who was himself a curious mixture of reminiscences of Franz Hals,
Ribera, and Velasquez, with an admixture of personal self-will. He
lays great, dark, almost dirty spots on the canvas, and treats human
skin with boorish coarseness—I might almost say, with the curry-comb.
But what truth and energy in all the movements! How economically and
yet how exhaustively he can reveal the thoughts and feelings of his
subject. There is little in the whole of modern painting so pathetic as
his three-panelled picture, “Sea Folk,” that now adorns the Luxembourg
Museum. In the middle, the parting meal of the Jack Tars before
starting, round the village table fifteen people, strapping young men
with their womenfolk—mothers, wives, and sweethearts. Through the
open window dark-green night looks in; from the petroleum lamp there
gleams a sharp streak of yellow light; the men sit close to each other
in silence; forebodings and the sadness of leave-taking exalt them
and raise the souls of these horny-handed toilers to the regions of
poetic thought and dreams. On the right, the boat that is conveying the
sailors to their ship; some are rowing or steering, the rest are in a
reverie. All go carelessly to meet their fate, which perhaps will mean
merely prosaic seaman’s work on a voyage without any adventures, but
perhaps even heroic tragedies of struggle and destruction. On the left,
the women remaining behind, who watch from the shore the departing men,
their lovers, their bread-winners, with sorrowful love and prayer in
their looks, their mien, their hands, and their attitudes.
Possibly this profound picture moves me so much only because it
illustrates completely what I meant when I described the social mission
of art in the future in these words: “In a work of art which is to
attract the people, the people must find themselves again, but just
as formerly the priest and king did: magnified and ennobled. The work
of art must show them their own likeness, though a beautified one.
It must raise the people in their own eyes, teach them to respect
themselves.... Works which can show the dignity and beauty of the
occupations of the multitude, which are a sanctification of labour,
an apotheosis of the tragedies and idyls, of all the sweet and bitter
stirrings of emotion in the common life—these works, I believe,
constitute the type of the art work of the future.”
Cottet’s triptych is one of these works. It renders my abstract
deductions concrete. He is a great painter who can extract with so
sure a hand from the stone of everyday life all the gold of beauty it
contains.
Cottet gets his suggestions for the most part from Brittany. Almost
all his works, in any case his most famous ones, tell of Breton
nature and the life of the Breton people. His “Midsummer Fire” is
very affecting. The holiday fire is kindled beneath the clear sky of
a midsummer night; around it assemble the Bretons, ever faithful to
their traditions. The smoke ascends vertically; the flames glow on the
countenances gazing on them. Old women and children they are, for the
most part, who celebrate the solstice according to ancient custom;
there are hardly one or two men among the devout multitude. The sterner
sex, the middle-aged, laugh at the superstition; but the grandmothers
foster the custom of their ancestors, and entwine it into the earliest
childhood of their grandchildren as a dear remembrance that grows up
with all the joys and sorrows of their infant years. Thus what is old
is retained and is handed down from generation to generation. Cottet
has expressively illustrated this rule of folk-lore, not because he
intended it, but because he was true. Far and wide, as far as the eye
can reach, other fires are burning, and mirroring themselves in the
sea, and you can guess that, even around the furthest, which are hardly
visible in the night, the villagers are making a circle, just as round
the flame in the foreground. One single note hovers over the whole
of this landscape; one single feeling dominates the soul of all this
population. Each one of these old women whose glances are submerged in
the holy flame feels herself at this instant a unit of the whole race
inhabiting the hereditary granite soil, and part and parcel of her
forefathers who have long rested beneath the sod. Thus a real work
of art, without straying into literature, points far beyond its own
boundaries.
