could play the silken courtier with success. The Arabs say that "one
who has been stung by a snake shivers at a string," and perhaps the
violence with which the painter attacked the religious may be set down
to the score of his youthful fears and flights when the Inquisition
was after him. He was a sort of Voltaire in black and white. The
corruption of churchmen and court at this epoch seems almost
incredible. Goya noted it with a boldness that meant but one
thing--friends high in power. This was the case. He was admired by the
king, Charles IV, and admired--who knows how much!--by his queen,
Marie Louise of Parma, Goya painted their portraits; also painted the
portraits of the royal favourite and prime minister and Prince de la
Paz, Manuel Godoy--favourite of both king and queen. Him, Goya left in
effigy for the scorn of generations to come. "A grocer's family who
have won the big lottery prize," was the witty description of
Théophile Gautier when he saw the picture of the royal family.
Curiously enough, this Goya, who from the first plucked success from
its thorny setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840
recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical
literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard.
And Gautier's sketch of a few pages still remains the most
comprehensive estimate. From it all have been forced to borrow;
Richard Muther in his briskly enthusiastic monograph and the section
in his valuable History of Modern Painting; Charles Yriarte, Will
Rothenstein, Lafond, Lefort, Condé de la Vinaza--all have read Gautier
to advantage. Valerian von Loga has devoted a study to the etchings,
and Don Juan de la Rada has made a study of the frescoes in the church
of San Antonio de la Florida; Carl Justi, Stirling Maxwell, C.G.
Hartley should also be consulted. Yriarte is interesting, inasmuch as
he deals with the apparition of Goya in Rome, an outlaw, but a blithe
one, who, notebook in hand, went through the Trastevere district
sketching with ferocious rapidity the attitudes and gestures of the
vivacious population. A man after Stendhal's heart, this Spaniard. And
in view of his private life one is tempted to add--and after the
heart, too, of Casanova. Notwithstanding, he was an unrivalled
interpreter of child-life. Some of his painted children are of a
dazzling sweetness.
GOYA
II
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born March 30 (or 31), 1746, at
Fuentetodos, near Saragossa, Aragon. He died at Bordeaux, France,
where he had gone for his health, April 16, 1828--Calvert, possibly by
a pen slip, makes him expire a month earlier. He saw the beginnings of
French romanticism, as he was himself a witness of the decadence of
Spanish art. But his spirit has lived on in Manet and Zuloaga.
Decadent he was; a romantic before French romanticism, he yet had
borrowed from an earlier France. Some of his gay Fêtes Champêtres
recall the influence of Watteau--a Watteau without the sweet elegiac
strain. He has been called a Spanish Hogarth--not a happy simile.
Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a
pen stroke the didactic side. His youth was not extraordinary in
promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. The story of his
discovery by a monk of Saragosela--Father Felix Salvador of the
Carthusian convent of Aula Dei--is not missing. He studied with José
Martinez. He ran away in 1766. He remained, say some, in Italy from
1769 to 1774; but in 1771 he appeared in Saragossa again, and the year
1772 saw him competing for the painting about to be undertaken in the
cathedral. He married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the court painter.
He has told us what he thought of his jealous, intriguing
brother-in-law in a portrait. In 1775 he was at Madrid. From 1776 he
executed forty-six tapestry cartoons. In 1779 he presented to the king
his etchings after Velasquez. His rise was rapid. He painted the
queen, with her false teeth, false hair, and her infernal simper, and
this portrait was acclaimed a masterpiece.
