impressions, leaves one rather sad. An Irish girl, Annie, is superb in
its suggestion of form and colour. Saint-Gaudens and his model is
excellent; we prefer the portrait. The Evening Girl Bathing is rare in
treatment--simple, restrained, vital. She has turned her back, and we
are grateful, for it is a beautiful back. The landscape is as
evanescent as Whistler, the printing is in a delicate key. The Berlin
Gallery contains a Zorn, a portrait striking in its reality. It
represents Miss Maja von Heyne wearing a collar of skins. She could
represent the Maja of Ibsen's epilogue, When We Dreamers Awake; Maja,
the companion of the bear hunter, Ulfheim. As etched, we miss the
massiveness, the rich, vivid colour, yet it is a plate of distinction.
Among his portraits are the Hon. Daniel S. Lamont, Senator "Billy"
Mason, the Hon. John Hay, Mr. and Mrs. Atherton Curtis, and several
big-wigs of several nations. An oil-painting is an impressionistic
affair, showing some overblown girls dressing after their bath. The
sun flecks their shoulders, but otherwise seems rather inclined to
retire modestly. Evidently not the midnight sun.
We have barely indicated the beauties in which the virile spirit of
Anders Zorn comes out at you from the wall--a healthy, large-hearted,
girted Swede is this man with the Z.
BRANGWYN
The name of Frank Brangwyn may fall upon unresponsive ears; yet he has
a Continental reputation and is easily the foremost English
impressionist. New York has seen but little of his work; if we mistake
not, there was a large piece of his, a Gipsy Tinker in the open air,
hung several seasons ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Mr.
Kennedy shows extraordinary etchings of his at the Wunderlich
Galleries. We call them extraordinary not alone because of their size,
but also because Brangwyn is practically the first among latter-day
artists to apply boldly to etching the methods of the impressionists.
Etching in its essential nature is an impressionistic art. We do not
mean to assert that Brangwyn uses the dot or dash or broken dabs in
his plates, for the very good reason that he is working in black and
white; nevertheless a glance at his plates will show you a new way of
conquering old prejudices. Whistler it was who railed at large
etchings. He was not far wrong. In the hands of the majority of
etchers a large plate is an abomination, diffused in interest, coarse
of line; but Brangwyn is not to be considered among this majority. He
is a big fellow in everything. Besides, Whistler was using the
familiar argument, _pro doma sua_. The same may be said of Poe, who
simply would not hear of a long poem (shades of Milton!) or of Chopin,
who lost his way in the sonata form, though coming out in the gorgeous
tropical land, the thither side of sonatas and other tonal animals.
Because Catullus and Sappho did not write epics that is no reason why
Dante should not. It is the old story of the tailless fox. Brangwyn as
well as Anders Zorn has been called a rough-and-ready artist. For
exquisite tone and pattern we must go to Whistler and his school.
Brangwyn is never exquisite, though he is often poetic, even epical.
Look at that Bridge, Barnard Castle. It is noble in outline, lovely in
atmosphere. Or at the Old Hammersmith--"swell," as the artist slang
goes. The Mine is in feeling and mass Rembrandtish; and as we have
used the name of the great Dutchman we may as well admit that to him,
despite a world of difference, Brangwyn owes much. He has the sense of
mass. What could be more tangibly massive than the plate called
Breaking Up of the Hannibal? Here is a theme which Turner in The
Fighting Téméraire made truly poetic, and Seymour Haden in his
Agamemnon preserved more than a moiety of sentiment, not to mention
the technical prowess displayed; but in the hulk of this ugly old
vessel of Brangwyn's there is no beauty. However, it is hugely
impressive. His landscapes are not too seldom hell-scapes.
The Inn of the Parrot is quaint with its reversed lettering. The Road
to Montreuil is warm in colour and finely handled. How many have
realised the charm of the rear view of Santa Maria Salute? It is one
of the most interesting of Brangwyn's Venetian etchings. His vision of
Saint Sophia, Constantinople, has the mystic quality we find in the
Dutchman Bauer's plates. A Church at Montreuil attracts the eye;
London Bridge is positively dramatic; the Old Kew Bridge has delicacy;
the Sawyers with their burly figures loom up monstrously; the Building
of the New Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, recalls, as
treated by the impressionistic brush of Brangwyn (for the needle seems
transformed into a paint-loaded spike), one of H.G. Wells's terrific
socialistic structures of the year 2009. Remember that Brangwyn is
primarily a painter, an impressionist. He sees largely. His dream of
the visible world (and like Sorolla, it is never the world invisible
with him) is one of patches and masses, of luminous shadows, of
animated rhythms, of rich arabesques. He is sib to the Scotch. His
father is said to have been a Scottish weaver who settled in Bruges.
