wisdom in art. That everybody knows who has occupied himself with
contemporary painting otherwise than as a picture-dealer. Among the
long-haired ones who dwell on the mountain land of Montmartre, no
name conveys a worse insult. He who wants to make an impression on
the Botticelli ladies when visiting the “Salon,” must make a grimace
of sudden, severe nausea when he comes across a painting by this
“manufacturer of perfumery labels.” On the other hand, Bouguereau
has managed to collect in his head in a coronet of all sorts all the
honours that blossom for an artist in France. He is Commander of the
Legion of Honour and Member of the Institute; he gained the _Prix de
Rome_, and has pocketed all the medals that the Salons and Universal
Exhibitions had to bestow. His works fetch the highest prices in the
market, and if no Parisian artist finds purchasers, the big pork
butcher of Chicago, that painters’ Providence, to whom in their
prayers they turn their countenances, always has gold for Bouguereau.
The deplorable Philistine, who would also very much like to have a
little share in the æsthetic enjoyments of this world, tears his hair
and groans: “Where is truth?” The _Chat Noir_ treats Bouguereau as
a buffoon, but the Academy erects altars to him. Criticism scoffs,
but America pays. And, however readily the Philistine yields to the
appearance of daring modernity, if he listens to the voice of his own
heart, he notices to his embarrassment that Bouguereau, as a matter
of fact, pleases him. He gazes with secret delight at his “Cupid and
Psyche,” his “Pearl,” and “Innocence,” his “Oblation to Cupid,” his
“Wasps’ Nest,” his “Cupid _mouillé_,” his “Holy Women at the Tomb.” It
is always the same: a sweet maiden, or even several, a well-built youth
of rosy body and slender limbs, laughing little mouths with pearly
teeth, blooming cheeks, snowy bosoms and rosy fingers—all lovely, all
a delight to the eye. The Philistine wriggles under the decree of
fashion, which forces him to find these charming things horrible, and
his troubled look frames the question that his mouth dares not utter:
“Why? Why?”
I think we are doing a good work when we answer him calmly and in
a friendly manner, without exaggeration or cheap witticisms which
neither explain nor prove anything, not even necessarily the sincerity
of the witling. Bouguereau pleases the insufficiently trained eye,
because he paints prettily; but in art prettiness is the direct
opposite of the beautiful, for it is untruth, since a conscience
originally delicate or happily trained only feels truth to be beautiful.
Prettiness is necessarily untruth, for it is that which is conceived
without trouble, which excites no opposition, which compels no strain
on the attention and no adaptation on the part of the spectator to the
peculiarity of the artist. Its effect is merely the effect of what
meets the spectator’s pre-existent thoughts or feelings completely.
This pre-existing element is not, however, the result of collective
observation and strong feeling, but the dissipated precipitate of the
most fugitive, indifferent perception, which is totally unfitted to
obtrude into the world of phenomena.
The artist whose goal is prettiness, does not glance at reality, but at
the soul of the crowd which he wishes to please. He does not portray
what he sees, and what makes an impression on him, but what suits the
feeble, inexact concepts which the average man forms of things. He is
a courtier of the crowd; he flatters their shallowness and incapacity.
He wants them to say, with a self-satisfied smile: “This man is a great
artist, for he has the same way of looking at things as ourselves.”
Prettiness is, in lyric poetry, rhyming “love” with “dove,” “heart”
and “part”; in drama, it is rewarding the good characters with
advantageous marriages and lucrative posts, and making the wicked fall
into the pit they have dug for others. For this is just what the public
expects; such is the world-picture which the world has arranged for
itself, and it is grateful to the poet that he does not force it to
rectify its comfortable way of thinking.
In the plastic arts prettiness is the average or typical. Bouguereau
paints a pattern, not a person. He has a canon to which he holds; and
if he would only go so far as to look at real human beings, and had
to admit that nature does not act according to his canon, he would
certainly say: “So much the worse for nature.”
Superficiality always confuses prettiness with the ideal. One cannot
fail to see that prettiness lacks exactness. This inexactness is,
however, praised as an improvement on reality: the master of prettiness
understands nature better than she understands herself. He guesses what
she would, but cannot always, do, and comes with his superior creative
power to help the poor incapable. The truth is that prettiness is the
exact reverse of the ideal; for the ideal is the presentiment of future
developments: prettiness the pompous repetition of what is commonplace.
