movement are without question Pissarro and Sisley. It is the belief of
these two artists in the appearance of things for themselves, under
the influence of the light problem, which gives them a strength not
always visible at first by reason of a greater simplicity of effect
which dominates all of their pictures. We see in both these men a real
and impressive desire for a more exacting scientific relation as
discovered by intellectual consideration, than is to be found in the
emotional outcry predominating in most of the pictures of Monet. These
do not hold for us in this day as solidly as they were expected to.
There is a kind of superficiality and consequent dissatisfaction in
the conspicuous aspiration toward the first flush, one may call it, of
enthusiasm for impressionistic experience. There comes to one who is
really concerned, the ever increasing desire to turn toward Pissarro
and Sisley and to quietly dispense with many or most of Monet's
pictures, not to speak of a legitimate haste to pass over the
phlegmatic enthusiasms of the younger followers.
One feels that Pissarro must have been a great man among men not so
great. One feels likewise that the stately reticence of a man like
Sisley is worth far more to us now, if only because we find in his
works as they hang one beside another in numbers, a soberer and more
cautious approach to the theme engrossing him and the other artists of
the movement of that time. In the pictures of Sisley there is the
charm of the fact for itself, the delight of the problem of placing
the object in relation to the luminous atmosphere which covers it.
Men like Pissarro and Sisley were not forgetting Courbet and his
admirable knowledge of reality. They were not concerned with the
spectacular aspect of the impressionistic principle, not nearly so
much as with the satisfying realization of the object under the
influence of the new scientific problem in esthetics with which they
were concerned. For myself I am out of touch with Monet as a creator
and I find myself extracting far more satisfaction and belief from
Pissarro and Sisley, who deal with the problem of nature plus idea,
with a much greater degree of let me even say sincerity, by reason of
one fact and perhaps the most important one: they were not dramatizing
the idea in hand. They were not creating a furor with pink and
lavender haystacks. They were satisfied that there was still something
to be found in the old arrangement of negative and positive tones as
they were understood before the application of the spectrum turned the
brains and sensibilities of men. In other words Courbet survived while
the Barbizonians perished. There was an undeniable realization of fact
still there, clamoring for consideration. There was the reality then
even as now, as always. With Pissarro and Sisley there appeared the
true separation of tone, making itself felt most intelligently in the
work of these men from whom the real separatists Seurat, Signac, and
Cross were to realize their principle of pointilism, of which
principle Seurat was to prove himself the most satisfactory creative
exponent.
The world of art lost a very great deal in the untimely death of
Seurat; he was a young man of great artistic and intellectual gifts.
There was an artist by the name of Vignon who came in for his share
during the impressionistic period, probably not with any more dramatic
glamour than he achieves now by his very simple and unpretentious
pictures. I am sorry for my own pleasure that I have not been able to
see more of this artist's pictures from whom I think our own Theodore
Robinson must have gained a deal of strength for his own bridge
building between Bastien Le Page and the Monet "eccentricity," so to
call it.
There is always a reason for reticence, and it is usually apt to come
from thinking. Sisley and Pissarro, Vignon, Seurat, and Robinson were
thinking out a way to legitimize the new fantastic craze for prismatic
violence, and they found it in the direct consideration for the fact.
They knew that without objects light would have nowhere to fall, that
the earth confronted them with indispensable phenomena each one of
which had its reason for being. They were finding instead of losing
their heads, which is always a matter of praise. I could stay with
almost any Pissarro or Sisley I have ever seen, as I could always want
any Seurat near me, just as I could wish almost any Monet out of sight
because I find it submerged with emotional extravagance, too much
enthusiasm for his new pet idea.
Scientific appreciation had not come with scientific intentions. Like
most movements, it was left to other than the accredited innovators
for its completion and perfection. That is why we find Cézanne
working incessantly to create an art which would achieve a union of
impressionism and an art like the Louvre, as he is said to have
characterized it for himself. We know now how much Cézanne cared for
Chardin as well as for Courbet, and Greco. There is a reason why he
must have respected Pissarro, far more than he did at any time such
men as Gaugin, the "flea on his back" as he so vividly and perhaps
justly named him. There was far more hope for a possible great art to
come out of Van Gogh, who, in his brief seven years had experimented
with every aspect of impressionism that had then been divulged. He too
was in search of a passionate realization of the object. His method of
heavy stitching in bright hues was not a perfected style. It was an
extravagant hope toward a personal rhythm. He was an "upwardly"
aspiring artist by reason of his hyper-accentuated religious fervours.
All these extraneous and one might even say irrelevant attempts toward
speedy arrivism are set aside in the presence of the almost solemn
severity of minds like Pissarro and Sisley, and of Cézanne, who
extracted for himself all that was valuable in the passing idea of
impressionism. The picture which lasts is never the entirely
idiosyncratic one. It is that picture which strives toward realization
of ideas through a given principle with which it is involved.
