PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST
By JAMES HUNEKER
1910
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Promenades of an Impressionist. 12mo, (_Postage_ 15 cents_),
_net_, $1.50.
Egoists: A Book of Supermen. 12mo, _net_, $1.50.
Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists. 12mo, _net_, $1.50.
Overtones: A Book of Temperaments. 12mo, _net_, $1.50.
Mezzotints in Modern Music. 12mo, $1.50.
Chopin: The Man and His Music. With Portrait. l2mo, $2.00.
Visionaries. 12mo, $1.50.
Melomaniacs. 12mo, $1.50
TO: FREDERICK JAMES GREGG
-"Let us promenade our prejudices."--Stendhal(?)
CONTENTS
I. PAUL CÉZANNE
II. ROPS THE ETCHER
III. MONTICELLI
IV. RODIN
V. EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE
VI. DEGAS
VII. BOTTICELLI
VIII. SIX SPANIARDS:
"EL GRECO"
"VELASQUEZ"
GOYA
FORTUNY
SOROLLA
ZULOAGA
IX. CHARDIN
X. BLACK AND WHITE:
PIRANESI
MERYON
JOHN MARTIN
ZORN
BRANGWYN
DAUMIER
LALANNE
LEGRAND
GUYS
XI. IMPRESSIONISM:
MONET
RENOIR
MANET
XII. A NEW STUDY OF WATTEAU
XIII. GAUGUIN AND TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
XIV. LITERATURE AND ART
XV. MUSEUM PROMENADES:
PICTURES AT THE HAGUE
THE MESDAG MUSEUM
HALS OF HAARLEM
PICTURES IN AMSTERDAM
ART IN ANTWERP
MUSEUMS OF BRUSSELS
BRUGES THE BEAUTIFUL
THE MOREAU MUSEUM
PICTURES IN MADRID
EL GRECO AT TOLEDO
VELASQUEZ IN THE PRADO
CODA
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST
I. PAUL CÉZANNE
After prolonged study of the art shown at the Paris Autumn Salon you
ask yourself: This whirlpool of jostling ambitions, crazy colours,
still crazier drawing and composition--whither does it tend? Is there
any strain of tendency, any central current to be detected? Is it
young genius in the raw, awaiting the sunshine of success to ripen its
somewhat terrifying gifts? Or is the exhibition a huge, mystifying
_blague_? What, you ask, as you apply wet compresses to your weary
eyeballs, blistered by dangerous proximity to so many blazing
canvases, does the Autumn Salon mean to French art?
There are many canvases the subjects of which are more pathologic than
artistic, subjects only fit for the confessional or the privacy of the
clinic. But, apart from these disagreeable episodes, the main note of
the Salon is a riotous energy, the noisy ebullition of a gang of
students let loose in the halls of art. They seem to rush by you,
yelling from sheer delight in their lung power, and if you are rudely
jostled to the wall, your toes trod upon and your hat clapped down on
your ears, you console yourself with the timid phrase: Youth must have
its fling.
PROMENADES
And what a fling! Largely a flinging of paint pots in the sacred
features of tradition. It needs little effort of the imagination to
see hovering about the galleries the faces of--no, not Gérôme, Bonnat,
Jules Lefèvre, Cabanel, or any of the reverend _seigneurs_ of the old
Salon--but the reproachful countenances of Courbet, Manet, Degas, and
Monet; for this motley-wearing crew of youngsters are as violently
radical, as violently secessionistic, as were their immediate
forebears. Each chap has started a little revolution of his own, and
takes no heed of the very men from whom he steals his thunder, now
sadly hollow in the transposition. The pretty classic notion of the
torch of artistic tradition gently burning as it is passed on from
generation to generation receives a shock when confronted by the
methods of the hopeful young anarchs of the Grand Palais. Defiance of
all critical canons at any cost is their shibboleth. Compared to their
fulgurant colour schemes the work of Manet, Monet, and Degas pales and
retreats into the Pantheon of the past. They are become classic.
Another king has usurped their throne--his name is Paul Cézanne.
No need now to recapitulate the story of the New Salon and the
defection from it of these Independents. It is a fashion to revolt in
Paris, and no doubt some day there will arise a new group that will
start the August Salon or the January Salon.
"Independent of the Independents" is a magnificent motto with which to
assault any intrenched organisation.
PAUL CÉZANNE
If riotous energy is, as I have said, the chief note of many of these
hot, hasty, and often clever pictures, it must be sadly stated that of
genuine originality there are few traces. To the very masters they
pretend to revile they owe everything. In vain one looks for a
tradition older than Courbet; a few have attempted to stammer in the
suave speech of Corot and the men of Fontainebleau; but 1863, the year
of the _Salon des Refusés_, is really the year of their artistic
ancestor's birth. The classicism of Lebrun, David, Ingres, Prudhon;
the romanticism of Géricault, Delacroix, Decamps; the tender poetry of
those true _Waldmenschen_, Millet, Dupré, Diaz, Daubigny, or of that
wild heir of Giorgione and Tiepolo, the marvellous colour virtuoso who
"painted music," Monticelli--all these men might never have been born
except for their possible impact upon the so-called "Batignolles"
school. Alas! such ingratitude must rankle. To see the major portion
of this band of young painters, with talent in plenty, occupying
itself in a frantic burlesque of second-hand Cézannes, with here and
there a shallow Monet, a faded Renoir, an affected Degas, or an
impertinent Gauguin, must be mortifying to the older men.
