the Empire, of whom Meissonier is the best type; on the other, the
naturalists with Courbet, the impressionists with Manet and Monet; and
so the development went on to the confused struggles of this moment.
That period of the July Revolution was felt by its contemporaries as
an age of storm and stress in art. On us later-born children it has
the effect of halcyon days, the full, rapturous life and sunny joys of
which the present generation longs for in vain.
VII
THE TRIUMPH OF A REVOLUTION
THE REALISTS
In the last years of the Empire and the first of the Republic, great
things occurred on the sacred hill of Montmartre, on the summit of
which the Church of the Sacred Heart had not yet supplanted the Muses
and Graces. A group of painters, diminishing in number, yet brave
as lions, and pugnacious, arose in defence and attack against the
official art of the _Académie_, the _École des Beaux Arts_, and the
_Salon_, which was still an institution of the State. Their palette
was a battle-shield, their brush a lethal weapon for cutting and
thrusting, their easel a barricade. Uproar was what they painted, and
plunder and carnage were the subjects of their conversation in endless
beer and tobacco sessions. They wanted to massacre the old idols in
oil-painting, and the tyrants of the plastic arts now become twaddlers.
No more painting by tinker, plumber, or chimney-sweep! No soot in
place of air! No Dutch dolls in tin armour, with volunteer firemen’s
brass helmets on their gingerbread heads! On the contrary, an honest
rendering of phenomena of light and colour from actual observation,
sincerity, open air, and impression.
The first to gather with fury and wild gesticulation around the daring
preachers of the new gospel were literary men and journalists. They
did not understand anything about painting, and would not have been
capable of distinguishing a varnished oleograph for a cab-drivers’
public house from a real Leonardo; whether a picture was blackened or
saturated by sunlight, whether a human figure was clumsily conventional
or felt and understood with truth to nature, that was to them quite as
indifferent as the colour of the Empress of China’s dressing-gown. They
had, however, the feeling that this movement in art was, in some way
or other, connected with thought of general subversion, and attacked
the government. They thought they heard the naked women in Eduard
Manet’s “Down with Napoleon” shriek. The gleaming, noonday lights of
Claude Monet seemed to them a cry for vengeance for the _coup d’état_.
They understood Pissarro’s landscapes as illustrating Victor Hugo’s
_Châtiments_, and Renoir’s dancing _grisettes_ clearly pronounced a
crushing verdict on the Mexican Expedition. All the enemies of the
Empire regarded open air as an item of their political programme.
To be a true republican one must swear allegiance to realism. Thus
Gambetta and Zola became fanatics of the new movement, not on æsthetic
principles—such did not exist for either—but from a tendency to
opposition.
We should be wrong to laugh at a Radical mob orator and an anarchist
novelist being fervent advocates of a school of painting from party
interests. It arises out of a quite correct feeling. “All is in all.”
A close relationship unites all the phenomena of one time, and the
most opposed forms may express a single fundamental mood. About 1868
realism meant quite as much a revolt against a bit of authority as
republicanism did. Were not a luxuriant beard and a soft hat in 1848
proof positive of revolutionary sentiments? And about 1895 were not a
tail-coat and a flowing neck-tie the acknowledgment of belief in blank
verse and Maeterlinck?
From the first moment, then, realism had the honours of the opposition
press and the support of those politicians, the majority of whom, later
on, were to play the principal parts in the revolt of the Commune.
The artists, to be sure, despised it at first, as long as it gained
no _Salon_ distinctions and had no market. For a long time—for some
decades—it had none. The public regarded the works of the new movement
only as expressions of unconscious or intentional artistic humour.
It laughed at them as it did at the saucy caricatures in the comic
papers. There was perhaps only one individual who, a generation ago,
took the Manets and Monets, the Renoirs and Pissarros seriously, and
was prepared to manifest his belief in them by ready money—the only
genuine martyrdom in our days—and this seer, prophet, and confessor was
Caillebotte. He bought their pictures; not at a big price, it is true,
for we must not expect the superhuman from mere mortals, but he bought
them; he poured out his red gold for them, and this sacrifice probably
preserved the life of realism, or, at any rate, of its teachers.