Frank saw much of the world before settling in London. He was born at
Bruges, 1867. The Golden Book of Art describes him as a one-time
disciple of William Morris. He has manufactured glass, furniture,
wall-paper, pottery. His curiosity is insatiable. He is a mural
decorator who in a frenzy could cover miles of space if some kind
civic corporation would but provide the walls. As the writer of the
graceful preface to the Wunderlich catalogue has it: "He gets the
character of his theme. His art is itself full of character."
Temperament, overflowing, passionate, and irresistible, is his
key-note. In music he might have been a Fritz Delius, a Richard
Strauss. He is an eclectic. He knows all schools, all methods. He is
Spanish in his fierce relish of the open air, of the sights--and we
almost said sounds--of many lands, but the Belgian strain, the touch
of the mystic and morose, creeps into his work. We have caught it more
in his oils than etchings. It is not singular, then, that his small
etched plates do not hold the eye; they lack magnetic quality. It is
the Titan, rude and raging, dashing ink over an acre of white paper,
that rivets you. The stock attitudes and gestures he does not give
you; and it is doubtful if he will have an audience soon in America,
where the sleek is king and prettiness is exalted over power.
DAUMIER
Mr. Frank Weitenkampf, the curator of the Lenox Library print
department, shows nineteen portfolios which hold about seven hundred
lithographs by Honoré Daumier. This collection is a bequest of the
late Mr. Lawrence, and we doubt if the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris
surpasses it; that is, in the number of detached examples. There the
works of the great artist are imbedded in the various publications for
which he laboured so many years--such at _La Caricature, Les Beaux
Arts, L'Artiste, Les Modes Parisiennes, La Gazette Musicale, Le
Boulevard,_ and _Masques et Visages_. The Lawrence lithographs are
representatives, though not complete; the catalogue compiled by Loys
Delteil comprises 3,958 plates; the paintings and drawings are also
numerous. But an admirable idea of Daumier's versatile genius may be
gleaned at the Lenox Library, as all the celebrated series are there:
Paris Bohemians, the Blue Stockings, the Railways, La Caricature,
Croquis d'Expressions, Emotions Parisiennes, Actualités, Les
Baigneurs, Pastorales, Moeurs Conjugales, the Don Quixote plates,
Silhouettes, Souvenirs d'Artistes, Types Parisiens, the Advocates and
Judges, and a goodly number of the miscellanies. Altogether an
adequate exhibition.
Honoré Daumier, who died February 11, 1879, was almost the last of the
giants of 1830, though he outlived many of them. Not affiliated with
the Barbizon group--though he was a romantic in his hatred of the
bourgeois--several of these painters were intimate friends; indeed,
Corot was his benefactor, making him a present of a cottage at
Valmondois (Seine-et-Oise), where the illustrator died. He was blind
and lonely at the end. Corot died 1875; Daubigny, his companion, 1878;
Millet, 1875, and Rousseau, with whom he corresponded, died 1867. In
1879 Flaubert still lived, working heroically upon that monument of
human inanity, Bouvard et Pécuchet; Maupassant, his disciple, had just
published a volume of verse; Manet was regarded as a dangerous
charlatan, Monet looked on as a madman; while poor Cézanne was only a
bad joke. The indurated critical judgment of the academic forces
pronounced Bonnat a greater portraitist than Velasquez, and Gérôme and
his mock antiques and mock orientalism far superior to Fromentin and
Chasseriau. It was a glorious epoch for mediocrity. And Daumier, in
whom there was something of Michael Angelo and Courbet, was admired
only as a clever caricaturist, the significance of his paintings
escaping all except a few. Corot knew, Daubigny knew, as earlier
Delacroix knew; and Balzac had said: "There is something of the
Michael Angelo in this man!"