The idealist is impelled by a restless longing after novelty to
represent; he seeks in invisible germs which the average soul does
not perceive to detect the later glory of blossom. The painter of
prettiness shows scant satisfaction in attainment, and his creation is
nothing but a sleepy reminiscence of impressions he is accustomed to.
The chief harm done by prettiness in art is that it confirms the
multitude in their dulness instead of arousing them from it. What
the “man in the street” feels in presence of a work of Bouguereau’s
is self-complacent pleasure at the artist agreeing with him. He
will expect the same feeling also from real works of art, and be
disappointed if he fails to find it. Pretty paintings deaden the mind
of the average man for powerful works, which teach men to see, educate
eyes, operate for cataract, and heal colour-blindness, are keys to the
hidden sense of lines of movement, interpret the symbolism of form,
and point the way to unknown beauty. The bloodthirsty backwoodsman
of Montmartre is, therefore, right to think little or nothing of
Bouguereau, and to scalp him; and the Philistine who expects to elevate
and enrich his mind by art must make the sacrifice of renouncing the
cheap pleasure which the engaging banality of prettiness procures him.
If Bouguereau has anything personal to say, he can say it no worse than
many another. His “Portrait of Himself” in the velvet painting-jacket
is sincere, and at any rate strives to be honest. It is true that here,
too, he has not been quite able to overcome his habit of embellishing,
and his cheeks are distressingly rosy. One could not expect from
him the almost terrifying inexorableness with which a David has
confessed the dreadful grimace of his face paralysed on one side, and
a Rembrandt, in his old age, the puffiness of his features and the
wateriness of his eyes. These men had such a pride in truthfulness
that, in their anxiety not to be partial, they felt almost hostile to
themselves, and tried, and judged themselves accordingly. Bouguereau
does not understand why he should treat himself more ill-temperedly
than his Cupids and nymphs, and smiles good-humouredly at himself.
Frank Brangwyn.—This young Englishman, born in Belgium, is a painter
of the great class from which the kings of art spring. In his delight
in colour, he reminds us of Delacroix in his _Sturm und Drang_ period;
in the dauntlessness with which he wields the brush, of Franz Hals
himself, the boldest fighter with this weapon that ever lived up to
now. His two first works exhibited in the Paris Salon, “A Sailor’s
Funeral” and “All Hands Aloft,” instantly called attention to him. His
“Buccaneers” was a veritable revelation. In a boat, floating on the
blue-black tide of the Carribean Sea, row some life-sized fellows clad
in variegated material, their heads bound with bright red cloths. In
the glowing, tropical sun that swelters down on them, everything is
a blinding, bright flame: the foam, wet oars, the ship’s planks, the
clothing and headgear of the people. The brown cut-throats get in
this noonday glory an almost superhuman relief, and in their savage
countenances a calm consciousness of their formidableness is revealed,
which even in the picture has the effect of a challenge to mortal
combat. A year later he exhibited “Goatherds,” likewise life-sized,
and likewise plunged in the noonday glow of a southern sky, and, in
addition, a reposefully coloured and marvellously deep night-piece,
“The Three Holy Kings offering the Infant Jesus Gold, Incense, and
Myrrh.” His ability was further enhanced by a “Market on the Shore” and
a “Miraculous Draught of Fishes.”
The “Market on the Shore” is held in a Barbary harbour. Little
bright-coloured carpets are spread on the yellow loamy sand, where
negroes in brown and green-lined _haiks_ and _burnooses_ lie squatting.
They are surrounded by poorer people in fantastic rags, with red
_tarboosh_ on long, clean-shaven Hamitic skulls. Beyond, three ships
extend their prows over the flat beach, and in the background, on the
further side of a strip of water, we get a glance, through a gateway
with three pointed arches, at the dim throng of a mysterious Mohammedan
town.
The “Miraculous Draught of Fishes” takes place in the evening. The
fishing-boat rocks softly on the almost oil-smooth, dark blue mirror
of the Lake of Genesareth, on the shallow valleys and crests of whose
waves the setting sun’s nearly horizontal beams strew leaves and
strips of thin gold. Four fishermen are busy hauling in with powerful
movements the net heavy with their catch. Behind their vessel, a
green, flat-bottomed boat with sails, steered by a disciple, carries
the Saviour, veiled in the gloaming, across the water.
