was one of those who came into the world with a ray of sunshine in
their brains--altering the phrase of Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Señor
Sorolla is also one of the half-dozen (are there so many?) great
living painters. He belongs to the line of Velasquez and Goya, and he
seldom recalls either. Under the auspices of the Hispanic Society of
America there was an exhibition of his works in 1909, some two hundred
and fifty in all, hung in the museum of the society, West 156th
Street, near Broadway. The liveliest interest was manifested by the
public and professional people in this display. Those who saw
Sorolla's art at the Paris Exposition, 1900, and at the Georges Petit
Gallery, Paris, a few years ago need not be reminded of his virile
quality and masterly brush-work. Some art lovers in this city are
aware of his Sad Inheritance, the property of Mr. John E. Berwind,
which has been hung in the Sunday-school room of the Ascension Church,
Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. It is one of the artist's few pictures
in which he feels the _Weltschmerz_. His is a nature bubbling over
with health and happiness.
He is a Valencian, was born in 1863 of poor parents, and by reason of
his native genius and stubborn will power he became what he is--the
painter of vibrating sunshine without equal. Let there be no mincing
of comparisons in this assertion. Not Turner, not Monet painted so
directly blinding shafts of sunlight as has this Spaniard. He is an
impressionist, but not of the school of Monet. His manner is his own,
cunningly compounded as it is of the proceeds of half a dozen artists.
His trip to Rome resulted in nothing but a large eclectic canvas
without individuality; what had this pagan in common with saints or
sinners! He relates that in Paris Bastien-Lepage and Menzel affected
him profoundly. This statement is not to be contradicted; nevertheless
Sorolla is the master of those two masters in his proper province of
the portrayal of outdoor life. Degas was too cruel when he called
Bastien the "Bouguereau of the modern movement"; Bastien academicised
Manet and other moderns. He said nothing new. As for Menzel, it would
be well here to correct the notion bandied about town that he
discovered impressionism before the French. He did not. He went to
Paris in 1867. Meissonier at first, and later Courbet, influenced him.
His Rolling Mill was painted in 1876. It is very Courbet. The Paris
Exposition, 1867, picture shows the influence of Monet--who was in the
Salon of 1864; and Monet was begat by Boudin, who stemmed from
Jongkind; and Jongkind studied with Isabey; and they came from Turner,
idolater of the Sun. Remember, too, that Corot and Courbet called
Eugène Boudin "roi des ciels." Monet not only studied with him but
openly admitted that he had learned everything from him, while Boudin
humbly remarked that he had but entered the door forced by the
Dutchman Jongkind. Doubtless Sorolla found what he was looking for in
Bastien, though it would be nearer the truth to say that he studied
the Barbizons and impressionists and took what he needed from them
all.
He is a temperament impressionable to the sun, air, trees, children,
women, men, cattle, landscapes, the ocean. Such swift, vivid notation
of the fluid life about him is rare; it would be photographic were it
not the personal memoranda of a selecting eye; it would be transitory
impressionism were it not for a hand magical in its manipulation of
pigments. Brain and brush collaborate with an instantaneity that does
not perplex because the result is so convincing. We do not intend to
quote that musty flower of rhetoric which was a favourite with our
grandfathers. It was the fashion then to say that
Nature--capitalised--took the brush from the hand of the painter,
meaning some old duffer who saw varnish instead of clear colour, and
painted the picture for him. Sorolla is receptive; he does not attempt
to impose upon nature an arbitrary pattern, but he sees nature with
his own eyes, modified by the thousand subtle experiences in which he
has steeped his brain. He has the tact of omission very well
developed. After years of labour he has achieved a personal vision. It
is so completely his that to copy it would be to perpetrate a
burlesque. He employs ploys the divisional _taches_ of Monet, spots,
cross-hatchings, big sabre-like strokes à la John Sargent, indulges in
smooth sinuous silhouettes, or huge splotches, refulgent patches,
explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily
surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You
can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other
hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It
sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient
in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his
_entrain_, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he
is less satisfactory; it is the first impression or nothing in his
art. Apart from his luscious, tropical colour, he is a sober narrator
of facts. Ay, but he is a big chap, this amiable little Valencian with
a big heart and a hand that reaches out and grabs down clouds, skies,
scoops up the sea, and sets running, wriggling, screaming a joyful
band of naked boys and girls over the golden summer sands in a sort of
ecstatic symphony of pantheism.
