AN ART STUDENT IN PARIS
I went to Paris to wait for the impending rising in Milan, and
meanwhile entered the atelier of Yvon, not to lose my time. My only
English-speaking companion in the atelier was a younger brother of
Edward Armitage, the Royal Academician; the popular atelier at that
time for the English and American students being that of Couture.
Yvon had about thirty pupils, to whom his attentions were given
gratuitously and conscientiously, three times a week, with rare
exceptions of the Saturday visit, by the pupils regarded as the least
important. Of the thirty there were not more than a half dozen who
showed any degree of special aptitude for their work, and only two
were regarded by their colleagues as likely to be an honor to the
atelier in the future, and of these, unless they have changed their
names, no renown has come in later times. There was a marquis whose
income was one hundred francs a month, and a count whose father gave
him five sous and a piece of bread for his breakfast when he left
home, but the rest were plebeians, with neither past nor future, whose
enthusiasm in the face of their weekly failures, and patience in
following an arid path, were most interesting as a social phenomenon.
I have always found more to wonder at in the failures than in the
great successes of artist life--seeing the content and even happiness
which some of the hopelessly enthusiastic found in their futile and
endless labor. We used to go to work at six in the morning, draw two
hours and then go to a little _laiterie_ and take our bowl of _café au
lait_ and a small loaf of bread, and then draw till noon, when we went
home for the second breakfast. Armitage and myself used to breakfast
at the Palais Royal, or some other quarter where the bill of fare was
by the rest of the men considered luxurious, and we were dubbed the
"aristocrats" of the atelier, my breakfast costing me one franc and a
half and my dinner two francs. I had fixed my expenses, as in London,
at the limit of twenty-five francs a week, which had to pay all the
expenses of atelier, food, and lodging, and it was surprising how much
comfort could then be got for that sum.
I had found a tiny room in the _maison meublée_ in the Cité d'Antin
where Mrs. Coxe lived, and Mr. Coxe in returning to America had given
me charge of his women folk, so that I had a social resource and a
relief from tedium which gave me no expense. On Sunday the daughter
came home from school, and we all went out to dine at one or another
of the Palais Royal restaurants, or made, in the fine weather, an
excursion into the environs. Now and then, Mrs. Coxe invited me to
take them to the theatre, and thus I saw some of the famous actors,
Rachel and Frédéric Lemaître being still vividly impressed on my
memory. The afternoons of the week days were given to the galleries
and visiting the studios of the painters whose work attracted me, and
who admitted visitors. I thus made the acquaintance of Delacroix,
Gérôme, Théodore Rousseau, and by a chance met Delaroche and Ingres;
but Delacroix most interested me, and I made an application to him to
be received as a pupil, which he in a most amiable manner refused, but
he seemed interested in putting me on the right way and gave me such
advice as was in the range of casual conversation. I asked him what,
in his mind, was the principal defect of modern art, as compared with
ancient, and he replied "the execution." He had endeavored to remedy
this in his own case by extensive copying of the old masters, and he
showed me many of the copies--passages of different works, apparently
made with the object of catching the quality of execution.
In fact, if we consider the differences between the system of
education in painting and that in music or any other art or occupation
in which the highest executive ability is required, we shall see that
we give insufficient opportunity for the painter's hand to acquire the
subtle skill we find in the successful violinist or pianist, and which
is due to the early and incessant practice in the manual operations
of his art. The fact is recognized, that the education of a violinist
must begin in the early years, when the will and hand are flexible,
and not merely the training, but the occupation, is almost exclusive,
for the specialist is made only by a special and relatively exclusive
devotion to the particular faculties which are desired to be trained.
It is useless to attempt to develop the finest qualities of the
draughtsman without the same attention to the condition of training
which we insist on in the musician. The theory may come later, the
intellectual element may develop under many influences, and healthily,
later in life, but the hand is too fine and subtly constituted an
implement to be brought into its best condition and efficiency unless
trained from the beginning to the definite use imposed on it.
Admitting, therefore, as I do, that the criticism of Delacroix was
just, it is evident that, until we give to the modern student of
painting a similar training to that which the early one had, we cannot
expect him to attain the executive powers of the Italian renaissance,
nor can we be sure that he appreciates the subtlety of the work of the
masters, any more than the member of a village choir can understand
the finesse of the highest order of musical execution, or its first
violinist appreciate the touch of a Joachim or a Sarasate. For it is
just in the last refinement of touch of a Raphael drawing or the rapid
and expressive outline of a Mantegna that we find the analogy between
the two arts, in a refinement of touch which is lost on the public,
and appreciated only by the practiced student either of music or
painting. This final attainment of the hand is only possible to a man
who has been trained as a boy to his work. We find it in a water-color
drawing of Turner, as in a pencil drawing of Raphael, and in the
outlines of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but in modern figure
painting never, even in France, where the youth generally takes up the
training at fourteen to sixteen. I believe that the reason why this
supreme manual excellence is so completely lacking, even in French
art, that, so far as I know, only Meissonier amongst them has attained
a measure of it, is that the seriousness of life and purpose necessary
for any consummate achievement is so rarely found there in conjunction
with that early and sound training.
