several likenesses. He is as popular as on the first day, and will
always remain so as long as children play with tin soldiers and the
picture sheets of Epinal—the French Neu-Ruppin—find a ready sale. How
he dazzles! He does so to a degree which deserves admiration. From a
distance his pictures appear to be something; one must look at them
quite closely to see that they are nothing, absolutely nothing. The
colossal canvas is apparently full of men: thousands of soldiers march,
encamp, storm, fight; but, as a matter of fact, not a single figure
is painted; the whole pomp of war and victory is composed of little
stencilled gingerbread men, without any bones in their bodies, and with
scarcely the remotest resemblance to human beings. Could Horace Vernet
draw? Had he really any other conception of the human form than that
of an inflated india-rubber figure? In Paris and Versailles I have seen
many paintings by him, but I cannot yet answer these questions. Horace
Vernet is the fourth of a dynasty of painters: the first, Antoine, was
great at little figures on sedan-chair panels; the second, Joseph,
painted the well-known series of French harbours; the third, Carle, is
a master in depicting horses; Horace, the fourth, is the weakest of
them all, incomparably inferior in ability to his father, grandfather,
and great-grandfather. He alone, however, has attained fame, and his
renown throws his ancestors into the shade. The wheel of fortune now
and then plays immoral jokes of this sort, perhaps in order to teach
its own futility.
Daumier was known to me and, I suppose, most people, only as a
draughtsman. We learnt now to prize him as a painter of high rank.
His numerous paintings are illustrations to “Don Quixote,” romantic
merry-Andrews, street-singers, Molière’s _Malade Imaginaire_, and a
crowded group of lawyers in cap and gown. His manner is the same in oil
as in lead-pencil and crayon-drawing: his lines of movement broad and
firm, the outlines blunted, and now and again rubbed; all his figures
mysteriously surrounded in mist, yet all so clearly and faultlessly
represented that one is never led to suspect that their mysteriousness
is a trick to hide carelessness or lack of skill. Even his oil-painting
is really caricature, but discreet caricature. The nobler method
instils into him self-respect, and preserves him from caricature; he
just marks roguishly the burlesque features, but does not diverge from
reality. Thus his lawyers are portraits, but they look so maliciously
intelligent, so inexorably penetrating, that we can doubt of this or
that head whether it is a likeness or a caricature. Let us say this:
the model will take it for a caricature, but his friends will regard
it as a portrait. Daumier is a solitary; he is akin to none of his
contemporaries, yet an example of the migration of souls; for in him
Hogarth comes to life again, but a Hogarth who for his part would be
animated by a spark of Rembrandt’s spirit.
Suddenly another solitary appears in the ranks of the allied men of
school and tradition, viz., Millet. Precipitation would infer: the
romantic is overcome; a new generation with new modes of feeling
arises; the nerves of the century begin to vibrate according to a
new rhythm. That is sheer nonsense; nothing has been overcome. The
romantic masters still form romantic pupils, the crowd still feels in
the traditional way; the range of themes and the fashion of treating
them remain what they have been for a generation, but amidst the
dependent, the docile ones, the imitator forms for himself, by the law
of elective affinity, a divergent group—the group of the forest-folk
of Barbizon—and amidst this group steps forth an individual man who
forgets the master’s _atelier_, who, in painting, thinks of neither the
_salon_ nor the art-dealers, who looks not into books and newspapers
nor on prototypes, but out into the world, and on that account falls
completely out of the century.
If we follow up the development of art in the Exhibition, we may easily
fall into the error of thinking that with Millet one epoch closes and
another begins. Such was not the case in reality. The contemporaries
who appreciated Millet were a diminishing few. Official art despised
him. There were no distinctions for him on the part of the State. The
critical phrase-makers knew nothing of him or mocked him horribly.
The rich connoisseurs passed him by. A very small congregation of
moderately well-off admirers, whose valuation appraised their most
honest admiration at 1,000 francs at most, bought his pictures at
prices which just made it possible for him to live in Barbizon in
wooden shoes and a blouse, and to bring up his numerous family on
potatoes and bacon. But as he was a personality he succeeded—though
only after his death. He made a school, like every one who has
something to teach. He gained influence on the views of the creators,
the critics, and the public. People began to understand his speech,
nay, to feel that what he said was beautiful. But to this day there
is no Millet epoch in French art, and his fame is really an optical
delusion. His works did not bring him into the mouth of the masses,
but the caprice of a millionaire. On the day when it occurred to M.