How does he secure such intensity of pitch in his painting of
atmosphere, of sunshine? By a convention, just as the falsification of
shadows by rendering them darker than nature made the necessary
contrasts in the old formula. Brightness in clear-coloured shadows is
the key-note of impressionistic open-air effects. W.C.
Brownell--French Art--puts it in this way: "Take a landscape with a
cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old sense of the term,
and observe the effect upon it of a sudden burst of sunlight. What is
the effect where considerable portions of the scene are suddenly
thrown into marked shadow, as well as others illuminated with intense
light? Is the absolute value of the parts in shadow lowered or raised?
Raised, of course, by reflected light. Formerly, to get the contrast
between sunlight and shadow in proper scale the painter would have
painted the shadows darker than they were before the sun appeared.
Relatively they are darker, since their value, though heightened, is
raised infinitely less than the parts in sunlight. Absolutely, their
value is raised considerably. If, therefore, they are painted lighter
than they were before the sun appeared they in themselves seem truer.
The part of Monet's pictures that is in shadow is measurably true, far
truer than it would have been if painted under the old theory of
correspondence, and had been unnaturally darkened to express the
relation of contrast between shadow and sunlight."
Like Turner, Monet forced the colour of his shadows, as MacColl points
out, and like Monet, Sorolla forces the colour of his shadows--but
what a compeller of beautiful shadows--forces the key to the very
verge of the luminous abyss. Señor Beruete, the Velasquez expert,
truthfully says of Sorolla's method: "His canvases contain a great
variety of blues and violets, balanced and juxtaposed with reds and
yellows. These, and the skilful use of white, provide him with a
colour scheme of great simplicity, originality, and beauty." There are
no non-transparent shadows, and his handling of blacks reveals a
sensitive feeling for values. Consider that black-gowned portrait of
his wife. His underlying structural sense is never obscured by his
fat, flowing brush.
It must not be supposed that because of Sorolla's enormous _brio_ his
general way of entrapping nature is brutal. He is masculine and
absolutely free from the neurasthenic _morbidezza_ of his
fellow-countryman Zuloaga. (And far from attaining that painter's
inches as a psychologist.) For the delineation of moods nocturnal, of
poetic melancholy, of the contemplative aspect of life we must not go
to Sorolla. He is not a thinker. He is the painter of bright mornings
and brisk salt breezes. He is half Greek. There is Winckelmann's
_Heiterkeit_, blitheness, in his groups of romping children, in their
unashamed bare skins and naïve attitudes. Boys on Valencian beaches
evidently believe in Adamic undress. Nor do the girls seem to care.
Stretched upon his stomach on the beach, a youth, straw-hatted, stares
at the spume of the rollers. His companion is not so unconventionally
disarrayed, and as she has evidently not eaten of the poisonous apple
of wisdom she is free from embarrassment. Balzac's two infants,
innocent of their sex, could not be less carefree than the Sorolla
children. How tenderly, sensitively, he models the hardly nubile forms
of maidens. The movement of their legs as they race the strand, their
dash into the water, or their nervous pausing at the rim of the
wet--here is poetry for you, the poetry of glorious days in
youth-land. Curiously enough his types are for the most part more
international than racial; that is, racial as are Zuloaga's Basque
brigands, _manolas_, and gipsies.
But only this? Can't he paint anything but massive oxen wading to
their buttocks in the sea; or fisher boats with swelling sails
blotting out the horizon; or a girl after a dip standing, as her
boyish cavalier covers her with a robe--you see the clear, pink flesh
through her garb; or vistas of flower gardens with roguish maidens and
courtly parks; peasants harvesting, working women sorting raisins;
sailors mending nets, boys at rope-making--is all this great art?
Where are the polished surfaces of the cultured studio worker; where
the bric-a-brac which we inseparably connect with pseudo-Spanish art?
You will not find any of them. Sorolla, with good red blood in his
veins, the blood of a great, misunderstood race, paints what he sees
on the top of God's earth. He is not a book but a normal nature-lover.