Baudelaire, whose critical _flair_ never failed him, wrote in his
Curiosités Esthétiques: "Daumier's distinguishing note as an artist is
his certainty. His drawing is fluent and easy; it is a continuous
improvisation. His powers of observation are such that in his work we
never find a single head that is out of character with the figure
beneath it. ... Here, in these animalised faces, may be seen and read
clearly all the meannesses of soul, all the absurdities, all the
aberrations of intelligence, all the vices of the heart; yet at the
same time all is broadly drawn and accentuated." Nevertheless one must
not look at too many of these caricatures. At first the Rabelaisian
side of the man appeals; presently his bitterness becomes too acrid.
Humanity is silly, repulsive; it is goat, pig, snake, monkey, and
tiger; but there is something else. Daumier would see several sides.
His pessimism, like Flaubert's, is deadly, but at times reaches the
pitch of the heroic. He could have echoed Flaubert's famous sentence:
"The ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope." Yet what wit, what
humour, what humanity in Daumier! His Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are
worth a wilderness of Dorés. And the Good Samaritan or The Drinkers.
The latter is as jovial as Steen or Hals.
A story went the rounds after his death which neatly illustrates his
lack of worldliness. His modesty was proverbial, and once Daubigny, on
introducing him to an American picture dealer, warned him not to ask
less than five thousand francs for the first picture he sold to the
man. The American went to Daumier's atelier, and seeing a picture on
the easel, asked, "How much?" The artist, remembering Daubigny's
warning, answered, "Five thousand francs." The dealer immediately
bought it, and on demanding to see something else, Daumier put another
canvas on the easel, far superior to the one sold. The Yankee again
asked the price. The poor artist was perplexed. He had received no
instructions from Daubigny regarding a second sale; so when the
question was repeated he hesitated, and his timidity getting the
better of him, he replied: "Five hundred francs." "Don't want it;
wouldn't take it as a gift," said the dealer. "I like the other
better. Besides, I never sell any but expensive pictures," and he went
away satisfied that a man who sold so cheaply was not much of an
artist. This anecdote, which we heard second hand from Daubigny, may
be a fable, yet it never failed to send Daubigny into fits of
laughter. It may be surmised that, despite his herculean labours,
extending over more than half a century, Daumier never knew how to
make or save money.
He was born at Marseilles in 1808. His father was a third-rate poet
who, suspecting his own gift, doubted the talent of his son, though
this talent was both precocious and prodigious. The usual thing
happened. Daumier would stick at nothing but his drawing; the attempt
to force him into law studies only made him hate the law and lawyers
and that hatred he never ceased to vent in his caricatures. He knocked
about until he learned in 1829 the technics of lithography; then he
soon became self-supporting. His progress was rapid. He illustrated
for the Boulevard journals; he caricatured Louis Philippe and was sent
to jail, Sainte-Pélagie, for six months. Many years afterward he
attacked with a like ferocity Napoleon III.
Look at his frontispiece--rather an advertisement--of Victor Hugo's
Les Châtiments. It is as sinister, as malign as a Rops. The big book,
title displayed, crushes to earth a vulture which is a travesty of the
Napoleonic beak. Daumier was a power in Paris. Albert Wolff, the
critic of _Figaro_, tells how he earned five francs each time he
provided a text for a caricature by Daumier, and Philipon, who founded
several journals, actually claimed a share in Daumier's success
because he wrote some of the silly dialogues to his plates.
Daumier was the artistic progenitor of the Caran d'Aches, the
Forains--who was it that called Forain "Degas en
caricature"?--Willettes, and Toulouse-de-Lautrecs. He was a political
pamphleteer, a scourger of public scamps, and a pictorial muck-raker
of genius. His mockery of the classic in art was later paralleled by
Offenbach in La Belle Hélène. But there were other sides to his
genius. Tiring of the hurly-burly of journalism, he retired in 1860 to
devote himself to painting.
His style has been pronounced akin to that of Eugène Carrière; his
sense of values on a par with Goya's and Rembrandt's (that Shop Window
of his in the Durand-Ruel collection is truly Rembrandtesque). This
feeling for values was so remarkable that it enabled him to produce an
impression with three or four tones. The colours he preferred were
grays, browns, and he manipulated his blacks like a master. Mauclair
does not hesitate to put Daumier among the great painters of the past
century on the score of his small canvases. "They contain all his
gifts of bitter and profound observation, all the mastery of his
drawings, to which they add the attractions of rich and intense
colour," declares Mauclair. Doubtless he was affected by the influence
of Henri Monnier, but Daumier really comes from no one. He belongs to
the fierce tribe of synics and men of exuberant powers, like Goya and
Courbet. A born anarch of art, he submitted to no yoke. He would have
said with Anacharsis Cloots: "I belong to the party of indignation."
