Ursula for the benefit of St. Jean's Hospital as a recompense for
treatment while sick there. He was a burgher living comfortably at
Bruges. The museum is a short distance from the hospital. Its Van Eyck
(Jan), La Vierge et l'Enfant--known as the Donator because of the
portrait of George van der Paele--is its chief treasure, though there
is the portrait of Jan's wife; Gerard David's Judgment of King
Cambyses, and the savage execution companion picture; Memling's
triptych, St. Christopher bearing the Christ Child, and David's
masterpiece, The Baptism of Christ. Holbein never painted a head with
greater verisimilitude than Van Eyck's rendering of the Donator. What
an eye! What handling, missing not a wrinkle, a fold of the aged skin,
the veins in the senile temples, or the thin soft hair above the ears!
What synthesis! There are no niggling details, breadth is not lost in
this multitude of closely observed and recorded facts. The large eyes
gaze devoutly at the vision of the Child, and if neither Virgin nor
Son is comely there is character delineated. The accessories must fill
the latter-day painter avid of surface loveliness with consuming envy.
But it is time for sleep. The Brugeois cocks have crowed, the sun is
setting, and eyelids are lowering. Lucky you are if your dreams evoke
the brilliant colours, the magical shapes of the Primitives of Bruges
the Beautiful.
THE MOREAU MUSEUM
Out of the beaten track of sight-seers, and not noticed with
particular favour by the guide-books, the museum founded by Gustave
Moreau at 14 Rue de la Rochefoucauld in Paris, is known only to a
comparatively few artists and amateurs. You seldom hear Americans
speak of this rare collection, it is never written about in the
magazines. In September, 1897, Moreau made a will leaving his house
and its contents to the State. He died in 1898 (not in 1902, as
Bryan's dictionary has it), and in 1902 President Loubet authorised
the Minister of Public Instruction to accept this rich legacy in the
name of the republic. The artist was not known to stranger countries;
indeed he was little known to his fellow-countrymen. Huysmans had
cried him up in a revolutionary article; but to be praised by Huysmans
was not always a certificate of fame. That critic was more successful
in attracting public attention to Degas and Rops; and Moreau, a born
eclectic, though without any intention of carrying water on both
shoulders, was regarded suspiciously by his associates at the
Beaux-Arts, while the new men he praised, Courbet, Manet, Whistler,
Monet, would hold no commerce with him. To this day opinion is divided
as to his merits, he being called a _pasticheur_ or else a great
painter-poet. Huysmans saw straight into the heart of the
enigma--Gustave Moreau is poet and painter, a highly endowed man who
had the pictorial vision in an unusual degree; whose brush responded
to the ardent brain that directed it, the skilled hand that
manipulated it; always responded, we say, except in the creation of
life. His paintings are, strictly speaking, magnificent still-life. No
vital current animates their airless, gorgeous, and sometimes
cadaverous surfaces.
Like his friend Gustave Flaubert, with whom he had so much in common
(at least on the Salammbô side of that writer), Moreau was born to
affluence. His father was a government architect; he went early to the
Êcole des Beaux-Arts, and also studied under Picot. In 1852 he had a
Pietà in the Salon (he was born April 6,1826), and followed it the
next season with a Darius and a large canvas depicting an episode from
the Song of Songs. The latter was purchased for the Dijon Museum. At
the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he showed a monster work, The
Athenians and the Minotaur. He withdrew from the public until 1864,
when his Oedipus and the Sphinx set Paris talking. He exhibited until
1880 various canvases illustrative of his studies in classic
literatures and received sundry medals. He was elected a member of the
Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1888, replacing Boulanger. He was decorated
in 1875 with the Legion of Honour and made _officier_ in 1883. When a
member of the Institute he had few friends, and as professor at the
Beaux-Arts he disturbed the authorities by his warm praise of the
Primitives. Altogether a career meagre in exciting incident, though
singularly rich and significant on the intimate side.
A first visit to the museum proved startling. We had seen and admired
the fifteen water-colours at the Luxembourg, among them the famous
Apparition, but for the enormous number of pictures, oil,
water-colour, pastels, drawings, cartons, studies, we were unprepared.
