brilliant achievement in Rembrandt's career is the so-called
"Woodcutter's Family," belonging to the decade between 1640 and 1650.
After an old fashion the Holy Family is represented as seen in a
painting before which a curtain is partly drawn. The mother sits by the
side of a cradle from which she has lifted the child who clings to her
neck while she presses him to her in a close embrace. In the farther
corner of the room is the figure of the father in his carpenter's apron,
and in the center a cat is crouching near some dishes on the floor. The
room is filled with a mild sunlight that filters through the air and
falls across the figures of the mother and child and across the broad
expanse of floor. The simplicity and poetic feeling in lighting and
gesture are worthy of Rembrandt's prime, and there is no trace of the
extreme drama that marks the religious compositions at Munich. The color
is beautiful and the tone mysterious. Nevertheless one misses the
precious quality of the earlier craftmanship as it shines in such lovely
paintings as the "Saskia" and the "Portrait of a Young Woman." In these
the painter shows that he was still young, that he had arrived at a
skill of hand that permitted him to use his medium with ease and
certainty, but that he had not yet ceased to attempt what lay just
beyond his powers. His brush still sought out subtle refinements of
modeling with the patience that allied him to the earlier Dutch and
Flemish masters. He had, no doubt, the instinctive feeling of ardent
youth, the assumption of time ahead for the carrying out of all
projects, and his brilliant manipulations of his pigment showed neither
haste, nor as yet the complete confidence that leaves untold the detail
of the story for the imagination of the audience to supply. He was not
ready to sacrifice everything else to that light and atmosphere of which
he made his own world in his later years. Characteristic of his most
winning use of this light that he created for his own purposes is the
portrait of Nicholas Bruyningh, Secretary of one of the divisions of the
Courts of Justice at Amsterdam: one of the most salient and brilliant of
the Rembrandts in the Cassel Gallery. This portrait belongs to the year
1652 when the artist was about forty-five years old, and it is a superb
example of matured genius. The subject offered an opportunity for daring
handling and pictorial arrangement upon which Rembrandt seized with a
full understanding of its possibilities. The beautiful gay face with its
suggestion of irresponsibility glows from a mist of atmosphere that
veils all minor detail, leaving in strong relief the mass of curling
hair, the smiling dark eyes, the smiling mouth unconcealed by the slight
moustache, the firmly modeled nose and pliant chin, with the tasseled
collar below catching the point of highest light. It is the poetry of
good humor, of physical beauty, of content with life and life's
adventures. It also marks what Herr Knackfuss calls Rembrandt's "softer
manner" in which all sharp outlines of objects are effaced, and the
lights gleam from a general darkness. More than "The Sentinel," which
sometimes is given as the starting point for this departure in style, it
has the appearance of a dramatic emergence from shadow. From having been
a painstaking craftsman Rembrandt at this time had become a dramatist
selecting from his material those elements best adapted to sway the
emotions. He has lost himself--or found himself--in the expression of
character; not merely character as one element in a picture's interest,
but character as _the_ element. In this picture of Nicholas Bruyningh we
cannot escape from the merry careless temperament. We cannot as in the
early portrait of Saskia linger in dalliance over charming accessories
and beautifully discriminated textures until we reach by moderate
degrees the eloquence of the profoundly studied face. Bruyningh's face
is like the "_tirade_" of a French play--it is rendered at white heat
and in one inconceivably long breath. Its significance is so intensified
as to produce a profound feeling in a sympathetic spectator.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Berlin Photographic Company. In the Cassel
Museum.
NICHOLAS BRUYNINGH
_From a portrait by Rembrandt_]
If we compare it with the badly named "Laughing Cavalier" of Franz Hals
we see clearly enough the difference between drama and realism. Drama as
defined by Robert Louis Stevenson consists not of incident but of
passion that must progressively increase in order that the actor may be
able to "carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest
and emotion." This also defines Rembrandt's painting at all periods. As
one approaches the human face in his pictures one becomes aware of an
emotional quality that is irresistible, and in a portrait like that of
Bruyningh the emotional quality is almost isolated from incident or
detail. It is the great moment of the third act when the audience holds
its breath.
"The Standard Bearer" is not accepted by Dr. Bode as a fine work or even
as certainly original, the version of the same subject in Baron G. du
Rothschild's collection having made much deeper an impression upon him.