His religious frescoes, supposed to be _ad majorem Dei gloriam_, were
really for the greater glory of Goya. They are something more than
secular, often little short of blasphemous. That they were tolerated
proves the cynical temper of his times. When the fat old scoundrel of
a Bourbon king ran away with all his court and the pusillanimous
Joseph Bonaparte came upon the scene, Goya swerved and went through
the motions of loyalty, a thing that rather disturbs the admirers of
the supposedly sturdy republican. But he was only marking time. He
left a terrific arraignment of war and its horrors. Nor did he spare
the French. Callot, Hell-Breughel, are outdone in these swift, ghastly
memoranda of misery, barbarity, rapine, and ruin. The hypocrite
Ferdinand VII was no sooner on the throne of his father than Goya, hat
in hand but sneer on lip and twinkle in eye, approached him, and after
some parleying was restored to royal favour. Goya declared that as an
artist he was not personally concerned in the pranks of the whirligig
politic. Nevertheless he was bitterly chagrined at the twist of
events, and, an old man, he retired to his country house, where he
etched and designed upon its walls startling fancies. He died
disillusioned, and though nursed by some noble countrymen, his career
seemed to illustrate that terrifying picture of his invention--a
skeleton lifts its gravestone and grinningly traces with bony finger
in the dust the word _Nada_--Nothing! Overtaxed by the violence of his
life and labours--he left a prodigious amount of work behind
him--soured by satiety, all spleen and rage, he was a broken-down
Lucifer, who had trailed his wings in the mud. But who shall pass
judgment upon this unhappy man? Perhaps, as he saw the "glimmering
square" grow less, the lament of Cardinal Wolsey may have come to a
brain teeming with memories. Goya had always put his king before his
God. But in his heart he loved the old romantic faith--the faith that
hovered in the background of his art. Goya is not the first son of his
mother church who denied her from sheer perversity. What a nation!
Cervantes and Lope da Vega, Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada--most glorious
of her sex, saint and genius--and Goya! Spain is the land of great and
diverse personalities. But with Calderon we must now say: "Let us to
our ship, for here all is shadowy and unsettled."
Goya, as Baudelaire pointed out more than half a century ago, executed
his etchings by combining aquatint and the use of the dry point. A few
years before his death he took up lithography, then a novelty. His
Caprices, Proverbs, and Horrors of War may outlive his paintings. His
colour scheme was not a wide one, blacks, reds, browns, and yellows
often playing solo; but all modern impressionism may be seen on his
canvases--harsh dissonances, dots, dabs, spots, patches, heavy planes,
strong rhythmic effects of lighting, heavy impasto, luminous
atmosphere, air, sunshine, and vibrating movements; also the
strangeness of his material. Manet went to him a beginner. After
studying the Maja desnuda at the Prado Museum he returned to France
and painted the Olympe, once of the Luxembourg, now in the Louvre. The
balcony scenes of Goya, with their manolas--old-fashioned
grisettes--must have stirred Manet; recall the Frenchman's Balcony.
And the bull-fights? Oh! what an iron-souled master was there--Goya
when he slashed a bull in the arena tormented by the human brutes!
None of his successors matches him. The same is the case with that
diverting, devilish, savoury, and obscene series he called Caprices.
It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in
Paris who secured a set of these rare plates. The witch's sabbaths and
the modern version of them, prostitution and its symbolism, filled the
brain of Goya. He always shocks any but robust nerves with his hybrid
creatures red in claw and foaming at mouth as they fight in midair,
hideous and unnamable phantoms of the dark. His owls are theologians.
The females he often shows make us turn aside our head and shudder.
With implacable fidelity he displayed the reverse of war's heroic
shield. It is something more than hell.
Sattler, Charlet, Raffet, James Ensor, Rethel, De Groux, Rops, Edvard
Münch (did you ever see his woman wooed by a skeleton?), and the rest
of these delineators of the morbid and macabre acknowledge Goya as
their progenitor. He must have been a devil-worshipper. He pictures
the goat devil, horns and hoofs. Gautier compares him to E.T.W.
Hoffmann--Poe not being known in Paris at that time--but it is a
rather laboured comparison, for there was a profoundly human side to
the Spaniard. His perception of reality was of the solidest. He had
lived and loved and knew before Flaubert that if the god of the
Romantics was an upholsterer the god of eighteenth-century Spain was
an executioner. The professed lover of the Duchess of Alba, he painted
her nude, and then, hearing that the Duke might not like the theme so
handled, he painted her again, and clothed, but more insolently
uncovered than before. At the Spanish museum in New York you may see
another portrait of this bold beauty with the name of Goya scratched
in the earth at her feet. Her attitude is characteristic of the
intrigue, which all Madrid knew and approved. At home sat Mrs. Goya
with her twenty children.
Goya was a man of striking appearance. Slender in youth, a graceful
dancer, in middle life he had the wide shoulders and bull neck of an
athlete. He was the terror of Madrileñan husbands. His voice had
seductive charm. He could twang the guitar and fence like ten devils.