Caillebotte himself painted, but only for himself, and that was
praiseworthy; but what was more important, he had acquired a handsome
fortune by commerce, and spent the major portion of his fine income on
open-air pictures. He did not exhaust his enthusiasm by that. When he
died, he bequeathed the most striking pieces—“the pearls,” he called
them—of his collection to the French State, on the condition that it
left them together and accommodated them with a room in a Paris museum.
The Department of Fine Arts at first made difficulties; but finally,
it resolved to accept the bequest. The Luxembourg Museum was enlarged
by an additional building, and a small room in the new wing now
accommodates the pictures left by Caillebotte, amongst which he also
smuggled in two from his own brush. Thus the Revolutionaries attained
the honours of a State museum. This triumph crowns an adventurous
campaign which, after apparently fatal defeats at first, led from
victory to victory, and from conquest to conquest. For a decade and a
half the art of the Manets and Monets has dominated painting. Only in
the works of a few obstinate old fogies is their spirit untraceable,
at any rate on the Continent; for in England, to be sure, they have
not succeeded in gaining the slightest influence on the Præ-Raphaelite
movement. On the other hand, in countries without old and uninterrupted
art traditions of their own, for which the history of painting begins
at the moment in which they themselves first co-operate actively in it,
therefore especially in North America and Scandinavia, there is, as a
rule, no other art. When the painters in these countries awoke to art,
that was the newest thing, _le dernier cri_ of realism, and they took
to this latest fashion, just as, in new colonies, negro ladies, who
yesterday knew no other aid to their dusky loveliness than an apron of
plaited grass and a few glass beads, insist that their toilet, or, at
any rate, portions of it, shall be quite up to date.
But the victory in lands barbaric so far as art is concerned, and
the apotheosis in the Luxembourg Museum, do not spell the end of the
battle or the conclusion of peace. Realism had even recently to
fight hard battles of persecution. Whilst the crowd pressed into the
Caillebotte room, which was opened in 1897, and, it must be admitted,
gave expression to very mixed feelings, certain masters of the Art
School, the narrow Academician, Gérôme, at their head, sent to the
Minister concerned a fiercely angry warning against the desecration
of the Museum’s hallowed rooms by the admission of rubbish which
they characterised as “scandalous daubs,” the “offspring of utter
incompetency or lunacy.”
The warning was wrongly timed. In 1897 it came too early, or too late.
Too late, because Manet and Monet have apparently held their own
against Gérôme and Gustave Moreau, and protests are futile against
facts, or what are regarded as such at a given period. Too early, for
people then still stood—and probably they stand now—at an insufficient
distance from the movement now called impressionist to regard it from
the perspective of history, and to assign it its proper place in the
development of painting. That moment will come, most likely very soon.
Then the protest of the Academicians will be superfluous, for even the
æsthetic boors will repeat the verdict, then become a commonplace, that
realism had its justification; that, besides transient harm, it was the
author of permanent utility; and that, after a half-miraculous progress
not uncommon in the history of art, the new men, who themselves could
do little or nothing at all, taught more competent successors something
precious.
The Caillebotte room will help to bring about a correct estimate of
the revolutionists of “the ’sixties.” Gérôme ought to have rejoiced
at the opening of that room, for it really, for the first time, sets
a legend in the light of history. For twenty years everybody has
thought he had a right to chatter about realism, though few have really
seen the documentary monuments of it, because up to now they were
never conveniently accessible as a whole. The prototypical works of
the Naturalist School were mostly shown cursorily in rare and little
noticed exhibitions. Then they hung in their authors’ studios, or in
some private collections. He who had not lived in Paris for thirty
years, and observed with close attention all the details of the art
movement, or did not undertake troublesome journeys of exploration and
discovery, could speak of them only from untrustworthy imitations, or
from absolutely worthless hearsay. Now, at last, the material can be
seen by all. Whoever is capable of receiving his own impressions can
procure them.
