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Title: The History of Modern Painting, Volume 2 (of 4) - Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century
Author: Muther, Richard
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The History of Modern Painting, Volume 2 (of 4) - Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century" ***
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THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo_
LESLIE MY UNCLE TOBY AND THE WIDOW WADMAN]
THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING
BY RICHARD MUTHER
PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY
AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF BRESLAU
IN FOUR
VOLUMES
[Illustration]
VOLUME
TWO
REVISED EDITION
CONTINUED BY THE AUTHOR
TO THE END OF THE XIX CENTURY
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. MCMVII
CONTENTS
PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
BOOK III
THE TRIUMPH OF THE MODERNS
CHAPTER XVI
THE DRAUGHTSMEN
The general alienation of painting from the interests of life
during the first half of the nineteenth century.--The draughtsmen
and caricaturists the first who brought modern life into the
sphere of art.--England: Gillray, Rowlandson, George Cruikshank,
"Punch," John Leech, George du Maurier, Charles Keene.--Germany:
Johann Adam Klein, Johann Christian Erhard, Ludwig Richter, Oscar
Pletsch, Albert Hendschel, Eugen Neureuther, "Die Fliegende
Blätter," Wilhelm Busch, Adolf Oberländer.--France: Louis
Philibert Debucourt, Carle Vernet, Bosio, Henri Monnier, Honoré
Daumier, Gavarni, Guys, Gustave Doré, Cham, Marcellin, Randon,
Gill, Hadol, Draner, Léonce Petit, Grévin.--Need of a fresh
discovery of the world by painters.--Incitement to this by the
English 1
CHAPTER XVII
ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850
England little affected by the retrospective tendency of the
Continent.--James Barry, James Northcote, Henry Fuseli, William
Etty, Benjamin Robert Haydon.--Painting continues on the course
taken by Hogarth and Reynolds.--The portrait painters: George
Romney, Thomas Lawrence, John Hoppner, William Beechey, John
Russell, John Jackson, Henry Raeburn.--Benjamin West and John
Singleton Copley paint historical pictures from their own
time.--Daniel Maclise.--Animal painting: John Wootton, George
Stubbs, George Morland, James Ward, Edwin Landseer.--The painting
of _genre_: David Wilkie, W. Collins, Gilbert Stuart Newton,
Charles Robert Leslie, W. Mulready, Thomas Webster, W. Frith.--The
influence of these _genre_ pictures on the painting of the
Continent 53
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MILITARY PICTURE
Why the victory of modernity on the Continent came only by
degrees.--Romantic conceptions.--Æsthetic theories and the
question of costume.--Painting learns to treat contemporary
costume by first dealing with uniform.--France: Gros, Horace
Vernet, Hippolyte Bellangé, Isidor Pils, Alexander Protais,
Charlet, Raffet, Ernest Meissonier, Guillaume Régamey, Alphonse de
Neuville, Aimé Morot, Edouard Détaille.--Germany: Albrecht Adam,
Peter Hess, Franz Krüger, Karl Steffeck, Th. Horschelt, Franz
Adam, Joseph v. Brandt, Heinrich Lang 92
CHAPTER XIX
ITALY AND THE EAST
Why painters sought their ideal in distant countries, though they
did not plunge into the past.--Italy discovered by Leopold Robert,
Victor Schnetz, Ernest Hébert, August Riedel.--The East was for
the Romanticists what Italy had been for the Classicists.--France:
Delacroix, Decamps, Prosper Marilhat, Eugène Fromentin, Gustave
Guillaumet.--Germany: H. Kretzschmer, Wilhelm Gentz, Adolf
Schreyer, and others.--England: William Muller, Frederick Goodall,
F. J. Lewis.--Italy: Alberto Pasini 118
CHAPTER XX
THE PAINTING OF HUMOROUS ANECDOTE
After seeking exotic subjects painting returns home, and finds
amongst peasants a stationary type of life which has preserved
picturesque costume.--Munich: The transition from the military
picture to the painting of peasants.--Peter Hess, Heinrich Bürkel,
Carl Spitzweg.--Hamburg: Hermann Kauffmann.--Berlin: Friedrich
Eduard Meyerheim.--The influence of Wilkie, and the novel of
village life.--Munich: Johann Kirner, Carl Enhuber.--Düsseldorf:
Adolf Schroedter, Peter Hasenclever, Jacob Becker, Rudolf Jordan,
Henry Ritter, Adolf Tidemand.--Vienna: Peter Krafft, J. Danhauser,
Ferdinand Waldmüller.--Belgium: Influence of Teniers.--Ignatius
van Regemorter, Ferdinand de Braekeleer, Henri Coene, Madou, Adolf
Dillens.--France: François Biard 140
CHAPTER XXI
THE PICTURE WITH A SOCIAL PURPOSE
Why modern life in all countries entered into art only under the
form of humorous anecdote.--The conventional optimism of these
pictures comes into conflict with the revolutionary temper of the
age.--France: Delacroix' "Freedom," Jeanron, Antigna, Adolphe
Leleux, Meissonier's "Barricade," Octave Tassaert.--Germany:
Gisbert Flüggen, Carl Hübner.--Belgium: Eugène de Block, Antoine
Wiertz 175
CHAPTER XXII
THE VILLAGE TALE
Germany: Louis Knaus, Benjamin Vautier, Franz Defregger, Mathias
Schmidt, Alois Gabl, Eduard Kurzbauer, Hugo Kauffmann, Wilhelm
Riefstahl.--The Comedy of Monks: Eduard Grützner.--Tales of the
Exchange and the Manufactory: Ludwig Bokelmann, Ferdinand
Brütt.--Germany begins to transmit the principles of _genre_
painting to other countries.--France: Gustave Brion, Charles
Marchal, Jules Breton.--Norway and Sweden stand in union with
Düsseldorf: Karl D'Uncker, Wilhelm Wallander, Anders Koskull,
Kilian Zoll, Peter Eskilson, August Jernberg, Ferdinand Fagerlin,
V. Stoltenberg-Lerche, Hans Dahl.--Hungary fructified by Munich:
Ludwig Ebner, Paul Boehm, Otto von Baditz, Koloman Déry, Julius
Aggházi, Alexander Bihari, Ignaz Ruskovics, Johann Jankó, Tihamér
Margitay, Paul Vagó, Arpad Fessty, Otto Koroknyai, D.
Skuteczky.--Difference between these pictures and those of the old
Dutch masters.--From Hogarth to Knaus.--Why Hogarth succumbed, and
_genre_ painting had to become painting pure and simple.--This new
basis of art created by the landscapists 194
CHAPTER XXIII
LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN GERMANY
The significance of landscape for nineteenth-century
art.--Classicism: Joseph Anton Koch, Leopold Rottmann, Friedrich
Preller and his followers.--Romanticism: Karl Friedrich Lessing,
Karl Blechen, W. Schirmer, Valentin Ruths.--The discovery of
Ruysdael and Everdingen.--The part of mediation played by certain
artists from Denmark and Norway: J. C. Dahl, Christian
Morgenstern, Ludwig Gurlitt.--Andreas Achenbach, Eduard
Schleich.--The German landscape painters begin to travel
everywhere.--Influence of Calame.--H. Gude, Niels Björnson Möller,
August Cappelen, Morten-Müller, Erik Bodom, L. Munthe, E. A.
Normann, Ludwig Willroider, Louis Douzette, Hermann Eschke, Carl
Ludwig, Otto v. Kameke, Graf Stanislaus Kalkreuth, Oswald
Achenbach, Albert Flamm, Ascan Lutteroth, Ferdinand Bellermann,
Eduard Hildebrandt, Eugen Bracht.--Why many of their pictures,
compared with those of the old Dutch masters, indicate an
expansion of the geographical horizon, rather than a refinement of
taste.--The victory over interesting-subject-matter and
sensational effect by the "_paysage intime_" 230
CHAPTER XXIV
THE BEGINNINGS OF "PAYSAGE INTIME"
Classical landscape painting in France: Hubert Robert, Henri
Valenciennes, Victor Bertin, Xavier Bidault, Michallon, Jules
Cogniet, Watelet, Théodore Aligny, Edouard Bertin, Paul Flandrin,
Achille Benouville, J. Bellel.--Romanticism and the resort to
national scenery: Victor Hugo, Georges Michel, the Ruysdael of
Montmartre, Charles de la Berge, Camille Roqueplan, Camille Flers,
Louis Cabat, Paul Huet.--The English the first to free themselves
from composition and the tone of the galleries: Turner.--John
Crome, the English Hobbema, and the Norwich school: Cotman, Crome
junior, Stark, Vincent.--The water colour artists: John Robert
Cozens, Girtin, Edridge, Prout, Samuel Owen, Luke Clennel, Howitt,
Robert Hills.--The influence of aquarelles on the English
conception of colour.--John Constable and open-air
painting.--David Cox, William Muller, Peter de Wint, Creswick,
Peter Graham, Henry Dawson, John Linnell.--Richard Parkes
Bonington as the link between England and France 257
CHAPTER XXV
LANDSCAPE FROM 1830
Constable in the Louvre and his influence on the creators of the
French _paysage intime_.--Théodore Rousseau, Corot, Jules Dupré,
Diaz, Daubigny and their followers.--Chintreuil, Jean Desbrosses,
Achard, Français, Harpignies, Émile Breton, and others.--Animal
painting: Carle Vernet, Géricault, R. Brascassat, Troyon, Rosa
Bonheur, Jadin, Eugène Lambert, Palizzi, Auguste Lançon, Charles
Jacque 294
CHAPTER XXVI
JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
His importance, and the task left for those who followed
him.--Millet's principle _Le beau c'est le vrai_ had to be
transferred from peasant painting to modern life, from Barbizon to
Paris 360
BOOK IV
THE REALISTIC PAINTERS AND THE MODERN IDEALISTS
CHAPTER XXVII
REALISM IN FRANCE
Gustave Courbet and the modern painting of artisan life.--Alfred
Stevens and the painting of "Society."--His followers Auguste
Toulmouche, James Tissot, and others.--In opposition to the
Cinquecento the study of the old Germans, the Lombards, the
Spaniards, the Flemish artists, and the _Rococo_ masters becomes
now a formative influence.--Gustave Ricard, Charles Chaplin,
Gaillard, Paul Dubois, Carolus Duran, Léon Bonnat, Roybet, Blaise
Desgoffe, Philippe Rousseau, Antoine Vollon, François Bonvin,
Théodule Ribot 391
BIBLIOGRAPHY 435
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES IN COLOUR
PAGE
LESLIE: My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman _Frontispiece_
ROMNEY: Serena 53
LAWRENCE: Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of George IV 60
MACLISE: The Waterfall, Cornwall 64
MORLAND: Horses in a Stable 69
LANDSEER: Jack in Office 76
FROMENTIN: Algerian Falconers 132
ROTTMANN: Lake Kopaïs 234
TURNER: The old Téméraire 268
CONSTABLE: Willy Lott's House 275
BONINGTON: La Place de Molards, Geneva 290
COROT: Landscape 316
MILLET: The Wood-Sawyers 370
IN BLACK AND WHITE
ACHENBACH, ANDREAS.
Sea Coast after a Storm 247
Fishing Boats in the North Sea 249
ADAM, ALBRECHT.
Albrecht Adam and his Sons 112
A Stable in Town 113
BAADE, KNUT.
Moonlight Night on the Coast 253
BECKER, JACOB.
A Tempest 165
BERGE, CHARLES DE LA.
Landscape 263
BOILLY, LEOPOLD.
The Toilette 2
The Newsvendor 3
The Marionettes 4
BONHEUR, ROSA.
The Horse-Fair 351
Ploughing in Nivernois 353
BONINGTON, RICHARD PARKES.
The Windmill of Saint-Jouin 290
Reading Aloud 291
Portrait of Richard Parkes Bonington 293
BONNAT, LÉON.
Adolphe Thiers 423
Victor Hugo 424
BONVIN, FRANÇOIS.
The Cook 427
The Work-Room 428
BRETON, ÉMILE.
The Return of the Reapers 225
The Gleaner 226
BRION, GUSTAVE.
Jean Valjean 221
BUNBURY, WILLIAM HENRY.
Richmond Hill 9
BÜRKEL, HEINRICH.
Portrait of Heinrich Bürkel 143
Brigands Returning 144
A Downpour in the Mountains 145
A Smithy in Upper Bavaria 146
BUSCH, WILHELM.
Portrait of Wilhelm Busch 29
CABAT, LOUIS.
Le Jardin Beaujon 264
CALAME, ALEXANDRE.
Landscape 250
CHAPLIN, CHARLES.
The Golden Age 418
Portrait of Countess Aimery de la Rochefoucauld 419
CHARLET, NICOLAS TOUISSAINT.
Un homme qui boît seul n'est pas digne de vivre 95
CHINTREUIL, ANTOINE.
Landscape: Morning 343
CONSTABLE, JOHN.
Portrait of John Constable 274
Church Porch, Bergholt 275
Dedham Vale 277
The Romantic House 278
The Cornfield 279
Cottage in a Cornfield 283
The Valley Farm 285
COPLEY, JOHN SINGLETON.
The Death of the Earl of Chatham 65
COROT, CAMILLE.
Portrait of Camille Corot 306
The Bridge of St. Angelo, Rome 307
Corot at Work 308
Daphnis and Chloe 309
Vue de Toscane 310
At Sunset 311
The Ruin 312
Evening 313
An Evening in Normandy 314
The Dance of the Nymphs 315
A Dance 316
La Route d'Arras 317
COURBET, GUSTAVE.
Portrait of Gustave Courbet 393
The Man with a Leather Belt. Portrait of Himself as
a Youth 394
A Funeral at Ornans 395
The Stone-Breakers 397
The Return from Market 400
The Battle of the Stags 401
A Woman Bathing 402
Deer in Covert 403
Girls lying on the Bank of the Seine 404
A Recumbent Woman 405
Berlioz 406
The Hind on the Snow 407
My Studio after Seven Years of Artistic Life 409
The Wave 412
COX, DAVID.
Crossing the Sands 286
The Shrimpers 287
CROME, JOHN (OLD CROME).
A View near Norwich 273
CRUIKSHANK, GEORGE.
Monstrosities of 1822 6
DANHAUSER, JOSEF.
The Gormandizer 179
DAUBIGNY, CHARLES FRANÇOIS.
Portrait of Charles François Daubigny 335
Springtime 336
A Lock in the Valley of Optevoz 337
On the Oise 338
Shepherd and Shepherdess 339
Landscape: Evening 341
DAUMIER, HONORÉ.
Portrait of Honoré Daumier 37
The Connoisseurs 38
The Mountebanks 39
In the Assize Court 40
"La voilà ... ma Maison de Campagne" 41
Menelaus the Victor 42
DEBUCOURT, LOUIS PHILIBERT.
In the Kitchen 33
The Promenade 34
DECAMPS, ALEXANDRE.
The Swineherd 127
Coming out from a Turkish School 129
The Watering-Place 131
DEFREGGER, FRANZ.
Portrait of Franz Defregger 208
Speckbacher and his Son 209
The Wrestlers 210
Sister and Brothers 211
The Prize Horse 213
Andreas Hofer appointed Governor of the Tyrol 215
DÉTAILLE, EDOUARD.
Salut aux Blessés 111
DIAZ, NARCISSE VIRGILIO.
Portrait of Narcisse Diaz 328
The Descent of the Bohemians 329
Among the Foliage 331
The Tree Trunk 332
Forest Scene 333
DUBOIS, PAUL.
Portrait of my Sons 421
DUPRÉ, JULES.
Portrait of Jules Dupré 318
The House of Jules Dupré at L'isle-Adam 319
The Setting Sun 320
The Bridge at L'isle-Adam 321
Near Southampton 322
The Punt 323
Sunset 324
The Hay-Wain 325
The old Oak 326
The Pool 327
DURAN, CAROLUS.
Portrait of Carolus Duran 422
ENHUBER, CARL.
The Pensioner and his Grandson 163
ERHARD, JOHANN CHRISTOPH.
Portrait of Johann Christoph Erhard 21
A Peasant Scene 22
A Peasant Family 23
FLÀMM, ALBERT.
A Summer Day 251
FLÜGGEN, GISBERT.
The Decision of the Suit 186
FRITH, WILLIAM POWELL.
Poverty and Wealth 89
FROMENTIN, EUGÈNE.
Portrait of Eugène Fromentin 133
Arabian Women returning from drawing Water 134
The Centaurs 135
GAILLARD, FERDINAND.
Portrait 420
GAVARNI (SULPICE GUILLAUME CHEVALIER).
Portrait of Gavarni 43
Thomas Vireloque 44
Fourberies de Femmes 45
Phèdre at the Théâtre Français 48
"Ce qui me manque à moi? Une t'ite mère comme ça,
qu'aurait soin de mon linge" 49
GILLRAY, JAMES.
Affability 5
GRÉVIN, ALFRED.
Nos Parisiennes 51
GRÜTZNER, EDUARD.
Twelfth Night 219
GUILLAUMET, GUSTAVE.
The Séguia, near Biskra 136
A Dwelling in the Sahara 137
GURLITT, LUDWIG.
On the Sabine Mountains 245
GUYS, CONSTANTIN.
Study of a Woman 50
HARPIGNIES, HENRI.
Moonrise 344
HÉBERT, ERNEST.
The Malaria 123
HESS, PETER.
The Reception of King Otto in Nauplia 114
A Morning at Partenkirche 142
HÜBNER, CARL.
July 187
HUET, PAUL.
Portrait of Paul Huet 265
The Inundation at St. Cloud 266
HUGO, VICTOR.
Ruins of a Mediæval Castle on the Rhine 261
JACQUE, CHARLES.
The Return to the Byre (Etching) 355
A Flock of Sheep on the Road 356
Millet at Work in his Studio 365
Millet's House at Barbizon 366
KAUFFMANN, HERMANN.
Woodcutters Returning 154
A Sandy Road 155
Returning from the Fields 156
KEENE, CHARLES.
The Perils of the Deep 17
From "Our People" 19
KIRNER, JOHANN.
The Fortune Teller 162
KLEIN, JOHANN ADAM.
A Travelling Landscape Painter 20
KNAUS, LOUIS.
Portrait of Louis Knaus 195
In great Distress 196
The Card-Players 197
The Golden Wedding 199
Behind the Scenes 201
KOBELL, WILLIAM.
A Meeting 141
KOCH, JOSEPH ANTON.
Portrait of Josef Anton Koch 231
KRAFFT, PETER.
The Soldier's Return 170
LANDSEER, SIR EDWIN.
A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society 72
The last Mourner at the Shepherd's Grave 73
High Life 74
Low Life 75
LAWRENCE, SIR THOMAS.
Mrs. Siddons 57
Princess Amelia 58
The English Mother 59
The Countess Gower 61
LEECH, JOHN.
The Children of Mr. and Mrs. Blenkinsop 11
Little Spicey and Tater Sam 11
From "Children of the Mobility" 12
LELEUX, ADOLPHE.
Mot d'ordre 181
LESLIE, CHARLES ROBERT.
Sancho and the Duchess 87
LESSING, CARL FRIEDRICH.
Portrait of Carl Friedrich Lessing 239
The Wayside Madonna 240
MACLISE, DANIEL.
Noah's Sacrifice 67
Malvolio and the Countess 68
MADOU, JEAN BAPTISTE.
In the Ale-house 172
The Drunkard 173
MARCHAL, CHARLES.
The Hiring Fair 223
MARCKE, EMILE VAN.
La Falaise 354
MARILHAT, PROSPER.
A Halt 132
DU MAURIER, GEORGE.
The Dancing Lesson 13
A Recollection of Dieppe 14
Down to Dinner 15
A Wintry Walk 16
MEISSONIER, ERNEST.
Portrait of Ernest Meissonier 101
1814 103
The Outpost 105
MEYERHEIM, FRIEDRICH EDUARD.
Portrait of Friedrich Eduard Meyerheim 157
Children at Play 158
The King of the Shooting Match 159
The Morning Hour 160
The Knitting Lesson 161
MICHEL, GEORGES.
A Windmill 262
MILLAIS, SIR JOHN EVERETT.
George du Maurier 12
MILLET, JEAN FRANÇOIS.
Portrait of Himself 361
The House at Gruchy 363
The Winnower 367
A Man making Faggots 368
The Gleaners 369
Vine-dresser Resting 371
At the Well 373
Burning Weeds 375
The Angelus 377
The Shepherdess and her Sheep 378
The Shepherd at the Pen at Nightfall 379
A Woman feeding Chickens 380
The Shepherdess 381
The Labourer Grafting a Tree 383
A Woman Knitting 384
The Rainbow 385
The Barbizon Stone 387
MONNIER, HENRI.
A Chalk Drawing 35
Joseph Proudhomme 36
MORGENSTERN, CHRISTIAN.
A Peasant Cottage (Etching) 243
MORLAND, GEORGE.
The Corn Bin 69
Going to the Fair 70
The Return from Market 71
MULLER, WILLIAM.
Prayer in the Desert 138
The Amphitheatre at Xanthus 288
MULREADY, WILLIAM.
Fair Time 88
Crossing the Ford 91
DE NEUVILLE, ALPHONSE.
Portrait of Alphonse de Neuville 107
Le Bourget 109
NEWTON, GILBERT STUART.
Yorick and the Grisette 83
OBERLÄNDER, ADOLF.
Variations on the Kissing Theme. Rethel 30
Variations on the Kissing Theme. Gabriel Max 30
Variations on the Kissing Theme. Hans Makart 31
Portrait of Adolf Oberländer 31
Variations on the Kissing Theme. Genelli 32
Variations on the Kissing Theme. Alma Tadema 32
PETTENKOFEN, AUGUST VON.
A Hungarian Village (Pencil Drawing) 224
PRELLER, FRIEDRICH.
Portrait of Friedrich Preller 235
Ulysses and Leucothea 237
RAEBURN, SIR HENRY.
Sir Walter Scott 63
RAFFET, AUGUSTE MARIE.
Portrait of Auguste Marie Raffet 96
The Parade 97
1807 98
Polish Infantry 99
The Midnight Review 100
REID, SIR GEORGE.
Portrait of Charles Keene 18
RIBOT, THÉODULE.
The Studio 429
At a Norman Inn 430
Keeping Accounts 431
St. Sebastian, Martyr 432
RICARD, GUSTAVE.
Madame de Calonne 417
RICHTER, LUDWIG.
Portrait of Ludwig Richter 24
Home 25
The End of the Day 26
Spring 27
After Work it's good to rest 28
RIEDEL, AUGUST.
The Neapolitan Fisherman's Family 124
Judith 125
ROBERT, HUBERT.
Monuments and Ruins 259
ROBERT, LEOPOLD.
Portrait of Leopold Robert 119
Fishers of the Adriatic 120
The Coming of the Reapers to the Pontine Marshes 121
ROMNEY, GEORGE.
Portrait of George Romney 55
Lady Hamilton as Euphrosyne 56
ROTTMANN, KARL.
Portrait of Karl Rottmann 232
The Coast of Sicily 233
ROUSSEAU, THÉODORE.
Portrait of Théodore Rousseau 295
Morning 296
Landscape, Morning Effect 297
The Village of Becquigny in Picardy 299
La Hutte 301
Evening 302
Sunset 303
The Lake among the Rocks at Barbizon 304
A Pond, Forest of Fontainebleau 305
ROWLANDSON, THOMAS.
Harmony 7
SCHIRMER, JOHANN WILHELM.
An Italian Landscape 241
SCHNETZ, VICTOR.
An Italian Shepherd 122
SPITZWEG, CARL.
Portrait of Carl Spitzweg 147
At the Garret Window 148
A Morning Concert 149
The Postman 151
STEVENS, ALFRED.
The Lady in Pink 413
La Bête à bon Dieu 414
The Japanese Mask 415
The Visitors 416
TASSAERT, OCTAVE.
Portrait of Octave Tassaert 182
After the Ball 183
The Orphans 184
The Suicide 185
TIDEMAND, ADOLF.
The Sectarians 167
Adorning the Bride 169
TROYON, CONSTANT.
Portrait of Constant Troyon 345
In Normandy: Cows Grazing 346
Crossing the Stream 347
The Return to the Farm 348
A Cow scratching Herself 349
TURNER, JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM.
Portrait of J. M. W. Turner 267
A Shipwreck 268
Dido building Carthage 269
Jumièges 270
Landscape with the Sun rising in a Mist 271
Venice 272
VAUTIER, BENJAMIN.
Portrait of Benjamin Vautier 202
The Conjurer 203
The Dancing Lesson 205
November 207
VERNET, HORACE.
The Wounded Zouave 93
VOLLON, ANTOINE.
Portrait of Antoine Vollon 425
A Carnival Scene 426
WALDMÜLLER, FERDINAND.
The First Step 171
WALLANDER, WILHELM.
The Return 227
WEBSTER, THOMAS.
The Rubber 85
WEST, BENJAMIN.
The Death of Nelson 64
WIERTZ, ANTOINE.
The Orphans 189
The Things of the Present as seen by Future Ages 191
The Fight round the Body of Patroclus 192
WILKIE, DAVID.
Blind-Man's-Buff 77
A Guerilla Council of War in a Spanish Posada 79
The Blind Fiddler 80
The Penny Wedding 81
The First Earring 82
DE WINT, PETER.
Nottingham 289
BOOK III
THE TRIUMPH OF THE MODERNS
CHAPTER XVI
THE DRAUGHTSMEN
Inasmuch as modern art, in the beginning of its career, held commerce
almost exclusively with the spirits of dead men of bygone ages, it had
set itself in opposition to all the great epochs that had gone before.
All works known to the history of art, from the cathedral pictures of
Stephan Lochner down to the works of the followers of Watteau, stand in
the closest relationship with the people and times amid which they have
originated. Whoever studies the works of Dürer knows his home and his
family, the Nuremberg of the sixteenth century, with its narrow lanes
and gabled houses; the whole age is reflected in the engravings of this
one artist with a truth and distinctness which put to shame those of the
most laborious historian. Dürer and his contemporaries in Italy stood in
so intimate a relation to reality that in their religious pictures they
even set themselves above historical probability, and treated the
miraculous stories of sacred tradition as if they had been commonplace
incidents of the fifteenth century. Or, to take another instance, with
what a striking realism, in the works of Ostade, Brouwer, and Steen, has
the entire epoch from which these great artists drew strength and
nourishment remained vivid in spirit, sentiment, manners, and costume.
Every man whose name has come down to posterity stood firm and unshaken
on the ground of his own time, resting like a tree with all its roots
buried in its own peculiar soil; a tree whose branches rustled in the
breeze of its native land, while the sun which fell on its blossoms and
ripened its fruits was that of Italy or Germany, of Spain or the
Netherlands, of that time; never the weak reflection of a planet that
formerly had shone in other zones.
It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this
connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to
the art of painting. It cannot be supposed that later generations will
be able to form a conception of life in the nineteenth century from
pictures produced in this period, or that these pictures will become
approximately such documents as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
possess in the works of Dürer, Bellini, Rubens, or Rembrandt. The old
masters were the children of their age to the very tips of their
fingers. They were saturated with the significance, the ideals, and the
aims of their time, and they saturated them with their own aims, ideals,
and significance. On the other hand, if any one enters a modern picture
gallery and picks out the paintings produced up to 1850, he will often
receive the impression that they belong to earlier centuries. They are
without feeling for the world around, and seem even to know nothing of
it.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE TOILETTE.]
Even David, the first of the moderns, has left no work, with the
exception of his "Marat," which has been baptized with the blood of the
French Revolution. To express the sentiment of Liberty militant he made
use of the figures of Roman heroes. The political freedom of the people,
so recently won, so fresh in men's minds, he illustrated by examples
from Roman history. At a later time, when the allied forces entered
Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he made use of the story of Leonidas
at Thermopylæ. Only in portrait painting was any kind of justice done to
modern life by the painters in "the grand style." True it is that there
lived, at the time, a few "little masters" who furtively turned out for
the market modest little pictures of the life around them, paintings of
buildings and kitchen interiors. The poor Alsatian painter _Martin
Drolling_, contemptuously designated a "dish painter" by the critics,
showed in his kitchen pictures that, in spite of David, something of the
spirit of Chardin and the great Dutchmen was still alive in French art.
But he has given his figures and his pots and pans and vegetables the
pose and hard outline of Classicism. A few of his portraits are better
and more delicate, particularly that of the actor Baptiste, with his
fine head, like that of a diplomatist. At the exhibition of 1889, this
picture, with its positive and firmly delineated characterisation, made
the appeal of a Holbein of 1802. Another "little master," _Granet_,
painted picturesque ruins, low halls, and the vaults of churches; he
studied attentively the problem of light in inner chambers, and thereby
drew upon himself the reproach of David, that "his drawing savoured of
colour." In _Leopold Boilly_ Parisian life--still like that of a country
town--and the arrival of the mail, the market, and the busy life of the
streets, found an interpreter,--_bourgeois_ no doubt, but true to his
age. In the time of the Revolution he painted a "Triumph of Marat," the
tribune of the people, who is being carried on the shoulders of his
audience from the _palais de justice_ in Paris, after delivering an
inflammatory oration. In 1807, when the exhibition of David's Coronation
picture had thrown all Paris into excitement, Boilly conceived the
notion of perpetuating in a rapid sketch the scene of the exhibition,
with the picture and the crowd pressing round it. His speciality,
however, was little portrait groups of honest _bourgeois_ in their stiff
Sunday finery. Boilly knew with accuracy the toilettes of his age, the
gowns of the actresses, and the way they dressed their heads; he cared
nothing whatever about æsthetic dignity of style, but represented each
subject as faithfully as he could, and as honestly and sincerely as
possible. For that reason he is of great historical value, but he is not
painter enough to lay claim to great artistic interest. The execution of
his pictures is petty and diffidently careful, and his neat, Philistine
painting has a suggestion of china and enamel, without a trace of the
ease and spirit with which the eighteenth century carolled over such
work. The heads of his women are the heads of dolls, and his silk looks
like steel. His forerunners are not the Dutchmen of the good periods,
Terborg and Metsu, but the contemporaries of Van der Werff. He and
Drolling and Granet were rather the last issue of the fine old Dutch
schools, rather descendants of Chardin than pioneers, and amongst the
younger men there was at first no one who ventured to sow afresh the
region which had been devastated by Classicism. Géricault certainly was
incited to his "Raft of the Medusa" not by Livy or Plutarch, but by an
occurrence of the time which was reported in the newspapers; and he
ventured to set an ordinary shipwreck in the place of the Deluge or a
naval battle, and a crew of unknown mortals in the place of Greek
heroes. But then his picture stands alone amongst the works of the
Romanticists, and is too decidedly transposed into a classical key to
count as a representation of modern life.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE NEWSVENDOR.]
[Illustration: _Baschet._ BOILLY. THE MARIONETTES.]
In its striving after movement and colour, Romanticism put forward the
picturesque and passionate Middle Ages in opposition to the stiff and
frigid neo-Greek or neo-Roman ideal; but it joined with Classicism in
despising the life of the present. Even the political excitement at the
close of the Restoration and the Revolution of July had but little
influence on the leading spirits of the time. Accustomed to look for the
elements of pictorial invention in religious myths, in the fictions of
poets, or in the events of older history, they paid no attention to the
mighty social drama enacted so near to them. The fiery spirit of
Delacroix certainly led him to paint his picture of the barricades, but
he drew his inspiration from a poet, from an ode of Auguste Barbier, and
he gave the whole an air of romance and allegory by introducing the
figure of Liberty. He lived in a world of glowing passions, amid which
all the struggles of his age seemed to have for him only a petty
material interest. For that reason he has neither directly nor
indirectly drawn on what he saw around him. He painted the soul, but not
the life of his epoch. He was attracted by Teutonic poets and by the
Middle Ages. He set art free from Greek subject-matter and Italian form,
to borrow his ideas from Englishmen and Germans and his colour from the
Flemish school. He is inscrutably silent about French society in the
nineteenth century.
[Illustration: Queen Charlotte. George III.
GILLRAY. AFFABILITY.
"Well, Friend, where a' you going, hay?--what's your name, hay?--where
d'ye live, hay?--hay?"]
And this alienation from the living world is even more noticeable in
Ingres. His "Mass of Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel" is the only one of
his many works which deals with a subject of contemporary life, and it
was blamed by the critics because it deviated so far from the great
style. As an historical painter, and when better employed as a painter
of portraits, Ingres has crystallised all the life and marrow of the
past in his icy works, and he appears in the midst of the century like a
marvellous and sterile sphinx. Nothing can be learnt from him concerning
the needs and passions and interests of living men. His own century
might writhe and suffer and struggle and bring forth new thoughts, but
he knew nothing about them, or if he did he never allowed it to be seen.
[Illustration: CRUICKSHANK. MONSTROSITIES OF 1822.]
Delaroche approached somewhat nearer to the present, for he advanced
from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century; and the
historical picture, invented by him, virtually dominated French art
under Napoleon III, in union with the dying Classicism. Even then there
was no painter who yet ventured to portray the manners and types of his
age with the fresh insight and merciless observation of Balzac. All
those scenes from the life of great cities, their fashion and their
misery, which then began to form the substance of drama and romance, had
as yet no counterpart in painting.
[Illustration: ROWLANDSON. HARMONY.]
[Illustration: BUNBURY. RICHMOND HILL.]
The Belgians preserved the same silence. During the whole maturity of
Classicism, from 1800 to 1830, François, Paelinck, van Hanselaere,
Odevaere, de Roi, Duvivier, etc., with their coloured Greek statues,
ruled the realm of figure painting as unmitigated dictators; and amongst
the historical painters who followed them, Wappers, in his "Episode,"
was the only one who drew on modern life for a subject. There was a
desire to revive Rubens. Decaisne, Wappers, de Keyzer, Bièfve, and
Gallait lit their candle at his sun, and were hailed as the holy band
who were to lead Belgian art to a glorious victory. But their original
national tendency deviated from real life instead of leading towards it.
For the sake of painting cuirasses and helmets they dragged the most
obscure national heroes to the light of day, just as the Classicists had
done with Greeks and Romans. German painting wandered through the past
with even less method, taking its material, not from native, but from
French, English, and Flemish history. From Carstens down to Makart,
German painters of influence carefully shut their eyes to reality, and
drew down the blinds so as to see nothing of the life that surged below
them in the street, with its filth and splendour, its laughter and
misery, its baseness and noble humanity. And from an historical point of
view this alienation from the world is susceptible of an easy
explanation.
[Illustration: LEECH. THE CHILDREN OF MR. AND MRS. BLENKINSOP.]
[Illustration: LEECH. LITTLE SPICEY AND TATER SAM.]
In France, as in all other countries, the end of the _ancien régime_,
the tempest of the Revolution, and the consequent modification of the
whole of life--of sentiments, habits, and ideas, of dress and social
conditions--at first implied such a sudden change in the horizon that
artists were necessarily thrown into confusion. When the monarchy
entered laughingly upon its struggle of life and death, the survivors
from the time of Louis XVI, charming "little masters" who had been great
masters in that careless and graceful epoch, were suddenly made
witnesses of a revolution more abrupt than the world had yet seen.
Savage mobs forced their way into gardens, palaces, and reception-rooms,
pike in hand, and with the red cap upon their heads. The walls echoed
with their rude speech, and plebeian orators played the part of oracles
of freedom and brotherhood like old Roman tribunes of the people. What
was there yesterday was no longer to be seen; a thick powder-smoke hung
between the past and the present. And the present itself had not yet
assumed determinate shape; it hovered, as yet unready, between the old
and the new forms of civilization. The storms of the Revolution put an
end to the comfortable security of private life. Thus it was that the
ready-made and more easily intelligible shapes and figures of a world
long buried out of sight, with which men believed themselves to have an
elective affinity, at first seemed to the artists to have an infinitely
greater value than the new forms which were in the throes of birth.
Painters became Classicists because they had not yet the courage to
venture on the ground where the century itself was going through a
process of fermentation.
[Illustration: LEECH. FROM "CHILDREN OF THE MOBILITY."]
[Illustration: _Magazine of Art._
SIR JOHN MILLAIS PINXT. GEORGE DU MAURIER.]
The Romanticists despised it, for they thought the fermenting must had
yielded flat lemonade instead of fiery wine. The artist must live in art
before he can produce art. And the more the life of nations has been
beautiful, rich, and splendid, the more nourishment and material has art
been able to derive from it. But when they came the Romanticists
found--in France as in Germany--everything, except a piece of reality
which they could deem worthy of being painted. The whole of existence
seemed to this generation so poor and bald, the costume so inartistic
and so like a caricature, the situation so hopeless and petty, that they
were unable to tolerate the portrayal of themselves either in poetry or
art. It was the time of that wistfully sought phantom which, as they
believed, was to be found only in the past. The powerful passions of the
Middle Ages were set in opposition to a flaccid period that was barren
of action.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DU MAURIER. THE DANCING LESSON.]
And then came the overwhelming pressure of the old masters. After the
forlorn condition of colouring brought about by David and Carstens, it
was so vitally necessary to restore the artistic tradition and technique
of the old masters, that it was at first thought necessary to adopt the
old subject-matter also--especially the splendid robes of the city of
the lagoons--in order to test the newly acquired secrets of the palette.
Faltering unsteadily under influences derived from the old artists,
modern painting did not yet feel itself able to create finished works of
art out of the novel elements which the century placed at its disposal.
It still needed to be carried in the arms of a Venetian or Flemish
nurse.
And æsthetic criticism bestowed its blessing on these attempts. The
Romanticists had been forced to the treatment of history and the
deification of the past by disgust with the grey and colourless present;
the younger generation were long afterwards held captive in this
province by æsthetic views of the dignity of history. To paint one's own
age was reckoned a crime. One had to paint the age of other people. For
this purpose the _prix de Rome_ was instituted. The spirit which
produced the pictures of Cabanel and Bouguereau was the same that
induced David to write to Gros, that the battles of the empire might
afford the material for occasional pictures done under the inspiration
of chance, but not for great and earnest works of art worthy of an
historical painter. That æsthetic criticism which taught that, whatever
the subject be, and whatever personages may be represented, if they
belong to the present time the picture is merely a _genre_ picture,
still held the field. Whilst the world was laughing and crying, the
painter, with the colossal power of doing everything, amused himself by
trying not to appear the child of his own time. No one perceived the
refinement and grace, the corruption and wantonness, of modern life as
it is in great cities. No one laid hold on the mighty social problems
which the growing century threw out with a seething creative force.
Whoever wishes to know how the men of the time lived and moved, what
hopes and sorrows they bore in their breasts, whoever seeks for works in
which the heart-beat of the century is alive and throbbing, must have
his attention directed to the works of the draughtsmen, to the
illustrations of certain periodicals. It was in the nineteenth century
as in the Middle Ages. As then, when painting was still an
ecclesiastical art, the slowly awakening feeling for nature, the joy of
life was first expressed in miniatures, woodcuts, and engravings, so
also the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century were the first who
set themselves with their whole strength to bring modern life and all
that it contained earnestly and sincerely within the range of art, the
first who held up the glass to their own time and gave the abridged
chronicle of their age. Their calling as caricaturists led them to
direct observation of the world, and lent them the aptitude of rendering
their impressions with ease; and that at a time when the academical
methods of depicting physiognomy obtained elsewhere in every direction.
It necessitated their representing subjects to which, in accordance with
the æsthetic views of the period, they would not otherwise have
addressed themselves; it led them to discover beauties in spheres of
life by which they would otherwise have been repelled. London, the
capital of a free people ruling in all quarters of the globe, the home
of millions, where intricate old corners and back streets left more
space than in other cities for old-fashioned "characters," for odd,
eccentric creatures and better-class charlatans of every description,
afforded a ground peculiarly favourable for caricature. In this
province, therefore, England holds the first place beyond dispute.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DU MAURIER. A RECOLLECTION OF DIEPPE.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DU MAURIER. DOWN TO DINNER.]
Direct from Hogarth come the group of political caricaturists, in whom
the sour, bilious temper of John Bull lives on in a new and improved
edition. Men like _James Gillray_ were a power in the political warfare
of their time; bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom with a
divine rage and slashing irony, while at the same time they were
masterly draughtsmen in a vehement and forceful style. The worst of it
is, that the interest excited by political caricature is always of a
very ephemeral nature. The antagonism of Pitt and Fox, Shelburne and
Burke, the avarice and stupidity of George III, the Union, the conjugal
troubles of the Prince of Wales, and the war with France, seem very
uninteresting matters in these days. On the other hand, _Rowlandson_,
who was not purely a politician, appeals to us in an intelligible
language even after a hundred years have gone by.
Like Hogarth, he was the antithesis of a humorist. Something bitter and
gloomily pessimistic runs through all he touches. He is brutal, with an
inborn power and an indecorous coarseness. His laughter is loud and his
cursing barbarous. Ear-piercing notes escape from the widely opened lips
of his singers, and the tears come thickly from the eyes of his
sentimental old ladies who are hanging on the declamation of a tragic
actress. His comedy is produced by the simplest means. As a rule any
sort of contrast is enough: fat and thin, big and little, young wife and
old husband, young husband and old wife, shying horse and helpless rider
on a Sunday out. Or else he brings the physical and moral qualities of
his figures into an absurd contrast with their age, calling, or
behaviour: musicians are deaf, dancing masters bandy-legged, servants
wear the dresscoats and orders of lords, hideous old maids demean
themselves like coquettes, parsons get drunk, and grave dignitaries of
state dance the cancan. And so, when the servant gets a thrashing, and
the coquette a refusal, and the diplomatist loses his orders by getting
a fall, it is their punishment for having forgotten their proper place.