Chauchard to pay 600,000 francs for Millet’s “Angelus,” snobs of
both worlds took off their hats and murmured in a voice hushed with
reverence: “That must be a great painter.” As we see, the world’s fame
is but a question of money. Many more men are able to reckon than are
able to feel the beauty of art, and, to the vast majority, its price is
the infallible, the one key to the understanding of a work.
I must say that the millionaire who acted as Millet’s herald of fame,
had no sense of proportion. If the work of an artist is to be measured
by a gauge, the figures of which represent gold coins, Millet does
not reach the altitude of 600,000 francs, unless we estimate at least
thirty of his contemporaries equally high. In technique, Millet follows
the Dutch; a David Teniers without humour and without aim at humour.
His landscape, never the essential with him, is poorer than that of
Rousseau and François, not to speak of Corot. His greatness lies in
his personality, in his simplicity, in his avoidance of pose, in the
pious earnestness with which he follows the daily toil of the field
labourer. That is no new note in art, but it is the manifestation of an
individuality. Many are his superiors purely as painters. But souls
cannot be compared and measured: they are incommensurable.
Courbet follows on Millet. Those mad on systematising have classed
the two together as pioneers of Naturalism. What blindness to the
essential! If anything does connect them—according to the Hegelian
method—it is their very antithesis. Millet—let us think of the “Man
with the Mattock,” “The Gleaners,” even “The Pig-Killing,” and the two
pictures in the Century Exhibition: the field-labourer, who, his day’s
work ended, is putting on his coat, and the mother feeding her little
child with pap, as well as “The Angelus”—Millet indicates, in heavy
painting and little-pleasing colours, in people whose coarse externals
do not attract a spirituality that ennobles them and makes us forget
their soil-stained smock-frocks and their hard features. Courbet, on
the other hand, draws faultlessly, and is master of every knack of the
trade; but, with his rich means, he never gets above the spiritual
stage of photography, and he knows not how to open to us the smallest
corner of the moral and spiritual being of his men and women.
But, strangely enough, this same Courbet, who never conceives human
beings except as soulless forms, can put a soul into nature and her
lower-conditioned life. His justly famed “Sea-Waves” breathes a
dramatic will-power. His “Roes in the Wood” are spirited. Ancient,
mysterious wisdom appears to possess even his trees. Animals and
plants, sea and land, speak in Courbet; man alone is dumb. He is a
pantheist who excludes only man from the All-Divine. That is pessimism
rooted in the most profound unconsciousness, which hints at serious
organic disturbance.
Rosa Bonheur, represented by a wonderful “Team of Oxen before a Hay
Waggon,” is in this respect akin to Courbet. She, too, is an eloquent
advocate of the beauty and profound feeling of the brute; but, more
logical than Courbet, she confines herself to representing animals, and
does not meddle with human beings. Man fails to interest her; she takes
no heed of his indifferent appearance. The animal alone attracts her
attention. A Rudyard Kipling of the brush, she has painted all her life
the “Jungle-Book,” that tells of the wise and good and honest beasts,
and the cunning men. Sir Edwin Landseer was also an animal-painter, but
of quite another sort than Rosa Bonheur. When Landseer wanted to flatter
the beasts, he gave them human qualities. Rosa Bonheur would have
felt she was insulting her dear animals, if she had painted a picture
like the “Diogenes” in the National Gallery in London. The humanising
of animals seems to her like degrading their special animal beauty.
Her love of animals was morbid; it was, however, a deep and powerful
emotion that made of her a great artist.
Our wandering through the Century Exhibition led us finally past
the great landscape-men, the founders of modern landscape-painting,
to Manet and Monet, Renoir and Degas, with whom a new century of art
begins. In a later section on the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg
Museum, I shall study closely the authors of the Open Air Movement. The
fight against the children of classicism and romance was furious, and
“free-light” was victorious in the degree in which it deserved victory.
