time on, did not alter in technique.
Only in his picturesque and bizarre subject-matter is noticeable any
deviation from his habitual routine.
[Illustration: PAYSAGE by GUILLAUMIN]
The individual achievements of the Impressionists, however, no matter
how competent, are of minor importance. Impressionism was a new weapon
in the hands of art's anarchists. It has come to be regarded as a
faultless faith whose devotees can do no wrong. There has been little or
no adequate literature devoted to its exposition, its causes and
influence; and the exaggeration of its attainments are as grotesque as
the calumny with which it was at first received. It was not an ultimate
and isolated movement, but a simple and wholly natural offshoot in the
evolution of new means. The artists who fathered it were, except in one
instance, men whose enthusiasm outstripped their abilities as composers.
Their greatest good lay in that they turned the thoughts of painters
toward colour, and outlined, summarily to be sure, the uses to which
this new and highly intense element might be put. They expressed just
what their desires permitted them:--nature in all its visible changes.
Those exquisite moments of full sunlight on land and water, of cloud
shadows over the hills, of the warm brilliancy of a blue sky on the
upturned faces of flowers; the stillness of summer amid the woods; the
cold serenity of snow-clad fields--all were seen and captured and
immortalised by these men. They were the greatest painters of effects
the world has ever known. They never strove to evoke the sensation of
weight in the objects they painted; and that organisation of parts,
which is a replica of the cosmos, they were too busy to attempt. Their
very deficiencies were what permitted them so complete a vision of the
only side of realism which still remained for painting to investigate.
The Impressionists did not embody concretely the teachings of their
forerunners, but used them all in the abstract. Delacroix had
sacrificed photographic truth in drawing in order to present a more
intense impression of truth. Daumier had built form as nature builds it,
colour aside. Courbet had turned painters from the poetic contemplation
of a great past to the life about them. Manet had made images of
whatever was at hand for the pure love of painting. The Impressionists
turned to the things nearest them, paid scant heed to scholastic
drawing, translated Daumier's doctrine of form into light, and like
Manet painted for the joy of the work. As experimenters they were
valuable; but their pictures, to those unsentimental persons whose
appreciations of art are wholly aesthetic, mean little more than records
of how a cabbage patch appears at sunrise, a lily pond at midday, or a
country lane at twilight. The Impressionists did not amalgamate and
express the dreams of their forerunners. They were one of those
transitional generations whose vitality is spent in a stupendous
endeavour to conceive before the time is ripe. The need for a great
birth had not yet made itself felt; for only when the period of embryo
is complete can great art be born. Renoir brought forth that issue; and
with him evolution seems to halt a moment before plunging onward. The
meagre aesthetics of the early Impressionists could not lead to the
highest artistic results. Indeed, their animating aims had to be
abandoned before Renoir could attain to true significance.
V
AUGUSTE RENOIR
The entire past progress of painting is condensed and expressed in each
of its great men. The creation of new art cannot be accomplished
overnight, any more than that of a new organism; it must stem from first
impulses and be formed on the differentiations of the past. Those men
who declare themselves primitives and seek to acquire the eyes and minds
of the Phoenicians or Aztecs are as conscious of their inability to
create new art forms as are those visionaries who live in a mythical
future and try to prophesy the forms that are to come. No man is born
too soon or too late. There are those who strive toward classic
intellectual ideals, toward Utopian economic states, toward new orders
of society: but such reformers are only the malcontents. The truly great
and practical men quickly assimilate the impulses of their own epochs
and push the frontiers of the mind's possibilities further into the
unknown. These latter comprise the maligned vanguard of heroic thinkers
who fight the battles for their weaker followers. Often, however, these
followers rise to great heights, for in the world of endeavour two
conspicuous types exist--the man who experiments and the man who
achieves. Delacroix, Manet and the Impressionists belong to the first;
Courbet and Renoir are of the second.
In Renoir's life story, as in that of Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt, we
see in miniature the evolution of all the painting that preceded him--the
bitter struggles with the chimeras of convention, and each slow change
that came over drawing, style, colour and composition. In the end, after
a life full of near defeats, strife, yearning and anxiety, we behold the
great man emerge triumphantly from his broken fetters and take his place
beside the masters of the past. Some painters have more arduous fights
than others, for the odds against them are greater. Rubens and Delacroix
seemed the pampered favourites of a high destiny: Courbet and Renoir had
to cleave and chisel each step of the way through the adamant of public
suspicion. The world appears incapable of recognising either an
intensification or a modification of an old and accepted formula. Hence
Courtois and Puget were preferred to Delacroix; Ribera and Rembrandt to
Courbet; the Avignon painters to Manet; Corot, Diaz and Rousseau to the
Impressionists; and Rubens and Ingres to Renoir. In all of these
parallelisms, the latter had their roots in the former. They were
complications and variations of their forerunners--dissimilar only in
method and manner.
