of realists to which I alluded in my foregoing appreciation of
the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum. He, too, like his
companions—Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Renouard—was a rebel against
traditions, and a preacher of new gospels. He also denied old idols
with fine disdain, and preached doctrines that seemed to him to embrace
in themselves the whole truth. He managed, indeed, to collect a few
convinced disciples, but, on the other hand, hardly any congregation
about his altar or pulpit; and this was due simply to the sobriety and
uncongeniality of his dogmas, which failed to satisfy the cravings for
æsthetic devotion of the faithful.
Sisley was a landscape painter. He was purely this, to the exclusion of
every admixture. He never introduced a human figure, and, so far as I
remember, only one of an animal, into his paintings. The only life that
moved and stirred in them was that of atmosphere: the play of lights,
of their refractions, of their coloured dust, of their vanishing in
shadows and darkness of various depths. Even the vegetable world,
though one of the most important elements in academical landscape
painting, he treated slightingly. He had no respect for the attractive
individuality of a tree. It interested him at most as an object in
his field of view, which catches and diverts the beams of the sun in
a particular way. He saw nothing of the marvels of colour and form
of the minute life, that is displayed in a piece of turf, a bush, or
underwood, and reveals to the thoughtful and experienced eye the whole
nature-tragedy of the struggle for existence: the despairing striving
in the various plants for air and light, or moisture and shade; the
victorious domination of one or several species; the meek supplication
for mercy of single scattered flowers or plants; the defeat and
flight of families unable to maintain their position against superior
antagonists; the intrusion of bold strangers demanding for themselves a
place among the old settlers; the confederacies of friendly groups that
reside together and trust each other; the single combats of enemies
seeking to throttle and uproot one another. He who has never gazed
deeply into nature perhaps regards all these pictures of combat and
triumph as mere phrases, corresponding to nothing real. The biologist
of plants knows better, to be sure, and many a landscape painter too;
so did the first English Præ-Raphaelites especially. However unbearable
their vagaries and perversions may be—on these I will not enter
now—this one thing must be said in their praise: they understand and
love plant-life. For them every grass and herb, to say nothing of those
lords, the trees, has a physiognomy, a personal mystery, which they
know how to unriddle, and reveal, or, at any rate, indicate. Of all
this Sisley knows nothing. For him a grassy mead is a plain of colours
with gradations, starred with varied patches; always a mere study of
light and nothing else; never an expression of events of life.
Here lies the limitation of his capacity. In my book, “Paradoxes,” I
have tried to classify painters according to the rank of that segment
of the central nerve-system, in which their talent is rooted. By
this method I arrived at a distinction between painters who feel
joy only in colours and their harmonies, and others who, besides
delighting in colour, often even without this, have a developed sense
of the proportion of things in space, therefore, of forms, reciprocal
distances, movements so far as these latter can be indicated by means
of the painter’s fixed process: those, in short, who know how to elicit
from visible phenomena an invisible, emotional significance, and to
represent them so that they express, in a natural way, psychical
processes and feelings, without becoming falsified through the
intentional introduction of arbitrary features foreign to them. Now,
Sisley is an instructive instance of those painters who are painters
only through their retina and lowest centres of perception, viz., their
feeling for colour, and the vivid sensation of enjoyment it affords
them.