But even in those days of turmoil there were idyllists who remained
undisturbed by the tumult, and did not notice it. Gustave Moreau
painted his colour stories from a palette of gold and precious stones,
from a palette of Limosin and the glass-painters of Gothic cathedrals,
as if there had never existed an “Olympia” of Manet or a “Funeral
Procession of Ornans,” of Courbet. The high importance of Moreau, to
whom I return in a special study, lies in the fact that he teaches us
the feebleness of all classification of art development into epochs.
True artists are not subject to time, and move side by side without
influencing reciprocally their orbits. They are not subject to Newton’s
law of gravitation.
The Century Exhibition taught us something more. It sharpened our sight
for distinguishing between the literary painters and the painters
proper. The former, as a rule, find fame quicker than the latter, but
their fame affects posterity as a bad jest. They are illustrators of
the time, and what it brings, that is the worthless, art-destroying
“actuality.” Every attempt to put painting at the service of
contemporary thought, to demand of it philosophical collaboration in
the development of political, moral, and social doctrines, is a sin
against an art whose essence directs it to the eternal aspects of the
phenomenal world. Only those are genuine painter temperaments which
can follow reflectively the play of light on surfaces in motion, and
tell us what feelings this play awakens in them. All symbolism, all
allegory, all graphic accompaniment of poetry, is weak. Only what has
been really seen has permanence, even if it is reproduced with little
skill. You cannot paint from hearsay, only from the impressions which
the eye takes in, and the soul delivers. It is astonishing that so
primitive a biological truth should be so difficult to grasp.
VI
THE SCHOOL OF 1830
Thomy Thiéry was a rich man of the formerly French, but afterwards
English, island of Mauritius, who lived and died in Paris, and left
his art collection, consisting of paintings, Barye bronzes, and some
Gobelins, to the Louvre. Thomy Thiéry was a man of a single passion
and a single thought; he loved only the Barbizon School and some of
its artistic contemporaries who, in his opinion, stood in an elective
affinity to it; but he loved them with unshaken fidelity and constant
self-sacrifice. And in contrast to other more eclectic amateurs, he
did not perform his heroic deeds of an undaunted purchaser in auction
rooms and art-shops, but carried his money to the studios of the living
and struggling as long as he was able, and appeared on the market as
an ordinary collector only when the brush had slipped from the hand of
the creators. In this way his gallery got the warmth and unity of an
organic being, and besides its beauty, gave joy through the idea that
it was not the result of _parvenu_ vanity, or of that cruel fancy that
takes satisfaction in a work without troubling about the originator,
but that a grateful patronage, which not only wishes to purchase art
treasures, but also to lighten and beautify the artist’s earthly
pilgrimage, had created it. As a legacy to the Louvre, the collection
has from a fraction become an integral section that methodically
dovetails into its place in the frame of this incomparable museum, in
which the history of art is made to live before our gaze in select
examples. The management has added the pictures which it formerly
possessed of Thomy Thiéry’s favourites, so that the three halls of the
collection now afford a good survey of the fruitful movement, which,
about 1830, took place in French painting, and diverted it from the
degraded classicism then dominant into the path pursued at present.
The School of Barbizon! A convenient, but, for that very reason,
a meaningless, expression. The men comprised in this commonplace
designation have not much in common. In age not far apart, they were
bound to each other by personal friendship, and partly inhabitants of
that Fontainebleau wood, in which some of them experienced Nature’s
revelation. They were, however, very different in temperament, genius,
and impulse, and they strove for personal ideals with dissimilar modes
of expression. Only one peculiarity belongs in like degree to all,
viz., the burning longing with which they yearned to get out of the
stupid hole-in-the-wall of the academic studio that had become to them
a goal into freedom and life.
Without punning, the free air and freedom meant to them the same thing.
Landscape furnished them with the means of renewing their acquaintance
with Nature. Under a completely Faust-like impulse, they struggled out
of the _atelier_, where, “in reek and decay, only the skeletons of
brutes and dead men’s bones” surrounded them, “into the far country.”
Their appearance about the time of the July Revolution was the
Easter-morning walk after brooding in the Gothic studio.