Extravagant enthusiasm for the pioneers of the “Open Air” movement will
now be quite as little excusable as its condemnation without mitigating
circumstances. The former will, in face of the Caillebotte room, be
recognised at the first glance as sheer weak-mindedness, the latter as
lack of understanding. That is the great service of this room in the
Museum: it adduces all that can be said on behalf of realism, and shows
at the same time, inexorably, its limitations.
I should like beforehand to exclude Raffaelli from the painters
that appear in this collection. He is not a labourer from the first
hour. Even later on, when he joined the movement, he was no orthodox
believer. People, from their superficial knowledge, jumbled him up
with the realists, because he was at first always, as the latter were
often, a pessimistic confessor of the truth. His peculiar temperament
decided his choice of sad subjects. In his outlook on life he was wont
to dwell, with self-torturing choice, on depressing sights: on the sick
in lazar-houses; on the homeless tramps in the moats about the Paris
forts; on poor, human wrecks that float through the street-current of
the great city. He told the story of these men with heart-breaking
accuracy. He depicted them in mean, miserable, mud-tints; in the
dust-grey of unswept, suburban streets; the sickly lime-white and
dung-brown of neglected house-walls; the washed-out greenish-blue of
worn-out cotton blouses. In this mood was painted his “Convalescents in
the Hospital Yard,” with its livid faces beneath the white skull-caps,
and emaciated bodies in blue dressing-gowns, on the dank, moss-covered
stone benches, in front of the sullen lazar-house. This picture, like
all of Raffaelli’s, makes up for the unpleasantness of its story by
the severe honesty of its drawing; and in the street picture, “Behind
Notre Dame,” the astonishingly effective employment of the gay red
kerchief of a workwoman in the foreground, amidst the subdued tones
of a murky Paris day in uncertain weather, shows what a clever and
faithful colourist this painter is, who so long painted obstinately
from a degraded palette. Nowadays, he has, in the main, overcome his
depression of spirits, and in his soul a bright sunshine laughs, the
rays of which are discernible in all his later works.
The real originator of the new tendency was Eduard Manet. Of his three
pictures in the Caillebotte room, one, the “Olympia,” is a masterpiece.
It had already long been the property of the Luxembourg collection,
and amongst the academic works of that Museum it seemed so strange
that it forced expressions of repugnance from most visitors. After
this comes an insipid brown lady in a mantilla, and the important
“Balcony.” “Olympia” is a faded, decayed lady of the class which
people in Paris are accustomed to describe as “the old guard.” The
person, whose hair is dressed for a _soirée_, but who is entirely
without clothing, lies outstretched on a bed, displaying her charms,
which might convert Don Juan himself to the monastic rule of chastity.
By the couch stands a pretty negress, busied with her mistress. The
“Balcony” shows two ladies with a gentleman friend, and a man-servant
in the background. The two pictures display Manet’s purpose and method.
There is nothing of impressionism and open air to be remarked in the
“Olympia.” The scene is a closed room filled with diffused rays of
chamber-light. The figures of the two women are accurately painted,
indeed in a painfully and curiously dry style. In vain would one
look for the smartness and bold dashing on of colour that are now
held to be the characteristics of impressionism. It is all painfully
and laboriously measured, without swing or freedom, without mastery
over the model or the tone. The picture is revolutionary only in its
straightforwardness. When it appeared, the academic masters painted
prettily. When they had to represent nudity, they painted a sort of
conventional rose-coloured jelly, without bones or physiognomy, smooth,
ordinary, and superficially pleasing as a china doll, inartistic, and
unspeakably tedious. In his “Olympia,” Manet rebelled against this
prettiness in painting that so falsifies nature. He chose the most
repulsive model he could find, and reproduced it with literal exactness
in all its repulsive truth. He showed that there is female flesh not
altogether too old that is not composed of snow and rose leaves. He
taught his truth brutally and unwisely, with churlish violation of good
taste and gallantry, but with ardour and conviction. The “Balcony”
already announces the joyous tidings of open air. The two women are
bathed in full daylight, which cruelly misuses their faces. Here, too,
Manet wears the blinkers that narrow his artistic horizon. He wishes to
oppose sunny brightness to the brown broth which was given out in the
masters’ studios as the only colour whereby one could find salvation.