A gamester, too. In a word, a figure out of the Renaissance, when the
deed trod hard on the heels of the word. One of his self-portraits
shows him in a Byronic collar, the brow finely proportioned, marked
mobile features, sombre eyes--the ideal Don Juan Tenorio to win the
foolish heart of an Emma Bovary or a bored noblewoman. Another, with
its savage eye--it is a profile--and big beaver head-covering, recalls
Walt Whitman's "I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out." A giant
egoist, and as human, all too human, a fellow as Spain ever begot,
Goya is only hinted at in Baudelaire's searching quatrain beginning:
"Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues." _Fleurs du Mal_ would be
a happy title for the work of Francisco Goya if to "The Flowers of
Evil" were added "and Wisdom." Goya is often cruel and lascivious and
vulgar, but he is as great a philosopher as painter. And to offset his
passionate gloom there are his visions of a golden Spain no longer in
existence; happy, gorgeous of costume, the Spain of sudden coquetries,
of fans, masques, bull-fights, and fandangos, of a people dancing on
the rim of a fire-filled mountain, pious, capricious, child-like,
romantic, and patriotic--the Spain of the eighteenth century. Goya is
its spokesman, as is Velasquez the mirror of Philip's more spacious
times. Velasquez--Goya! poles asunder, yet both born to the artistic
purple. And the stately aristocrat who signed himself Velasquez is not
more in tune with the twentieth-century _Zeitgeist_ than that
coarse-fibred democrat of genius, Francisco Goya.
FORTUNY
Mariano Fortuny: what a magic-breeding name! The motto of this lucky
Spanish painter might have been "Fortuny Fortunatus." Even his sudden
death, at the early age of thirty-six, came after he had executed a
number of masterpieces, an enormous quantity of water-colours,
etchings, ceramics, damascene swords and chased ornaments; it followed
on the heels of sudden glory. His name was in the mouth of artistic
Europe, and the sale of the contents of his studio at Rome in 1875
brought eight hundred thousand francs. Yet so slippery is fame that
Fortuny's name to-day is seldom without a brace of epithets, such as
"garish," or "empty." His work is neither. He is a virtuoso. So was
Tiepolo. He is a Romantic; so the generation preceding him. The
Orientalist par excellence, he has somehow been confounded with
Meissonier and Gérôme, has been called glittering like the former,
hard as was the latter. It is true there are no emotional undertones
in his temperament, the brilliant overtones predominating; but it is
also true that when he died his manner was changing. He had said that
he was tired of the "gay rags" of the eighteenth century, and his
Strand of Portici shows a new line of departure. Edouard Manet made
special appeal to Fortuny; Manet, who had derived from Goya, whose
Spanish _fond_ is undeniable. Perhaps the thrice-brilliant Fortuny's
conscience smote him when he saw a Frenchman so successfully absorbing
the traditions of Goya; but it was not to be. He passed away at the
very top of his renown, truly a favourite of the gods. He was admired,
imitated, above all parodied; though, jealously as are his pictures
guarded, he has been put on the shelf like one of the amazing painted
bibelots in his work.
The injustice of this is patent. Between Fortuny and Meissonier there
lies the gulf that separates the genius and the hard-working man of
talent. Nevertheless Meissonier's statue is in the garden of the
Louvre, Meissonier is extolled as a master, while Fortuny is usually
described in patronising terms as a facile trifler. The reverse is the
truth. No one has painted sunlight with more intensity; he was an
impressionist before the word was coined. He is a colourist almost as
sumptuous as Monticelli, with a precision of vision never attained by
the Marseilles rhapsodist. His figures are as delicious as Watteau's
or Debucourt's--he recalls the latter frequently--and as an
Orientalist he ranks all but a few. Gérôme, Guillaumet, Fromentin,
Huguet are not to be mentioned in the same breath with Fortuny as to
the manipulation of material; and has Guillaumet done anything
savouring more of the mysterious East than Fortuny's At the Gate of
the Seraglio? The magician of jewelled tones, he knew all the subtler
modulations. His canvases vibrate, they emit sparks of sunlight, his
shadows are velvety and warm. Compared with such a picture as The
Choice of a Model, the most laboriously minute Meissonier is as cold
and dead as a photograph--Meissonier, who was a capital fan painter, a
patient miniaturist without colour talent, a myopic delineator of
costumes, who, as Manet said, pasted paper soldiers on canvas and
called the machine a battle-field.
