painter of curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the
artists of to-day. Louis Legrand also shows to what extent Manet and
Degas have revolutionised the art of illustration, in freeing the
painters from obsolete laws and guiding them toward truth and frank
psychological study. Legrand is full of them without resembling them.
We must not forget that besides the technical innovation [division of
tones, study of complementary colours] impressionism has brought us
novelty of composition, realism of character, and great liberty in the
choice of subjects. From this point of view Rops himself, in spite of
his symbolist tendencies, could not be classed with any other group if
it were not that any kind of classification in art is useless and
inaccurate. However that may be, Louis Legrand has signed some volumes
with the most seductive qualities."
Gustave Kahn, the symbolist poet who was introduced to the English
reading world in one of the most eloquent pages of George Moore,
thinks that Legrand is frankly a symbolist. We side with Mauclair in
not trying to pin this etcher down to any particular formula. He is
anything he happens to will at the moment, symbolist, poet, and also
shockingly frank at times. Take the plate with a pun for a title, Le
paing quotidien ("paing" is slang for "poing," a blow from the fist,
and may also mean the daily bread). A masculine brute is with clinched
fist about to give his unfortunate partner her daily drubbing. He is
well dressed. His silk hat is shiny, his mustache curled in the true
Adolphe fashion. His face is vile. The woman cries aloud and protects
herself with her hands. In Marthe Baraquin, by Rosny senior, you will
find the material for this picture, though Legrand found it years ago
in the streets. Unpleasant, truly, yet a more potent sermon on man's
cruelty to woman than may be found in a dozen preachments, fictions,
or the excited outpourings at a feminist congress. Legrand presents
the facts of the case without comment, except the irony--such dismal
irony!--of the title. In this he is the true pupil of Rops.
However, he does not revel long among such dreary slices of life. The
Poe illustrations are grotesque and shuddering, but after all make
believe. The plate of The Black Cat piles horror on horror's head
(literally, for the demon cat perches on the head of the corpse) and
is, all said, pictorial melodrama. The Berenice illustration is, we
confess, a little too much for the nerves, simply because in a
masterly manner Legrand has exposed the most dreadful moment of the
story (untold by Poe, who could be an artist in his tact of omission).
The dental smile of the cataleptic Berenice as her necrophilic cousin
bends over the coffin is a testimony to a needle that in this instance
matches Goya's and Rops's in its evocation of the horrific. We turn
with relief to the ballet-girl series. The impression gained from this
album is that Legrand sympathises with, nay loves, his subject. Degas,
the greater and more objective artist, nevertheless allows to sift
through his lines an inextinguishable hatred of these girls who labour
so long for so little; and Degas did hate them, as he hated all that
was ugly in daily life, though he set forth this ugliness, this
mediocrity, this hatred in terms of beautiful art. Legrand sees the
ugliness, but he also sees the humanity of the _ballateuse_. She is a
woman who is brought up to her profession with malice aforethought by
her parents. These parents are usually noted for their cupidity. We
need not read the witty history of the Cardinal family to discover
this repellent fact. Legrand sketches the dancer from the moment when
her mother brings her, a child, to undergo the ordeal of the first
lesson.
The tender tot stands hesitating in the doorway; one hand while
holding the door open seems to grasp it as the last barrier of defence
that stands between her and the strange new world. She is attired in
the classical figurante's costume. Behind, evidently pushing her
forward, is the grim guardian, a bony, forbidding female. Although you
do not see them, it is an easy feat to imagine the roomful of girls
and dancing master all staring at the new-comer. The expression on the
child's face betrays it; instinctively, like the generality of
embarrassed little girls, her hand clasps her head. In less than a
minute she will weep.
Another plate, L'ami des Danseuses, is charged with humanity. The
violinist who plays for the ballet rehearsals sits resting, and facing
him are two young dancers, also sitting, but stooping to relieve their
strained spines and the tendons of their muscular legs. The old fellow
is giving advice from the fulness of a life that has been not too
easy. The girls are all attention. It is a genre bit of distinction.