He therefore lavishes his light, which overcomes and disperses the
darkness; but he forgets that sunshine influences local colours; that
it gives them various effects, according to their illuminative power;
that it envelops and blends them, however opposite they may be, in one
single underlying harmony of silver or gold tone, and with no more
misgiving than a saucy child, he lays on the canvas the true colours of
things unaltered and unbalanced. I do not doubt that the grey-green of
the window-shutters and the arsenical green of the obliquely crossed
iron bars of the balcony are painted with the very trade colours which
the house-painters actually use for these objects. Of course, this
truth in detail produces the greatest artistic untruth in the whole,
and the picture that was to be the Whitsun sermon of holy “Open Air,”
becomes, through Manet’s inadequacy, a speech for the prosecution of
the sun.
Claude Monet, the classic of impressionism, is not to be reproached
with any incapacity. His execution never betrays him. He says what he
wants to say to the last dot on the “i,” and if what he has said fails
to satisfy, it is not because he lacked words, but solely because he
had no more to say. Monet is a tippler, a drunkard so far as light is
concerned. He cannot pass by any lively brilliant illumination without
turning in for a painting-bout. Form, however, is to him a matter of
indifference; it has no physiognomy for him, nor does it arouse in him
any association of ideas. He neglects it absolutely. He does not draw
or compose. In his pictures everything is without form, as in nature
herself, unless we regard her with pre-existing thoughts of arrangement
and meaning—in short, under the optical and logical categories. But
he has not his peer in arresting the fugitive magic of sportive rays,
their motes, their refractions on surfaces of every kind, on fixed
bodies, liquids, and gases. His “Railway Station,” with its wide
opening towards the railway line, the bluish clouds of smoke and steam
from the puffing locomotive transfused with light, the shimmering
vapour under the framework of the iron roof, is unsurpassable as a
rendering of absolutely meaningless effects of light. Pictures of
this sort will become expressive only when the photography of natural
colours is so perfected as to admit of instantaneous copies. Equally
remarkable as painting, and more valuable as higher art, is his
“Interior of a Room,” with a shadowy boy and plants in the foreground,
and a shining floor flooded with blue from daylight pouring in like
a cataract through the window in the background. More valuable
artistically, because this interior of great elegance, this outline
of a child, and this blue, fairy-tale tone of the flood of light, are
capable of awakening mood, _i.e._, will have an effect not only on the
senses but also on the soul; will stimulate not only the optic centres
of perception, but also the higher centres of conception and judgment.
“Breakfast in the Open Air,” and two landscapes and marine pieces, are
painted after the same rule as the two panels I have described.
Gueuneutte’s “Morning Porridge” draws its inspiration from Raffaelli,
Degas’s “Dancers and their Mothers” from Manet. I put Degas, however,
above Manet, for he draws more lightly and smoothly than the latter,
and when he has to depose to ugly reality under the witness’s oath of
his naturalistic conscience, he does it, not in an angry and provoking
way like Manet, but with the divine gift of humour.
Monet’s joy in light becomes with P. M. Renoir an affectation. He has
not the simple love of truth of his comrade. He falls into exaggeration
which betrays conscious purpose and straining after originality. His
two “Young Girls” at a piano of the colour of cranberry syrup; his
nude figure of a woman, on whose skin lights and shadows play so
unfortunately that she looks as if beaten black and blue, in places
even as if studded with the corpse-stains of putrescence in the second
degree; the “Girl in the Swing,” and particularly the “Ball at the
Moulin de la Galette,” seek rather to disconcert than to convince us
by their unwonted tones. These pictures have historical importance
as ancestors. From their jests of colour are descended the jokes of
Besnard, from their rain of sunlight through shadowing foliage comes
the piebaldness of a Zorn and particularly of a Max Lieberman, who make
an eruption of yellow and reddish spots fall on their bodies. Renoir’s
“Girl Reading” finally is a simple aberration. He who tolerates such
stumps of hands in a picture that is not meant for a mere sketch is
either without capacity or without conscience—the one as bad as the
other.
