Delacroix's color deepens into an almost musical intensity occasionally
in Decamps, whose oriental landscapes and figures, far less important
intellectually, far less _magistrales_ in conception, have at times, one
may say perhaps without being too fanciful, a truly symphonic quality
that renders them unique. "The Suicide" is like a chord on a violin. But
it is when we come to speak of the "Fontainebleau Group," in especial, I
think, that the æsthetic susceptibility characteristic of the latter
half of the nineteenth century feels, to borrow M. Taine's introduction
to his lectures on "The Ideal in Art," that the subject is one only to
be treated in poetry.
Of the noblest of all so-called "schools," Millet is perhaps the most
popular member. His popularity is in great part, certainly, due to his
literary side, to the sentiment which pervades, which drenches, one may
say, all his later work--his work after he had, on overhearing himself
characterized as a painter of naked women, betaken himself to his true
subject, the French peasant. A literary, and a very powerful literary
side, Millet undoubtedly has; and instead of being a weakness in him it
is a power. His sentimental appeal is far from being surplusage, but, as
is not I think popularly appreciated, it is subordinate, and the fact
of its subordination gives it what potency it has. It is idle to deny
this potency, for his portrayal of the French peasant in his varied
aspects has probably been as efficient a characterization as that of
George Sand herself. But, if a moral instead of an æsthetic effect had
been Millet's chief intention, we may be sure that it would have been
made far less incisively than it has been. Compare, for example, his
peasant pictures with those of the almost purely literary painter Jules
Breton, who has evidently chosen his field for its sentimental rather
than its pictorial value, and whose work is, perhaps accordingly, by
contrast with Millet's, noticeably external and superficial even on the
literary side. When Millet ceased to deal in the Correggio manner with
Correggiesque subjects, and devoted himself to the material that was
really native to him, to his own peasant genius--whatever he may have
thought about it himself, he did so because he could treat this material
_pictorially_ with more freedom and less artificiality, with more zest
and enthusiasm, with a deeper sympathy and a more intimate knowledge of
its artistic characteristics, its pictorial potentialities. He is, I
think, as a painter, a shade too much preoccupied with this material, he
is a little too philosophical in regard to it, his pathetic struggle for
existence exaggerated his sentimental affiliations with it somewhat, he
made it too exclusively his subject, perhaps. We gain, it may be, at his
expense. With his artistic gifts he might have been more fortunate, had
his range been broader. But in the main it is his pictorial handling of
this material, with which he was in such acute sympathy, that
distinguishes his work, and that will preserve its fame long after its
humanitarian and sentimental appeal has ceased to be as potent as it now
is--at the same time that it has itself enforced this appeal in the
subordinating manner I have suggested. When he was asked his intention,
in his picture of a maimed calf borne away on a litter by two men, he
said it was simply to indicate the sense of weight in the muscular
movement and attitude of the bearers' arms.
His great distinction, in fine, is artistic. His early painting of
conventional subjects is not without significance in its witness to the
quality of his talent. Another may paint French peasants all his life
and never make them permanently interesting, because he has not Millet's
admirable instinct and equipment as a painter. He is a superb colorist,
at times--always an enthusiastic one; there is something almost
unregulated in his delight in color, in his fondness for glowing and
resplendent tone. No one gets farther away from the academic grayness,
the colorless chiaro-oscuro of the conventional painters. He runs his
key up and loads his canvas, occasionally, in what one may call not so
much barbaric as uncultivated and elementary fashion. He cares so much
for color that sometimes, when his effect is intended to be purely
atmospheric, as in the "Angélus," he misses its justness and fitness,
and so, in insisting on color, obtains from the color point of view
itself an infelicitous--a colored--result. Occasionally he bathes a
scene in yellow mist that obscures all accentuations and play of values.