He is in love with light, and by his treatment of relative values
creates the illusion of sun-flooded landscapes. He does not cry for
the "sun," as did Oswald Alving; it comes to him at the beckoning of
his brush. His many limitations are but the defects of his good
qualities.
Sorolla is sympathetic. He adores babies and delights in dancing. His
babies are irresistible. He can sound the _Mitleid_ motive without a
suspicion of odious sentimentality. What charm there is in some of his
tiny children as they lean their heads on their mothers! They fear the
ocean, yet are fascinated by it. Near by is a mother and child in bed.
They sleep. The right hand of the mother stretches, instinctively,
toward the infant. It is the sweet, unconscious gesture of millions of
mothers. On one finger of the hand there is just a hint of gold from a
ring. The values of the white counterpane and the contrast of
dark-brown hair on the pillow are truthfully expressed. One mother and
babe, all mothers and babes, are in this picture. Turn to that old
rascal in a brown cloak, who is about to taste a glass of wine. A snag
gleams white in his sly, thirsty mouth. The wine tastes fine, eh! You
recall Goya. As for the boys swimming, the sensations of darting and
weaving through velvety waters are produced as if by wizardry. But you
never think of Sorolla's line, for line, colour, idea, actuality are
merged. The translucence of this sea in which the boys plash and
plunge is another witness to the verisimilitude of Sorolla's vision.
Boecklin's large canvas at the new Pinakothek, Munich, is often cited
as a _tour_ _de force_ of water painting. We allude to the mermaids
and mermen playing in the trough of a greenish sea. It is mere
"property" water when compared to Sorolla's closely observed and
clearly reproduced waves. Rhythm--that is the prime secret of his
vitality.
His portraiture, when he is interested in his sitters, is excellent.
Beruete is real, so Cossio, the author of the El Greco biography; so
the realistic novelist Blanco Ibañez; but the best, after those of
his, Sorolla's, wife and children, is that of Frantzen, a
photographer, in the act of squeezing the bulb. It is a frank
characterisation. The various royalties and high-born persons whose
counterfeit presentments are accomplished with such genuine effort are
interesting; but the heart is missing. Cleverness there is in the
portraits of Alphonse; and his wife's gorgeous costume should be the
envy of our fashionable portrait manufacturers. It is under the skies
that Sorolla is at ease. Monet, it must not be forgotten, had two
years' military service in Morocco; Sorolla has always lived,
saturated himself in the rays of a hot sun and painted beneath the
hard blue dome of Spanish skies.
Sorolla is a painting temperament, and the freshening breezes and
sunshine that emanate from his canvases should drive away the odours
of the various chemical cook-shops which are called studios in our
"world of art."
One cannot speak too much of the large-minded and cultivated spirit of
Archer Milton Huntington, who is the projector and patron of the
exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum. Sorolla y Bastida, through
the invitation of Mr. Huntington, made this exhibition.
IGNACIO ZULOAGA
We are no longer with Sorolla and his vibrating sunshine on Valencian
sands, or under the hard blue dome of San Sebastian; the two-score
canvases on view in 1909 at the Hispanic Museum were painted by a man
of profounder intellect, of equally sensual but more restrained
temperament than Sorolla; above all, by an artist with different
ideals--a realist, not an impressionist, Ignacio Zuloaga. It would not
be the entire truth to say that his masterpieces were seen; several
notable pictures, unhappily, were not; but the exhibition was finely
representative. Zuloaga showed us the height and depth of his powers
in at least one picture, and the longer you know him the more secrets
he yields up.
In Paris they say of Sorolla that he paints too fast and too much; of
Zuloaga that he is too lazy to paint. Half truths, these. The younger
man is more deliberate in his methods. He composes more elaborately,
executes at a slower gait. He resents the imputation of realism. The
fire and fury of Sorolla are not his, but he selects, weighs,
analyses, reconstructs--in a word, he composes and does not improvise.
He is, nevertheless, a realist--a verist, as he prefers to be called.
He is not cosmopolitan, and Sorolla is: the types of boys and girls
racing along the beaches of watering places which Sorolla paints are
cosmopolitan. Passionate vivacity and the blinding sunshine are not
qualities that appeal to Zuloaga. He portrays darkest--let us rather
say greenest, brownest Spain. The Basque in him is the strongest
strain. He is artistically a lineal descendant of El Greco, Velasquez,
Goya; and the map of his memory has been traversed by Manet. He is
more racial, more truly Spanish, than any painter since Goya. He
possesses the genius of place.