The Cassel version is nevertheless a work of great distinction, the
grave and beautiful face and shining armor looking out of a luminous
atmosphere that has more of the Rembrandtesque quality than many
authenticated works of Rembrandt's riper period. The work is engaging,
personal, striking, and if not entirely great certainly possessed of
many of the qualities of greatness.
While the Cassel collection does not contain any of the superb self
portraits of Rembrandt's later years, the one example in this kind
having authority without great interest, it does include one biblical
picture of unusual importance belonging to the year 1656, the "Jacob
Blessing his Grandchildren," which is, however, unfinished. The square,
direct brush strokes suggest those of Hals, the drapery is thinly
painted with a flowing medium, the black shadows on the face of Jacob
cut sharply into the half tones, there is little discrimination in the
textures and the background comes forward. But the faces of the children
are charming in characterization, recalling the simple tenderness of the
"Girl Leaning Out of the Window" at Dulwich, one of the most enchanting
embodiments of youth ever achieved by Rembrandt, and the woman,
Israelitish in type, with large eyes and features rather abruptly
defined, is an attractive attempt to realize feminine beauty, a task in
which Rembrandt was never dexterous, however.
Of the two landscapes, that with the ruined castle is the most
impressive, but neither compares favorably with the dainty perfection of
the landscape etchings.
If we add to these examples the studies of old men's heads and the
delightful portrait of the artist's sister holding a pink in her hand,
we realize that the group as a whole covers many phases of Rembrandt's
constantly changing inspiration. He betrayed in his later works the
impatience of those to whom few years are left in which to complete
their accomplishment, but he kept the sensitiveness of his youth well
into his brief prime, although he transferred it from the field of form
to that of light. It betrays itself in the quality of that light which
absorbs all that is ugly, coarse, or ultra real in its poetizing
glamour. From the tender explicit craftsmanship of the wonderful Saskia
to the golden mist enveloping the figure of Nicholas Bruyningh, is a
long step, but not longer than many a painter has taken in his progress
from youth to maturity. The special comment upon Rembrandt's character
as a painter which we are able to gather from the Cassel pictures is
that in casting off the trammels of particularity he did not become less
receptive to poetic influences. He grew more and more a dreamer, and in
losing the clear objective manner of his early portraits he substituted
not the idle carelessness which in the work of a painter's later years
is apt to be condoned as freedom, but the generalization that excludes
vulgarities of execution and makes necessary increased mastery of the
difficult craft of painting.
FANTIN-LATOUR
VIII
FANTIN-LATOUR
Fantin-Latour was born in 1836, was the son of a painter, and was
educated at Paris under his father's guidance and that of Lecoq and
Boisbaudeau, professor at a little art school connected with the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts. One of the most interesting painters of the little group
in France whose work began to come before the public about the middle of
the nineteenth century, a close friend of Whistler, a passionate admirer
of Delacroix, and an inspired student of the old masters, he managed to
preserve intact an individuality that has a singular richness and
simplicity seen against the many-colored tapestry of nineteenth-century
art. Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Nicolaas Maas, Pieter
de Hooch and Vermeer of Delft, Watteau and Chardin, Van Dyck, Titian,
Tintoret, and Veronese were his true masters and his copies of their
works are said by his enlightened critic, M. Arsene Alexandre, to have a
masterly quality of their own, to be far removed from the
conventionality of facsimiles, and to bear upon an underlying fidelity
of transcription an impress of individual sentiment. He sought to be
faithful to the originals beyond external imitation, by seeking to
render the original tone of the painting in its first freshness, as it
appeared before time and varnish had yellowed and darkened it. He thus
made himself familiar with the technical methods of the great periods of
painting, and, coming into his inheritance of modern ideas and ideals,
he was able to achieve a beauty of execution much too rarely sought by
his contemporaries, although his intimate companions like himself
frequented the Louvre with a considerable assiduity, spending upon the
old masters the enthusiasm which they withheld from the later academic
school of painting.