But always his feeling for color betrays him a painter rather than a
moralist. And in composition he is, I should say, even more
distinguished. His composition is almost always distinctly elegant. Even
in so simple a scheme as that of "The Sower," the lines are as fine as
those of a Raphael. And the way in which balance is preserved, masses
are distributed, and an organic play of parts related to each other and
each to the sum of them is secured, is in all of his large works so
salient an element of their admirable excellence, that, to those who
appreciate it, the dependence of his popularity upon the sentimental
suggestion of the raw material with which he dealt seems almost
grotesque. In his line and mass and the relations of these in
composition, there is a severity, a restraint, a conformity to
tradition, however personally felt and individually modified, that
evince a strong classic strain in this most unacademic of painters.
Millet was certainly an original genius, if there ever was one. In spite
of, and in open hostility to, the popular and conventional painting of
his day, he followed his own bent and went his own way. Better, perhaps,
than any other painter, he represents absolute emancipation from the
prescribed, from routine and formulary. But it would be a signal mistake
to fail to see, in the most characteristic works of this most personal
representative of romanticism, that subordination of the individual whim
and isolated point of view to what is accepted, proven, and universal,
which is essentially what we mean by the classic attitude. One may
almost go so far as to say, considering its reserve, its restraint and
poise, its sobriety and measure, its quiet and composure, its
subordination of individual feeling to a high sense of artistic decorum,
that, romantic as it is, unacademic as it is, its most incontestable
claim to permanence is the truly classic spirit which, however modified,
inspires and infiltrates it. Beside some of the later manifestations of
individual genius in French painting, it is almost academic.
In Corot, anyone, I suppose, can see this note, and it would be
surplusage to insist upon it. He is the ideal classic-romantic painter,
both in temperament and in practice. Millet's subject, not, I think, his
treatment--possibly his wider range--makes him seem more deeply serious
than Corot, but he is not essentially as nearly unique. He is unrivalled
in his way, but Corot is unparalleled. Corot inherits the tradition of
Claude; his motive, like Claude's, is always an effect, and, like
Claude's, his means are light and air. But his effect is a shade more
impalpable, and his means are at once simpler and more subtle. He gets
farther away from the phenomena which are the elements of his
_ensemble_, farther than Claude, farther than anyone. His touch is as
light as the zephyr that stirs the diaphanous drapery of his trees.
Beside it Claude's has a suspicion, at least, of unctuousness. It has a
pure, crisp, vibrant accent, quite without analogue in the technic of
landscape painting. Taking technic in its widest sense, one may speak of
Corot's shortcomings--not, I think, of his failures. It would be
difficult to mention a modern painter more uniformly successful in
attaining his aim, in expressing what he wishes to express, in conveying
his impression, communicating his sensations.
That a painter of his power, a man of the very first rank, should have
been content--even placidly content--to exercise it within a range by no
means narrow, but plainly circumscribed, is certainly witness
of limitation. "Delacroix is an eagle, I am only a skylark," he remarked
once, with his characteristic cheeriness. His range is not, it is true,
as circumscribed as is generally supposed outside of France. Outside of
France his figure-painting, for example, is almost unknown. We see
chiefly variations of his green and gray arbored pastoral--now idyllic,
now heroic, now full of freshness, the skylark quality, now of grave and
deep harmonies and wild, sweet notes of transitory suggestion. Of his
figures we only know those shifting shapes that blend in such classic
and charming manner with the glades and groves of his landscapes. Of his
"Hagar in the Wilderness," his "St. Jerome," his "Flight into Egypt,"
his "Democritus," his "Baptism of Christ," with its nine life-size
figures, who, outside of France, has even heard? How many foreigners
know that he painted what are called architectural subjects
delightfully, and even _genre_ with zest?
But compared with his landscape, in which he is unique, it is plain that
he excels nowhere else. The splendid display of his works in the
Centenaire Exposition of the great World's Fair of 1889, was a
revelation of his range of interest rather than of his range of power.
It was impossible not to perceive that, surprising as were his essays in
other fields to those who only knew him as a landscape painter, he was
essentially and integrally a painter of landscape, though a painter of
landscape who had taken his subject in a way and treated it in a manner
so personal as to be really unparalleled. Outside of landscape his
interest was clearly not real. In his other works one notes a certain
_débonnaire_ irresponsibility. He pursued nothing seriously but
out-of-doors, its vaporous atmosphere, its crisp twigs and graceful
branches, its misty distances and piquant accents, what Thoreau calls
its inaudible panting. His true theme, lightly as he took it, absorbed
him; and no one of any sensitiveness can ever regret it. His powers,
following the indication of his true temperament, his most genuine
inspiration, are concentrated upon the very finest thing imaginable in
landscape painting; as, indeed, to produce as they have done the finest
landscape in the history of art, they must have been.