Religious subjects have an especial attraction for Brangwyn. In his
great picture, “The Scoffers,” he shows a man with the bearded curly
head of an enthusiast, fastened to a pillory. The scene, as is usual
with Brangwyn, is an Eastern town. A crowd, which is amusing by its
negro and Moorish types and their charming garments and rags, presses
on the prisoner, who is wearing the strange garb of a Western artisan,
and reviles him with the words from their mouths opened in sneering
laughter; with the glances of their stupid, malicious eyes; with the
gesture of their forked and pointed fingers. Pity is mingled with
curiosity only in the case of a handsome, brown, young maiden in
the foreground, who, with a noble water-pot on her head, evidently
returning home from the spring, remains standing in order to gaze at
the scene. You may understand the story as you please. Perhaps it is
a foreign socialist or anarchist, who tried to preach his doctrines
there, and to whom the authorities are giving short shrift, and
whose only reward now is the mockery of the stupid crowd to whom he
intended to bring a message of salvation. Perhaps the incident has a
deeper and more solemn sense, and is the subjective, half-touched-up,
half-modernised representation of the mocking of Christ when He was
bound to the pillar in order to undergo flagellation. Whether the drama
is conceived from a sociological or theological standpoint, it is of
supreme power. The great pain of the altruist who sacrifices himself
for mankind, and sees his sacrifice despised; the great sin of the
populace that is thoughtlessly guilty of the most horrible ingratitude,
are strikingly expressed. And in what form is this rich spiritual and
moral purport clothed? Such repose and nobility in varied colour; such
witchery in the flat triad of dark yellow, reddish purple, and deep
blue; such amazing sureness in modelling by means of mere patches of
colour without outlines, it has not been my lot to meet with twice in
contemporary painting.
Neither must I leave his “St Simon Stylites” unnoticed. The saint is
sitting, with his back resting against a pole, on the platform of his
lofty pillar. On the other edge of the platform, ascending by a ladder,
appears a priest in mass vestments, accompanied by a deacon, in order
to administer Holy Communion to the Stylite, who is apparently dying.
The story, however, is a matter of indifference. It is the wonderful
harmony of colours that makes this picture so expressive. It is late in
the day; twilight is approaching; the last ray of sunlight is finely
sprinkled through the air around the figures above the roofs of the
Syrian town, from which arises a transparent cloud, so thin that it is
rather a breath, an exhalation, than a vapour, and is more surmised
than seen. A flight of swallows glides past the saint, and the birds,
with their arrow-swift and pleasing motions, observed in the precise
Japanese way, greatly help to produce an impression of height and
airiness, which Brangwyn attains chiefly by his art of distributing
light, and his eerie perspective.
Brangwyn fixes in his pictures all the magic of noon and midnight. He
shows his figures either flushed by the quivering heat of the full
burning sun, or covered with a veil of half-transparent darkness. Both
illuminations have the peculiarity of suppressing all subsidiary work
and letting only what is essential remain. The face or body of a man
steeped in sun rays becomes almost transparent. Behind the skin and the
connecting tissues which we perceive only as a covering, the muscles
and bones come forth. The intense brightness prepares a body almost
as the dissecting knife of anatomy. Darkness has a similar effect; it
blots out the connections and transitions, and only accentuates the
strong lines of construction. Only diffused light gives an equal value
to all the parts of a surface; it shows all and explains nothing.
Direct light, on the other hand, just like darkness, graduates
phenomena, makes us recognise at the first glance what is external
ornamentation and what are the supports and timber.
Brangwyn is an impressionist in the best sense of the word, a perfect
representative of what Impressionism contains that is justifiable. He
does not stop over trivialities and accessories. He sees only the
essential in phenomena, but this he sees with infallible certainty and
intensity. A feature which marks exhaustively the direction, purpose,
and force of a movement; a spot of colour that challenges and fixes the
eye, as a sudden stroke of a bell does the ear—these are the optical
elements which he grasps, and with delightful simplicity, weight, and
carelessness, and, as it were, in student fashion, throws on the canvas
“straight from the wrist.” The spectator finds once more in the picture
exactly the component parts of the phenomenon which in the actual thing
would alone excite and fix his attention, and, corresponding to his
psychological habit, he supplements the indications of the painting by
pictures from his own memory, till it becomes a perfect copy of the
real thing, which then includes also all the subsidiary matters either
merely hinted at, or quite passed over by the painter.