And now we reach the holy precincts. If ardent youths sneered at the
lyric ecstasy of Renoir, at the severe restraint of Chavannes, at the
poetic mystery of Carrière, their lips were hushed as they tiptoed
into the Salle Cézanne. Sacred ground, indeed, we trod as we gazed and
wondered before these crude, violent, sincere, ugly, and bizarre
canvases. Here was the very hub of the Independents' universe. Here
the results of a hard-labouring painter, without taste, without the
faculty of selection, without vision, culture--one is tempted to add,
intellect--who with dogged persistency has painted in the face of
mockery, painted portraits, landscapes, flowers, houses, figures,
painted everything, painted himself. And what paint! Stubborn, with an
instinctive hatred of academic poses, of the atmosphere of the studio,
of the hired model, of "literary," or of mere digital cleverness,
Cézanne has dropped out of his scheme harmony, melody,
beauty--classic, romantic, symbolic, what you will!--and doggedly
represented the ugliness of things. But there is a brutal strength, a
tang of the soil that is bitter, and also strangely invigorating,
after the false, perfumed boudoir art of so many of his
contemporaries.
Think of Bouguereau and you have his antithesis in Cézanne--Cézanne
whose stark figures of bathers, male and female, evoke a shuddering
sense of the bestial. Not that there is offence intended in his badly
huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, naked fashion the horrors
of some undressed humans. His landscapes are primitive though suffused
by perceptible atmosphere; while the rough architecture, shambling
figures, harsh colouring do not quite destroy the impression of
general vitality. You could not say with Walt Whitman that his stunted
trees were "uttering joyous leaves of dark green." They utter, if
anything, raucous oaths, as seemingly do the
self-portraits--exceedingly well modelled, however. Cézanne's
still-life attracts by its whole-souled absorption; these fruits and
vegetables really savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life
with realistic beauty; if he had ever painted an onion it would have
revealed a certain grace. When Paul Cézanne paints an onion you smell
it. Nevertheless, he has captured the affections of the rebels and is
their god. And next season it may be some one else.
It may interest readers of Zola's L'Oeuvre to learn about one of the
characters, who perforce sat for his portrait in that clever novel (a
direct imitation of Goncourt's Manette Salomon). Paul Cézanne bitterly
resented the liberty taken by his old school friend Zola. They both
hailed from Aix, in Provence. Zola went up to Paris; Cézanne remained
in his birthplace but finally persuaded his father to let him study
art at the capital. His father was both rich and wise, for he settled
a small allowance on Paul, who, poor chap, as he said, would never
earn a franc from his paintings. This prediction was nearly verified.
Cézanne was almost laughed off the artistic map of Paris. Manet they
could stand, even Claude Monet; but Cézanne--communard and anarchist
he must be (so said the wise ones in official circles), for he was
such a villainous painter! Cézanne died, but not before his apotheosis
by the new crowd of the Autumn Salon. We are told by admirers of Zola
how much he did for his neglected and struggling fellow-townsman; how
the novelist opened his arms to Cézanne. Cézanne says quite the
contrary. In the first place he had more money than Zola when they
started, and Zola, after he had become a celebrity, was a great man
and very haughty.
"A mediocre intelligence and a detestable friend" is the way the
prototype of Claude Lantier puts the case. "A bad book and a
completely false one," he added, when speaking to the painter Emile
Bernard on the disagreeable theme. Naturally Zola did not pose his old
friend for the entire figure of the crazy impressionist, his hero,
Claude. It was a study composed of Cézanne, Bazille, and one other, a
poor, wretched lad who had been employed to clean Manet's studio,
entertained artistic ambitions, but hanged himself. The conversations
Cézanne had with Zola, his extreme theories of light, are all in the
novel--by the way, one of Zola's most finished efforts. Cézanne, an
honest, hard-working man, bourgeois in habits if not by temperament,
was grievously wounded by the treachery of Zola; and he did not fail
to denounce this treachery to Bernard.
Paul Cézanne was born January 19, 1839. His father was a rich
bourgeois, and while he was disappointed when his son refused to
prosecute further his law studies, he, being a sensible parent and
justly estimating Paul's steadiness of character, allowed him to go to
Paris in 1862, giving him an income of a hundred and fifty francs a
month, which was shortly after doubled. With sixty dollars a month an
art student of twenty-three could, in those days, live comfortably,
study at leisure, and see the world. Cézanne from the start was in
earnest. Instinctively he realised that for him was not the rapid
ascent of the rocky path that leads to Parnassus. He mistrusted his
own talent, though not his powers of application. At first he
frequented the Académie Suisse, where he encountered as fellow-workers
Pissarro and Guillaumin. He soon transferred his easel to the
Beaux-Arts and became an admirer of Delacroix and Courbet. It seems
strange in the presence of a Cézanne picture to realise that he, too,
suffered his little term of lyric madness and wrestled with huge
mythologic themes--giant men carrying off monstrous women.