There are, however, two things worth noting in Corot's landscape, beyond
the mere fact that, better even than Rousseau, he expresses the essence
of landscape, dwells habitually among its inspirations, and is its
master rather than its servant. One is the way in which he poetizes, so
to speak, the simplest stretches of sward and clumps of trees, and long
clear vistas across still ponds, with distances whose accents are
pricked out with white houses and yellow cows and placid fishers and
ferrymen in red caps, seen in glimpses through curtains of sparse,
feathery leafage--or peoples woodland openings with nymphs and fawns,
silhouetted against the sunset glow, or dancing in the cool gray of
dusk. A man of no reading, having only the elements of an education in
the general sense of the term, his instinctive sense for what is refined
was so delicate that we may say of his landscapes that, had the Greeks
left any they would have been like Corot's. And this classic and
cultivated effect he secured not at all, or only very incidentally,
through the force of association, by dotting his hillsides and vaporous
distances with bits of classic architecture, or by summing up his
feeling for the Dawn in a graceful figure of Orpheus greeting with
extended gesture the growing daylight, but by a subtle interpenetration
of sensuousness and severity resulting in precisely the sentiment fitly
characterized by the epithet classic. The other trait peculiar to
Corot's representation of nature and expression of himself is his color.
No painter ever exhibited, I think, quite such a sense of refinement in
so narrow a gamut. Green and gray, of course, predominate and set the
key, but he has an interestingly varied palette on the hither side of
splendor whose subtleties are capable of giving exquisite pleasure.
Never did anyone use tints with such positive force. Tints with Corot
have the vigor and vibration of positive colors--his lilacs, violets,
straw-colored hues, his almost Quakerish coquetry with drabs and slates
and pure clear browns, the freshness and bloom he imparted to his tones,
the sweet and shrinking wild flowers with which as a spray he sprinkled
his humid dells and brook margins. But Corot's true distinction--what
gives him his unique position at the very head of landscape art, is
neither his color, delicate and interesting as his color is, nor his
classic serenity harmonizing with, instead of depending upon, the chance
associations of architecture and mythology with which now and then he
decorates his landscapes; it is the blithe, the airy, the truly
spiritual way in which he gets farther away than anyone from both the
actual pigment that is his instrument, and from the phenomena that are
the objects of his expression--his ethereality, in a word. He has
communicated his sentiment almost without material, one may say, so
ethereally independent of their actual analogues is the interest of his
trees and sky and stretch of sward. This sentiment, thus mysteriously
triumphant over color or form, or other sensuous charm, which
nevertheless are only subtly subordinated, and by no manner of means
treated lightly or inadequately, is as exalted as any that has in our
day been expressed in any manner. Indeed, where, outside of the very
highest poetry of the century, can one get the same sense of elation, of
aspiring delight, of joy unmixed with regret--since "the splendor of
truth" which Plato defined beauty to be, is more animating and consoling
than the "weary weight of all this unintelligible world," is depressing
to a spirit of lofty seriousness and sanity?
* * * * *
Dupré and Diaz are the decorative painters of the Fontainebleau group.