Brangwyn is one of those rare gifted _virtuosi_ who does not need to
draw. The line does not subsist for him, just as it does not subsist in
nature. He models with light and colour. He puts spots irregularly near
one another, little and big, long and short, angular and round, bright
and dark, white and coloured; and from these spots, from this mosaic of
correctly-felt effects of light, he builds up the phenomenon in space
with incomparably genuine and intense corporeality. Our judgment adds
the lines which the painter has never drawn, as it does when looking at
the actual thing. We have here the optical elements themselves, which
are perceived by the retina of the eye as mere gradations of light, but
are apprehended and interpreted by the higher centres as coloured and
plastic phenomena. Such a way of painting demands infallible certainty
of sight and trustworthy obedience of the hand, else it leads to
bankruptcy in art.
Paul Cézanne.—He was one of the protagonists and pioneers of
Naturalism. He was with Claude Monet, Caillebotte, and the other
Impressionists an interesting subverter; with Zola he was for a moment
a victor, and is now vanquished, although, probably, he will not
admit it. A barefooted Masaniello, whom a successful revolution of
the rabble carries to the top and lodges in the king’s palace, but
who has very soon to exchange his purple mantle for his hereditary
rags. Fortunately, the lot of overthrown art-revolutionaries is not so
horrible as Masaniello’s; they do not end under the executioner’s hand.
Cézanne has one thing in his favour which prepossesses us for him,
_i.e._, his uprightness. It is his nature that ugliness has for him an
attraction. He sees only what is abnormal, unpleasant, and repulsive
in actual life. If he paints a house, it must be warped, and threaten
to tumble down soon. If he portrays a human being, the latter has
a distorted face, apparently paralysed on one side, and a deeply
depressed or stupid expression. Every model that submits himself to
him is put in some sort of convict’s dress. Here is a female portrait.
A withered, dried-up face, mud-bedaubed clothes that look as if they
had been trailed through the gutter. Doubtless a “professional” who
at a raid was accommodated in “Black Maria,” and, after a night in
the cells of the police station, discharged? Nothing of the sort. She
is a respectable lady of the upper middle-class. This man with the
trouble-distorted countenance and the greasy felt hat and overcoat
is perhaps a starveling from Bohemia, a broken-down creature, ruined
artist or writer? Most certainly not. He is a well-to-do person of
independent means. It is curious to me how any one can allow himself
of his own accord to be painted by Cézanne, unless it were done in a
contrite, penitential mood as a penance. To be sure, one cannot be
angry with him, for he does not treat himself any better than his other
victims. He has painted portraits of himself which would be grossly
libellous if another had painted them. In truth he is not vain, for he
sees himself as he represents himself in these pictures. And his morose
eye disfigures not only faces, heads, and raiment, but also the rest.
Heine assures us that “A woman’s body is a poem.” He would not dare to
sustain this statement if he were to see Cézanne’s “Three Naked Women
before the Bath.” Such nudities are really immoral, and shriek, not for
a discreet fig-leaf, but for a nine-fold covering of cloth and fur.
Blaise Desgoffes.—This painter, who died in 1902, was an incomparable
copier of still life; for indeed there exists a still and secret life
in the productions of the artist’s hand, as an eye lovingly steeped
in form and beauty of colour sees them. Desgoffes was great in little
pictures, which rendered splendid things of gold and enamel, of rock
crystal, jasper and chalcedony, trinkets and precious stones, lace
and embroidery on velvet and silk, carved and polished ebony in
insurpassable perfection. There is a school which very contemptuously
calls these pictures _bodegones_. That is the disdainful Spanish
expression both for a cookshop and for daubed representations of vulgar
eatables such as sausages, smoked herrings, and cheese made from whey.
Copying the productions of human hands should be unworthy of an artist.
