Of the realistic landscape painters, the strict impressionists apart,
none is more eminent than M. Cazin, whose work is full of interest, and
if at times it leaves one a little cold, this is perhaps an affair of
the beholder's temperament rather than of M. Cazin's. He is a thoroughly
original painter, and, what is more at the present day, an imaginative
one. He sees in his own way the nature that we all see, and paints it
not literally but personally. But his landscapes invariably attest,
above all, an attentive study of the phenomena of light and air, and
their truthfulness is the more marked for the personality they
illustrate. The impression they make is of a very clairvoyant and
enthusiastic observation exercised by an artist who takes more pleasure
in appreciation than in expression, whose pleasure in his expression is
subordinate to his interest in the external world, and in large measure
confined to the delight every artist has in technical felicity when he
can attain it. Their skies are beautifully observed--graduated in value
with delicate verisimilitude from the horizon up, and wind-swept, or
drenched with mist, or ringing clear, as the motive may dictate. All
objects take their places with a precision that, nevertheless, is in
nowise pedantic, and is perfectly free. Cazin's palette is, moreover, a
thoroughly individual one. It is very pure, and if its range is not
great, it is at any rate not grayed into insipidity and ineffectualness,
but is as positive as if it were more vivid. A distinct air of elegance,
a true sense of style, is noteworthy in many of his pictures; not only
in the important ones, but occasionally when the theme is so slight as
to need hardly any composition whatever--the mere placing of a tree, its
outline, its relation to a bank or a roadway, are often unmistakably
distinguished. Cazin is not exclusively a landscape painter, and though
the landscape element in all his works is a dominant one, even in his
"Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert," and his "Judith Setting out for
Holofernes's Camp" (in which latter one can hardly identify the heroine
at all), the fact that he is not a landscape painter, pure and simple,
like Harpignies and Pointelin, perhaps accounts for his inferiority to
them in landscape sentiment. In France it is generally assumed that to
devote one's self exclusively to any one branch of painting is to betray
limitations, and there are few painters who would not resent being
called landscapists. Something, perhaps, is lost in this way. It
witnesses a greater pride in accomplishment than in instinctive bent.
But however that may be, Cazin never penetrates to the sentiment of
nature that one feels in such a work as Harpignies's "Moonrise," for
example, or in almost any of Pointelin's grave and impressive
landscapes. Hardly less truthful, I should say, though perhaps less
intimately and elaborately real (a romanticist would say less
superficially real) than Cazin's, the work of both these painters is
more pictorial. They have a quicker sense for the beautiful, I think.
They feel very certainly much more deeply the suggestiveness of a scene.
They are not so _débonnaires_ in the presence of their problems. In a
sense, for that reason, they understand them better. There is very
little feeling of the desert, the illimitable space, where, according to
Balzac, God is and man is not, in the "Hagar and Ishmael;" indeed there
seems to have been no attempt on the part of the painter to express any.
True as his sand-heap is, you feel somehow that there may be a
kitchen-garden or the entrance to a coal-mine on the other side of it,
or a little farther along. And the landscape of the "Judith," fine as
its sweep is, and admirable as are the cool tone and clear distance of
the picture, might really be that of the "south meadow" of some
particular "farm" or other.
The contrast which Guillaumet presents to Fromentin affords a very
striking illustration of the growth of the realistic spirit in recent
years. Fromentin is so admirable a painter that I can hardly fancy any
appreciative person wishing him different. His devoted admirer and
biographer, M. Louis Gonse, admits, and indeed expressly records,
Fromentin's own lament over the insufficiency of his studies. Fond as he
was of horses, for instance, he does not know them as a draughtsman with
the science of such a conventional painter in many other respects as
Schreyer. But it is not in the slightly amateurish nature of his
technical equipment--realized perfectly by himself, of course, as the
first critic of the technic of painting among all who have ventured upon
the subject--that his painting differs from Guillaumet's. It is his
whole point of view. His Africa is that of the critic, the
_littérateur_, the _raffiné_. Guillaumet's is Africa itself. You feel
before Guillaumet's Luxembourg canvases, as in looking over the
slightest of his vivid memoranda, that you are getting in an acute and
concentrated form the sensations which the actual scenes and types
rendered by the painter would stimulate in you, supposing, of course,
that you were sufficiently sensitive. Fromentin, in comparison, is
occupied in picture-making--giving you a beautifully colored and highly
intelligent pictorial report as against Guillaumet's actual
reproduction. There is no question as to which of the two painters has
the greater personal interest; but it is just as certain that for
abiding value and enduring charm personal interest must either be
extremely great or else yield to the interest inherent in the material
dealt with, an interest that Guillaumet brings out with a felicity and a
puissance that are wholly extraordinary, and that nowadays meet with a
readier and more sympathetic recognition that even such delicate
personal charm as that of Fromentin.