The bulky catalogue registers 1,132 pieces, and remember that while
there are some unfinished canvases the amount of work executed--it is
true during half a century--is nevertheless a testimony to Moreau's
muscular and nervous energy, poetic conception, and intensity of
concentration. Even his unfinished pictures are carried to a state of
elaboration that would madden many modern improvisers in colour. Apart
from sheer execution, there is a multitude of visions that must have
been struggled for as Jacob wrestled with the Angel, for Moreau's was
not a facile mind. He brooded over his dreams, he saw them before he
gave them shape. He was familiar with all the Asiatic mythologies, and
for him the pantheon of Christian saints must have been bone of his
bone. The Oriental fantasy, the Buddhistic ideas, the fluent knowledge
of Persian, Indian, and Byzantine histories, customs, and costumes
sets us to wondering if this artist wasn't too cultured ever to be
spontaneous. He recalls Prester John and his composite faiths.
There was besides the profound artistic erudition another
stumbling-block to simplicity of style and unity of conception. Moreau
began by imitating both Delacroix and Ingres. Now, such a precedure is
manifestly dangerous. Huysmans speaks with contempt of promiscuity in
the admiration of art. You can't admire Manet and Bastien-Lepage--"le
Grévin de cabaret, le Siraudin de banlieue," he names the gentle
Bastien; nor ought you to admire Manet and Moreau, we may add. And
Huysmans did precisely what he preached against. Moreau was a man of
wide intellectual interests. Devoid of the creative energy that can
eject an individual style at one jet, as a volcano casts forth a rock,
he attempted to aid nature by the process of an exquisite selection.
His taste was trained, his range wide--too wide, one is tempted to
add; and thus by a conscious act of the will he originated an art that
recalls an antique chryselephantine statue, a being rigid with
precious gems, pasted with strange colours, something with mineral
eyes without the breath of life--contemporary life--yet charged with
its author's magnetism, bearing a charmed existence, that might come
from a cold, black magic; monstrous, withal possessing a strange
feverish beauty, as Flaubert's Salammbô is beautiful, in a remote,
exotic way.
However, it is not fair to deny Moreau human sympathies. There are
many of his paintings and drawings, notably the latter, that show him
as possessing heart. His handling of his medium though heavy is never
timid, and at times is masterly. Delacroix inspired many of his
landscape backgrounds, as Ingres gave him the proportions of his
female figures. You continually encounter variations of Ingres, the
sweet, serene line, the tapering feet and hands. Some critics have
discerned the toe forms of Perugino; but such mechanical measurements
strain our notion of eclecticism. Certainly Moreau studied Bellini,
Mantegna, and Da Vinci without ever attaining the freedom and
distinction of any of them. His colour, too, is often hard and cold,
though not in the sumptuous surfaces of his fabrics; there Venetian
splendour is apparent. He can be fiery and insipid, metallic and
morbid; his Orientalism is at times transposed from the work of his
old friend the painter Chasseriau into the key of a brilliant, if
pompous rhetoric.
THE MOREAU MUSEUM
This herculean attempt at reassembling many styles in a unique style
that would best express a certain frozen symbolism was the amiable
mania his life long of Moreau. He compelled the spirits to come to his
bidding. The moment you cross the threshold of his house the spell
begins to work. It is dissipated by the daylight of Paris, but while
you are under the roof of the museum you can't escape it. Nor is it as
with Rossetti, a mystic opiate, or with Wiertz, a madman's delirious
fancy. Moreau was a philosophic poet, and though he disclaimed being a
"literary" painter, it is literature that is the mainspring of his
elevated and decorative art. Open at random the catalogue full of
quotations from the painter's pen and you encounter such titles as
Leda and the Swan, treated with poetic restraint; Jupiter and Semele,
Tyrtæus Singing During the Combat, St. Elizabeth and the Miracle of
the Roses, Lucretia and Tarquin, Pasiphae, the Triumph of Alexander,
Salome, Dante and Virgil, Bathsheba, Jason and the Golden Fleece. All
literatures were ransacked for themes. This painter suffered from the
nostalgia of the ideal. When a subject coincided with his technical
expression the result approximates perfection. Consider the Salome, so
marvellously paraphrased in prose by Huysmans. The aquarelle in the
Luxembourg is more plastic, more jewelled than the oil; Moreau often
failed in the working-out of his ideas. Yet, never in art has a
hallucination been thus set before us with such uncompromising
reality. The sombre, luxurious _décor_, the voluptuous silhouette of
the dancing girl, the hieratic pose of the Tetrarch, even the aureoled
head of John, are forgotten in the contemplation of Salome, who is
become cataleptic at sight of the apparition. Arrested her attitude
her flesh crisps with fear. Her face is contracted into a mask of
death. The lascivious dance seems suspended in midair. To have painted
so impossible a picture bears witness to the extraordinary quality of
Moreau's complex art. Nor is the Salome his masterpiece. In the realm
of the decorator he must be placed high. His genius is Byzantine.