He was a proud individualist. That he had a tender side, a talent for
friendship, may be noted in the affectionate intercourse he maintained
for years with Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Dupré, Geoffroy, the sculptor
Pascal, and others. He was very impulsive and had a good heart with
all his misanthropy, for he was an idealist reversed. The etching of
him by Loys Delteil is thus described by a sympathetic commentator:
"Daumier was very broad-shouldered, his head rather big, with slightly
sunken eyes, which must, however, have had an extraordinary power of
penetration. Though the nose is a little heavy and inelegant, the
projecting forehead, unusually massive like that of Victor Hugo or of
Beethoven and barred with a determined furrow, reveals the great
thinker, the man of lofty and noble aspirations. The rather long hair,
thrown backward, adds to the expression of the fine head; and finally
the beard worn collarwise, according to the prevailing fashion, gives
to Daumier's face the distinctive mark of his period." This etched
portrait may be seen in several states at the Lenox Library.
LALANNE'S ETCHINGS
How heavily personality counts in etching may be noted in the etched
work of Maxime Lalanne which is at the Keppel Galleries. This skilful
artist, so deft with his needle, so ingenious in fancy, escapes great
distinction by a hair's breadth. He is without that salt of
individuality that is so attractive in Whistler. Of him Hamerton
wrote: "No one ever etched so gracefully as Maxime Lalanne; ... he is
essentially a true etcher... There have been etchers of greater power,
of more striking originality, but there has never been an etcher equal
to him in a certain delicate elegance." This is very amiable, and
Joseph Pennell is quite as favourable in his judgment. "His ability,"
wrote Mr. Pennell in Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen, "to express a
great building, a vast town, or a delicate little landscape has never
been equalled, I think, by anybody but Whistler." Mr. Pennell modestly
omits his own name; but the truth is that Pennell is as excellent if
not more individual a draughtsman as Lalanne, and when it comes to
vision, to invention, and to the manipulation of the metal he is the
superior of the Frenchman. The American etcher rates Lalanne's lines
above Titian's. Whistler and Titian would be big companions indeed for
the clever-mannered and rather pedantic Lalanne.
Let us admit without balking at Hamerton that his line is graceful. He
belongs to the old-fashioned school which did not dream, much less
approve, of modern tonal effects in their plates. A Lalanne etching is
as clean and vivid as a photograph (not an "art" photograph). It is
also as hard. Atmosphere, in the material as well as the poetic sense,
is missing. His skies are disappointing. Those curly-cue clouds are
meaningless, and the artist succeeds better when he leaves a blank. At
least some can fill it with the imagination. Another grave defect is
the absence of modulation in his treatment of a landscape and its
linear perspective. Everything seems to be on the same plane of
interest, nor does he vary the values of his blacks--in foreground,
middle distance, and the upper planes the inking is often in the same
violent key. Such a capital plate, for example, which depicts a fire
in the port of Bordeaux is actually untrue in its values. Dramatic in
feeling and not without a note here and there of Rembrandt, this
particular composition fails, just fails to hit the bull's-eye.
After all, we must judge a man in his genre, as Keppel _père_ puts it.
Maxime Lalanne's style is that of a vanished generation in etching. He
was a contemporary of Meryon, but that unhappy man of genius taught
him nothing. Born at Bordeaux in 1827, Lalanne died in 1886. He was a
pupil of Jean Gigoux (1806-94), a painter whose gossipy souvenirs
(1885) pleased Paris and still please the curious. (Gigoux it was who
remained in Balzac's house when the novelist died; though he was not
visiting the master of the house.) From this painter Lalanne evidently
imbibed certain theories of his art which he set forth in his Treatise
on Etching (1866).
Strangely enough, illustrator as he was, his transpositions into black
and white of subjects by Troyon, Ruysdael, Crome, Constable, and many
others are not so striking either in actual technique or individual
grasp as his original pieces. Constable, for instance, is thin,
diffuse, and without richness. Mezzotinted by the hands of such a man
as Lucas, we recognise the real medium for translating the English
painter. A master of the limpid line, Lalanne shows you a huddled bit
of Amsterdam or a distant view of Bordeaux, or that delicious prospect
taken on a spot somewhere below the Pont Saint-Michel, with the Pont
Neuf and the Louvre in the background. He had a feeling for those
formal gardens which have captured within their enclosure a moiety of
nature's unstudied ease. The plate called Aux Environs de Paris
reveals this. And what slightly melancholy tenderness there is in Le
Canal à Pont Sainte-Maxence. There are several states of the "Villers"
etching, an attractive land and seascape, marred, however, by the
clumsy sameness of the blacks in the foreground.