Connoisseurs at the sale of Zola's art treasures were astonished by
the sight of a canvas signed Cézanne, the subject of which was
L'Enlèvement, a romantic subject, not lacking in the spirit of
Delacroix. The Courbet influence persisted, despite the development of
the younger painter in other schools. Cézanne can claim Courbet and
the Dutchmen as artistic ancestors.
When Cézanne arrived in Paris the first comrade to greet him was Zola.
The pair became inseparable; they fought for naturalism, and it was to
Cézanne that Zola dedicated his _Salons_ which are now to be found in
a volume of essays on art and literature bearing the soothing title of
Mes Haines. Zola, pitching overboard many friends, wrote his famous
eulogy of Manet in the _Evenement_, and the row he raised was so
fierce that he was forced to resign as art critic from that journal.
The fight then began in earnest. The story is a thrice-told one. It
may be read in Théodore Duret's study of Manet and, as regards
Cézanne, in the same critic's volume on Impressionism. Cézanne
exhibited in 1874 with Manet and the rest at the impressionists'
salon, held at the studio of Nadar the photographer. He had earlier
submitted at once to Manet's magic method of painting, but in 1873, at
Auvers-sur-Oise, he began painting in the _plein air_ style and with
certain modifications adhered to that manner until the time of his
death. The amazing part of it all is that he produced for more than
thirty years and seldom sold a canvas, seldom exhibited. His solitary
appearance at an official salon was in 1882, and he would not have
succeeded then if it had not been for his friend Guillaumin, a member
of the selecting jury, who claimed his rights and passed in, amid
execrations, both mock and real, a portrait by Cézanne.
Called a _communard_ in 1874, Cézanne was saluted with the title of
anarchist in 1904, when his vogue had begun; these titles being a
species of official nomenclature for all rebels. Thiers, once
President of the French Republic, made a _bon mot_ when he exclaimed:
"A Romantic--that is to say, Communist!" During his entire career this
mild, reserved gentleman from Aix came under the ban of the critics
and the authorities, for he had shouldered his musket in 1871, as did
Manet, as did Bazille,--who, like Henri Regnault, was killed in a
skirmish.
His most virulent enemies were forced to admit that Edouard Manet had
a certain facility with the brush; his quality and beauty of sheer
paint could not be winked away even by Albert Wolff. But to Cézanne
there was no quarter shown. He was called the "Ape of Manet"; he was
hissed, cursed, abused; his canvases were spat upon, and as late as
1902, when M. Roujon, the Director of the Beaux-Arts, was asked by
Octave Mirbeau to decorate Cézanne, he nearly fainted from
astonishment. Cézanne! That barbarian! The amiable director suggested
instead the name of Claude Monet. Time had enjoyed its little
whirligig with that great painter of vibrating light and water, but
Monet blandly refused the long-protracted honour. Another anecdote is
related by M. Duret. William II of Germany in 1899 wished to examine
with his own eyes, trained by the black, muddy painting of Germany,
the canvases of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, and Manet, acquired
by Director Tschudi for the Berlin National Gallery. He saw them all
except the Cézanne. Herr Tschudi feared that the Parisian fat would be
in the imperial fire if the Cézanne picture appeared. So he hid it. As
it was his Majesty nodded in emphatic disapproval of the imported
purchases. If he had viewed the Cézanne!
At first blush, for those whose schooling has been academic, the
Cézanne productions are shocking. Yet his is a personal vision, though
a heavy one. He has not a facile brush; he is not a great painter; he
lacks imagination, invention, fantasy; but his palette is his own. He
is a master of gray tones, and his scale is, as Duret justly observes,
a very intense one. He avoids the anecdote, historic or domestic. He
detests design, prearranged composition. His studio is an open field,
light the chief actor of his palette. He is never conventionally
decorative unless you can call his own particular scheme decorative.
He paints what he sees without flattery, without flinching from any
ugliness. Compared with him Courbet is as sensuous as Correggio. He
does not seek for the correspondences of light with surrounding
objects or the atmosphere in which Eugène Carrière bathes his
portraits, Rodin his marbles. The Cézanne picture does not modulate,
does not flow; is too often hard, though always veracious--Cézannes
veracity, be it understood. But it is an inescapable veracity. There
is, too, great vitality and a peculiar reserved passion, like that of
a Delacroix _à ribbers_, and in his still-life he is as great even as
Manet.
His landscapes are real, though without the subtle poetry of Corot or
the blazing lyricism of Monet. He hails directly from the Dutch: Van
der Near, in his night pieces. Yet no Dutchman ever painted so
uncompromisingly, so close to the border line that divides the rigid
definitions of old-fashioned photography--the "new" photography hugs
closely the mellow mezzotint--and the vision of the painter. An
eye--nothing more, is Cézanne. He refuses to see in nature either a
symbol or a sermon. Withal his landscapes are poignant in their
reality. They are like the grill age one notes in ancient French
country houses--little caseate cut in the windows through which you
may see in vivid outline a little section of the landscape. Cézanne
marvellously renders certain surfaces, china, fruit, tapestry.
Slowly grew his fame as a sober, sincere, unaffected workman of art.
Disciples rallied around him. He accepted changing fortunes with his
accustomed equanimity. Maurice Denis painted for the Champ de Mars
Salon of 1901 a picture entitled Homage à Cézanne, after the
well-known _hommages_ of Fantin-Latour. This _homage_ had its uses.