Jupiter and Semele, with its colossal and acrian architectures, its
gigantic figure of the god, from whose august head emanate spokes of
light, is Byzantine of a wild luxuriousness in pattern and fancy.
Moreau excels in representing cataracts of nude women, ivory-toned of
flesh, exquisite in proportion, set off by radiant jewels and
wonder-breeding brocades. His skies are in violent ignition, or else
as soft as Lydian airs. What could be more grandiose than the Triumph
of Alexander (No. 70 in the catalogue)? Not John Martin or Piranesi
excelled the Frenchman in bizarre architectural backgrounds. And the
Chimeras, what a Baudelairian imagination! Baudelaire of the bitter
heart! All luxury, all sin, all that is the shame and the glory of
mankind is here, as in a tapestry dulled by the smoke of dreams; but
as in his most sanguinary combats not a sound, not a motion comes from
this canvas. When the slaves, lovely females, are thrown to the fish
to fatten them for some Roman patrician's banquet, we admire the
beauty of colour, the clear static style, the solidity of the
architecture, but we are unmoved. If there is such a thing as
disinterested art it is the claustral art of Moreau--which can be both
perverse and majestic.
His versatility amazes. He did not always paint the same picture. The
Christ Between Two Thieves is academic, yet attracts because the
expression of the converted thief is remarkable. The Three Magi and
Moses Within Sight of the Promised Land do not give one the fullest
sense of satisfaction, as do The Daughters of Thespus or The Rape of
Europa; yet they suggest what might be termed a tragic sort of
decoration. Moreau is a painter who could have illustrated Marlowe's
fatuous line, "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia," and superbly; or,
"See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament." He is an exotic
blossom on the stem of French art. He saw ivory, apes, and peacocks,
purple, gold, and the heavens aflame with a mystic message. He never
translated that message, for his was an art of silence; but the
painter of The Maiden with the Head of Orpheus, of Salome, of Jason
and Medea, of Jupiter and Semele, will never fail to win the
admiration and homage of those art lovers who yearn for dreams of
vanished ages, who long to escape the commonplaces of the present.
Gustave Moreau will be their poet-painter by predilection.
Once in the streets of prosaic Paris he is as unreal as Rossetti or
the Pre-Raphaelites (though their superior as one who could make
palpable his visions). In the Louvre--where the _Salon Carré_ is
little changed--Manet's Olympe, with her every-day seductiveness,
resolves the phantasies of Moreau into thin air. Here is reality for
you, familiar as it may be. It is wonderful how long it took French
critics to discover that Manet was _un peintre de race_. He is very
French in the French gallery where he now hangs. He shows the lineage
of David, one of whose declamatory portraits with beady eyes hangs
near by. He is simpler than David in his methods--Mr. C.S. Ricketts
critically described David as possessing the mind of a policeman--and
as a painter more greatly endowed. But Goya also peeps out from the
Olympe. After seeing the Maja desnuda at the Prado you realise that
Manet's trip to Madrid was not without important results. Between the
noble lady who was the Duchess of Alba and the ignoble girl called
Olympe there is only the difference between the respective handlings
of Goya and Manet.
PICTURES IN MADRID
I
The noblest castle in Spain is the museum on the Prado. Now every
great capital of Europe boasts its picture or sculpture gallery; no
need to enumerate the treasures of art to be found in London, Paris,
Vienna--the latter too little known by the average
globe-trotter--Berlin, Dresden, Cassel, Frankfort, Brussels, Bruges,
Antwerp, Amsterdam, Florence, Rome, Naples, St. Petersburg, or Venice.