They are, of modern painters, perhaps the nearest in spirit to the old
masters, pictorially speaking. They are rarely in the grand style,
though sometimes Dupré is restrained enough to emulate if not to achieve
its sobriety. But they have the _bel air_, and belong to the aristocracy
of the painting world. Diaz, especially, has almost invariably the
patrician touch. It lacks the exquisiteness of Monticelli's, in which
there is that curiously elevated detachment from the material and the
real that the Italians--and the Provençal painter's inspiration and
method, as well as his name and lineage, suggest an Italian rather than
a French association--exhibit far oftener than the French. But Diaz has
a larger sweep, a saner method. He is never eccentric, and he has a
dignity that is Iberian, though he is French rather than Spanish on his
æsthetic side, and at times is as conservative as Rousseau--without,
however, reaching Rousseau's lofty simplicity except in an occasional
happy stroke. Both he and Dupré are primarily colorists. Dupré sees
nature through a prism. Diaz's groups of dames and gallants have a
jewel-like aspect; they leave the same impression as a tangle of
ribbons, a bunch of exotic flowers, a heap of gems flung together with
the felicity of haphazard. In general, and when they are in most
completely characteristic mood, it is not the sentiment of nature that
one gets from the work of either painter. It is not even _their_
sentiment of nature--the emotion aroused in their susceptibilities by
natural phenomena. What one gets is their personal feeling for color and
design--their decorative quality, in a word.
The decorative painter is he to whom what is called "subject," even in
its least restricted sense and with its least substantial suggestions,
is comparatively indifferent. Nature supplies him with objects; she is
not in any intimate degree his subject. She is the medium through which,
rather than the material of which, he creates his effects. It is her
potentialities of color and design that he seeks, or at any rate, of all
her infinitely numerous traits, it is her hues and arabesques that
strike him most forcibly. He is incurious as to her secrets and calls
upon her aid to interpret his own, but he is so independent of her, if
he be a decorative painter of the first rank--a Diaz or a Dupré--that
his rendering of her, his picture, would have an agreeable effect, owing
to its design or color or both, if it were turned upside down.
Decorative painting in this sense may easily be carried so far as to
seem incongruous and inept, in spite of its superficial attractiveness.
The peril that threatens it is whim and freak. Some of Monticelli's,
some of Matthew Maris's pictures, illustrate the exaggeration of the
decorative impulse. After all, a painter must get his effect, whatever
it be and however it may shun the literal and the exact, by rendering
things with pigments. And some of the decorative painters only escape
things by obtruding pigments, just as the _trompe-l'oeil_ or optical
illusion painters get away from pigments by obtruding things. It is the
distinction of Diaz and Dupré that they avoid this danger in most
triumphant fashion. On the contrary, they help one to see the decorative
element in nature, in "things," to a degree hardly attained elsewhere
since the days of the great Venetians. Their predilection for the
decorative element is held in leash by the classic tradition, with its
reserve, its measure, its inculcation of sobriety and its sense of
security. Dupré paints Seine sunsets and the edge of the forest at
Fontainebleau, its "long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight," in a
way that conveys the golden glow, the silvery gleam, the suave outline
of spreading leafage, and the massive density of mysterious boscage with
the force of an almost abstract acuteness. Does nature look like this?
Who knows? But in this semblance, surely, she appeared to Dupré's
imagination. And doubtless Diaz saw the mother-of-pearl tints in the
complexion of his models, and is not to be accused of artificiality,
but to be credited with a true sincerity of selection in juxtaposing his
soft corals and carnations and gleaming topaz, amethyst, and sapphire
hues. The most exacting literalist can hardly accuse them of solecism in
their rendering of nature, true as it is that their decorative sense is
so strong as to lead them to impose on nature their own sentiment
instead of yielding themselves to absorption in _hers_, and thus, in
harmonious and sympathetic concert with her, like Claude and Corot,
Rousseau and Daubigny, interpreting her subtle and supreme significance.