Upon the technical virtuosity in which this etcher excels we shall not
dwell. Some of his single figures are marvels. The economy of line,
the massing of lights and darks, the vitality he infuses into a woman
who walks, a man who works in the fields, a child at its mother's
breast, are not easily dealt with in a brief study. We prefer to note
his more general qualities. His humour, whether in delineating a
stupid soldier about to be exploited by camp followers, or in his
Animales, is unforced. It can be Rabelaisian and it can be a record of
simple animal life, as in the example with the above title. A cow
stands on a grassy shore; near by a stolid peasant girl sits slicing
bread and eating it. Cow and girl, grass and sky and water are woven
into one natural pattern. The humour inheres in several sly touches.
It is a comical Millet. Very Millet-like too is the large picture,
Beau Soir, in which a field labourer bends over to kiss his wife, who
has a child at her breast. A cow nuzzles her apron, the fourth member
of this happy group. The Son of the Carpenter is another peasant
study, but the transposition of the Holy Family to our century. A
slight nimbus about the mother's head is the only indication that this
is not a humble household somewhere in France. Maternal Joy, Mater
Inviolata are specimens of a sane, lovely art which celebrate the
joys, dolors, and exaltations of motherhood. We prefer this side of
the art of Legrand to his studies of sinister jail-birds, _hetairai_,
noctambules, high kickers, and private bars, the horrors of Parisian
night life. Whatever he touches he vivifies. His leaping, audacious
line is like the narrative prose of a Maupassant or a Joseph Conrad.
Every stroke tells.
His symbolical pictures please us least. They doubtless signify no end
of profound things, yet to us they seem both exotic and puerile. We go
back to the tiny dancers, tired to sleepiness, who sit on a sofa
waiting to be called. Poor babies! Or to the plate entitled Douleur.
Or to the portraits of sweet English misses--as did Constantin Guys,
Legrand has caught the precise English note--or any of the children
pieces. If he knows the psychology of passion, knows the most intimate
detail of the daily life of _les filles_, Legrand is master too of the
psychology of child life. This will endear him to English and American
lovers of art, though it is only one of his many endowments. His wit
keeps him from extremes, though some of his plates are not for
puritans; his vivid sympathies prevent him from falling into the
sterile eccentricities of so many of his contemporaries; if he is
cynical he is by the same taken soft-hearted. His superb handling of
his material, with a synthetic vision superadded, sets apart Louis
Legrand in a profession which to-day is filled with farceurs and
fakers and with too few artists by the grace of God.
GUYS, THE ILLUSTRATOR
Practitioners of the noble art of illustration are, as we know, modest
men, but no matter the degree of their modesty they are all distanced
by the record in shyness still maintained by Constantin Guys. This
artist was once a living protest against Goethe's assertion that only
fools are modest, and the monument recently erected to his memory in
Paris is provocation enough to bring him ferrying across the Styx to
enter a disclaimer in the very teeth of his admirers. So set in his
anonymity was he that Charles Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, was
forced to write a long essay about his work and only refer to the
artist as C.G. The poet relates that once when Thackeray spoke to Guys
in a London newspaper office and congratulated him on his bold
sketches in the _Illustrated London News_, the fiery little man
resented the praise as an outrage. Nor was this humility a pose. His
life long he was morbidly nervous, as was Meryon, as was Cézanne; but
he was neither half mad, like the great etcher, nor a cenobite, as was
the painter of Aix. Few have lived in the thick of life as did Guys.
To employ the phrase of Turgenieff, life, like grass, grew over his
head. In the Crimean camps, on the Parisian boulevards, in London
parks, Guys strolled, crayon in hand, a true reporter of things seen
and an ardent lover of horses, soldiers, pretty women, and the mob.
Baudelaire called him the soldier-artist. He resembled in his restless
wanderings Poe's man of the multitude, and at the end of a long life
he still drew, as did Hokusai.