Sisley has the most delicate sense for the lightest gradations and
depths of colour. If I may use an image from an adjacent intellectual
domain, he does optically what an ear would do acoustically which
was capable of feeling purely all the tones of a chromatic divided,
perhaps, into sixty-fourths. This faculty gives him his rank as an
artist, but it was also the torturing demon of his life; for he wanted
to reproduce with equal clearness what he saw so distinctly. That is,
however, impossible by the medium of oil-painting. Let it never be
forgotten that the colours an artist uses are very different from
the natural appearances which they wish to recall. All painting is
a translation that falls short of the original text, and even the
most refined palette only permits a vulgar groping after the subtle
play of colour in the reality. It is sheer convention, to which our
eyes are artificially trained, that we recognise in definite play of
colours, human flesh, an evening sky, foliage, or mirroring water. In
all cases we have, at most, approximations before us, and even a man’s
countenance by Franz Hals reproduces the true coloration of the skin
on a human face, as little as perhaps the well-known _scherzo_ in the
second movement of the Pastoral reproduces the true note of the golden
oriole. Sisley, overlooked, like the majority indeed of impressionists,
and like many very juvenile stipplers and black and white artists,
this technical main condition—if you like, this main defect—of all
painting with media as at present known; and he obstinately insisted on
overcoming a difficulty that is, as a matter of fact, insuperable. The
whole labour of his life is a struggle with the resistance of matter,
intensely pathetic, but, nevertheless, finally only irritating, because
its utter hopelessness is admitted. He tries to square the circle,
which, as may be proved to him, is not feasible, and he aimlessly
dissipates his energies in this futile effort. He is bent on arresting
the most fugitive vanishing, the gentlest swaying of a ray of light,
and, as it were, the fourth decimal place of a fraction of colour, and
on fixing it on the canvas. And as he cannot conjure forth this feat
from his colour-tubes, in spite of the most learned and complicated
mixing, he tries to reach his goal by newly invented tricks of the
brush. Thus he gets to dotting and spotting. Innumerable minute touches
with the brush are to leave behind a chaos of colour-dots, from which
the eye may come to discern, or, at any rate, get an inkling of, the
play of colour in the actual object. This method is extremely laborious
and risky. It postulates great patience and ability to emphasise in
the minute work the firm lines of the drawing. For if one loses sight
of these lines, or cannot make them ring out clearly from the colour
gamut disseminated equally over the whole canvas, the picture dissolves
into a shapeless daub. Sisley himself is often wrecked on this rock. By
his method, however, in a few happy moments, he obtains, to be sure,
effects which would scarcely be deemed possible. Then we may enjoy in
his pictures a real dance of sun-motes in transfulgent air.
A single picture of Sisley’s even the connoisseur easily passes by.
It is insignificant. Even a whole row of pictures which represent
different themes will hardly make a great impression. At most, certain
delicacies of tone, a certain far-sighted clearness of atmosphere,
make an impression. If, on the other hand, you see near one another
panels which depict the same subjects at different hours of the day or
seasons of the year, under different lights and conditions of weather,
you grasp in astonishment the meaning of this artist. The subject is
the same, but so altered as to be hardly recognisable. People marvel
at the power with which Sisley can arrest strangely changing aspects,
and gain some faint idea of the difficulty which the exposition of
observations calls for, observations which are generally out of reach
of any but the most acute feeling and the most painful attention.
Sisley has openly admitted that his skill is unintelligible without
the key afforded by comparison. That was why he exhibited, as a rule,
at least two—usually many more—treatments of the same subject. Thus in
the _Salon_ in the Champs de Mars in 1898, he showed a beach, “Lady’s
Cove,” in two lights; and, in 1896, Moret Church, in transparent pale
lilac just before sunset, and also in softly-veiled slate-grey in rainy
weather. I remember a row of studies of the same village church, which
ran through all the divisions of the spectrum, one after another,
and, on each succeeding panel, was a revelation the more dazzling in
proportion as one already knew its form in all its details. Sisley has
hardly ever had his equal in transposing a piece into different keys.
Admiration for the almost morbidly exaggerated sensitiveness to the
slightest differences in tones of colour, and sympathetic feeling for
the artist’s despair at the inadequacy of a technique, gross, after
all, as the medium of the most delicate intentions—these are the
impressions which one feels at even the most friendly consideration
of Sisley’s most successful works. Dreaming and longing, reminiscence
and presentiment, on the other hand, they never inspire, for they are
absolutely lacking in all psychic, emotional, and imaginative sense.