The disciples became a swelling, noisy chorus, and in 1904 the Cézanne
room was thronged by overheated enthusiasts who would have offered
violence to the first critical dissident. The older men, the followers
of Monet, Manet, Degas, and Whistler, talked as if the end of the
world had arrived. Art is a serious affair in Paris. However, after
Cézanne appeared the paintings of that half-crazy, unlucky genius,
Vincent van Gogh, and of the gifted, brutal Gauguin. And in the face
of such offerings Cézanne may yet, by reason of his moderation,
achieve the unhappy fate of becoming a classic. He is certainly as far
removed from Van Gogh and Gauguin on the one side as he is from Manet
and Courbet on the other. Huysmans does not hesitate to assert that
Cézanne contributed more to accelerate the impressionist movement than
Manet. Paul Cézanne died in Aix, in Provence, October 23, 1906.
Emile Bernard, an admirer, a quasi-pupil of Cézanne's and a painter of
established reputation, discoursed at length in the _Mercure de
France_ upon the methods and the man. His anecdotes are interesting.
Without the genius of Flaubert, Cézanne had something of the great
novelist's abhorrence of life--fear would be a better word. He
voluntarily left Paris to immure himself in his native town of Aix,
there to work out in peace long-planned projects, which would, he
believed, revolutionise the technique of painting. Whether for good or
evil, his influence on the younger men in Paris has been powerful,
though it is now on the wane. How far they have gone astray in
imitating him is the most significant thing related by Emile Bernard,
a friend of Paul Gauguin and a member of his Pont-Aven school.
In February, 1904, Bernard landed in Marseilles after a trip to the
Orient. A chance word told him that there had been installed an
electric tramway between Marseilles and Aix. Instantly the name of
Cézanne came to his memory; he had known for some years that the old
painter was in Aix. He resolved to visit him, and fearing a doubtful
reception he carried with him a pamphlet he had written in 1889, an
eulogium of the painter. On the way he asked his fellow-travellers for
Cézanne's address, but in vain; the name was unknown. In Aix he met
with little success. Evidently the fame of the recluse had not reached
his birthplace. At last Bernard was advised to go to the Mayor's
office, where he would find an electoral list. Among the voters he
discovered a Paul Cézanne, who was born January 19, 1839, who lived at
25 Rue Boulegon. Bernard lost no time and reached a simple dwelling
house with the name of the painter on the door. He rang. The door
opened. He entered and mounted a staircase. Ahead of him, slowly
toiling upward, was an old man in a cloak and carrying a portfolio. It
was Cézanne. After he had explained the reason for his visit, the old
painter cried: "You are Emile Bernard! You are a maker of biographies!
Signac"--an impressionist--"told me of you. You are also a painter?"
Bernard, who had been painting for years, and was a friend of Signac,
was nonplussed at his sudden literary reputation, but he explained the
matter to Cézanne, who, however, was in doubt until he saw later the
work of his admirer.
He had another atelier a short distance from the town; he called it
"The Motive." There, facing Mount Sainte-Victoire, he painted every
afternoon in the open; the majority of his later landscapes were
inspired by the views in that charming valley. Bernard was so glad to
meet Cézanne that he moved to Aix.
In Cézanne's studio at Aix Bernard encountered some extraordinary
studies in flower painting and three death heads; also monstrous
nudes, giant-like women whose flesh appeared parboiled. On the streets
Cézanne was always annoyed by boys or beggars; the former were
attracted by his bohemian exterior and to express their admiration
shouted at him or else threw stones; the beggars knew their man to be
easy and were rewarded by small coin. Although Cézanne lived like a
bachelor, his surviving sister saw that his household was comfortable.
His wife and son lived in Paris and often visited him. He was rich;
his father, a successful banker at Aix, had left him plenty of money;
but a fanatic on the subject of art, ceaselessly searching for new
tonal combinations, he preferred a hermit's existence. In Aix he was
considered eccentric though harmless. His pride was doubled by a
morbid shyness. Strangers he avoided. So sensitive was he that once
when he stumbled over a rock Bernard attempted to help him by seizing
his arm. A terrible scene ensued. The painter, livid with fright,
cursed the unhappy young Parisian and finally ran away. An explanation
came when the housekeeper told Bernard that her master was a little
peculiar. Early in life he had been kicked by some rascal and ever
afterward was nervous. He was very irritable and not in good health.
In Bernard's presence he threw a bust made of him by Solari to the
ground, smashing it. It didn't please him. In argument he lost his
temper, though he recovered it rapidly. Zola's name was anathema. He
said that Daumier drank too much; hence his failure to attain
veritable greatness. Cézanne worked from six to ten or eleven in the
morning at his atelier; then he breakfasted, repaired to the "Motive,"
there to remain until five in the evening. Returning to Aix, he dined
and retired immediately. And he had kept up this life of toil and
abnegation for years. He compared himself to Balzac's Frenhofer (in
The Unknown Masterpiece), who painted out each day the work of the
previous day. Cézanne adored the Venetians--which is curious--and
admitted that he lacked the power to realise his inward vision; hence
the continual experimenting. He most admired Veronese, and was
ambitious of being received at what he called the "Salon de
Bouguereau." The truth is, despite Cézanne's long residence in Paris,
he remained provincial to the end; his father before becoming a banker
had been a hairdresser, and his son was proud of the fact. He never
concealed it. He loved his father's memory and had wet eyes when he
spoke of him.
