motive in art, as Spanish as is the Madonna Italian--over which are
thrown gorgeous shawls, smiling, flirting; with languorous eyes and
provocative fans, they sit ensconced as they sat in Goya's time and
centuries before Goya, the Eternal Feminine of Spain. Zuloaga is her
latest interpreter. Isn't Candida delicious in green, with black
head-dress of lace--isn't she bewitching? Her stockings are green. The
wall is a most miraculous adumbration of green. Across the room is
another agent of disquiet in Nile green, Mercedes by name. Her
aquiline nose, black eyes, and the flowers she wears at the side of
her head bewilder; the sky, clouds, and landscape are all very lovely.
This is a singularly limpid, loose, flowing picture. It has the paint
quality sometimes missing in the bold, fat massing of the Zuloaga
colour chords. The Montmartre Café concert singer is a sterling
specimen of Zuloaga's portraiture. He is unconventional in his poses;
he will jam a figure against the right side of the frame (as in the
portrait of Marthe Morineau) or stand a young lady beside an
ornamental iron gate in an open park (not a remarkable portrait, but
one that pleases the ladies because of the textures). The head of the
old actor capitally suggests the Spanish mummer. And the painter's
cousin, Esperanza! What cousins he boasts! We recall The Three
Cousins, with its laughing trio and the rich colour scheme. Our
recollection, too, of The Piquant Retort, and its brown and scarlet
harmonies; of the Promenade After the Bull-fight, which has the
classical balance and spaced charm of Velasquez; and that startling
Street of Love overbalances any picture except one in this exhibition,
and that is The Bull-fighter's Family. The measuring eye of Zuloaga,
his tremendous vitality, his sharp, superb transference to canvas of
the life he has elected to represent and interpret are at first sight
dazzling. The performance is so supreme--remember, not in a niggling,
technical sense--a half-dozen men beat him at mere pyrotechnics and
lace _fioritura_--that his limitations, very marked in his case, are
overlooked. You have drunk a hearty Spanish wine; oil to the throat,
confusion to the senses. You do not at first miss the soul; it is not
included in the categories of Señor Zuloaga. Zuloaga, like his
contemporary farther north, Anders Zorn, is a man as well as a
painter; the conjunction is not too frequent. The grand manner is
surely his. He has the modulatory sense, and Christian Brinton notes
his sonorous acid effects. He paints beggars, dwarfs, work-girls,
noblemen, bandits, dogs, horses, lovely women, gitanas, indolent
Carmens; but real, not the pasteboard and foot-lights variety of
Merimée and Bizet. Zuloaga's Spain is not a second-hand Italy, like
that of so many Spanish painters. It is not all bric-a-brac and
moonlight and chivalric tinpot helmets. It is the real Spain of
to-day, the Spain that has at last awakened to the light of the
twentieth century after sleeping so long, after sleeping,
notwithstanding the desperate nudging it was given a century ago by
the realist Goya. Now, Zuloaga is not only stepping on his country's
toes, but he is recording the impressions he makes. He, too, is a
realist, a realist with such magic in his brush that it would make us
forgive him if he painted the odour of garlic.
Have you seen his Spanish Dancers? Not the dramatic Carmencita of
Sargent, but the creature as she is, with her simian gestures, her
insolence, her vulgarity, her teeth--and the shrill scarlet of the
bare gum above the gleaming white, His street scenes are a transcript
of the actual facts, and inextricably woven with the facts is a sense
of the strange beauty of them all. His wine harvesters, venders of
sacred images, or that fascinating canvas My Three Cousins--before
these, also before the Promenade After the Bull-fight, you realise
that by some miracle of nature the intensity of Goya and his sense of
life, the charm of Velasquez and his sober dignity are recalled by the
painting of a young Spanish artist who a decade ago was unknown. Nor
is Zuloaga an eclectic. His force and individuality are too patent for
us to entertain such a heresy. A glance at Jacques-Emile Blanche's
portrait of the Spanish painter explains other things. There is the
physique of a man who can work many hours a day before an easel; there
are the penetrating eyes of an observer, spying eyes, slightly cruel;
the head is an intellectual one, the general conformation of the face
harmonious and handsome. The body is that of an athlete, but not of
the bull-necked sort we see in Goya. The temperament suggested is
impetuous, controlled by a strong will; it has been fined down by
study and the enforced renunciations of poverty-haunted youth. Above
all, there is race; race in the proud, resolute bearing, race in the
large, firm, supple, and nervous hands. Indeed, the work of Zuloaga is
all race. He is the most Spanish painter since Goya.