Another acquaintance made in these days, which has always remained a
delight to me, was that of Théodore Rousseau, to my mind the greatest
of the French landscape painters. Though living and working mostly
at Barbison, he had a studio in Paris, and there I used to see
him, always received in the friendly and helpful way which was
characteristic of most of the French artists of the higher order.
Later I went to Barbison, where, besides Rousseau, I knew J.F. Millet,
and a minor, but in his way a very remarkable, painter, Charles
Jacque. Rousseau was a most instructive talker on art, beyond the
sphere of which he hardly seemed to care to go in his thinking. He had
never been out of France, had never seen the Alps, and did not care
for mountain scenery, but concentrated all his feelings and labor on
what he used to call "_sujets intimes_," the picturesque nooks of
landscape one can always find in a highly cultivated country, where
nature is tamed to an intimacy with the domestic spirit, or where she
vainly struggles against the invasion of culture, as in the borders
of the forest of Fontainebleau. In such material, nature withdraws
farther and makes a wider margin for art, and the wedding and welding
of the two become more subtle and playful.
It has always seemed to me that with all the differences inherent
in the antagonism of the characters of the two men, the essential
features of the art of Rousseau and Turner were the same; pure
impressionism based on the most intimate and largest knowledge of the
facts of nature, but without direct copying of them--rather working
from memoranda or memories, for neither ever painted directly from
nature; the same conception of the subject as a whole, its rhythmic
and harmonic unity as opposed to the fragmentary manner of treatment
of most of their contemporaries; the lyric passion in line and tint;
the same originality which often became waywardness in the conception
of subject in itself; the same revolt from all precedent; and the same
passion for subtle gradation and infinite space, air, and light--and
some of Rousseau's skies were the most vaporous I have ever seen.
These are the fundamental agreements of the art of the two great
masters, and in those qualities no other man of their countries and
epoch has equaled them, but outside of these the contrasts are of the
most pronounced. Pyne told me that Turner said he wished he could do
without trees; Rousseau worshiped them. Turner loved the mountains;
Rousseau never cared to see them and never painted one. Turner, a
colorist, reveled in color like a Bacchanal; Rousseau, a tonalist,
felt it like a vestal; but both had the sense of color in the subtlest
refinement.
Rousseau used to say that if you had not your picture in the first
five lines you would never have it, and he laid down as a rule that
whenever you worked on it you should go over the whole and keep it
together, growing in all parts _pari passu_. Wishing to give me a
lesson in values one day as he was painting, he turned his palette
over and painted a complete little scheme of a picture on the back of
it, suggested by the subject before us as we looked out of the studio
window. He showed me his studies from nature, mere notes of form and
of local color and pastel. It was to me always a puzzle that, even in
the educated art circles of Paris, Corot should have found so great
a popularity as compared to that of Rousseau. Without in the least
disparaging the greatness of Corot's best work, such for instance as
the St. Sebastian and some other classical subjects, the names of
which I cannot recall, the range of conception and treatment is
limited as compared with that of Rousseau. This alone would give Corot
a lower rank, in the absence of a marked superiority in some special
high quality--superiority which does not exist, for the picked work of
Rousseau possesses technical excellences all its own, as consummate as
anything in the world's landscape art, while the range of treatment
and subject, so much greater in Rousseau than in Corot, puts the
limited and mannered art of the latter as a whole in a distinct
inferiority.
Of Millet I saw much less, but enough to know the man and his art,
simple and human, the one as the other. His love for manhood in its
most primitive attainable types, those furnished by the peasant, was
the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early
schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and
therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the
man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of
an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations. He conceived and
executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal
as his imagination presented it to him, not as the model served him.
The form is of his own day, the spirit of his art that of all time
and of all good art, the elaboration of a type and not merely the
reproduction of a picturesque model. It is the custom now to class all
peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his
art. Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not
realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian
renaissance, not in the modern _pose plastique_. The peasant in it was
merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life. Millet was himself
a peasant, he used to say, and his moral purpose, if he had any, was
the glorification, so far as art can effect it, of his class, the
class which above all others in his eyes dignified humanity and held
his sympathy. This feeling was with him no affectation, but the
deliberate, final conclusion of his life--he reverenced the _sabot_
and the _blouse_, the implements of tillage and work, as the Greek did
his gods and the implements of war and glory; he saw humanity reduced
to its simplest and most noble physical functions and possibilities,
as the Greek did the perfection of the physical form, but he lacked
the perception of the types of pure beauty of the Greek.