Bernard thinks that the vision of his master was defective; hence the
sometime shocking deformations he indulged in. "His _optique_ was more
in his brain than in his eye." He lacked imagination absolutely, and
worked slowly, laboriously, his method one of excessive complication.
He began with a shadow, then a touch, superimposing tone upon tone,
modelling his paint somewhat like Monticelli, but without a hint of
that artist's lyricism. Sober, without rhetoric, a realist, yet with a
singularly rich and often harmonious palette, Cézanne reported
faithfully what his eyes told him.
It angered him to see himself imitated and he was wrathful when he
heard that his still-life pictures were praised in Paris. "That stuff
they like up there, do they? Their taste must be low," he would
repeat, his eyes sparkling with malice. He disliked the work of Paul
Gauguin and repudiated the claim of being his artistic ancestor. "He
did not understand me," grumbled Cézanne. He praised Thomas Couture,
who was, he asserted, a true master, one who had formed such excellent
pupils as Courbet, Manet, and Puvis. This rather staggered Bernard, as
well it might; the paintings of Couture and Cézanne are poles apart.
He had, he said, wasted much time in his youth--particularly in
literature. A lettered man, he read to Bernard a poem in imitation of
Baudelaire, one would say very Baudelairian. He had begun too late,
had submitted himself to other men's influence, and wished for half a
century that he might "realise"--his favourite expression--his
theories. When he saw Bernard painting he told him that his palette
was too restricted; he needed at least twenty colours. Bernard gives
the list of yellows, reds, greens, and blues, with variations. "Don't
make Chinese images like Gauguin," he said another time. "All nature
must be modelled after the sphere, cone, and cylinder; as for colour,
the more the colours harmonise the more the design becomes precise."
Never a devotee of form--he did not draw from the model--his
philosophy can be summed up thus: Look out for the contrasts and
correspondence of tones, and the design will take care of itself. He
hated "literary" painting and art criticism. He strongly advised
Bernard to stick to his paint and let the pen alone. The moment an
artist begins to explain his work he is done for; painting is
concrete, literature deals with the abstract. He loved music,
especially Wagner's, which he did not understand, but the sound of
Wagner's name was sympathetic, and that had at first attracted him!
Pissarro he admired for his indefatigable labours. Suffering from
diabetes, which killed him, his nervous tension is excusable. He was
in reality an amiable, kind-hearted, religious man. Above all, simple.
He sought for the simple motive in nature. He would not paint a Christ
head because he did not believe himself a worthy enough Christian.
Chardin he studied and had a theory that the big spectacles and visor
which the Little Master (the Velasquez of vegetables) wore had helped
his vision. Certainly the still-life of Cézanne's is the only modern
still-life that may be compared to Chardin's; not Manet, Vollon, Chase
has excelled this humble painter of Aix. He called the Écoles des
Beaux-Arts the "Bozards," and reviled as farceurs the German
secessionists who imitated him. He considered Ingres, notwithstanding
his science, a small painter in comparison with the Venetians and
Spaniards.
A painter by compulsion, a contemplative rather than a creative
temperament, a fumbler and seeker, nevertheless Paul Cézanne has
formed a school, has left a considerable body of work. His optic nerve
was abnormal, he saw his planes leap or sink on his canvas; he often
complained, but his patience and sincerity were undoubted. Like his
friend Zola his genius--if genius there is in either man--was largely
a matter of protracted labour, and has it not been said that genius is
a long labour?
From the sympathetic pen of Emile Bernard we learn of a character
living in the real bohemia of Paris painters who might have figured in
any of the novels referred to, or, better still, might have been
interpreted by Victor Hugo or Ivan Turgenieff. But the Frenchman would
have made of Père Tanguy a species of poor Myriel; the Russian would
have painted him as he was, a saint in humility, springing from the
soil, the friend of poor painters, a socialist in theory, but a
Christian in practice. After following the humble itinerary of his
life you realise the uselessness of "literary" invention. Here was
character for a novelist to be had for the asking. The Crainquebille
of Anatole France occurs to the lover of that writer after reading
Emile Bernard's little study of Father Tanguy.
His name was Julien Tanguy. He was born in 1825 at Plédran, in the
north of France. He was a plasterer when he married. The young couple,
accustomed to hardships of all kinds, left Saint-Brieuc for Paris.
This was in 1860. After various vicissitudes the man became a colour
grinder in the house of Edouard, Rue Clauzel. The position was meagre.