His earlier subjects were largely Biblical and historical. He then
passed to domestic scenes and in 1859, 1861, and 1863 was painting his
pictures of _Les Liseurs_ and _Les Brodeuses_ which showed the charming
face of his sister with her sensitive smiling mouth and softly modeled
brows, and later that of his wife. At the Salon of 1859 he and Whistler
both submitted subjects drawn from family life, Whistler his _At the
Piano_ with his own sister and his niece, little Annie Haden, for the
models, and Fantin his painting of young women embroidering and reading,
only to have their canvases refused. Fantin was not, however, a martyr
to his predilections in art. He early obtained admission to the Salon
although he had enough rejected work to permit him to appear among the
painters exhibiting in the famous little "Salon des Refuses" of 1863. He
received medals and official recognitions. But his modesty of taste led
him to hold himself somewhat apart and exclusive among those who shared
his likings. His portrait of himself, painted in 1858, shows a dreamy
young man with serious, almost solemn, eyes, sitting before his easel,
and looking into the distance with the expression of one who sees
visions.
As a matter of fact he did see visions and attempted to fix them with
his art. An ardent lover of music, he was eager to translate the
emotions aroused by it into the terms of his own art. As early as 1859
he was in England, to which he returned in 1861 and 1864, and while
there he was surrounded by a group of people who shared his enthusiasm
for German music. There he first became familiar with Schumann's
melodies, and made the rare little etching representing his English
friends, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, playing one of Schumann's compositions,
Edwards with his flute and Mrs. Edwards at the piano. In 1862 he had the
very tempered satisfaction of finding that Wagner, already beloved by
him, had reached the public taste through the labors of the courageous
Pasdeloup. "I always regret," he wrote to Edwards, "seeing the objects
of my adoration adored by others, especially by the masses. I am very
jealous when I love."
In order to celebrate Wagner's triumph over these masses, however, he at
once made the lithograph called _Venusberg_, from which sprang the very
different oil version of the same subject which together with the
_Hommage a Delacroix_, the story of which M. Benedite has recounted, was
admitted to the Salon of 1864. Fantin's lithographs, a number of which
are in the print room of the Lenox Library building in New York City,
show clearly his preoccupation with music, and an interesting article on
this phase of his temperament appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_,
September 15, 1906. Naturally a worshiper, he did not confine himself to
commemorating only the musicians who were his favorites. In lithography
and painting he exalted such diverse heroes of the different arts as
Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Manet, Schumann, Weber, Berlioz,
and Wagner. In 1877 his enthusiasm for Wagner revived in his work, and
compositions based on the Ring music followed each other in rapid
succession. Wolfram gazing at the evening star, or following with
enchanted eyes Elizabeth's ghostly figure as it moves slowly up the hill
toward the towers of Wartburg; the Rhine maidens playing with rhythmic
motions in the swirling waters, with Alberic, crouched in the
foreground, watching them; Sieglinde, giving Siegmund to drink, as
hounded and pursued he sinks at the door of Hunding's dwelling; the
evocation of Kundry by Klingner; Siegfried blowing his horn and
receding from the enticements of the Rhine maidens--these are among the
subjects that engaged him. It would be difficult to describe his manner
of interpretation. Quite without theatrical suggestion, it combines a
dramatic use of dark and light and a feeling for palpable atmosphere
hardly equaled by Rembrandt himself, with a remarkably certain touch.
Nothing could better emphasize the value of technical drill to a poetic
temperament than these imaginative drawings. In them Fantin gives full
rein to his emotional delight in tender visions and twilight dreams. The
lovely rhythm of his lines, the rise and fall of his sensitive shadows
and lights that play and interplay in as strict obedience to law as the
waves of the sea, his delicate modeling by which he brings form out of
nebulous half-tones with the slightest touches, the least discernible
accents, the accurate bland drawing, the ordered composition, the subtle
spacing, the innumerable indications of close observation of life--all
these qualities combine to give an impression of fantasy and reality so
welded and fused as to be indistinguishable to the casual glance.
[Illustration: In the Brooklyn Art Museum.
PORTRAIT OF MME. MAITRE
_From a painting by Fantin-Latour_]
In spite of the assiduous study of Dutch and Italian masters, Fantin's
work is characteristically French in both its fantasy and its realism.
Not only the grace of the forms and the elegance of the gestures, but
the sentiment of the composition and the quality of the color, are
undisguisedly Gallic. He is closer to Watteau than to any other painter
but his firmer technic and more patient temperament give him an
advantage over the feverish master of eighteenth-century idyls. His art
throbs with a fuller life and in his airiest dreams his world is made of
a more solid substance. For melancholy he offers serenity, for
daintiness he offers delicacy.