They are all of them "careers on slippery ground," with the same
punishments as Hogarth delighted to depict. But Rowlandson became
another man when he set himself to represent the life of the people.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DU MAURIER. A WINTRY WALK.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
KEENE. FROM "OUR PEOPLE." THE PERILS OF THE DEEP.]
Born in July 1756, in a narrow alley of old London, he grew up amidst
the people. As a young man he saw Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries.
He went regularly to all clubs where there was high play. As man,
painter, and draughtsman alike, he stood in the midst of life. Street
scenes in Paris and London engage his pencil, especially scenes from
Vauxhall Gardens, the meeting-place of fashionable London, and there is
often a touch of Menzel in the palpitating life of these pictures--in
these lords and ladies, fops and ballad-singers, who pass through the
grounds of the gardens in a billowy stream. His illustrations include
everything: soldiers, navvies, life at home and in the tavern, in town
and in village, on the stage and behind the scenes, at masquerades and
in Parliament. When he died at seventy, on 22nd April 1827, the
obituaries were able to say of him with truth that he had drawn all
England in the years between 1774 and 1809. And all these leaves torn
from the life of sailors and peasants, these fairs and markets, beggars,
huntsmen, smiths, artizans, and day labourers, were not caricatures, but
sketches keenly observed and sharply executed from life. His countrymen
have at times a magnificent Michelangelesque stir of life which almost
suggests Millet. He was fond of staying at fashionable watering-places,
and came back with charming scenes from high life. But his peculiar
field of observation was the poor quarter of London. Here are the
artizans, the living machines. Endurance, persistence, and resignation
may be read in their long, dismal, angular faces. Here are the women of
the people, wasted and hectic. Their eyes are set deep in their sockets,
their noses sharp and their skin blotched with red spots. They have
suffered much and had many children; they have a sodden, depressed,
stoically callous appearance; they have borne much, and can bear still
more. And then the devastations of gin! that long train of wretched
women who of an evening prostitute themselves in the Strand to pay for
their lodging! those terrible streets of London, where pallid children
beg, and tattered spectres, either sullen or drunken, rove from
public-house to public-house, with torn linen and rags hanging about
them in shreds! The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great
cities was first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the
poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity.
But, curiously enough, this same man, who as an observer could be so
uncompromisingly sombre, and so rough and brutal as a caricaturist, had
also a wonderfully delicate feeling for feminine charm. In the pages he
has devoted to the German waltz there lives again the chivalrous
elegance of the period of Werther, and that peculiarly English grace
which is so fascinating in Gainsborough. His young girls are graceful
and wholesome in their round straw hats with broad ribbons; his pretty
little wives in their white aprons and coquettish caps recall Chardin.
One feels that he has seen Paris and appreciated the fine fragrance of
Watteau's pictures.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
SIR GEO. REID. PORTRAIT OF CHARLES KEENE.]
Mention should also be made of _Henry William Bunbury_, who excelled in
the drawing of horses and ponies. "A long Story" is an excellent example
of his powers as a caricaturist pure and simple. The variations rung on
the theme of boredom and the self-centred and animated stupidity of the
narrator have been vividly observed, and are earnestly rendered.
Rowlandson has the savage indignation of Swift; Bunbury is not savage,
but he has the same English seriousness and something of the same
brutality. The faces here are crapulous and distorted, and the subject
is treated without lightness or good-nature. Perhaps the English do not
take their pleasures so very seriously, but undoubtedly they jest in
earnest. Yet Bunbury's incisiveness and his thorough command of what it
is his design to express assure him a distinct position as an artist.
His "Richmond Hill" shows the pleasanter side of English character. The
breeze billowing in the trees, the little lady riding by on her cob, the
buxom dames in the shay, and the man spinning past on his curricle,
give the scene a spirit of life and movement, besides rendering it an
historical document of the period of social history that lies between
_The Virginians_ and _Vanity Fair_.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
KEENE. FROM "OUR PEOPLE."]
As a political caricaturist _George Cruikshank_ has the same
significance for England as Henri Monnier has for France, and the
drawings of the latter often go straight back to the great English
artist. But his first works in 1815 were children's books, and such
simple delineations from the world of childhood and the life of society
have done more to preserve his name than political caricatures. Their
touch of satire is only very slight. Cruikshank's ladies panting under
heavy chignons, his serious and exceedingly prosy dames pouring out tea
for serious and not less ceremonious gentlemen, whilst the girls are
galloping round Hyde Park on their thoroughbreds, accompanied by a
brilliant escort of fashionable young men--they are all of them not so
much caricatures as pictures freshly caught from life. He had a great
sense for toilettes, balls, and parties. And he could draw with
artistic observation and tender feeling the babbling lips and shining
eyes of children, the shy confidence of the little ones, their timid
curiosity and their bashful advances. And thus he opened up the way
along which his disciples advanced with so much success.
[Illustration: KLEIN. A TRAVELLING LANDSCAPE PAINTER.]
The style of illustration has adapted itself to the altered character of
English life. What at first constituted the originality of English
caricaturists was their mordant satire. Everything was painted in
exceedingly vivid colours. Whatever was calculated to bring out an idea
in comic or brutal relief--great heads and little bodies, an absurd
similarity between persons and animals, the afflorescence of
costume--was seized upon eagerly. These artists fought for the weary and
heavy-laden, and mercilessly lashed the cut-throats and charlatans. They
delighted in spontaneous obscenity, exuberant vigour, and undisguised
coarseness. Men were shaken by a broad Aristophanic laughter till they
seemed like epileptics. At the time when the Empire style came into
England, Gillray could dare to represent by speaking likenesses some of
the best-known London beauties, in a toilette which the well developed
Madame Tallien could not have worn with more assurance. Such things were
no longer possible when England grew out of her awkward age. After the
time of Gillray a complete change came over the spirit of English
caricature. Everything brutal or bitterly personal was abandoned. The
clown put on his dress-clothes, and John Bull became a gentleman. Even
by Cruikshank's time caricature had become serious and well-bred. And
his disciples were indeed not caricaturists at all, but addressed
themselves solely to a delicately poetic representation of subjects.
They know neither Rowlandson's innate force and bitter laughter, nor the
gallows humour and savagery of Hogarth; they are amiable and tenderly
grave observers, and their drawings are not caricatures, but charming
pictures of manners.
_Punch_, which was founded in 1841, has perhaps caught the social and
political physiognomy of England in the middle of the nineteenth century
with the greatest delicacy. It is a household paper, a periodical read
by the youngest girls. All the piquant things with which the Parisian
papers are filled are therefore absolutely excluded. It scrupulously
ignores the style of thing to which the _Journal Amusant_ owes
three-fourths of its matter. Every number contains one big political
caricature, but otherwise it moves almost entirely in the region of
domestic life. Students flirting with pretty barmaids, neat little
dressmakers carrying heavy bonnet-boxes and pursued by old
gentlemen--even these are scenes which go a little too far for the
refined tone of the paper which has been adapted to the drawing-room.
[Illustration: JOHANN CHRISTOPH ERHARD.]
Next to Cruikshank, the Nestor of caricature, must be mentioned _John
Leech_, who between 1841 and 1864 was the leading artist on _Punch_. In
his drawings there is already to be found the high-bred and fragrant
delicacy of the English painting of the present time. They stand in
relation to the whimsical and vigorous works of Rowlandson as the fine
_esprit_ of a rococo abbé to the coarse and healthy wit of Rabelais. The
mildness of his own temperament is reflected in his sketches. Others
have been the cause of more laughter, but he loved beauty and purity.
Men are not often drawn by him, or if he draws them they are always
"pretty fellows," born gentlemen. His young women are not coquettish and
_chic_, but simple, natural, and comely. The old English brutality and
coarseness have become amiable, subtle, refined, mild, and seductive in
John Leech. He is a fine and delicate spirit, who seems very ethereal
beside Hogarth and Rowlandson, those giants fed on roast-beef; he
prefers to occupy himself with sport and boating, the season and its
fashions, and is at home in public gardens, at balls, and at the
theatre. Here a pretty baby is being taken for an airing in Hyde Park by
a tidy little nurse-maid, and there on mamma's arm goes a charming
schoolgirl, who is being enthusiastically greeted by good-looking boys;
here again a young wife is sitting by the fireside with a novel in her
hand and her feet out of her slippers, while she looks dreamily at the
glimmering flame. Or a girl is standing on the shore in a large straw
hat, with her hand shading her eyes and the wind fluttering her dress.
Even his "Children of the Mobility" are little angels of grace and
purity, in spite of their rags. The background, be it room, street, or
landscape, is merely given with a few strokes, but it is of more than
common charm. Every plate of Leech has a certain fragrance and lightness
of touch and a delicacy of line which has since been attained only by
Frederick Walker. His simplicity of stroke recalls the old Venetian
woodcuts. There is not an unnecessary touch. Everything is in keeping,
everything has a significance.
[Illustration: ERHARD. A PEASANT SCENE.]
Leech's successor, _George du Maurier_, is less delicate--that is to
say, not so entirely and loftily æsthetic. He is less exclusively
poetic, but lives more in actual life, and suffers less from the raw
breath of reality. At the same time, his drawing is pithier and more
incisive; one discerns his French training. In 1857 du Maurier was a
pupil of Gleyre, and returned straight to England when Leech's place on
_Punch_ became vacant by his death. Since that time du Maurier has been
the head of the English school of drawing--of the diarists of that
society which is displayed in Hyde Park during the season, and found in
London theatres and dining-rooms, and in well-kept English pleasure
grounds, at garden parties and tennis meetings, the leaders of clubs and
drawing-rooms. His snobs rival those of Thackeray, but he has also a
special preference for the fair sex--for charming women and girls who
race about the lawn at tennis in large hats and bright dresses, or sit
by the fire in fashionable apartments, or hover through a ball-room
waltzing in their airy skirts of tulle. The coquettishness of his little
ones is entirely charming, and so too is the superior and comical
exclusiveness of his æsthetically brought-up children, who will
associate with no children not æsthetic.
[Illustration: ERHARD. A PEASANT FAMILY.]
But the works of _Charles Keene_ are the most English of all. Here the
English reveal that complete singularity which distinguishes them from
all other mortals. Both as a draughtsman and as a humorist Keene stands
with the greatest of the century, on the same level as Daumier and
Hokusai. An old bachelor, an original, a provincial living in the vast
city, nothing pleased him better than to mix with the humbler class, to
mount on the omnibus seat beside the driver, to visit a costermonger, or
sit in a dingy suburban tavern. He led a Bohemian life, and was,
nevertheless, a highly respectable, economical, and careful man. Trips
into the country and little suppers with his friends constituted his
greatest pleasures. He was a member of several glee clubs, and when he
sat at home played the Scotch bagpipes, to the horror of all his
neighbours. During his last years his only company was an old dog, to
which he, like poor Tassaert, clung with a touching tenderness. All the
less did he care about "the world." Grace and beauty are not to be
sought in his drawings. For him "Society" did not exist. As du Maurier
is the chronicler of drawing-rooms, Keene was the fine and unsurpassed
observer of the people and of humble London life, and he extended
towards them a friendly optimism and a brotherly sympathy. An endless
succession of the most various, the truest, and the most animated types
is contained in his work: mighty guardsmen swagger, cane in hand, burly
and solemn; cabmen and omnibus drivers, respectable middle-class
citizens, servants, hairdressers, the City police, waiters, muscular
Highlanders, corpulent self-made City men, the seething discontent of
Whitechapel; and here and there amidst them all incomparable old
tradesmen's wives, and big, raw-boned village landladies in the
Highlands. Keene has something so natural and self-evident in his whole
manner of expression, that no one is conscious of the art implied by
such drawing. Amongst those living in his time only Menzel could touch
him as a draughtsman, and it was not through chance that each, in spite
of their differences of temperament, greatly admired the other. Keene
bought every drawing of Menzel's that he could get, and Menzel at his
death possessed a large collection of Keene's sketches.
[Illustration: LUDWIG RICHTER.]
In the beginning of the century Germany had no draughtsmen comparable
for realistic impressiveness with Rowlandson. At a time when the great
art lay so completely bound in the shackles of the Classic school,
drawing, too, appeared only in traditional forms. The artist ventured to
draw as he liked just as little as he ventured to paint anything at all
as he saw it; for both there were rules and strait-waistcoats. Almost
everything that was produced in those years looks weak and flat to-day,
forced in composition and amateurish in drawing. Where Rowlandson with
his brusque powerful strokes recalls Michael Angelo or Rembrandt, the
Germans have something laboured, diffident, and washed out. Yet even
here a couple of unpretentious etchers rise as welcome and surprising
figures out of the tedious waste of academic production, though they
were little honoured by their contemporaries. In their homely sketches,
however, they have remained more classic than those who put on the
classical garment as if for eternity. What the painter refused to paint,
and the patrons of art who sought after ideas would not allow to count
as a picture, because the subject seemed to them too poor, and the form
too commonplace and undignified--military scenes at home and abroad,
typical and soldierly figures from the great time of the war of
Liberation, the life of the people, the events of the day--was what the
Nuremberg friends, _Johann Adam Klein_ and _Johann Christoph Erhard_,
diligently engraved upon copper with sympathetic care, and so left
posterity a picture of German life in the beginning of the century that
seems the more sincere and earnest because it has paid toll neither to
style in composition nor to idealism. This invaluable Klein was a
healthy and sincere realist, from whom the æsthetic theories of the time
recoiled without effect, and he had no other motive than to render
faithfully whatever he saw. Even in Vienna, whither he came as a young
man in 1811, it was not the picture galleries which roused him to his
first studies, but the picturesque national costumes of the Wallachians,
Poles, and Hungarians, and their horses and peculiar vehicles. A sojourn
among the country manors of Styria gave him opportunity for making a
number of pretty sketches of rural life. In the warlike years 1813 and
1814, with their marching and their bivouacs, he went about all day long
drawing amongst the soldiers. Even in Rome it was not the statues that
fascinated him, but the bright street scenes, the ecclesiastical
solemnities, and the picturesque caravans of country people. And when he
settled down in Nuremburg, and afterwards in Munich, he did not cease to
be sensitive to all impressions that forced themselves on him in varying
fulness. The basis of his art was faithful and loving observation of
life as it was around him, the pure joy the genuine artist has in making
a picture of everything he sees.
[Illustration: L. RICHTER. HOME.]
Poor Erhard, who at twenty-six ended his life by suicide, was a yet more
delicate and sensitive nature. The marching of Russian troops through
his native town roused him to his first works, and even in these early
military and canteen scenes he shows himself an exceptionally sharp and
positive observer. The costumes, the uniforms, the teams and waggons,
are drawn with decision and accuracy. From Vienna he made walking tours
to the picturesque regions of the Schneeberg, wandered through Salzburg
and Pinzgau, and gazed with wonder at the idyllic loveliness of nature
as she is in these regions, on the cosy rooms of the peasants with their
great tiled stoves and the sun-burnt figures of the country people. He
had a heart for nature, an intimate, poetic, and profound love for what
is humble and familiar--for homely meadows, trees, and streams, for
groves and hedgerows, for quiet gardens and sequestered spots. He
approached everything with observation as direct as a child's. Both
Klein and he endeavoured to grasp a fragment of nature distinctly, and
without any kind of transformation or generalisation; and this fresh,
unvarnished, thoroughly German feeling for nature gives them, rather
than Mengs and Carstens, the right to be counted as ancestors of the
newer German art.
[Illustration: L. RICHTER. THE END OF THE DAY.]
Klein and Erhard having set out in advance, others, such as Haller von
Hallerstein, L. C. Wagner, F. Rechberger, F. Moessmer, K. Wagner, E. A.
Lebschée, and August Geist, each after his own fashion, made little
voyages of discovery into the world of nature belonging to their own
country. But Erhard, who died in 1822, has found his greatest disciple
in a young Dresden master, whose name makes the familiar appeal of an
old lullaby which suddenly strikes the ear amid the bustle of the
world--in _Ludwig Richter_, familiar to all Germans. Richter himself has
designated Chodowiecki, Gessner, and Erhard as those whose contemplative
love of nature guided him to his own path. What Leech, that charming
draughtsman of the child-world, was to the English, Ludwig Richter
became for the Germans. Not that he could be compared with Leech in
artistic qualities. Beside those of the British artist his works are
like the exercises of a gifted amateur: they have a petty correctness
and a _bourgeois_ neatness of line. But Germans are quite willing to
forget the artistic point of view in relation to their Ludwig Richter.
Sunny and childlike as he is, they love him too much to care to see his
artistic failings. Here is really that renowned German "_Gemüth_" of
which others make so great an abuse.
[Illustration: L. RICHTER. SPRING.]
"I am certainly living here in a rather circumscribed fashion, but in a
very cheerful situation outside the town, and I am writing you this
letter (it is Sunday afternoon) in a shady arbour, with a long row of
rose-bushes in bloom before me. Now and then they are ruffled by a
pleasant breeze--which is also the cause of a big blot being on this
sheet, as it blew the page over." This one passage reveals the whole
man. Can one think of Ludwig Richter living in any town except Dresden,
or imagine him except in this dressing-gown, seated on a Sunday
afternoon in his shady arbour with the rose-bushes, and surrounded by
laughing children? That profound domestic sentiment which runs through
his works with a biblical fidelity of heart is reflected in the
homeliness of the artist, who has remained all his life a big,
unsophisticated child; and his autobiography, in its patriarchal
simplicity, is like a refreshing draught from a pure mountain spring.
Richter survived into the present as an original type from a time long
vanished. What old-world figures did he not see around him as a boy,
when he went about, eager for novelty, with his grandfather, the
copperplate printer, who in his leisure hours studied alchemy and the
art of producing gold, and was surrounded by an innumerable quantity of
clocks, ticking, striking, and making cuckoo notes in his dark workroom;
or as he listened to his blind, garrulous grandmother, around whom the
children and old wives of the neighbourhood used to gather to hear her
tales. That was in 1810, and two generations later, as an old man
surrounded by his grandsons, he found once more the old, merry child
life of his own home. And it was once more a fragment of the good old
times, when on Christmas Eve the little band came shouting round the
house of gingerbread from _Hansel and Gretel_ which grandfather had
built out of real gingerbread after his own drawing.
[Illustration: L. RICHTER. AFTER WORK IT'S GOOD TO REST.]
"If my art never entered amongst the lilies and roses on the summit of
Parnassus, it bloomed by the roads and banks, on the hedges and in the
meadows, and travellers resting by the wayside were glad of it, and
little children made wreaths and crowns of it, and the solitary lover of
nature rejoiced in its colour and fragrance, which mounted like a prayer
to Heaven." Richter had the right to inscribe these words in his diary
on his eightieth birthday.
Through his works there echoes a humming and chiming like the joyous cry
of children and the twitter of birds. Even his landscapes are filled
with that blissful and solemn feeling that Sunday and the spring produce
together in a lonely walk over field and meadow. The "_Gemüthlichkeit_,"
the cordiality, of German family-life, with a trait of contemplative
romance, could find such a charming interpreter in none but him, the old
man who went about in his long loose coat and had the face of an
ordinary village schoolmaster. Only he who retained to his old age that
childlike heart--to which the kingdom of heaven is given even in
art--could really know the heart of the child's world, which even at a
later date in Germany was not drawn more simply or more graciously.
His illustrations present an almost exhaustive picture of the life of
the German people at home and in the world, at work and in their
pleasure, in suffering and in joy. He follows it through all grades and
all seasons of the year. Everything is true and genuine, everything
seized from life in its fulness: the child splashing in a tub; the lad
shouting as he catches the first snowflake in his hat; the lovers seated
whispering in their cosy little chamber, or wandering arm in arm on
their "homeward way through the corn" amid the evening landscape touched
with gold; the girl at her spinning-wheel and the hunter in the forest,
the travelling journeyman, the beggar, the well-to-do Philistine. The
scene is the sitting-room or the nursery, the porch twined with vine,
the street with old-fashioned overhanging storeys and turrets, the
forest and the field with splendid glimpses into the hazy distance.
Children are playing round a great tree, labourers are coming back from
the field, or the family is taking its rest in some hour of relaxation.
A peaceful quietude and chaste purity spread over everything. Certainly
Richter's drawing has something pedantic and unemphatic, that weak,
generalising roundness which, beside the sharp, powerful stroke of the
old artists, has the spirit of a drawing-master. But what he has to give
is always influenced by delicate and loving observation, and never
stands in contradiction to truth. He does not give the whole of nature,
but neither does he give what is unnatural. He is one of the first of
Germans whose art did not spring from a negation of reality, produced by
treating it on an arbitrary system, but rested instead upon tender
reverie, transfigured into poetry. When in the fifties he stayed a
summer in pleasant Loschwitz, he wrote in his diary: "O God, how
magnificent is the wide country round, from my little place upon the
hill! So divinely beautiful, and so sensuously beautiful! The deep blue
heaven, the wide green world, the bright and fair May landscape alive
with a thousand voices."
[Illustration: WILHELM BUSCH.]
In all that generation, to whom existence seemed so sad, Ludwig Richter
is one of the few who really felt content with the earth, and held the
life around them to be the best and healthiest material for the artist.
And that is the substance of the plate to which he gave the title "Rules
of Art." A wide landscape stretches away with mighty oaks slanting down,
and a purling spring from which a young girl is drawing water, whilst a
high-road, enlivened by travellers young and old, runs over hill and
dale into the sunny distance. In the midst of this free rejoicing world
the artist is seated with his pencil. And above stands the motto written
by Richter's hand--
"Und die Sonne Homer's, siehe sie lächelt auch uns."
By the success of Richter certain disciples were inspired to tread the
same ground, although none of them equalled him in his charming human
qualities. And least of all _Oskar Pletsch_, whose self-sufficient smile
is soon recognised in all its emptiness. Everything which in Richter was
genuine and original is in him flat, laboured, and prearranged. His
landscapes, which in part are very pretty, are derived from R. Schuster;
what seems good in the children is Richter's property, and what Pletsch
contributed is the conventionality. _Albert Hendschel_ also stood on
Richter's shoulders, but his popularity is more justifiable. Even in
these days one takes pleasure in his sketch-books, in which he
immortalised the joy and sorrow of youth in such a delicious way.
[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._
OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
RETHEL.]
_Eugen Neureuther_ worked in Munich, and as an etcher revelled in the
charming play of arabesques and ornamental borders, and told of pleasant
little scenes from the life of the Bavarian people in his pretty peasant
quatrains.
[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._
OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
GABRIEL MAX.]
The rise of caricature in Germany dates from the year 1848. Though there
are extant from the first third of the century no more than a few
topical papers of no artistic importance, periodical publications, which
soon brought a large number of vigorous caricaturists into notice, began
to appear from that time, owing to the political agitations of the
period. _Kladderadatsch_ was brought out in Berlin, and _Fliegende
Blätter_ was founded in Munich, and side by side with it _Münchener
Bilderbogen_. But later generations will be referred _par excellence_ to
_Fliegende Blätter_ for a picture of German life in the nineteenth
century. What the painters of those years forgot to transmit is here
stored up: a history of German manners which could not imaginably be
more exact or more exhaustive. From the very first day it united on its
staff of collaborators almost all the most important names in their own
peculiar branch. Schwind, Spitzweg, that genial humorist, and many
others whom the German people will not forget, won their spurs here, and
were inexhaustible in pretty theatre scenes, satires on German and
Italian singing, memorial sketches of Fanny Elsler, of the inventor of
the dress coat, etc., which enlivened the whole civilized world at that
time. This elder generation of draughtsmen on _Fliegende Blätter_ were,
indeed, not free from the guilt of producing stereotyped figures. The
travelling Englishman, the Polish Jew, the counter-jumper, the young
painter, the rich boor, the stepmother, the housemaid, and the nervous
countess are everywhere the same in the first volumes. In caricature,
just as in "great art," they still worked a little in accordance with
rules and conventions. To observe life with an objective unprejudiced
glance, and to hold it fast in all its palpitating movement, was
reserved for men of later date.
[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._
OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
HANS MAKART.]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ ADOLF OBERLÄNDER.]
Two of the greatest humorists of the world in illustrative art, _Wilhelm
Busch_ and _Adolf Oberländer_, stand at the head of those who ushered in
the flourishing period of German caricature. They are masters, and take
in with their glance the entire social world of our time, and in their
brilliant prints they have made a history of civilisation for the epoch
which will be more vivid and instructive for posterity than the most
voluminous works of the greatest historians. Their heads are known by
Lenbach's pictures. One has an exceptionally clever, expressive
countenance--a thorough painter's head. The humorist may be recognised
by the curious narrowing of one eye, the well-known eye of the humorist
that sees everything, proves everything, and holds fast every absurdity
in the gestures, every eccentricity in the bearing of his neighbour.
That is Wilhelm Busch.
[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._
OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
GENELLI.]
[Illustration: _Braun, Munich._
OBERLÄNDER. VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
ALMA TADEMA.]
In the large orbs of the other--orbs which seem to grow strangely wide
by long gazing as at some fixed object--there is no smile of deliberate
mischief, and it is not easy to associate the name of Oberländer with
this Saturnian round face, with its curiously timid glance. One is
reminded of the definition of humour as "smiling amid tears."
Even in those days when he came every year to Munich and painted in
Lenbach's studio, Busch was a shy and moody man, who thawed only in the
narrowest circle of his friends: now he has buried himself in a
market-town in the province of Hanover, in Wiedensahl, which, according
to Ritter's _Gazetteer_, numbers eight hundred and twenty-eight
inhabitants. He lives in the house of his brother-in-law, the clergyman
of the parish, and gives himself up to the culture of bees. His laughter
has fallen silent, and it is only a journal on bees that now receives
contributions from his hand. But what works this hermit of Wiedensahl
produced in the days when he migrated from Düsseldorf and Antwerp to
Munich, and began in 1859 his series of sketches for _Fliegende
Blätter_! The first were stiff and clumsy, the text in prose and not
particularly witty. But the earliest work with a versified text, _Der
Bauer und der Windmüller_, contains in the germ all the qualities which
later found such brilliant expression in _Max und Moritz_, in _Der
Heilige Antonius_, _Die Fromme Helene_, and _Die Erlebnisse Knopps,_
_des Junggesellen_, and made Busch's works an inexhaustible fountain of
mirth and enjoyment.
Busch unites an uncommonly sharp eye with a marvellously flexible hand.
Wild as his subjects generally are, he solves the greatest difficulties
as easily as though they were child's play. His heroes appear in
situations of the most urgent kind, which place their bodily parts in
violent and exceedingly uncomfortable positions: they thrash others or
get thrashed themselves, they stumble or fall. And in what a masterly
way are all these anomalies seized, the boldest foreshortenings and the
most flying movements! Untrained eyes see only a scrawl, but for those
who know how to look, a drawing by Busch is life itself, freed from all
unnecessary detail, and marked down in its great characteristic lines.
And amid all this simplification, what knowledge there is under the
guise of carelessness, and what fine calculation! Busch is at once
simpler and more inventive than the English. With a maze of flourishes
run half-mad, and a few points and blotches, he forms a sparkling
picture. With the fewest possible means he hits the essential point, and
for that reason he is justly called by Grand Cartaret the classic of
caricaturists, _le roi de la charge et la bouffonnerie_.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DEBUCOURT. IN THE KITCHEN.]
_Oberländer_, without whom it would be impossible to imagine _Fliegende
Blätter_, has not fallen silent. He works on, "fresh and splendid as on
the first day." A gifted nature like Busch, he possesses, at the same
time, that fertility of which Dürer said: "A good painter is inwardly
complete and opulent, and were it possible for him to live eternally,
then by virtue of those inward ideas of which Plato writes he would be
always able to pour something new into his works." It is now thirty
years ago that he began his labours for _Fliegende Blätter_, and since
that time some drawing of his, which has filled every one with delight,
has appeared almost every week. Kant said that Providence has given men
three things to console them amid the miseries of life--hope, sleep, and
laughter. If he is right, Oberländer is amongst the greatest benefactors
of mankind. Every one of his new sketches maintains the old precious
qualities. It might be said that, by the side of the comedian Busch,
Oberländer seems a serious psychologist. Wilhelm Busch lays his whole
emphasis on the comical effects of simplicity; he knows how to reduce an
object in a masterly fashion to its elemental lines, which are comic in
themselves by their epigrammatic pregnancy. He calls forth peals of
laughter by the farcical spirit of his inventions and the boldness with
which he renders his characters absurd. He is also the author of his own
letterpress. His drawings are unimaginable without the verse, without
the finely calculated and dramatic succession of situations growing to a
catastrophe. Oberländer gets his effect purely by means of the pictorial
elements in his representation, and attains a comical result, neither by
the distorted exaggeration of what is on the face of the matter
ridiculous, nor by an elementary simplification, but by a refined
sharpening of character. It seems uncanny that a man should have such
eyes in his head; there is something almost visionary in the way he
picks out of everything the determining feature of its being. And whilst
he faintly exaggerates what is characteristic and renders it distinct,
his picture is given a force and power of conviction to which no
previous caricaturist has attained, with so much discretion at the same
time. No one has attained the drollness of Oberländer's people, animals,
and plants. He draws _à la_ Max, _à la_ Makart, Rethel, Genelli, or
Piloty, hunts in the desert or theatrical representations, Renaissance
architecture run mad or the most modern European mashers. He is as much
at home in the Cameroons as in Munich, and in transferring the droll
scenes of human life to the animal world he is a classic. He sports with
hens, herrings, dogs, ducks, ravens, bears, and elephants as Hokusai
does with his frogs. Beside such animals all the Reinecke series of
Wilhelm Kaulbach look like "drawings from the copybook of little
Moritz." And landscapes which in their tender intimacy of feeling seem
like anticipations of Cazin sometimes form the background of these
creatures. One can scarcely err in supposing that posterity will place
certain plates from the work of this quiet, amiable man beside the best
which the history of drawing has anywhere to show.
[Illustration: DEBUCOURT. THE PROMENADE.]
The _Charivari_ takes its place with _Punch_ and _Fliegende Blätter_.
In the land of Rabelais also caricature has flourished since the opening
of the century, in spite of official masters who reproached her with
desecrating the sacred temple of art, and in spite of the gendarmes who
put her in gaol. Here, too, it was the draughtsmen who first broke with
æsthetic prejudices, and saw the laughing and the weeping dramas of life
with an unprejudiced glance.
Debucourt and Carle Vernet, the pair who made their appearance
immediately after the storms of the Revolution, are alike able and
charming artists, who depict the pleasures of the salon in a graceful
style; and they rival the great satirists on the other side of the
Channel in the incisiveness of their drawing, and frequently even
surpass them by the added charm of colour.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
MONNIER. A CHALK DRAWING.]
_Carle Vernet_, originally an historical painter, remembered that he had
married the daughter of the younger Moreau, and set himself to portray
the doings of the _jeunesse dorée_ of the end of the eighteenth century
in his _incroyables_ and his _merveilleuses_. Crazy, eccentric, and
superstitious, he divided his time afterwards between women and his
club-fellows, horses and dogs. He survives in the history of art as the
chronicler of sport, hunting, racing, and drawing-room and café scenes.
_Louis Philibert Debucourt_ was a pupil of Vien, and had painted _genre_
pictures in the spirit of Greuze before he turned in 1785 to colour
engraving. In this year appeared the pretty "Menuet de la Mariée," with
the peasant couples dancing, and the dainty châtelaine who laughingly
opens the ball with the young husband. After that he had found his
specialty, and in the last decade of the eighteenth century he produced
the finest of his colour engravings. In 1792 there is the wonderful
promenade in the gallery of the Palais Royal, with its swarming crowd of
young officers, priests, students, shop-girls, and _cocottes_; in 1797
"Grandmother's Birthday," "Friday Forenoon at the Parisian Bourse," and
many others. The effects of technique which he achieved by means of
colour engraving are surprising. A freshness like that of water colour
lies on these yellow straw hats, lightly rouged cheeks, and rosy
shoulders. To white silk cloaks trimmed with fur he gives the
iridescence of a robe by Netscher. If there survived nothing except
Debucourt from the whole art of the eighteenth century, he would alone
suffice to give an idea of the entire spirit of the time. Only one note
would be wanting, the familiar simplicity of Chardin. The smiling grace
of Greuze, the elegance of Watteau, and the sensuousness of Boucher--he
has them all, although they are weakened in him, and precisely by his
affectation is he the true child of his epoch. The crowd which is
promenading beneath the trees of the Palais Royal in 1792 is no longer
the same which fills the drawing-rooms of Versailles and Petit Trianon
in the pages of Cochin. The faces are coarser and more plebeian. Red
waistcoats with _breloques_ as large as fists, and stout canes with
great gold tops, make the costume of the men loud and ostentatious,
while eccentric hats, broad sashes, and high coiffures bedizen the
ladies more than is consistent with elegance. At the same time,
Debucourt gives this democracy an aristocratic bearing. His prostitutes
look like duchesses. His art is an attenuated echo of the _rococo_
period. In him the _décadence_ is embodied, and all the grace and
elegance of the century is once more united, although it has become more
_bourgeois_.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MONNIER. JOSEPH PROUDHOMME.]
The Empire again was less favourable to caricature. Not that there was
any want of material, but the censorship kept a strict watch over the
welfare of France. Besides, the artists who made their appearance after
David lived on Olympus, and would have nothing to do with the common
things of life. Neither draughtsmen nor engravers could effect anything
so long as they saw themselves overlooked by a Greek or Roman phantom as
they bent over their paper or their plate of copper, and felt it their
duty to suggest the stiff lines of antique statues beneath the folds of
modern costume.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ HONORÉ DAUMIER.]
_Bosio_ was the genuine product of this style. Every one of his pictures
has become tedious, because of a spurious classicism to which he adhered
with inflexible consistency. He cannot draw a grisette without seeing
her with David's eyes. It deprives his figures of truth and interest.
Something of the correctness of a schoolmistress is peculiar to them.
His grace is too classic, his merriment too well-bred, and everything in
them too carefully arranged to give the idea of scenes rapidly depicted
from life. Beauty of line is offered in place of spontaneity of
observation, and even the character of the drawing is lost in a pedantic
elegance which envelopes everything with the uniformly graceful veil of
an insipidly fluent outline.
As soon as Romanticism had broken with the classic system, certain great
draughtsmen, who laid a bold hand on modern life without being shackled
by æsthetic formulæ, came to the front in France. _Henri Monnier_, the
eldest of them, was born a year after the proclamation of the Empire.
Cloaks, plumes, and sabretasches were the first impressions of his
youth; he saw the return of triumphant armies and heard the fanfare of
victorious trumpets. The Old Guard remained his ideal, the inglorious
kingship of the Restoration his abhorrence. He was a supernumerary clerk
in the Department of Justice when in 1828 his first brochure, _Moeurs
administratives dessinées d'aprés nature par Henri Monnier_, disclosed
to his superiors that the eyes of this poor young man in the service of
the Ministry had seen more than they should have done. Dismissed from
his post, he was obliged to support himself by his pencil, and became
the chronicler of the epoch. In Monnier's prints breathes the happy
Paris of the good old times, a Paris which in these days scarcely exists
even in the provinces. His "Joseph Proudhomme," from his shoe-buckles to
his stand-up collar, from his white cravat to his blue spectacles, is as
immortal as _Eisele und Beisele_, _Schulze und Müller_, or Molière's
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Monnier himself is his own Proudhomme. He is
the Philistine in Paris, enjoying little Parisian idylls with a
_bourgeois_ complacency. With him there is no distinction between
beautiful and ugly; he finds that everything in nature can be turned to
account. How admirably the different worlds of Parisian society are
discriminated in his _Quartiers de Paris_! How finely he has portrayed
the grisette of the period, with her following of young tradesmen and
poor students! As yet she has not blossomed into the fine lady, the
luxurious _blasée_ woman of the next generation. She is still the
bashful _modiste_ or dressmaker's apprentice whose outings in the
country are described by Paul de Kock, a pretty child in a short skirt
who lives in an attic and dresses up only when she goes to the theatre
or into the country on a Sunday. Monnier gives her an air of
good-nature, something delightfully childlike. In the society of her
adorers she is content with the cheapest pleasures, drinks cider and
eats cakes, rides on a donkey or breakfasts amid the trees, and hardly
coquets at all when a fat old gentleman follows her on the boulevards.
These innocent flirtations remind one as little of the more recent
_lorettes_ of Gavarni as these in their turn anticipate the drunken
street-walkers of Rops.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DAUMIER. THE CONNOISSEURS.]
Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature,
the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it.
It never raised its head more proudly than under the _bourgeois_ king,
whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for
his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt
more terrible blows. Charles Philippon's famous journal _La Caricature_
was the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the "July
government"; it was equally feared by the Ministry, the _bourgeoisie_,
and the throne. When the _Charivari_ followed _La Caricature_ in 1832,
political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of
manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a
facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion.
French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principally
_Daumier_ and _Gavarni_ for being brought gradually within the sphere of
artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet
they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long
years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great
history, which embraced thousands of chapters--at a true zoology of the
human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white,
proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists
who merit a place beside the greatest.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DAUMIER. THE MOUNTEBANKS.
(_By permission of M. Eugène Montrosier, the owner of the picture._)]
When in his young days Daubigny trod the pavement of the Sistine Chapel
in Rome, he is said to have exclaimed in astonishment, "That looks as if
it had been done by Daumier!" and from that time Daumier was aptly
called the Michael Angelo of caricature. Even when he is laughing there
is a Florentine inspiration of the terrible in his style, a grotesque
magnificence, a might suggestive of Buonarotti. In the period before
1848 he dealt the constitutional monarchy crushing blows by his
drawings. "Le Ventre legislatif" marks the furthest point to which
political caricature ever ventured in France. But when he put politics
on one side and set himself free from Philippon, this same man made the
most wonderful drawings from life. His "Robert Macaire" giving
instructions to his clerk as a tradesman, sending his patients
exorbitant bills as doctor to the poor, lording it over the bourse as
banker, taking bribes as juryman, and fleecing a peasant as land-agent,
is the incarnation of the _bourgeois_ monarchy, a splendid criticism on
the money-grubbing century. Politicians, officials, artists, actors,
honest citizens, old-clothes-mongers, newspaper-boys, impecunious
painters, the most various and the basest creatures are treated by his
pencil, and appear on pages which are often terrible in their depth and
truthfulness of observation. The period of Louis Philippe is accurately
portrayed in these prints, every one of which belongs to the great
volume of the human tragicomedy. In his "Émotions parisiennes" and
"Bohémiens de Paris" he deals with misfortune, hunger, the impudence of
vice, and the horror of misery. His "Histoire ancienne" ridiculed the
absurdity of Classicism _à la_ David at a time when it was still
regarded as high treason to touch this sacred fane. These modern figures
with the classical pose, which to some extent parodied David's pictures,
were probably what first brought his contemporaries to a sense of the
stiffness and falsity of the whole movement; and at a later period
Offenbach also contributed his best ideas with much the same result.
Moreover, Daumier was a landscape-painter of the first order. No one has
more successfully rendered the appearance of bridges and houses, of
quays and streets under a downpour, of nature enfeebled as it is in the
precincts of Paris. He was an instantaneous photographer without a
rival, a physiognomist such as Breughel was in the sixteenth century,
Jan Steen and Brouwer in the seventeenth, and Chodowiecki in the
eighteenth, with the difference that his drawing was as broad and
powerful as Chodowiecki's was delicate and refined. This inborn force of
line, suggestive of Jordaens, places his sketches as high, considered as
works of art, as they are invaluable as historical documents. The
treatment is so summary, the outline so simplified, the pantomime,
gesticulation, and pose always so expressive; and Daumier's influence on
several artists is beyond doubt. Millet, the great painter of peasants,
owes much to the draughtsman of the _bourgeois_. Precisely what
constitutes his "style," the great line, the simplification, the
intelligent abstention from anecdotic trifles, are things which he
learnt from Daumier.
During the years when he drew for the _Charivari_, _Gavarni_ was the
exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the
other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and
almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly
flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with
Rabelais; Gavarni, the _spirituel_ journalist of the _grand monde_ and
the _demi-monde_, the draughtsman of elegance and of _roués_ and
_lorettes_, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in
Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from
the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the
conduct of a fashion journal, _Les Gens du Monde_, and began it with a
series of drawings from the life of the _jeunesse dorée_: _les
Lorettes_, _les Actrices_, _les Fashionables_, _les Artistes_, _les
Étudiants de Paris_, _les Bals masqués_, _les Souvenirs du Carnaval_,
_la Vie des Jeunes Hommes_. A new world was here revealed with bold
traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy,
quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in
the management of their household, and who go to market and take their
husband's place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are
piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft
velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in the _cabinet particulier_,
and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon
crystal mirrors.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DAUMIER. IN THE ASSIZE COURT.]
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
DAUMIER. "LA VOILÀ ... MA MAISON DE CAMPAGNE."]