The Tanguys moved up in the social scale by accepting the job of
concierge somewhere on the Butte Montmartre. This gave Père Tanguy
liberty, his wife looking after the house. He went into business on
his own account, vending colours in the quarter and the suburbs. He
traversed the country from Argenteuil to Barbizon, from Ecouen to
Sarcelle. He met Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, all youthful and
confident and boiling over with admiration for Corot, Courbet, and
Millet. They patronised the honest, pleasant pedlar of colours and
brushes, and when they didn't have the money he trusted them. It was
his prime quality that he trusted people. He cared not enough for
money, as his too often suffering wife averred, and his heart, always
on his sleeve, he was an easy mark for the designing. This supreme
simplicity led him into joining the Communists in 1871, and then he
had a nasty adventure. One day, while dreaming on sentry duty, a band
from Versailles suddenly descended upon the outposts. Père Tanguy lost
his head. He could not fire on a fellow-being, and he threw away his
musket. For this act of "treachery" he was sentenced to serve two
years in the galleys at Brest. Released by friendly intervention he
had still to remain without Paris for two years more. Finally,
entering his beloved quarter he resumed his tranquil occupation, and
hearing that the Maison Edouard had been moved from the Rue Clauzel he
rented a little shop, where he sold material to artists, bought
pictures, and entertained in his humble manner any friend or luckless
devil who happened that way. Cézanne and Vignon were his best
customers. Guillemin, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Oller,
Messurer, Augustin, Signac, De Lautrec, symbolists of the Pont-Aven
school, neo-impressionists, and the young _fumistes_ of schools as yet
unborn, revolutionaries with one shirt to their back, swearing at the
official _Salon_ and also swearing by the brotherhood of man (with a
capital), assembled in this dingy old shop. Tanguy was a rallying
point. He was full of the milk of human kindness, and robbed himself
to give a worthless fellow with a hard-luck story some of the sous
that should have gone to his wife. Fortunately she was a philosopher
as well as an admirable housekeeper. If the rent was paid and there
was some soup-meat for dinner she was content. More she could not
expect from a man who gave away with both hands. But--and here is the
curious part of this narrative of M. Bernard's--Tanguy was the only
person in Paris who bought and owned pictures by Cézanne. He had
dozens of his canvases stacked away in the rear of his
establishment--Cézanne often parted with a canvas for a few francs.
When Tanguy was hard up he would go to some discerning amateur and
sell for two hundred francs pictures that to-day bring twenty thousand
francs. Tanguy hated to sell, especially his Cézannes. Artists came to
see them. His shop was the scene of many a wordy critical battle.
Gauguin uttered the paradox, "Nothing so resembles a daub as a
masterpiece," and the novelist Elémir Bourges cried, "This is the
painting of a vintager!" Alfred Stevens roared in the presence of the
Cézannes, Anquetin admired; but, as Bernard adds, Jacques Blanche
bought. So did Durand-Ruel, who has informed me that a fine Cézanne
to-day is a difficult fish to hook. The great public won't have him,
and the amateurs who adore him jealously hold on to their prizes.
The socialism of Père Tanguy was of a mild order. He pitied with a
Tolstoyan pity the sufferings of the poor. He did not hate the rich,
nor did he stand at street corners preaching the beauties of torch and
bomb. A simple soul, uneducated, not critical, yet with an instinctive
_flair_ for the coming triumphs of his young men, he espoused the
cause of his clients because they were poverty-stricken, unknown, and
revolutionists--an æsthetic revolution was his wildest dream. He said
of Cézanne that "Papa Cézanne always quits a picture before he
finishes it. If he moves he lets his canvases lie in the vacated
studio." He no doubt benefited by this carelessness of the painter.
Cézanne worked slowly, but he never stopped working; he left nothing
to hazard, and, astonishing fact, he spent every morning at the
Louvre. There he practised his daily scales, optically speaking,
before taking up the brush for the day's work. Many of Vincent von
Gogh's pictures Tanguy owned. This was about 1886. The eccentric,
gifted Dutchman attracted the poor merchant by his ferocious
socialism. He was, indeed, a ferocious temperament, working like a
madman, painting with his colour tubes when he had no brushes, and
literally living in the _boutique_ of Tanguy. The latter always read
_Le Cri du Peuple_ and _L'Intransigeant_, and believed all he read. He
did not care much for Van Gogh's compositions, no doubt agreeing with
Cézanne, who, viewing them for the first time, calmly remarked to the
youth, "Sincerely, you paint like a crazy man." A prophetic note! Van
Gogh frequented a tavern kept by an old model, an Italian woman. It
bore the romantic title of The Tambourine. When he couldn't pay his
bills he would cover the walls with furious frescoes, flowers of
tropical exuberance, landscapes that must have been seen in a
nightmare. He was painting at this time three pictures a day. He would
part with a canvas at the extortionate price of a franc.
Tanguy was the possessor of a large portrait by Cézanne, done in his
earliest manner. This he had to sell on account of pressing need. Dark
days followed. He moved across the street into smaller quarters. The
old crowd began to drift away; some died, some had become famous, and
one, Van Gogh, shot himself in an access of mania. This was a shock to
his friend. A second followed when Van Gogh's devoted brother went
mad. Good Father Tanguy, as he was affectionately called, sickened. He
entered a hospital. He suffered from a cancerous trouble of the
stomach. One day he said to his wife, who was visiting him: "I am
bored here... I won't die here... I mean to die in my own home." He
went home and died shortly afterward. In 1894 Octave Mirbeau wrote a
moving article for the _Journal_ about the man who had never spoken
ill of any one, who had never turned from his door a hungry person.
The result was a sale organised at the Hôtel Drouot, to which
prominent artists and literary folk contributed works. Cazin,
Guillemet, Gyp, Maufra, Monet, Luce, Pissarro, Rochegrosse, Sisley,
Vauthier, Carrier-Belleuse, Berthe Morisot, Renoir, Jongkind,
Raffaelli, *Helleu, Rodin, and many others participated in this noble
charity, which brought the widow ten thousand francs. She soon died.