From the example of Sisley, we recognise the accuracy of the maxim
which, when put nakedly, sounds almost provokingly paradoxical, and
yet is literally correct, viz., that landscape painting, or, at any
rate, a certain kind of landscape painting, is the most literary of
all species of plastic art, the one from which the least is received,
and into which the most is put. Landscape painting seems to reproduce
nature herself, and therefore necessarily to be as objective as a land
surveyor’s plan, or even as a photograph. It is, as a matter of fact,
incomparably more subjective than portrait, historical, or _genre_
painting, for there is throughout, not nature over again, but the
features of nature which have excited the attention of the painter,
and aroused in him a mood. It therefore discloses to us, more than
any other kind of painting, the soul of the painter, the peculiarity
of his mode of feeling, the bent of his dreams, and the object of
his longing. If every work of art is a confession on the part of the
artist, landscape painting is a particularly complete and honest
acknowledgment. It is a portrait of the artist, which he himself has
painted, transcribing all the wrinkles of his soul.
Nature in herself is absolutely expressionless. The feeling of the
person who contemplates her first adds expression, just as his senses
translate the movements of the atmosphere and matter, which are, in
themselves, devoid of colour and sound to the perceptible values
of colours and tones. The contemplation of nature awakens in us
associations of ideas, and these we project into nature. Therefore we
find, again, in this latter the whole range of emotion and thought of
our consciousness, and nature, therefore, influences every one who
contemplates her correspondingly to his education and mental habits.
Landscape painting is, then, also a continuous illustration of the
literature of its time. It is anti-classical in the Renaissance and
Late Renaissance up to Poussin; Ossianic and Rousseauesque in the
eighteenth century, and, in Corot, is Lamartinish. It would, of course,
be going too far to point out here what the relations are between
each individual great landscape painter and the writings of his
contemporaries; and how certain notable exceptions from the rule of
parallelism between landscape painting and the fashion of the day in
literature—Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, and Turner (just to mention only
three)—are to be explained. It is, meanwhile, not to be disputed that
the landscape painter approaches nature with a soul filled with the
literary spirit of his time, and puts into her what he has retained
from his reading. A painting, then, awakens also in the mind of the
spectator an echo of all the poetic melodies that have enthralled him,
and it is the soft echo of these thousands of poetic voices in our
soul, to which we listen when we enjoy a landscape painting.
We listen, however, in vain before a picture of Sisley’s; all is still
in our soul. This is because the painter has regarded nature from a
wholly unliterary standpoint. She awakens in him no associations of
ideas, therefore his pictures awaken none in us. He has seen the play
of colour, found his delight in it, and has taken no further thought,
but has merely striven to reproduce it accurately. We follow his
efforts with curiosity, and approve the results if they are successful.
But in this appraisement, humour and imaginative power have no part.
Is such landscape painting art, or a clever trick? The question is
worth careful consideration.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
One of the most interesting artists in our times was this Pissarro,
born at St Thomas in the Danish Antilles, though of a Dutch Jewish
family of Spanish extraction settled in Curaçoa, who died in Paris in
1903 at the age of seventy-three. He was a born painter, of the class
whose sense of form hardly exceeds the average, whose remarkably fine
perception of colour, however, reacting very strongly on every optical
irritation, makes the excitement of the retina the source for them of
profound feelings of pleasure or the contrary, and fixes their idea and
thought, to a certain extent polarises it according to colour.
It is sufficient to say few words as to his outer life. Impelled
by his bent for painting, he came to Paris at the age of twenty,
and had the good fortune to be taken as a pupil by old Corot. He
saw Th. Rousseau and Millet working with his master, and he lived
during the most susceptible years of youth amongst such originals,
in the most glorious Barbizon period. His natural tendency directed
him imperiously to landscape painting. This, then, is the substance
of his whole life as an artist. Incited by Millet’s example, in his
young days he put peasants in his fields and meadows, but they were
always mere accessories in the landscape, and arrested the eye less
than the ground and plants. He had then also sufficient knowledge of
himself to abandon, at an early stage, human figures, for he realised
that there was more life in the tiniest sod of his turf than in his
conscientious but insignificant villagers. In the high school, in
which it was his privilege to learn, he acquired that certainty and
force which distinguished him up to his old age. When, however, he had
mastered Corot’s brilliant technique and Rousseau’s draughtsmanship
and composition, he ceased to be an imitative disciple, and with full
deliberation, went his own ways, which for a time lay far from Corot’s
goal, but at last, by a wonderfully circuitous route, brought him back
to it once more. Not long did he try modestly and laudably, with a good
young man’s carefully moderated works, in the _Salon_ for certificates
of industry and good marks from the academical masters. At once he
joined the hot-headed set; he exhibited, from 1864 onwards, only in the
“Salon of the Rejected” and with the “Independents,” and became one of
the most prominent men in the group of impressionists.