Gavarni was the first who seized the worldly side of modern life; he
portrayed elegant figures full of _chic_, and gave them a garb which
fitted them exactly. In his own dress he had a taste for what was
dandified, and he plunged gaily into the enjoyment of the Parisian life
which eddied around in a whirl of pleasure. The present generation feels
that the air in such old journals of fashion is heavy. In every work of
art there is, in addition to what endures, a fine perfume that
evaporates after a certain number of years, and is no longer perceptible
to those who come afterwards. What is fresh and modern to-day looks
to-morrow like the dried flowers which the botanist keeps in a
herbarium. And those who draw the fashions of their age are specially
liable to this swift decay. Thus many of Gavarni's lithographs have the
effect of pallid pictures of a vanished world. But the generation of
1830 honoured in him the same _charmeur_, the same master of enamoured
grace, which that of 1730 had done in Watteau. He was sought after as an
inventor of fashions, whom the tailor Humann, the Worth of the "July
Monarchy," regarded as his rival. He was the discoverer of all the fairy
costumes which formed the chief attraction at masquerades and theatres,
the delicate _gourmet_ of the eternal feminine; and having dangled much
after women, he knew how to render the wave of a petticoat, the
seductive charm of a well-proportioned leg, and the coquettishness of a
new _coiffure_ with the most familiar connoisseurship. He has been
called the Balzac of draughtsmen. And the sentences at the bottom of his
sketches, for which he is also responsible, are as audacious as the
pictures themselves. Thus, when the young exquisite in the series "La
Vie des Jeunes Hommes" stands with his companion before a skeleton in
the anthropological museum, the little woman opines with a shudder,
"When one thinks that this is a man, and that women love _that_"!
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
DAUMIER. MENELAUS THE VICTOR.]
But that is only one side of the sphinx. He is only half known when one
thinks only of the draughtsman of ladies' fashions who celebrated the
free and easy graces of the _demi-monde_ and the wild licence of the
carnival. At bottom Gavarni was not a frivolous butterfly, but an artist
of a strangely sombre imagination, a profound and melancholy philosopher
who had a prescience of all the mysteries of life. All the mighty
problems which the century produced danced before his spirit like
spectral notes of interrogation.
The transition was made when, as an older man, he depicted the cold,
sober wakening that follows the wild night. _Constantin Guys_ had
already worked on these lines. He was an unfortunate and ailing man, who
passed his existence, like Verlaine, in hospital, and died in an
almshouse. Guys has not left much behind him, but in that little he
shows himself the true forerunner of the moderns, and it is not a mere
chance that Baudelaire, the ancestor of the _décadence_, established
Guys' memory. These women who wander aimlessly about the streets with
weary movements and heavy eyes deadened with absinthe, and who flit
through the ball-room like bats, have nothing of the innocent charm of
Monnier's grisettes. They are the uncanny harbingers of death, the
demoniacal brides of Satan. Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which
brought into being his _Invalides du sentiment_, his _Lorettes
vieilles_, and his _Fourberies de femmes_. "The pleasure of all
creatures is mingled with bitterness." The frivolous worldling became a
misanthrope from whom no secret of the foul city was hidden; a pessimist
who had begun to recognise the human brute, the swamp-flower of
over-civilisation, the "bitter fruit which is inwardly full of ashes,"
in the queen of the drawing-room as in the prostitute of the gutter.
Henceforth he only recognises a love whose pleasures are to be reckoned
amongst the horrors of death. His works could be shown to no lady, and
yet they are in no sense frivolous: they are terrible and puritanic.
If Daumier by preference showed mastery in his men, Gavarni showed it in
his women as no other has done. He is not the powerful draughtsman that
Daumier is; he has not the feeling for large movement, but with what
terrible directness he analyses faces! He has followed woman through all
seasons of life and in every grade, from youth to decay, and from
brilliant wealth to filthy misery, and he has written the story of the
_lorette_ in monumental strophes: café chantant, villa in the Champs
Elysées, equipage, grooms, Bois de Boulogne, procuress, garret, and
radish-woman, that final incarnation which Victor Hugo called the
sentence of judgment.
[Illustration: GAVARNI.]
And Gavarni went further on this road. His glance became sharper and
sharper, and the seriousness of meditation subdued his merriment; he
came to the study of his age with the relentless knife of a
vivisectionist. Fate had taught him the meaning of the struggle for
existence. A journal he had founded in the thirties overwhelmed him with
debts. In 1835 he sat in the prison of Clichy, and from that time he
meditated on the miserable, tattered creatures whom he saw around him,
with other eyes. He studied the toiling masses, and roamed about in
slums and wine-caves amongst pickpockets and bullies. And what Paris had
not yet revealed to him, he learnt in 1849 in London. Even there he was
not the first-comer. Géricault, who as early as 1821 dived into the
misery of the vast city, and brought out a series of lithographs, showed
him the way. Beggars cowering half dead with exhaustion at a baker's
door, ragged pipers slouching round deserted quarters of the town, poor
crippled women wheeled in barrows by hollow-eyed men past splendid
mansions and surrounded by the throng of brilliant equipages--these are
some of the scenes which he brought home with him from London. But
Gavarni excels him in trenchant incisiveness. "What is to be seen in
London gratis," runs the heading of a series of sketches in which he
conjures up on paper, in such a terrible manner, the new horrors of this
new period: the starvation, the want, and the measureless suffering that
hides itself with chattering teeth in the dens of the great city. He
went through Whitechapel from end to end, and studied its drunkenness
and its vice. How much more forcible are his beggars than those of
Callot! The grand series of "Thomas Vireloque" is a dance of death in
life; and in it are stated all the problems which have since disturbed
our epoch. By this work Gavarni has come down to us as a contemporary,
and by it he has become a pioneer. The enigmatical figure of "Thomas
Vireloque" starts up in these times, following step by step in the path
of his prototype: he is the philosopher of the back streets, the ragged
scoundrel with dynamite in his pocket, the incarnation of the _bête
humaine_, of human misery and human vice. Here Gavarni stands far above
Hogarth and far above Callot. The ideas on social politics of the first
half of the century are concentrated in "Thomas Vireloque."
[Illustration: _Baschet._
GAVARNI. THOMAS VIRELOQUE.]
Of course the assumption of government by Napoleon III marked a new
phase in French caricature. It became more mundane and more highly
civilised. All the piquancy and brilliance, waywardness and corruption,
looseness and amenity, mirth and affectation of this refined city life,
which in those days threw its dazzling splendour over all Europe, found
intelligent and subtle interpreters in the young generation of
draughtsmen. The _Journal pour rire_ comes under consideration as the
leading paper. It was founded in 1848, and in 1856 assumed the title of
_Journal amusant_, under which it is known at the present day.
[Illustration: _Hetzel, Paris._
GAVARNI. FOURBERIES DE FEMMES.
_Au premier Mosieu._--"Attendez-moi ce soir, de quatre à cinq heures,
quai de l'Horloge du Palais.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."
_Au deuxième Mosieu._--"Ce soir, quai des Lunettes, entre quatre et
cinq heures.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."
_Au troisième Mosieu._--"Quai des Morfondus, ce soir, de quatre heures
à cinq.--_Votre_ AUGUSTINE."
_À un quatrième Mosieu._--"Je t'attends ce soir, à quatre
heures.--_Ton_ AUGUSTINE."]
_Gustave Doré_, to the lessening of his importance, moved on this ground
only in his earliest period. He was barely sixteen and still at school
in his native town Burg, in Alsace, when he made an agreement with
Philippon, who engaged him for three years on the _Journal pour rire_.
His first drawings date from 1844: "Les animaux socialistes," which were
very suggestive of Grandville, and "Désagréments d'un voyage
d'agrément"--something like the German _Herr und Frau Buchholz in der
Schweiz_--which made a considerable sensation by their grotesque wit. In
his series "Les différents publics de Paris" and "La Ménagerie
Parisienne" he represented with an incisive pencil the opera, the
_Théâtre des Italiens_, the circus, the _Odéon_ and the _Jardin des
Plantes_. But since that time the laurels of historical painting have
given him no rest. He turned away from his own age as well as from
caricature, and made excursions into all zones and all periods. He
visited the Inferno with Dante, lingered in Palestine with the
patriarchs of the Old Testament, and ran through the world of wonders
with Perrault. The facility of his invention was astonishing, and so too
was the aptness with which he seized for illustration on the most vivid
scenes from all authors. But he has too much Classicism to be
captivating for very long. His compositions dazzle by an appearance of
the grand style, but attain only an outward and scenical effect. His
figures are academic variations of types originally established by the
Greeks and the Cinquescentisti. He forced his talent when he soared into
regions where he could not stand without the support of his
predecessors. Even in his "Don Quixote" the figures lose in character
the larger they become. Everything in Doré is calligraphic, judicious,
without individuality, without movement and life, composed in accordance
with known rules. There is a touch of Wiertz in him, both in his
imagination and in his design, and his youthful works, such as the
"Swiss Journey," in which he merely drew from observation without
pretensions to style, will probably last the longest.
In broad lithographs and charming woodcuts, _Cham_ has been the most
exhaustive in writing up the diary of modern Parisian life during the
period 1848-78. The celebrated caricaturist--he has been called the most
brilliant man in France under Napoleon III--had worked in the studio of
Delaroche at the same time as Jean François Millet. After 1842 he came
forward as Cham (his proper name was Count Amadée de Noë) with drawings
which soon made him the artist most in demand on the staff of the
_Charivari_. Neither so profound nor so serious as Gavarni, he has a
constant sparkle of vivacity, and is a draughtsman of wonderful _verve_.
In his reviews of the month and of the year, everything which interested
Paris in the provinces of invention and fashion, art and literature,
science and the theatre, passes before us in turn: the omnibuses with
their high imperials, table-turning and spirit-rapping, the opening of
the _Grands Magasins du Louvre_, Madame Ristori, the completion of the
Suez Canal, the first newspaper kiosks, New Year's Day in Paris, the
invention of ironclads, the tunnelling of Mont Cenis, Gounod's _Faust_,
Patti and Nilsson, the strike of the tailors and hat-makers, jockeys and
racing. Everything that excited public attention had a close observer
in Cham. His caricatures of the works of art in the Salon were full of
spirit, and the International Exhibition of 1867 found in him its
classic chronicler. Here all the mysterious Paris of the third Napoleon
lives once more. Emperors and kings file past, the band of Strauss
plays, gipsies are dancing, equipages roll by, and every one lives,
loves, flirts, squanders money, and whirls round in a maëlstrom. But the
end of the exhibition betokened the end of all that splendour. In Cham's
plates which came next one feels that there is thunder in the air.
Neither fashions nor theatres, neither women nor pleasure, could prevent
politics from predominating more and more: the fall of Napoleon was
drawing near.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
GAVARNI. PHÈDRE AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.]
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
GAVARNI. "CE QUI ME MANQUE À MOI? UNE 'TITE MÈRE COMME ÇA, QU'AURAIT
SOIN DE MON LINGE."]
There was a greater division of labour amongst those who followed Cham,
since one chose "little women" as a speciality, another the theatre,
and another high-life. Assisted by photography, _Nadar_ turned again to
portraiture, which had been neglected since Daumier, and enjoyed a great
success with his series "Les Contemporains de Nadar." _Marcellin_ is the
first who spread over his sketches from the world of fashions and the
theatre all the _chic_ and fashionable glitter which lives in the novels
of those years. He is the chronicler of the great world, of balls and
_soirées_; he shows the opera and the _Théâtre des Italiens_, tells of
hunting and racing, attends the drives in the Corso, and at the call of
fashion promptly deserts the stones of Paris to look about him in
châteaux and country-houses, seaside haunts in France, and the little
watering-places of Germany, where the gaming-tables formed at that time
the rendezvous of well-bred Paris. Baden-Baden, where all the lions of
the day, the politicians and the artists and all the beauties of the
Paris salons, met together in July, offered the draughtsman a specially
wide field for studies of fashion and _chic_. Here began the series
"Histoires des variations de la mode depuis le XVI siècle jusqu'à nos
jours." In a place where all classes of society, the great world and the
_demi-monde_, came into contact, Marcellin could not avoid the latter,
but even when he verged on this province he always knew how to maintain
a correct and distinguished bearing. He was peculiarly the draughtsman
of "society," of that brilliant, pleasure-loving, tainted, and yet
refined society of the Second Empire which turned Paris into a great
ball-room.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
GUYS. STUDY OF A WOMAN.]
_Randon_ is as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is
the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his "squad,"
or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M.
Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: "Let
the little ones come to me with their nurses." His province includes
everything that has nothing to do with _chic_. The whole life of the
Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more
important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been
transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did
not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and
Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he
observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets
and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being
piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to
anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks--everywhere there is as much life
in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and
man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of
curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and
marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things
possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger.
Soon afterwards there came _Hadol_, who made his début in 1855, with
pictures of the fashions; _Stop_, who specially represented the
provinces and Italy; _Draner_, who occupied himself with the Parisian
ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls.
_Léonce Petit_ drew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a
simple, familiar fashion--the mortal tedium of little towns, poor
villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the
house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of
the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The
trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into
the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is
pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a
great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty,
meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome
existence of the peasant folk.
[Illustration: _Journal Amusant._
GRÉVIN. NOS PARISIENNES.
"Tiens! ne me parle pas de lui, je ne peux pas le souffrir, même en
peinture!"
"Cependant, s'il t'offrait de t'epouser?"
"Ça, c'est autre chose."]
_Andrieux_ and _Morland_ discovered the _femme entretenue_, though
afterwards her best known delineator was _Grévin_, an able, original,
facile, and piquant draughtsman, whom some--exaggerating beyond a
doubt--called the direct successor of Gavarni. Grévin's women are a
little monotonous, with their ringleted chignons, their expressionless
eyes which try to look big, their perverse little noses, their defiant,
pouting lips, and the cheap toilettes which they wear with so much
_chic_. But they too have gone to their rest with the grisettes of
Monnier and Gavarni, and have left the field to the women of Mars and
Forain. In these days Grévin's work seems old-fashioned, since it is no
longer modern and not yet historical; nevertheless it marks an epoch,
like that of Gavarni. The _bals publics_, the _bals de l'Opéra_, those
of the _Jardin Mabille_, the _Closerie des Lilas_, the races, the
promenades in the _Bois de Vincennes_, the seaside resorts, all places
where the _demi-monde_ pitched its tent in the time of Napoleon III,
were also the home of the artist. "How they love in Paris" and "Winter
in Paris" were his earliest series. His finest and greatest drawings,
the scenes from the Parisian hotels and "The English in Paris," appeared
in 1867, the year of the Exhibition. His later series, published as
albums--"Les filles d'Ève," "Le monde amusant," "Fantaisies
parisiennes," "Paris vicieux," "La Chaîne des Dames"--are a song of
songs upon the refinements of life.
It does not lie within the plan of this book to follow the history of
drawing any further. Our intention was merely to show that painting had
to follow the path trodden by Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Erhard and
Richter, Daumier and Gavarni, if it was to be art of the nineteenth
century, and not to remain for ever dependent on the old masters.
Absolute beauty is not good food for art; to be strong it must be
nourished on the ideas of the century. When the world had ceased to draw
inspiration from the masterpieces of the past merely with the object of
depicting by their aid scenes out of long-buried epochs, there was for
the first time a prospect that mere discipleship would be overcome, and
that a new and original painting would be developed through the fresh
and independent study of nature. The passionate craving of the age had
to be this: to feel at home on the earth, in this long-neglected world
of reality, which hides the unsuspected treasure of vivid works of art.
The rising sun is just as beautiful now as on the first day, the streams
flow, the meadows grow green, the vibrating passions are at war now as
in other times, the immortal heart of nature still beats beneath its
rough covering, and its pulsation finds an echo in the heart of man. It
was necessary to descend from ideals to existing fact, and the world had
to be once more discovered by painters as in the days of the first
Renaissance. The question was how by the aid of all the devices of
colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases
and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure,
the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the
quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire
natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to
nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the
English to the French and German painters.
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
ROMNEY. SERENA.]
CHAPTER XVII
ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850
"The English school has an advantage over others in being young: its
tradition is barely a century old, and, unlike the Continental schools,
it is not hampered by antiquated Greek and Latin theories. What
fortunate conditions it has for breaking away into really modern work!
whereas in other nations the weight of tradition presses hard on the
boldest innovators. The English do not look back; on the contrary, they
look into life around them." So wrote Burger-Thoré in one of his Salons
in 1867.
Yet England was not unaffected by the retrospective tendency on the
Continent. Perhaps it might even be demonstrated that this movement had
its earliest origin on British soil. England had its "Empire style" in
architecture fifty years before there was any empire in France; it had
its Classical painting when David worked at Cupids with Boucher, and it
gave the world a Romanticist at the very time when the literature of the
Continent became "Classical." _The Lady of the Lake_, _Marmion_, _The
Lord of the Isles_, _The Fair Maid of Perth_, _Old Mortality_,
_Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, who is there that does not know these
names by heart? We have learnt history from Walter Scott, and that
programme of the artistic crafts which Lorenz Gedon drew up in 1876,
when he arranged the department _Works of our Fathers_ in the Munich
Exhibition, had been carried out by Scott as early as 1816. For Scott
laid out much of the money he received for his romances in building
himself a castle in the style of the baronial strongholds of the Middle
Ages: "Towers and turrets all imitated from a royal building in
Scotland, windows and gables painted with the arms of the clans, with
lions couchant," rooms "filled with high sideboards and carved chests,
targes, plaids, Highland broadswords, halberts, and suits of armour, and
adorned with antlers hung up as trophies." Here was a Makartesque studio
very many years before Makart.
Amongst the painters there were Classicists and Romanticists; but they
were neither numerous nor of importance. What England produced in the
way of "great art" in the beginning of last century could be erased from
the complete chart of British painting without any essential gap being
made in the course of its development. Reynolds had had to pay dear for
approaching the Italians in his "Ugolino," his "Macbeth," and his "Young
Hercules." And a yet more arid mannerism befell all the others who
followed him on the way to Italy, among them _James Barry_, who, after
studying for years in Italy, settled down in London in 1771, with the
avowed intention of providing England with a classical form of art. He
believed that he had surpassed his own models, the Italian classic
painters, by six pompous representations of the "Culture and Progress of
Human Knowledge," which he completed in 1783, in the theatre of the
Society for the Encouragement of Arts. The many-sided _James Northcote_,
equally mediocre in everything, survives rather by his biographies of
Reynolds and Titian than by the great canvases which he painted for
Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. That which became best known was "The
Murder of the Children in the Tower." _Henry Fuseli_, who was also much
occupied with authorship and as _preceptor Britanniæ_, always mentioned
with great respect by his numerous pupils, produced a series of
exceedingly thoughtful and imaginative works, to which he was incited by
Klopstock and Lavater. By preference he illustrated Milton and
Shakespeare, and amongst this series of pictures his painting of
"Titania with the Ass," from Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_, in
the London National Gallery, is probably the best. His pupil _William
Etty_ was saturated with the traditions of the Venetian school; he is
the British Makart, and followed rather heavily and laboriously in the
track of Titian, exploring the realms of nude beauty, and toiling to
discover that secret of blooming colour which gleams from the female
forms of the Venetians. The assiduous _Benjamin Robert Haydon_, a spirit
ever seeking, striving, and reflecting, became, like Gros in France, a
victim of the grand style. He would naturally have preferred to paint
otherwise, and more simply. The National Gallery possesses a charming
picture by him of a London street (for some years past on loan at
Leicester), which represents a crowd watching a Punch and Judy show.
But, like Gros, he held it a sin against the grand style to occupy
himself with such matters. He thought it only permissible to paint
sacred subjects or subjects from ancient history upon large spaces of
canvas; and he sank ever deeper into his theories, reaching the
profoundest abyss of abstract science when he made diligent anatomical
studies of the muscles of a lion, in order to fashion the heroic frames
of warriors on the same plan. His end, on 26th June 1846, was like that
of the Frenchman. There was found beside his body a paper on which he
had written: "God forgive me. Amen. Finis," with the quotation from
Shakespeare's _Lear_: "Stretch me no longer on the rack of this rough
world." All these masters are more interesting for their human qualities
than for their works, which, with their extravagant colour, forced
gestures, and follies of every description, contain no new thing worthy
of further development. Even when they sought to make direct copies from
Continental performances, they did not attain the graceful sweep of
their models. The refinements which they imitated became clumsy and
awkward in their hands, and they remained half _bourgeois_ and half
barbaric.
The liberating influence of English art was not found in the province of
the great painting, and it is probably not without significance that the
few who tried to import it came to grief in the experiment. There can be
no doubt that such art goes more against the grain of the English
nature than of any other. Even in the days of scholastic philosophy the
English asserted the doctrine that there are only individuals in nature.
In the beginning of modern times a new era, grounded on the observation
of nature, was promulgated from England. Bacon had little to say about
beauty: he writes against the proportions and the principle of selection
in art, and therefore against the ideal. Handsome men, he says, have
seldom possessed great qualities. And in the same way the English stage
had just as little bent for the august and rhythmical grandeur of
classical literature. When he stabbed Polonius, Garrick never dreamed of
moving according to the taste of Boileau, and was probably as different
from the Greek leader of a chorus as Hogarth from David. The peculiar
merits of English literature and science have been rooted from the time
of their first existence in their capacity for observation. This
explains the contempt for regularity in Shakespeare, the feeling for
concrete fact in Bacon. English philosophy is positive, exact,
utilitarian, and highly moral. Hobbes and Locke, John Stuart Mill and
Buckle, in England take the place of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and
Kant upon the Continent. Amongst English historians Carlyle is the only
poet: all the rest are learned prose-writers who collect observations,
combine experiences, arrange dates, weigh possibilities, reconcile
facts, discover laws, and hoard and increase positive knowledge. The
eighteenth century had seen the rise of the novel as the picture of
contemporary life; in Hogarth this national spirit was first turned to
account in painting. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, again,
the good qualities of English art consisted not in bold ideality, but in
sharpness of observation, sobriety, and flexibility of spirit.
[Illustration: GEORGE ROMNEY.]
Their proper domain was still to be found in portraiture, and if none of
the new portrait painters can be compared with the great ancestors of
English art, they are none the less superior to all their contemporaries
on the Continent. _George Romney_, who belongs rather to the eighteenth
century, holds the mean course between the refined classic art of Sir
Joshua and the imaginative poetic art of Thomas Gainsborough. Less
personal and less profound in characterisation, he was, on the other
hand, the most dexterous painter of drapery in his age: a man who knew
all the secrets of the trade, and possessed, at the same time, that art
which is so much valued in portrait painters--the art of beautifying his
models without making his picture unlike the original. Professional
beauties beheld themselves presented in their counterfeit precisely as
they wished to appear, and accorded him, therefore, a fervent adoration.
And after his return from Italy in 1775 his fame was so widespread that
it outstripped Gainsborough's and equalled that of Reynolds. Court
beauties and celebrated actresses left no stone unturned to have their
portraits introduced into one of his "compositions"; for Romney eagerly
followed the fashion of allegorical portraiture which had been set by
Reynolds, representing persons with the emblem of a god or of one of the
muses. Romney has painted the famous Lady Hamilton, to say nothing of
others, as Magdalen, Joan of Arc, a Bacchante, and an Odalisque.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
ROMNEY. LADY HAMILTON AS EUPHROSYNE.]
Great as his reputation had been at the close of the eighteenth century,
it was outshone twenty years later by that of _Sir Thomas Lawrence_.
Born in Bristol in 1769, Lawrence had scarcely given up the calling of
an actor before he saw all England in raptures over his genius as a
painter. The catalogue of his portraits is a complete list of all who
were at the time pre-eminent for talent or beauty. He received fabulous
sums, which he spent with the grace of a man of the world. In 1815 he
was commissioned to paint for the Windsor Gallery the portraits of all
the "Victors of Waterloo," from the Duke of Wellington to the Emperor
Alexander. The Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle gave him an opportunity for
getting the portraits of representatives of the various Courts. All the
capitals of Europe, which he visited for this purpose, received him with
princely honours. He was member of all the Academies under the sun, and
President of that in London; but, as a natural reaction, this
over-estimation of earlier years has been followed by an equally
undeserved undervaluation of his works in these days. Beneath the
fashionable exterior of his ceremonial pictures naturalness and
simplicity are often wanting, and so too are the deeper powers of
characterisation, firm drawing, and real vitality. A feminine coquetry
has taken the place of character. His drawing has a banal effect, and
his colouring is monotonous in comparison with that realism which
Reynolds shares with the old masters. It is easy to confound the
majority of his pictures of ceremonies with those of Winterhalter, and
his smaller portraits with pretty fashion plates; yet one cannot but
admire his ease of execution and nobility of composition. Several of his
pictures of women, in particular, are touched by an easy grace and a
fine charm of poetic sensuousness in which he approaches Gainsborough.
Not many at that time could have painted such pretty children's heads,
or given young women such an attractive and familiar air of life. With
what a girlish glance of innocence and melancholy does Mrs. Siddons look
out upon the world from the canvas of Lawrence: how piquant is her white
Greek garment, with its black girdle and the white turban. And what
subtle delicacy there is in the portrait of Miss Farren as she flits
with muff and fur-trimmed cloak through a bright green summer landscape.
The reputation of Lawrence will rise once more when his empty formal
pieces have found their way into lumber-rooms, and a greater number of
his pictures of women--pictures so full of indescribable fascination, so
redolent of mysterious charm--are accessible to the public.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
LAWRENCE. MRS. SIDDONS.]
As minor stars, the soft and tender _John Hoppner_, the attractively
superficial _William Beechey_, the celebrated pastellist _John Russell_,
and the vigorously energetic _John Jackson_ had their share with him in
public favour, whilst _Henry Raeburn_ shone in Scotland as a star of the
first magnitude.
He was a born painter. Wilkie says in one of his letters from Madrid,
that the pictures of Velasquez put him in mind of Raeburn; and certain
works of the Scot, such as the portrait of Lord Newton, the famous _bon
vivant_ and doughty drinker, are indeed performances of such power that
comparison with this mighty name is no profanation. At a time when there
was a danger that portrait painting would sink in the hands of Lawrence
into an insipid painting of prettiness, Raeburn stood alone by the
simplicity and naturalistic impressiveness of his portraiture. The three
hundred and twenty-five portraits by him which were exhibited in the
Royal Scottish Academy in 1876, gave as exhaustive a picture of the life
of Edinburgh at the close of the century as those of Sir Joshua gave of
the life of London. All the celebrated Scotchmen of his time--Robertson,
Hume, Ferguson, and Scott--were painted by him. Altogether he painted
over six hundred portraits; and, small though the number may seem
compared with the two thousand of Reynolds, Raeburn's artistic qualities
are almost the greater. The secret of his success lies in his vigorous
healthiness, in the indescribable _furia_ of his brush, in the harmony
and truth of his colour-values. His figures are informed by a startling
intensity of life. His old pensioners, and his sailors in particular,
have something kingly in the grand air of their calm and noble
countenances. Armstrong has given him a place between Frans Hals and
Velasquez, and occasionally his conception of colour even recalls the
modern Frenchmen, as it were Manet in his Hals period. He paints his
models, just as they come into contact with him in life, in the frank
light of day and without any attempt at the dusk of the old masters; of
raiment he gives only as much as the comprehension of the picture
demands, and depicts character in large and simple traits.
[Illustration: LAWRENCE. PRINCESS AMELIA.]
The importance of West and Copley, two Americans who were active in
England, is that they were the first to apply the qualities acquired in
English portrait painting to pictures on a large scale.
_Benjamin West_ has undoubtedly been over-praised by his contemporaries,
and by a critic of the present day he has, not unfairly, been designated
"the king of mediocrity." At his appearance he was interesting to
Europeans merely as an anthropological curiosity,--as the first son of
barbaric America who had used a paint brush. A thoroughly American puff
preceded his entry into the Eternal City in 1760. It was reported that
as the son of a quaker farmer he had grown up amongst his father's
slaves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Indians, and had painted
good portraits in Philadelphia and New York without having ever seen a
work of art. People were delighted when, on being brought into the
Vatican, he clapped his hands and compared the Apollo Belvidere to an
Indian chief. In the art of making himself interesting "the young
savage" was ahead of all his patrons; and as he followed the ruling
classical tendency with great aptitude, within the course of a year he
was made an honorary member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and
Florence, and praised by the critics of Rome as ranking with Mengs as
the first painter of his day. In 1763, at a time when Hogarth and
Reynolds, Wilson and Gainsborough, were in the fulness of their powers,
he went to London; and as people are always inclined to value most
highly what they do not possess, he soon won an important position for
himself, even beside these masters. Hogarth produced nothing but
"_genre_ pictures," Wilson only landscapes, and Reynolds and
Gainsborough portraits: West brought to the English what they did not as
yet possess--a "great art."
[Illustration: LAWRENCE. THE ENGLISH MOTHER.]
His first picture--in the London National Gallery--"Pylades and Orestes
brought as Hostages before Iphigenia," is a tiresome product of that
Classicism which upon the Continent found its principal representatives
in Mengs and David: it is stiff in drawing, its composition is
suggestive of a bas-relief, and its cold grey colouring is classically
academic. His other pictures from antique and sacred history stand much
on the same level as those of Wilhelm Kaulbach, with whose works they
share their stilted dignity, their systematically antiquarian structure,
and their mechanical combination of forms borrowed in a spiritless
fashion from the Cinquecentisti.
Fortunately West has left behind him something different from these
ambitious attempts; for on the occasions when he turned away from the
great style he created works of lasting importance. This is specially
true of some fine historical pictures dealing with his own age, which
will preserve his name for ever. "The Death of General Wolfe" at the
storming of Quebec on 13th September 1759--exhibited at the opening of
the Royal Academy in 1768--is by its very sobriety a sincere, honest,
and sane piece of work, which will maintain its value as an historical
document. It was just at this time that so great a part was played by
the question of costume, and West encountered the same difficulties
which Gottfried Schadow was obliged to face when he represented Ziethen
and the Old Dessauer in the costume of their age. The connoisseurs held
that such a sublime theme would only admit of antique dress. If West in
their despite represented the general and his soldiers in their
regulation uniform, it seems at the present time no more than the result
of healthy common sense, but at that time it was an artistic event of
great importance, and one which was only accomplished in France after
the work of several decades. In that country Gérard and Girodet still
clung to the belief that they could only raise the military picture to
the level of the great style by giving the soldiers of the Empire the
appearance of Greek and Roman statues. Gros is honoured as the man who
first ceased from giving modern soldiers an air of the antique. But the
American Englishman had anticipated him by forty years. As in
Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa," it was only the pyramidal composition
in West's picture that betrayed the painter's alliance with the
Classical school; in other respects it forecast the realistic programme
for decades to come, and indicated the course of development which leads
through Gros onwards. If in Gros men are treated purely as accessories
to throw a hero into relief, in West they stand out in action. They
behave in the picture spontaneously as they do in life. That is to say,
there is in West's work of 1768 the element through which Horace
Vernet's pictures of 1830 are to be distinguished from those of Gros.
This realistic programme was carried out with yet greater consistency by
West's younger compatriot _John Singleton Copley_, who after a short
sojourn in Italy migrated to England in 1775. His chief works in the
London National Gallery depict in the same way events from contemporary
history--"The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 7th April 1778" and "The
Death of Major Pierson, 6th January 1781,"--and it is by no means
impossible that when David, in the midst of the classicising tendencies
of his age, ventured to paint "The Death of Marat" and "The Death of
Lepelletier," he was led to do so by engravings after Copley. In the
representation of such things other painters of the epoch had draped
their figures in antique costume, called genii and river-gods into
action, and given a Roman character to the whole. Copley, like West,
offers a plain, matter-of-fact representation of the event, without any
rhetorical pathos. And what raises him above West is his liquid, massive
colour, suggestive of the old masters. In none of his works could West
set himself free from the dead grey colour of the Classical school,
whereas Copley's "Death of William Pitt" is the result of intimate
studies of Titian and the Dutch. The way the light falls on the perukes
of the men and the brown, wainscoted walls puts one in mind of
Rembrandt's "Anatomical Lecture"; only, instead of a pathetic scene from
the theatre, we have a collection of good portraits in the manner of the
Dutch studies of shooting matches.
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo_
LAWRENCE. CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, QUEEN OF GEORGE IV.]
[Illustration: LAWRENCE. THE COUNTESS GOWER.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
RAEBURN. SIR WALTER SCOTT.]
That this unhackneyed conception of daily life has its special home in
England is further demonstrated by the work of _Daniel Maclise_, who
depicted "The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher," "The Death of Nelson,"
and other patriotic themes upon walls and canvases several yards square,
with appalling energy, promptitude, and expenditure of muscle. By these
he certainly did better service to national pride than to art.
Nevertheless, with their forcible, healthy realism they contrast
favourably with the mythological subjects so universally produced on the
Continent at that time.
Beside the portrait painters of men stand the portrait painters of
animals. Since the days of Elias Riedinger animal painting had fallen
into general disesteem on the Continent. Thorwaldsen, the first of the
Classicists who allowed animals to appear in his works (as he did in his
Alexander frieze), dispensed with any independent studies of nature, and
contented himself with imitating the formal models on the frieze of the
Parthenon; or, in lack of a Grecian exemplar, simply drew out of the
depths of his inner consciousness. Especially remarkable is the sovran
contempt with which he treated the most familiar domestic creatures.
German historical painting knew still less what to make of the brute
creation, because it only recognised beauty in the profundity of ideas,
and ideas have nothing to do with beasts. Its four-footed creatures have
a philosophic depth of contemplation, and are bad studies after nature.
Kaulbach's "Reinecke" and the inclination to transplant human
sentiments into the world of brutes delayed until the sixties any
devoted study of the animal soul. France, too, before the days of
Troyon, had nothing to show worth mentioning. But in England, the land
of sport, animal painting was evolved directly from the old painting of
the chase, without being seduced from its proper course. Fox-hunting has
been popular in England since the time of Charles I. Racing came into
fashion not long after, and with racing came that knowledge of
horseflesh which has been developed in England further than elsewhere.
Since the seventeenth century red deer have been preserved in the
English parks. It is therefore comprehensible that English art was early
occupied with these animals, and since it was sportsmen who cared most
about them, the painter was at first their servant. He had not so much
to paint pictures as reminiscences of sport and the chase. His first
consideration in painting a horse was to paint a fine horse; as to its
being a fine picture, that was quite a secondary matter. _John Wootton_
and _George Stubbs_ were in this sense portrayers of racehorses. The
latter, however, took occasion to emancipate himself from his patrons by
representing the noble animal, not standing at rest by his manger, or
with a groom on his back and delighting in the consciousness of his own
beauty, but as he was in action and amongst pictorial surroundings.
[Illustration: WEST. THE DEATH OF NELSON.]
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo_
MACLISE. THE WATERFALL, CORNWALL.]
[Illustration: COPLEY. THE DEATH OF THE EARL OF CHATHAM.]
[Illustration: MACLISE. NOAH'S SACRIFICE.]
Soon afterwards _George Morland_ made his appearance. He made a
specialty of old nags, and was perhaps the most important master of the
brush that the English school produced at all. His pictures have the
same magic as the landscapes of Gainsborough. He painted life on the
high-road and in front of village inns--scenes like those which Isaac
Ostade had represented a century before: old horses being led to water
amid the sunny landscape of the downs, market carts rumbling heavily
through the rough and sunken lanes, packhorses coming back to their
stalls of an evening tired out with the day's exertions, riders pulling
up at the village inn or chatting with the pretty landlady. And he has
done these things with the delicacy of an old Dutch painter. It is
impossible to say whether Morland had ever seen the pictures of Adriaen
Brouwer; but this greatest master of technique amongst the Flemings can
alone be compared with Morland in verve and artistic many-sidedness; and
Morland resembled him also in his adventurous life and his early death.
To the spirit and dash of Brouwer he joins the refinement of
Gainsborough in his landscapes, and Rowlandson's delicate feeling for
feminine beauty in his figures. He does not paint fine ladies, but women
in their everyday clothes, and yet they are surrounded by a grace
recalling Chardin: young mothers going to see their children who are
with the nurse, smart little tavern hostesses in their white aprons and
coquettish caps busily serving riders with drink, and charming city
madams in gay summer garb sitting of a Sunday afternoon with their
children at a tea-garden. Over the works of Morland there lies all the
chivalrous grace of the time of Werther, and that fine Anglo-Saxon aroma
exhaled by the works of English painters of the present day. Genuine as
is the fame which he enjoys as an animal painter, it is these little
social scenes which show his finest side; and only coloured engraving,
which was brought to such a high pitch in the England of those days, is
able to give an idea of the delicacy of hue in the originals.
[Illustration: MACLISE. MALVOLIO AND THE COUNTESS.]
[Illustration: _Mansell & Co._
MORLAND. HORSES IN A STABLE.]
Morland's brother-in-law, the painter and engraver _James Ward_, born in
1769 and dying in 1859, united this old English school with the modern.
The portrait which accompanies the obituary notice in the _Art Journal_
is that of a very aged gentleman, with a grey beard and thick, white,
bristly hair. The pictures which he painted when he had this
appearance--and they are the most familiar--were exceedingly weak and
insipid works. In comparison with Morland's broad, liquid, and
harmonious painting, that of Ward seems burnished, sparkling, flaunting,
anecdotic, and petty. But James Ward was not always old James Ward. In
his early days he was one of the greatest and manliest artists of the
English school, with whom only Briton Rivière can be compared amongst
the moderns. When his "Lioness" appeared in the Royal Academy Exhibition
of 1816 he was justly hailed as the best animal painter after Snyders,
and from that time one masterpiece followed another for ten long years.
What grace and power there are in his horses and dogs! In pictures of
this sort Stubbs was graceful and delicate; Ward painted the same horse
in as sporting a manner and with the same knowledge, but with an
artistic power such as no one had before him. His field of work was
wide-reaching. He painted little girls with the thoroughly English
feeling of Morland, and had the whole animal world for his domain.
Lions, snakes, cats, pigs, oxen, cows, sheep, swans, fowls, frogs are
the characters in his pictures. And characters they were, for he never
humanised the looks of his four-footed models, as others did later. The
home of his animals is not the drawing-room, but the woods and meadows,
the air and the gardens. His broad, weighty manner was transformed first
into extravagant virtuosity and then into pettiness of style during the
last thirty years of his life, when he became senile. His reputation
paled more than he deserved before the star of the world-famous
Landseer.
[Illustration: MORLAND. THE CORN BIN.]
The most popular animal painter, not merely of England but of the whole
century, was _Edwin Landseer_. For fifty years his works formed the
chief features of attraction in the Royal Academy. Engravings from him
had such a circulation in the country that in the sixties there was
scarcely a house in which there did not hang one of his horses or dogs
or stags. Even the Continent was flooded with engravings of his
pictures, and Landseer suffered greatly from this popularity. He is
much better than the reproductions with their fatal gloss allow any one
to suppose, and his pictures can be judged by them just as little as can
Raphael's "School of Athens" from Jacobi's engraving.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
MORLAND. GOING TO THE FAIR.]
Edwin Landseer came of a family of artists. His father, who was an
engraver, sent him out into the free world of nature as a boy, and made
him sketch donkeys and goats and sheep. When he was fourteen he went to
Haydon, the prophet on matters of art; and, on the advice of this
singular being, studied the sculptures of the Parthenon. He "anatomised
animals under my eyes," writes Haydon, "copied my anatomical drawings,
and applied my principles of instruction to animal painting. His genius,
directed in this fashion, has, as a matter of fact, arrived at
satisfactory results." Landseer was the spoilt child of fortune. There
is no other English painter who can boast of having been made a member
of the Royal Academy at twenty-four. In high favour at Court, honoured
by the fashionable world, and tenderly treated by criticism, he went on
his way triumphant. The region over which he held sway was narrow, but
he stood out in it as in life, powerful and commanding. The exhibition
of his pictures which took place after his death in 1873 contained three
hundred and fourteen oil paintings and one hundred and forty-six
sketches. The property which he left amounted to £160,000; and a further
sum of £55,000 was realised by the sale of his unsold pictures. Even
Meissonier, the best paid painter of the century, did not leave behind
him five and a half million francs.
One reason of Landseer's artistic success is perhaps due to that in him
which was inartistic--to his effort to make animals more beautiful than
they really are, and to make them the medium for expressing human
sentiment. All the dogs and horses and stags which he painted after
1855, and through which he was made specially familiar to the great
public, are arrayed in their Sunday clothes, their glossiest hide and
their most magnificent horns. And in addition to this he "Darwinises"
them: that is to say, he tries to make his animals more than animals; he
lends a human sentimental trait to animal character; and that is what
distinguishes him to his disadvantage from really great animal painters
like Potter, Snyders, Troyon, Jadin, and Rosa Bonheur. He paints the
human temperament beneath the animal mask. His stags have expressive
countenances, and his dogs appear to be gifted with reason and even
speech. At one moment there is a philosophic dignity in their behaviour,
and at another a frivolity in their pleasures. Landseer discovered the
sentimentality of dogs, and treated them as capable of culture. His
celebrated picture "Jack in Office" is almost insulting in its
characterisation: there they are, Jack the sentry, an old female dog
like a poor gentlewoman, another dog like a professional beggar, and so
on. And this habit of bringing animals on the stage, as if they were the
actors of tragical, melodramatic, or farcical scenes, made him a
peculiar favourite with the great mass of people. Nor were his
picture-stories merely easy to read and understand; the characteristic
titles he invented for each of them--"Alexander and Diogenes," "A
Distinguished Member of the Humane Society," and the like--excited
curiosity as much as the most carefully selected name of a novel. But
this search after points and sentimental anecdotes only came into
prominence in his last period, when his technique had degenerated and
given way to a shiny polish and a forced elegance which obliged him to
provide extraneous attractions. His popularity would not be so great,
but his artistic importance would be quite the same, if these last
pictures did not exist at all.