* * * * *
Rousseau carried the fundamental principle of the school farther than
the others--with him interest, delight in, enthusiasm for nature became
absorption in her. Whereas other men have loved nature, it has been
acutely remarked, Rousseau was in love with her. It was felicitously of
him, rather than of Dupré or Corot, that the naif peasant inquired, "Why
do you paint the tree; the tree is there, is it not?" And never did
nature more royally reward allegiance to her than in the sustenance and
inspiration she furnished for Rousseau's genius. You feel the point of
view in his picture, but it is apparently that of nature herself as well
as his own. It is not the less personal for this. On the contrary, it
is extremely personal, and few pictures are as individual, as
characteristic. Occasionally Diaz approaches him, as I have said, but
only in the very happiest and exceptional moments, when the dignity of
nature as well as her charm seems specially to impress and impose itself
upon the less serious painter. But Rousseau's selection seems
instinctive and not sought out. He knows the secret of nature's
pictorial element. He is at one with her, adopts her suggestions so
cordially and works them out with such intimate sympathy and
harmoniousness, that the two forces seem reciprocally to reinforce each
other, and the result gains many fold in power from their subtle
co-operation. His landscapes have in this way a Wordsworthian
directness, simplicity, and severity. They are not troubled and dramatic
like Turner's. They are not decorative like Dupré's, they have not the
solemn sentiment of Daubigny's, or the airy aspiration and fairy-like
blitheness of Corot's. But there is in them "all breathing human
passion;" and at times, as in "Le Givre," they rise to majesty and real
grandeur because they are impregnated with the sentiment, as well as are
records of the phenomena, of nature, and one may say of Rousseau,
paraphrasing Mr. Arnold's remark about Wordsworth, that nature seems
herself to take the brush out of his hand and to paint for him "with her
own bare, sheer, penetrating power." Rousseau, however, is French, and
in virtue of his nativity exhibits always what Wordsworth's treatment of
nature exhibits only occasionally, namely, the Gallic gift of style. It
is rarely as felicitous as in Corot, in every detail of whose every
work, one may almost say, its informing, co-ordinating, elevating
influence is distinctly to be perceived; but it is always present as a
factor, as a force dignifying and relieving from all touch, all taint of
the commonness that is so often inseparably associated with art whose
absorption in nature is listlessly unthinking instead of enthusiastic
and alert. In Rousseau, too, in a word, we have the classic strain, as
at least a psychological element, and note as one source of his power
his reserve and restraint, his perfect self-possession.
In Daubigny a similar attitude toward nature is obvious, but with a
sensible difference. Affection for, rather than absorption in her, is
his inspiration. Daubigny stands somewhat apart from the Fontainebleau
group, with whom nevertheless he is popularly and properly associated,
for though he painted Normandy mainly, he was spiritually of the
Barbizon kindred. He stands, however, somewhat apart from French
painting in general, I think. There is less style, more sentiment, more
poetry in his landscapes than in those of his countrymen who are to be
compared with him. Beyond what is admirable in them there is something
attaching as well. He drew and engraved a good deal, as well as painted.
He did not concentrate his powers enough, perhaps, to make as signal and
definite a mark as otherwise he might have done. He is a shade
desultory, and too spontaneous to be systematic. One must be systematic
to reach the highest point, even in the least material spheres. But
never have the grave and solemn aspects of landscape found a sweeter and
serener spirit to interpret them. In some of his pictures there is a
truly religious feeling. His frankness recalls Constable's, but it is
more distinguished in being more spiritual. He has not Diaz's elegance,
nor Corot's witchery, nor Rousseau's power, but nature is more
mysteriously, more mystically significant to him, and sets a deeper
chord vibrating within him. He is a sensitive instrument on which she
plays, rather than a magician who wins her secrets, or an observer whose
generalizing imagination she sets in motion. The design of some of his
important works, notably that of his last _Salon_ picture, is very
distinguished, and in one of his large canvases representing a road like
that from Barbizon through the level plain to Chailly, there is the
spirit and sentiment of all the summer evenings that ever were. But he
has distinctly less power than the strict Fontainebleau group. He has,
in force, less affinity with them than Troyon has, whose force is often
magnificent, and whose landscape is so sweet, often, and often so strong
as well, that one wonders a little at his fondness for cattle--in spite
of the way in which he justifies it by being the first of cattle
painters. And neither Daubigny nor Troyon, nor, indeed, Rousseau
himself, often reaches in dramatic grandeur the lofty landscape of
Michel, who, with Paul Huet (the latter in a more strictly historical
sense) were so truly the forerunners and initiators of the romantic
landscape movement, both in sentiment and chronology, in spite of their
Dutch tradition, as to make the common ascription of its debt to
Constable, whose aid was so cordially welcomed in the famous Salon of
1824, a little strained.