Nothing is funnier than to read the explanation of the terms
“Impressionists” and “Impressionism” of certain art-gossipers among
the critics in Germany. These transcendental phrasegrinders, who have
no notion how the word arose, believe it was invented by painters or
æsthetics with the set purpose of characterising an artistic tendency,
and of indicating elliptically a method of execution; and, with the
rapturous, prophet-mien common among this brotherhood, they treat us
to the deepest and most breath-ravishing explanations of the word. The
truth is that the expression owes its origin to the jest of a comic
paper that intended nothing special by it, least of all an æsthetic
theory. In 1874 the painters who for ten years had been known as the
“Open Air” artists or “Realists” exhibited a number of their works
in the reception-room of the writer and photographer, Nadar. Claude
Monet appeared, amongst others, with a sunset, which was quite in the
manner of Turner’s last years, and he entitled it “Impression.” It was
a remarkable and characteristic work, without form, consisting only of
streaks of red and orange, in the highest degree offensive to those who
will not have the contemplation of nature restricted to the observation
of colours, but look also for outline and modelling. A wanton scoffer,
making merry in the “Charivari” over this exhibition, seized on Monet’s
“Impression” as the pattern of the new style, sneered at it in the
tone of a genuine back-biter, and, with the object of belittling them,
called Monet’s fellow-combatants “Impressionists,” by which he meant
only that, according to his view, their pictures were daubs, just like
Claude Monet’s “Impression.” That is the simple origin of the word
into which the German commentators have read something exceedingly
mysterious and wonderful.
Pissarro belonged to Monet’s circle of friends, and fell under the
designation, which rapidly became current, of “Impressionist.” In his
case, it only means that he sought and found in nature only effects of
light, only the play of sunbeams on things and around things.
In the three or four centuries that landscape painting has been raised
to the rank of a branch of art—I leave out of consideration, in this
place, the ancient landscape, because the modern development is
unconnected with it—an enquiry, which enters into the motives and aims
of painters, can distinguish three different kinds of landscape, which
I would term respectively the literary, the lyric, and the optical.
I do not choose these new designations for old and well-known things
arbitrarily, but because, in my opinion, they mark what is essential
better than do the prescriptive ones.
Literary landscape, on which I have already briefly expressed my
views in treating of Sisley, is that which traditionally goes under
the names of historical, heroic, ideal, or artificial landscape. It
is not prompted by delight in nature, but is either the offspring of
imaginative power or a piece of intellectual know-all work, in both
cases, the result of reading. It is, to put it briefly, a continuous
illustration of the literature in vogue. Since the Renaissance, ancient
heroic materials have been specially favoured in poetry. The Spanish
theatre, Corneille, and Racine lived on them. Even if they placed the
lofty exploits of their heroes in a less remote past and on another
stage than the ancient world, still, they endowed them with hundreds
of reminiscences of the Græco-Roman mythology and history. Poussin,
and even Claude Lorrain, conceived their landscapes as the frames of
heroic romances and dramas. They were designed as stage decoration,
which the spectator might people from his memory with figures in Roman
mail-armour or Gothic plate-armour, familiar to him from contemporary
poetry. In order to facilitate this play of fancy, ancient temples
or ruins, perhaps even men in classical garb, helpfully stimulate
the association of ideas. J. J. Rousseau substituted the sentimental
for the heroic fashion; but the return to nature, which he and his
innumerable imitators preached, did not to landscape painters at
all mean the sinking into the contemplation of God’s actual world,
but only the substitution for the heroes and knights, the upright
or fallen marble pillars of their predecessors, of shepherds and
shepherdesses, rustic cottages and herdsmen’s fires. Thus landscape
painting illustrated in turn Orlando Furioso, Jerusalem Delivered,
the Æneid, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, Rousseau, Gessner,
and Ossian; then, nearer to our time, Victor Hugo and the Romantics,
Zola and the Naturalists, down to the latest symbolists and mystics,
whose contemplation, so far as one can speak of such a thing in their
gassy heads, greets us from the pictures of Burne-Jones and his
continental imitators, and also from the landscape compositions of
Puvis de Chavannes and Henri Martin. It may be safely affirmed that,
of the pictures of literary landscape, not a single one would have
been painted unless a book or some species of literature had, to some
extent, commissioned them with an exact specification of all details.