IX. CHARDIN
Zola, as reported by George Moore, said of Degas: "I cannot accept a
man who shuts himself up all his life to draw a ballet girl as ranking
co-equal in dignity and power with Flaubert, Daudet, and Goncourt."
This remark gives us the cue for Zola's critical endowment; despite
his asseverations his naturalism was only skin deep. He, too, was
swayed by his literary notions concerning the importance of the
subject. In painting the theme may count for little and yet a great
picture result; in Zola's field there must be an appreciable subject,
else no fiction. But what cant it is to talk about "dignity." Zola
admits ingrained romanticism. He would not see, for instance, that the
Degas ballet girls are on the same plane as the Ingres odalisques;
that a still-life by Chardin outweighs a big canvas by David; and it
must be admitted that the world is on the side of Zola. The heresy of
the subject will never be stamped out, the painted anecdote will
always win the eye of the easily satisfied majority.
It may be remembered that the great Spaniard began his apprenticeship
to art by copying still-life, which he did in a superlative manner;
his Bodegones, or kitchen pieces, testify to this. Chardin, who led as
laborious an existence as Degas, shutting himself away from the world,
studied surfaces with an intensity that Zola, the apostle of realism,
would have misunderstood. Later the French painter devoted himself
with equal success to genre and figure subjects; but for him there was
no such category as still-life. Everything of substance, shape,
weight, and colour is alive for the eye that observes, and, except
Velasquez, Vermeer, and a few others, no man was endowed with the eye
of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, an eye microscopic in intensity and
that saw the beautiful in the homely.
Edmond Pilon has published a comprehensive little monograph in the
series Les Maîtres de L'Art. M. Pilon is as sympathetic as he is just
in his critical estimates of the man and his work. There is not much
to relate of the quotidian life of the artist. His was not a romantic
or a graceful figure among his contemporaries, the pastellist La Tour,
Fragonard, and the rest, nor had his personality a jot of the
mysterious melancholy of Watteau. His artistic ancestry was Dutch; in
the footsteps of De Hooch, the younger Teniers, Vermeer, Terburg,
Kalf, he trod, rather plodded, producing miracles of light, colour,
finish. A long patience his career, he never indulged in brilliancy
for the mere sake of brilliancy; nevertheless he was an amazing
virtuoso of the brush. He was born in the Rue de Seine, Paris,
November 2,1699. His father, Jean Chardin, a joiner, was a man of
artistic instinct whose furniture and marquetrie were admired and in
demand. The lad began his tuition under Cazes, but soon went to the
atelier of Coypel. Later he worked under the eye of Carle Vanloo in
the restoration of the large gallery at Fontainebleau. His painting of
a barber-chirurgeon's sign drew upon him the notice of several artists
of influence and he became a member of the Academy of St. Luc. When he
exhibited for the first time in public, in the Place Dauphine, 1728,
Watteau had been dead seven years; Coypel, Allegrain, Vanloo, Troy,
and the imitators of the pompous art of Le Brun were the vogue. Colour
had become a conventional abstraction; design, of the most artificial
sort, the prime requisite for a sounding reputation. The unobtrusive
art of Chardin, who went to nature not to books for his inspiration,
was not appreciated. He was considered a belated Dutchman, though his
superior knowledge of values ought to have proved him something else.
Diderot, alone among the critics of his epoch, saluted him in company
with the great Buffon as a man whom nature had taken into her
confidence.
In 1728 he was received at the Academy as painter of fruit and
flowers. He married his first wife, Marguerite Saintan, in 1731, and
his son, J.B. Chardin, was born the same year. In 1735 he lost his
wife and infant daughter, and the double blow drove him into
retirement, but he exposed his pictures from time to time. He was made
counsellor of the Academy in 1743, and in 1744 married the second
time, a widow, Françoise Marguerite Pouget by name. This was a happy
marriage; Madame Chardin, a sensible, good-tempered bourgeoise,
regulated the household accounts, and brought order and peace into the
life of the lonely artist. Hereafter he painted without interruptions.