The “National Fête at Camaret” is celebrated so earnestly by the
Breton peasants that, in spite of the bright paper lamps on the tree,
it has the effect of a church solemnity. In “The Old Breton Nag,”
Cottet has translated from bronze into less severe painting one of the
never-to-be-forgotten coal-mine horses of Constantin Meunier. “Mourning
by the Sea” is one of his masterpieces. Grandmother, mother, and
daughter are sitting together on a stone bench on the shore. They are
all three wearing widow’s weeds. They are speechless and motionless,
abandoned to their thoughts, which abide with their dead. The sea,
which has swallowed their husbands, and to which they turn their backs,
lurks behind them in insidious calm behind two storms that depopulate
the coast, and leave behind the granite cliffs only old and young
widows and children, who, in turn, also will be trained for the sea—the
merciless sea, on which the poor devoted fishermen and sailors seek
their living and find their death. The existence of a population, its
truceless fight with hostile nature, is comprised in the black figures
of these three modern Niobes. To-day, too, as in its beginnings, true
art is myth-making.
To this series of pictures from Breton peasant life belongs also
an “Early Mass in Winter,” which at present hangs in the “Little
Palace,” at Paris. In the early dawn, beneath heavy clouds, a few
Breton peasant women, of whom we get a back view, are proceeding
across the flat, damp heath to an insignificant village church. They
wear the round mantle with a hood, which is usual in that country.
On first glancing at these short, broad, black figures without human
form, which look like wobbling, tightly-filled coal-sacks, I could not
help laughing aloud. But I observed in the mien of other observers
composedness, piety, and admiration. These evidently saw in the picture
only the walk to church, not the clumsy sacks, always a proof how
powerfully Cottet can conjure up a mood.
Once or twice Cottet has in some measure proved faithless to his usual
dark style of painting, and allowed himself to revel in colour. Thus
in his portrayal of a family of Breton fisherfolk, when the corpse of
a baby is laid on its bier. The dead child lies in its little open
coffin, around which four tapers are burning. On both sides of the
bier the seven or eight relatives stand grouped: the parents, aunts,
little brothers and sisters express, each in his or her way, their
grief, which, in the case of the still unconscious children only,
sinks to the level of mere curiosity. From the coffin proceed two
vividly red ribbons which stream across the bier down to the ground.
Flowers of a similar furious red are strewn over the bier. These shrill
values do not produce exactly a fine and harmonious effect in the
dark-toned general atmosphere with the opposite warm yellow spots of
the taper-flames. Moreover, the composition here is also not a happy
one. It is an error to make the pale little corpse of the child the
centre of a large picture. Death does not attract the eyes, but repels
them. It does not endure the rivalry of life unless it can compel
attention perhaps by means of special melodramatic circumstances or
symbolical value. The glance turns naturally to the living, feeling,
acting human beings, and thus the centre of the picture, which should
be the keystone of the arch that holds the composition together, seems
to be a gap. Christ’s dead body may be made the centre of a picture.
This dead Saviour will always be, in the beholder’s imagination, the
most living, the only living thing in the picture. So, too, the dead
Lazarus and Jairus’s little daughter are suitable for the main figures
in a composition, because these dead persons are virtually living, and
what makes them interesting is not death, but returning life. But the
innumerable “Lessons in Anatomy,” which were a favourite subject with
the Dutch painters (Aart Pietersen, M. van Mirevelt, Rembrandt, Adrian
Backer, Van Neck, Cornelis Troost, etc.) show how unsuitable a corpse,
to which no suggestions beyond its visible condition are united, is for
arresting the attention. Even a master such as Rembrandt is unable, in
what is, I suppose, the most famous of all “Lessons in Anatomy,” to
direct attention to the dead body. In spite of the large space occupied
by the corpse, we do not see it, but only Dr Tulp and his audience.
Cottet’s picture is the most convincing proof of the impossibility,
in a composition containing living persons also, of laying the chief
stress on a dead one. The psychic element, _i.e._, the mourners’ pain,
Cottet has, however, expressed with gripping force and truth. It is his
strength and glory that the inward, emotional life preponderates with
him so far beyond all externals.