The writer recalls the sensations once evoked by a close view of
Fortuny's Choice of a Model at Paris years ago, and at that time in
the possession of Mr. Stewart. Psychology is not missing in this
miracle of virtuosity; the nude posing on the marble table, the
absolute beauty of the drawing, the colouring, the contrast of the
richly variegated marble pillars in the background, the
eighteenth-century costumes of the Academicians so scrupulously yet so
easily set forth, all made a dazzling ensemble. Since Fortuny turned
the trick a host of spurious pictures has come overseas, and we now
say "Vibert" at the same time as "Fortuny," just as some enlightened
persons couple the names of Ingres and Bouguereau. In the kingdom of
the third rate the mediocre is conqueror.
Listen to this description of La Vicaria (The Spanish Wedding), which
first won for its painter his reputation. Begun in 1868, it was
exhibited at Goupil's, Paris, the spring of 1870 (some say 1869), when
the artist was thirty-two years old. Théophile Gautier--whose genius
and Théodore de Banville's have analogies with Fortuny's in the matter
of surfaces and astounding virtuosity--went up in the air when he saw
the work, and wrote a feuilleton that is still recalled by the old
guard. The following, however, is not by Gautier, but from the pen of
Dr. Richard Muther, the erudite German critic: "A marriage is taking
place in the sacristy of a rococo church in Madrid. The walls are
covered with faded Cordova leather hangings figured in gold and dull
colours, and a magnificent rococo screen separates the sacristy from
the middle aisle. Venetian lustres are suspended from the ceiling,
pictures of martyrs, Venetian glasses in carved oval frames hang on
the wall, richly ornamented wooden benches and a library of missals
and gospels in sparkling silver clasps, and shining marble tables and
glistening braziers form part of the scene in which the marriage
contract is being signed. The costumes are those of the time of Goya.
An old beau is marrying a young and beautiful girl. With affected
grace and a skipping minuet step, holding a modish three-cornered hat
under his arm, he approaches the table to put his signature in the
place which the _escribano_ points out with an obsequious bow. He is
arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is wearing a white silk
dress trimmed with flowered lace and has a wreath of orange blossoms
in her luxuriant black hair. As a girl friend is talking to her she
examines with abstracted attention the pretty little pictures upon her
fan, the finest she ever possessed. A very piquant little head she
has, with her long lashes and black eyes. Then, in the background,
follow the witnesses, and first of all a young lady in a swelling silk
dress of the brightest rose colour. Beside her is one of the
bridegroom's friends in a cabbage-green coat with long flaps and a
shining belt, from which a gleaming sabre hangs. The whole picture is
a marvellous assemblage of colours in which tones of Venetian glow and
strength, the tender pearly gray beloved of the Japanese, and a
melting neutral brown each sets off the other and gives a shimmering
effect to the entire mass."
Fortuny was a gay master of character and comedy as well as of
bric-a-brac. Still life he painted as no one before or after him; if
Chardin is the Velasquez of vegetables, Fortuny is the Rossini of the
rococo; such lace-like filigrees, _fiorturi_, marbles that are of
stone, men and women that are alive, not of marble (like
Alma-Tadema's). The artificiality of his work is principally in the
choice of a subject, not in the performance. How luminous and silky
are his blacks may be noted at the Metropolitan Museum in his portrait
of a Spanish lady. There is nothing of the _petit-maître_ in the
sensitive and adroit handling of values. The rather triste expression,
the veiled look of the eyes, the _morbidezza_ of the flesh tones, and
the general sense of amplitude and grace give us a Fortuny who knew
how to paint broadly. The more obvious and dashing side of him is
present in the Arabian Fantaisie of the Vanderbilt Gallery. It must be
remembered that he spent some time copying, at Madrid, Velasquez and
Goya, and as Camille Mauclair enthusiastically declares, these copies
are literal "identifications." They are highly prized by the Marquise
Carcano (who owned the Vicaria), Madrazo, and the Baron Davillieu--the
last named the chief critical authority on Fortuny.
In the history of the arts there are cases such as Fortuny's, of
Mozart, Chopin, Raphael, and some others, whose precocity and
prodigious powers of production astonished their contemporaries.