The David tradition held painting in thrall. The master’s greatest
pupil, Baron Gros, and, with him, the gifted Géricault, sought to
overcome the stiff mummifiedness and dryness of forms, the staginess of
subject of this art, which found its triumph in the “Rape of the Sabine
Women” and the “Coronation at Notre Dame.” But Géricault, misjudged
and undervalued, died early a conquered man, and Gros, going astray in
uncertain sounding of himself, returned, after his short revolt, to the
tin and paste formulary of his first epoch, recognised in alarm its
hollowness, and, by voluntary death in the Seine, got rid of the pains
of the sceptic who has lost his faith and his ideal. The then young
generation, warned and shaken by the tragedy of this seeker who found
nothing, broke with the dominant rule, and sat down at the feet of
Nature, to learn from her.
The country is the great master-workshop. There Nature speaks her most
eloquent language of form. There she finds the tones that awaken the
loudest echo in the soul of the genuine born painter. The creation of
a pictorial artist is, like each of the higher mental activities, very
complicated; the most opposed organs of the brain have a variously
graded and mixed share in it. The vivid reception and rendition of
a phenomenon at rest, of the expressive line of one in motion, is
an exercise of the motor centres. In the representation of man, or
what pertains to man, which is, directly or indirectly, through the
awakening of anthropomorphic ideas, to seize on our minds, trains of
thought, reason, and judgment play a part by the side of the emotions
growing out of the unconscious. But the real and essential element
in painting is neither the motorial production of the drawing, nor
the travail of thought in the composition, but is ever the giving
of light and colour. Now what counts in landscape is the effect of
light and colour. Here the painter stands before the magic changes
of lights and the alluring colour-mysteries of Nature, which excite
him most keenly; for they stimulate his optical centre, of which the
extraordinary development and particular susceptibility of light is
the psycho-physical basis and preliminary condition of the primitive,
impulsive gift of painting. Ever when men of talent feel the stiffened
traditions of the schools to be intolerable, and want to follow their
own inward impulse, they flee to the country in order, in its free
light, to wash themselves clean from the dust of the schools, and bathe
into health their limbs, aching from constrained positions. There
is profound instruction in the fact that to Giotto, in his effort
completely to burst the fetters of Byzantinism, which his master,
Cimabue, had already strongly shaken, it first occurred to introduce
into his work the elements of landscape. His picture in the Louvre of
St Francis of Assisi is a touchingly _naïve_ example of this.
It was Corot who first uttered in the French painting of the nineteenth
century the creative words, “Let there be light.” Of course, he did
not discover day, for there were masters before him in whose pictures
the sun shone. We find in Ruysdael the keen, chilly clearness of a
northern sky. Claude Lorrain gives warm, tender evening tones of the
south, which have the effect of luxurious warm baths. From him, Turner
directly traces his descent, who overheats Claude’s pleasant tepidity
to a glow, and raises his gentle clearness to a blinding splendour
of radiancy. But no one before Corot has understood, like him, how
to fill pictures with such discreet yet penetrating, delicate yet
glowing light. It is no melodramatic, no Bengal or concocted light,
no light of strange, exceptional occasions, of confusing colours, no
vulgar, pompous, excessively brilliant light, but a restfully even,
inexhaustibly rich, cheerful light that fills the soul with joy and
hope.
Corot’s light sheds its rays from a hopeful soul. It is luminous
optimism in visible form. Some years ago, a Corot Exhibition took
place in the Galliera Museum, and those who arranged it contrived
to collect about the whole of the master’s life-work. I looked
attentively at one point: it contained hardly a single evening, not
a single autumn note or muttering of a storm, but only morning and
spring and blue sky. That is characteristic of this child of the sun.
In Corot the elements of beauty are nearly always the same: pleasant
hill-countries, winding paths that lead to weird distances and invite
our yearning to fare thither; at a curve of the road gleaming water
mirroring silver cloudlets; in the foreground delicately-leaved trees;
around and over everything the wondrous air thrilling with light,
animated with a thin haze of mist, in which, bewitched by the feeling
of spring, by an association of ideas, we fancy we can hear the soft
bell-notes of invisible church towers, the twitter of pairing birds
engaged in building their nests, and the buzz of early beetles. Some
of the Corots in the Thiéry rooms, _e.g._, the view of the Coliseum,
are youthful productions, and do not yet show the dreamily soft, as it
were, inspired style and silver glow of his maturity. They are still
somewhat dry and hard, yet, even in these more prosaic pictures, the
heart-quickening light falls from heaven—Corot’s incomparable strength.