[Illustration: MORLAND. THE RETURN FROM MARKET.]
But the middle period of Landseer, ranging from 1840 to 1850, contains
masterpieces which set him by the side of the best animal painters of
all times and nations. The well-known portrait of a Newfoundland dog of
1838; that of the Prince Consort's favourite greyhound of 1841; "The
Otter Speared" of 1844, with its panting and yelping pack brought to a
standstill beneath a high wall of rock; the dead doe which a fawn is
unsuspectingly approaching, in "A Random Shot," 1848; "The Lost Sheep"
of 1850, that wanders frightened and bleating through a wide and lonely
landscape covered with snow,--these and many other pictures, in their
animation and simple naturalness, are precious examples of the fresh and
delicate observation peculiar to him at that time. Landseer's portrait
reveals to us a robust and serious man, with a weather-beaten face, a
short white beard, and a snub bulldog nose. Standing six feet high, and
having the great heavy figure of a Teuton stepping out of his aboriginal
forest, he was indeed much more like a country gentleman than a London
artist. He was a sportsman who wandered about all day long in the air
with a gun on his arm, and he painted his animal pictures with all the
love and joy of a child of nature. That accounts for their strength,
their convincing power, and their vivid force. It is as if he had become
possessed of a magic cap with which he could draw close to animals
without being observed, and surprise their nature and their inmost life.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
LANDSEER. A DISTINGUISHED MEMBER OF THE HUMANE SOCIETY.]
Landseer's subject-matter and conception of life are indicated by the
pictures which have been named. Old masters like Snyders and Rubens had
represented the contrast between man and beast in their boar and lion
hunts. It was not wild nature that Landseer depicted, but nature tamed.
Rubens, Snyders, and Delacroix displayed their horses, dogs, lions, and
tigers in bold action, or in the flame of passion. But Landseer
generally introduced his animals in quiet situations--harmless and
without fear--in the course of their ordinary life.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
LANDSEER. THE LAST MOURNER AT THE SHEPHERD'S GRAVE.]
Horses, which Leonardo, Rubens, Velasquez, Wouwerman, and the earlier
English artists delighted to render, he painted but seldom, and when he
painted them it was with a less penetrating comprehension. But lions,
which had been represented in savage passion or in quiet dignity by
artists from Rubens to Decamps, were for him also a subject of long and
exhaustive studies, which had their results in the four colossal lions
round the base of the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square. Here the
Englishman makes a great advance on Thorwaldsen, who designed the model
for the monument in Lucerne without ever having seen a lion. Landseer's
brutes, both as they are painted and as they are cast in bronze, are
genuine lions, cruel and catlike, although in savageness and bold
passion they are not to be compared with those of Delacroix, nor with
those of his elder compatriot, James Ward. On the other hand, stags and
roes were really first introduced into painting by Landseer. Those of
Robert Hills, who had previously been reckoned the best painter of
stags, are timid, suspicious creatures, while Landseer's are the true
kings of the forest, the shooting of which ought to be punished as an
act of assassination. His principal field of study was the Highlands.
Here he painted these proud creatures fighting on the mountain slopes,
swimming the lake, or as they stand at a gaze in their quiet beauty.
With what a bold spirit they raise their heads to snuff the mountain
air, whilst their antlers show their delight in battle and the joy of
victory. And how gentle and timid is the noble, defenceless roe in
Landseer's pictures.
[Illustration: LANDSEER. HIGH LIFE.]
He had also a delight in painting sheep lost in a snow-storm. But dogs
were his peculiar specialty. Landseer discovered the dog. That of
Snyders was a treacherous, snarling cur; that of Bewick a robber and a
thief. Landseer has made the dog the companion of man, an adjunct of
human society, the generous friend and true comrade who is the last
mourner at the shepherd's grave. Landseer first studied his noble
countenance and his thoughtful eyes, and in doing so he opened a new
province to art, in which Briton Rivière went further at a later period.
But yet another and still wider province was opened to continental
nations by the art of England. In an epoch of archæological
resuscitations and romantic regrets for the past, it brought French and
German painters to a consciousness that the man of the nineteenth
century in his daily life might be a perfectly legitimate subject for
art. Engravings after the best pictures of Wilkie hang round the walls
of Louis Knaus's reception-room in Berlin. And that in itself betrays to
us a fragment of the history of art. The painters who saw the English
people with the eyes of Walter Scott, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Dickens
were a generation in advance of those who depicted the German people in
the spirit of Immermann, Auerbach, Gustav Freytag, and Fritz Reuter. The
English advanced quietly on the road trodden by Hogarth in the
eighteenth century, whilst upon the Continent the nineteenth century had
almost completed half its course before art left anything which will
allow future generations to see the men of the period as they really
were. Since the days of Fielding and Goldsmith the novel of manners had
been continually growing. Burns, the poet of the plough, and
Wordsworth, the singer of rustic folk, had given a vogue to that poetry
of peasant life and those village tales which have since gone the round
of all Europe. England began at that time to become the richest country
in the world, and great fortunes were made. Painters were thus obliged
to provide for the needs of a new and wealthy middle class. This fact
gives us the explanation both of the merits and the faults which are
characteristic of English _genre_ painting.
[Illustration: LANDSEER. LOW LIFE.]
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century _David Wilkie_, the
English Knaus, was the chief _genre_ painter of the world. Born in 1785
in the small Scotch village of Cults, where his father was the
clergyman, he passed a happy childhood, and possibly had to thank his
youthful impressions for the consistent cheerfulness, the good-humour
and kindliness that smile out of his pictures, and make such a contrast
with Hogarth's biting acerbity. At fourteen he entered the Edinburgh
School of Art, where he worked for four years under the historical
painter John Graham. Having returned to Cults, he painted his
landscapes. A fair which he saw in the neighbouring village gave the
impulse for his earliest picture of country life, "Pitlessie Fair." He
sold it for five and twenty pounds, and determined in 1805 to try his
luck with this sum in London. In the very next year his "Village
Politicians" excited attention in the exhibition. From that time he was
a popular artist. Every one of his numerous pictures--"The Blind
Fiddler," "The Card Players," "The Rent Day," "The Cut Finger," "The
Village Festival"--called forth a storm of applause. After a short
residence in Paris, where the Louvre gave him a more intimate knowledge
of the Dutch, came his masterpieces, "Blind-Man's Buff," "Distraining
for Rent," "Reading the Will," "The Rabbit on the Wall," "The Penny
Wedding," "The Chelsea Pensioners," and so forth. Even later, after he
had become an Academician, he kept to plain and simple themes, in spite
of the reproaches of his colleagues, who thought that art was vulgarised
by the treatment of subjects that contained so little dignity. It was
only at the end of his life that he became untrue to himself. His
reverence for Teniers and Ostade was not sufficient to outweigh the
impression made on him during a tour taken in 1825 through Italy, Spain,
Holland, and Germany, by the artistic treasures of the Continent, and
especially Murillo and Velasquez. He said he had long lived in darkness,
but from that time forth could say with the great Correggio: "_Anch' io
sono pittore._" He renounced all that he had painted before which had
made him famous, and showed himself to be one of the many great artists
of those years who had no individuality, or ventured to have none. He
would have been the Burns of painting had he remained as he was. And
thus he offered further evidence that the museums and the Muses are
contradictory conceptions; since the modern painter always runs the risk
of falling helplessly from one influence into another, where he is bent
on combining the historical student of art with the artist. Of the
pictures that he exhibited after his return in 1829, two dealt with
Italian and three with Spanish subjects. The critics were loud in
praise; he had added a fresh branch of laurel to his crown. Yet,
historically considered, he would stand on a higher pedestal if he had
never seen more than a dozen good pictures of Teniers, Ostade, Metsu,
Jan Steen, and Brouwer. Now he began to copy his travelling sketches in
a spiritless fashion; he only represented _pifferari_, smugglers, and
monks, who, devoid of all originality, might have been painted by one of
the Düsseldorfers. Even "John Knox Preaching," which is probably the
best picture of his last period, is no exception.
"He seemed to me," writes Delacroix, who saw him in Paris after his
return from Spain,--"he seemed to me to have been carried utterly out of
his depth by the pictures he had seen. How is it that a man of his age
can be so influenced by works which are radically opposed to his own?
However, he died soon after, and, as I have been told, in a very
melancholy state of mind." Death overtook him in 1841, on board the
steamer _Oriental_, just as he was returning from a tour in Turkey. At
half-past eight in the evening the vessel was brought to, and as the
lights of the beacon mingled with those of the stars the waters passed
over the corpse of David Wilkie.
[Illustration: _Mansell Photo_
LANDSEER. JACK IN OFFICE.]
[Illustration: WILKIE. BLIND-MAN'S BUFF.]
In judging his position in the history of art, only those works come
into consideration which he executed before that journey of 1825. Then
he drew as a labour of love the familiar scenes of the household hearth,
the little dramas, the comic or touching episodes that take place in the
village, the festivals, the dancing, and the sports of the country-folk,
and their meeting in the ale-house. At this time, when as a young
painter he merely expressed himself and was ignorant of the efforts of
continental painting, he was an artist of individuality. In the village
he became a great man, and here his fame was decided; he painted
rustics. Even when he first saw the old masters in the National Gallery
their immediate effect on him was merely to influence his technique. And
by their aid Wilkie gradually became an admirable master of technical
detail. His first picture, "Pitlessie Fair," in its hardness of colour
recalled a Dutch painter of the type of Jan Molenaer; but from that time
his course was one of constant progress. In "The Village Politicians"
the influence of Teniers first made itself felt, and it prevailed until
1816. In this year, when he painted the pretty sketch for "Blind-Man's
Buff," a warm gold hue took the place of the cool silver tone; and
instead of Teniers, Ostade became his model. The works in his Ostade
manner are rich in colour and deep and clear in tone. Finally, it was
Rembrandt's turn to become his guiding-star, and "The Parish Beadle," in
the National Gallery--a scene of arrest of the year 1822--clearly shows
with what brilliant success he tried his luck with Rembrandt's dewy
_chiaroscuro_. It was only in his last period that he lost all these
technical qualities. His "Knox" of 1832 is hard and cold and
inharmonious in colour.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
WILKIE. A GUERILLA COUNCIL OF WAR IN A SPANISH POSADA.]
So long as he kept from historical painting, art meant for him the same
thing as the portrayal of domestic life. Painting, he said, had no other
aim than to reproduce nature and to seek truth. Undoubtedly this must be
applied to Wilkie himself with considerable limitation. Wilkie painted
simple fragments of nature just as little as Hogarth; he invented
scenes. Nor was he even gifted with much power of invention. But he had
a fund of innocent humour, although there were times when it was in
danger of becoming much too childlike. "Blind-Man's Buff," "The Village
Politicians," and "The Village Festival," pictures which have become so
popular through the medium of engraving, contain all the characteristics
of his power of playful observation. He had no ambition to be a
moralist, like Hogarth, but just as little did he paint the rustic as he
is. He dealt only with the absurdities and minor accidents of life. His
was one of those happy dispositions which neither sorrow nor dream nor
excite themselves, but see everything from the humorous side: he enjoyed
his own jests, and looked at life as at a pure comedy; the serious part
of it escaped him altogether. His peasantry know nothing of social
problems; free from want and drudgery, they merely spend their time over
trifles and amuse themselves--themselves and the frequenters of the
exhibition, for whom they are taking part in a comedy on canvas. If
Hogarth had a biting, sarcastic, scourging, and disintegrating genius,
Wilkie is one of those people who cause one no lasting excitement, but
are always satisfied to be humorous, and laugh with a contented
appreciation over their own jokes.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
WILKIE. THE BLIND FIDDLER.]
And in general such is the keynote of this English _genre_. All that was
done in it during the years immediately following is more or less
comprised in the works of the Scotch "little master"; otherwise it
courts the assistance of English literature, which is always rich in
humorists and excellent writers of anecdote and story. In painting, as
in literature, the English delight in detail, which by its dramatic,
anecdotic, or humorous point is intended to have the interest of a short
story. Or perhaps one should rather say that, since the English came to
painting as novices, they began tentatively on that first step on which
art had stood in earlier centuries as long as it was still "the people's
spelling-book." It is a typical form of development, and repeats itself
constantly. All painting begins in narrative. First it is the subject
which has a fascination for the artist, and by the aid of it he casts a
spell over his public. The simplification of motives, the capacity for
taking a thing in at a single glance, and finding a simple joy in its
essentially pictorial integrity, is of later growth. Even with the
Dutch, who were so eminently gifted with a sense for what is pictorial,
the picture of manners was at first epical. Church festivals, skating
parties, and events which could be represented in an ample and detailed
fashion were the original materials of the _genre_ picture, which only
later contented itself with a purely artistic study of one out of
countless groups. This period of apprenticeship, which may be called the
period of interesting subject-matter, was what England was now going
through; and England had to go through it, since she had the
civilisation by which it is invariably produced.
[Illustration: WILKIE. THE PENNY WEDDING.]
Just as the first _genre_ pictures of the Flemish school announced the
appearance of a _bourgeoisie_, so in the England of the beginning of the
century a new plebeian, middle-class society had taken the place of the
patrons of earlier days, and this middle class set its seal upon manners
and communicated its spirit to painting. Prosperity, culture, travel,
reading, and leisure, everything which had been the privilege of
individuals, now became the common property of the great mass of men.
They prized art, but they demanded from it substantial nourishment. That
two colours in connection with straight and curved lines are enough for
the production of infinite harmonies was still a profound secret. "You
are free to be painters if you like," artists were told, "but only on
the understanding that you are amusing and instructive; if you have no
story to tell we shall yawn." When they comply with these demands,
artists are inclined to grow fond of sermonising and develop into
censors of the public morals, almost into lay preachers.
Or, if the aim of painting lies in its narrative power, there is a
natural tendency to represent the pleasant rather than the unpleasant
facts of life, which is the cause of this one-sided character of _genre_
painting. Everything that is not striking and out of the way--in other
words, the whole poetry of ordinary life--is left untouched. Wilkie only
paints the rustic on some peculiar occasion, at merry-making and
ceremonial events; and he depicts him as a being of a different species
from the townsman, because he seeks to gain his effects principally by
humorous episodes, and aims at situations which are proper to a novel.
[Illustration: WILKIE. THE FIRST EARRING.]
Baptisms and dances, funerals and weddings, carousals and bridal visits
are his favourite subjects; to which may be added the various contrasts
offered by peasant life where it is brought into contact with the
civilisation of cities--the country cousin come to town, the rustic
closeted with a lawyer, and the like. A continual roguishness enlivens
his pictures and makes comical figures out of most of these good people.
He amuses himself at their expense, exposes their little lies, their
thrift, their folly, their pretensions, and the absurdities with which
their narrow circle of life has provided them. He pokes fun, and is sly
and farcical. But the hard and sour labour of ordinary peasant life is
left on one side, since it offers no material for humour and anecdote.
[Illustration: NEWTON. YORICK AND THE GRISETTE.]
Through this limitation painting renounced the best part of its
strength. To a man of pictorial vision nature is a gallery of
magnificent pictures, and one which is as wide and far-reaching as the
world. But whoever seeks salvation in narrative painting soon reaches
the end of his material. In the life of any man there are only three or
four events that are worth the trouble of telling; Wilkie told more, and
he became tiresome in consequence. We are willing to accept these
anecdotes as true, but they are threadbare. Things of this sort may be
found in the gaily-bound little books which are given as Christmas
presents to children. It is not exhilarating to learn that worldly
marriages have their inconveniences, that there is a pleasure in talking
scandal about one's friends behind their backs, that a son causes pain
to his mother by his excesses, and that egoism is an unpleasant failing.
All that is true, but it is too true. We are irritated by the
intrusiveness of this course of instruction. Wilkie paints insipid
subjects, and by one foolery after another he has made painting into a
toy for good children. And good children play the principal parts in
these pictures.
As a painter, one of George Morland's pupils, _William Collins_, threw
the world into ecstasies by his pictures of children. Out of one hundred
and twenty-one which he exhibited in the Academy in the course of forty
years the principal are: the picture of "The Little Flute-Player," "The
Sale of the Pet Lamb," "Boys with a Bird's Nest," "The Fisher's
Departure," "Scene in a Kentish Hop-Garden," and the picture of the
swallows. The most popular were "Happy as a King"--a small boy whom his
elder playmates have set upon a garden railing, from which he looks down
laughing proudly--and "Rustic Civility"--children who have drawn up like
soldiers, by a fence, so as to salute some one who is approaching. But
it is clear from the titles of such pictures that in this province
English _genre_ painting did not free itself from the reproach of being
episodic. Collins was richer in ideas than Meyer of Bremen. His children
receive earrings, sit on their mother's knee, play with her in the
garden, watch her sewing, read aloud to her from their spelling-book,
learn their lessons, and are frightened of the geese and hens which
advance in a terrifying fashion towards them in the poultry-yard. He is
an admirable painter of children at the family table, of the pleasant
chatter of the little ones, of the father watching his sleeping child of
an evening by the light of the lamp, with his heart full of pride and
joy because he has the consciousness of working for those who are near
to him. Being naturally very fond of children, he has painted the life
of little people with evident enjoyment of all its variations, and yet
not in a thoroughly credible fashion. Chardin painted the poetry of the
child-world. His little ones have no suspicion of the painter being near
them. They are harmlessly occupied with themselves, and in their
ordinary clothes. Those of Collins look as if they were repeating a
copybook maxim at a school examination. They know that the eyes of all
the sightseers in the exhibition are fixed upon them, and they are doing
their utmost to be on their best behaviour. They have a lack of
unconsciousness. One would like to say to them: "My dear children,
always be good." But no one is grateful to the painter for taking from
children their childishness, and for bringing into vogue that codling
which had its way for so long afterwards in the pictures of children.
_Gilbert Stuart Newton_, an American by birth, who lived in England from
1820 to 1835, devoted himself to the illustration of English authors.
Like Wilkie, he has a certain historical importance, because he devoted
himself with great zeal to a study of the Dutchmen of the seventeenth
century and to the French painters of the eighteenth, at a time when
these masters were entirely out of fashion on the Continent and sneered
at as representatives of "the deepest corruption." Dow and Terborg were
his peculiar ideals; and although the colour of his pictures is
certainly heavy and common compared with that of his models, it is
artistic, and shows study when one thinks of contemporary productions on
the Continent. His works ("Lear attended by Cordelia," "The Vicar of
Wakefield restoring his Daughter to her Mother," "The Prince of Spain's
Visit to Catalina" from _Gil Blas_, and "Yorick and the Grisette" from
Sterne), like the pictures of the Düsseldorfers, would most certainly
have lost in actuality but for the interest provided by the literary
passages; yet they are favourably distinguished from the literary
illustrations of the Düsseldorfers by the want of any sort of idealism.
While the painters of the Continent in such pictures almost invariably
fell into a rounded, generalising ideal of beauty, Newton had the scene
played by actors and painted them realistically. The result was a
theatrical realism, but the way in which the theatrical effects are
studied and the palpableness of the histrionic gestures are so
convincingly true to nature that his pictures seem like records of stage
art in London about the year 1830.
[Illustration: WEBSTER. THE RUBBER.]
[Illustration: C. R. LESLIE. SANCHO AND THE DUCHESS.]
_Charles Robert Leslie_, known as an author by his pleasant book on
Constable and a highly conservative _Handbook for Young Painters_, had a
similar _repértoire_, and rendered in oils Shakespeare, Cervantes,
Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Molière, with more or less ability. The
National Gallery has an exceedingly prosaic and colourless picture of
his, "Sancho Panza in the Apartment of the Duchess." Some that are in
the South Kensington Museum are better; for example, "The Taming of the
Shrew," "The Dinner at Mr. Page's House" from _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_, and "Sir Roger de Coverley." His finest and best-known work is
"My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman," which charmingly illustrates the
pretty scene in _Tristram Shandy_: "'I protest, madam,' said my Uncle
Toby, 'I can see nothing whatever in your eye.' 'It is not in the
white!' said Mrs. Wadman. My Uncle Toby looked with might and main into
the pupil." As in Newton's works, so in Leslie's too, there is such a
strong dose of realism that his pictures will always keep their value as
historical documents--not for the year 1630 but for 1830. As a colourist
he was--in his later works at any rate--a delicate imitator of the
Dutch _chiaroscuro_; and in the history of art he occupies a position
similar to that of Diez in Germany, and was esteemed in the same way,
even in later years, when the young Pre-Raphaelite school began its
embittered war against "brown sauce"--the same war which a generation
afterwards was waged in Germany by Liebermann and his followers against
the school of Diez.
[Illustration: MULREADY. FAIR TIME.]
_Mulready_, thirty-two of whose pictures are preserved in the South
Kensington Museum, is in his technique almost more delicate than Leslie,
and he has learnt a great deal from Metsu. By preference he took his
subjects out of Goldsmith. "Choosing the Wedding Gown" and "The
Whistonian Controversy" would make pretty illustrations for an _édition
de luxe_ of _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Otherwise he too had a taste for
immortalising children, by turns lazy and industrious, at their tea or
playing by the water's edge.
From _Thomas Webster_, the fourth of these kindly, childlike masters,
yet more inspiriting facts are to be obtained. He has informed the world
that at a not very remote period of English history all the agricultural
labourers were quite content with their lot. No one ever quarrelled with
his landlord, or sat in a public-house and let his family starve. The
highest bliss of these excellent people was to stay at home and play
with their children by the light of a wax-candle. Webster's rustics,
children, and schoolmasters are the citizens of an ideal planet, but the
little country is a pleasant world. His pictures are so harmless in
intention, so neat and accurate in drawing, and so clear and luminous in
colour that they may be seen with pleasure even at the present day.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
FRITH. POVERTY AND WEALTH.]
The last of the group, _William Powell Frith_, was the most copious in
giving posterity information about the manners and costumes of his
contemporaries, and would be still more authentic if life had not seemed
to him so genial and roseate. His pictures represent scenes of the
nineteenth century, but they seem like events of the good old times. At
that period people were undoubtedly good and innocent and happy. They
had no income-tax and no vices and worries, and all went to heaven and
felt in good spirits. And so they do in Frith's pictures, only not so
naturally as in Ostade and Beham. For example, he goes on the beach at a
fashionable English watering-place during the season, in July or August.
The geniality which predominates here is quite extraordinary. Children
are splashing in the sea, young ladies flirting, niggers playing the
barrel-organ and women singing ballads to its strains; every one is
doing his utmost to look well, and the pair of beggars who are there for
the sake of contrast have long become resigned to their fate. In his
racecourse pictures everything is brought together which on such
occasions is representative of London life: all types, from the baronet
to the ragman; all beauties, from the lady to the street-walker. A
rustic has to lose his money, or a famished acrobat to turn his pockets
inside out to assure himself that there is really nothing in them. His
picture of the gaming-table in Homburg is almost richer in such examples
of dry observation and humorous and spirited episode.
[Illustration: MULREADY. CROSSING THE FORD.]
This may serve to exemplify the failures of these painters of _genre_.
Not light and colour, but anecdote, comedy, and genial tale-telling are
the basis of their labours. And yet, notwithstanding this attempt to
express literary ideas through the mediums of a totally different art,
their work is significant. While continental artists avoided nothing so
much as that which might seem to approach nature, the English, revolting
from the thraldom of theory, gathered subjects for their pictures from
actual life. These men, indeed, pointed out the way to painters from
every country; and they, once on the right road, were bound ultimately
to arrive at the point from which they no longer looked on life through
the glasses of the anecdotist, but saw it with the eye of the true
artist.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MILITARY PICTURE
While English painting from the days of Hogarth and Wilkie embraced
rustic and middle-class life, the victory of modernity on the Continent
could only be accomplished slowly and by degrees. The question of
costume played an important part in it. "Artists love antiquated costume
because, as they say, it gives them greater sweep and freedom. But I
should like to suggest that in historical representations of their own
age an eye should be kept on propriety of delineation rather than on
freedom and sweep. Otherwise one might just as well allow an historian
to talk to us about phalanxes, battlements, triarii, and argyraspids in
place of battalions, squadrons, grenadiers, and cuirassiers. The
painters of the great events of the day ought, especially, to be more
true to fact. In battle-pieces, for example, they ought not to have
cavalry shooting and sabreing about them in leather collars, in round
and plumed hats, and the vast jack-boots which exist no longer. The old
masters drew, engraved, and painted in this way because people really
dressed in such a manner at the time. It is said that our costume is not
picturesque, and therefore why should we choose it? But posterity will
be curious to know how we clothed ourselves, and will wish to have no
gap from the eighteenth century to its own time."
[Illustration: VERNET. THE WOUNDED ZOUAVE.]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
CHARLET. UN HOMME QUI BOÎT SEUL N'EST PAS DIGNE DE VIVRE.]
These words, which the well-known Vienna librarian Denis wrote in 1797
in his _Lesefrüchte_, show how early came the problem which was at
high-water mark for a generation afterwards. The painting of the
nineteenth century could only become modern when it succeeded in
recognising and expressing the characteristic side of modern costume.
But to do that it took more than half a century. It was, after all,
natural that to people who had seen the graceful forms and delicate
colours of the _rococo_ time, the garb of the first half of the century
should seem the most unfortunate and the least enviable in the whole
history of costume. "What person of artistic education is not of the
opinion," runs a passage in Putmann's book on the Düsseldorf school in
1835,--"what person of artistic education is not of the opinion that the
dress of the present day is tasteless, hideous, and ape-like? Moreover,
can a true style be brought into harmony with hoop-petticoats and
swallow-tail coats and such vagaries? In our time, therefore, art is
right in seeking out those beautiful fashions of the past, about which
tailors concern themselves so little. How much longer must we go about,
unpicturesque beings, like ugly black bats, in swallow-tail coats and
wide trousers? The peasant's blouse, indeed, can be accepted as one of
the few picturesque dresses which have yet been preserved in Germany
from the inauspicious influence of the times." The same plaint is sung
by Hotho in his history of German and Netherlandish painting; the
costume of his age he declares to be thoroughly prosaic and tiresome. It
is revolting to painters and an offence to the educated eye. Art must
necessarily seek salvation in the past, unless it is to wait, and give
brush and palette a holiday, until that happy time when the costume of
nations comes to its pictorial regeneration. Only one zone, the realm of
blouse and military uniform, was beyond the domain of tail-coat and
trousers, and still furnished art with rich material.
Since it was by working on uniform that plastic artists first learnt how
to treat contemporary costume, so it was the military picture that first
entered the circle of modern painting. By exalting the soldier into a
warrior, and the warrior into a hero, it was here possible, even in the
times of David and Carstens, to effect a certain compromise with the
ruling classical ideas. Gérard, Girodet--to some extent even Gros--made
abundant use of the mask of the Greek or Roman warrior, with the object
of admitting the battle-piece into painting in the grand style. The real
heroes of the Napoleonic epoch had not this plastic appearance nor these
epic attitudes. Classicism altered their physiognomies and gave them,
most illogically, the air of old marble statues. It was Horace Vernet
who freed battle painting from this anathema. This, but little else,
stands to his credit.
Together with his son-in-law Paul Delaroche, _Horace Vernet_ is the most
genuine product of the _Juste-milieu_ period. The king with the umbrella
founded the Museum of Versailles, that monstrous depôt of daubed canvas,
which is a horrifying memory to any one who has ever wandered through
it. However, it is devoted _à toutes les gloires de la France_. In a few
years a suite of galleries, which it takes almost two hours merely to
pass through from end to end, was filled with pictures of all sizes,
bringing home the history of the country, from Charlemagne to the
African expedition of Louis Philippe, under all circumstances which are
in any way flattering to French pride. For miles numberless
manufacturers of painting bluster from the walls. As _pictor celerrimus_
Horace Vernet had the command-in-chief, and became so famous by his
chronicle of the conquest of Algiers that for a long time he was held by
trooper, Philistine, and all the kings and emperors of Europe as the
greatest painter in France. He was the last scion of a celebrated
dynasty of artists, and had taken a brush in his hand from the moment he
threw away his child's rattle. A good deal of talent had been given him
in his cradle: sureness of eye, lightness of hand, and an enviable
memory. His vision was correct, if not profound; he painted his pictures
without hesitation, and is favourably distinguished from many of his
contemporaries by his independence: he owes no one anything, and reveals
his own qualities without arraying himself in those of other people.
Only these qualities are not of an order which gives his pictures
artistic interest. The spark of Géricault's genius, which seems to have
been transmitted to him in the beginning, was completely quenched in his
later years. Having swiftly attained popularity by the aid of
lithography which circulated his "Mazeppa" through the whole world, he
became afterwards a bad and vulgar painter, without poetry, light, or
colour; a reporter who expressed himself in banal prose and wounded all
the finer spirits of his age. "I loathe this man," said Baudelaire, as
early as 1846.
[Illustration: AUGUSTE MARIE RAFFET.]
Devoid of any sense of the tragedy of war, which Gros possessed in such
a high degree, Vernet treated battles like performances at the circus.
His pictures have movement without passion, and magnitude without
greatness. If it had been required of him, he would have daubed all the
boulevards; his picture of Smala is certainly not so long, but there
would have been no serious difficulty in lengthening it by half a mile.
This incredible stenographical talent won for him his popularity. He was
decorated with all the orders in the world. The _bourgeois_ felt happy
when he looked at Vernet's pictures, and the paterfamilias promised to
buy a horse for his little boy. The soldiers called him "_mon colonel_,"
and would not have been surprised if he had been made a Marshal of
France. A lover of art passes the pictures of Vernet with the sentiment
which the old colonel owned to entertaining towards music. "Are you fond
of music, colonel?" asked a lady. "Madame, I am not afraid of it."
[Illustration: RAFFET. THE PARADE.]
The trivial realism of his workmanship is as tedious as the unreal
heroism of his soldiers. In the manner in which he conceived the
trooper, Vernet stands between the Classicists and the moderns. He did
not paint ancient warriors, but French soldiers: he knew them as a
corporal knows his men, and by this respect for prescribed regulation he
was prevented from turning them into Romans. But though he disregarded
Classicism, in outward appearance, he did not drop the heroic tone. He
always saw the soldier as the bold defender of his country, the warrior
performing daring deeds, as in the "Battle of Alexander"; and in this
way he gave his pictures their unpleasant air of bluster. For neither
modern tactics nor modern cannon admit of the prominence of the
individual as it is to be seen in Vernet's pictures. The soldier of the
nineteenth century is no longer a warrior, but the unit in a multitude;
he does what he is ordered, and for that he has no need of the spirit of
an ancient hero; he kills or is killed, without seeing his enemy or
being seen himself. The course of a battle advances, move by move,
according to mathematical calculation. It is therefore false to
represent soldiers in heroic attitudes, or even to suggest deeds of
heroism on the part of those in command. In giving his orders and
directing a battle a general has to behave pretty much as he does at
home at his writing-table. And he is never in the battle, as he is
represented by Horace Vernet; on the contrary, he remains at a
considerable distance off. Therefore, even with the dimensions of which
Vernet availed himself, the exact portrait of a modern battle is
exclusively an affair for panorama, but never for the flat surface of a
picture. A picture must confine itself, either to the field-marshal
directing the battle from a distance upon a hill in the midst of his
staff, or else to little pictorial episodes in the individual life of
the soldier. The gradual development from unreal battle-pieces to simple
episodic paintings can be followed step by step in the following works.
[Illustration: RAFFET. 1807.]
What was painted for the Versailles Museum in connection with deeds of
arms in the Crimean War and the Italian campaign kept more or less to
the blustering official style of Horace Vernet. In the galleries of
Versailles the battles of Wagram, Loano, and Altenkirche (1837-39), and
an episode from the retreat from Russia (1851), represent the work of
_Hippolyte Bellangé_. These are huge lithochromes which have been very
carefully executed. _Adolphe Yvon_, who is responsible for "The
Taking of Malakoff," "The Battle of Magenta," and "The Battle of
Solferino," is a more tedious painter, and remained during his whole
life a pupil of Delaroche; he laid chief stress on finished and rounded
composition, and gave his soldiers no more appearance of life than could
be forced into the accepted academic convention. The fame of _Isidor
Pils_, who immortalised the disembarkation of the French troops in the
Crimea, the battle of Alma, and the reception of Arab chiefs by Napoleon
III, has paled with equal rapidity. He could paint soldiers, but not
battles, and, like Yvon, he was too precise in the composition of his
works. In consequence they have as laboured an effect in arrangement as
they have in colour. He was completely wanting in sureness and
spontaneity. It is only his water-colours that hold one's attention; and
this they do at any rate by their unaffected actuality, and in spite of
their dull and heavy colour. _Alexandre Protais_ verged more on the
sentimental. He loved soldiers, and therefore had the less toleration
for war, which swept the handsome young fellows away. Two pendants, "The
Morning before the Attack" and "The Evening after the Battle," founded
his reputation in 1863. The first showed a group of riflemen waiting in
excitement for the first bullets of the enemy; the second represented
the same men in the evening delighted with their victory, but at the
same time--and here you have the note of Protais--mournful over the loss
of their comrades. "The Prisoners" and "The Parting" of 1872 owed their
success to the same lachrymose and melodramatic sensibility.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
RAFFET. POLISH INFANTRY.]
[Illustration: RAFFET. THE MIDNIGHT REVIEW.
C'est la grande revue
Qu'aux Champs-Elysées
A l'heure de minuit
Tient César décédé.]
A couple of mere lithographists, soldiers' sons, in whom a repining for
the Napoleonic legend still found its echo, were the first great
military painters of modern France. "Charlet and Raffet," wrote
Bürger-Thoré in his _Salon_ of 1845, "are the two artists who best
understand the representation of that almost vanished type, the trooper
of the Empire; and after Gros they will assuredly endure as the
principal historians of that warlike era."
_Charlet_, the painter of the old bear Napoleon I, might almost be
called the Béranger of painting. The "little Corporal," the "great
Emperor" appears and reappears in his pictures and drawings without
intermission; his work is an epic in pencil of the grey coat and the
little hat. From his youth he employed himself with military studies,
which were furthered in Gros' studio, which he entered in 1817. The
Græco-Roman ideal did not exist for him, and he was indifferent to
beauty of form. His was one of those natures which have a natural turn
for actual fact; he had a power for characterisation, and in his many
water-colours and lithographs he was merely concerned with the proper
expression of his ideas. How it came that Delacroix had so great a
respect for him was nevertheless explained when his "Episode in the
Retreat from Russia," in the World Exhibition of 1889, emerged from the
obscurity of the Lyons Museum; it is perhaps his best and most important
picture. When it appeared in the Salon of 1836, Alfred de Musset wrote
that it was "not an episode but a complete poem"; he went on to say that
the artist had painted "the despair in the wilderness," and that, with
its gloomy heaven and disconsolate horizon, the picture gave the
impression of infinite disaster. After fifty years it had lost none of
its value. Since the reappearance of this picture it has been recognised
that Charlet was not merely the specialist of old grey heads with their
noses reddened with brandy, the Molière of barracks and canteens, but
that he understood all the tragical sublimity of war, from which Horace
Vernet merely produced trivial anecdotes.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
ERNEST MEISSONIER.]
Beside him stands his pupil _Raffet_, the special painter of the _grande
armée_. He mastered the brilliant figure of Napoleon; he followed it
from Ajaccio to St. Helena, and never left it until he had said
everything that was to be said about it. He showed the "little Corsican"
as the general of the Italian campaign, ghastly pale and consumed with
ambition; the Bonaparte of the Pyramids and of Cairo; the Emperor
Napoleon on the parade-ground reviewing his Grenadiers; the triumphal
hero of 1807 with the Cuirassiers dashing past, brandishing their sabres
with a hurrah; the Titan of Beresina riding slowly over the waste of
snow, and, in the very midst of disaster, spying a new star of fortune;
the war-god of 1813, the great hypnotiser greeted even by the dying with
a cry of "Long life to the Emperor"; the adventurer of 1814, riding at
the head of shattered troops over a barren wilderness; the vanquished
hero of 1815, who, in the midst of his last square, in the thick of his
beloved battalions, calls fickle fate once more into the lists; and the
captive lion who, from the bridge of the ship, casts a last look on the
coast of France as it fades in the mist. He has called the Emperor from
the grave, as a ghostly power, to hold a midnight review of the _grande
armée_. And with love and passion and enthusiasm he has followed the
instrument of these victories, the French soldiers, the swordsmen of
seven years' service, through bivouac and battle, on the march and on
parade, as patrols and outposts. The ragged and shoeless troops of the
Empire are portrayed in his plates, with a touch of real sublimity, in
defeat and in victory. The empty inflated expression of martial
enthusiasm has been avoided by him; everything is true and earnest.
In a masterly fashion he could make soldiers deploy in masses. No one
has known in the same way how to render the impression of the multitude
of an army, the notion of men standing shoulder to shoulder, the welding
of thousands of individuals into one complete entity. In Raffet a
regiment is a thousand-headed living being that has but one soul, one
moral nature, one spirit, one sentiment of willing sacrifice and heroic
courage. His death was as adventurous as his life; he passed away in a
hotel in Genoa, and was brought back to French soil as part of the cargo
of a merchant ship. For a long time his fame was thrown into the shade,
at first by the triumphs of Horace Vernet, and then by those of
Meissonier, until at length a fitting record was devoted to him by the
piety of his son Auguste.
Never had _Ernest Meissonier_ to complain of want of recognition. After
his _rococo_ pictures had been deemed worth their weight in gold he
climbed to the summit of his fame, his universal celebrity and his
popularity in France, when he devoted himself in the sixties to the
representation of French military history. The year 1859 took him to
Italy in the train of Napoleon III. Meissonier was chosen to spread the
martial glory of the Emperor, and, as the nephew was fond of drawing
parallels between himself and his mighty uncle, Meissonier was obliged
to depict suitable occasions from the life of the first Napoleon. His
admirers were very curious to know how the great "little painter" would
acquit himself in such a monumental task. First came the "Battle of
Solferino," that picture of the Musée Luxembourg which represents
Napoleon III overlooking the battle from a height in the midst of his
staff. After lengthy preparations it appeared in the Salon of 1864, and
showed that the painter had not been untrue to himself: he had simply
adapted the minute technique of his _rococo_ pictures to the painting of
war, and he remained the Dutch "little master" in all the battle-pieces
which followed.
Napoleon III had no further deeds of arms to record, so the intended
parallel series was never accomplished. It is true, indeed, that he took
the painter with the army in 1870; but after the first battle was lost,
Meissonier went home: he did not wish to immortalise the struggles of a
retreat. Henceforward his brush was consecrated to the first Napoleon.
"1805" depicts the triumphant advance to the height of fame; "1807"
shows Napoleon when the summit has been reached and the soldiers are
cheering their idol in exultation; "1814" represents the fall: the star
of fortune has vanished; victory, so long faithful to the man of might,
has deserted his banners. There is still a look of indomitable energy on
the pale face of the Emperor, as, in utter despair, he aims his last
shot against the traitor destiny; but his eyes seem weary, his mouth is
contorted, and his features are wasted with fever.
[Illustration: MEISSONIER. 1814.
(_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MEISSONIER. THE OUTPOST.
(_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)]
Meissonier has treated all these works with the carefulness which he
expended on his little _rococo_ pictures. To give an historically
accurate representation of Napoleon's boots he did not content himself
with borrowing them from the museum. Walking and riding--for he was a
passionate horseman--he wore for months together boots of the same make
and form as those of the "little Corporal." To get the colour of the
horses of the Emperor and his marshals, in their full-grown winter coat,
and to paint them just as they must have appeared after the hardships
and negligence of a campaign, he bought animals of the same race and
colour as those ridden by the Emperor and his generals, according to
tradition, and picketed them for weeks in the snow and rain. His models
were forced to wear out the uniforms in sun and storm before he painted
them; he bought weapons and harness at fancy prices when he could not
borrow them from museums. And there is no need to say that he copied all
the portraits of Napoleon, Ney, Soult, and the other generals that were
to be had, and read through whole libraries before beginning his
Napoleon series. To paint the picture "1814," which is generally
reckoned his greatest performance--Napoleon at the head of his staff
riding through a snow-clad landscape--he first prepared the scenery on a
spot in the plain of Champagne, corresponding to the original locality,
just as he did in earlier years with his interiors of the _rococo_
period; he even had the road laid out on which he wished to paint the
Emperor advancing. Then he waited for the first fall of snow, and had
artillery, cavalry, and infantry to march for him upon this snowy path,
and actually contrived that overturned transport waggons, discarded
arms, and baggage should be decoratively strewn about the landscape.
From these laborious preparations it may be understood that he spent
almost as many millions of francs upon his pictures as he received. In
his article, _What an Old Work of Art is Worth_, Julius Lessing has
admirably dealt with the hidden ways of taste and commerce applied to
art. Amongst all painters of modern times Meissonier is the only one
whose pictures, during his own lifetime, fetched prices such as are only
reached by the works of famous old masters of the greatest epochs. And
yet he sold them straight from his easel, and never to dealers.