The personal relations between Rousseau and Millet were in the best
sense of the word fraternal, and from neither did I ever hear a word
to the disparagement of a brother artist, while Rousseau used to talk
in the subtlest vein of critical appreciation of his rivals among the
landscape painters, the Duprés, Ziem, Troyon, and others, so that I
regret that in those days I thought only of my own instruction, and
not of the putting on record the opinions of a man whose ideas of art
were amongst the most exalted I have known.
A charming nature was that of Troyon, a simple, robust worker, and,
like all the larger characters in the French art world with whom I
became acquainted, full of sympathy and guidance for those who wanted
light and leading. But the lives of these three great painters, like
that of Corot (whom I never knew personally), show how completely the
French public, so proud of its intelligence of art, ignored the best
qualities of it till outsiders pointed to them. Troyon told me that
for the first ten years of his career he had never sold a picture, but
lived by painting for Sèvres; the prosperity of Millet came from
the patronage of American collectors, led by the appreciation of
a Bostonian painter, William Hunt, and I well remember his famous
"Sowers" on the highest line in the Salon, so completely skied that
only one who looked for a Millet was likely to see it; while Rousseau,
at the time I speak of, was glad to accept the smallest commission,
and sold mostly to American collectors. Nor is it otherwise with the
Rousseaus, Millets, and Troyons of to-day--the public taste, and the
banal criticism of a journalism at its best the tardy echo of the
opinions of the rare wise man, find genius only when it has ceased to
have the quality of the new and unforeseen.
Yvon, in whose atelier I worked, was essentially a teacher, and his
more recent assignment to the directorship of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
put him in his true place, that of a master of style in drawing and
the elements of art instruction. He was engaged, when I knew him, on
the battle-pieces of the Crimean war, the chief of which were already
at Versailles. His was an earnest, indefatigable nature. He was as
kindly and zealous a teacher as if he were receiving, like his
English confrères, a guinea a lesson. Nothing so strongly marked the
difference between the French and the English feeling for art as this
characteristic feature of the disinterestedness of the French artist
in giving instruction without compensation, while his English
colleague of equal distinction gave instruction only at a price
impracticable for a poor artist, if indeed he would give it at any
price. And even thus, the English drawing-master did not teach art,
but facile tricks of the brush. Need one seek any other reason for the
curious fact that, with a marked superiority in the occasional highest
attainment of rare and original abilities which English art shows,
France has become the school of Europe, than that in England the
master will teach only on terms which are prohibitive of the formation
of a school, while in France, with few exceptions, the most eminent
painters regard it as a duty to open their ateliers to pupils often
gratuitously, but in any case freely and on terms which are adaptable
to the modest means of the poorest class of workers? In how different
a position in relation to the art of the world would English art now
be in, had Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Turner, and two or three
others who could be named, thrown open their studios to the young
enthusiasts who followed them, and the sterling talents which have
never been wanting in England been enabled to profit by the experience
and art of their elders, instead of groping their way alone to
efficiency, or, still worse, going to South Kensington, generally
"arriving" too late to succeed fully!
Waiting the word from Kossuth which should call me to join the
ever-impending and ever-postponed insurrection, I passed the winter
thus, profiting as I could by all opportunities for the study of art
and making acquaintance with the artists. My money was running to an
end, but this was a matter in which my faith in Providence did not
allow me to borrow trouble, and I made it a rule never to run into
debt. That I never borrowed I cannot say, but I never did so except in
cases where I was in such personal relations with the lender that if I
died without paying the debt, it would neither weigh on him nor on my
conscience. I kept up my regular round of economy and work, and
one Saturday, when I had paid for my dinner at the Palais Royal
restaurant, I found myself with fifty centimes in my pocket, and went
on a long walk in the streets of Paris, to meditate on my immediate
future. Mrs. Coxe, one of the kindest of friends, would, I knew,
gladly lend me what I needed, but I did not allow her to know that I
needed, and how to pay for my next day's dinner I did not see. Still,
confident that something would turn up, I walked towards my lodgings
through the Rue Royale and its arcades, feeling the ten-sou piece in
my pocket, when I saw a young girl dart out from one of the recesses
of the arcade, dragging after her a boy of two or three years, and
then, as if her courage failed, turn and hide herself and him again in
the doorway from which she had come. I saw her case at once,--want and
shame at begging,--went to her and gave her the ten-sou piece, and
went to bed feeling better.
The next day being Sunday and no atelier, I slept late, and was awaked
by a knock at my door, when to the spoken "Entrez" came in no other
than my friend Dr. Ruggles, between whom and myself there were various
communities of feeling which made us like brothers. He sat down by my
bedside, and, salutations passed, broke out, "Do you want any money?"