He received from the king a pension of five hundred francs, his son
obtained the prix de Rome for a meritorious canvas, and if he had had
his father's stable temperament he would have ended an admirable
artist. But he was reckless, and died at Venice in a mysterious
manner, drowned in a canal, whether by murder or suicide no one knew.
Chardin never recovered his spirits after this shock. The king offered
him lodging in the gallery of the Louvre (Logement No. 12). This was
accepted, as much as he disliked leaving his comfortable little house
in the Rue Princesse. As he aged he suffered from various ailments and
his eyes began to give him trouble; then it was he took up pastels.
December 6, 1779, he died, his wife surviving him until 1791.
He was a man of short stature, broad-shouldered and muscular. Liked by
his friends and colleagues for his frankness, there was a salt savour
in his forthright speech--he never learned to play the courtier. His
manners were not polished, a certain rusticity clung to him always,
but his honesty was appreciated and he held positions of trust.
Affectionate, slow--with the Dutch slowness praised by Rodin--and
tenacious, he set out to conquer a small corner in the kingdom of art,
and to-day he is first among the Little Masters. This too convenient
appellation must not class him with such myopic miniaturists as
Meissonier. There are breadth of style, rich humanity, largeness of
feeling, apart from his remarkable technique, that place him in the
company of famous portrait painters. He does not possess what are
called "general ideas"; he sounds no tragic chords; he has no spoor of
poetry, but he sees the exterior world steadily; he is never obvious,
and he is a sympathetic interpreter in the domestic domain and of
character. His palette is as aristocratic as that of Velasquez: the
music he makes, like that of the string quartet, borders on
perfection.
At his début he so undervalued his work that Vanloo, after reproaching
the youth for his modesty, paid him double for a picture. Another time
he gave a still-life to a friend in exchange for a waistcoat whose
flowery pattern appealed to him. His pictures did not fetch fair
prices during his lifetime; after more than half a century of hard
work he left little for his widow. Nor in the years immediately
subsequent to that of his death did values advance much. The engraver
Wille bought a still-life for thirty-six livres, a picture that to-day
would sell for thousands of dollars. At the beginning of the last
century, in 1810, when David was ruler of the arts in Paris, the two
masterpieces in pastel, now in the Louvre, the portraits of Chardin
aux besicles, and the portrait of Marguerite Pouget, his second
spouse, could have been bought for twenty-four francs. In 1867 at the
Laperlier sale the Pourvoyeuse was sold for four thousand and fifty
francs to the Louvre, and forty years later the Louvre gave three
hundred and fifty thousand francs to Madame Emile Trépard for Le Jeune
Homme au Violon and l'Enfant au Toton. Diderot truly prophesied that
the hour of reparation would come.
He is a master of discreet tonalities and a draughtsman of the first
order. His lighting, more diffused than Rembrandt's, is the chief
actor in his scene. With it he accomplishes magical effects, with it
he makes beautiful copper caldrons, humble vegetables, leeks, carrots,
potatoes, onions, shining rounds of beef, hares, and fish become
eloquent witnesses to the fact that there is nothing dead or ugly in
nature if the vision that interprets is artistic. It is said that no
one ever saw Chardin at work in his atelier, but his method, his
_facture_ has been ferreted out though never excelled. He employs the
division of tones, his _couches_ are fat and his colour is laid on
lusciously. His colour is never hot; coolness of tone is his chief
allurement. Greuze, passing one of his canvases at an exhibition, a
long time regarded it and went away, heaving a sigh of envy. The
frivolous "Frago," who studied with Chardin for a brief period, even
though he left him for Boucher, admired his former master without
understanding him. Decamps later exclaimed in the Louvre: "The whites
of Chardin! I don't know how to recapture them." He might have added
the silvery grays. M. Pilon remarks that as in the case of Vermeer the
secret of Chardin tones has never been surprised. The French painter
knew the art of modulation, while his transitions are bold; he
enveloped his objects in atmosphere and gave his shadows a due share
of luminosity. He placed his colours so that at times his work
resembles mosaic or tapestry. He knew a century before the modern
impressionists the knack of juxtaposition, of opposition, of tonal
division; his science was profound. He must have studied Watteau and
the Dutchmen closely. Diderot was amazed to find that his surpassing
whites were neither black nor white, but a neuter--but by a subtle
transposition of tones looked white. Chardin worked from an
accumulation of notes, but there are few sketches of his in existence,
a _sanguine_ or two. The paucity of the Velasquez sketches has piqued
criticism. Like Velasquez, Chardin was of a reflective temperament, a
slow workman and a patient corrector.