At the first glance his “Breton Festival” is even more repellent than
the “Dead Baby.” The line of hills on the horizon, the stern heath, the
church, the breakfast laid on the white tablecloth in the foreground,
are certainly masterly achievements; but the Breton women grouped in
the open air round this still life wound us with their silk bodices
of the crudest blue, green, and violet! It is said that Breton women
actually dress in such shrill colours. This may be so; but that does
not really justify the crude reproduction of such brutalities. It is
asserted that time will subdue the overloud tones of these violent
colours and effect a reconciliation of them. On this subject our
children or grandchildren will have an opinion. What we see now is,
anyhow, unpleasant. Has Cottet wished to show that he is able to deal
with something besides asphalt and umber? If so, let him be told that
his dark harmonies of brown, grey, and black are more agreeable than
all these shrill penny-trumpet tones.
Cottet stands at the zenith of his life and artistic capacity. It
would be rash to predict his further development. Whether he keeps
to the dark style of painting, to which he owes his reputation, or
lets himself be led away by the strong, bright, full colours; whether
he remains faithful to Brittany, which seems with the young race of
artists to take the place of the classic Italy of their predecessors,
or seeks another soil and another landscape to serve as frames for his
men and women of deep emotions—in any case, Cottet has already secured
himself a place in the History of Art; deservedly, too, but chiefly
because the change in the valuation of tones is bound up with his name.
It was day; it became night. Manet and Monet had denoted dawn; Cottet
introduced evening twilight.
XII
PHYSIOGNOMIES IN PAINTING
John W. Alexander, an American, possesses an enviable skill and
certainty. He is master of the means of expression belonging to his
art, and has a trustworthy feeling for the harmony of those light,
subdued colours called in Fiance “Liberty” shades, after the name of
an American tradesman in the Avenue de l’Opéra who first brought into
vogue clothing, furniture, and wall stuffs in such peculiarly anæmic
and almost chlorotic colours. With his dexterous draughtsmanship and
charming harmony of cool, diluted blue, soft green, faint pale yellow
and delicate rose, he might possibly have pleased connoisseurs, but
could hardly have attained world-wide fame. He, therefore, hit upon
painting women’s portraits in amazing positions. He was the inventor
of acrobatics in portraiture. His women lie about, in orgiastic
contortions, on the ground or on sofas, with their legs up and heads
hanging over the edge, or with forms twisted twice round, like a screw,
or curled round like a sleeping dog, astonishing the inoffensive
spectator, and suggesting to him of corrupt imagination certain
lustful ideas. The means were effectual. Alexander became a first-class
firm, and the _crétins_ of criticism did not fail to praise his special
knowledge of, and feeling for, the “modern women of high-strung
nerves and Satanic caprices.” Now Alexander seems to find that he has
acquired sufficient fame, and is abandoning his follies. Among his
later pictures there very rarely occurs one of which the model betrays
his earlier leaning to gymnastics. The ladies he now paints are quite
decent in their attitudes, and only, perhaps, a serpentine movement in
their long, flowing garments reminds us still of the old gutta-percha
or snakelike contortions of his bodies. Alexander has slipped through
the fingers of his modernistic critics. Whilst they still keep on
raving about his “modern women with high-strung nerves and Satanic
caprices,” he is painting prosperously, peacefully, and intelligently,
and can now be recommended to the most respectable _bourgeois_ families
to immortalise their matrons.
Aman-Jean is a melancholy painter, whose palette has been tuned in
a minor key. He is the guitarist of the falling leaf, twilight,
tapestry-hung ancestral halls, sombre Gobelins. His pictures result
from the mood in which a man catches himself humming the _King of
Thule_. I do not say that this tone of colour does not possess its
charm. He who does not live his life like a thoughtless, devouring,
and digesting animal has, I suppose, on every blessed day of his
existence, an hour in which he finds his own soul in the subdued
and faded palette of Aman-Jean. It is, however, morbid to see the
phenomena of the universe merely as old Gobelins in the hue of twilight
hours. And morbid, too, is the way in which Aman-Jean transforms his
impressions of poems into a painter’s view. I know, for instance, a
“Beatrice” of his which affords the maximum of involuntary comicality.