Renoir began to paint at an early age. The poverty of his family
necessitated him to make his own living, and at the age of thirteen he
was in a factory painting porcelains. Five years later he applied for
work at a place given over to the decoration of transparent screens.
Here his unusual facility permitted him to paint ten times as fast as
his fellow decorators, and since he was paid by the piece, he soon saved
enough money to give himself an education in the art which had now
become with him a conscious instinct--painting. From his earliest youth
he had evinced a discontent with the slow-moving minds about him, and it
was natural that he should first look upon art through the eyes of his
great revolutionary contemporary, Courbet. His earliest work, of which
Le Cabaret de la Mere Anthony and Diane Chasseresse are the best-known
examples, reflected Courbet in both palette and conception. Even later,
when Manet claimed him, he clung to his first influence. For while his
work now reached out toward the substance of light to be found in La
Musique aux Tuileries, it revealed at the same time all the form of the
Ornans master. Le Menage Sisley and Lise strikingly combine these two
early influences.
Since humanity has emerged from the darkness of unconsciousness and the
individual from the darkness of the womb, it is consistent with nature
that in a man's creative development--the route of which lies between
dark and dark--the use of black should be his first instinct. Renoir,
like all painters of great promise, started with this negation of
colour. But wherein his intellectual distinction manifested itself was
his innate proclivity for the rhythm of surface lines which he alone of
all his contemporaries recognised in Courbet. In Lise, painted in 1867,
a year after his Diane Chasseresse, both of these early penchants are
evident. Black is the keynote of his sunlight; and while in conception
the canvas is akin to Manet, it is a Manet made dexterous and masterly.
It contains a balance and a linear rhythm of which that painter was
ignorant. Lise is one of the few Renoirs into which the influence of
Velazquez and Goya can be imagined. Even in its pyramidal form, which
when used by most painters becomes a static figure, there is a movement
at its apex which opens into a shape like a lily. This is brought about
by the tilt of the sunshade and the continuation of the line of the sash
outward in the tree trunk. By just such obvious and simple signs as
these in early works, can we foretell an artist's later developments.
The next year, 1868, Renoir's work is more net, more able in its
balance, more sure in its effect. Le Menage Sisley is one of his finest
early examples of how this rhythmic continuity of line obsesses a mind
avid for form, colour, vitality. At first glance we see only an
irregular pyramid formed by the outline of the two figures; but after a
minute's study we notice that on the right the line of the skirt curves
gracefully inward to the waist-line, sweeps up to the woman's neck, then
begins an outward flexure, and finally disperses itself amid the tree's
slanting branches in the right-hand upper corner. On the left, the
outline of the man's right leg and arm and hair forms another curve
which bends back the line of the opposing curve of the woman's dress,
and completes the figure of the pyramid. But the first curve, the force
of which is seemingly ended at the woman's waist, is continued in the
outline of the light tonality which begins at the man's right elbow,
curves outward to the frame, then inward, and ends on the upper frame a
little to the left of the man's head. Furthermore, the volume made by
the light tonality in the upper left-hand corner serves as a balance to
the form of the woman's tunic. This composition is, in all essentials,
the same as in Lise, and embraces that rhythm in two dimensions which
Manet did not know, and that balance of tonal form of which Manet was
never capable. Manet's mind was that of the lesser Dutch and Spaniards.
Renoir's was the plastic and flowing mind of the Latin races, never
satisfied with angularity and immobility, but needful of the smooth
progression of sequence and movement.
The recognition of the artistic necessity for linear rhythm led Renoir
to search for it in others than Courbet. Among the painters by whom he
might profit, Delacroix stood nearest his own time. To him Renoir
turned; and it was out of him that Renoir's greatness was to grow.
Delacroix's organisations appealed to him--especially the triangular one
which opens at the top. His admiration for this artist's talent led him
to paint in 1872 a canvas called Parisiennes Habillees en Algeriennes,
an ambitious essay to compete with Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur
Appartement. Intrinsically the picture was a failure, but it taught its
creator more than he had heretofore learned concerning colour and
drawing. In it are discernible indications of the formal
unconventionalities and the chromatic brilliancies which later were to
be such dominant qualities in Renoir's work. Although for two years he
had used Impressionistic methods, it was through this picture that
Delacroix introduced him to the Impressionists' colour. Manet had
already introduced him to Ingres: and these two incidents went far
toward laying the foundation for his greatness. On neither the
Impressionists nor Ingres did he build a style; but from both he
learned something of far more value:--freedom from the dictates of style.
Here again Delacroix had a hand, for by studying this artist's uses of
Ingres's simplifications, Renoir was able to make these simplifications
plastic.