Lyrical landscape is that which is perhaps also designated landscape
of mood. It is more consistent with nature than literary landscape. It
owes much less to reminiscence of books or plays; its only relation
to literature is that through this the painter is schooled to be more
susceptible of certain features of nature. Landscape pictures of this
species could be painted under some circumstances by artists who had
never read a book or heard a poem, if only their own disposition
were attuned to poetry. For this painting the landscape itself is
a poem—ballad, romance, or idyll, in many cases, perhaps, even a
melodrama. It tells some tale, or hints at one, the more delicately
so much the more expressively. The wrinkles of the ground, the
irregularity and abruptness of the lines of mountains, the gloom of the
woods, awaken presentiments; our yearning follows the paths which are
lost in the blue distance, or behind hills and bends; coolness rises
from the foaming rivulet; mystery broods over the motionless fish-pond.
Everything unspoken, or partly unspeakable, which a keenly perceptive
man of deep contemplation imports into nature, moves and reigns in and
over the lyric landscape painting. It expresses a complex, subjective
mood, embracing in itself many elements of sense, feeling, and
thought—the joy of spring, the melancholy of autumn, the cheerlessness
of winter, the shudder at the weird, the dread of eternity. It is
viewed anthropomorphically. It owes its strongest effects to traits
which do not exist in nature herself, but are added to her by human
imagination. Japanese art knows only lyric landscape. In Europe it was
first developed by the great Dutchmen, Ruysdael and Van Ostade, to
attain in Corot its zenith unsurpassed up to the present time. As it
lays expression into its forms, it must figure the latter distinctly.
It draws and composes, therefore, with deliberation. It proceeds from
the realistically rendered topographical anecdote, even if it achieves
this by the transcendental.
Optical landscape, finally, is that which seeks to reproduce only
the play of convergent or divergent, of reflected or broken light
in nature. It is neither book-illustration nor views of places. It
does not invite to the enjoyment of nature in the sense of the Sunday
excursionist from big towns, or the summer tripper. It offers no scene
with suggestion that we should live out our subjective moods there.
The outlines, the plastic of the bodies, are a matter of indifference
to it. Everything is merely a patch of colour to it; only an arena
of dancing sunbeams. It wants to reproduce, as truly and fully as
possible, the change and merging of lights and shades, the reciprocal
influence of neighbouring and overlapping colours, the _crescendo_ of
hues in the foreground and their fading away in the perspective. It
systematically rates the intellectual and moral relations as foreign to
its art. It is not enthusiastic for a particular season of the year or
a certain architecture of cliffs and mountains. It knows nothing of the
secret magic of water, heath, forest, or snow-plain. It gives light in
scales, and in harmonised and dissonant chords, and will give nothing
else. This landscape painting is an art of purely sensual preception,
which may call pre-existent feelings and thoughts over the threshold of
consciousness, but brings about no feelings and thoughts of itself. It
is to be compared with the effect of the Æolian harp, which stimulates
our hearing with melodious sound, but says nothing thematically
differentiated to it. Debussy, latterly, consciously strives back to
these origins of acoustic pleasure. The disciples of Turner in England
and on the Continent enter in landscape on the same way back to a style
of painting which, neglecting form, lays stress on the harmonies of
light and colour.