Meissonier avenged himself magnificently for the privations of his
youth. In 1832, when he gave up his apprenticeship with Menier, the
great chocolate manufacturer, to become a painter, he had fifteen francs
a month to spend. He had great difficulty in disposing of his drawings
and illustrations for five or ten francs, and was often obliged to
console himself with a roll for the want of a dinner. Only ten years
later he was able to purchase a small place in Poissy, near St. Germain,
where he went for good in 1850, to give himself up to work without
interruption. Gradually this little property became a pleasant country
seat, and in due course of time the stately house in Paris, in the
Boulevard Malesherbes, was added to it. His "Napoleon, 1814," for which
the painter himself received three hundred thousand francs, was bought
at an auction by one of the owners of the "Grands Magasins du Louvre"
for eight hundred and fifty thousand francs; "Napoleon III at Solferino"
brought him two hundred thousand, and "The Charge of the Cuirassiers"
three hundred thousand. And in general, after 1850, he only painted for
such sums. It was calculated that he received about five thousand francs
for every centimetre of painted canvas, and left behind him pictures
which, according to present rate, were worth more than twenty million
francs, without having really become a rich man; for, as a rule, every
picture that he painted cost him several thousand.
And Meissonier never sacrificed himself to money-making and the trade.
He never put a stroke on paper without the conviction that he could not
make it better, and for this artistic earnestness he was universally
honoured, even by his colleagues, to his very death. As master beyond
dispute he let the Classicists, Romanticists, Impressionists, and
Symbolists pass by the window of his lonely studio, and always remained
the same. A little man with a firm step, an energetic figure, eyes that
shone like coals, thick, closely cropped hair, and the beard of a
river-god, that always seemed to grow longer, at eighty years of age he
was as hale and active as at thirty. By a systematic routine of life he
kept his physique elastic, and was able to maintain that unintermittent
activity under which another man would have broken down. During long
years Meissonier went to rest at eight every evening, slept till
midnight, and then worked at his drawings by lamplight into the morning.
In the course of the day he made his studies from nature and painted.
Diffident in society and hard of access, he did not permit himself to be
disturbed in his indefatigable diligence by any social demands. A sharp
ride, a swim or a row was his only relaxation. In 1848, as captain of
the National Guard, he had taken part in the street and barricade
fighting; and again in 1871, when he was sixty-six, he clattered through
the streets of the capital, with the dangling sword he had so often
painted and a gold-laced cap stuck jauntily on one side, as a smart
staff-officer. Even the works of his old age showed no exhaustion of
power, and there is something great in attaining ripe years without
outliving one's reputation. As late as the spring of 1890, only a short
time before his death, he was the leader of youth, when it transmigrated
from the Palais des Champs Elysées to the Champ de Mars; and he
exhibited in this new Salon his "October 1806," with which he closed his
Napoleonic epic and his general activity as a painter. Halting on a
hill, the Emperor in his historical grey coat, mounted on a powerful
grey, is thoughtfully watching the course of the battle, without
troubling himself about the Cuirassiers who salute him exultantly as
they storm by, or about the brilliant staff which has taken up position
behind him. Not a feature moves in the sallow, cameo-like face of the
Corsican. The sky is lowering and full of clouds. In the foreground lie
a couple of dead soldiers, in whose uniform every button has been
painted with the same conscientious care that was bestowed on the
buttons of the _rococo_ coats of fifty years before.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ ALPHONSE DE NEUVILLE.]
Beyond this inexhaustible correctness I can really see nothing that can
be said for Meissonier's fame as an artist. He, whose name is honoured
in both hemispheres, was most peculiarly the son of his own work. The
genius for the infinitesimal has never been carried further. He knew
everything that a man can learn. The movements in his pictures are
correct, the physiognomies interesting, the delicacy of execution
indescribable, and his horses have been so exactly studied that they
stand the test of instantaneous photography. But painter, in the proper
sense, he never was. Precisely through their marvellous minuteness of
execution--a minuteness which is merely attractive as a trial of
patience and as an example of what the brush can do--his pictures are
wanting in unity of conception, and they leave one cold by the hardness
of their contours, the aridness of their colour, and the absence of all
vibrating, nervous feeling. In a cavalry charge, with the whirling dust
and the snorting horses, who thinks of costume? And who thinks of
anything else when Meissonier paints a charge? Here are life and
movement, and there a museum of military uniforms. When Manet saw
Meissonier's "Cuirassiers" he said, "Everything is iron here except the
cuirasses."
His _rococo_ pictures are probably his best performances; they even
express a certain amount of temperament. His military pictures make one
chilly. Reproduced in woodcuts they are good illustrations for
historical works, but as pictures they repel the eye, because they lack
air and light and spirit. They rouse nothing except astonishment at the
patience and incredible industry that went to the making of them. One
sees everything in them--everything that the painter can have seen--to
the slightest detail; only one does not rightly come into contact with
the artist himself. His battle-pieces stand high above the scenic
pictures of Horace Vernet and Hippolyte Bellangé, but they have nothing
of the warmth of Raffet or the vibrating life of Neuville. There is
nothing in them that is contagious and carries one away, or that appeals
to the heart. Patience is a virtue: genius is a gift. Precious without
originality, intelligent without imagination, dexterous without verve,
elegant without charm, refined and subtile without delicacy, Meissonier
has all the qualities that interest, and none of those which lay hold of
one. He was a painter of a distinctness which causes astonishment, but
not admiration; an artist for epicures, but for those of the second
order, who pay the more highly for works of art in proportion as they
value their artifice. His pictures recall the unseasonable compliment
which Charles Blanc made to Ingres: "_Cher maître, vous avez deviné la
photographie trente ans avant qu'il y eut des photographes._" Or else
one thinks of that malicious story of which Jules Dupré is well known as
the author. "Suppose," said he, "that you are a great personage who has
just bought a Meissonier. Your valet enters the salon where it is
hanging. 'Ah! Monsieur,' he cries, 'what a beautiful picture you have
bought! That is a masterpiece!' Another time you buy a Rembrandt, and
show it to your valet, in the expectation that he will at any rate be
overcome by the same raptures. _Mais non!_ This time the man looks
embarrassed. 'Ah! Monsieur,' he says, '_il faut s'y connaître_,' and
away he goes."
_Guillaume Regamey_, who is far less known, supplies what is wanting in
Meissonier. Sketchy and of a highly strung nervous temperament, he could
not adapt himself to the picture-market; but the history of art honours
him as the most spirited draughtsman of the French soldier, after
Géricault and Raffet. He did not paint him turned out for parade, ironed
and smartened up, but in the worst trim. Syria, the Crimea, Italy, and
the East are mingled with the difference of their types and the
brightness of their exotic costumes. He had a great love for the
catlike, quick-glancing chivalry of Turcos and Sapphis; but especially
he loved the cavalry. His "Chasseurs d'Afrique" are part and parcel of
their horses, like centaurs, and many of his cavalry groups recall the
frieze of the Parthenon. Unfortunately he died at thirty-eight, shortly
before the war of 1870, the historians of which were the younger
painters, who had grown up in the shadow of Meissonier.
[Illustration: DE NEUVILLE. LE BOURGET.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: DÉTAILLE. SALUT AUX BLESSÉS.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil, the owners of the copyright._)]
The most important of the group, _Alphonse de Neuville_, had looked at
war very closely as an officer during the siege of Paris, and in this
way he made himself a fine illustrator, who in his anecdotic pictures
specially understood the secret of painting powder-smoke and the
vehemence of a fusillade. The "Bivouac before Le Bourget" brought him
his first success. "The Last Cartridges," "Le Bourget," and "The
Graveyard of Saint-Privat" made him a popular master. Neuville is
peculiarly the French painter of fighting. He did not know, as Charlet
did, the soldier in time of peace, the peasant lad of yesterday who only
cares about his stomach and has little taste for martial adventure. His
soldier is an elegant and enthusiastic youthful hero. He even neglected
the troops of the line; his preference was for the Chasseur, whose cap
is stuck jauntily on his head and whose trousers fall better. He loved
the plumes, the high boots of the officers, the sword-knots, canes, and
eye-glasses. Everything received grace from his dexterous hand; he even
saw in the trooper a gallant and ornamental _bibelot_, which he painted
with chivalrous verve.
The pictures of Aimé Morot, the painter of "The Charge of the
Cuirassiers," possibly smell most of powder. Neuville's frequently
over-praised rival, Meissonier's favourite pupil, _Edouard Détaille_,
after he had started with pretty little costume pictures from the
_Directoire_ period, went further on the way of his teacher with less
laboriousness and more lightness, with less calculation and more
sincerity. The best of his works was "Salut aux Blessés"--the
representation of a troop of wounded Prussian officers and soldiers on a
country road, passing a French general and his staff, who with graceful
chivalry lift their caps and salute the wounded men. Détaille's great
pictures, such as "The Presentation of the Colours," and his panoramas
were as accurate as they were tedious and arid, although they are far
superior to most of the efforts which the Germans made to depict scenes
from the war of 1870.
[Illustration: _Soldan, Nürnberg._ ALBRECHT ADAM AND HIS SONS.]
In Germany the great period of the wars of liberation first inspired a
group of painters with the courage to enter the province of
battle-painting, which had been so much despised by their classical
colleagues. Germany had been turned into a great camp. Prussian, French,
Austrian, Russian, and Bavarian troops passed in succession through the
towns and villages: long trains of cannon and transport waggons came in
their wake, and friends and foes were billeted amongst the inhabitants;
the Napoleonic epoch was enacted. Such scenes followed each other like
the gay slides in a magic lantern, and once more gave to some among the
younger generation eyes for the outer world. There was awakened in them
the capacity for receiving impressions of reality and transferring them
swiftly to paper. Two hundred years before, the emancipation of Dutch
art from the Italian house of bondage had been accomplished in precisely
the same fashion. The Dutch struggle for freedom and the Thirty Years'
War had filled Holland with numbers of soldiery. The doings of these
mercenaries, daily enacted before them in rich costume and with manifold
brightness, riveted the pictorial feeling of artists. Echoes of war,
fighting scenes, skirmishes and tumult, the incidents of camp life,
arming, billeting, and marauding episodes are the first independent
products of the Dutch school. Then the more peaceable doings of soldiers
are represented. At Haarlem, in the neighbourhood of Frans Hals, were
assembled the painters of social pieces, as they are called; pieces in
which soldiers, bold and rollicking officers, make merry with gay
maidens at wine and play and love. From thence the artist came to the
portrayal of a peasantry passing their time in the same rough, free and
easy life, and thence onward to the representation of society in towns.
[Illustration: ADAM. A STABLE IN TOWN.]
German painting in the nineteenth century took the same road. Eighty
years ago foreign troops, and the extravagantly "picturesque and often
ragged uniforms of the Republican army, the characteristic and often
wild physiognomies of the French soldiers," gave artists their first
fresh and variously hued impressions. Painters of military subjects make
their studies, not in the antiquity class of the academy, but upon the
parade-ground and in the camp. Later, when the warlike times were over,
they passed from the portrayal of soldiers to that of rustics; and so
they laid the foundation on which future artists built.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
HESS. THE RECEPTION OF KING OTTO IN NAUPLIA.]
In Berlin Franz Krüger and in Munich Albrecht Adam and Peter Hess were
figures of individual character, belonging to the spiritual family of
Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow; and, entirely undisturbed by
classical theories or romantic reverie, they penetrated the life around
them with a clear and sharp glance. They lacked, indeed, the temperament
to comprehend either the high poetic tendencies of the old Munich school
or the sentimental enthusiasm of the old Düsseldorf.
On the other hand, they were unhackneyed artists, facing facts in a
completely unprejudiced spirit: entirely self-reliant, they refused to
form themselves upon any model derived from the old masters; they had
never had a teacher and never enjoyed academic instruction. This naïve
straightforwardness makes their painting a half-barbaric product;
something which has been allowed to run wild. But in a period of
archæological resuscitations, pedantic brooding over the past and
slavish imitation of the ancients, it seems, for this very reason, the
first independent product of the nineteenth century. As vigorous,
matter-of-fact realists they know nothing of more delicate charms, but
represented fact for all it was worth and as honestly and
conscientiously as was humanly possible. They are lacking in the
distinctively pictorial character, but they are absolutely untouched by
the Classicism of the epoch. They never dream of putting the uniforms
of their warriors upon antique statues. It is this downright honesty
that renders their pictures not merely irreplaceable as documents for
the history of civilisation, and in spite of their unexampled frigidity,
hardness, and gaudiness, lends them, even from the standpoint of art, a
certain innovating quality. In a pleasantly written autobiography
_Albrecht Adam_ has himself described the drift of historical events
which made him a painter of battles.
He was a confectioner's apprentice in Nördlingen when, in the year 1800,
the marches of the French army began in the neighbourhood. In an inn he
began to sketch sergeants and Grenadiers, and went proudly home with the
pence that he earned in this way. "Adam, when there's war, I'll take you
into the field with me," said an old major-general, who was the
purchaser of his first works. That came to pass in 1809, when the
Bavarians went with Napoleon against Austria. After a few weeks he was
in the thick of raging battle. He saw Napoleon, the Crown-Prince Ludwig,
and General Wrede, was present at the battles of Abensberg, Eckmühl, and
Wagram, and came to Vienna with his portfolios full of sketches. There
his portraits and pictures of the war found favour with the officers,
and Eugène Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, took him to Upper Italy and
afterwards to Russia. He was an eye-witness of the battles at Borodino
and on the Moskwa, and saved himself from the conflagration of Moscow by
his courage and determination. A true soldier, he mounted a horse when
he was sixty-two years of age to be present on the Italian expedition of
the Austrian army under Radetzky in 1848. His battle-pieces are
therefore the result of personal experience. When campaigning he led the
same life as the soldiers whom he portrayed, and as he proceeded in this
portrayal with the objective quietness and fidelity of an historian, his
artistic productions are invaluable as documents. Even where he could
not draw as an eye-witness he invariably made studies afterwards,
endeavouring to collect the most reliable material upon the spot, and
preparing it with the utmost conscientiousness. The ground occupied by
bodies of troops, the marshalling of them, and the conflict of masses,
together with the smallest episodes, are represented with simplicity and
reality. In the portrayal of the soldier's life in time of peace he was
inexhaustible. Just as vividly could he render horses undergoing the
strain of the march and in the tumult of battle as in the stall, the
farm-horse of the transport waggon no less than the noble creature
ridden for parade. That his colour was sharp and hard, and his pictures
therefore devoid of harmony, is to be explained by the helplessness of
the age in regard to colouring. Only his last pictures, such as "The
Battle on the Moskwa," have a certain harmony of hue; and there is no
doubt that this is to be set to the account of his son Franz.
After Adam, the father of German battle-painters, _Peter Hess_ made an
epoch by the earnestness and actuality of his pictures. He too
accompanied General Wrede on the 1813-15 campaigns, and has left behind
him exceedingly healthy, sane, and objectively viewed Cossack scenes,
bivouacs, and the like, belonging to this period; though in his great
pictures he aimed at totality of effect just as little as Adam. Confused
by the complexity of his material, he only ventured to single out
individual incidents, and then put them together on the canvas after the
fashion of a mosaic; and, to make the nature of the action as clear as
possible, he assumed as his standpoint the perspective view of a bird.
Of course, pictures produced in this way make an effect which is
artistically childish, but as the primitive endeavours of modern German
art they will keep their place. The best known of his pictures are those
inspired by the choice of Prince Otto of Bavaria as King of Greece,
especially "The Reception of King Otto in Nauplia," which is to be found
in the new Pinakothek in Munich. In spite of its hard, motley, and quite
impossible colouring, and its petty pedantry of execution, this is a
picture which will not lose its value as an historical source.
Vigorous _Franz Krüger_ had been long known in Berlin, by his famous
pictures of horses, before the Emperor of Russia in 1829 commissioned
him to paint, on a huge canvas, the great parade on the _Opernplatz_ in
Berlin, where he had reviewed his regiment of Cuirassiers before the
King of Prussia. From that time such parade pictures became Krüger's
specialty; especially famous is the great parade of 1839, with the
likenesses of those who at the time played a political or literary part
in Berlin. In these works he has left a true reflection of old Berlin,
and bridged over the chasm between Chodowiecki and Menzel: this is
specially the case with his curiously objective water-colour portrait
heads. Mention should be made of Karl Steffeck as a pupil of Krüger, and
Theodor Horschelt--in addition to Franz Adam--as a pupil of Adam. By
_Steffeck_, a healthy, vigorous realist, there are some well-painted
portraits of horses, and by _Th. Horschelt_, who in 1858 took part in
the fights of the Russians against the Circassians in the Caucasus,
there survive some of the spirited and masterly pen-and-ink sketches
which he published collectively in his _Memories from the Caucasus_.
_Franz Adam_, who first published a collection of lithographs on the
Italian campaign of 1848 in connection with Raffet, and in the Italian
war of 1859 painted his first masterpiece, a scene from the battle of
Solferino, owes his finest successes--although he had taken no part in
it--to the war of 1870. In respect of harmony of colouring he is perhaps
the finest painter of battle-pieces Germany has produced. As I shall
later have no opportunity of doing so, I must mention here the works of
_Josef Brandt_, the best of Franz Adam's pupils. They are painted with
verve and chivalrous feeling. There is a flame and a sparkle, both in
the forms of his warriors and of his horses, in his pictures of old
Polish cavalry battles. Everything is aristocratic: the distinction of
the grey colouring no less than the ductile drawing with its chivalrous
sentiment. In everything there breathes life, vigour, fire, and
freshness: the East of Eugène Fromentin translated into Polish.
_Heinrich Lang_, a spirited draughtsman, who had the art of seizing the
most difficult positions and motions of a horse, embodied the wild
tumult of cavalry charges ("The Charge of the Bredow Brigade," "The
Charge at Floing," etc.) in rapid pictures of incisive power, though
otherwise the heroic deeds of the Germans in 1870 resulted in but few
heroic deeds in art.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XIX
ITALY AND THE EAST
In the beginning of the century the man who did not wear a uniform was
not a proper subject for art unless he lived in Italy as a peasant or a
robber. That is to say, painters were either archæologists or tourists;
when they did not dive into the past they sought their romantic ideal in
the distance. Italy, where monumental painting had first seen the light,
was the earliest goal for travellers, and satisfied the desire of
artists, since, for the rest of the world, it was still enveloped in
poetic mystery. Only in Rome, in Naples, and in Tuscany was it thought
possible to meet with human beings who had not become vulgar and hideous
under the influence of civilisation. There they still preserved
something of the beauty of Grecian statues. There artists were less
afraid of being diverted from absolute beauty by the study of nature,
and thus an important principle was carried. Instead of copying directly
from antique statues, as David and Mengs had done before them, painters
began to study the descendants of those who had been the models of the
old Roman sculptors; and so it was that, almost against their will, they
turned from museums to look rather more closely into nature, and from
the past to cast a glance into the present.
To _Leopold Robert_ belongs the credit of having opened out this new
province to an art which was enclosed in the narrow bounds of
Classicism. He owes his success with the public of the twenties and his
place in the history of art entirely to the fact that in spite of his
strict classical training he was one of the first to interest himself,
however little, in contemporary life. Hundreds of artists had wandered
into Italy and seen nothing but the antique until this young man set out
from Neufchâtel in 1818 and became the painter of the Italian people.
What struck him at the first glance was the character of the people,
together with their curious habits and usages, and their rude and
picturesque garb. "He wished to render this with all fidelity," and
especially "to do honour to the absolute nobility of that people which
still bore a trace of the heroic greatness of their forefathers." Above
all, he fancied that he could find this phenomenon of atavism amongst
the bandits; and as Sonnino, an old brigand nest, had been taken and the
inhabitants removed to Engelsburg shortly after his arrival, a
convenient opportunity was offered to him for making his studies in this
place. The pictures of brigand life which he painted in the beginning of
the twenties soon found a most profitable market. "Dear M. Robert,"
said the fashionable guests who visited his studio by the dozen, "could
you paint a little brigand, if it is not asking too much?" Robbers with
sentimental qualms were particularly prized: for instance, at the moment
when they were fondling their wives, or praying remorsefully to God, or
watching over the bed of a sick child.
From brigands he made a transition to the girls of Sorrento, Frascati,
Capri, and Procida, and to shepherd lads, fishers, pilgrims, hermits,
and _pifferari_. Early in the twenties, when he made an exhibition of a
number of these little pictures in Rome, it effectually prepared the way
for his fame; and when he sent a succession of larger pictures to the
Paris Salon in 1824-31 he was held as one of the most brilliant masters
of the French school, to whom Romanticists and Classicists paid the same
honour. In the first of these pictures, painted in 1824, he had
represented a number of peasants listening to a Neapolitan fisherman
improvising to the accompaniment of a harmonica. "The Return from a
Pilgrimage to the Madonna dell' Arco" of 1827 is the painting of a
triumphal waggon yoked with oxen. Upon it are seated lads and maidens
adorned with foliage, and in their gay Sunday best. An old _lazzarone_
is playing the mandolin, and girls are dancing with tambourines, whilst
a young man springs round clattering his castanets, and a couple of
boys, to complete the seasons of life, head the procession. His third
picture, "The Coming of the Reapers to the Pontine Marshes," was the
chief work in the Salon of 1831 after the "Freedom" of Delacroix. Heine
accorded him a classical passage of description, and the orthodox
academical critics were liberal with most unmerited praise, treating the
painter as a dangerous revolutionary who was seducing art into the
undignified naturalism of Ribera and Caravaggio. Robert, the honest,
lamblike man, who strikes us now as being a conscientious follower of
the school of David!
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
LEOPOLD ROBERT.]
How little did the artistic principles which he laid down in his letters
accord with his own paintings! "I try," he wrote to a friend in 1819,
"to follow Nature in everything. Nature is the only teacher who should
be heard. She alone inspires and moves me, she alone appeals to me: it
is Nature that I seek to fathom, and in her I ever hope to find the
special impulse for work." She is a miracle to him, and one that is
greater than any other, a book in which "the simple may read as well as
the great." He could not understand "how painters could take the old
masters as their model instead of Nature, who is the only great
exemplar!" What is to be seen in his pictures is merely an awkward
transference of David's manner of conception and representation to the
painting of Italian peasants--a scrupulously careful adaptation of
classical rules to romantic subjects. He looked at modern Italians
solely through the medium of antique statuary, and conducts us to an
Italy which can only be called Leopold Robert's Italy, since it never
existed anywhere except in Robert's map. All his figures have the
movement of some familiar work of antique sculpture, and that expression
of cherished melancholy which went out of fashion after the time of Ary
Scheffer. Never does one see in his pictures a casual and unhackneyed
gesture in harmony with the situation. It seems as if he had dressed up
antique statues or David's Horatii and his Sabine women in the costume
of the Italian peasantry, and grouped them for a _tableau vivant_ in
front of stage scenery, and in accordance with Parisian rules of
composition. His peasants and fishers make beautiful, noble, and often
magnificent groups. But one can always give the exact academic rules for
any particular figure standing here and not there, or in one position
and not in another. His pictures are much too official, and obtrusively
affect the favourite pyramid form of composition.
[Illustration: L. ROBERT. FISHERS OF THE ADRIATIC.]
But as they are supposed to be pictures of Italian manners, the contrast
between nature and the artificial construction is almost more irritating
than it is in David's mythological representations. It is as if Robert
had really never seen any Italian peasants, though he maintains all the
while that he is depicting their life. The hard outlines and the sharp
bronze tone of his works are a ghastly evidence of the extent to which
the sense of colour had become extinct in the school of David. It was
merely form that attracted him; the sun of Italy left him indifferent.
The absence of atmosphere gives his figures an appearance of having been
cut out of picture sheets. O great artists of Holland, masters of
atmospheric effect and of contour bathed in light, what would you have
said to such heartless silhouettes! In his youth Robert had been a line
engraver, and he adapted the prosaic technique of line engraving to
painting. However, he was a transitional painter, and as such he has an
historical interest. He was a modern Tasso, too, and on the strength of
the adventurous relationship to Princess Charlotte Napoleon, which
ultimately drove him to suicide, he could be used with effect as the
hero of a novel. Through the downfall of the school of David his star
has paled--one more proof that only Nature is eternal, and that
conventional painting falls into oblivion with the age that saw it rise.
"I wished to find a _genre_ which was not yet known, and this _genre_
has had the fortune to please. It is always an advantage to be the
first." With these words he has himself indicated, in a way which is as
modest as it is accurate, the ground of his reputation amongst
contemporaries, and why it is that the history of art cannot quite
afford to forget him.
[Illustration: L. ROBERT. THE COMING OF THE REAPERS TO THE PONTINE
MARSHES.]
Amongst the multitude of those who, incited by Robert's brilliant
successes, made the Spanish staircase in Rome the basis of their art,
_Victor Schnetz_, by his "Vow to the Madonna" of 1831, specially
succeeded in winning public favour. At a later time his favourite themes
were the funerals of children, inundations, and the like; but his arid
method of painting contrasts with the sentimental melancholy of these
subjects in a fashion which is not particularly agreeable.
[Illustration: SCHNETZ. AN ITALIAN SHEPHERD.]
It was _Ernest Hébert_ who first saw Italy with the eyes of a painter.
He might be called the Perugino of this group. He was the most romantic
of the pupils of Delaroche, and owed his conception of colour to that
painter. His spiritual father was Ary Scheffer. The latter has
discovered the poetry of sentimentality; Hébert the poetry of disease.
His pictures are invariably of great technical delicacy. His style has
something femininely gracious, almost languishing: his colouring is
delicately fragrant and tenderly melting. He is, indeed, a refined
artist who occupies a place by himself, however mannered the melancholy
and sickliness of his figures may be. In "The Malaria" of 1850 they were
influenced by the subject itself. The barge gliding over the waters of
the Pontine Marshes, with its freight of men, women, and children, seems
like a gloomy symbol of the voyage of life; the sorrow of the passengers
is that of resignation: dying they droop their heads like withering
flowers. But later the fever became chronic in Hébert. The interesting
disease returned even where it was out of place, as it does still in the
pictures of his followers. The same fate befell the painters of Italy
which befalls tourists. What Robert had seen in the country as the first
comer whole generations saw after him, neither more nor less than that.
The pictures were always variations on the old theme, until in the
sixties Bonnat came with his individual and realistic vision.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
HÉBERT. THE MALARIA.]
In Germany, where "the yearning for Italy" had been ventilated in an
immoderate quantity of lyrical poems ever since the time of
Wackenroder's _Herzensergiessungen_, _August Riedel_ represented this
phase of modern painting; and as Leopold Robert is still celebrated,
Riedel ought not to be forgotten. Riedel lived too long (1800-1883),
and, as he painted nothing but bad pictures during the last thirty
years of his life, what he had done in his youth was forgotten. At that
time he was the first apostle of Leopold Robert in Germany, and as such
he has his importance as an innovator. When he began his career in the
Munich Academy in 1819 Peter Langer, a Classicist of the order of Mengs,
was still director there. Riedel also painted classical subjects and
church pictures--"Christ on the Mount of Olives," "The Resurrection of
Lazarus," and "Peter and Paul healing the Lame." But when he returned
from Italy in 1823 he reversed the route which others had taken: the
classic land set him free from Classicism, and opened his eyes to the
beauty of life. Instead of working on saints in the style of Langer, he
painted beautiful women in the costume of modern Italy. His "Neapolitan
Fisherman's Family" was for Germany a revelation similar to that which
Robert's "Neapolitan Improvisator" had been for France. The fisherman,
rather theatrically draped, is sitting on the shore, while his wife and
his little daughter listen to him playing the zither. The blue sea,
dotted with white sails, and distant Ischia and Cape Missene, form the
background; and a blue heaven, dappled with white clouds, arches above.
Everything was of an exceedingly conventional beauty, but denoted
progress in comparison with Robert. It already announced that search for
brilliant effects of light which henceforward became a characteristic of
Riedel, and gave him a peculiar position in his own day. "Even hardened
connoisseurs," wrote Emil Braun from Rome about this time, "stand
helpless before this magic of colouring. It is often long before they
are able to persuade themselves that such glory of colour can be
produced by the familiar medium of oil painting, and with materials that
any one can buy at a shop where pigments are sold." Riedel touched a
problem--diffidently, no doubt--which was only taken up much later in
its full extent. And if Cornelius said to him, "You have fully attained
what I have avoided with the greatest effort during the course of my
whole life," it is none the less true that Riedel's Italian girls in the
full glow of sunlight have remained, in spite of their stereotyped
smile, so reminiscent of Sichel, better able to stand the test of
galleries than the pictures of the Michael-Angelo of Munich. Before his
"Neapolitan Fisherman's Family," which went the world over like a melody
from Auber's _Masaniello_, before his "Judith" carrying the head of
Holofernes in the brightest light of morning, before his "Girls Bathing"
in the dimness of the forest, and before his "Sakuntala," painted "with
refined effects of light," the cartoon painters mumbled and grumbled,
and raised hue and cry over the desecration of German art; but Riedel's
friends were just as loud in proclaiming the witchery of his colour, and
"the Southern sunlight which he had conjured on to his palette," to be
splendid beyond the powers of comprehension. It is difficult at the
present day to understand the fame that he once had as "a pyrotechnist
in pigments." But the results which he achieved by himself in colouring,
long before the influence of the Belgians in Germany, will always give
him a sure place in the history of German art. And these qualities were
unconsciously inherited by his successors, who troubled their heads no
further about the pioneer and founder.
[Illustration: RIEDEL. THE NEAPOLITAN FISHERMAN'S FAMILY.]
[Illustration: RIEDEL. JUDITH.]
Those who painted the East with its clear radiance, its interesting
people, and its picturesque localities, stand in opposition to the
Italian enthusiasts. They are the second group of travellers. Gros had
given French art a vision of that distant magic land, but he had had no
direct disciples. Painters were as yet in too close bondage to their
classical proclivities to receive inspiration from Napoleon's expedition
into Egypt. But the travels of Chateaubriand and the verse of Byron, and
then the Greek war of liberation, and, above all, the conquest of
Algiers, once more aroused an interest in these regions, and, when the
revolution of the Romanticists had once taken place, taught art a way
into the East. Authors, journalists, and painters found their place in
this army of travellers. The first view of men and women standing on the
shore in splendid costume, with turbans or high sheepskin hats, and
surrounded by black slaves, or mounted upon horses richly caparisoned,
or listening to the roll of drums and the muezzin resounding from the
minarets, was like a scene from _The Arabian Nights_. The bazaars and
the harems, the quarters of the Janizaries and gloomy dungeons were
visited in turn. Veiled women were seen, and mysterious houses where
every sound was hushed. At first the Moors, obedient to the stern laws
of the Koran, fled before the painters as if before evil spirits, but
the Moorish women were all the more ready to receive these conquerors
with open arms. Artists plunged with rapture into a new world; they
anointed themselves with the oil of roses, and tasted all the sweets of
Oriental life. The East was for the Byronic enthusiasts of 1830 what
Italy had been for the Classicists. Could anything be imagined more
romantic? You went on board a steamer provided with all modern comforts
and all the appliances of the nineteenth century, and it carried you
thousands of years back in the history of the world; you set foot on a
soil where the word progress did not exist--in a land where the
inhabitants still sat in the sun as if cemented to the ground, and wore
the same costumes in which their forefathers had sat there two thousand
years ago. Here the Romanticists not only found nature decked in the
rich hues which satisfied their passion for colour, but discovered a
race of people possessed of that beauty which, according to the
Classicists, was only to be seen in the Italian peasants. They beheld
"men of innate dignity and remarkable distinction of pose and gesture."
Thus a new experience was added to life. There was the East, where
splendour and simplicity, cruelty and beauty, softness of temper and
savage austerity, and brilliant colour and blinding light are more
completely mingled than anywhere else in the world; there was the East,
where rich tints laugh in the midst of squalor and misery, the
brightness of earlier days in the midst of outworn usages, and the pride
of art in the midst of ruined villages. It was so great, so
unfathomable, and so like a fairy tale that it gave every one the chance
of discovering in it some new qualities.
For _Delacroix_, the Byron of painting, it was a splendid setting for
passion in its unfettered wildness and its unscrupulous daring. He, who
had lived exclusively in the past, now turned to the observation of
living beings, as may be seen in his "Algerian Women," his "Jewish
Wedding," his "Emperor of Morocco," and his "Convulsionaries of
Tangier." Amongst the Orientals he also found the hotly flaming
sensuousness and primitive wildness which beset his imagination with its
craving for everything impassioned.
The great _charmeur_, the master of pictorial caprice, _Decamps_, found
his province in the East, because its sun was so lustrous, its costume
so bright, and its human figures so picturesque. If Delacroix was a
powerful artist, Decamps was no more than a painter,--but painter he was
to his finger-tips. He was indifferent to nothing in nature or history:
he showed as much enthusiasm for a pair of tanned beggar-boys playing in
the sunshine at the corner of a wall as for Biblical figures and
old-world epics. He has painted hens pecking on a dung-heap, dogs on the
chase and in the kennel, monkeys as scholars, and musicians in all the
situations which Teniers and Chardin loved. His "Battle of Tailleborg"
of 1837 has been aptly termed the only picture of a battle in the
Versailles Museum. He looked on everything as material for painting, and
never troubled as to how another artist would have treated the subject.
There is an individuality in every one of his works; not an
individuality of the first order, but one that is decidedly charming and
that assures him a very high place amongst his contemporaries.
Having made a success in 1829 with an imaginary picture of the East, he
had a wish to see how far the reality corresponded with his ideas of
Turkey, and in the same year--therefore before Delacroix--he went on
that journey to the Greek Archipelago, Constantinople, and Asia Minor
which became a voyage of discovery for French painting. In the Salon of
1831 was exhibited his "Patrol of Smyrna," which at once made him one of
the favourite French painters of the time. Soon afterwards came the
picture of the "Pasha on his Rounds," accompanied by a lean troop of
running and panting guards, that of the great "Turkish Bazaar," in which
he gave such a charming representation of the gay and noisy bustle of an
Oriental fair, those of the "Turkish School," the "Turkish Café," "The
Halt of the Arab Horsemen," and "The Turkish Butcher's Shop." In
everything which he painted from this time forward--even in his Biblical
pictures--he had before his eyes the East as it is in modern times. Like
Horace Vernet, he painted his figures in the costume of modern Arabs and
Egyptians, and placed them in landscapes with modern Arab buildings. But
the largeness of line in these landscapes is expressive of something so
patriarchal and Biblical, and of such a dreamy, mystical poetry, that,
in spite of their modern garb, the figures seem like visions from a far
distance.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DECAMPS. THE SWINEHERD.]
Decamps' painting never became trivial. All his pictures soothe and
captivate the eye, however much they disappoint, on the first glance,
the expectations which the older descriptions of them may have excited.
Fifty years ago it was said that Delacroix painted with colour and
Decamps with light; that his works were steeped in a bath of sunshine.
This vibrating light, this transparent atmosphere, which contemporaries
admired, is not to be found in Decamps' pictures. Their brilliancy of
technique is admirable, but he was no painter of light. The world of
sunshine in which everything is dipped, the glow and lustre of objects
in shining, liquid, and tremulous air, is what Gustave Guillaumet first
learnt to paint a generation later. Decamps attained the effect of
light in his pictures by the darkening of shadows, precisely in the
manner of the old school. To make the sky bright, he threw the
foreground into opaque and heavy shade. And as, in consequence of the
ground of bole used to produce his beautiful red tones, the dark parts
of his pictures gradually became as black as pitch, and the light parts
dead and spotty, he will rather seem to be a contemporary of Albert Cuyp
than of Manet.
As draughtsman to a German baron making a scientific tour in the East,
_Prosper Marilhat_, the third of the painters of Oriental life, was
early in following this career. He visited Greece, Asia Minor, and
Egypt, and returned to Paris in 1833 intoxicated with the beauties of
these lands. Especially dear to him was Egypt, and in his pictures he
called himself, "Marilhat the Egyptian." Decamps had been blinded by the
sharp contrast between light and shadow in Oriental nature, by the vivid
blaze of colour in its vegetation, and by the tropical glow of the
Southern sky. Marilhat took novelties with a more quiet eye, and kept
close to pure reality. He has not so much virtuosity as Decamps, and in
colour he is less daring, but he is perhaps more poetic, and on that
account, in the years 1833-44, he was prized almost more. The exhibition
of 1844, in which eight of his pictures appeared, closed his career. He
had expected the Cross of the Legion of Honour, but did not get it, and
this disappointment affected him so deeply that he became first
hypochondriacal and then mad. His early death at thirty-six set Decamps
free from a powerful rival.
_Eugène Fromentin_ went further in the same direction as Marilhat. He
knew nothing of the preference for the glowing hues of the tropics nor
of the fantastic colouring of the Romanticists. He painted in the spirit
of a refined social period in which no loud voice is tolerated, but only
light and familiar talk. The East gave him his grace; the proud and
fiery nature of the Arab horse was revealed to him. In his portraits
Fromentin looks like a cavalry officer. In his youth he had studied law,
but that was before his acquaintance with the landscape painter Cabat
brought him to his true calling, and a sojourn made on three different
occasions--in 1845, 1848, and 1852--on the borders of Morocco decided
for him his specialty. By his descriptions of travels, _A Year in
Sahel_, which appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, he became known
as a writer: it was only after 1857, however, that he became famous as a
painter. Fromentin's East is Algiers. While Marilhat tried to render the
marvellous clearness of the Southern light, and Decamps depicted the
glowing heat of the East, its dark brooding sky in the sultry hours of
summer and the grand outlines of its landscape, Fromentin has tried--and
perhaps with too much system--to express the grace and brilliant spirit
of the East. Taste, refinement, ductility, distinction of colouring, and
grace of line are his special qualities. His Arabs galloping on their
beautiful white horses have an inimitable chivalry; they are true
princes in every pose and movement. The execution of his pictures is
always spirited, easy, and in keeping with their high-bred tone.
Whatever he does has the nervous vigour of a sketch, with that degree of
finish which satisfies the connoisseur. There is always a coquetry in
his arrangement of colour, and his tones are light and delicate if they
are not deep. In the landscape his little Arab riders have the effect of
flowers upon a carpet.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DECAMPS. COMING OUT FROM A TURKISH SCHOOL.
(_By permission of Mme. Moreau-Nélaton, the owner of the picture._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DECAMPS. THE WATERING PLACE.]
Afterwards, when naturalism was at its zenith, Fromentin was much
attacked for this wayward grace. He was accused of making a superficial
appeal to the eye, and of offering everything except truth. And for its
substantive fidelity Fromentin's "East" cannot certainly be taken very
seriously. He was a man of fine culture, and in his youth he had studied
the old Dutch masters more than nature; he even saw the light of the
East through the Dutch _chiaroscuro_. His pictures are subtle works of
art, nervous in drawing and dazzling in brilliancy of construction, but
they are washed in rather than painted, and stained rather than
coloured. In his book he speaks himself of the cool, grey shadows of the
East. But in his pictures they turn to a reddish hue or to brown. An
effort after beauty of tone in many ways weakened his Arab scenes. He
looked at the people of the East too much with the eyes of a Parisian.
And the more his recollections faded, the more did he begin to create
for himself an imaginary Africa. He painted grey skies simply because he
was tired of blue; he tinted white horses with rosy reflections,
chestnuts with lilac, and dappled-greys with violet. The grace of his
works became more and more an affair of affectation, until at last,
instead of being Oriental pictures, they became Parisian fancy goods,
which merely recalled the fact that Algiers had become a French town.
[Illustration: MARILHAT. A HALT.]
But after all what does it matter whether pictures of the East are true
to nature or not? Other people whose names are not Fromentin can provide
such documents. In his works Fromentin has expressed himself, and that
is enough. Take up his first book, _L'été dans la Sahara_: by its grace
of style it claims a place in French literature. Or read his classic
masterpiece, _Les maîtres d'autrefois_, published in 1876 after a tour
through Belgium and Holland: it will remain for ever one of the finest
works ever written on art. A connoisseur of such refinement, a critic
who gauged the artistic works of Belgium and Holland with such subtlety,
necessarily became in his own painting an epicure of beautiful tones.
This man, who never made an awkward movement nor uttered a brutal word,
this sensitive, distinguished spirit could be no more than a subtle
artist who had eyes for nothing but the aristocratic side of Eastern
life. As a painter, however, he might wish to be true to nature; he
could be no more than this. His art, compact of grace and distinction,
was the outcome of his own nature. He is a descendant of those
delicately feminine, seductively brilliant, facile and spontaneous,
sparkling and charming painters who were known in the eighteenth century
as _peintres des fêtes galantes_. He is the Watteau of the East, and in
this capacity one of the most winning and captivating products of French
art.
[Illustration: E. FROMENTIN. ARABIAN FALCONERS.]
Finally, _Guillaumet_, the youngest and last of the group, found in the
East peace: a scion of the Romanticists, there is none the less a
whole world of difference between him and them. While the Romanticists,
as sons of a flaccid, inactive period, lashed themselves into enthusiasm
for the passion and wild life of the East, Guillaumet, the child of a
hurried and neurotic epoch, sought here an opiate for his nerves. Where
they saw contrasts he found harmony; and he did not find it, like
Fromentin, in what is understood as _chic_. Manet's conception of colour
had taught him that nature is everywhere in accord and harmoniously
delicate.