Before an artificial-looking orange-tree, which she overtowers in
height, Dante’s beloved, with the upper part of her body thrown back,
and her stomach pushed forward, performs a sort of _danse du ventre_.
To her girdle she has a golden laurel garland hanging, which, as a
note of illumination in the dull night-hues, has an excellent effect
as _valeur_ (as the French say), but as an object or requisite is very
comic. Aman-Jean himself, with that misappreciation of subordination in
his pictures, which is so common among artists, lays far greater value
on such ridiculous whims than on his portraits. And yet it is only in
these that he shows with what sureness and intensity he is able to
seize and lay bare the most inaccessible and most mysteriously elusive
thing that reality has to exhibit, viz., living man. His “Jules Caze”
and his “Dampt the Sculptor” belong to the most delicate portrayals of
men, just as his “Paul Verlaine” and “Madame Henri Martin” must also
remain unforgettable by every one who has beheld them.
His portraits, to be sure, are not by any means of the same value.
There is, for instance, a portrait by him of a “Cossack Colonel” that
must fully mislead in regard to him. Materiality is entirely lacking
in the full-length figure he has painted of the Russian officer; it is
clapped flat on the canvas like a pancake. A laurel bush climbs from
the bottom to the top of the picture—one cannot say in the background,
as the picture has no depth, but, apparently, behind the man. The
shrub seems painted on the wall to the height of the head. It suddenly
grows plastic before our eyes, and shoots its leaves in front of the
colonel’s nose and forehead. By this symbolism which scoffs at all the
laws of perspective, the painter evidently wants to suggest relations
between the warrior and fame. One can only shrug one’s shoulders at
such puerility.
He is more and more breaking himself of the habit of regarding living
models, and allows himself to be hypnotised by the Præ-Raphaelite magic
lantern. We might wish for an Orpheus to take this noble artist by the
hand and lead him back to the light from the shades in which he has
lost himself. Perhaps the adventure would be more successful than in
the case of Eurydice.
Albert Besnard.—Contemporary painting knows no more harsh contrasts
than Puvis de Chavannes and Albert Besnard. The former saw nothing in
the world except spectres; the latter sees only fireworks. Puvis’s eyes
perceived no living colour; Besnard’s eye is in a state as if it had
received a violent blow from a fist, in consequence of which it saw the
proverbial ten thousand candles. There is nothing objectionable about
his delight in colour; on the contrary, any one who is not suffering
from Daltonism would be delighted to be invited to his debauch of
colours. If only Besnard only satisfied his taste in a somewhat nobler
way! It pleases him to introduce his dazzling rockets into women’s
faces, and there no man of healthy taste will care to follow him.
Besnard has marvellously beautiful yellow, orange, green, blue, and
red on his palette. He can attune them, too, to a beautifully sounding
harmony; but why must he put yellow on the cheeks, green on the hair,
and blue and orange on the shoulders in his portraits? Why must he
so portray his model as if it were streaked with luminous paint or
bathed in a stream of light that has flowed through a coloured glass
window? His mastery of drawing and modelling certainly makes his
colouring-run-mad somewhat more endurable, but it does not justify his
not searching for the tumult of colour which he loves in actual life
(where, after all, he might with some effort find them), but chasing
them into actual life without any regard or thought.
In the _salons_ of late years, Albert Besnard pursues a curious
policy. Near one or more aggressively stupid works, he exhibits a
portrait or painting which is amazingly rational. In this there is
method, unmistakably. It is a sort of self-defence. Besnard seems,
from his canvasses, to address the visitors to the “Salon” in these
words: “You see that I am in private life quite a sane individual
and correct painter, who is as much the master of his art as anybody
in the world. The other rubbish is for the fools of modernism. For
those I am bound at times to play the Jack Pudding, but you need not,
however, worry yourself about that.” Once, for instance, this painted
plea was the life-sized portrait of Denys Cochin, the nationalist
deputy for Paris—an excellent work, laborious, powerfully drawn, and
irreproachable in colour, which reminds one of Herkomer’s best style.