Who was he? Where did he receive his artistic training? Baudelaire did
not tell, nor Théophile Gautier. He went through the Crimean campaign;
he lived in the East, in London and Paris. Not so long ago the art
critic Roger Marx, while stopping at Flushing, Holland, discovered his
baptismal certificate, which reads thus: "Ernestus Adolphus Hyacinthus
Constantinus Guys, born at Flushing December 3, 1805, of Elizabeth
Bétin and François Lazare Guys, Commissary of the French Marine." The
baptism occurred January 26, 1806, and revealed the fact that he had
for godfather an uncle who held a diplomatic position. Guys told his
friends that his full family name was Guys de Sainte-Hélène--which may
have been an amiable weakness of the same order as that of Barbey
d'Aurevilly and of Villiers de l'Isle Adam, both of whom boasted noble
parentage. However, Guys was little given to talk of any sort. He was
loquacious only with his pencil, and from being absolutely forgotten
after the downfall of the Second Empire to-day every scrap of his work
is being collected, even fought for, by French and German collectors.
Yet when the Nadar collection was dispersed, June, 1909, in Paris, his
aquarelles went for a few francs. Félix Fénéon and several others now
own complete sets. In New York there are a few specimens in the
possession of private collectors, though the Lenox Library, as a rule
rich in such prints, has only reproductions to show.
The essay of Charles Baudelaire, entitled Le Peintre de la Vie
Moderne, to be found in Volume III of his collected works (L'Art
Romantique), remains thus far the standard reference study concerning
Guys, though deficient in biographical details. Other critical studies
are by Camille Mauclair, Roger Marx, Richard Muther, and George
Grappe; and recently Elizabeth Luther Cary in a too short but
admirably succinct article characterised the Guys method in this
fashion: "He defined his forms sharply and delicately, and used within
his bounding line the subtlest variation of light and shade. His
workmanship everywhere is of the most elusive character, and he is a
master of the art of reticence." Miss Cary further speaks of his
"gentle gusto of line in motion, which lately has captivated us in the
paintings of the Spaniard Sorolla, and long ago gave Botticelli and
Carlo Crivelli the particular distinction they had in common."
Mauclair mentions "the most animated water-colour drawings of Guys,
his curious vision of nervous elegance and expressive skill," and
names it the impressionism of 1845, while Dr. Muther christened him
the Verlaine of the crayon because, like Verlaine, he spent his life
between the almshouse and a hospital, so said the German critic.
Furthermore, Muther believes it was no mere chance that made of
Baudelaire his admirer; in both the decadent predominated--which is
getting the cart before the horse. Rops, too, is recalled by Guys, who
depicted the gay grisette of the faubourgs as well as the nocturnal
pierreuse of the fortifications. "Guys exercised on Gavarni an
influence which brought into being his Invalides du sentiment, his
Lorettes vielles, and his Fourberies de femmes."
It is not quite fair to compare Guys with Rops, or indeed with either
Gavarni or Daumier. These were the giants of French illustration at
that epoch. Guys was more the skirmisher, the sharpshooter, the
reporter of the moment, than a creative master of his art. The street
or the battle-field was his atelier; speed and grace and fidelity his
chief claims to fame. He never practised his art within the walls of
academies; the material he so vividly dealt with was the stuff of
life. The very absence of school in his illustrations is their chief
charm; a man of genius this, self-taught, and a dangerous precedent
for fumblers or those of less executive ability. From the huge mass of
his work being unearthed from year to year he may be said to have
lived crayon in hand. He is the first of a long line of newspaper
illustrators. His profession was soldiering, and legend has it that he
accompanied Byron to Missolonghi. The official career of his father
enabled the youth to see much of the world--Greece, the Balkans,
Turkey, Persia, and perhaps India. On returning to France he became an
officer of dragoons and for some time led the life of a dandy and man
about town. With his memory, of which extraordinary tales are told, he
must have stored up countless films of impressions, all of which were
utilised years later.
In 1845 we find him installed at Paris, though no longer in the army.
Then it was he began to design. He became contributor to many
periodicals, among the rest the _Illustrated London News_ and _Punch_.
For the former journal he went to the Crimean war as accredited art
correspondent. The portfolio containing the Crimean set is now most
sought for by his admirers. He is said to have originated the
expression "taken on the spot," in the title of one of his
instantaneous sketches. Few draughtsmen could boast his sure eye and
manual dexterity. The Balaklava illustration is as striking in its way
as Tennyson's lines, though containing less of poetic heroism and more
ugly realism. Like the trained reporter that he was, Guys followed a
battle, recording the salient incidents of the engagement, not
overemphasising the ghastliness of the carnage, as did Callot or Goya
or Raffet, but telling the truth as he saw it, with a phlegm more
British and German than French. Though he had no Dutch blood in his
veins, he was, like Huysmans, more the man of Amsterdam than the man
of Paris. He noted the changing and shocking scenes of hospital life,
and sympathy without sentimentality drops from his pen. He is drily
humorous as he shows us some plumaged General peacocking on foot, or
swelling with Napoleonic pride as he caracoles by on his horse. And
such horses! Without a hint of the photographic realism of a Muybridge
and his successors, Guys evokes vital horses and riders, those seen by
the normal vision. The witching movement of beautiful Arabian steeds
has not had many such sympathetic interpreters.
In Turkey he depicted episodes of daily life, of the courts of the
Sublime Porte itself, of the fête of Baïram, which closes the fast of
Ramadan. His Turkish women are not all houris, but they bear the stamp
of close study. They are pretty, indolent, brainless creatures. In his
most hurried crayons, pen-and-ink sketches, and aquarelles Guys is
ever interesting. He has a magnetic touch that arrests attention and
atones for technical shortcomings. Abbreviation is his watchword; his
drawings are a species of shorthand notations made at red-hot tempo,
yet catching the soul of a situation. He repeats himself continually,
but, as M. Grappe says, is never monotonous. In love with movement,
with picturesque massing, and broad simple colour schemes, he
naturally gravitated to battle-fields. In Europe society out of doors
became his mania. Rotten Row, in the Bois, at Brighton or at
Baden-Baden, the sinuous fugues of his pencil reveal to succeeding
generations how the great world once enjoyed itself or bored itself to
death. No wonder Thackeray admired Guys. They were kindred spirits;
both recognised and portrayed the snob mundane.
As he grew older Guys became an apparition in the life of Paris. The
smash-up of the Empire destroyed the beloved world he knew so well.
Poor, his principal pleasure was in memory; if he couldn't actually
enjoy the luxury of the rich he could reproduce its images on his
drawing-pad. The whilom dandy and friend of Baudelaire went about
dressed in a shabby military frock-coat. He had no longer a nodding
acquaintance with the fashionable lions of Napoleon the Little's
reign, yet he abated not his haughty strut, his glacial politeness to
all comers, nor his daily promenade in the Bois. A Barmecide feast
this watching the pleasures of others more favoured, though Guys did
not waste the fruits of his observation. At sixty-five he began to go
down-hill. His habits had never been those of a prudent citizen, and
as his earning powers grew less some imp of the perverse entered his
all too solitary life. With this change of habits came a change of
theme. Henceforth he drew _filles_, the outcasts, the scamps and
convicts and the poor wretches of the night. He is now a forerunner of
Toulouse-Lautrec and an entire school. This side of his career
probably caused Dr. Muther to compare him with Paul Verlaine.
Absinthe, the green fairy of so many poets and artists, was no
stranger to Guys.
In 1885, after dining with Nadar, his most faithful friend, Guys was
run over in the Rue du Havre and had his legs crushed. He was taken to
the Maison Dubois, where he lived eight years longer, dying at the
venerable age of eighty-seven, though far from being a venerable
person. Astonishing vitality! He did not begin to draw, that is, for a
living, until past forty. His method of work was simplicity itself,
declare those who watched him at work. He seemingly improvised his
aquarelles; his colour, sober, delicate, was broadly washed in; his
line, graceful and modulated, does not suggest the swiftness of his
execution. He could be rank and vulgar, and he was gentle as a refined
child that sees the spectacle of life for the first time. The
bitterness of Baudelaire's flowers of evil he escaped until he was in
senile decadence. In the press of active life he registered the shock
of conflicting arms, the shallow pride of existence and the mere joy
of living, all in a sane manner that will ever endear him to lovers of
art.
George Moore tells the following anecdote of Degas: Somebody was
saying he did not like Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long
while. "If you were to show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he
would admire it; he would take off his hat; but if you were to show
him a Cabanel, he would say with a sigh, 'That is my fault.'"
If you could show Raphael a croquis by Constantin Guys he would
probably look the other way, but Degas would certainly admire and buy
the drawing.
XI. IMPRESSIONISM
I - MONET
The impressionists claim as their common ancestors Claude Lorraine,
Watteau, Turner, Monticelli. Watteau, Latour, Largillière, Fragonard,
Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen are their sponsors in the matters of
design, subject, realism, study of life, new conceptions of beauty and
portraiture. Mythology, allegory, historic themes, the neo-Greek and
the academic are under the ban--above all, the so-called "grand
style." Impressionism has actually elevated genre painting to the
position occupied by those vast, empty, pompous, frigid, smoky,
classic pieces of the early nineteenth century. However, it must not
be forgotten that modern impressionism is only a new technique, a new
method of execution--we say new, though that is not exactly the case.
The home of impressionism is in the East; it may be found in the vivid
patterns woven in Persia or in old Japan. In its latest avatar it is
the expression of contemporaneous reality. Therein lies its true
power. The artist who turns his face only to the past--his work will
never be anything but an echo. To depict the faces and things and pen
the manners of the present is the task of great painters and
novelists. Actualists alone count in the future. The mills of the
antique grind swiftly--like the rich, they will be always with us--but
they only grind out imitations; and from pseudo-classic marbles and
pseudo-"beautiful" pictures may Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies, deliver
us.
That able and sympathetic writer D.S. MacColl has tersely summed up in
his Vision of the Century the difference between the old and new
manner of seeing things. "The old vision had beaten out three separate
acts--the determination of the edges and limits of things, the
shadings and the modellings of the spaces in between with black and
white, and the tintings of those spaces with their local colour. The
new vision that had been growing up among the landscape painters
simplifies as well as complicates the old. For purposes of analysis it
sees the world as a mosaic of patches of colour, such and such a hue,
such and such a tone, such and such a shape... The new analysis looked
first for colour and for a different colour in each patch of shade or
light. The old painting followed the old vision by its three processes
of drawing the contours, modelling the chiaroscura in dead colour, and
finally in colouring this black-and-white preparation. The new
analysis left the contours to be determined by the junction, more or
less fused, of the colour patches, instead of rigidly defining them as
they are known to be defined when seen near at hand or felt... 'Local
colour' in light or shade becomes different not only in tone but in
hue."
To the layman who asked, "What is impressionism?" Mauclair has given
the most succinct answer in his book L'Impressionisme: "In nature," he
declares, "no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the object is
pure illusion; the only creative source of colour is the sunlight,
which envelops all things and reveals them, according to the hours,
with infinite modifications... The idea of distance, of perspective,
of volume is given us by darker or lighter colours; this is the sense
of values; a value is the degree of light or dark intensity which
permits our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer
than another. And as painting is not and cannot be the imitation of
nature, but merely her artificial interpretation, since it has only at
its disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only
means that remain for expressing depth on a flat surface. Colour is
therefore the procreatrix of design... Colours vary with the intensity
of light... Local colour is an error; a leaf is not green, a tree
trunk is not brown... According to the time of day, _i. e._, according
to the greater or smaller inclination of the rays (scientifically
called the angle of incidence), the green of the leaf and the brown of
the tree are modified... The composition of the atmosphere... is the
real subject of the picture... Shadow is not absence of light, but
light of a different quality and of a different value. Shadow is not
part of the landscape where light ceases, but where it is subordinated
to a light which appears to us more intense. In the shadow the rays of
the spectrum vibrate with a different speed. Painting should therefore
try to discover here, as in the light parts, the play of the atoms of
solar light, instead of representing shadows with ready-made tones
composed of bitumen and black... In a picture representing an interior
the source of light [windows] may not be indicated; the light
circulating, circling around the picture, will then be composed of the
_reflections_ of rays whose source is invisible, and all the objects,
acting as mirrors for these reflections, will consequently influence
each other. Their colours will affect each other even if the surfaces
be dull. A red vase placed upon a blue carpet will lead to a very
subtle but mathematically exact exchange between this blue and this
red; and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two
colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite
reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two
principal colours.