The first thing to remember of the painter Henner is that he is above
all a poet. Has he then created stories or narrated them pathetically?
Has he made it the business of painting to do literary work? He has
done nothing of the kind. Even where he has used classical mythology
and Biblical tradition as the excuse for his canvases, the derived
subject seems to have taken hold of him but lightly; he has been
dramatic to the extent to which--well, shall I say?--to the extent to
which a reciter in a drawing-room is permissibly dramatic--gracefully
indicating action and character, never violently insisting on them.
Henner’s poetry--his gift of creating, of idealising, in restrained and
refined ways--is never shown by the usurpation of another’s functions.
It is shown in part by his choice of beautiful, artistic themes; by the
exceptional fulness of his appreciation of lovely form and hue; by the
combinations of faultless and harmonious colour which occur upon his
canvases; by the associations these somehow evoke; by the high pleasure
they bestow. To define it much further is impossible. I feel myself, in
describing his art, to be ineffective and faltering; but the analyst
does not exist who could account completely for his charm.
Henner, it will be allowed by those who are most qualified to notice,
is a great painter of the Nude. The Nude, according as you treat it,
can rise to poetic heights and address itself to the refined, or can
sink to more than prosaic depths. There is the high and there is the
low, and there are many levels for the painter to stay at and live upon
between them; and to the real artistic instinct, to the real fineness
of taste, in looking at the Nude, there is permitted that immediate
ease of judgment and decision by which the work is classed at once,
and its motive appraised. When the true judges appraise the Nude of
Monsieur Henner, the decision is a happy one. He is refinement to the
finger-tips--as refined as Burne-Jones, yet not sexless. Painters whom
only the Puritanic could accuse of vulgarity--Benner, say, in France,
with his ‘Dormeuse’ of Amiens; Ingres, a generation ago, with his
‘Source’ and her ‘_âme végétale_’; Etty, say, in England, with his
daylight flesh-colour, which the sunshine suffers to be neither creamy
nor grey, but rose and opal--they, and how many others, may be named
with praise. But Monsieur Henner’s work has somehow, in this matter, a
reticence and a distinction--a part of his Alsatian Poetry--which one
is apt to think unique. And it is worthy of notice--it throws a little
light on the undramatic, the simply painter-like method of Henner’s
work--that the undraped figure is there, not seldom, as a necessary
note of colour, and nothing besides: a note of ivory, telling, in some
picture of evening, against that olive green of the embrowned woodland
which rises, massed and darkening, against the last turquoise of the
sky.
Yes, it is a purely painter-like quality, the poetry of colours in
that more than blameless juxtaposition which is a rare achievement of
Art--the poetry of gleaming form, of discreet light, of restful and
mysterious shadow--that Henner will live by. The story he illustrates
gains nothing in dramatic interest by his treatment of it. His
business, even when he paints an ‘Hérodiade,’ is to solace and charm
rather than to excite; and the refinement and suavity of his vision
may accomplish for us of the Nineteenth Century what David’s music did
for the troubled soul of King Saul. Like Puvis de Chavannes--in work
more grandly decorative, in conception vast and suave--he administers
to men the refreshment of a pure and high beauty. In such a subject
as his ‘Prayer,’ it is his function but to vary things delicately:
to escape the commonplace, nothing more. But, as regards his figure
painting, in the refinement of his models we are never suffered to
lose sight of what is familiar, homely, intimate, personal. Nature has
been suggested with reticence, but nature has been constantly referred
to. Of his landscape, the materials are simple and few; breadth and
simplicity are of the very essence of his treatment. His selection is
arbitrary; a certain noble conventionality reigns in his canvases.
Give him a tranquil sky, a pool, a square stone fountain, a nymph, a
solemn cypress, a tangle of woodland--what more! Petty imitation, fussy
realisation of a hundred objects, he will hold to be valueless. But his
work must have Unity: it must have Style.
An artist with these preoccupations is not, one may say with safety,
likely to be a very popular portrait painter. Yet Henner has painted a
fair share of portraits. And no ‘hard and fast’ line can divide such
portraiture as he produces from his ideal work. When the touches on
his canvas are no longer dictated by what is obviously imagination, it
is not likely that a striking realism succeeds to the control, that
_modernité_ speaks from every corner of the picture, that the poet has
become the fashionable portrait painter. Reticence is still remembered.
Henner can perceive character, but it must be conveyed without
emphasis. With the palette set as of old, and the schemes of colour
such as the ideal work has already accustomed us to, Henner must pursue
his task. Perhaps it is the pallor of a thoughtful face of middle age,
to be framed in black hair, with an olive background. Perhaps, as in
the ‘Créole,’ it is the old Venetian tresses that are to fall richly on
the bust that is shining marble, that is gleaming ivory. A likeness, no
doubt; but before all things, a picture.
(_Magazine of Art_, May 1888.)