He writes: "_Je commence à distinguer quelques formes: des silhouettes
indécises bougent le long des murs enfumés sous des poutres luisantes de
sui. Les détails sortent du demi-jour, s'animent graduellement avec la
magie des Rembrandt. Même mystère des ombres, mêmes ors dans les
reflets--c'est l'aube.... Des terrains poudreux inondés de soleil; un
amoncellement de murailles grises sous un ciel sans nuage; une cité
somnolente baignée d'une lumière égale, et dans le frémissement visible
des atomes aériens quelques ombres venant ça et là détacher une forme,
accuser un geste parmi les groupes en burnous qui se meuvent sur les
places ... tel m'apparait le ksar, vers dix heures du matin...._
"_L'oeil interroge: rien ne bouge. L'oreille écoute: aucun bruit. Pas un
souffle, si ce n'est le frémissement presque imperceptible de l'air
au-dessus du sol embrasé. La vie semble avoir disparu, absorbée par la
lumière. C'est le milieu du jour.... Mais le soir approche.... Les
troupeaux rentrent dans les douars; ils se pressent autour des tentes, à
peine visibles, confondus sous cette teinte neutre du crépuscule, faite
avec les gris de la nuit qui vient et les violets tendres du soir qui
s'en va. C'est l'heure mystérieuse, où les couleurs se mèlent, où les
contours se noient, où toute chose s'assombrit, où toute voix se tait,
où l'homme, à la fin du jour, laisse flotter sa pensée devant ce qui
s'éteint, s'efface et s'evanouit._"
[Illustration: _L'Art._ EUGÈNE FROMENTIN.]
This description of a day in Algiers in Guillaumet's _Tableaux
algériens_ interprets the painter Guillaumet better than any critical
appreciation could possibly do. For him the East is the land of dreams
and melting softness, a far-off health-resort for neurotic patients,
where one lies at ease in the sun and forgets the excitements of Paris.
It was not what was brilliant and pictorial in sparkling jewels and
bright costume that attracted him at all, but the silence, the mesmeric
spell of the East, the vastness of the infinite horizon, the imposing
majesty of the desert, and the sublime and profound peace of the nights
of Africa. "The Evening Prayer in the Desert" was the name of the first
picture that he brought back with him in 1863. There is a wide and
boundless plain; the straight line of the horizon is broken by a few
mountain forms and by the figures of a party belonging to a caravan;
but, bowed as they are in prayer, these figures are scarcely to be
distinguished. The smoke of the camp ascends like a pillar into the air.
The monotony of the wilderness seems to stretch endlessly to the right
and to the left, like a grand and solemn Nirvana smiting the human
spirit with religious delirium.
[Illustration: FROMENTIN. ARABIAN WOMEN RETURNING FROM DRAWING WATER.]
For Decamps and Marilhat the East was a great, red copper-block beneath
a blue dome of steel; a beautiful monster, bright and glittering.
Guillaumet has no wish to dazzle. His pictures give one the impression
of intense and sultry heat. His light is really "_le frémissement
visible des atomes aériens_." Moreover, he did not see the chivalry of
the East like Fromentin. The latter was fascinated by the nomad, the
pure Arab living in tent or saddle, the true aristocrat of the desert,
mounted on his white palfrey, hunting wild beasts through fair blue and
green landscapes. Poor folk who never owned a horse are the models of
Guillaumet. With their dogs--wild creatures who need nothing--they squat
in the sun as if with their own kin: they are the lower, primitive
population, the pariahs of the wilderness; tattered men whose life-long
siesta is only interrupted by the anguish of death, animal women whose
existence flows by as idly as in the trance of opium.
After the French Romanticists had shown the way, other nations
contributed their contingent to the painters of Oriental subjects. In
Germany poetry had discovered the East. Rückert imitated the measure and
the ideas of the Oriental lyric, and the Greek war of liberation
quickened all that passionate love for the soil of old Hellas which
lives in the German soul. _Wilhelm Müller_ sang his songs of the Greeks,
and in 1825 _Leopold Schefer_ brought out his tale _Die Persierin_. But
just as the Oriental tale was a mere episode in German literature, an
exotic grafted on the native stem, so the Oriental painting produced no
leading mind in the country, but merely a number of good soldiers who
dutifully served in the troops of foreign commanders.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
FROMENTIN. THE CENTAURS.]
_Kretszchmer_ of Berlin led the way with ethnographical representations,
and was joined at a later time by Wilhelm Gentz and Adolf Schreyer of
Frankfort. _Gentz_, a dexterous painter, and, as a colourist, perhaps
the most gifted of the Berlin school in the sixties, is, in comparison
with the great Frenchmen who portrayed the East, a thoroughly arid
realist. He brought to his task a certain amount of rough vigour and
restless diversity, together with North German sobriety and Berlin
humour. _Schreyer_, who lived in Paris, belonged to the following of
Fromentin. The Arab and his steed interested him also. His pictures are
bouquets of colour, dazzling the eye. Arabs in rich and picturesque
costume repose on the ground or are mounted on their milk-white steeds,
which rear and prance with tossing manes and wide-stretched nostrils.
The desert undulates away to the far horizon, now pale and now caressed
by the softened rays of the setting sun, which tip the waves of sand
with burnished gold. Schreyer was--for a German--a man with an
extraordinary gift for technique and a brilliantly effective sense of
life. The latter remark is specially true of his sketches. At a later
date--in 1875, after being with Lembach and Makart in Cairo--the
Viennese _Leopold Müller_ found the domain of his art beneath the clear
sky, in the brightly coloured land of the Nile. Even his sketches are
often of great delicacy of colour, and the ethnographical accuracy which
he also possessed has long made him the most highly valued delineator of
Oriental life and a popular illustrator of works on Egypt. The learned
and slightly pedantic vein in his works he shares with Gérôme, but by
his greater charm of colour he comes still nearer to Fromentin.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
GUILLAUMET. THE SÉGUIA, NEAR BISKRA.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
GUILLAUMET. A DWELLING IN THE SAHARA.]
The route to the East was shown to the English by the glowing landscapes
of _William Müller_; but the English were just as unable to find a Byron
amongst their painters. _Frederick Goodall_ has studied the classical
element in the East, and endeavoured to reconstruct the past from the
present. Best known amongst these artists was _J. F. Lewis_, who died in
1876 and was much talked of in earlier days. For long years he wandered
through Asia Minor, filling his portfolios with sketches and his trunks
with Oriental robes and weapons. When he returned there was a perfect
scramble for his pictures. They revealed a new world to the English
then, but no one scrambles for them now. John Lewis was exceedingly
diligent and conscientious; he studied the implements, the costumes, and
the popular types of the East with incredible industry. In his harem
pictures as in his representations of Arabian camp life everything is
painted, down to the patterns of embroidery, the ornaments of turbans,
and the pebbles on the sand. Even his water-colours are triumphs of
endurance; but patience and endurance are not sufficient to make an
interesting artist. John Lewis stands in respect of colour, too, more or
less on a level with Gentz. He has seized neither the dignity of the
Mussulman nor the grace of the Bedouin, but has contented himself with a
faithful though somewhat glaring reproduction of accessories. _Houghton_
was the first who, moving more or less parallel with Guillaumet,
succeeded in delicately interpreting the great peace and the mystic
silence of the East.
[Illustration: W. MÜLLER. PRAYER IN THE DESERT.]
The East was in this way traversed in all directions. The first comers
who beheld it with eager, excited eyes collected a mass of gigantic
legends, with no decided aim or purpose and driven by no passionate
impulse, merely eager to pluck here or there an exotic flower, or
lightly to catch some small part of the glamour that overspread all that
was Eastern, piled up dreams upon dreams, and gave it a gorgeous and
fantastic life. There were deserts shining in the sun, waves lashed by
the storm, the nude forms of women, and all the Asiatic splendour of the
East: dark-red satin, gold, crystal, and marble were heaped in confusion
and executed in terrible fantasies of colour in the midst of darkness
and lightning. After this generation had passed like a thunderstorm the
_chic_ of Fromentin was delicious. He profited by the taste which others
had excited. Painters of all nationalities overran the East. The great
dramas were transformed into elegies, pastorals, and idylls; even
ethnographical representations had their turn. Guillaumet summed up the
aims of that generation. His dreamy and tender painting was like a
beautiful summer evening. The radiance of the blinding sky was
mitigated, and a peaceful sun at the verge of the horizon covered the
steppes of sand, which it had scorched a few hours before, with a
network of rosy beams.
They were all scions of the Romantic movement. The yearning which filled
their spirits and drove them into distant lands was only another symptom
of their dissatisfaction with the present.
Classicism had dealt with Greek and Roman history by the aid of antique
statues, and next used the colours of the Flemish masters to paint
Italian peasantry. Romanticism had touched the motley life of the Middle
Ages and the richly coloured East; but both had anxiously held aloof
from the surroundings of home and the political and social relations of
contemporaries.
It was obvious that art's next task was to bring down to earth again the
ideal that had hovered so long over the domain of ancient history, and
then winged its flight to the realms of the East. "_Ah la vie, la vie!
le monde est là; il rit, crie, souffre, s'amuse, et on ne le rend pas._"
In these words the necessity of the step has been indicated by Fromentin
himself. The successful delivery of modern art was first accomplished,
the problem stated in 1789 was first solved, when the subversive
upheaval of the Third Estate, which had been consummating itself more
and more imperiously ever since the Revolution, found distinct
expression in the art of painting. Art always moves on parallel lines
with religious conceptions, with politics, and with manners. In the
Middle Ages men lived in the world beyond the grave, and so the subjects
of painting were Madonnas and saints. According to Louis XIV, everything
was derived from the King, as light from the sun, and so royalty by the
grace of God was reflected in the art of his epoch. The royal sun
suffered total eclipse in the Revolution, and with this mighty change of
civilisation art had to undergo a new transformation. The 1789 of
painting had to follow on the politics of 1789: the proclamation of the
liberty and equality of all individuals. Only painting which recognised
man in his full freedom, no privileged class of gods and heroes,
Italians and Easterns, could be the true child of the Revolution, the
art of the new age. Belgium and Germany made the first diffident steps
in this direction.
CHAPTER XX
THE PAINTING OF HUMOROUS ANECDOTE
At the very time when the East attracted the French Romanticists, the
German and Belgian painters discovered the rustic. Romanticism, driven
into strange and tropical regions by its disgust of a sluggish,
colourless and inglorious age, now planted a firm foot upon native soil.
Amid rustics there was to be found a conservative type of life which
perpetuated old usages and picturesque costume.
It is not easy for a dilettante to enter into sympathetic relationship
with these early pictures of peasant life. They are gaudy in tone,
smooth as metal, and the figures stand out hard against the atmosphere,
as if they had been cut from a picture-sheet. But the historian has no
right to be merely a dilettante. It would be unfair of him to make the
artistic conceptions of the present time the means of depreciating the
past. For, after all, works of the past are only to be measured with
those of their own age, and when one once remembers what an importance
these modest "little masters" had for their time it is no longer
difficult to treat them with justice. In an age when futile and aimless
intentions lost their way in theory and imitation of the "great
painting" there blossomed here, and for the first time, a certain
individuality of mind and temper. While Cornelius, Kaulbach, and their
fellows formed a style which was ideal in a purely conventional sense,
and epitomised the art of the great masters according to method, the
"_genre_ painters" seized upon the endless variety of nature, and, after
a long period of purely reproductive painting, made the first diffident
attempt to set art free from the curse of system and the servile
repetition of antiquated forms.
Even as regards colour they have the honour of preparing the way for a
restoration in the technique of painting. Their own defects in technique
were not their fault, but the consequence of that fatal interference of
Winckelmann through which art lost its technical traditions. They did
not enjoy the advantages of issuing from a long line of ancestors. In a
certain sense they had to make a beginning in the history of art by
themselves; for between them and the older German painting they only met
with men who held the ability to paint as a shame and a disgrace. With
the example of the old Dutch and Flemish masters before them, they had
to knit together the bonds which these men had cut; and considering the
æsthetic ideas of the age, this reference to Netherlandish models was an
event of revolutionary importance. In doing this they may have been
partially influenced by Wilkie, who made his tour in Germany in 1825,
and whose pictures had a wide circulation through the medium of
engraving. And from another side attention was directed to the old Dutch
masters by Schnaase's letters of 1834. While the entire artistic school
which took its rise from Winckelmann gave the reverence of an empty,
formal idealism to classical antiquity and the Cinquecento, applying
their standards to all other periods, Schnaase was the first to give an
impulse to the historical consideration of art. In this way he revealed
wide and hitherto neglected regions to the creative activity of modern
times. The result of his book was that the Netherlandish masters were no
longer held to be "the apes of vulgar nature," but took their place as
exquisite artists from whom the modern painter had a great deal to
learn.
[Illustration: KOBELL. A MEETING.]
In Munich the conditions of a popular, national art were supplied by the
very site of the town. Since the beginning of the century Munich had
been peculiarly the type of a peasant city, the capital of a peasant
province; it had a peasantry abounding in old-fashioned singularities,
gay and motley in costume as in their ways of life, full of bright and
easy-going good-humour, and gifted with the Bavarian force of character.
Here it was, then, that "the resort to national traits" was first made.
And if, in the event, this painting of rustic life produced many
monstrosities, it remained throughout the whole century an unfailing
source from which the art of Munich drew fresh and vivid power.
Even in the twenties there was an art in Munich which was native to the
soil, and in later years shot up all the more vigorously through being
for a time cramped in its development by the exotic growths of the
school of Cornelius. It was as different from the dominant historical
painting as the "_magots_" of Teniers from the mythological machinery of
Lebrun, and it was treated by official criticism with the same contempt.
Cornelius and his school directed the attention of educated people so
exclusively to themselves, and so entirely proscribed the literature of
the day, that what took place outside their own circle in Munich was
but little discussed. The vigorous group of naturalists had not much to
offer critics who wished to display their knowledge by picking to pieces
historical pictures, interpreting philosophical cartoons, and pointing
to similarities of style between Cornelius and Michael Angelo. But for
the historian, seeking the seeds of the present in the past, they are
figures worthy of respect. Setting their own straightforward conception
of nature against the eclecticism of the great painters, they laid the
foundation of an independent modern art.
The courtly, academic painting of Cornelius derived its inspiration from
the Sistine Chapel; the naturalism of these "_genre_ painters" was
rooted in the life of the Bavarian people. The "great painters" dwelt
alone in huge monumental buildings; the naturalists, who sought their
inspiration in the life of peasants, in the life of camps, and in
landscape, without troubling themselves about antique or romantic
subjects, furnished the material for the first collections of modern
art. Both as artists and as men they were totally different beings.
Cornelius and his school stand on the one side, cultured, imperious,
fancying themselves in the possession of all true art, and abruptly
turning from all who are not sworn to their flag; on the other side
stand the naturalists, brisk and cheery, rough it may be, but sound to
the core, and with a sharp eye for life and nature.
[Illustration: PETER HESS. A MORNING AT PARTENKIRCHE.]
Painting in the grand style owed its origin to the personal tastes of
the king and to the great tasks to which it was occasionally set;
independent of princely favour, realistic art found its patrons amongst
the South German nobility and, at a later date, in the circle of the
Munich Art Union, and seems the logical continuation of that military
painting which, at the opening of the century, had its representatives
in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Munich. The motley swarm of foreign soldiers
which overran the soil of Germany incited Albrecht Adam, Peter Hess,
Johann Adam Klein, and others, to represent what they saw in a fashion
which was sincere and simple if it was also prosy. And when the warlike
times were over it was quite natural that some of the masters who had
learnt their art in camps should turn to the representation of peasant
life, where they were likewise able to find gay, pictorial costumes.
_Wilhelm Kobell_, whose etchings of the life of the Bavarian people are
more valuable than his battle-pieces, was one of the first to make this
transition. In 1820 sturdy _Peter Hess_ painted his "Morning at
Partenkirche," in which he depicted a simple scene of mountain
life--girls at a well in the midst of a sunny landscape--in a homely but
poetic manner. When this breach had been made, Bürkel was able to take
the lead of the Munich painters of rustic subjects.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ HEINRICH BÜRKEL.]
_Heinrich Bürkel's_ portrait reveals a square-built giant, whose
appearance contrasts strangely with that of his celebrated
contemporaries. The academic artists sweep back their long hair and look
upwards with an inspired glance. Bürkel looks down with a keen eye at
the hard, rough, and stony earth. The academic artists had a mantle--the
mantle of Rauch's statues--picturesquely draped about their shoulders;
Bürkel dressed like anybody else. No attribute is added which could
indicate that he was a painter; neither palette, nor brush, nor picture;
beside him on the table there is--a mug of beer. There he sits without
any sort of pose, with his hand resting on his knee--rough, athletic,
and pugnacious--for all the world as if he were quite conscious of his
peculiarities. Even the photographer's demand for "a pleasant smile" had
no effect upon him. This portrait is itself an explanation of Bürkel's
art. His was a healthy, self-reliant nature, without a trace of romance,
sentimentality, affected humour, or sugary optimism. Amongst all his
Munich contemporaries he was the least academic in his whole manner of
feeling and thinking.
Sprung from the people, he became their painter. He was born, 29th May
1802, in Pirmasens, where his father combined a small farm with a
public-house and his mother kept a shop; and he had been first a
tradesman's apprentice, and then assistant clerk in a court of justice,
before he came to Munich in 1822. Here the Academy rejected him as
without talent; but while it shut the door against the pupil, life
revealed itself to the master. He went to the Schleissheimer Gallery,
and sat there copying the pictures of Wouwerman, Ostade, Brouwer, and
Berghem, and developed his powers, by the study of these Netherlandish
masters, with extraordinary rapidity. His first works--battles,
skirmishes, and other martial scenes--are amateurish and diffident
attempts; it is evident that he was without any kind of guidance or
direction. All the more astonishing is the swiftness with which he
acquired firm command of abilities, admirable for that age, and the
defiant spirit of independence with which he went straight from pictures
to nature, though hardly yet in possession of the necessary means of
expression. He painted and drew the whole new world which opened itself
before him: far prospects over the landscape, mossy stones in the
sunlight, numbers of cloud-pictures, peasants' houses with their
surroundings, forest paths, mountain tracks, horses, and figures of
every description. The life of men and animals gave him everywhere some
opportunity for depicting it in characteristic situations. And later,
when he had settled down again in Munich, he did not cease from
wandering in the South German mountains with a fresh mind. Up to old age
he made little summer and winter tours in the Bavarian highlands.
Tegernsee, Rottach, Prien, Berchtesgaden, South Tyrol, and Partenkirche
were visited again and again, on excursions for the week or the day; and
he returned from them all with energetic studies, from which were
developed pictures that were not less energetic.
[Illustration: BÜRKEL. BRIGANDS RETURNING.]
[Illustration: BÜRKEL. A DOWNPOUR IN THE MOUNTAINS.]
For, as every artist is the result of two factors, of which one lies in
himself and the other in his age and surroundings, the performances of
Bürkel are to be judged, not only according to the requirements of the
present day, but according to the conditions under which they were
produced. What is weak in him he shares with his contemporaries; what is
novel is his own most peculiar and incontestable merit. In a period of
false idealism worked up in a museum--false idealism which had aped from
the true the way in which one clears one's throat, as Schiller has it,
but nothing more indicative of genius--in a period of this
accomplishment Bürkel preferred to expose his own insufficiency rather
than adorn himself with other people's feathers; at a time which prided
itself on representing with brush and pigment things for which pen and
ink are the better medium, he looked vividly into life; at a time when
all Germany lost itself aimlessly in distant latitudes, he brought to
everything an honest and objective fidelity which knew no trace of
romantic sentimentalism; and by these fresh and realistic qualities he
has become the father of that art which rose in Munich in a later day.
Positive and exact in style, and far too sincere to pretend to raise
himself to the level of the old masters by superficial imitation, he
was the more industrious in penetrating the spirit of nature and showing
his love for everything down to its minutest feature; weak in the
sentiment for colour, he was great in his feeling for nature. That was
Heinrich Bürkel, and his successors had to supplement what was wanting
in him, but not to wage war against his influence.
[Illustration: BÜRKEL. A SMITHY IN UPPER BAVARIA.]
The peculiarity of all his works, as of those of the early Dutch and
Flemish artists, is the equal weight which he lays on figures and on
landscape. In his eyes the life of man is part of a greater whole;
animals and their scenic surroundings are studied with the same love,
and in his most felicitous pictures these elements are so blended that
no one feature predominates at the expense of another. Seldom does he
paint interiors, almost always preferring to move in free and open
nature. But here his field is extraordinarily wide.
Those works in which he handled Italian subjects form a group by
themselves. Bürkel was in Rome from 1829 to 1832, the very years in
which Leopold Robert celebrated his triumphs there; but curious is the
difference between the works of the Munich and those of the Swiss
painter. In the latter are beautiful postures, poetic ideas, and all
the academical formulas; in the former unvarnished, naturalistic
bluntness of expression. Even in Italy he kept romantic and academic art
at a distance. They had no power over the rough, healthy, and sincere
nature of the artist. He saw nothing in Italy that he had not met with
at home, and he painted things as he saw them, honestly and without
beatification.
To find material Bürkel did not need to go far. Picture to yourself a
man wandering along the banks of the Isar, and gazing about him with a
still and thoughtful look. A healthy peasant lass with a basket, or a
plough moving slowly in the distance behind a sweating yoke of horses,
is quite enough to fill him with feelings and ideas.
His peculiar domain was the high-road, which in the thirties and the
forties, before the railways had usurped its traffic, was filled with a
much more manifold life than it is to-day. Waggons and mail-carts passed
along before the old gateways; in every village there were taverns
inviting the wayfarer to rest, and blacksmiths sought for custom on the
road. There were vehicles of every description, horses at the forge,
posting-stages, change of teams, the departure of marketing folk, and
passengers taking their seats or alighting. Here horses were being
watered, and an occasion was given for brief dialogues between the
coachman and his fares. There travellers surprised by a shower were
hurrying under their umbrellas into an inn; or, in wintry weather, they
were waiting impatiently, wrapped up in furs, whilst a horse was being
shod.
[Illustration: CARL SPITZWEG.]
The beaten tracks through field and forest offered much of the same
sort. Peasants were driving to market with a cart-load of wood. Horses
stood unyoked at a drinking-trough whilst the driver, a muscular fellow
with great sinews, quietly enjoyed his pipe. Along some shadowy woodland
path a team drew near to a forge or a lonely charcoal-burner's hut,
where the light flickered, and over which there soared a bare and snowy
mountain peak.
Such pictures of snow-clad landscape were a specialty of Bürkel's art,
and in their simplicity and harmony are to be ranked with the best that
he has done. Heavily freighted wood-carts passing through a drift,
waggons brought to a standstill in the snow, raw-boned woodmen
perspiring as they load them in a wintry forest, are the accessory
objects and figures.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
SPITZWEG. AT THE GARRET WINDOW.]
But life in the fields attracted him also. Having a love of representing
animals, he kept out of the way of mowers, reapers, and gleaners. His
favourite theme is the hay, corn, or potato harvest, which he paints
with much detail and a great display of accessory incidents. Maids and
labourers, old and young, are feverishly active in the construction of
hay-cocks, or, in threatening weather, pile up waggons, loaded as high
as a house, with fresh trusses.
In this enumeration all the rustic life of Bavaria has been described.
It is only the Sunday and holiday themes, the peculiar motives of the
_genre_ painter, that are wanting. And in itself this is an indication
of what gives Bürkel his peculiar position.
By their conception his works are out of keeping with everything which
the contemporary generation of "great painters" and the younger _genre_
painters were attempting. The great painters had their home in museums;
Bürkel lived in the world of nature. The _genre_ painters, under the
influence of Wilkie, were fond of giving their motive a touch of
narrative interest, like the English. Cheerful or mournful news, country
funerals, baptisms, and public dinners offered an excuse for
representing the same sentiment in varying keys. Their starting-point
was that of an illustrator; it might be very pretty in itself, but it
was too jovial or whimpering for a picture. Bürkel's works have no
literary background; they are not composed of stories with a humorous or
sentimental tinge, but depict with an intimate grasp of the subject the
simplest events of life. He neither offered the public lollipops, nor
tried to move them and play upon their sensibilities by subjects which
could be spun out into a novel. He approached his men, his animals, and
his landscapes as a strenuous character painter, without gush,
sentimentality, or romanticism. In contradistinction from all the
younger painters of rustic subjects, he sternly avoided what was
striking, peculiar, or in any way extraordinary, endeavouring to paint
everyday life in the house or the farmyard, in the field or upon the
highway, in all plainness and simplicity.
At first, indeed, he thought it necessary to satisfy the demands of the
age by, at any rate, painting in a broad and epical manner. The public
collections chiefly possess pictures of his which contain many figures:
"The Return from the Mountain Pasture," "Coming Back from the Bear
Hunt," "The Cattle Show," and "From the Fair"; scenes before an inn at
festivals, or waggoners setting out, and the like. But in these works
the scheme of composition and the multitude of figures have a somewhat
overladen and old-fashioned effect. On the other hand, there are
pictures scattered about in private collections which are of a
simplicity which was unknown at the time: dusty roads with toiling
horses, lonely charcoal burners' huts in the dimness of the forest,
villages in rain or snow, with little figures shivering from frost or
damp as they flit along the street. From the very beginning, free from
the vices of _genre_ and narrative painting and the search after
interesting subjects, he has, in these pictures, renounced the epical
manner of representing a complicated event. Like the moderns, he paints
things which can be grasped and understood at a glance.
[Illustration: SPITZWEG. A MORNING CONCERT.]
But, after all, Bürkel occupies a position which is curiously
intermediate. His colour relegates him altogether to the beginning of
the century. He was himself conscious of the weakness of his age in this
respect, and stands considerably above the school of Cornelius, even
where its colouring is best. Yet, in spite of the most diligent study of
the Dutch masters, he remained, as a colourist, hard and inartistic to
the end. Having far too much regard for outline, he is not light enough
with what should be lightly touched, nor fugitive enough with what is
fleeting. What the moderns leave to be indistinctly divined he renders
sharp and palpable in his drawing. He trims and rounds off objects which
have a fleeting form, like clouds. But although inept in technique, his
works are more modern in substance than anything that the next
generation produced. They have an intimacy of feeling beyond the reach
of the traditional _genre_ painting. In his unusually fresh, simple, and
direct studies of landscape he did not snatch at dazzling and
sensational effects, but tried to be just to external nature in her
work-a-day mood; and, in the very same way, in his figures he aimed at
the plain reproduction of what is given in nature.
The hands of his peasants are the real hands of toil--weather-stained,
heavy, and awkward. There are no movements that are not simple and
actual. Others have told droller stories; Bürkel unrolls a true picture
of the surroundings of the peasant's life. Others have made their
rustics persons suitable for the drawing-room, and cleaned their nails;
Bürkel preaches the strict, austere, and pious study of nature. An
entirely new age casts its shadow upon this close devotion to life. In
their intimacy and simplicity his pictures contain the germ of what
afterwards became the task of the moderns. All who came after him in
Germany were the sons of Wilkie until Wilhelm Leibl, furnished with a
better technical equipment, started in spirit from the point at which
Bürkel had left off.
_Carl Spitzweg_, in whose charming little pictures tender and discreet
sentiment is united with realistic care for detail, must likewise be
reckoned with the few who strove and laboured in quiet, apart from the
ruling tendency, until their hour came. Thrown entirely on his own
resources, without a teacher, he worked his way upwards under the
influence of the older painters. By dint of copying he discovered their
secrets of colour, and gave his works, which are full of poetry, a
remarkable impress of sympathetic delicacy, suggestive of the old
masters. One turns over the leaves of the album of Spitzweg's sketches
as though it were a story-book from the age of romance, and at the same
time one is astonished at the master's ability in painting. He was a
genius who united in himself three qualities which seem to be
contradictory--realism, fancy, and humour. He might be most readily
compared with Schwind, except that the latter was more of a romanticist
than a realist, and Spitzweg is more of a realist than a romanticist.
The artists' yearning carries Schwind to distant ages and regions far
from the world, and a positive sense of fact holds Spitzweg firmly to
the earth.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
SPITZWEG. THE POSTMAN.]
Like Jean Paul, he has the boundless fancy which revels in airy dreams,
but he is also like Jean Paul in having a cheery, provincial
satisfaction in the sights of his own narrow world. He has all Schwind's
delight in hermits and anchorites, and witches and magic and nixies, and
he plays with dragons and goblins like Boecklin; but, for all that, he
is at home and entirely at his ease in the society of honest little
schoolmasters and poor sempstresses, and gives shape to his own small
joys and sorrows in a spirit of contemplation. His dragons are only
comfortable, Philistine dragons, and his troglodytes, who chastise
themselves in rocky solitudes, perform their penance with a kindly
irony. In Spitzweg a fine humour is the causeway between fancy and
reality. His tender little pictures represent the Germany of the
forties, and lie apart from the rushing life of our time, like an
idyllic hamlet slumbering in Sunday quietude. Indeed, his pictures come
to us like a greeting from a time long past.
There they are: his poor poet, a little, lean old man, with a sharp nose
and a night-cap, sits at his garret window scanning verses on his frozen
fingers, enveloped in a blanket drawn up to his chin, and protected from
the inclemency of the weather by a great red umbrella; his clerk, grown
grey in the dust of parchments, sharpens his quill with dim-sighted
eyes, and feels himself part of a bureaucracy which rules the world; his
book-worm stands on the highest ladder in the library, with books in his
hand, books in his pockets, books under his arms, and books jammed
between his legs, and neglects the dinner-hour in his peaceful
enjoyment, until an angry torrent of scolding is poured over his devoted
head by the housekeeper; there is his old gentleman devoutly sniffing
the perfume of a cactus blossom which has been looked forward to for
years; there is his little man enticing his bird with a lump of sugar;
the widower glancing aside from the miniature of his better half at a
pair of pretty maidens walking in the park; the constable whiling away
the time at the town-gate in catching flies; the old-fashioned bachelor,
solemnly presenting a bouquet to a kitchen-maid who is busied at the
market-well, to the amusement of all the gossips watching him from the
windows; the lovers who in happy oblivion pass down a narrow street by
the stall of a second-hand dealer, where amidst antiquated household
goods a gilded statuette of Venus reposes in a rickety cradle; the
children holding up their pinafores as they beg the stork flying by to
bring them a little brother.
Spitzweg, like Jean Paul, makes an effect which is at once joyous and
tender, _bourgeois_ and idyllic. The postillion gives the signal on his
horn that the moment for starting has arrived; milk-maids look down from
the green mountain summit into the far country; hermits sit before their
cells forgotten by the world; old friends greet each other after years
of separation; Dachau girls in their holiday best pray in woodland
chapels; school children pass singing through a still mountain valley;
maidens chatter of an evening as they fetch water from the moss-grown
well, or the arrival of the postman in his yellow uniform brings to
their windows the entire population of an old country town.
The little man with the miserable figure of a tailor had been an
apothecary until he was thirty years of age, but he had an independent
and distinctive artistic nature which impresses itself on the memory in
a way that is unforgettable. It is only necessary to see his portrait as
he sits at his easel in his dressing-gown with his meagre beard, his
long nose, and the droll look about the corners of his eyes, to feel
attracted by him before one knows his works. Spitzweg reveals in them
his own life: the man and the painter are one in him. There is a pretty
little picture of him as an elderly bachelor, looking out of the window
in the early morning and nodding across the roofs to an old sempstress
who had worked the whole night through without noticing that the day had
broken; that is the world he lived in, and the world which he has
painted. As a kind-hearted, inflexible Benedick, full of droll
eccentricities, he lived in the oldest quarter of Munich in a
fourth-storey attic. His only visitor was his friend Moritz Schwind, who
now and then climbed the staircase to the little room that looked over
the roofs and gables and pinnacles to distant, smoky towers. His studio
was an untidy confusion of prosaic discomfort and poetic cosiness.
[Illustration: KAUFFMANN. WOODCUTTERS RETURNING.]
Here he sat, an ossified hermit, _bourgeois_, and book-worm, as if he
were in a spider's nest, and here at a little window he painted his
delightful pictures. Here he took his homely meal at the rickety little
table where he sat alone in the evening buried in his books. A pair of
heavy silver spectacles with keen glasses sparkled on his thick nose,
and the great head with its ironically twinkling eyes rested upon a huge
cravat attached to a pointed stand-up collar. When disturbed by
strangers he spoke slowly and with embarrassment, though in the society
of Schwind he was brilliant and satirical. Then he became as mobile as
quicksilver, and paced up and down the studio with great strides,
gesticulating and sometimes going through a dramatic performance in
vivid mimicry of those of whom he happened to be talking.
His character has the same mixture of Philistine contentment and genial
comedy which gleams from his works with the freshness of dew. A touch of
the sturdy Philistinism of Eichendorf is in these provincial idylls of
Germany; but at the same time they display an ability which even at the
present day must compel respect. The whole of Romanticism chirps and
twitters in the Spitzweg Album, as from behind the wires of a birdcage.
Everything is here united: the fragrance of the woods and the song of
birds, the pleasures of travelling and the sleepy life of provincial
towns, moonshine and Sunday quiet, vagabonds, roving musicians, and the
guardians of law, learned professors and students singing catches,
burgomasters and town-councillors, long-haired painters and strolling
players, red dressing-gowns, green slippers, night-caps, and pipes with
long stems, serenades and watchmen, rushing streams and the trill of
nightingales, rippling summer breezes and comely lasses, stroking back
their hair of a morning, and looking down from projecting windows to
greet the passers-by. In common with Schwind he shows a remarkable
capacity for placing his figures in their right surroundings. All these
squares, alleys, and corners, in which his provincial pictures are
framed, seem--minutely and faithfully executed as they are--to be
localities predestined for the action, though they are painted freely
from memory. Just as he forgot none of the characteristic figures which
he had seen in his youth, so he held in his memory the whimsical and
marvellous architecture of the country towns of Swabia and Upper Bavaria
which he had visited for his studies, with such a firm grip that it was
always at his command; and he used it as a setting for his figures as a
musician composes an harmonious accompaniment for a melody.
[Illustration: KAUFFMANN. A SANDY ROAD.]
[Illustration: KAUFFMANN. RETURNING FROM THE FIELDS.]
To look at his pictures is like wandering on a bright Sunday morning
through the gardens and crooked, uneven alleys of an old German town. At
the same time one feels that Spitzweg belonged to the present and not
to the period of the ingenuous Philistines. It was only after he had
studied at the university and passed his pharmaceutical examination that
he turned to painting. Nevertheless he succeeded in acquiring a
sensitiveness to colour to which nothing in the period can be compared.
He worked through Burnett's _Treatise on Painting_, visited Italy, and
in 1851 made a tour, for the sake of study, to Paris, London, and
Antwerp, in company with Eduard Schleich. In the gallery of
Pommersfelden he made masterly copies from Berghem, Gonzales Coquez,
Ostade, and Poelenburg, and lived to see the appearance of Piloty. But
much as he profited by the principles of colour which then became
dominant, he is like none of his contemporaries, and stands as far from
Piloty's brown sauce as from the frigid hardness of the old _genre_
painters. He was one of the first in Germany to feel the really sensuous
joy of painting, and to mix soft, luxuriant, melting colours. There are
landscapes of his which, in their charming freshness, border directly on
the school of Fontainebleau. Spitzweg has painted bright green meadows
in which, as in the pictures of Daubigny, the little red figures of
peasant women appear as bright and luminous patches of colour. His
woodland glades penetrated by the sun have a pungent piquancy of colour
such as is only to be found elsewhere in Diaz. And where he diversified
his desolate mountain glens and steeply rising cliffs with the fantastic
lairs of dragons and with eccentric anchorites, he sometimes produced
such bold colour symphonies of sapphire blue, emerald green, and red,
that his pictures seem like anticipations of Boecklin. Spitzweg was a
painter for connoisseurs. His refined cabinet pieces are amongst the
few German productions of their time which it is a delight to possess,
and they have the savour of rare delicacies when one comes across them
in the dismal wilderness of public galleries.
Bürkel's realistic programme was taken up with even greater energy by
_Hermann Kauffmann_, who belonged to the Munich circle from 1827 to
1833, and then painted until his death in 1888 in his native Hamburg.
His province was for the most part that of Bürkel: peasants in the
field, waggoners on the road, woodmen at their labour, and hunters in
the snowy forest. For the first few years after his return home he used
for his pictures the well-remembered motives taken from the South German
mountain district. A tour in Norway, undertaken in 1843, gave him the
impulse for a series of Norwegian landscapes which were simple and
direct, and of more than common freshness. In the deanery at Holstein he
studied the life of fishers. Otherwise the neighbourhood of Hamburg is
almost always the background of his pictures: Harburg, Kellinghusen,
Wandsbeck, and the Alster Valley. Concerning him Lichtwark is right in
insisting upon the correctness of intuition, the innate soundness of
perception which one meets with in all his works.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH EDUARD MEYERHEIM.]
In Berlin the excellent _Eduard Meyerheim_ went on parallel lines with
these masters. An old tradition gives him the credit of having
introduced the painting of peasants and children into German art. But in
artistic power he is not to be compared with Bürkel or Kauffmann. They
were energetic realists, teeming with health, and in everything they
drew they were merely inspired by the earnest purpose of grasping life
in its characteristic moments. But Meyerheim, good-humoured and
childlike, is decidedly inclined to a sentimentally pathetic compromise
with reality. At the same time his importance for Berlin is
incontestable. Hitherto gipsies, smugglers, and robbers were the only
classes of human society, with the exception of knights, monks, noble
ladies, and Italian women, which, upon the banks of the Spree, were
thought suitable for artistic representation. Friedrich Eduard
Meyerheim sought out the rustic before literature had taken this step,
and in 1836 he began with his "King of the Shooting Match," a series of
modest pictures in which he was never weary of representing in an honest
and sound-hearted way the little festivals of the peasant, the happiness
of parents, and the games of children.
He had grown up in Dantzic, and played as a child in the tortuous lanes
of the old free imperial city, amid trumpery shops, general dealers, and
artisans. Later, when he settled down in Berlin, he painted the things
which had delighted him in his youth. The travels which he made for
study were not extensive: they hardly led him farther beyond the
boundaries of the Mark than Hesse, the Harz district, Thüringen,
Altenburg, and Westphalia. Here he drew with indefatigable diligence the
pleasant village houses and the churches shadowed by trees; the cots,
yards, and alleys; the weather-beaten town ramparts, with their
crumbling walls; the unobtrusive landscapes of North Germany, lovely
valleys, bushy hills, and bleaching fields, traversed by quiet streams
fringed with willows, and enlivened by the figures of peasants, who
still clung to so much of their old costume. His pictures certainly do
not give an idea of the life of the German people at the time. For the
peasantry have sat to Meyerheim only in their most pious mood, in Sunday
toilette, and with their souls washed clean. Clearness, neatness, and
prettiness are to be found everywhere in his pictures. But little as
they correspond to the truth, they are just as little untrue through
affectation, for their idealism sprang from the harmless and cheerful
temperament of the painter, and from no convention of the schools.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. CHILDREN AT PLAY.]
A homely, idyllic poetry is to be found in his figures and his
interiors. His women and girls are chaste and gracious. It is evident
that Meyerheim had a warm sympathy for the sorrows and joys of humble
people; that he had an understanding for this happy family life, and
liked himself to take part in these merry popular festivals; that he did
not idealise the world according to rules of beauty, but because in his
own eyes it really was so beautiful. His "King of the Shooting Match"
of 1836 (Berlin National Gallery) has as a background a wide and
pleasant landscape, with blue heights in the distance and the cheerful
summer sunshine resting upon them. In the foreground are a crowd of
figures, neatly composed after studies. The crowned king of the match,
adorned for a festival, stands proudly on the road by which the
procession of marksmen is advancing, accompanied by village music. An
old peasant is congratulating him, and the pretty village girls and
peasant women, in their gay rustic costumes, titter as they look on,
while the neighbours are merrily drinking his health. Then there is the
"Morning Lesson," representing a carpenter's house, where an old man is
hearing his grandson repeat a school task; "Children at Play," a picture
of a game of hide-and-seek amongst the trees; "The Knitting Lesson," and
the picture of a young wife by the bed of a naked boy who has thrown off
the bedclothes and is holding up one of his rosy feet; and "The Road to
Church," where the market-place is shadowed with lime trees and the
fresh young girlish figures adorned in their Sunday best. These are all
pictures which in lithograph and copperplate engraving once flooded all
Germany and enraptured the public at exhibitions.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. THE KING OF THE SHOOTING MATCH.]
But the German _genre_ picture of peasant life only became universally
popular after the village novel came into vogue at the end of the
thirties. Walter Scott was not only a Romanticist, but the founder of
the peasant novel: he was the first to study the life and the human
character of the peasantry of his native land, their rough and healthy
merriment, their humorous peculiarities, and their hot-headed love of
quarrelling; and he led the Romanticists from their idyllic or sombre
world of dreams nearer to the reality and its poetry. A generation later
Immermann created this department of literature in Germany by the
Oberhof-Episode of his _Münchhausen_. "The Village Magistrate" was soon
one of those typical figures which in literature became the model of a
hundred others. In 1837 Jeremias Gotthelf began in his _Bauernspiegel_
those descriptions of Bernese rustic life which found general favour
through their downright common sense. Berthold Auerbach, Otto Ludwig,
and Gottfried Keller were then active, and Fritz Reuter lit upon a more
clear-cut form for his tales in dialect.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. THE MORNING HOUR.]