Van Gogh painted a portrait of Tanguy about 1886. It is said to belong
to Rodin. It represents the naïve man with his irregular features and
placid expression of a stoic; not a distinguished face, but
unmistakably that of a gentle soul, who had loved his neighbour better
than himself (therefore he died in misery). He it was who may be
remembered by those who knew him--and also a few future historians of
the futility of things in general--as the man who first made known to
Paris the pictures of the timid, obstinate Paul Cézanne. An odd fish,
indeed, was this same Julien Tanguy, little father to painters.
II. ROPS THE ETCHER
I
That personality in art counts, next to actual genius, heavier than
all other qualities, is such a truism that it is often forgotten. In
the enormous mass of mediocre work which is turned out annually by
artists of technical talent seldom is there encountered a strong,
well-defined personality. Imitation has been called the bane of
originality; suppress it as a factor, and nine-tenths of living
painters, sculptors, etchers would have to shut up shop. The stencil
is the support of many men who otherwise might have become useful
citizens, shoemakers, tailors, policemen, or vice-presidents. For this
reason the phrase "academic" should be more elastic in its meanings.
There are academic painters influenced by Corot or Monticelli, as well
as by David, Gros, or Meissonier. The "academic" Rodin has appeared in
contemporary sculpture; the great Frenchman found for himself his
formula, and the lesser men have appropriated it to their own uses.
This is considered legitimate, though not a high order of art;
however, the second-rate rules in the market-place, let the genius
rage as he will. He must be tamed. He must be softened; his divine
fire shaded by the friendly screens of more prudent, more conventional
talent. Even among men of genius up on the heights it is the
personality of each that enters largely into the equation of their
work. No one can confuse Whistler the etcher with the etcher
Rembrandt; the profounder is the Dutchman. Yet what individuality
there is in the plates of the American! What personality! Now,
Félicien Rops, the Belgian etcher, lithographer, engraver, designer,
and painter, occupies about the same relative position to Honoré
Daumier as Whistler does to Rembrandt. How seldom you hear of Rops.
Why? He was a man of genius, one of the greatest etchers and
lithographers of his century, an artist with an intense personal line,
a colossal workman and versatile inventor--why has he been passed over
and inferior men praised?
His pornographic plates cannot be the only reason, because his
representative work is free from licence or suggestion. Giulio
Romano's illustrations to Aretino's sonnets are not held up as the
representative art of this pupil of Raphael, nor are the vulgarities
of Rowlandson, Hogarth, George Morland set against their better
attempts. Collectors treasure the engravings of the eighteenth-century
_éditions des fermiers-généraux_ for their capital workmanship, not
for their licentious themes. But Rops is always the Rops of the
Pornocrates! After discussing him with some amateurs you are forced to
realise that it is his plates in which he gives rein to an
unparalleled flow of animal spirits and _gauloiserie_ that are the
more esteemed. Rops the artist, with the big and subtle style, the
etcher of the Sataniques, of Le Pendu, of La Buveuse d'Absinthe and
half a hundred other masterpieces, is set aside for the witty
illustrator, with the humour of a Rabelais and the cynicism of
Chamfort. And even on this side of his genius he has never been
excelled, the Japanese alone being his equals in daring of invention,
while he tops them in the expression of broad humour.
In the Luxembourg galleries there is a picture of an interesting man,
in an etcher's atelier. It is the portrait of Rops by Mathey, and
shows him examining at a window, through which the light pours in, a
freshly pulled proof. It depicts with skill the intense expression
upon his handsome face, the expression of an artist absolutely
absorbed in his work. That is the real Rops. His master quality was
intensity. It traversed like a fine keen flame his entire production
from seemingly insignificant tail-pieces to his agonised designs, in
which luxury and pain are inextricably commingled.
He was born at Namur, Belgium, July 10, 1833, and died at Essonnes,
near Paris, August 23,1898. He was the son of wealthy parents, and on
one side stemmed directly from Hungary. His grandfather was Rops
Lajos, of the province called Alfod. The Maygar predominated. He was
as proud and fierce as Goya. A fighter from the beginning, still in
warrior's harness at the close, when, "cardiac and impenitent," as he
put it, he died of heart trouble. He received at the hands of the
Jesuits a classical education. A Latinist, he was erudite as were few
of his artistic contemporaries. The mystic strain in him did not
betray itself until his third period. He was an accomplished humourist
and could generally cap Latin verses with D'Aurevilly or Huysmans.
Tertullian's De Cultu Feminarum he must have read, for many of his
plates are illustrations of the learned Bishop of Carthage's attitude
toward womankind. The hot crossings of blood, Belgian and Hungarian,
may be responsible for a peculiarly forceful, rebellious, sensual, and
boisterous temperament.
Doubtless the three stadia of an artist's career are the arbitrary
classification of critics; nevertheless they are well marked in many
cases. Balzac was a romantic, a realist, a mystic; Flaubert was
alternately romantic and realist. Tolstoi was never a romantic, but a
realist he was, and he is a mystic. Dostoïevski, from whom he absorbed
so much, taught him the formulas of his mysticism--though Tolstoi has
never felt the life of the soul so profoundly as this predecessor.