They all boast special excellences, but the Prado collection contains
pictures by certain masters, Titian, Rubens, Correggio, and others,
that cannot be seen elsewhere. Setting aside Velasquez and the Spanish
school, not in Venice, Florence, or London are there Titians of such
quality and in such quantity as in Madrid. And the Rubenses are of a
peculiar lovely order, not to be found in Antwerp, Brussels or Paris.
Even without Velasquez the trying trip to the Spanish capital is a
necessary and exciting experience for the painter and amateur of art.
The Prado is largely reinforced by foreign pictures and is sadly
lacking in historical continuity whether foreign or domestic schools.
It is about ninety years old, having been opened in part (three rooms)
to the public in November, 1819. At that time there were three hundred
and eleven canvases. Other galleries were respectively added in 1821,
1828, 1830, and 1839. In 1890 the Queen-mother had the Sala de la
Reina Isabel rearranged and better lighted. It contained then the
masterpieces, but in 1899, the tercentenary of Velasquez's birth, a
gallery was built to hold his works, with a special room for that
masterpiece among masterpieces Las Meninas. Many notable pictures that
had hung for years in the Academia de Nobles Artes de San Fernando, at
the Escorial Palace, and and the collection of the Duke of Osuna are
now housed within the walls of the Prado. At the entrance you
encounter a monumental figure of Goya, sitting, in bronze, the work of
the sculptor J. Llaneses.
The Prado has been called a gallery for connoisseurs, and it is the
happiest title that could be given it, for it is not a great museum in
which all schools are represented. You look in vain for the chain
historic that holds together disparate styles; there are omissions,
ominous gaps, and the very nation that ought to put its best foot
foremost, the Spanish, does not, with the exception of Velasquez. Of
him there are over sixty authentic works; of Titian over thirty. Bryan
only allows him twenty-three; this is an error. There are fifteen
Titians in Florence, divided between the Uffizi and the Pitti; in
Paris, thirteen, but one is the Man with the Glove. Quality counts
heaviest, therefore the surprise is not that Madrid boasts numbers but
the wonderful quality of so many of them. To lend additional lustre to
the specimens of the Venetian school, the collection starts off with a
superb Giorgione; Giorgione, the painter who taught Titian his magic
colour secrets; the painter whose works are, with a few exceptions,
ascribed to other men--more is the pity! (In this we are at one with
Herbert Cook, who still clings to the belief that the Concert of the
Pitti Palace is Giorgione and not Titian. At least the Concert
Champêtre of the Louvre has not been taken from "Big George.") The
Madrid masterpiece is The Virgin and Child Jesus with St. Anthony and
St. Roch.
It is easy to begin with the Titians, one of which is the famous
Bacchanal. Then there are The Madonna with St. Bridget and St. Hulfus,
The Garden of the Loves, Emperor Charles V. at Mühlberg, an equestrian
portrait; another portrait of the same with figure standing, King
Philip, Isabella of Portugal, La Gloria, The Entombment of Christ,
Venus and Adonis, Danaë and the Golden Shower, a variation of this
picture is in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, the other in the National
Museum, Naples; Venus Listening to Music, two versions, the stately
nude evidently a memory of the Venus reposing in the Uffizi: Adam and
Eve (also a copy of this by Rubens); Prometheus, Sisyphus--long
supposed to be copies by Coello; Christ Bearing the Cross, St.
Margaret, a portrait of the Duke of Este, Salom, Ecce Homo, La
Dolorosa, the once admired Allocution; Flight Into Egypt, St.
Catalina, a self-portrait, St. Jerome, Diana and Actæon, The Sermon on
the Mount--the list is much longer.