So it seems then, that if Monet invented the principle of
impressionism as applied to painting, Pissarro and Sisley assisted
greatly in the creative idea for our lasting use and pleasure by the
consideration of the intellect which they applied to it; just as
Seurat has given us a far greater realization than either Signac or
Cross have offered us in the principle of pointillism.
The "test of endurance" in the impressionistic movement is borne out;
the strength of realization is to be found in Pissarro and Sisley and
not in the vapid niceties of Monet, whose work became thinner and
thinner by habitual repetitive painting, and by a possible false sense
of security in his argument. Monet had become the habitual
impressionist, and the habitual in art is its most conspicuous
fatality. The art of Monet grew weaker throughout the various stages
of Waterloo, Venice, Rouen, Giverney, and the Water Lilies which
formed periods of expression, at least to the mind of the observer.
Monet's production had become a kind of mercerized production, and a
kind of spurious radiance invested them, in the end. It remained for
Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, and Seurat to stabilize the new discovery,
and to give it the stamina it was meant to contain, as a scientific
idea, scientifically applied.
ODILON REDON
With the passing of this rare artist during the late summer months,[2]
we are conscious of the silencing of one of the foremost lyricists in
painting, one of the most delicate spirits among those who have
painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, pictures of such
real distinction and merit. For of true charm, of true grace, of true
melodic, Redon was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted
the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has this artist,
possessed of the love of all that is dream-like and fleeting in the
more transitory aspect of earthly things. No one has ever felt more
that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more
jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye
upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his
feet.
[Footnote 2: Of 1917.--Ed.]
It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of
the morning is in each of his fragile works. There seems always to be
hovering in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of which he
was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later
day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust
upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young
boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a
windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile
expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never
struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He
knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of
light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his
pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and
exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to
believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or entities once
they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed
faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris
where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them,
always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the
universe.
I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read
passages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he
recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used
to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill
shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves
into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic
of their delicate color and form--indeed, it would seem as if all
things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had
condescended to an earthward existence for a brief space, the better
to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously
rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take
on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They
paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his--"I have
fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was
the engraver and just how long he was the painter--it is evident
everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel
and stone.
Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in
pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of
them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear
to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was
in them for him. He had in his spirit the classical outline of music,
with nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we call revolt
other than the strict adherence to personal relationship, no other
prejudice than the artist's reaction against all that is not really
refined to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to render with
extreme tranquillity everything delicate and lovely in passing things.
There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic
of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only
because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days
because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is
Redon who has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme
artistry, the fragment.
It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, that one finds the
true analogy to lyric poetry. This lyricism makes them seem mostly
Greek--often I have thought them Persian, sometimes again, Indian;
certainly he learned something from the Chinese in their porcelains
and in their embroidery. I am sure he has been fond of these outer
influences, these Oriental suggestions which were for him the
spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontaneous ideas, for he,
too, had much of all this magic, as he had much of the hypnotic
quality of jewelry and precious stones in all his so delicate
pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed
to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more
the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just
flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held
this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem
than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would
expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art
he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger
school, especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the painters of this
time it is certain he was first among them essaying to picture the
jewelled loveliness of nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was
in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has created this touch
for himself and it is the touch of the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have
been well if Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of expression,
had followed Redon more closely, as he might then have added a little
more lustre to these very dead literary failures of his.
I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand Khnopff has been influenced
greatly by him, but I do know that he was beloved by the more modern
men, that he was revered by all regardless of theories or tenets, for
there is in existence somewhere in Paris a volume of letters and
testimonials celebrating some anniversary of Redon in proof of it. And
I think that--regardless of ideas--the artist must always find him
sympathetic, if for no other reason than that he was the essence of
refinement, of delicacy, and of taste. When I think of Redon I think
of Shelley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about among the
stars," and I think somewhat, too, of some phrases in Debussy and his
unearthly school of musicians, for if we are among those who admire
sturdier things in art we can still love the fine gift of purity. And
of all gifts Redon has that, certainly.
His art holds, too, something of that breathlessness among the trees
one finds in Watteau and in Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for
he, also, was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think of Redon as
among those who transvaluate all earthly sensations in terms of a
purer element. We think of him as living with his head among the
mists, alert for all those sudden bursts of light which fleck here and
there forgotten or unseen places, making them live with a new
resplendency, full of new revealment, perfect with wonder. Happily we
find in him a hatred of description and of illustration, we find these
pictures to be illuminations from rich pages not observed by the
common eye, decorations out of a world the like of which has been but
too seldom seen by those who aspire to vision. _Chansons sans paroles_
are they, ringing clearly and flawlessly to the eye as do those songs
of Verlaine (with whom he has also some relationship) to the
well-attuned ear.
He was the master of the nuance, and the nuance was his lyricism, his
special gift, his genius. He knew perfectly the true vibration of note
to note, and how few are they whose esthetic emotions are built upon
the strictly poetic basis, who escape the world-old pull towards
description and illustration. How few, indeed, among those of the
materialistic vision escape this. But for Redon there was but one
world, and that a world of imperceptible light on all things visible,
with always a kind of song of adoration upon his lips, as it were,
obsessed with reverence and child wonder toward every least and
greatest thing, and it was in these portrayals of least things that he
exposed their naked loveliness as among the greatest. Never did Redon
seek for the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the
representation of the whole, that the perfect fragment is a true
representative of beauty, and that the vision of some fair hand or
some fair eye is sure to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the
individual.