The influence which these writers had upon painting was enormous. It now
turned everywhere to the life of the people, and took its joy and
pleasure in devoting itself to reality. And the rustic was soon a
popular figure much sought after in the picture market. Yet this
reliance on poetry and fiction had its disadvantage. For in Germany,
also, a vogue was given to that "_genre_ painting" which, instead of
starting with a simple, straightforward representation of what the
artist had seen, offered an artistically correct composition of what he
had invented, and indulged in a rambling display of humorous narrative
and pathetic pieces.
In Carlsruhe _Johann Kirner_ was the first to work on these lines,
adapting the life of the Swabian peasantry to the purposes of humorous
anecdote. In Munich _Carl Enhuber_ was especially fertile in the
invention of comic episodes amongst the rustics of the Bavarian
highlands, and his ponderous humour made him one of the favourite heroes
of the Art Union. Every one was in raptures over his "Partenkirche
Fair," over the charlatan in front of the village inn, who (like a
figure after Gerhard Dow) is bringing home to the multitude by his
lofty eloquence the fabulous qualities of his soap for removing spots;
over that assembly of peasants which gave the painter an opportunity for
making clearly recognisable people to be found everywhere in any little
town, from the judge of the county court and the local doctor down to
the watchmen. His second hit was "The Interrupted Card Party": the
blacksmith, the miller, the tailor, and other dignitaries of the village
are so painfully disturbed in their social reunion by the unamiable wife
of the tailor that her happy spouse makes his escape under the table.
The house servant holds out his blue apron to protect his master, whilst
the miller and the blacksmith try to look unconcerned; but a small boy
who has accompanied his mother with a mug discovers the concealed sinner
by his slipper, which has come off. The "Session Day" contains a still
greater wealth of comical types: here is the yard of a country assize
court, filled with people, some of them waiting their turn, some issuing
in contentment or dejection. Most contented, of course, are a bridal
pair from the mountains--a stout peasant lad and a buxom maiden--who
have just received official consent to their marriage. Disastrous
country excursions--townspeople overtaken by rain on their arrival in
the mountains--were also a source of highly comical situations.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. THE KNITTING LESSON.]
In Düsseldorf the reaction against the prevailing sentimentality
necessarily gave an impulse to art on these humorous lines. When it
seemed as if the mournfulness of the thirties would never be ended,
_Adolf Schroedter_, the satirist of the band of Düsseldorf artists in
those times, broke the spell when he began to parody the works of the
"great painters." When Lessing painted "The Sorrowing Royal Pair,"
Schroedter painted "The Triumphal Procession of King Bacchus"; when
Hermann Stilke produced his knights and crusaders, Schroedter
illustrated _Don Quixote_ as a warning; and when Bendemann gave the
world "The Lamentation of Jeremiah" and "The Lamentation of the Jews,"
Schroedter executed his droll picture "The Sorrowful Tanners," in which
the tanners are mournfully regarding a hide carried away by the stream.
Since he was a humorist, and humour is rather an affair for drawing than
painting, the charming lithographs, "The Deeds and Opinions of Piepmeyer
the Delegate," published in conjunction with Detmold, the Hanoverian
barrister, and author of the _Guide to Connoisseurship_, are perhaps to
be reckoned as his best performances. _Hasenclever_ followed the
dilettante Schroedter as a delineator of the "stolid Peter" type, and
painted the "Study" and similar pictures for Kortum's _Jobsiade_ with
great technical skill, and, at the same time, with little humour and
much complacency. By the roundabout route of illustration artists were
gradually brought more directly into touch with life, and painted side
by side with melodramatic brigands, rustic folk, or a student at a
tavern on the Rhine, absurd people reading the newspapers, comic men
sneezing, or the smirking Philistine tasting wine.
[Illustration: KIRNER. THE FORTUNE TELLER.]
[Illustration: ENHUBER. THE PENSIONER AND HIS GRANDSON.]
[Illustration: JACOB BECKER. A TEMPEST.]
_Jacob Becker_ went to the Westerwald to sketch little village
tragedies, and won such popularity with his "Shepherd Struck by
Lightning" that for a long time the interest of the public was often
concentrated on this picture in the collection of the Staedel Institute.
_Rudolf Jordan_ of Berlin settled on Heligoland, and became by his
"Proposal of Marriage in Heligoland" one of the most esteemed painters
of Düsseldorf. And in 1852 _Henry Ritter_, his pupil, who died young,
enjoyed a like success with his "Middy's Sermon," which represents a
tiny midshipman with comical zeal endeavouring to convert to temperance
three tars who are staggering against him. A Norwegian, _Adolf
Tidemand_, became the Leopold Robert of the North, and, like Robert,
attained an international success when, after 1845, he began to present
his compatriots, the peasants, fishers, and sailors of the shores of the
North Sea, to the public of Europe. There was no doubt that a true
ethnographical course of instruction in the life of a distant race, as
yet unknown to the rest of Europe, was to be gathered from his pictures,
as from those of Robert, or from the Oriental representations of Vernet.
In Tidemand's pictures the Germans learnt the Norwegian usage of
Christmas, accompanied the son of the North on his fishing of a night,
joined the bridal party on the Hardanger Fjord, or listened to the
sexton giving religious instruction; sailed with fishing girls in a
skiff to visit the neighbouring village, or beheld grandmother and the
children dance on Sunday afternoon to father's fiddle. Norwegian peasant
life was such an unknown world of romance, and the costume so novel,
that Tidemand's art was greeted as a new discovery. That the truth of
his pictures went no further than costume was only known at a later
time. Tidemand saw his native land with the eyes of a Romanticist, as
Robert saw Italy, and, in the same one-sided way, he only visited the
people on festive occasions. Though a born Norwegian, he, too, was a
foreigner, a man who was never familiar with the life of his country
people, who never lived at home through the raw autumn and the long
winter, but came only as a summer visitor, when nature had donned her
bridal garb, and naturally took away with him the mere impressions of a
tourist. As he only went to Norway for recreation, it is always
holiday-tide and Sabbath peace in his pictures. He represents the same
idyllic optimism and the same kindly view of "the people" as did
Björnson in his earliest works; and it is significant that the latter
felt himself at the time so entirely in sympathy with Tidemand that he
wrote one of his tales, _The Bridal March_, as text to Tidemand's
picture "Adorning the Bride."
To seek the intimate poetry in the monotonous life of the peasant, and
to go with him into the struggle for existence, was what did not lie in
Tidemand's method of presentation; he did not live amongst the people
sufficiently long to penetrate to their depths. The sketches that
resulted from his summer journeys often reveal a keen eye for the
picturesque, as well as for the spiritual life of this peasantry; but
later in Düsseldorf, when he composed his studies for pictures with the
help of German models, all the sharp characterisation was watered down.
What ought to have been said in Norwegian was expressed in a German
translation, where the emphasis was lost. His art is Düsseldorf art with
Norwegian landscapes and costumes; a course of lectures on the manners
and customs of Norwegian villages composed for Germans. The only thing
which distinguishes Tidemand to his advantage from the German
Düsseldorfers is that he is less humorously and sentimentally disposed.
Pictures of his, such as "The Lonely Old People," "The Catechism," "The
Wounded Bear Hunter," "The Grandfather's Blessing," "The Sectarians,"
etc., create a really pleasant and healthy effect by a certain actual
simplicity which they undoubtedly have. Other men would have made a
melodrama out of "The Emigrant's Departure" (National Gallery in
Christiania). Tidemand portrays the event without any sort of emphasis,
and feels his way with tact on the boundary between sentiment and
sentimentality. There is nothing false or hysterical in the behaviour of
the man who is going away for life, nor in those who have come to see
him off.
In Vienna the _genre_ painters seem to owe their inspiration especially
to the theatre. What was produced there in the province of grand art
during the first half of the century was neither better nor worse than
elsewhere. The Classicism of Mengs and David was represented by
_Heinrich Füger_, who had a more decided leaning towards the operatic.
The representative-in-chief of Nazarenism was _Josef Führich_, whose
frescoes in the Altlerchenfeld Church are, perhaps, better in point of
colour than the corresponding efforts of the Munich artists, though they
are likewise in a formal way derivative from the Italians. Vienna had
its Wilhelm Kaulbach in _Carl Rahl_, its Piloty in _Christian Ruben_,
who, like the Munich artist, had a preference for painting Columbus, and
was meritorious as a teacher. It was only through portrait painting
that Classicism and Romanticism were brought into some sort of relation
with life; and the Vienna portraitists of this older régime are even
better than their German contemporaries, as they made fewer concessions
to the ruling idealism. Amongst the portrait painters was _Lampi_, after
whom followed _Moritz Daffinger_ with his delicate miniatures; but the
most important of them all was _Friedrich Amerling_, who had studied
under Lawrence in London and under Horace Vernet in Paris, and brought
back with him great acquisitions in the science of colour. In the first
half of the century these assured him a decided advantage over his
German colleagues. It was only later, when he was sought after as the
fashionable painter of all the crowned heads, that his art degenerated
into mawkishness.
[Illustration: TIDEMAND. THE SECTARIANS.]
_Genre_ painting was developed here as elsewhere from the military
picture. As early as 1813 _Peter Krafft_, an academician of the school
of David, had exhibited a great oil-painting, "The Soldier's
Farewell"--the interior of a village room with a group of life-size
figures. The son of the family, in grey uniform, with a musket in his
hand, is tearing himself from his young wife, who has a baby on her arm
and is trying in tears to hold him back. His old father sits in a corner
with folded hands beside his mother, who is also crying, and has hid her
face. In 1820 Krafft added "The Soldier's Return" as a pendant to this
picture. It represents the changes which have taken place in the family
during the warrior's absence: his old mother is at rest in her grave;
his grey-headed father has become visibly older, his little sister has
grown up, and the baby in arms is carrying the musket after his father.
They are both exceedingly tiresome pictures; the colour is cold and
grey, the figures are pseudo-classical in modern costume, and the pathos
of the subject seems artificial and forced. Nevertheless a new principle
of art is declared in them. Krafft was the first in Austria to recognise
what a rich province had been hitherto ignored by painting. He warned
his pupils against the themes of the Romanticists. These, as he said,
were worked out, since no one would do anything better than the "Last
Supper of Leonardo da Vinci or the Madonnas of Raphael." And he warmly
advocated the conviction "that nothing could be done for historical
painting so long as it refused to choose subjects from modern life."
Krafft was an admirable teacher with a sober and clear understanding,
and he invariably directed his pupils to the immediate study of life and
nature. The consequence of his career was that _Carl Schindler_,
_Friedrich Treml_, _Fritz L'Allemand_, and others set themselves to
treat in episodic pictures the military life of Austria, from the
recruiting stage to the battle, and from the soldier's farewell to his
return to his father's house. A further result was that the Viennese
_genre_ painting parted company with the academical and historic art.
Just at this time Tschischka and Schottky began to collect the popular
songs of the Viennese. Castelli gave a poetic representation of
_bourgeois_ life, and Ferdinand Raimund brought it upon the stage in his
dramas. Bauernfeld's types from the life of the people enjoyed a rapid
popularity. Josef Danhauser, Peter Fendi, and Ferdinand Waldmüller went
on parallel lines with these authors. In their _genre_ pictures they
represented the Austrian people in their joys and sorrows, in their
merriment and heartiness and good-humour; the people, be it understood,
of Raimund's popular farces, not those of the pavement of Vienna.
_Josef Danhauser_, the son of a Viennese carpenter, occupied himself
with the artisan and _bourgeois_ classes. David Wilkie gave him the form
for his work and Ferdinand Raimund his ideas. His studio scenes, with
boisterous art students caught by their surly teacher at the moment when
they are playing their worst pranks, gave pleasure to the class of
people who, at a later date, took so much delight in Emanuel Spitzer.
His "Gormandizer" is a counterpart to Raimund's _Verschwender_; and
when, in a companion picture, the gluttonous liver is supping up the
"monastery broth" amongst beggars, and his former valet remains true to
him even in misfortune, Grillparzer's _Treuer Diener seines Herrn_
serves as a model for this type. Girls confessing their frailty to their
parents had been previously painted by Greuze. Amongst those of his
pictures which had done most to amuse the public was the representation
of the havoc caused by a butcher's dog storming into a studio. In his
last period he turned with Collins to the nursery, or wandered through
the suburbs with a sketch-book, immortalising the doings of children in
the streets, and drawing "character heads" of the school-teacher tavern
_habitués_ and the lottery adventurer.
[Illustration: TIDEMAND. ADORNING THE BRIDE.]
And this was likewise the province to which _Waldmüller_ devoted
himself. Chubby peasant children are the heroes of almost all his
pictures. A baby is sprawling with joy on its mother's lap, while it is
contemplated with proud satisfaction by its father, or it is sleeping
under the guardianship of a little sister; a boy is despatched upon the
rough path which leads to school, and brings the reward of his conduct
home with rapturous or dejected mien, or he stammers "Many happy returns
of the day" to grandpapa. Waldmüller paints "The First Step," the joys
of "Christmas Presents," and "The Distribution of Prizes to Poor School
Children"; he follows eager juveniles to the peep-show; he is to be met
at "The Departure of the Bride" and at "The Wedding"; he is our guide to
the simple "Peasant's Room," and shows the benefit of "Almsgiving."
Though his pictures may seem old-fashioned in subject nowadays, their
artistic qualities convey an entirely modern impression. Born in 1793,
he anticipated the best artists of later days in his choice of material.
Both in his portraits and in his country scenes there is a freshness
and transparency of tone which was something rare among the painters of
that time.
[Illustration: PETER KRAFFT. THE SOLDIER'S RETURN.]
_Friedrich Gauermann_ wandered in the Austrian Alps, in Steiermark, and
Salzkammergut, making studies of nature, the inhabitants, and the animal
world. In contradistinction from Waldmüller, painter of idylls, and the
humorist Danhauser, he aimed above all at ethnographical exactness. With
sincere and unadorned observation Gauermann represents the local
peculiarities of the peasantry, differentiated according to their
peculiar valleys; life on the pasture and at the market, when some
ceremonial occasion--a shooting match, a Sunday observance, or a church
consecration--has gathered together the scattered inhabitants.
_Genre_ painting in other countries worked with the same types. The
costume was different, but the substance of the pictures was the same.
In Belgium Leys had already worked in the direction of painting everyday
life; for although he had painted figures from the sixteenth century,
they were not idealised, but as rough and homely as in reality. When the
passion for truthfulness increased, as it did in the following years,
there came a moment when the old German tradition, under the shelter of
which Leys yet took refuge, was shaken off, and artists went directly to
nature without seeking the mediation of antiquated style. At that time
Belgium was one of the most rising and thriving countries in Europe. It
had private collections by the hundred. Wealthy merchants rivalled one
another in the pride of owning works by their celebrated painters. This
necessarily exerted an influence on production. Pretty _genre_ pictures
of peasant life soon became the most popular wares; as for their
artistic sanction, it was possible to point to Brouwer and Teniers, the
great national exemplars.
At first, then, the painters worked with the same elements as Teniers.
The common themes of their pictures were the ale-house with its thatched
roof, the old musician with his violin, the mountebank standing in the
midst of a circle of people, lovers, or drinkers brawling. Only the
costume was changed, and everything coarse, indecorous, or unrestrained
was scrupulously excluded _ad usum Delphini_. That the deep colouring of
the old masters became meagre and motley was in Belgium also an
inevitable result of the helplessness in regard to colour which had been
brought on by Classicism. The pictorial _furia_ of Adriaen Brouwer gave
way to a polished porcelain painting which hardly bore a trace of the
work of the hand. Harsh and gaudy reds and greens were especially
popular.
[Illustration: WALDMÜLLER. THE FIRST STEP.]
The first who began a modest career on these lines was _Ignatius van
Regemorter_. As one recognises the pictures of Wouwerman by the
dappled-grey horse, Regemorter's may be recognised by the violin. Every
year he turned out one picture at least in which music was being played,
and people were dancing with a rather forced gaiety. Then came
_Ferdinand de Braekeleer_, who painted the jubilees of old people, or
children and old women amusing themselves at public festivities. Teniers
was his principal model, but his large joviality was transformed into a
chastened merriment, and his broad laughter into a discreet smile.
Braekeleer's peasantry and proletariat are of an idyllic mildness;
honest, pious souls who, with all their poverty, are as moral as they
are happy. _Henri Coene_ elaborated such themes as "Oh, what beautiful
Grapes!" or "A Pinch of Snuff for the Parson!"
[Illustration: MADOU. IN THE ALE-HOUSE.]
Madou's merit lies in having extended Belgian _genre_ painting somewhat
beyond these narrow bounds; he introduced a greater variety of types
verging more on reality than that everlasting honest man painted by
Ferdinand de Braekeleer. _Madou_ was a native of Brussels. There he was
born in 1796, and he died there in 1877. When he began his career
Wappers had just made his appearance. Madou witnessed his successes, but
did not feel tempted to follow him. Whilst the latter in his large
pictures in the grand style aimed at being Rubens _redivivus_, Madou
embodied his ideas in fleeting pencil sketches. A great number of
lithographs of scenes from the past bore witness to his conception of
history. There was nothing in them that was dignified, nothing that was
stilted, no idealism and no beauty; in their tabards and helmets the
figures moved with the natural gestures of ordinary human beings. By the
side of great seigneurs, princes, and knights, and amid helmets and
hose, drunken scoundrels, tavern politicians, and village cretins
started into view, and grimaced and danced and scuffled. In Belgium his
plates occupy a position similar to that of the first lithographs of
Menzel in Germany. But Madou lingered for a still briefer period in the
Pantheon of history; the tavern had for him a yet greater attraction.
The humorous books which he published in Paris and Brussels first showed
him in his true light. Having busied himself for several years
exclusively with drawings, he made his _début_ in 1842 as a painter. It
is difficult to decide how much Madou produced after that date. The long
period between 1842 and 1877 yields a crowded chronicle of his works.
Even in the seventies he was just as vigorous as at the beginning, and
though he was regarded as a jester during his lifetime he was honoured
as a great painter after his death. At the auction of his unsold works,
pictures fetched 22,000 francs, sketches reached 3200, water-colours
2150, and drawings 750. The present generation has reduced this
over-estimation to its right measure, but it has not shaken Madou's
historical importance. He has a firm position as the man who conquered
modern life in the interests of Belgian art, and he is the more
significant for the _genre_ painting of his age, as he eclipsed all his
contemporaries, even in Germany and England, in the inexhaustible fund
of his invention.
[Illustration: MADOU. THE DRUNKARD.]
A merry world is reflected in his pictures. One of his most popular
figures is the ranger, a sly old fox with a furrowed, rubicund visage
and huge ears, who roves about more to the terror of love-making couples
than of poachers, and never aims at any one except for fun at the rural
justice, a portly gentleman in a gaudy waistcoat, emerging quietly at
the far end of the road. He introduces a varied succession of braggarts,
poor fellows, down-at-heel and out-at-elbows, old grenadiers joking with
servant girls, old marquesses taking snuff with affected dignity,
charlatans at their booth, deaf and dumb flute-players, performing dogs,
and boys sick over their first pipe. Here and there are fatuous or
over-wise politicians solemnly opening a newly printed paper, with their
legs astraddle and their spectacles resting on their noses. Rascals with
huge paunches and blue noses fall asleep on their table in the
ale-house, and enliven the rest of the company by their snoring. At
times the door is opened and a scolding woman appears with a broom in
her hand. On these occasions the countenance of the toper is a comical
sight. At the sound of the beloved voice he endeavours to raise
himself, and anxiously follows the movements of his better half as he
clings reeling to the table, or plants himself more firmly in his chair
with a resigned and courageous "_J'y suis, j'y reste_."
Being less disposed to appear humorous, _Adolf Dillens_ makes a more
sympathetic impression. He, too, had begun with forced anecdotes, but
after a tour to Zealand opened his eyes to nature; he laid burlesque on
one side, and depicted what he had seen in unhackneyed pictures: sound
and healthy men of patriarchal habits. Even his method of painting
became simpler and more natural; his colouring, hitherto borrowed from
the old masters, became fresher and brighter. He emancipated himself
from Rembrandt's _chiaroscuro_, and began to look at nature without
spectacles. There is something poetic in his method of observation: he
really loved these good people and painted them in the unadorned
simplicity of their life--cheery old age that knows no wrinkles and
laughing youth that knows no sorrows. He is indeed one-sided, for a good
fairy has banished all trouble from his happy world; but his pictures
are the product of a fresh and amiable temperament. His usual themes are
a friendly gathering at the ale-house, a conversation beneath the porch,
skating, scenes in cobblers' workshops, a gust of wind blowing an
umbrella inside out; and if he embellishes them with little episodic
details, this tendency is so innocent that nobody can quarrel with him.
In France it was _François Biard_, the Paul de Kock of French painting,
who attained most success in the thirties by humorous anecdote. He
devoted his whole life to the comical representation of the minor
trespasses and misfortunes of the commonplace _bourgeoisie_. He had the
secret of displaying his comicalities with great aptitude, and of
mocking at the ridiculous eccentricities of the Philistine in an obvious
and downright fashion. Strolling players made fools of themselves at
their toilette; lads were bathing whilst a gendarme carried off their
clothes; a sentry saluted a decorated veteran, whose wife gratefully
acknowledged the attention with a curtsey; the village grandee held a
review of volunteers with the most pompous gravity; a child was
exhibited at the piano to the admiration of its yawning relatives. One
of his chief pictures was called "Posada Espagnol." The hero was a monk
winking at a beauty of forty who was passing by while he was being
shaved. Women were sitting and standing about, when a herd of swine
dashing in threw everything over and put the ladies to flight, and so
called forth one of those comic effects of terror in which Paul de Kock
took such delight.
Biard was inexhaustible in these expedients for provoking laughter; and
as he had travelled far he had always in reserve a slave-market, a
primeval forest, or an ice-field to appease the curiosity of his
admirers when there was nothing more to laugh at. From the German
standpoint he had importance as an artist whose flow of ideas would have
furnished ten _genre_ painters; and if he is the only representative of
the humorously anecdotic picture in France, the reason is that there
earlier than elsewhere art was led into a more earnest course by the
tumult of ideas on social politics.
CHAPTER XXI
THE PICTURE WITH A SOCIAL PURPOSE
That modern life first entered art, in all countries, under the form of
humorous anecdote is partly the consequence of the one-sided æsthetic
ideas of the period. In an age that was dominated by idealism it was
forgotten that Murillo had painted lame beggars sitting in the sun,
Velasquez cripples and drunkards, and Holbein lepers; that Rembrandt had
so much love for humble folk, and that old Breughel with a strangely
sombre pessimism turned the whole world into a terrible hospital. The
modern man was hideous, and art demanded "absolute beauty." If he was to
be introduced into painting, despite his want of _beauté suprême_, the
only way was to treat him as a humorous figure which had to be handled
ironically. Mercantile considerations were also a power in determining
this form of humour. At a time when painting was forced to address
itself to a public which was uneducated in art, and could only
appreciate anecdotes, such comicalities had the best prospect of favour
and a rapid sale. The object was to provoke laughter, at all hazards, by
drollness of mien, typical stupidity, and absurdity of situation. The
choice of figures was practically made according as they were more or
less serviceable for a humorous purpose. Children, rustics, and
provincial Philistines seemed to be most adapted to it. The painter
treated them as strange and naïve beings, and brought them before the
public as a sort of performing dogs, who could go through remarkable
tricks just as if they were human beings. And the public laughed over
whimsical oddities from another world, as the courtiers of Louis XIV had
laughed in Versailles when M. Jourdain and M. Dimanche were acted by the
king's servants upon the stage of Molière.
Meanwhile painters gradually came to remark that this humour _à l'huile_
was bought at too dear a price. For humour, which is like a soap-bubble,
can only bear a light method of representation, such as Hokusai's
drawing or Brouwer's painting, but becomes insupportable where it is
offered as a laborious composition executed with painstaking realism.
And ethical reasons made themselves felt independently of these artistic
considerations.
The drollness of these pictures did not spring from the characters, but
from an effort to amuse the public at the expense of the painted
figures. As a general rule a peasant is a serious, square-built, angular
fellow. For his existence he does battle with the soil; his life is no
pleasure to him, but hard toil. But in these pictures he appeared as a
figure who had no aim or purport; in his brain the earnestness of life
was transformed into a romping game. Painters laughed at the little
world which they represented. They were not the friends of man, but
parodied him and transformed life into a sort of Punch and Judy show.
And even when they did not approach their figures with deliberate irony,
they never dreamed of plunging with any sincere love of truth into the
depths of modern life. They painted modern matter without taking part in
it, like good children who know nothing of the bitter facts that take
place in the world. When the old Dutch painters laughed, their laughter
had its historical justification. In the pictures of Ostade and Dirk
Hals there is seen all the primitive exuberance and wild joy of life
belonging to a people who had just won their independence and abandoned
themselves after long years of war with a sensuous transport to the
gladness of existence. But the smile of these modern _genre_ painters is
forced, conventional, and artificial; the smile of a later generation
which only took the trouble to smile because the old Dutch had laughed
before them. They put on rose-coloured glasses, and through these gaudy
spectacles saw only a gay masque of life, a fair but hollow deception.
They allowed their heroes to pass such a merry existence that the
question of what they lived upon was never touched. When they painted
their tavern pictures they anxiously suppressed the thought that people
who drained their great mugs so carelessly possibly had sick children at
home, hungry and perishing with cold in a room without a fire. Their
peasants are the favoured sons of fortune: they sowed not, neither did
they reap, nor gathered into barns, but their Heavenly Father fed them.
Poverty and vice presented themselves merely as amiable weaknesses, not
as great modern problems.
Just at this time the way was being paved for the Revolution of 1848:
the people fought and suffered, and for years before literature had
taken part in this struggle. Before the Revolution the battle had been
between the nobility and the middle class; but now that the latter had
to some extent taken the place of the nobility of earlier days, there
rose the mighty problem of strife between the unproductive and the
productive, between rich and poor.
In England, the birthplace of the modern capitalistic system, in a
country where great industry and great landed property first ousted the
independent yeomanry and called forth ever sharper division between
those who possessed everything and those who possessed nothing, the
unsolved problem of the nineteenth century found its earliest utterance.
More than sixty years ago, in the year of Goethe's death, a new
literature arose there, the literature of social politics. With Ebenezer
Elliott, who had been himself a plain artisan, the Fourth Estate made
its entry into literature; a workman led the train of socialistic poets.
Thomas Hood wrote his _Song of the Shirt_, that lyric of the poor
sempstress which soon spread all over the Continent. Carlyle, the
friend and admirer of Goethe, came forward in 1843 as the burning
advocate of the poor and miserable in _Past and Present_. He wrote there
that this world was no home to the working-man, but a dreary dungeon
full of mad and fruitless plagues. It was an utterance that shook the
world like a bomb. Benjamin Disraeli's _Sybil_ followed in 1845. As a
novel it is a strange mixture of romantic and naturalistic chapters, the
latter seeming like a prophetic announcement of Zola's _Germinal_. As a
reporter Charles Dickens had in his youth the opportunity of learning
the wretchedness of the masses in London, even in the places where they
lurked distrustfully in dark haunts. In his Christmas stories and his
London sketches he worked these scenes of social distress into thrilling
pictures. The poor man, whose life is made up of bitter weeks and scanty
holidays, received his citizenship in the English novel.
In France the year 1830 was an end and a beginning--the close of the
struggles begun in 1789, and the opening of those which led to the
decisive battle of 1848. With the _roi bourgeois_, whom Lafayette called
"the best of republicans," the Third Estate came into possession of the
position to which it had long aspired; it rose from the ranks of the
oppressed to that of the privileged classes. As a new ruling class it
made such abundant capital with the fruits of the Revolution of July
that even in 1830 Börne wrote from Paris: "The men who fought against
all aristocracy for fifteen years have scarcely conquered--they have not
yet wiped the sweat from their faces--and already they want to found for
themselves a new aristocracy, an aristocracy of money, a knighthood of
fortune." To the same purpose wrote Heine in 1837: "The men of thought
who, during the eighteenth century, were so indefatigable in preparing
the Revolution, would blush if they saw how self-interest is building
its miserable huts on the site of palaces that have been broken down,
and how, out of these huts, a new aristocracy is sprouting up which,
more ungraciously than the old, has its primary cause in money-making."
There the radical ideas of modern socialism were touched. The
proletariat and its misery became henceforward the subject of French
poetry, though they were not observed with any naturalistic love of
truth, but from the romantic standpoint of contrast. Béranger, the
popular singer of _chansons_, composed his _Vieux Vagabond_, the song of
the old beggar who dies in the gutter; Auguste Barbier wrote his Ode to
Freedom, where _la sainte canaille_ are celebrated as immortal heroes,
and with the scorn of Juvenal "lashes those who drew profit from the
Revolution, those _bourgeois_ in kid gloves who watched the sanguinary
street fights comfortably from the window." In 1842-43 Eugène Sue
published his _Mystères de Paris_, a forbidding and nonsensical book,
but one which made an extraordinary sensation, just because of the
disgusting openness with which it unveiled the life of the lower strata
of the people. Even the great spirits of the Romantic school began to
follow the social and political strife of the age with deep emotion and
close sympathy. Already in the course of the thirties socialistic ideas
forced their way into the Romantic school from every side. Their source
was Saint Simon, whose doctrines first found a wide circulation under
Louis Philippe.
According to Saint Simon, the task of the new Christianity consisted in
improving as quickly as possible the fate of the class which was at once
the poorest and the most numerous. His pupils regarded him as the
Messiah of the new era, and went forth into the world as his disciples.
George Sand, the boldest feminine genius in the literature of the world,
mastered these seething ideas and founded the artisan novel in her
_Compagnon du Tour de France_. It is the first book with a real love of
the people--the people as they actually are, those who drink and commit
deeds of violence as well as those who work and make mental progress. In
her periodical, _L'Éclaireur de l'Indre_, she pleads the cause both of
the artisan in great towns and of the rustic labourer; in 1844 she
declared herself as a Socialist, without qualification, in her great
essay _Politics and Socialism_, and she brought out her celebrated
_Letters to the People_ in 1848.
The democratic tide of ideas came to Victor Hugo chiefly through the
religious apostle Lamennais, whose book, written in prison, _De
l'Esclavage Moderne_, gave the same fuel to the Revolution of 1848 as
the works of Rousseau had done to that of 1789. "The peasant bears the
whole burden of the day, exposes himself to rain and sun and wind, to
make ready by his work the harvest which fills our barns in the late
autumn. If there are those who think the lighter of him on that account,
and will not accord him freedom and justice, build a high wall round
them, so that their noisome breath may not poison the air of Europe."
From the forties there mutters through Hugo's poems the muffled sound of
the Revolution which was soon to burst over Paris, and thence to move,
like a rolling thunderstorm, across Europe. In place of the tricolor
under which the _bourgeoisie_ and the artisan class had fought side by
side eighteen years before, the banner of the artisan was hoisted
blood-red against the ruling _bourgeoisie_.
This _Zeitgeist_, this spirit of the age which had grown earnest,
necessarily guided art into another course; the painted humour and
childlike optimism of the first _genre_ painters began to turn out a
lie. In spite of Schiller, art cannot be blithe with sincerity when life
is earnest. It can laugh with the muscles of the face, but the laughter
is mirthless; it may haughtily declare itself in favour of some
consecrated precinct, in which nothing of the battles and struggles of
the outside world is allowed to echo; but, for all that, harsh reality
demands its rights. Josef Danhauser's modest little picture of 1836,
"The Gormandizer," is an illustration of this. In a sumptuously
furnished room a company of high station and easy circumstances are
seated at dinner. The master of the house, a sleek little man, is
draining his glass, and a young dandy is playing the guitar. But an
unwelcome disturbance breaks in. The figure of a beggar, covered with
rags and with a greasy hat in his hand, appears at the door. The ladies
scream, and a dog springs barking from under a chair, whilst the flunkey
in attendance angrily prepares to send the impudent intruder about his
business. That was the position which art had hitherto taken up towards
the social question. It shrank peevishly back as soon as rude and brutal
reality disturbed its peaceful course. People wished to see none but
cheerful pictures of life around them.
[Illustration: DANHAUSER. THE GORMANDIZER.]
For this reason peasants were invariably painted in neat and cleanly
dress, with their faces beaming with joy, an embodiment of the blessing
of work and the delights of country life. Even beggars were harmless,
peacefully cheerful figures, sparkling with health and beauty, and
enveloped in æsthetic rags. But as political, religious, and social
movements have always had a vivid and forcible effect on artists,
painters in the nineteenth century could not in the long run hold
themselves aloof from this influence. The voice of the disinherited made
itself heard sullenly muttering and with ever-increasing strength. The
parable of Lazarus lying at the threshold of the rich man had become a
terrible reality. Conflict was to be seen everywhere around, and it
would have been mere hardness of heart to have used this suffering
people any longer as an agreeable subject for merriment. A higher
conception of humanity, the entire philanthropic character of the age,
made the jests at which the world had laughed seem forced and tasteless.
Modern life must cease altogether before it can be a humorous episode
for art, and it had become earnest reality through and through. Painting
could no longer affect trivial humour; it had to join issue, and speak
of what was going on around it. It had to take its part in the struggle
for aims that belonged to the immediate time.
Powerfully impressed by the Revolution of July, it made its first
advance. The Government had been thrown down after a blood-stained
struggle, and a liberated people were exulting; and the next Salon
showed more than forty representations of the great events, amongst
which that of _Delacroix_ took the highest place in artistic
impressiveness. The principal figure in his picture is "a youthful
woman, with a red Phrygian cap, holding a musket in one hand and a
tricolor in the other. Naked to the hip, she strides forward over the
corpses, giving challenge to battle, a beautiful vehement body with a
face in bold profile and an insolent grief upon her features, a strange
mixture of Phryne, _poissarde_, and the goddess of Liberty." Thus has
Heine described the work while still under a vivid impression of the
event it portrayed. In the thick of the powder smoke stands "Liberty"
upon the barricade, at her right a Parisian gamin with a pistol in his
hand, a child but already a hero, at her left an artisan with a gun on
his arm: it is the people that hastens by, exulting to die the death for
the great ideas of liberty and equality.
The painter himself had an entirely unpolitical mind. He had drawn his
inspiration for the picture, not from experience, but out of _La Curée_,
those verses of Auguste Barbier that are ablaze with wrath--
"C'est que la Liberté n'est pas une comtesse
Du noble faubourg Saint-Germain,
Une femme qu'un cri fait tomber en faiblesse,
Qui met du blanc et du carmin;
C'est un forte femme aux puissantes mamelles,
À la voix rauque, aux durs appas,
Qui, du brun sur la peau, du feu dans les prunelles,
Agile et marchant à grands pas,
Se plait aux cris du peuple, aux sanglantes mêlées,
Aux longs roulements des tambours,
À l'odeur de la poudre, aux lointaines volées
Des cloches et des canons sourds."
And by this allegorical figure he has certainly weakened its grip and
directness; but it was a bold, naturalistic achievement all the same. By
this work the great Romanticist became the father of the naturalistic
movement, which henceforward, supported by the revolutionary democratic
press, spread more and more widely.
The critics on these journals began to reproach painters with troubling
themselves too little about social and political affairs. "The actuality
and social significance of art," it was written, "is the principal
thing. What is meant by Beauty? We demand that painting should influence
society, and join in the work of progress. Everything else belongs to
the domain of Utopias and abstractions." The place of whimsicalities is
accordingly taken by sentimental and melodramatic scenes from the life
of the poor. Rendered enthusiastic by the victory of the people, and
inspired by democratic sentiments, some painters came to believe that
the sufferings of the artisan class were the thing to be represented,
and that there was nothing nobler than work.
[Illustration: LELEUX. MOT D'ORDRE.]
One of the first to give an example was _Jeanron_. His picture of "The
Little Patriots," produced in connection with the Revolution of July,
was a glorification of the struggle for freedom; his "Scene in Paris" a
protest against the sufferings of the people. He sought his models
amongst the poor of the suburb, painted their ragged clothes and their
rugged heads without idealisation. For him the aim of art was not
beauty, but the expression of truth--a truth, no doubt, which made
political propaganda. It was Jeanron's purpose to have a socialistic
influence. One sees it in his blacksmiths and peasants, and in that
picture "The Worker's Rest" which in 1847 induced Thoré's utterance: "It
is a melancholy and barren landscape from the neighbourhood of Paris, a
plebeian landscape which hardly seems to belong to itself, and which
gives up all pretensions to beauty merely to be of service to man.
Jeanron is always plebeian, even in his landscapes: he loves the plains
which are never allowed to repose, on which there is always labour;
there are no beautiful flowers in his fields, as there is no gold
ornament on the rags of his beggars and labourers."
And afterwards, during the early years of the reign of Louis Philippe,
when the tendency became once more latent, the Revolution of February
worked out what the Revolution of July had begun. Mediocre painters like
_Antigna_ became famous because they bewailed the sorrows of the "common
man" in small and medium-sized pictures. Others began to display a
greater interest in rustics, and to take them more seriously than they
had done in earlier works. _Adolphe Leleux_ made studies in Brittany,
and discovered earnest episodes in the daily life of the peasant, which
he rendered with great actuality. And after sliding back into
Romanticism, as he did with his Arragon smugglers, he enjoyed his chief
success in 1849 with that picture at the Luxembourg to which he was
incited by the sad aspect of the streets of Paris during the rising of
1848. The men who, driven by hunger and misery, fought upon the
barricades may be found in Leleux's "Mot d'Ordre."
After the _coup d'état_ of 1851 even _Meissonier_, till then exclusively
a painter of _rococo_ subjects, encroached on this province. In his
picture of the barricades (2 December 1851) heaps of corpses are lying
stretched out in postures which could not have been merely invented. The
execution, too, has a nervous force which betrays that even so
calculating a spirit as Meissonier was at one time moved and agitated.
In his little smokers and scholars and waiting-men he is an adroit but
cold-blooded painter: here he has really delivered himself of a modern
epic. His "Barricade" (formerly in the Van Praet Collection) is the one
thrilling note in the master's work, which was elsewhere so quiet.
_Alexandre Antigna_, originally an historical painter, turned from
historical disasters to those which take place in the life of the lower
strata of the people. A dwelling of a poor family is struck by
lightning; poor people pack up their meagre goods with the haste of
despair on the outbreak of fire; peasants seek refuge from a flood upon
the roof of their little house; petty shopkeepers are driving with their
wares across the country, when their nag drops down dead in the shafts;
or an old crone, cowering at the street corner, receives the pence which
her little daughter has earned by playing on the fiddle.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ OCTAVE TASSAERT.]
But the artist in whose works the philanthropic if sentimental humour of
the epoch is specially reflected is that remarkable painter, made up of
contradictions, _Octave Tassaert_. Borrowing at one and the same time
from Greuze, Fragonard, and Prudhon, he painted subjects mythological,
ribald, and religious, boudoir pictures, and scenes of human misery.
Tassaert was a Fleming, a grandson of that Tassaert who educated
Gottfried Schadow and died as director of the Berlin Academy in 1788.
His name has been for the most part forgotten; it awakes only a dim
recollection in those who see "The Unhappy Family" in the Luxembourg
_Musée_. But forty years ago he was amongst the most advanced of his
day, and enjoyed the respect of men like Delacroix, Rousseau, Troyon,
and Diaz. He took Chardin and Greuze as his models, and is a real master
in talent. He was the poet of the suburbs, who spoke in tender
complaining tones of the hopes and sufferings of humble people. He
painted the elegy of wretchedness: suicide in narrow garrets, sick
children, orphans freezing in the snow, seduced and more or less
repentant maidens--a sad train. He was called the Correggio of the
attic, the Prudhon of the suburbs. His labours are confined to eleven
years, from 1846 to 1857. After that he sent no more to the Salon and
sulkily withdrew from artistic life. He had no wish ever to see his
pictures again, and sold them--forty-four altogether--to a dealer for
two thousand francs and a cask of wine. With a glass in his hand he
forgot his misanthropy. He lived almost unknown in a little house in the
suburbs with a nightingale, a dog, and a little shop-girl for his sole
companions.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
TASSAERT. AFTER THE BALL.]
But his nightingale died, and then the dog, who should have followed at
his funeral. He could not survive the blow. He broke his palette, threw
his colours into the fire, lit a pan of charcoal that he might die like
"The Unhappy Family," and was found suffocated on the following day. On
a scrap of paper he had written, without regard to metre or orthography,
a few verses to his nightingale and his dog.
There is much that is magniloquent and sentimental in Tassaert's
pictures. His poor women perish with the big eyes of the heroines of Ary
Scheffer. Nevertheless he belongs to the advance line of modern art, and
suffered shipwreck merely because he gave the signal too early. The sad
reality prevails in his work. Merciless as a surgeon operating on a
diseased limb, he made a dissecting-room of his art, which is often
brutal where his brush probes the deepest wounds of civilisation. There
is nothing in his pictures but wretched broken furniture, stitched rags,
and pale faces in which toil and hunger have ploughed their terrible
furrows. He painted the degeneration of man perishing from lack of light
and air. Himself a Fleming, he has found his greatest follower in
another Netherlander, _Charles de Groux_, whose sombre pessimism
dominates modern Belgian art.