Ibsen passed through the three stages. Huysmans, never romantic, began
as a realistic pessimist and ended as a pessimistic mystic. Félicien
Rops could never have been a romantic, though the _macabre_
romanticism of 1830 may be found in his designs. A realist, brutal,
bitter, he was in his youth; he saw the grosser facts of life, so
often lamentable and tender, in the spirit of a Voltaire doubled by a
Rabelais. There is honest and also shocking laughter in these early
illustrations. A _fantaisiste_, graceful, delicate--and
indelicate--emerged after the lad went up to Paris, as if he had
stepped out of the eighteenth century. Rops summed up in his book
plates, title-pages, and wood-cuts, illustrations done in a furious
speed, all the elegance, the courtly corruption, and Boucher-like
luxuriousness that may be detected in the moral _marquetrie_ of the
Goncourts. He had not yet said, "Evil, be thou my Good," nor had the
mystic delirium of the last period set in. All his afternoons must
have been those of a faun--a faun who with impeccable solicitude put
on paper what he saw in the heart of the bosk or down by the banks of
secret rivers. The sad turpitudes, the casuistry of concupiscence, the
ironic discolourations and feverish delving into subterranean moral
stratifications were as yet afar. He was young, handsome, with a
lithe, vigorous body and the head of an aristocratic Mephistopheles, a
head all profile, like the heads of Hungary--Hungary itself, which is
all profile. Need we add that after the death of his father he soon
wasted a fortune? But the reckless bohemian in him was subjugated by
necessity. He set to work to earn his bread. Some conception of his
labours for thirty-five years may be gleaned from the catalogue of his
work by Erastène Ramiro (whose real name is Eugène Rodrigues). Nearly
three thousand plates he etched, lithographed, or engraved, not
including his paintings or his experiments in various mediums, such as
_vernis mou_ and wood-engraving.
The coarse legends of old Flanders found in Rops their pictorial
interpreter. Less cerebral in his abounding youth he made Paris laugh
with his comical travesties of political persons, persons in high
finance, and also by his shrewd eye for the homely traits in the life
of the people. His street scenes are miracles of detail, satire, and
fun. The one entitled Spring is the most noted. That legacy of hate,
inherited from the 1830 poets, of the bourgeois, was a merry play for
Rops. He is the third of the trinity of caricature artists, Daumier
and Gavarni being the other two. The liberal pinch of Gallic salt in
the earlier plates need not annoy one. Deliberately vulgar he never
is, though he sports with things hallowed, and always goes out of his
way to insult the religion he first professed. There is in this
Satanist a religious _fond_; the very fierceness of his attacks, of
his blasphemies, betrays the Catholic at heart. If he did not believe,
why should he have displayed such continual scorn? No, Rops was not as
sincere as his friends would have us believe. He made his Pegasus plod
in too deep mud, and often in his most winged flights he darkened the
blue with his satyr-like brutalities. But in the gay middle period his
pages overflow with decorative Cupids and tiny devils, joyful girls,
dainty amourettes, and Parisian _putti_--they blithely kick their legs
over the edges of eternity, and smile as if life were a snowball jest
or a game at forfeits. They are adorable. His women are usually
strong-backed, robust Amazons, drawn with a swirling line and a
Rubens-like fulness. They are conquerors. Before these majestic idols
men prostrate themselves.
In his turbulent later visions there is no suspicion of the opium that
gave its inspiration to Coleridge, Poe, De Quincey, James Thomson, or
Baudelaire. The city of dreadful night shown us by Rops is the city
through whose streets he has passed his life long. Not the dream
cities of James Ensor or De Groux, the Paris of Rops is at once an
abode of disillusionment, of mordant joys, of sheer ecstasy and morbid
hallucinations. The opium of Rops is his imagination, aided by a
manual dexterity that is extraordinary. He is a master of linear
design. He is cold, deadly cold, but correct ever. Fabulous and
absurd, delicious and abominable as he may be, his spirit sits
critically aloft, never smiling. Impersonal as a toxicologist, he
handles his poisonous acids with the gravity of a philosopher and the
indifference of a destroying angel. There is a diabolic spleen more
strongly developed in Rops than in any of his contemporaries, with the
sole exception of Baudelaire, who inspired and spurred him on to
astounding atrocities of the needle and acid. This diabolism, this
worship of Satan and his works, are sincere in the etcher. A relic of
rotten Romanticism, it glows like phosphorescent fire during his last
period. The Church has in its wisdom employed a phrase for frigid
depravity of the Rops kind, naming it "morose delectation." Morose
Rops became as he developed. His private life he hid. We know little
or nothing of it save that he was not unhappy in his companionships or
choice of friends. He loathed the promiscuous methods by which some
men achieve admiration. But secret spleen there must have been--a
twist of a painter's wrist may expose his soul. He became a solitary
and ate the bitter root of sin, for, cerebral as he is, his discovery
of the human soul shows it as ill at ease before its maker. Flaubert
has said that "the ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope." But no
man may sun himself on this slope by the flames of hell without his
soul shrivelling away. Rodin, who admires Rops and has been greatly
influenced by him; Rodin, as an artist superior to the Belgian, has
revealed less preoccupation with the ignoble; at least, despite his
excursions into questionable territory, he has never been carried
completely away. He always returns to the sane, to the normal life;
but over the volcanic landscapes of Rops are strewn many moral
abysses.
II