We have as a result of this almost religious devotion of Redon's, the
fairest type of the expression of that element which is the eye's
equivalent for melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated his
belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either all things were
lovely in his eye, or they are made beautiful by thinking beautifully
of them. That was the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned
nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object on which his eye
rested. No one shall go to Redon for any kind of intellectual
departure or for any highly specialized theory--it is only too evident
from his work that he had none in mind. He had, I think, a definite
belief in the theosophic principle of aura, in that element of
emanation which would seem sometimes to surround delicate objects
touched with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things seemed
"possessed" by some colorful presence which they themselves could in
no way be conscious of, somewhat the same sort of radiance which
floods the features of some beauteous person and creates a presence
there which the person is not even conscious of, the imaginative
reality, in other words, existing either within or without everything
the eye beholds. For him the very air which hovered about all things
seemed to have, as well, the presence of color not usually seen of
men, and it was this emanation or presence which formed the living
quality of his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery heads and
hands and wings had their being, through which those dusty wings of
most unearthly butterflies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given
us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual spaces and the way
that these fluttering bodies which are little more than spirit
themselves have enjoyed a beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his
appreciation of perfect loveliness, like Shelley in his passionate
desire to transform all local beauty into universal terms.
No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What
we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest
always of perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by means of a rare
and graceful art some of those fragments which have given him his
private and personal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating a
personal art by being himself a rare and lovely person. He remains for
us one of the finest of artists, who has reverted those whisperings
from the great world of visual melody in which he lived. It was with
these exquisite fragments that he adorned the states of his own soul
in order that he might present them as artist in tangible art form. We
are grateful for his lyricism and for his exquisite goldsmithery.
After viewing his delicately beautiful pictures, objects take on a new
poetic wonder.
THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING
WITH SPECIAL PRAISES FOR JENNIE VANVLEET COWDERY
Some of the finest instances of pure painting will be found, not as
might be imagined by the layman, among the professional artists, but
among those amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing themselves first
of all. If you who read will make close reference to those rich examples
of the mid-Victorian period, when it was more or less distinguished to
take up painting along with the other accomplishments, you will find
that the much tabooed antimacassar period produced a species of painting
that was as indicative of personal style and research as it was fresh in
its elemental approach. The perfect instance in modern art of this sort
of original painting raised to the highest excellence is that of Henri
Rousseau, the true primitive of our so eclectic modern period. No one
can have seen a picture of this most talented douanier without being
convinced that technique for purely private personal needs has been
beautified to an extraordinary degree.
Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists as well as among the
best designers of modern time, and his pictures hold a quality so
related to the experience contained in their subjects, as to seem
like the essence of the thing itself. You feel that unquestionably
Rousseau's Paris is Paris, and you are made to feel likewise that his
jungle scenes are at very least his own experiences of his earlier
life in Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable sensitivity
and integrity of approach. He was not fabricating an art, he was
endeavoring to create a real picture for his own private satisfaction,
and his numerous successes are both convincing and admirable.
As I have said, if you have access to a variety of amateur pictures
created during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject,
you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting
as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always
engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted
romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for
instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and
its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above,
where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the
appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of
landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or
two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with
pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than
not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the
richness of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.
I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of
amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the
Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other
superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously
painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of
mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand
with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been
hampered in no way with the banality of school technique learned in
the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally
invent expression out of a personally accumulated passion for beauty
and they have become aware of it through their own intensely
personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period,
and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and
of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the
Marine Museum in Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of private
experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know,
the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many
surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of
expression.
Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual
years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally
driven to painting in order to establish his own psychic entity. And
so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in
the consciousness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common
experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. With the result
that many of them find their way out by taking to paints and brushes
and canvas, astonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored
layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one way or another by
something which he thinks he does not understand. It is of the
charming pictures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to speak
here.
Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact you become aware
instantly you find yourself in conversation with her. She evidences
all the traits and characteristics of a lady of her period, which is
to say the late mid-Victorian, for she must have been a graceful young
woman herself at the close of this fascinating period. And you find,
therefore, in her quaint and convincingly original pictures, the
passion for the charms and graces that were consistent with the period
in which she spent her girlhood, and which has left upon her
consciousness so dominant a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery,
despite their remoteness of surrounding--for she always places her
graceful figures, which are no less than the embodiments of her own
graceful states of being, in a dense woodland scene--bring up to the
senses all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of the
oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the shadow, and of the pansy
by the hedge. You expect these ladies to shake gently upon the air,
like flowers in the morning, their own fascinating perfumes, as you
expect them to recite in the quietude of the wood in which they are
walking those sentiments which are appropriate to the season and of
other soft remembrances.