Corot did not belong to the forestmen of Barbizon, but he was the
founder of their religion of light. Th. Rousseau shares with him the
silkiness, and approaches him in the down-like delicacy of his young
foliage. Daubigny has more temperament; he is sturdier, more manly,
perhaps I should say: more like a peasant. What raises him to the
rank of master is the depth of his pictures, and his gift of working
out his subjects in almost stereoscopic relief, in all planes—in the
fore-, middle-, and background. His “Skiff” is, therefore, an excellent
example. The mast of the vessel stands absolutely free. We see how
air is encompassing it on all sides. Dupré shares in equal degree the
praise of his two friends. That is not quite just, for he has by no
means so much personality as they. He does not feel originally, but
imitatively. Nature moves him first through the eyes of his companions
in art. He imitates alternately the softness of Corot’s foliage and his
silvery mistiness, Rousseau’s smoothness and insinuating harmony of
colour, and Daubigny’s tree-poetry, but I look in vain for the feature
that distinguishes him from the others.
The delicate, and at the same time reverential love with which the
Barbizon-men treat the individual tree, Troyon expends on domestic
animals. As to the former the tree, so long as it does not melt in the
haze of distance, is never merely part of the scheme, but a distinct,
living being, possessing a physiognomy of its own, of which they render
a strongly individualised likeness; so the latter regards animals with
the understanding of a shepherd, who is known to recognise by their
countenances all the sheep of a numerous flock. He will correctly
depict the physiognomy of animals, without any propensity to giving
them the look of human beings, through which animal painters only too
easily become, without intending it, comic.
Millet is the continuation and consummation of the great landscape
painters of 1830. We are not conscious of this if we regard him only
by himself; but it is at once forced on us if we see him in the
Thiéry Collection in connection with his comrades. Millet is also,
fundamentally, a landscape painter, only his landscapes are animated
by men; but not by men who are accessories, as is the case with
Corot, but by men who are a part of the landscape, its most important
and essential part, precisely as the trees and clouds are, but more
dignified and spiritual than trees or clouds. With him man grows
together with his rural environment, is himself a bit of nature in the
midst of nature, and it is not easy to decide whether he is degrading
man, or is elevating the earth with all that on it creeps and flies,
when he puts them on the same level. Millet discerns in nature an
all-living element that can take manifold bodily forms and be expressed
in a variety of ways, but is one and the same in all different forms.
This grand pantheistic feature uplifts his pictures from _genre_ to
high, spiritual art. And since nature is never comic, so Millet’s
peasants—themselves a bit of nature—never affect us comically, but
always pathetically, even when they are as sturdy, clumsy, and simple
as David Teniers’s boors. In one picture in the collection, “Maternal
Foresight,” Millet has apparently a humorous intention: a peasant woman
is assisting her very small youngster at the doorstep of her house in a
little necessity. Even here I cannot find anything to laugh at, unless
from kindly sympathy for the hop-o’-my-thumb and his tender mother. It
is just a glance at life, and at such no one who feels a reverence for
the sanctity of life ever laughs.
The devotees of the great Pan—Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, Millet, and
their followers of the second rank, gain in significance side by side.
Their contemporary, Delacroix, loses beside them. What I felt at the
Century Exhibition of French art, I feel even more strongly in the
Thiéry rooms at the Louvre. I am afraid Delacroix is one whose trial
must be revised. Perhaps we shall then be obliged to confirm the
unfavourable verdict that the adherents of the Classical movement
passed on him at his appearance, although on quite different grounds.
Delacroix was not in love with life; he did not seek and find nature;
he followed in her footsteps only in books. He was essentially an
illustrator; apart from Victor Hugo he is not to be thought of. The
Romantics performed a duty of gratitude when, with fanatical violence,
they carried him triumphantly through his detractors. He is their
henchman with the brush; he fights with them and for them. They only
act according to the rules of chivalry when they protect him. His
magic colouring is not to be contested, although it is often gaudy and
theatrical. But out of his “Hamlet with the Gravediggers,” his “Medea,”
his “Bride of Abydos,” his “Abduction of Rebecca” (“Ivanhoe”), a dreary
waste stares us in the face, which would be hardly bearable if we did
not happen to know the poems from which Delacroix drew his subjects.
We must put life into his dead pictures by what we remember of our
reading. Delacroix stops at the externals. We have to add soul and
passion.