Havelock Ellis's book, The Soul of Spain, is an excellent corrective
for the operatic Spain, and George Borrow is equally sound despite his
bigotry, while Gautier is invaluable. Arsène Alexandre in writing of
Zuloaga acutely remarks of the Spanish conspiracy in allowing the
chance tourist only to scratch the soil "of this country too well
known but not enough explored." Therefore when face to face with the
pictures of Zuloaga, with romantic notions of a Spain where castles
grow in the clouds and moonshine on every bush, prepare to be shocked,
to be disappointed. He will show you the real Spain--the sun-soaked
soil, the lean, sharp outlines of hills, the arid meadows, and the
swift, dark-green rivers. He has painted cavaliers and dames of
fashion, but his heart is in the common people. He knows the bourgeois
and he knows the gipsy. He has set forth the pride of the vagabond and
the garish fascinations of the gitana. Since Goya, you say, and then
wonder whether it might not be wiser to add: Goya never had so
complicated a psychology. A better craftsman than Goya, a more varied
colourist, a more patient student of Velasquez, of life, though
without Goya's invention, caprice, satanism, and _fougue_.
Zuloaga was not born poor, but with genius; and genius always spells
discontent. He would not become an engineer and he would paint. His
family, artists and artisans, did not favour his bent. He visited
Italy, almost starved in Paris, and after he knew how to handle his
tools he starved for recognition. It is only a few years since he
exhibited the portrait of his uncle, Daniel Zuloaga, and his cousins.
It now hangs in the Luxembourg; but Madrid would have none of him; a
Spanish jury rejected him at Paris in 1900, and not possessing the
means of Edouard Manet he could not hire a gallery and show the world
the stuff that was in him. He did not sulk; he painted. Barcelona took
him up; Paris, the world, followed suit. To-day he is rich, famous,
and forty. He was born at Eibar, 1870, in the Basque province of
Viscaya. He is a collector of rare taste and has housed his treasures
in a gallery at his birthplace. He paints chiefly at Segovia, in an
old church, though he wanders over Spain, sometimes afoot, sometimes
in his motor car, often accompanied by Rodin in the latter, and
wherever he finds himself he is at home and paints. A bull-fighter in
the ring, as was Goya--perhaps the legend stirred him to imitation--he
is a healthy athlete. His vitality, indeed, is enormous, though it
does not manifest itself in so dazzling a style as Sorolla's. The
demerits of literary comparisons are obvious, yet we dare to think of
Sorolla and Zuloaga as we should of Théophile Gautier and Charles
Baudelaire. In one is the clear day flame of impersonality; the other
is all personality, given to nocturnal moods, to diabolism and
perversities, cruelties and fierce voluptuousness. Sorolla is pagan;
Gothic is Zuloaga, a Goth of modern Spain. He has more variety than
Sorolla, more intellect. The Baudelairian strain grows in his work; it
is unmistakable. The crowds that went to see the "healthy" art of
Sorolla (as if art had anything in common with pulse, temperature, and
respiration) did not like, or indeed understand, many of Zuloaga's
magnificent pictorial ideas.
He paints in large _coups_, but his broad, slashing planes are not
impressionistic. He swims in the traditional Spanish current with joy.
Green with him is almost an obsession--a national symbol certainly.
His greens, browns, blacks, scarlets are rich, sonorous, and magnetic.
He is a colourist. He also is master of a restrained palette and can
sound the silver grays of Velasquez. His tonalities are massive. The
essential bigness of his conceptions, his structural forms, are the
properties of an eye swift, subtle, and all-embracing. It seems an
image that is at once solidly rooted in mother earth and is as
fluctuating as life. No painter to-day has a greater sense of
character, except Degas. The Frenchman is the superior draughtsman,
but he is no more vital in his interpretation of his ballet girls,
washerwomen, and grisettes than is Zuloaga in his delineations of
peasants, dwarfs, dogs, courtesans, scamps, zealots, pilgrims,
beggars, drunkards, and working girls. What verve, what grip, what
bowels of humanity has this Spaniard! A man, not a professor of
academic methods. He has no school, and he is a school in himself.