His clownery, on the other hand, was a huge picture which Besnard calls
“The Isle of the Blessed.” A bushy shore in the foreground, then a wide
expanse of water which looks partly like sand, partly like wine-soup,
and only in the remotest degree like natural water. Finally, in the
background, a flat shore with the outlines of a white town that stick,
as if cut out of paper, on the blue horizon. Across the level sea where
it is reddest, glides a skiff in which stands, in the attitude of the
Saviour calming the tempest, an enigmatical figure in red, flowing
garments, and with the countenance of an Indian chief, surrounded by
a grass-green and wine-dreg-coloured woman and a monkey-like rower
of sulphur-yellow hue. On the bank young maidens tarry for the new
arrivals, their light raiment, blown bell-shaped by the breeze,
reproducing a _motif_ of Botticelli. Between the trees groups of
bright-coloured figures are camped, and on the steps of a hill sit
or lounge flute-playing fauns, one of whom has the typical head of a
retired French colonel. The women in the skiff are distinguished by
distorted, acrobatic attitudes, which no model could sustain for ten
minutes without supports and props. On principle, no two figures are
placed side by side without being clad in the most opposite colours in
the spectrum. This arrangement of colours suggests the thought that
none of the figures must move away from the side of the others, and
none could step into another group, as otherwise the harmonies intended
by Besnard would be destroyed. That seems boldly and freely fanciful,
but is soberly and painfully subtilised. It is a mechanical game with
contrasts of colours, devoid of purpose and even of the charm of any
sense of colour. Albert Besnard has, in his later days, evidently
discovered Böcklin, or even has only heard him extolled and wants now
to make his own Böcklin. The fauns—up to their heads—the maidens on
the shore, the blue sea, the white town in the distance, are descended
in the direct line from the pictures of the Bâle master. But Besnard
has imitated the details as any one may copy a writing which he cannot
read. “The link of the spirit is all that it lacks.”
Jean Boldini is one of the most remarkable painters of female
portraits in our time. In these he makes himself most solicitous to
unite together the screw lines of Alexander’s demoniacs twisting in
hysterical convulsions, and Zorn’s bold, sunbeam dances. The faculty
of tumult hardly any one among contemporaries possesses like this
uncommonly skilful Italian. His pictures seem to fly up as from a
bursting bomb. Every fibre in his women palpitates and throbs. One of
his women sits half naked, just as if she had torn, in a rage, the
clothes off her body, on a lion’s skin, and he has made the head and
skin of this common floor-rug bristle with such an expression of cruel
savageness, that you jump back in terror from the expected spring of
the bloodthirsty monster. Another woman wears on her arm and shoulders
a feather boa with wonderful convolutions, which seems to rustle
from her in excitement like an eagle. A third lady stands in a door
frame—she seems to be about to spring forward with the leap of a tiger.
She wears one of those very modern, low-cut evening dresses, which are
fastened over the shoulders only by a tiny chain; her bust looks as if
it were laid bare because her dress was torn from her body in a brutal
struggle with a satyr. There is an atmosphere about this woman of all
hysterical convulsions, St Vitus’s dance, or defence with teeth and
claws against lawless attempts. There is a story about sorcerers and
witches who through a touch give another shape to men. This changing of
skin is not practised only in fairy tales. Certain portrait painters
also have it in their power. Old Cabanel transformed the rich, fat
wives of wholesale merchants and owners of house property, whom he
painted for 30,000 francs, into goddesses of the old Greek mythology.
Boldini by a spell transforms the ladies who trust themselves to
him into mænads, mad women, evil witches that ride of a night on
broomsticks to their Sabbath. I do not believe that people pay him
30,000 francs for that; but if a lady even disburses a centime to be
represented by Boldini as a Bacchante or a Vampire, she must be as much
a victim to neurosity as Boldini makes her out to be.