Fortuny, whose full name was Mariano José Maria Bernardo Fortuny y
Carbó, was born at Reus, a little town in the province of Tarragona,
near Barcelona. He was very poor, and at the age of twelve an orphan.
His grandfather, a carpenter, went with the lad on foot through the
towns of Catalonia exhibiting a cabinet containing wax figures painted
by Mariano and perhaps modelled by him. He began carving and daubing
at the age of five; a regular little fingersmith, his hands were never
idle. He secured by the promise of talent a pension of forty-two
francs a month and went to Barcelona to study at the Academy. Winning
the prize of Rome in 1857, he went there and copied old masters until
1860, when, the war between Spain and Morocco breaking out, he went to
Morocco on General Prim's staff, and for five or six months his brain
was saturated with the wonders of Eastern sunlight, exotic hues,
beggars, gorgeous rugs, snake-charmers, Arabs afoot or circling on
horseback with the velocity of birds, fakirs, all the huge glistening
febrile life he was later to interpret with such charm and exactitude.
He returned to Rome. He made a second trip to Africa. He returned to
Spain. Barcelona gave him a pension of a hundred and thirty-two francs
a month, which amount was kept up later by the Duke de Rianzarès until
1867. He went to Paris in 1866, was taken up by the Goupils, knew
Meissonier and worked occasionally with Gérôme. His rococo pictures,
his Oriental work set Paris ablaze. He married the daughter of the
Spanish painter Federigo Madrazo, and visited at Madrid, Granada,
Seville, Rome, and, in 1874, London. He contracted a pernicious fever
at Rome and died there, November 21, 1874, at the age of thirty-six.
His funeral was imposing, many celebrities of the world of art
participating. He was buried in the Campo Varano.
In 1866 at Rome he began etching, and in fifteen months finished a
series of masterpieces. His line, surprisingly agile and sinuous, has
the finesse of Goya--whom he resembled at certain points. He used
aquatint with full knowledge of effects to be produced, and at times
he recalls Rembrandt in the depth of his shadows. His friend the
painter Henri Regnault despaired in the presence of such versatility,
such speed and ease of workmanship. He wrote: "The time I spent with
Fortuny is haunting me still. What a magnificent fellow he is! He
paints the most marvellous things, and is the master of us all. I wish
I could show you the two or three pictures he has in his hand or his
etchings and water-colours. They inspired me with a real disgust of my
own. Ah, Fortuny, you spoil my sleep!"
Standing aloof from the ideas and tendencies of his times and not a
sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the
pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a
brainless technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which
Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius
as a museum panorama. Let us not be misled by the worship of the
elephantine. It is characteristic of his temperament that the big
battle piece he was commissioned by the Barcelona Academy to paint was
never finished. Not every one who goes to Rome does as the Romans do.
Dowered by nature with extraordinary acuity of vision, with a
romantic, passionate nature and a will of steel, Fortuny was bound to
become a great painter. His manual technique bordered on the fabulous;
he had the painter's hand, as his fellow-countryman Pablo de Sarasate
had the born hand of the violinist. That he spent the brief years of
his life in painting the subjects he did is not a problem to be posed,
for, as Henry James has said, it is always dangerous to challenge an
artist's selection of subject. Why did Goya conceive his _Caprichos_?
The love of decorative beauty in Fortuny was not bedimmed by
criticism. He had the lust of eye which not the treasures of Ormuz and
Ind, or ivory, apes, and peacocks, could satisfy. If he loved the
kaleidoscopic East, he also knew his Spain. We have seen at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts a tiny picture, the court-yard of a
Spanish inn through which passes a blinding shaft of sunlight, which
would make envious Señor Sorolla. Fortuny has personal charm, a
quality usually missing nowadays, for painters in their desire to be
truthful are tumbling head over heels into the prosaic. Individuality
is vanishing in the wastes of an over-anxious realism. If Fortuny is a
daring virtuoso on one or two strings, his palette is ever enchanting.
Personally he was a handsome man, with a distinguished head, his body
broad and muscular and capable of enduring fatigues that would have
killed most painters. Allied to this powerful physique was a seductive
sensibility. This peasant-born painter was an aristocrat of art. Old
Mother Nature is an implacable ironist.
SOROLLA Y BASTIDA