Only what is living, nay, only human life, should be justifiable. But
that is too narrow a conception. Certainly the highest mission of all
human art is the portrayal of men and women; and what is not itself
human becomes artistic in proportion as it gains relation to humanity
by means of secret anthropomorphic animation and spiritualisation. But
he who demands harshly and dogmatically that the human figure should be
treated to the exclusion of everything else, relegates a Hondekoeter,
a Landseer, a Rosa Bonheur to the second class, and denies a Desgoffes
the title of artist, which is sheer nonsense. I do not know if there is
a precedence in art, or any other precedence than that of the ability
to express and transmit the life of emotion. Anyhow, a man stands
very high who understood how to translate into painting the optical
peculiarities of choice woods, metals, stones, and textures better than
any painter before him.
Léon Frédéric amazes like an anachronism; in him lives the soul of a
primitive. Thus the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weydens, and Hans Memlings
regarded the world and man. That is, however, not a sort of affected,
antique skill, as in the English Præ-Raphaelites, and their Continental
imitators, but genuine, unconscious atavism, the purity of which is
evident from the fact that Frédéric paints no masquerades, but only
nude, human limbs, or contemporary types of the people in the miserable
working garb of our days. If they appear like figures out of mediæval
ballads or folk-stories, it is because Frédéric feels them so. He is an
out and out Fleming: mystical like his countrymen Ruysbroek, Suyskens,
etc.; and, besides, delighting in form, like the builders of the
Belgian cathedrals and guildhalls; in love with life, like the feasters
and dancers of the Flemish kermesses; honest and conscientious in his
work, like an old guild-master of the time of the Spanish Netherlands;
brooding and earnest, like a Beguine or a Lollard.
Frédéric does not actually copy, but he is curiously vivid in his
recollection of what he has seen. The old Low-German and Flemish
masters, whose outlook on the world he shares, hover before him. From
the Low-German artists he has his _naïve_, brick-red flesh tone and the
painfully conscientious kind of workmanship, which neglects no wrinkle
in the skin or curl in the hair; from Memling, his loving accuracy in
treating all accessory work—flowers, ground, clothes, and utensils.
Sprinkling the whole canvas with equally finished details, chiefly
luxuriant plants, is common to Frédéric and all the Præ-Raphaelites.
The pictures of this school, even if they take their subjects chiefly
from the fourth dimension, are optically of two dimensions. They are
only surfaces. They do not understand perspective, and, therefore,
cannot shade off a middle distance or background. Everything lies in
one and the same plane and is treated with the same clearness and
precision. In the accuracy with which they render every little stone,
every texture, and plant, the Præ-Raphaelites have no equals. If,
in addition to this, they could paint human beings also, they would
deserve unstinted praise, at any rate, as draughtsmen, if not as
colourists.
Frédéric feels the sacredness of his art profoundly, as do few other
painters of the present day. He seems to himself a priest. It is an
external, but a characteristic one: he paints hardly anything but
triptychs, which he regards, to a certain extent, as altar-pieces of
a philosophical religion; and what he portrays is always a sort of
pathetic symbol, from which there comes a sound like verses from the
Bible or Vedic hymns. His symbols are not always clear, but it is not
his fault that painting is not a fit expression of brief syntheses of
long trains of thought, or ethical and philosophical abstractions.
At most it is his fault that he does not feel this. His triptych,
the “Golden Age,” is, for instance, a view such as Ovid might have
described if he had lived in a Belgian district among Flemish people.
Frédéric relates the history of one day of his happy race: how human
creatures of all gradations of age sleep peacefully in the gleaming
night, clinging to one another; how they are awakened by rosy dawn and
refresh themselves in a crystal brook; how, beneath a noonday sun,
they play and dance and shout for joy, pluck blossoms and fruits, and
sit before dainty dishes. It is a profusion of magnificently modelled
nude women who are all very red of skin; a laughing exuberance of life
such as an old-time worshipper of the obscene god of fruitfulness might
have dreamt of amidst the reek of sacrifice. It is also a funnily
cannibalistic debauch of delicious children’s flesh and blooming,
well-nourished bodies. In other pictures Frédéric has occasionally
tortured us by quite as perfectly painted, but, on account of their
inexorable truth, fearfully painful representations of radiant nudities
torn by thorns, and whole heaps of children’s corpses. Here, however,
he is all joy and peace, and his picture is a delight to the eye.