The intimate charm of the Chardin interiors is not equalled even in
the Vermeer canvases. At the Louvre, which contains at least thirty of
the masterpieces, consider the sweetness of Le Benedicite, or the
three pastels, and then turn to the fruits, flowers, kitchen utensils,
game, or to La Raie Ouverte, that magnificent portrait of a skatefish,
with its cat slyly stealing over opened oysters, the table-cloth of
such vraisemblance that the knife balanced on the edge seems to lie in
a crease. What bulk, what destiny, what _chatoyant_ tones! Here are
qualities of paint and vision pictorial, vision that has never been
approached; paint without rhetoric, paint sincere, and the expression
in terms of beautiful paint of natural truths. In Chardin's case--by
him the relativity of mundane things was accepted with philosophic
phlegm--an onion was more important than an angel, a copper stew-pan
as thrilling as an epic. And then the humanity of his youth holding a
fiddle and bow, the exquisite textures of skin and hair, and the
glance of the eyes. You believe the story told of his advice to his
confrère: "Paint with sentiment." But he mixed his sentiment with
lovely colours, he is one of the chief glories of France as a
colourist.
X. BLACK AND WHITE.
I
Some Frenchman has called the theatre a book reversed. It is a happy
epigram. By a similar analogy the engraving or mezzotint might be
described as a reversed picture. And with still more propriety black
and white reproductions may be compared to the pianoforte in the hands
of a skilful artist. The pianoforte can interpret in cooler tones
orchestral scores. It gives in its all-formal severity the line; the
colour is only suggested. But such is the tendency of modern music
toward painting that the success of a pianoforte virtuoso to-day
depends upon his ability to arouse within his listeners' imagination
the idea of colour--in reality, the emotional element. The engraver
evokes colour by his cunning interplay of line and cross hatching; the
mezzotinter by his disposition of dark masses and white spaces.
Indeed, the mezzotint by reason of its warm, more sympathetic, and
ductile medium has always seemed more colourful in his plates than the
most laboriously executed steel engravings. In this sense the scraper
beats the burin, while the etcher, especially if he be a painter,
attains a more personal vision than either one of these processes.
"The stone was made for the mystics," say the Pennells. The revival of
lithography by contemporary artists of fame is very welcome.
Above all, the appeal of engraving, mezzotint, and etching is to the
refined. It is an art of a peculiarly intimate character. Just as some
prefer the exquisite tonal purity and finished performances of the
Kneisel String Quartet to the blare and thunder of the Philharmonic
Society; just as some enjoy in silence beautiful prose more than our
crude drama, so the lovers of black and white may feel themselves a
distinctive class. They have at their elbow disposed in portfolios or
spaced on walls the eloquent portraiture, the world's masterpieces,
marine views, and landscapes. There is no better way to study painting
historically than in the cabinet of an engraving collector.
Furthermore, divested of bad or mediocre paint--many famous pictures
by famous names are mere cartoons, the paint peeled or peeling
off--the student and amateur penetrates to the very marrow of the
painter's conception, to the very skeleton of his technical methods.
PIRANESI
I
"Battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars" is a line from
Wordsworth that Thomas de Quincey approvingly quotes in regard to his
opium-induced "architectural dreams," and, aptly enough, immediately
after a page devoted to Piranesi, the etcher, architect, and
visionary. You may find this page in The Confessions of an English
Opium Eater, that book of terror, beauty, mystification, and fudge (De
Quincey deluded himself quite as much as his readers in this
autobiography, which, like the confessions of most distinguished men,
must not be taken too literally): "Many years ago," he wrote, "when I
was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who
was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist,
called his Dreams, which record the scenery of his own soul during the
delirium of a fever. Some of them (described only from memory of Mr.
Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of
which stood all sorts of engines and machinery expressive of enormous
power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of
the walls, you perceived a staircase, and upon it, groping his way
upward, was Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little farther and
you perceive it to come to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any
balustrade, and allowing no step onward to him who had reached the
extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor
Piranesi? You suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way
terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of
stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this
time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eyes,
and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor
Piranesi on his aspiring labours, and so on, until the unfinished
stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall."
This plate was evidently one of the Carceri set--sixteen in all--which
the etcher improvised after some severe cerebral malady. What would we
not give to have heard the poet of Kubla Khan describing the fantastic
visions of the Venetian artist to the English opium eater! The
eloquence of the prose passage we have transcribed has in it some
faint echoes of Coleridge's golden rumble. That these two men
appreciated the Italian is something; perhaps they saw chiefly in his
work its fantastic side. There was no saner craftsman than Piranesi
apart from certain of his plates; no more solid construction in a
print can be shown than his various interpretations of the classic
ruins of Rome, the temples at Pæstum. He was a great engraver and
etcher whose passion was the antique. He deliberately withdrew from
all commerce with the ideas and art of his own times. He loved
architecture for architecture's sake; not as a decoration, not as a
background for humanity, but as something personal. It was for him
what the human face was for Rembrandt and Velasquez. That he was
called the Rembrandt of Architecture is but another testimony to the
impression he made upon his contemporaries, though the title is an
unhappy one. Piranesi even in his own little fenced-off coign of art
is not comparable to the etcher of the Hundred Guilder print, nor are
there close analogies in their respective handling of darks and
lights.
It might be nearer the mark to call Piranesi--though all such
comparisons are thorns in the critical flesh--the Salvator Rosa of
architecture, for there is much of Salvator's unbridled violence,
fantasy, and genius for deforming the actual that is to be encountered
in some of Piranesi's works. His was not a classic temperament. The
serene, airy, sun-bathed palaces and temples which Claude introduced
into his foregrounds are seldom encountered in Piranesi. A dark Gothic
imagination his, Gothic and often cruel. In his etching of public
buildings at Rome or elsewhere, while he is not always faultless in
drawing or scrupulous in observation, such was the sincerity and
passion of the man that he has left us the noblest transcriptions of
these stately edifices and monuments. It is in the rhythmic expression
of his personal moods that his sinister romantic imaginings are
revealed, and with a detail and fulness that are positively
overwhelming.
It should not be forgotten that in the eighteenth and in the early
part of the nineteenth centuries Piranesi achieved widespread
popularity. He was admired outside of Italy, in England, in France,
and Germany. A generation that in England read Vathek and Mrs.
Radcliffe, supped on the horrors of Melmoth and Frankenstein, knew
E.T.W. Hoffmann and the German romantic literature, could be relied on
to take up Piranesi, and for his lesser artistic side. Poe knew his
work and Baudelaire; we see that for De Quincey he was a kindred
spirit. The English mezzotinter John Martin must have studied him
closely, also Gustave Doré.
The Carceri (1750) of Piranesi are indoor compositions, enclosed
spaces in which wander aimlessly or deliriously the wraiths of damned
men, not a whit less wretched nor awful than Dante's immemorial mob.
Piranesi shows us cavernous abodes where appalling engines of torture
fill the foreground, while above, at vertiginous heights, we barely
discern perilous passageways, haunted windows peering out upon the
high heavens, stone-fretted ceilings that are lost in a magic mist. By
a sort of diabolic modulation the artist conducts our eye from these
dizzy angles and granitic convolutions down tortuous and tumultuous
staircases that seemingly wind about the axis of eternity. To traverse
them would demand an eternity and the nerves of a madman. Lower
barbaric devices reveal this artist's temperament. He is said to have
executed the prison set "during the delirium of fever." This is of the
same calibre as the clotted nonsense about Poe composing when
intoxicated or Liszt playing after champagne. It is a credible
anecdote for Philistines who do not realise that even the maddest
caprice, whether in black and white, marble, music, or verse, must be
executed in silence and cold blood. Piranesi simply gave wing to his
fancy, recalling the more vivid of his nightmares--as did Coleridge,
De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, and the rest of the drug-steeped choir.
We recall one plate of Piranesi's in which a miserable devil climbs a
staircase suspended over an abyss; as he mounts each step the lower
one crumbles into the depths below.