Without possessing Meryon's grim power in the presentation of old
Paris streets and tumble-down houses, Lalanne has achieved several
remarkable plates of this order. One is his well-known Rue des
Marmousets. This street is almost as repellent-looking as Rue
Mouffetard at its worst period. Ancient and sinister, its reputation
was not enticing. In it once dwelt a pastry cook who, taking his crony
the barber into his confidence, literally made mince-meat of a
stranger and sold the pies to the neighbours.
Messire Jacques du Breul, in his Le Théâtre des Antiquités de Paris
(1612), remarks, not without critical unction, in his quaint French:
"De la chair d'icelui faisit des pastez qui se trouvoient meilleurs
que les aultres, d'autant que la chair de l'homme est plus délicate à
cause de la nourriture que celle des aultres animaux." Every one to
his taste, as the old politician said when he kissed the donkey. When
you study the Lalanne etching of this gruesome alley you almost expect
to see at the corner Anatole France's famous cook-shop with its
delectable odours and fascinating company.
The scenes of Thames water-side, Nogent, Houlgate Beach, at Richmond,
or at Cusset are very attractive. His larger plates are not
convincing, the composition does not hang together; the eye vainly
seeks focussing centres of interest. Beraldi was right when he said
that Lalanne has not left one surpassing plate, one of which the world
can say: There is a masterpiece! Yet is Maxime Lalanne among the
Little Masters of characteristic etching. His appeal is popular, he is
easily comprehended of the people.
LOUIS LEGRAND
The etched work of the brilliant Frenchman Louis Legrand is at last
beginning to be appreciated in this country. French etchings, unless
by painter-etchers, have never been very popular with us. We admire
Meryon and Helleu's drypoints, Bracquemond, Jacquemart; Félix Buhot
has a following; Lalanne and Daubigny too; but in comparison with the
demand for Rembrandt, Whistler, Seymour Haden, or Zorn the Paris men
are not in the lead. There is Rops, for example, whose etchings may be
compared to Meryon's; yet who except a few amateurs seeks Rops? Louis
Legrand is now about forty-five, at the crest of his career, a
versatile, spontaneous artist who is equally happy with pigments or
the needle. His pastels are much sought, but his dry-points have
gained for him celebrity. Though a born colourist, the primary gift of
the man is his draughtsmanship. His designs, swift and supple
notations of the life around him, delight the eye by reason of their
personal touch and because of the intensely human feeling that he
infuses into every plate. Legrand was one of the few pupils of
Félicien Rops, and technically he has learned much of his master; but
his way of viewing men and women and life is different from that of
the Belgian genius. He has irony and wit and humour--the two we seldom
bracket--and he has pity also; he loves the humble and despised. His
portraits of babies, the babies of the people, are captivating.
Imagine a Rops who has some of Millet's boundless sympathy for his
fellow-humans and you have approximately an understanding of Louis
Legrand.
He is a native of Dijon, the city that gave birth to Bossuet, but
Legrand is not that kind of Burgundian. Several critics pretend to see
in his work the characteristics of his native Côte d'Or; that,
however, may be simply a desire to frame the picture appropriately.
Legrand might have hailed from the south, from Daudet's country; he is
exuberant as he is astute. The chief thing is that he has abundant
brains and in sheer craftsmanship fears few equals. Like Whistler, his
principal preoccupation is to suppress all appearance of technical
procedures. His method of work is said to be simplicity itself;
obsessed by his very definite visions, he transfers them to the
scratched plate with admirable celerity. Dry-point etching is his
principal medium. With his needle he has etched Montmartre, its
cabarets, its angels--in very earthly disguise--its orators, poets,
and castaways, and its visiting tourists--"God's silly sheep." He has
illustrated a volume of Edgar Poe's tales that displays a _macabre_
imagination. His dancers are only second to those of Edgar Degas, and
seen from an opposite side. His peasants, mothers, and children, above
all, babies, reveal an eye that observes and a brain that can
co-ordinate the results of this piercing vision. Withal, he is a poet
who extracts his symbols from everyday life.
This is what Camille Mauclair said of him at the time of his début: