solar spectrum and discard all the others;... he will, furthermore,
instead of composing mixtures on his palette, place upon his canvas
touches of none but the seven colours juxtaposed [Claude Monet has
added black and white] and leave the individual rays of each of these
colours to blend at a certain distance, so as to act like sunlight
upon the eye of the beholder." This is called _dissociation_ of tones;
and here is a new convention; why banish all save the spectrum? We
paint nature, not the solar spectrum.
Claude Monet has been thus far the most successful practitioner of
impressionism; this by reason of his extraordinary analytical power of
vision and native genius rather than the researches of Helmholtz,
Chevreul, and Rood. They gave him his scientific formulas after he had
worked out the problems. He studied Turner in London, 1870; then his
manner changed. He had been a devoted pupil of Eugène Boudin and could
paint the discreet, pearly gray seascapes of his master. But Turner
and Watteau and Monticelli modified his style, changed his way of
envisaging the landscape. Not Edouard Manet but Claude Monet was the
initiator of the impressionistic movement in France, and after
witnessing the rout and confusion that followed in its wake one is
tempted to misquote Nietzsche (who said that the first and only
Christian died on the cross) and boldly assert that there has been but
one impressionist; his name, Monet. "He has arrived at painting by
means of the infinitely varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour
spots which dissociate the tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of
objects through the arabesque of their vibrations." How his landscapes
shimmer with the heat of a summer day! Truly, you can say of these
pictures that "the dawn comes up like thunder." How his fogs, wet and
clinging, seem to be the first real fogs that ever made misty a
canvas! What hot July nights, with few large stars, has Monet not
painted! His series of hayricks, cathedrals, the Thames are precious
notations of contemporary life; they state facts in terms of exquisite
artistic value; they resume an epoch. It is therefore no surprise to
learn that in 1874 Monet gave the name (so variously abused) to the
entire movement when he exhibited a water piece on the Boulevard des
Capucines entitled Impression: Soleil Levant. That title became a
catchword usually employed in a derisive manner. Monet earlier had
resented the intrusion of a man with a name so like his, but succumbed
to the influence of Monet. One thing can no longer be
controverted--Claude Monet is the greatest landscape and marine
painter of the second half of the last century. Perhaps time may alter
this limit clause.
What Turgenieff most condemned in his great contemporary,
Dostoïevsky--if the gentle Russian giant ever condemned any one--was
Feodor Mikhailovitch's taste for "psychological mole runs"; an
inveterate burrowing into the dark places of humanity's soul. Now, if
there is a dark spot in a highly lighted subject it is the question,
Who was the first impressionist? According to Charles de Kay, Whistler
once told him that he, James the Butterfly, began the movement; which
is a capital and characteristic anecdote, especially if one recalls
Whistler's boast made to a young etcher as to the initiative of Corot.
Whistler practically said: "Before Corot was, I am!" And he adduced
certain canvases painted with the misty-edged trees long before--but
why continue? Whistler didn't start Corot--apart from the
chronological difficulties in the way--any more than Courbet and Manet
started Whistler; yet both these painters played important rôles in
the American master's art. So let us accept Mauclair's dictum as to
Claude Monet's priority in the field of impressionism. Certainly he
attained his marked style before he met Manet. Later he modified his
own paint to show his sympathy with the new school. Monet went to
Watteau, Constable, Monticelli for his ideas, and in London, about
1870, he studied Turner with an interest that finally bordered on
worship. And why not? In Turner, at the National Gallery, you may find
the principles of impressionism carried to extravagant lengths, and
years before Monet. Consider Rain, Steam and Speed--the Great Western
Railway, that vision of a locomotive dashing across a bridge in
chromatic chaos. Or the Sea Piece in the James Orrock collection--a
welter of crosshatchings in variegated hues wherein any school of
impressionism from Watteau's Embarkment to Monet's latest manner or
the _pointillisme_ of Signac and Seurat may be recognised. And there
is a water-colour of Turner's in the National Gallery called Honfleur,
which has anticipated many traits of Boudin and the Manet we know when
he had not forgotten Eugène Boudin's influence.
Let us enjoy our Monet without too many "mole runs." As De Kay pointed
out, it was not necessary for Monet to go to London to see Constables.
In the Louvre he could gaze upon them at leisure, also upon Bonington;
not to mention the Venetians and such a Dutchman as Vermeer. It is
therefore doubly interesting to study the Monets at Durand-Ruel's.
There are twenty-seven, and they range as far back as 1872, Promenade
à Trouville, and come down to the Charing Cross Bridge, 1904, and the
two Waterloo Bridge effects, 1903. It is a wide range in sentiment and
technique. The Mills in Holland of 1874 is as cool and composed as
Boudin. Sincerity and beauty are in the picture--for we do not agree
with those who see in Monet only an unemotional recorder of variations
in light and tone. He can compose a background as well as any of his
contemporaries, and an important fact is overlooked when Monet is
jumbled indiscriminately with a lot of inferior men. Monet knew how to
_draw_ before he handled pigment. Some lansdcape painters do not; many
impressionists trust to God and their palette-knife; so the big men
are sufferers. Monet, it may be noted, essayed many keys; his
compositions are not nearly so monotonous as has been asserted. What
does often exhaust the optic nerve is the violent impinging thereon of
his lights. He has an eagle eye, we have not. Wagner had the faculty
of attention developed to such an extraordinary pitch that with our
more normal and weaker nerves he soon exhausts us in his flights. Too
much Monet is like too much Wagner or too much sunshine.
The breezy effect with the poplars painted flat is an example very
unlike Monet. The church of Varengeville at Dieppe (1880) is a classic
specimen; so is the Pourville beach (1882). What delicate greens in
the Spring (1885)! What fine distance, an ocean view, in the Pourville
picture! Or, if you care for subdued harmonies, there is the ice floe
at Vétheuil (1881).
The London pictures tell of the older artist--not so vigorous, a vein
of tenderness beginning to show instead of his youthful blazing
optimism. Claude Monet must have had a happy life--he is still a
robust man painting daily in the fields, leading the glorious life of
a landscapist, one of the few romantic professions in this prosaic
age. Not so vain, so irritable as either Manet or Whistler, Monet's
nerves have never prompted him to extravagances. Backbiters declare
that Monet is suffering from an optical degeneration--poor, overworked
word! Monet sees better, sees more keenly than his fellow-men. What a
misfortune! Ibsen and Wagner suffered, too, from superior brains. If
Monet ever suffered seriously from a danger to his art it
was--success. He was abused in the beginning, but not as severely as
Manet. But success perched on Monet's palette. His pictures never seem
to suggest any time but high noon, in spirit, at least. And he is
never sad. Yet, is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul
incapable of sadness?
In his very valuable contribution to the history of the cause,
Théodore Duret, the biographer and friend of Whistler and Manet has in
his Les Peintres Impressionistes held the scales very much in favour
of Manet's priority in the field over Monet. It is true that in 1863
Manet had drawn upon his head the thunderous wrath of Paris by
exhibiting his Déjeuner sur l'Herbe and Olympe--by no means a
representative effort of the painter's genius, despite its diabolic
cleverness. (It reveals a profound study of Titian, Cranach, and
Goya.) But his vision was in reality synthetic, not analytic; he was a
primitive; he belongs to the family of Velasquez, Ribera, Goya. He
studied Hals--and with what glorious results in Le Bon Bock! He
manipulated paint like an "old master" and did astounding things with
the higher tones of the colour scale. He was not an impressionist
until he met Monet. Then in audacity he outstripped his associates.
Discouraged by critical attacks, his courage had been revived by
Charles Baudelaire, who fought for Richard Wagner as well as for Poe
and Manet. To the painter the poet scornfully wrote: "You complain
about attacks? But are you the first to endure them? Have you more
genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by
derision. And in order not to make you too proud, I must tell you that
they are models, each in his own way, and in a very rich world, while
you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art." Sinister and
disquieting that last phrase, and for those who see in impressionism
the decadence of painting (because of the predominance given to the
parts over the whole) it is a phrase prophetic.
Manet is a classic. His genuine power--technically speaking--lies in
the broad, sabre-like strokes of his brush and not in the niggling
_taches_ of the impressionists--of which the _reuctio ad absurdum_ is
pointillisme. He lays on his pigments in sweeping slashes and his
divisions are large. His significance for us does not alone reside in
his consummate mastery of form and colour, but in his forthright
expression of the life that hummed about him. He is as actual as Hals.
Study that Boy With the Sword at the Metropolitan Museum--is there
anything superficial about it? It is Spanish, the Spain of Velasquez,
in its beautiful thin, clear, flat painting, its sober handling of
values. The truth is that Manet dearly loved a fight, and being _chef
d'école_, he naturally drifted to the impressionists' camp. And it is
significant that Duret did not give this virile spirit a place in his
new volume, confining the estimate of his genius to the preface.
Mauclair, on the contrary, includes Manet's name in his more
comprehensive and more scientific study, as he also includes the name
of Edgar Degas--Degas, who is a latter-day Ingres, plus colour and a
new psychology.
The title of impressionism has been a misleading one. If Degas is an
impressionist, pray what then is Monet? Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne are
impressionists, and in America there is no impropriety in attaching
this handle to the works of Twachtmann, J. Alden Weir, W.L. Metcalf,
Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Robert Reid, Ernest Lawson, Paul
Cornoyer, Colin Campbell Cooper, Prendergast, Luks, and Glackens. But
Manet, Degas! It would have been a happier invention to have called
the 1877 group independents; independent they were, each man pursuing
his own rainbow. We may note an identical confusion in the mind of the
public regarding the Barbizon school. Never was a group composed of
such dissimilar spirits. Yet people talk about Millet _and_ Breton,
Corot _and_ Daubigny, Rousseau _and_ Dupré. They still say Goethe
_and_ Schiller, Beethoven _and_ Mozart, Byron _and_ Shelley. It is the
result of mental inertia, this coupling of such widely disparate
temperaments.
Nevertheless, divided tones and "screaming" palette do not always a
picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic
innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells
improvisation--an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process,
facile as well as factitious. Albert Wolff must have thought these
things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great
when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the
painstaking Bonnat. Whistler shocked Ruskin when he confessed to
having painted a nocturne in two days, but with a lifetime experience
in each stroke of the brush. Whistler was a swift worker, and while he
claimed the honour of being the originator of impressionism--didn't he
"originate" Velasquez?--he really belongs to the preceding generation.
He was impressionistic, if you will, yet not an impressionist. He was
Japanese and Spanish, never Watteau, Monticelli, Turner, or Monet.
MacColl has pointed out the weakness of the scientific side of
impressionism. Its values are strictly æsthetic; attempts to paint on
a purely scientific basis have proved both monotonous and ludicrous.
The experiments of the neo-impressionists (the 1885 group), of Signac,
Seurat, were not very convincing. Van Rhysselberge, one of the few
painters to-day who practise _pointillisme_, or the system of dots, is
a gifted artist; so is Anquetin. The feminine group is headed by the
name of Berthe Morisot (the wife of Eugène Manet, a brother of Edouard
and the great granddaughter of Fragonard), a pupil of Manet, the most
individual woman painter that ever lived; and Mary Cassatt, a pupil of
Degas, though more closely allied to the open-air school in her
methods. Miss Cassatt possesses a distinguished talent. As a school
impressionism has run down to a thin rill in a waste of sand. It is
more technical than personal, and while it was lucky to have such an
exponent as Claude Monet, there is every reason to believe that
Monet's impressionism is largely the result of a peculiar penetrating
vision. He has been imitated, and Maufra and Moret are carrying on his
tradition--yet there is but one Monet.
We know that the spectral palette is a mild delusion and sometimes a
dangerous snare, that impressionism is in the remotest analysis but a
new convention supplanting an old. Painters will never go back to the
muddy palette of the past. The trick has been turned. The egg of
Columbus has been once more stood on end. Claude Monet has taught us
the "innocence of the eye," has shown us how to paint air that
circulates, water that sparkles. The sun was the centre of the
impressionistic attack, the "splendid, silent sun." A higher pitch in
key colour has been attained, shadows have been endowed with vital
hues. (And Leonardo da Vinci, wonderful landscapist, centuries ago
wrote learnedly of coloured shadows; every new discovery is only a
rediscovery.) The "dim, religious light" of the studio has been
banished; the average palette is lighter, is more brilliant. And
Rembrandt is still worshipped; Raphael is still on his pedestal, and
the millionaire on the street continues to buy Bouguereau. The amateur
who honestly wishes to purge his vision of encrusted painted
prejudices we warn not to go too close to an impressionistic
canvas--any more than he would go near a red-hot stove or a keg of
gunpowder. And let him forget those toothsome critical terms,
decomposition, recomposition. His eyes, if permitted, will act for
themselves; there is no denying that the principles of impressionism
soundly applied, especially to landscape, catch the fleeting,
many-hued charm of nature. It is a system of coloured stenography--in
the hands of a master. Woe betide the fumbler!
II - RENOIR
The secret of success is never to be satisfied; that is, never to be
satisfied with your work or your success. And this idea seems to have
animated Auguste Renoir during his long, honourable career of painter.
In common with several members of the impressionistic group to which
he belonged, he suffered from hunger, neglect, obloquy; but when
prosperity did at last appear he did not succumb to the most dangerous
enemy that besets the artist. He fought success as he conquered
failure, and his continual dissatisfaction with himself, the true
critical spirit, has led him to many fields--he has been portraitist,
genre painter, landscapist, delineator of nudes, a marine painter and
a master of still-life. This versatility, amazing and
incontrovertible, has perhaps clouded the real worth of Renoir for the
public. Even after acknowledging his indubitable gifts, the usual
critical doubting Thomas grudgingly remarks that if Renoir could not
draw like Degas, paint land and water like Monet or figures like
Manet, he was a naturally endowed colourist. How great a colourist he
was may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, where his big canvas, La
Famille Charpentier, is now hung.
Charpentier was the publisher of Zola, Goncourt, Flaubert, and of the
newer realists. He was a man of taste, who cultivated friendships with
distinguished artists and writers. Some disappointment was experienced
at the recent public sale of his collection in Paris. The _clou_ of
the sale was undoubtedly the portrait of his wife and two children. It
was sold for the surprising sum of 84,000 francs to M. Durand-Ruel,
who acted in behalf of the Metropolitan Museum. Another canvas by
Renoir fetched 14,050 francs. A _sanguine_ of Puvis de Chavannes
brought 2,050 francs, and 4,700 francs was paid for a Cézanne picture.
The Charpentier Family, originally entitled Portrait de Madame
Charpentier et Ses Filles, was painted in 1878, first exhibited at the
Salon of 1879, and there we saw and admired it. The passage of the
years has tempered the glistening brilliancies and audacious chromatic
modulations to a suave harmony that is absolutely fascinating. The
background is Japanese. Mme. Charpentier is seated on a canopy
surrounded by furniture, flowers; under foot a carpet with arabesque
designs. She throws one arm carelessly over some rich stuff; the hand
is painted with masterly precision. The other arm has dropped in her
lap. She is an interesting woman of that fine maternal type so often
encountered in real France--though not in French fiction, alas! Her
gaze is upon her children, two adorable little girls. A superb dog, a
St. Bernard, with head resting on paws, looks at you with watchful
eyes. One of the girls sits upon his shaggy hide. The mother is in
black, a mellow reception robe, tulle and lace. White and blue are the
contrasting tones of the girls--the blue is tender. A chair is at the
side of a lacquer table, upon which are flowers. Renoir flowers, dewy,
blushing. You exclaim: "How charming!" It is normal French painting,
not the painting of the schools with their false ideal of pseudo-Greek
beauty, but the intimate, clear, refined, and logical style of a man
who does not possess the genius of Manet, Degas, or Monet, but is
nevertheless an artist of copiousness, charm, and originality. Charm;
yes, that is the word. There is a voluptuous magnetism in his colour
that draws you to him whether you approve of his capricious designs or
not. The museum paid $18,480 for the Charpentier portrait, and in
1877, after an exposition in the rue Le Peletier, sixteen of his
paintings, many of them masterpieces, netted the mortifying sum of
2,005 francs.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born at Limoges, February 25, 1840. His
father was a poor tailor with five children who went to Paris hoping
to better his condition. At the age of twelve the boy was painting on
porcelain--his father had picked up some rudiments of the art at
Limoges. Auguste did so well, displayed such energy and taste, that he
soon fell to decorating blinds, and saved, in the course of four
years, enough money to enable him to enter the atelier of Gleyre.
There he met Sisley, Bazille--afterward shot in the Franco-Prussian
war--and Claude Monet. They became friends and later allies in the
conflict with the Parisian picture public. Renoir made his first
offering to the Salon in 1863. It was refused. It was a romantic
bit--a nude lady reclining on a bed listening to the plucked music of
a guitar. It seems that the guitarist, and not the lady, was the cause
of offence. It is a convention that a thousand living beings may look
at an undressed female in a picture, but no painted man may be allowed
to occupy with her the same apartment. In 1864 Renoir tried
again--after all, the Salon, like our own academy, is a
market-place--and was admitted. He sent in an Esmeralda dancing. Both
these canvases were destroyed by the painter when he began to use his
eyes. In 1868 his Lise betrayed direct observation of nature,
influenced by Courbet. Until 1873 he sent pictures to the Salon; that
year he was shut out with considerable unanimity, for his offering
happened to be an Algerian subject, a Parisian woman dressed in
Oriental costume, and--horrors!--the shadows were coloured. He was
become an impressionist. He had listened, or rather looked at the
baleful pyrotechnics of Monet, and so he joined the secessionists,
though not disdaining to contribute annually to the Salon. In 1874 his
L'allee Cavalière au Bois de Boulogne was rejected, an act that was
evidently inspired by a desire to sacrifice Renoir because of the
artistic "crimes" of Edouard Manet. Otherwise how explain why this
easily comprehended composition, with its attractive figures, daring
hues, and brilliant technique, came to have the door of the Salon
closed upon it?
The historic exposition at Nadar's photographic studio, on the
Boulevard des Capucines, of the impressionists, saw Renoir in company
with Monet, Sisley, and the others. His La Danseuse and La Loge were
received with laughter by the discerning critics. Wasn't this the
exhibition of which Albert Wolff wrote that some lunatics were showing
their wares, which they called pictures, etc.? (No, it was in 1875.)
From 1868 to 1877 Renoir closely studied nature and his landscapes
took on those violet tones which gave him the nickname of Monsieur
Violette. Previously he had employed the usual clear green with the
yellow touches in the shadows of conventional _paysagistes_. But
Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir had discovered each for himself
that the light and shade in the open air vary according to the hours,
the seasons, the atmospheric conditions. Monet and Pissarro in
painting snow and frost effects under the sun did not hesitate to put
blue tones in the shadows. Sisley was fond of rose tones, Renoir saw
violet in the shadows. He enraged his spectators quite as much as did
Monet with his purple turkeys. His striking Avant le bain was sold for
one hundred and forty francs in 1875. Any one who has been lucky
enough to see it at Durand-Ruel's will cry out at the stupidity which
did not recognise a masterly bit of painting with its glowing,
nacreous flesh tints, its admirable modelling, its pervading air of
vitality. Renoir was never a difficult painter; that is, in the sense
of Monet or Manet or Gauguin. He offended the eyes of 1875, no doubt,
but there was in him during his first period much of Boucher; his
female nudes are, as Camille Mauclair writes, of the eighteenth
century; his technique is Boucher-like: "fat and sleek paint of soft
brilliancy laid on with the palette-knife with precise strokes around
the principal values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues
similar to those of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and
almost excluding the opposition of the shadows; vivacious attitudes
and decorative convention."