There are many Goyas; the museum is the home of this remarkable but
uneven painter. We confess to a disappointment in his colour, though
his paint was not new to us; but time has lent no pleasing _patina_ to
his canvases, the majority of which are rusty-looking, cracked,
discoloured, dingy or dark. There are several exceptions. The nude and
dressed full-lengths of the Duchess of Alba are in excellent
preservation, and brilliant audacious painting it is. A lovely
creature, better-looking when reclining than standing, as a glance at
her full-length portrait in the New York Hispanic Museum proves. One
of Goya's best portraits hangs in the Prado, the seated figure of his
brother-in-law, the painter Bayeu. The Family of Charles IV, his
patron and patroness, with the sheep-like head of the favourite De la
Paz, is here in all its bitter humour; it might be called a satiric
pendant to that other Familia, not many yards away, Las Meninas. There
are the designs for tapestries in the basement; Blind Man's Buff and
other themes illustrating national traits. The equestrian portraits of
Charles IV and his sweet, sinister spouse, Queen Maria Luisa, reveal a
Goya not known to the world. He could assume the grand manner when he
so willed. He could play the dignified master with the same
versatility that he played at bull-fighting. But his colour is often
hot and muddy, and perhaps he will go down to that doubtful quantity,
posterity, as an etcher and designer of genius. After leaving the
Prado you remember only the Caprices, the Bull-fights, and the
Disaster of War plates; perhaps the Duchess of Alba, undressed, and in
her dainty toreador costume. The historic pictures are a tissue of
horrors, patriotic as they are meant to be; they suggest the
slaughter-house. Goya has painted a portrait of Villanueva, the
architect of the museum; and there is a solidly constructed portrait
of Goya by V. Lopez.
The Raphaels have been reduced to two at the Prado: The Holy Family
with the Lamb, painted a year after the Ansedei Madonna, and that
wonderful head of young Cardinal Bibbiena, keen-eyed and ascetic of
features. Alas! for the scholarship that attributed to the Divine
Youth La Perla; the Madonna of the Fish; Lo Spasimo, Christ Bearing
the Cross, and several other masterpieces. Giulio Romana, Penni, and
perhaps another, turned out these once celebrated and overpraised
pictures--overpraised even if they had come from the brush of Raphael
himself. The Cardinal's portrait is worth the entire batch of them.
There is a Murillo gallery, full of representative work, the most
important being St. Elizabeth of Hungary Tending the Sick, formerly in
the Escorial. The various Conceptions and saints' heads are not
missing, painted in his familiar colour key with his familiar false
sentiment and always an eye to the appeal popular. A mighty magnet for
the public is Murillo. The peasants flock to him on Sundays as to a
sanctuary. There the girls see themselves on a high footing, a
heavenly saraband among woolly clouds, their prettiness idealised,
their costume of exceeding grace. After a while you tire of the
saccharine Murillo and his studio beggar boys, and turn to his
drawings with relief. His landscapes are more sincere than his
religious canvases, which are almost as sensuous and earthly as
Correggio without the magisterial brush-work and commanding conception
of the Parma painter. To be quite fair, it may be admitted that
Murillo could make a good portrait. Both in Madrid and Seville you may
verify this.
A beautiful Fra Angelico, a beautiful Mantegna open your eyes, for the
Italian Primitives are conspicuous by their absence. Correggio is
magnificent. The well-known Magdalen and Christ Risen, Noli Me
Tangere! His Virgin with Jesus and St. John is in his accustomed
melting _pâte_. One Del Sarto is of prime quality, The Virgin, Jesus
and St. John, called Asunto Mistico at the Prado. Truly a moving
picture, by a painter who owes much of his fame to Robert Browning.
His Lucrezia is a pretty portrait of his faithless wife. There are
Lotto, Parmigianino, Baroccio, Tintoretto, Bassano, Veronese, Domenico
Tiepolo, and his celebrated father the fantastic Giambattista
Tiepolo--not startling specimens any of them.
In the Spanish section Ribera comes at you the strongest. He was a
personality as well as a powerful painter. Consider his Martyrdom of
St. Bartholomew. Zurbaran follows next in interest, though morbid at
times; but of Berragueta, Borgona, Morales, Juanes, Navarette,
Coello--an excellent portraitist, imitator of Moro--La Cruz, Alfonso
Cano, Luis de Tristan, Espinosa, Bias del Prado, Orrente, Esteban de
March--two realistic heads of an old man and an old woman must be set
down to his credit--Ribalta, influenced by Caravaggio, in turn
influencing Ribera--Juan de las Roelas (el Clerigo), Del
Mazo--son-in-law of Velasquez, and responsible for dozens of false
attributions--Carreño de Miranda, José Leonardo, Juan Rizi V. Iriarte,
the two Herreras, the elder a truculent charlatan, the younger a
nonentity, and others of the Spanish school may be dismissed in a
word--mediocrities.
II