That the more serene, poetic aspects and readings of life have escaped
him is merely to say that he is not constituted a contemplative
philosopher. The sinister skein to be seen in some of his canvases
does not argue the existence of a spiritual bias but is the
recognition of evil in life. It is not very pleasant, nor is it
reassuring, but it is part of the artist, rooted deep in his Spanish
soul along with the harsh irony and a cruel spirit of mockery. He
refuses to follow the ideals of other men, and he paints a spade a
spade; at least the orchestration, if brutal, is not lascivious. A
cold, impartial eye observes and registers the corruption of cities
small and great and the infinitely worse immoralities of the open
country. Sometimes Zuloaga's comments are witty, sometimes
pessimistic. If he has studied Goya and Manet, he also knows Félicien
Rops.
The only picture in the Zuloaga exhibition that grazes the border-land
of the unconventional is Le Vieux Marcheur. It is as moral as Hogarth
and as bitter as Rops. It recalls the Montmartre days of the artist
when he was acquainted with Paul Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Two
women are crossing a bridge. Their actuality is impressed upon the
retina in a marvellous ly definite way. They live, they move. One is
gowned in dotted green, the other in black. There is a little
landscape with water beyond the iron railing. A venerable minotaur is
in pursuit. He wears evening clothes, an overcoat is thrown across his
left arm, under his right he carries waggishly a cane. His white tie
and hat of sober silk are in respectable contrast with his air of
fatuousness--the Marquis of Steyne en route; the doddering hero of
Mansfield in A Parisian Romance, or Baron Hulot. The alert expression
of the girls, who appear to be loitering, tells us more at a glance
than a chapter of Flaubert, Zola, or De Maupassant. Is it necessary to
add that the handling takes your breath away because of its consummate
ease and its realisation of the effects sought? Note the white of the
old party's spats, echoed by the bit of stocking showing a low shoe
worn by one of the girls; note the values of the blacks in the hat,
coat, trousers, shoe tips of the man. The very unpleasantness of the
theme is forgotten in the supreme art of its presentation.
M. Alexandre, the French critic, may argue valiantly that Zuloaga must
not be compared with Goya, that their methods and themes are
dissimilar. True, but those witches (Les Sorcières de San Millan) are
in the key of Goya, not manner, but subject-matter--a hideous crew. At
once you think of the _Caprichos_ of Goya. The hag with the distaff,
whose head is painted with a fidelity worthy of Holbein; the monkey
profile of the witch crouching near the lantern, that repulsive
creature in spectacles--Goya spectacles; the pattern hasn't varied
since his days--these ladies and their companions, especially that
anonymous one in a hood, coupled with the desperate dreariness of the
background, a country dry and hard as a volcanic cinder, make a
formidable ensemble. Zuloaga relates that the beldames screeched and
fought in his studio when he posed them. You exclaim while looking at
them: "How now, you secret black and midnight hags!" Hell hovers hard
by; each witch of the unholy trio has the evil eye.
As a painter of dwarfs Zuloaga has not been surpassed by any one but
Velasquez. His Gregorio, the monster with the huge head, the
sickening, livid, globular eye, the comical pose--you exclaim: What a
brush! The picture palpitates with reality, an ugly reality, for the
tall old couple are not prepossessing. The topography of the country
is minutely observed. But this painter does not wreak himself in
ugliness or morbidities; he is singularly happy in catching the
attitudes and gestures of the peasants as they return from the
vintage; of picadors, matadors, chulos, in the ring or lounging,
smoking, awaiting the signal. The large and celebrated family group of
the matador Gallito--which is to remain permanently in the Hispanic
Society's museum--is a superb exemplar of the synthetic and rhythmic
art of the Spaniard. Each character is seized and rendered. The strong
silhouettes melt into a harmonious arabesque; the tonal gamut is
nervous, strong, fiery; the dull gold background is a foil for the
scale of colour notes. It is a striking picture. Very striking, too,
is the portrait of Breval as Carmen, though it is the least Spanish
picture in the collection; Breval is pictured on the stage, the lights
from below playing over her features. The problem is solved, as
Besnard or Degas has solved it, successfully, but in purely personal
manner. It is the picture in the Metropolitan Museum that is bound to
attract attention, as it is a technical triumph; but it is not very
characteristic.