His technique, especially in his later work, is quite individual in its
character. He models with short swift strokes of the brush--not unlike
the brush work in some of Manet's pictures. His pigment is rather dry
and often almost crumbly in texture, but his values are so carefully
considered that this delicately ruffled surface has the effect of
casting a penumbra about the individual forms, of causing them to swim
in a thickened but fluent atmosphere, instead of suggesting the rugosity
of an ill-managed medium.
In his paintings of flowers he found the best possible expression for
his subtle color sense. The letters written to him by Whistler in the
sixties show how fervently these paintings were admired by the American
master of harmony, and also how much good criticism came to him from his
comrade whose enthusiasm for Japanese art already was fully awakened.
As a portraitist, Fantin was peculiarly fortunate. His exquisitely
painted flower studies, his pearly-toned beautifully drawn nudes, his
lithographs with their soft darks and tender manipulations of line, his
ambitious imaginative compositions, are none of them so eloquent of his
personality as his portraits with their absolute integrity, their fine
divination, and their fluent technique. The portrait which we reproduce
is of Madam Maitre, was painted in 1882, and was acquired by the Museum
of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1906. It represents a
woman of middle years with a sincere and thoughtful face and a quiet
bearing. The felicities of Fantin's brush are seen in the way in which
the silk sleeve follows the curve of the round firm arm, and the soft
lace of the bodice rests against the throat and is relieved almost
without contrast of color against the white skin. The touches of pure
pale blue in the fan and the delicate tints of the rose are
manifestations of the artist's restrained and subtle management of
color, but above all there is a perfectly unassuming yet uncompromising
rendering of character. There is nothing in the plain refined features
that cries out for recognition of a temperament astutely divined. They
have the calm repose that indicates entire lack of self-consciousness,
no quality is unduly insisted upon, there is neither sentimentality nor
brutal realism in the handling, the sitter simply lives as naturally
upon the canvas as we feel that she must have lived in the world. It is
for such sweet and logical truth-telling, such mild and strict
interpretation, that we must pay our debt of appreciation to Fantin, the
painter of ideal realities and of actual ideals.
CARL LARSSON
IX
CARL LARSSON
The accomplished Swedish critic, Georg Nordensvan, opens his monograph on
Carl Larsson with the statement that the latter is unquestionably the
most popular artist of the present day in his own country, and that he is
equally popular as a man. It is not often that the personality of an
artist seems so essentially connected with his work as in Larsson's case.
His gay, pugnacious, independent, yet amiable temper of mind is so
directly reflected in the character of his various production as to make
a consideration of the two together an almost necessary prelude to any
account of him. He has insisted upon expressing his individuality at
whatever cost of traditional and conventional technique and he has at the
same time unconsciously represented the frankest, most wholesome, and, on
the whole, most characteristic side of the Swedish character. A rather
daring and flippant humor enters into his paintings. One of his portraits
of himself shows him standing, his happy reddish face aglow, against a
yellowish-brown wall. He is dressed in a long, yellowish-brown smoking
frock, and holds in his raised hand a pencil from which appears to spring
a little feminine figure supposed to represent his genius. "This figure
carries what looks like a quantity of small round cookies," says his
critic, "possibly to symbolize the adequacy with which his genius
provides for his nourishment."
Another shows him with his little girl sitting on his head, maintaining
her equilibrium by planting stout feet on his shoulders. The painter
wears a house-jacket, loose slippers and baggy trousers, his face beams
with good-humor; the child is brimming with laughter; the little scene
is instinctive with the spirit of intimate domesticity, and the drawing,
free and easy, without apparent effort in the direction of elegant
arrangement or expressiveness of line, is nevertheless singularly
nervous and vigorous.
[Illustration: MY FAMILY
_From a painting by Carl Larsson_]
In still another portrait, he is sitting before his easel, his little
girl on one knee, his canvas on the other with the easel serving only as
a prop. His eyes are turned toward a mirror which is outside the picture
and the reflection in which he is using as a model; the child's eyes are
fixed on the canvas watching the growth of the design. These are
"self-portraits" in more than the usual sense. It is the rarest thing in
art to find a painter representing his own aspect with such complete
lack of self-consciousness. No characteristics seem especially to be
emphasized, none betray exaggeration, there apparently is neither
distortion nor idealization, nor is there any attempt to select a mood
that shall preserve a favorable impression of the sitter. Nothing could,
however, more favorably present a character to the critical scrutiny of
strangers than this superb good faith. The least sentimental of us must
recognize with frank delight the wholesome sweetness of the world these
kindly faithful records open to us.