Renoir's colour up to this time had been restrained by the dictates of
his epoch. But with the inspiration and encouragement given him by Les
Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement, it burst forth with all the force
of long-imprisoned energy, and drove him out of doors. In this picture
he found excuse to carry colour to any extreme he desired. At once the
instincts of the porcelain painter, ever latent in him, came uppermost.
Delacroix, in giving him the Impressionists' freedom of colour, had
brought him back to those rich and full little designs he had painted on
china between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. In this early training
alone lies the explanation of his later _matiere_ which has for so long
puzzled the critics. Many attribute his colour effects to Watteau. But
Renoir had developed his technique before he knew the older master.
Years previous he had been intensely interested in the very material of
his models. In Le Menage Sisley, La Baigneuse au Griffon and La Femme a
la Perruche is evinced the love of the connoisseur for rare and rich
stuffs. Furthermore he had begun to turn his eyes toward Impressionist
methods two years before he painted Les Parisiennes Habillees en
Algeriennes. Up to that time his brushing had been broad like Manet's or
Courbet's; immediately afterward it tended toward spotting, and Monet
took the upper hand. Watteau's manner of application served only to
substantiate Renoir in his choice of method.
The years from 1865 to 1876 constitute a period of Renoir's life rich in
its promise of splendid things. His keen admirations and high
enthusiasms made of him throughout this time a disciple. But his
achievements, small as they were, were more sumptuous and effectual than
either Manet's or Monet's. Their true significance, though, lay in their
assurance of what was to come after he had completed that unlearning
process through which all great men must pass. Only by sitting at a
master's feet can one acquire the knowledge that informs one which
influences should be utilised and which cast aside. One cannot learn
from experience the total lessons of many men, each one of whom has
given a lifetime to the study of a different side of a subject. If these
men are to be surpassed their life work must be used as a starting
point. Renoir began thus. He had fallen under the sway of Courbet,
Manet, Delacroix and Monet; but after eleven years he had exhausted his
creative interest in both their theories and their attainments. These
men had expressed all that was in them. For Renoir to cling to them was
to stand still. If he was to go down in history as a constructive genius
and not merely as an able imitator, it was time for him to strike out
alone.
He did not hesitate. The portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, done in 1876,
marks his transformation. In it he achieved the scintillation of light
which is not linked with colour or painting, but which seems to arise,
by some mysterious alchemy, from the surface of the canvas. In this
picture, and also in the Moulin de la Galette, finished in the same
year, he consummated the fondest ambition of the Impressionists, namely:
to make the spectator feel a picture, not as a depiction of nature's
light, but as a medium from which emanates the very force of light
itself. But Renoir did not stop here: to this achievement he added form
and rhythm--two attributes which the Impressionists, preoccupied with
objectivity, were too busy to attempt. And in addition he displayed a
technique so perfect in its adaptability to any expression, that its
mannerisms were completely submerged in the picture's total effect.
These were the qualities which Renoir was to develop to so superlative a
degree. He had begun to express form in 1870 in his Portrait de Dame.
Two years later in his Delacroix adaptation he had branched out into
colour. And in his very first canvases there was rhythmic balance of
lines. In 1876 all these tendencies coalesced. In consequence Renoir
blossomed forth free from aggressive influences, knowing his own
limitations and possibilities. This cannot be said even of those
excellent works, La Loge, La Danseuse and La Fillette Attentive, done
the two preceding years. It is only by contemplating such pictures as
the portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, La Chevelure and La Source that we
can perceive the path along which his development was to take place. For
these canvases, though far more significant than the works of Pissarro
and Monet, are almost negligible beside his later work. He was a man
never satisfied with results, no matter how exalted. His every new
achievement was only a higher elevation from which his horizon ever
receded.
[Illustration: LE DEJEUNER DES CANOTIERS by RENOIR]
One of Renoir's important advances in method is his liberation from the
circumscribed use of black. Although in some of his work of 1876 there
are still traces of that tone used organically, they are so slight that
they may be disregarded. Black was the very keynote of the paintings of
his day. It was looked upon as a necessity in the creation of volumes.
Courbet did little without it, and Manet brightened it only with
occasional flashes of colour. Today we know that it is not a technical
necessity, that pure colours, in fact, when properly used, can produce
the most solid forms. But whereas we have been able to profit by the
teachings of Cezanne and the Synchromists, Renoir had to learn this fact
by bitter experiments in a new element. In La Balancoire, done in the
same year as the Moulin de la Galette and now hanging with that picture
in the Luxembourg, black is entirely absent. This little canvas was
probably an experiment actuated by Monet, for never afterward did he on
principle lay black aside. While he realised its unimportance as a
fundamental for constructing volume, he nevertheless felt its need as a
complement to colour--the need of the static and the dead to accentuate
the plastic and alive.