His grandfather, just dead, had left him a legacy, and he had come
to Paris, artist-like, to spend it. I took from him, as I would have
given him the half of my last dollar, a hundred francs, and on this I
lived my normal life until, some weeks later, a friend of my brother
arriving from New York with instructions to find me out and provide
for my wants if I had any, supplied me for any probable emergency,
including an order for a free passage home on a steamer of which my
brother was part owner. I waited till the spring homesickness made
it too irksome to live quietly in Paris, and then finding that the
revolution so long waited for had gone by, I went home and to my
painting.
In American landscape the element of the picturesque is in a serious
deficiency. What is old is the wild and savage, the backwoods and the
wild mountain, with no trace of human presence or association to give
it sentiment; what is new is still in the crude and angular state in
which the utilities are served, and the comfort of the man and his
belongings most considered. Nothing is less paintable than a New
England village; nothing is more monotonous than the woodland mountain
of any of the ranges of eastern North America. The valley of the
Mohawk is one of the earliest settled and least unpicturesque sections
of the Eastern States, with its old Dutch farmhouses and the winding
of the beautiful river; but I had explored it on foot and in every
direction for miles around my birthplace, and found nothing that
seemed to "make up" save trees and water. I spent one summer after my
return amongst these familiar scenes, but found the few subjects which
repaid study too remote from any habitable centre to repay the labor
needed to get at them. I made long foot excursions through the valleys
of the Connecticut and Housatonic; but, after my experience in rural
England, it was very discouraging to ransack that still unhumanized
landscape for pictures. Everything was too neat and trim, and I
remember that one day, when I was on my search for a "bit," I found
a dilapidated barn which tempted me to sit down before it, when the
farmwife, guessing my intentions, ran out to beg me "not to take the
barn yet; they were going to do it up the next week as good as new,
and wouldn't I wait?"
An accident drove me to pass one of these summers in as complete
seclusion from society as I could find, and where I should be able to
do nothing but paint. I had been, two years before, hit in the face by
a snow missile, during one of the snowballing saturnalia the New York
roughs indulged in after every fall of snow; in this case the missile
was a huge block of frozen snow-crust, which flattened my nose on my
face and broke the upper maxillary inclosing all the front teeth. I
modeled the nose up on the spot, for it was as plastic as clay, but
the broken bone became carious, and, after enduring for two years the
fear of having my head eaten off by caries, and having resigned the
chance of having it shot off in the revolution, I decided to let my
brother operate. The bone inclosing the front teeth was taken out with
the six teeth, and I was sent into retirement for three months at
least, while the jaw was getting ready for the work of the dentist.
I had seen, when last in England, the picture by Millais, "The
Proscribed Royalist," which gave me a suggestion of the treatment of
a landscape which should be mainly foreground, such as I particularly
delighted in. Hoping to find a woodland subject which admitted of
this treatment, I went to pass the summer on the farm of an old uncle
(where I had caught my first trout), knowing it to be heavily wooded.
Of course when one goes out to look for a particular thing he never
finds it, nor did I then find the tree subject I wanted, but I found
a little spring under a branching beech and surrounded by mossy
boulders, and, taking a canvas of my usual size,--25x30 inches,--I
gave three months to painting it and carried it home still somewhat
unfinished. It was an attractive subject, though not what I had
wanted, and was hung in one of the best places in the Academy
exhibition, making its mark and mine. It was absolutely
unconventional, and the old stagers did not know what to say of a
picture which was all foreground. There was much discussion, and,
amongst the younger painters, much subsequent emulation; but it
did not find a purchaser at my price--$250. Anything so thoroughly
realistic that, as President Durand said, "The stones seemed to be,
not painting, but the real thing," puzzled the ordinary picture buyer;
and the American Art Union, which was the principal buyer of the
day, and the _dernier ressort_ of the young artist, was managed by a
committee of ordinary picture buyers. The picture gave rise to a hot
discussion when exhibited, the old school of painters denouncing such
slavish imitation of nature. As the negative photographic process had
just then been introduced in America, I had the picture photographed,
and a friend took a print of it to the head of the old school, without
any explanation. My antagonist and critic looked at it carefully and
exclaimed, "What is the use of Stillman making his pre-Raphaelite
studies when we can get such photographs from nature as this!" As I
had my brother's generosity to fall back on, I was not obliged to
sell, and the picture remained in my studio for two or three years.
Later Agassiz saw it and was so delighted with its botany that I
decided to give it to him; but when a fellow painter offered--when I
was leaving again for Europe--to "raffle it off," I allowed him to do
so, and he appropriated the proceeds. I had made a rule of giving the
pictures which were not sold in the exhibition to the person who
had shown the finest appreciation of them,--a habit which did not
contribute to pecuniary success, but which helped my _amour propre_,
and I have always regretted not having sent that picture to Agassiz,
who, in later years, became one of my best friends.