Pissarro is the triumph of seeing without thought. He seizes all the
marvels of transformation which the light of various periods of the
year and hours of the day accomplishes on objects over which it skims,
with the same certainty as Monet, but he imagines even less over it
than does the latter. With him the impressions which he feels from
the outer world do not generally pierce beyond the back of his eyes.
He is a remarkable instance of the sharpest sight with the retina in
conjunction with absolute soul-blindness.
The panegyrists of impressionism assert that it was not well
represented in the Caillebotte collection. That is a pretext of
perplexed swaggerers who can now be nailed fast, and who should in
shame and confusion crowd here, where it is easy to test their
wild exaggerations. Impressionism has never produced confessed more
characteristic works than those gathered in the Caillebotte room. It
has never been more straightforward than in Manet’s “Olympia” and
Degas’s “Theatre Mothers,” never more bright than in Monet’s “Breakfast
in the Open Air” and Pissarro’s landscape, never was it in a higher
degree lightening-sight and instantaneous painting than in Monet’s
“Railway Station.” Every verdict on impressionism based on this room
is an adequately grounded verdict, against which the attempted higher
appeal to I know not what unknown works must be rejected.
The painters who entered on the new movement are interesting as men,
because they aimed at much, and at what was comparatively great. They
are, from an artistic standpoint, uninteresting, because they achieved
little. It is the old tragedy of the will, to which the strength
plays traitor; of the mind, which subjectively and _in posse_ brings
about the highest, but objectively produces nothing, because it fails
in realisation. The Manets and Monets, the Renoirs and Pissarros,
wanted to create a new art by returning to the old truth. It gives
them a right to reckon themselves as belonging to the family of the
illustrious heroes of the Renaissance, who emancipated themselves
from the traditions of the Byzantine School, as the former did from
the sham-classic rule of a Couture, a Cabanel, or a Baudry. The man
affected by a Cimabue and a Giotto will not be unmoved in the presence
of Manet and Monet, especially of Monet, for he performed a creative
act. He said: “Let there be light,” and “there was light” in painting.
The miracle of Genesis is still being wrought to-day, and only in
Gustave Moreau and the Præ-Raphaelites has the Logos proved itself
powerless.
After paying them this tribute of recognition we will also take leave
of them. They have pointed out paths, but they have not walked in
them. In place of intricate Chinese signs, they have invented a free,
brilliantly progressive alphabet, but in this script they had nothing
to say. Their art is merely optical—neither emotional nor ideal. They
were commonplace—nay, to some extent—unbeautiful souls. That is why,
despite their honest passion for truth, and despite their precious
medium of sunshine, they have not been able to produce genuine art-work.
They have meanwhile not lived in vain. Their influence has been
fruitful. At first it indeed generally did harm. All bunglers flew to
imitating them, and the impudent rabble of both worlds alleged they
understood their teaching thus: “Drawing is superstition, and the
more repulsive a hide looks, so much more beautiful and especially
more modern it is.” But after this scum of the artistic rabble those
who had a vocation came over to the new movement, and showed what it
could achieve in consecrated hands. With the open air Roll became the
master he is; impressionism brought a Brangwyn to maturity; truth—the
beautiful truth, not the repulsive, vulgar truth—found its triumphs
in a Whistler and a Sargent. The weaknesses and mistakes of the
forerunners have furnished despicable parasites with the transitory
reputation, among the weak-minded, for genius, which will quickly
disappear before the recognition of their wretchedness. Their lofty
views, and, to some extent, the means of expression suggested by them,
have, however, equipped men of illustrious talent, who permanently
enrich mankind’s property in works of beauty.
ALFRED SISLEY