In Germany, where the socialistic writings of the French and English had
a wide circulation, _Gisbert Flüggen_, in Munich known as the German
Wilkie, was perhaps the first who as early as the forties went somewhat
further than the humorous representation of rustics, and entered into a
certain relation with the social ideas of his age in such pictures as
"The Interrupted Marriage Contract," "The Unlucky Gamester," "The
_Mésalliance_," "Decision of the Suit," "The Disappointed Legacy
Hunter," "The Execution for Rent," and the like. Under his influence
Danhauser in Vienna deserted whimsicalities for the representation of
social conflicts in middle-class life. To say nothing of his
"Gormandizer," he did this in "The Opening of the Will," where in a
somewhat obtrusive manner the rich relations of the deceased are grouped
to the right and the poor relations to the left, the former rubicund,
sleek, and insolent, the latter pale, spare, and needily clad. An
estimable priest is reading the last testament, and informs the poor
relatives with a benevolent smile that the inheritance is theirs,
whereon the rich give way to transports of rage.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
TASSAERT. THE ORPHANS.]
Yet more clearly, although similarly transposed into a sentimental key,
is the mood of the time just previous to 1848, reflected in the works of
_Carl Hübner_ of Düsseldorf. Ernest Wilkomm in the beginning of the
forties had represented in his sensational _genre_ pictures,
particularly in the "White Slaves," the contrast between afflicted serfs
and cruel landlords, between rich manufacturers and famishing artisans;
Robert Prutz had written his _Engelchen_, in which he had announced the
ruin of independent handicraft by the modern industrial system. Soon
afterwards the famine among the Silesian weavers, the intelligence of
which in 1844 flew through all Germany, set numbers of people reflecting
on the social question. Freiligrath made it the subject of his verses,
_Aus dem Schlesischen Gebirge_, the song of the poor weaver's child who
calls on Rübezahl--one of his most popular poems. And yet more
decisively does the social and revolutionary temper of the age find an
echo in Heine's _Webern_, composed in 1844. Even Geibel was impelled to
his poem _Mene Tekel_ by the spread of the news, though it stands in
curious opposition to his manner of writing elsewhere. Carl Hübner
therefore was acting very seasonably when he likewise treated the
distress of the Silesian weavers in his first picture of 1845.
Hübner knew the life of the poor and the heavy-laden; his feelings were
with them, and he expressed what he felt. This gives him a position
above and apart from the rest in the insipidly smiling school of
Düsseldorf, and sets his name at the beginning of a new chapter in the
history of German _genre_ painting. His next picture, "The Game Laws,"
sprang from an occasion which was quite as historical: a gamekeeper had
shot a poacher. In 1846 followed "The Emigrants," "The Execution for
Rent" in 1847, and in 1848 "Benevolence in the Cottage of the Poor."
These were works in which he continued to complain of the misery of the
working classes, and the contrast between ostentatious wealth and
helpless wretchedness, and to preach the crusade for liberty and human
rights. In opposition to the usual idyllic representations, he spoke
openly for the first time of the material weight oppressing large
classes of men. Undoubtedly, however, the artistic powers of the painter
corresponded but little to the good intentions of the philanthropist.
[Illustration: TASSAERT. THE SUICIDE.]
In 1853 even the historical painter Piloty entered this path in one of
his earliest pictures, "The Nurse": the picture represents a peasant
girl in service as a nurse in the town, with her charge on her arm,
entering the dirty house of an old woman with whom she is boarding her
own child. The rich child, already dressed out like a little lady, is
exuberant in health, whilst her own is languishing in a dark and cold
room without food or warm clothing.
In Belgium _Eugène de Block_ first took up these lines. The artistic
development of his character is particularly interesting, inasmuch as he
went through various transformations. First he had come forward in 1836
with the representation of a brawl amongst peasants, a picture which
contrasted with the tameness of contemporary painting by a native power
suggestive of Brouwer. Then, following the example of Madou and
Braekeleer, he occupied himself for a long time with quips and jests. At
a time when every one had a type to which he remained true as long as he
lived, Block chose poachers and game-keepers, and represented their
mutual cunning, now enveloping them, after the example of Braekeleer, in
the golden light and brown shadows of Ostade, now throwing over them a
tinge of Gallait's cardinal red. But this forced humour did not satisfy
him long; he let comicalities alone, and became the serious observer of
the people. A tender compassion for the poor may be noticed in his
works, though without doubt it often turns to a tearful sentimentalism.
He was an apostle of humanity who thundered against pauperism and set
himself up as spokesman on the social question; a tribune of the people,
who by his actions confirmed his reputation as a democratic painter.
This it is which places him near that other socialistic agitator who in
those days was filling Brussels with his fame.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
FLÜGGEN. THE DECISION OF THE SUIT.]
It was in 1835 that a young man wrote to one of his relatives from Italy
the proud words: "I will measure my strength with Rubens and Michael
Angelo."
[Illustration: HÜBNER. JULY.]
Having gained the _Prix de Rome_, he was enabled to make a sojourn in
the Eternal City. He was thinking of his return. He was possessed of a
lofty ambition, and dreamt of rivalling the fame of the old masters. As
a victor he made an entry into his native land, into the good town of
Dinant, which received him like a mother. He was accompanied by a huge
roll of canvas like a declaration of war. But he needed a larger
battle-field for his plans. "I imagine," said he, "that the universe has
its eyes upon me." So he went on to Paris with his "Patroclus" and a few
other pictures. No less than six thousand artists had seen the work in
Rome: a prince of art, Thorwaldsen, had said when he beheld it: "This
young man is a giant." And the young man was himself of that opinion.
With the gait of a conqueror he entered Paris, in the belief that
artists would line the streets to receive him. But when the portals of
the _Salon_ of 1839 were opened he did not see his picture there. It was
skied over a door, and no one noticed it. Théophile Gautier, Gustave
Planché, and Bürger-Thoré wrote their articles without even mentioning
it with one word of praise or blame.
For one moment he thought of exhibiting it out of doors in front of the
Louvre, of calling together a popular assembly and summoning all France
to decide. But an application to the minister was met with a refusal,
and he returned to Brussels hanging his head. There he puffed his
masterpiece, "The Fight round the Body of Patroclus," in magniloquent
phrases upon huge placards. A poet exclaimed, "Hats off: here is a new
Homer." The _Moniteur_ gave him a couple of articles. But when the
Exhibition came, artists were again unable to know what to make of it.
The majority were of an opinion that Michael Angelo was brutally
parodied by these swollen muscles and distorted limbs. And no earthquake
disturbed the studios, as the painter had expected. However, he was
awarded a bronze medal and thanked in an honest citizen-like fashion
"for the distinguished talent which he had displayed." Then his whole
pride revolted. He circulated caricatures and cried out: "This medal
will be an eternal blot on the century." Then he published in the
_Charivari_ an open letter to the king. "Michael Angelo," he wrote,
"never allowed himself to pass final judgment on the works of
contemporary artists, and so His Majesty, who hardly understands as much
about art as Michael Angelo, would do well not to decide on the worth of
modern pictures after a passing glance."
_Antoine Wiertz_, the son of a gendarme who had once been a soldier of
the great Republic, was born in Dinant in 1806. By his mother he was a
Walloon, and he had German blood in him through his father, whose family
had originally come from Saxony. German moral philosophy and treatises
on education had formed the reading of his youthful years. He had not to
complain of want of assistance. At the declaration of Belgian
independence he was five-and-twenty; so his maturity fell in the proud
epoch when the young nation laid out everything to add artistic to
political splendour. Even as a boy, their only child, he was idolised by
his parents, the old gendarme and the honest charwoman. His first
attempts were regarded by his relations as marvels. The neighbours went
into raptures over a frog he had modelled, "which looked just as if it
were alive." The landlord of a tavern ordered a signboard from him, and
when it was finished the whole population stood before it in admiration.
A certain Herr Maibe, who was artistically inclined, had his attention
directed to the young genius, undertook all the expenses of his
education, and sent him to the Antwerp Academy. There he obtained a
government scholarship, and gained in 1832 the _Prix de Rome_. From the
first he was quite clear as to his own importance.
[Illustration: _American Art Review._
WIERTZ. THE ORPHANS.]
Even as a pupil at the Antwerp Academy he wrote in a letter to his
father contemptuously of his fellow-students' reverence for the old
masters. "They imagine," said he, "that the old masters are invincible
gods, and not men whom genius may surpass." And instead of admonishing
him to be modest, his father answered with pride: "Be a model to the
youth of the future, so that in later centuries young painters may say,
'I will raise myself to fame as the great Wiertz did in Belgium.'" Such
dangerous flattery would have affected stronger characters. It needed
only the Italian journey to send him altogether astray. Michael Angelo
made him giddy, as had been the case with Cornelius, Chenavard, and many
another. With all the ambition of a self-taught man he held every touch
of his brush to be important, and was indignant if others refused to
think the same. After his failures in Paris and Brussels he began to
find high treason in every criticism, and started a discussion on "the
pernicious influence of journalism upon art and literature." We find him
saying: "If any one writes ill of me when I am dead, I will rise from
the grave to defend myself."
In his hatred of criticism he resolved to exhibit no more, lived a
miserable existence till his death in 1865, and painted hasty and
careless portraits, _pour la soupe_, when he was in pressing need of
money. These brought him at first from three to four hundred, and later
a thousand francs. He indulged in colossal sketches, for the completion
of which the State built him in 1850 a tremendous studio, the present
_Musée Wiertz_. It stands a few hundred paces from the Luxembourg
station, to the extreme north of the town, in a beautiful though rather
neglected little park, a white building with a pillared portico and a
broad perron leading up to it. Here he sat in a fantastically gorgeous
costume, for ever wearing his great Rubens hat. Philanthropic lectures
on this world and the next, on the well-being of the people and the
diseases of modern civilisation, were the fruits of his activity.
Whoever loves painting for painting's sake need never visit the museum.
There there are battles, conflagrations, floods, and earthquakes; heaven
and earth are in commotion. Giants hurl rocks at one another, and try,
like Jupiter, to shake the earth with their frown. All of them delight
in force, and bring their muscles into play like athletes. But the
painter himself is no athlete, no giant as Thorwaldsen called him, and
no genius as he fancied himself to be. _Le singe des génies_, he
conceived the notion of "great art" purely in its relation to space, and
believed himself greater than the greatest because his canvases were of
greater dimensions. When the ministry thought of making him Director of
the Antwerp Academy, after the departure of Wappers, he wrote the
following characteristic sentences: "I gather from the newspapers that I
may be offered the place of Wappers." If in the moment when the profound
philosopher is pondering over sublime ideas people were to say to him,
"Will you teach us the A, B, C? I believe that he whose dwelling-place
is in the clouds would fall straight from heaven to earth." Living in an
atmosphere of flattery at home, and overpowered by the incense which was
there offered to his genius, he could not set himself free from the
fixed idea of competing with Michael Angelo and Rubens. Below his
picture of "The Childhood of Mary" he placed the words: "Counterpart to
the picture by Rubens in Antwerp treating the same subject." He offered
his "Triumph of Christ" to the cathedral there under the condition of
its being hung beside Rubens' "Descent from the Cross." "The Rising up
of Hell" he wished to exhibit of an evening in the theatre when it was
opened for a performance. During the waits the audience were to
contemplate the picture while a choir sang with orchestral
accompaniment. But all these offers were declined with thanks.
Such failures make men pessimists; but it was through them that Wiertz,
after being an historical painter, became the child of his age. He began
to hurl thunderbolts against the evils of modern civilisation. He
preaches and lashes and curses and suffers. The forms of which he makes
use are borrowed from the old masters. The man of Michael Angelo, with
his athletic build, his gigantic muscles, his nude body, the man of the
Renaissance and not the man of the nineteenth century, strides through
his works; it is only in the subject-matter of his pictures that the
modern spirit has broken through the old formula. All the questions
which have been thrown out by the philosophy and civilisation of the
nineteenth century are reflected as vast problems in his vast pictures.
He fashions his brush into a weapon with which he fights for the
disinherited, for the pariahs, for the people. He is bent on being the
painter of democracy--a great danger for art.
[Illustration: WIERTZ. THE THINGS OF THE PRESENT AS SEEN BY FUTURE
AGES.]
He agitates in an impassioned way against the horrors of war. His
picture "Food for Powder" begins this crusade. A cannon is lying idle on
the wall of a fortress, and around this slumbering iron monster children
are playing at soldiers, with no suspicion that their sport will soon be
turned into bitter earnest, and that in war they will themselves become
food for this demon. In another picture, "The civilisation of the
Nineteenth Century," soldiers intoxicated with blood and victory have
broken into a chamber by night and are stabbing a mother with her child.
A third, "The Last Cannon Shot," hints dimly at the future pacification
of the world. "A Scene in Hell," however, is the chief of the effusions
directed against war. The Emperor Napoleon in his grey coat and his
historical three-cornered hat is languishing in hell; wavering flames
envelop him as with a flowing purple mantle, and an innumerable
multitude of mothers and sisters, wives and betrothed maidens, children
and fathers, from whom he has taken their dearest are pressing round
him. Fists are clenched against him, and screams issue from toothless,
raging mouths. He, on the other hand, with his arms crossed on his
breast, and his haughty visage stern and gloomy, stands motionless,
looking fixedly with satanic eyes upon the thousands whose happiness he
has destroyed.
[Illustration: WIERTZ. THE FIGHT ROUND THE BODY OF PATROCLUS.]
In his "Thoughts and Visions of a Decapitated Head", Wiertz, moved by
Victor Hugo's _Le dernier jour d'un condamné_, makes capital punishment
a subject of more lengthy disquisition. The picture, which is made up of
three parts, is supposed to represent the feelings of a man, who has
been guillotined, during the first three minutes after execution. The
border of the picture contains a complete dissertation: "The man who has
suffered execution sees his body dried up and in corruption in a dark
corner; and sees also, what it is only given to spirits of another world
to perceive, the secrets of the transmutation of matter. He sees all the
gases which have formed his body, and its sulphurous, earthy, and
ammoniacal elements, detach themselves from its decaying flesh and serve
for the structure of other living beings.... When that abominable
instrument the guillotine is one day actually abolished, may God be
praised," and so on.
Beside this painted plea against capital punishment hangs "The Burnt
Child," as an argument in favour of _crêches_. A poor working woman has
for one moment left her garret. Meanwhile a fire has broken out, and she
returns to find the charred body of her boy. In the picture "Hunger,
Madness, and Crime" he treats of human misery in general, and touches on
the question of the rearing of illegitimate children. There is a young
girl forced to live on the carrots which a rich man throws into the
gutter. In consequence of a notification to pay taxes she goes out of
her mind, and with hellish laughter cuts to pieces the baby who has
brought her to ruin. Cremation is recommended in the picture "Buried too
soon": there is a vault, and in it a coffin, the lid of which has been
burst open from the inside; through the cleft may be seen a clenched
hand, and in the darkness of the coffin the horror-stricken countenance
of one who is piteously crying for help.
In the "Novel Reader" he endeavours to show the baneful influence of
vicious reading upon the imagination of a girl. She is lying naked in
bed, with loosened hair and a book in her hand; her eyes are reddened
with hysterical tears, and an evil spirit is laying a new book on the
couch, _Antonine_, by Alexandre Dumas _Fils_. "The Retort of a Belgian
Lady"--an anticipation of Neid--glorifies homicide committed in the
defence of honour. A Dutch officer having taken liberties with a Belgian
woman, she blows out his brains with a pistol. In "The Suicide" the
fragments of a skull may be seen flying in all directions. How the young
man who has just destroyed himself came to this pass may be gathered
from the book entitled _Materialism_, which lies on his table. And thus
he goes on, though the spectator feels less and less inclined to take
any serious interest in these lectures. For although the intentions of
Wiertz had now and then a touch of the sublime, he was neither clear as
to the limits of what could be represented nor did he possess the
capacity of expressing what he wished in artistic forms. Like many a
German painter of those years, he was a philosopher of the brush, a
scholar in disguise, who wrote out his thoughts in paint instead of ink.
Wiertz made painting a vehicle for more than it can render as painting:
with him it begins to dogmatise; it is a book, and it awakens a regret
that this rich mind was lost to authorship. There he might, perhaps,
have done much that was useful towards solving the social and
philosophical questions of the day; as he is, he has nothing to offer
the understanding, and only succeeds in offending the eye. A human brain
with both great and trivial ideas lays itself bare. But, like Cornelius,
from the mere fulness of his ideas he was unable to give them artistic
expression. He groped from Michael Angelo to Rubens, and from Raphael to
Ary Scheffer, without realising that the artistic utterance of all these
masters had been an individual gift. The career of Wiertz is an
interesting psychological case. He was an abnormal phenomenon, and he
cannot be passed over in the history of art, because he was one of the
first who treated subjects from modern life in large pictures. Never
before had a genuinely artistic age brought forth such a monster, yet it
is impossible to ignore him, or deny that he claims a certain degree of
importance in the art history of the past century.
CHAPTER XXII
THE VILLAGE TALE
During the decade following the year 1848 _genre_ painting in Germany
threw off the shackles of the anecdotic style, and continued a
development similar to that of history, which, in the same country,
flourished long after it was moribund elsewhere. After the elder
artists, who showed so much zeal in producing perfectly ineffective
little pictures, executed with incredible pains and a desperate veracity
of detail, there followed, from 1850, a generation who were technically
better equipped. They no longer confined themselves to making tentative
efforts in the manner of the old masters, but either borrowed their
lights directly from the historical painters in Paris, or were
indirectly made familiar with the results of French technique through
Piloty. Subjects of greater refinement were united with a treatment of
colour which was less offensive.
The childlike innocence which had given pleasure in Meyerheim and
Waldmüller was now thought to be too childlike by far. The merriment
which radiated from the pictures of Schroedter or Enhuber found no echo
amidst a generation which was tired of such cheap humour: the works of
Carl Hübner were put aside as lachrymose and sentimental efforts. When
the world had issued from the period of Romanticism there was no
temptation to be funny over modern life nor to make socialistic
propaganda; for after the Revolution of 1848 people had become
reconciled to the changed order of affairs and to life as it actually
was--its cares and its worries, its mistakes and its sins. It was the
time when Berthold Auerbach's village tales ran through so many
editions; and, hand in hand with these literary productions, painting
also set itself to tell little stories from the life of sundry classes
of the people, amongst which rustics were always the most preferable
from their picturesqueness of costume.
At the head of this group of artists stands _Louis Knaus_, and if it is
difficult to hymn his praises at the present day, that is chiefly
because Knaus mostly drew upon that sarcastic and ironical
characteristic which is such an unpleasant moral note in the pictures of
Hogarth, Schroedter, and Madou. The figures of the old Dutch masters
behave as if the glance of no stranger were resting upon them: it is
possible to share their joys and sorrows, which are not merely acted. We
feel at our ease with them because they regard us as one of themselves.
In Knaus there is always an artificial bond between the figures and the
frequenters of the exhibition. They plunge into the greatest
extravagances to excite attention, tickle the spectator to make him
laugh, or cry out to move him to tears. With the exception of Wilkie, no
_genre_ painter has explained his purpose more obtrusively or in greater
detail. Even when he paints a portrait, by way of variation, he stands
behind with a pointer to explain it. On this account the portraits of
Mommsen and Helmholtz in the Berlin National Gallery are made too
official. Each of them is visibly conscious that he is being painted for
the National Gallery, and by emphasis and the accumulation of external
characteristics Knaus took the greatest pains to lift these
personalities into types of the nineteenth-century scholar.
[Illustration: L. Knaus.]
Since popular opinion is wont to represent the philologist as one
careless of outward appearance, and the investigator of natural
philosophy as an elegant man of the world,--Mommsen must wear boots
which have seen much service, and those of Helmholtz must be of polished
leather; the shirt of the one must be genially rumpled, and that of the
other must fit him to perfection. By such obvious characterisation the
Sunday public was satisfied, but those who were represented were really
deprived of character. It is not to be supposed that in Mommsen's room
the manuscripts of all his principal works would lie so openly upon the
writing-table and beneath it, so that every one might see them: it is
not probable that his famous white locks would flutter so as he sat at
the writing-table. Even the momentary gesture of the hand has in both
pictures something obtrusively demonstrative. "Behold, with this pen I
have written the history of Rome," says Mommsen. "Behold, there is the
famous ophthalmometer which I invented," says Helmholtz.
But as a _genre_ painter Knaus has fallen still more often into such
intolerable stage gesticulation. The picture "His Highness upon his
Travels" is usually mentioned as that in which he reached his zenith in
characterisation. Yet is not this characterisation in the highest degree
exaggerated? Is not the expression apportioned to every figure, like
parts to a theatrical company, and does not the result seem to be
strained beyond all measure? Just look at the children, see how each
plays a part to catch your eye. A little girl is leaning shyly on her
elder sister, who has bashfully thrust her finger into her mouth: some
are looking on with rustic simplicity, others with attention: a child
smaller than the others is puckering up its face and crying miserably.
The prince, in whose honour the children are drawn up, passes the group
with complete indifference, while his companion regards "the people"
haughtily through his eyeglass. The schoolmaster bows low, in the hope
that his salary may be raised, whilst the stupid churchwarden looks
towards the prince with a jovial smile, as though he were awaiting his
colleague from the neighbouring village. Of course, they are all very
intelligible types; but they are no more than types. For the painter the
mere accident of the moment is the source of all life. Would that
six-year-old peasant child who stands with the greatest dignity in
Knaus's picture as "The Village Prince" have ever stood in that fashion,
with a flower between his teeth and his legs thrust apart, unless he had
been carefully taught this self-conscious pose by the painter himself?
So that there may not be the slightest doubt as to which of the
shoemaker's apprentices is winning and which is losing, one of them has
to have a knowing smirk, whilst the other is looking helplessly at his
cards. And how that little Maccabee is acting to the public in "The
First Profit!" The old man in threadbare clothes, who stands in an
ante-chamber rubbing his hands in the picture "I can Wait"; the
frightened little girl who sees her bit of bread-and-butter imperilled
by geese in "In Great Distress,"--they have all the same deliberate
comicality, they are all treated with the same palpable carefulness, the
same pointed and impertinently satirical sharpness. Even in "The
Funeral" he is not deserted by the humorous proclivity of the
anecdotist, and the schoolmaster has to brandish the bâton with which he
is conducting the choir of boys and girls as comically as possible.
Knaus uses too many italics, and underlines as if he expected his public
to be very dull of understanding. In this way he appeals to
simple-minded people, and irritates those of more delicate taste. The
peasant sits in his pictures like a model; he knows that he must keep
quiet, and neither alter his pose nor his grimace, because otherwise
Knaus will be angry. All his pictures show signs of the superior and
celebrated city gentleman, who has only gone into the country to
interest himself in the study of civilisation: there he hunts after
effectively comical features, and, having arranged his little world in
_tableaux vivants_, he coolly surrenders it to the derision of the
cultivated spectator.
[Illustration: KNAUS. IN GREAT DISTRESS.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: KNAUS. THE CARD PLAYERS.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
But such a judgment, which seems like a condemnation, could not be
maintained from the historical standpoint. Germany could not forget
Knaus, if it were only for the fact that in the fifties he sided with
those who first spread the unusual opinion that painting was
incomprehensible without sound ability in the matter of colour. He was
not content, like the elder generation, to arrange the individual
characters in his pictures in well-disposed groups. He took care to make
his works faultless in colouring, so that in the fifties he not only
roused the enthusiasm of the great public by his "poetic invention," but
made even the Parisian painters enthusiastic by his easy mastery of
technique.
To the following effect wrote Edmond About in 1855: "I do not know
whether Herr Knaus has long nails; but even if they were as long as
those of Mephistopheles, I should still say that he was an artist to his
fingers' ends. His pictures please the Sunday public and the Friday
public, the critics, the _bourgeois_, and (God forgive me!) the
painters. What is seductive to the great multitude is the clearly
expressed dramatic idea, while artists and connoisseurs are won by his
knowledge and thorough ability. Herr Knaus has the capacity of
satisfying every one. His pictures attract the most incompetent eyes,
because they tell pleasant anecdotes; but they likewise fascinate the
most jaded by perfect execution of detail. The whole talent of Germany
is contained in the person of Herr Knaus. So Germany lives in the Rue de
l'Arcade in Paris."
In the fifties all the technical ability which was to be gained from the
study of the old Dutch masters and from constant commerce with the
modern French reached its highest point in Knaus. Even in his youth the
great Netherlandish painters, Ostade, Brouwer, and Teniers, must have
had more effect upon him than his teachers, Sohn and Schadow, since his
very first pictures, "The Peasants' Dance" of 1850 and "The Card
Sharpers" of 1850, had little in common with the Düsseldorf school, and
therefore so much the more with the Netherlandish _chiaroscuro_. "The
Card Sharpers" is precisely like an Ostade modernised. By his migration
to Paris in 1852 he sought to acquire the utmost perfection of finish;
and when he returned home, after a sojourn of eight years, he had at his
command such a sense for effect and fine harmony of tone, such a
knowledge of colour, and such a disciplined and refined taste, that his
works indicate an immeasurable advance on the motley harshness of his
predecessors. His "Golden Wedding" of 1858--perhaps his finest
picture--had nothing of the antiquated technique of the older type of
Düsseldorf pictures of peasant life; technically it stood on a level
with the works of the French.
[Illustration: KNAUS. THE GOLDEN WEDDING.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
And Knaus has remained the same ever since: a separate personality which
belongs to history. He painted peasant pictures of tragic import and
rustic gaiety; he recognised a number of graceful traits in child-life,
and, having seen a great deal of the world, he made a transition, after
he had settled in Berlin, from the character picture of the Black Forest
to such as may be painted from the life of cities. He even ventured to
touch on religious subjects, and taught the world the limitations of his
talent by his "Holy Families," composed out of reminiscences of all
times and all schools, and by his "Daniel in the Lions' Den." Knaus is
whole-heartedly a _genre_ painter; though that, indeed, is what he has
in common with many other people. But thirty years ago he had a genius
for colour amid a crowd of narrative and character painters, and this
makes him unique. He is a man whose significance does not merely lie in
his talent for narrative, but one who did much for German art. It may be
said that in giving the _genre_ picture unsuspected subtleties of colour
he helped German art to pass from mere _genre_ painting to painting pure
and simple. In this sense he filled an artistic mission, and won for
himself in the history of modern painting a firm and sure place, which
even the opponent of the illustrative vignette cannot take from him.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
KNAUS. BEHIND THE SCENES.]
_Vautier_, who must always be named in the same breath with Knaus, is in
truth the exact opposite of the Berlin master. He also is essentially a
_genre_ painter, and his pictures should not be merely seen but studied
in detail; but where Knaus has merits Vautier is defective, and where
Knaus is jarring Vautier has merits. In technique he cannot boast of
similar qualities. He is always merely a draughtsman who tints, but has
never been a colourist. As a painter he has less value, but as a _genre_
painter he is more sympathetic. In the pictures of Knaus one is annoyed
by the deliberate smirk, by his exaggerated and heartlessly frigid
observation. Vautier gives pleasure by characterisation, more delicately
reserved in its adjustment of means, and profound as it is simple, by
his wealth of individual motives and their charm, and by the
sensitiveness with which he renders the feelings and relationship of his
figures. A naïve, good-humoured, and amiable temperament is betrayed in
his works. He is genially idyllic where Knaus creates a pungently
satirical effect, and a glance at the portraits of the two men explains
this difference.
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
BENJAMIN VAUTIER.]
Knaus with his puckered forehead, and his searching look shooting from
under heavy brows, is like a judge or a public prosecutor. Vautier, with
his thoughtful blue eyes, resembles a prosperous banker with a turn for
idealism, or a writer of village tales _à la_ Berthold Auerbach. Knaus
worried himself over many things, brooded much and made many
experiments; Vautier was content with the acquisition of a plain and
simple method of painting, which appeared to him a perfectly sufficient
medium for the expression of that which he had realised with profound
emotion. The one is a reflective and the other a dreamy nature. Vautier
was a man of a happy temperament, one with whom the world went well from
his youth upwards, who enjoyed an existence free from care, and who had
accustomed himself as a painter to see the world in a rosy light. There
is something sound and pure in his characters, in his pictures something
peaceful and cordial; it does not, indeed, make his paltry pedantic
style of painting any the better, but from the human standpoint it
touches one sympathetically. His countrymen may be ashamed of Vautier as
a painter when they come across him amongst aliens in foreign
exhibitions, but they rejoice in him none the less as a _genre_ painter.
It is as if they had been met by the quiet, faithful gaze of a German
eye amid the fiery glances of the Latin nations. It is as if they
suddenly heard a simple German song, rendered without training, and yet
with a great deal of feeling. A generation ago Knaus could exhibit
everywhere as a painter; as such Vautier was only possible in Germany
during the sixties. But in Knaus it is impossible to get rid of the
impress of the Berlin professor, while from Vautier's pictures there
smiles the kindly sentiment of German home-life. Vautier's world, no
doubt, is as one-sided as that of old Meyerheim. His talkative Paul
Prys, his brides with their modest shyness, his smart young fellows
throwing amorous glances, his proud fathers, and his sorrow-stricken
mothers are, it may be, types rather than beings breathing positive and
individual life. Such a golden radiance of grace surrounds the pretty
figures of his bare-footed rustic maidens as never pertained to those of
the real world, but belongs rather to the shepherdess of a fairy tale
who marries the prince. His figures must not be measured by the standard
of realistic truth to nature. But they are the inhabitants of a dear,
familiar world in which everything breathes of prettiness and lovable
good-humour. It is almost touching to see with what purity and beauty
life is reflected in Vautier's mind.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
VAUTIER. THE CONJURER.]
How dainty are these brown-eyed Swabian peasant girls, how tender and
sympathetic the women, and how clean and well-behaved the children! You
could believe that Vautier mixed with his peasants like a friend or a
benevolent god-father, that he delighted in their harmless pleasures,
that he took part in their griefs and cares. In his pictures he does not
give an account of his impressions with severity or any deliberate
attempt to amuse, but with indulgence and cordiality. It is not his
design to excite or to thrill, to waken comedy through whimsicalities or
mournfulness by anything tragical. Life reveals to him "merely pleasant
things," as it did to Goethe during his tour in Italy, and even in its
tragedies only people "who bear the inevitable with dignity." He never
expressed boisterous grief: everything is subdued, and has that
tenderness which is associated with the mere sound of his Christian
name, Benjamin. Knaus has something of Menzel, Vautier of Memlinc: he
has it even in the loving familiarity with which he penetrates minute
detail. In their religious pictures the old German and Netherlandish
masters painted everything, down to the lilies worked on the Virgin's
loom, or the dust lying on the old service-book; and this thoroughly
German delight in still life, this complacent rendering of minutiæ, is
found again in Vautier.
Men and their dwellings, animated nature and atmosphere, combine to make
a pleasant world in his pictures. Vautier was one of the first to
discover the magic of environment, the secret influence which unites a
man to the soil from which he sprang, the thousand unknown, magnetic
associations existing between outward things and the spirit, between the
intuitions and the actions of man. The environment is not there like a
stage scene in front of which the personages come and go; it lives and
moves in the man himself. One feels at home in these snug and cosy
rooms, where the Black Forest clock is ticking, where little, tasteless
photographs look down from the wall with an honest, patriarchal air,
where the floor is scoured so clean, and greasy green hats hang on
splendid antlers. There is the great family bed with the flowered
curtains, the massive immovable bench by the stove, the solid old table,
around which young and old assemble at meal-times. There are the great
cupboards for the treasures of the house, the prayer-book given to
grandmother at her confirmation, the filigree ornaments, the glasses and
coffee-cups, which are kept for show, not for daily use. Over the
bedstead are hung the little pictures of saints painted on glass, and
the consecrated tokens. From the window one overlooks other
appurtenances of the house; gaudy scarlet runners clamber in from the
little garden, blossoming fruit-trees stand in its midst, and the gable
of the well-filled barn rises above it. Everything has an air of peace
and prosperity, the mood of a Sunday forenoon; one almost fancies that
one can catch the chime of the distant church bells through the blissful
stillness. But completeness of effect and pictorial harmony are not to
be demanded: the illustrated paper is better suited to his style than
the exhibition.
[Illustration: VAUTIER. THE DANCING LESSON.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
The third member of the alliance is _Franz Defregger_, a man of splendid
talent; of all the masters of the great Munich school of Piloty, he is
at once the simplest and the healthiest. True it is, no doubt, that when
posterity sifts and weighs his works, much of him, also, will be found
too light. Defregger's art has suffered from his fame and from the
temptations of the picture market. Moreover, he had not Vautier's fine
sense of the limitations of his ability, but often represented things
which he did not understand. He was less of a painter than any of the
artists of Piloty's school, and more completely tethered by the size of
his picture. He could not go beyond a certain space of canvas without
suffering for it; and he bound his talent on the bed of Procrustes when
he attempted to paint Madonnas, or placed himself with his Hofer
pictures in the rank of historical painters. But as a _genre_ painter he
stands beside Vautier, in the first line; and by these little _genre_
pictures--the simpler and quieter the better--and some of his genially
conceived and charming portrait studies, he will survive. Those are
things which he understood and felt. He had himself lived amid the life
he depicted, and so it was that what he depicted made such a powerful
appeal to the heart.
[Illustration: VAUTIER. NOVEMBER.]
The year 1869 made him known. The Munich Exhibition had in that year a
picture on a subject from the history of the Hofer rising of 1809. It
represented how the little son of Speckbacher, one of the Tyrolese
leaders, had come after his father, armed with a musket; and at the side
of an old forester he is entering the room in which Speckbacher is just
holding a council of war. The father springs up angry at his
disobedience, but also proud of the little fellow's pluck. From this
time Defregger's art was almost entirely devoted to the Tyrolese people.
To paint the smart lads and neat lasses of Tyrol in joy and sorrow, love
and hate, at work and merry-making, at home or outside on the mountain
pasture, in all their beauty, strength, and robust health, was the
life-long task for which he more than any other man had been created. He
had, over Knaus and most other painters of village tales, the enormous
advantage of not standing personally outside or above the people, and
not regarding them with the superficial curiosity of a tourist--for he
belonged to them himself. Others, if ironically disposed, saw in the
rustic the stupid, comic peasant; or, if inclined to sentimentalism,
introduced into the rural world the moods and feelings of "society,"
traits of drawing-room sensitiveness, the heavy air of the town. Models
in national costume were grouped for pictures of Upper Bavarian rustic
life. But Defregger, who up to the age of fifteen had kept his father's
cattle on the pastures of the Ederhof, had shared the joys and sorrows
of the peasantry long enough to know that they are neither comic nor
sentimental people.
The roomy old farmhouse where he was born in 1835 lay isolated amid the
wild mountains. He went about bare-footed and bare-headed, waded through
deep snow when he made his way to school in winter, and wandered about
amid the highland pastures with the flocks in summer. Milkmaids and
wood-cutters, hunters and cowherds, were his only companions. At fifteen
he was the head labourer of the estate, helped to thresh the corn, and
worked on the arable land and in the stable and the barn like others.
When he was twenty-three he lost his father and took over the farm
himself: he was thus a man in the full sense of the word before his
artistic calling was revealed to him. And this explains his qualities
and defects. When he came to Piloty after the sale of his farm and his
aimless sojourn in Innsbruck and Paris he was mature in mind; he was
haunted by the impressions of his youth, and he wanted to represent the
land and the people of Tyrol. But he was too old to become a good
"painter." On the other hand, he possessed the great advantage of
knowing what he wanted. The heroes of history did not interest him; it
was only the Tyrolese woodmen who persisted in his brain. He left
Piloty's studio almost as he had entered it--awkward, and painting
heavily and laboriously, and but very little impressed by Piloty's
theatrical sentiment. His youth and his recollections were rooted in the
life of the people; and with a faithful eye he caught earnest or
cheerful phases of that life, and represented them simply and cordially:
and if he had had the strength to offer a yet more effectual resistance
to the prevalent ideal of beauty, there is no doubt that his stories
would seem even more fresh and vigorous.
[Illustration: FRANZ DEFREGGER.]
"The Dance" was the first picture which followed that of "Speckbacher,"
and it was circulated through the world in thousands of reproductions.
There are two delightful figures in it: the pretty milkmaid who looks
around her, radiant with pleasure, and the wiry old Tyrolese who is
lifting his foot, cased in a rough hobnail shoe, to dance to the
_Schuhplattler_. At the same time he painted "The Prize Horse"
returning to his native village from the show decked and garlanded and
greeted exultantly by old and young as the pride of the place. "The Last
Summons" was again a scene from the Tyrolese popular rising of 1809. All
who can still carry a rifle, a scythe, or a pitchfork have enrolled
themselves beneath the banners, and are marching out to battle over the
rough village street. The wives and children are looking earnestly at
the departing figures, whilst a little old woman is pressing her
husband's hand. Everything was simply and genially rendered without
sentimentality or emphasis, and the picture even makes an appeal by its
colouring. As a sequel "The Return of the Victors" was produced in 1876:
a troop of the Tyrolese levy is marching through its native mountain
village, with a young peasant in advance, slightly wounded, and looking
boldly round. Tyrolese banners are waving, and the fifes and drums and
clarionet players bring up the rear. The faces of the men beam with the
joy of victory, and women and children stand around to welcome those
returning home. Joy, however, is harder to paint faithfully than sorrow.
It is so easy to see that it has been artificially worked up from the
model; nor is Defregger's picture entirely innocent on this charge.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
DEFREGGER. SPECKBACHER AND HIS SON.]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
DEFREGGER. THE WRESTLERS.]
"Andreas Hofer going to his Death" was his first concession to Piloty.
Defregger had become professor at the Munich Academy, and was entered in
the directory as "historical painter." The figures were therefore
painted life size; and in the grouping and the choice of the "psychic
moment" the style aimed at "grand painting." The result was the same
emptiness which blusters through the historical pictures of the school
of Delaroche, Gallait, and Piloty. The familiar stage effect and stilted
passion has taken the place of simple and easy naturalism. Nor was he
able to give life to the great figures of a large canvas as he had done
in the smaller picture of the "Return of the Victors." This is true of
"The Peasant Muster" of 1883--which represented the Tyrolese, assembled
in an arms manufactory, learning that the moment for striking had
arrived--and of the last picture of the series, "Andreas Hofer receiving
the Presents of the Emperor Francis in the Fortress of Innsbruck." All
the great Hofer pictures, which in earlier days were honoured as his
best performances, have done less for his memory than for that of the
sturdy hero. The _genre_ picture was Defregger's vocation. There lay his
strength, and as soon as he left that province he renounced his fine
qualities.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DEFREGGER. SISTER AND BROTHERS.]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
DEFREGGER. THE PRIZE HORSE.]
And a holiday humour, a tendency to beautify what he saw, is spread over
even his _genre_ pictures. They make one suppose that there is always
sunshine in the happy land of Tyrol, that all the people are chaste and
beautiful, all the young fellows fine and handsome, all the girls smart,
every household cleanly and well-ordered, all married folk and children
honest and kind; whereas in reality these milk-maids and woodmen are far
less romantic in their conduct; and so many a townsman who avoids
contact with the living people goes into raptures over them as they are
pictures. With Vautier he shares this one-sidedness as well as his
defective colour. Almost all his pictures are hard, dry, and diffident
in colouring, but, as with Vautier, the man atones for the painter. From
Defregger one asks for no qualities of colour and no realistic Tyrolese,
since he has rendered himself in his pictures, and gives one a glimpse
into his own heart; and a healthy, genial, and kindly heart it is. His
idealism is not born of laboriously acquired principles of beauty; it
expresses the temperament of a painter--a temperament which
unconsciously sees the people through a medium whereby they are
glorified. A rosy glow obscures sadness, ugliness, wretchedness, and
misery, and shows only strength and health, tenderness and beauty,
fidelity and courage. He treasured sunny memories of the cheerful
radiance which rested on his home in the hour of his return; he painted
the joy which swelled in his own breast as he beheld again the rocks of
his native country, heard once more the peaceful chime of its Sabbath
bells. And this is what gives his works their human, inward truth,
little as they may be authentic documents as to the population of Tyrol.
Later this will be more impartially recognised than it possibly can be
at present. The larger the school of any artist, the more it will make
his art trivial; and thus for a time the originality of the master
himself seems to be mere trifling. The Tyrolese were depreciated in the
market by Defregger's imitators; only too many have aped his painting of
stiff leather breeches and woollen bodices, without putting inside them
the vivid humanity which is so charming in a genuine Defregger. But his
position in the history of art is not injured by this. He has done
enough for his age; he has touched the hearts of many by his cheerful,
fresh, and healthy art, and he would be certain of immortality had he
thrown aside his brush altogether from the time when the progress of
painting left him in the rear.
With Defregger, the head of the Tyrolese school, Gabl and Mathias
Schmidt, standing at a measurable distance from him, may find a
well-merited place. _Mathias Schmidt_, born in the Tyrolese Alps in the
same year as Defregger, began with satirical representations of the
local priesthood. A poor image-carver has arrived with his waggon at an
inn, on the terrace of which are sitting a couple of well-fed
ecclesiastics, and by them he is ironically called to account as he
offers a crucifix for sale. A young priest, as an austere judge of
morals, reproves a pair of lovers who are standing before him, or asks a
young girl such insidious questions at the bridal examination that she
lowers her eyes, blushing. His greatest picture was "The Emigration of
the Zillerthal Protestants." Amongst later works, without controversial
tendencies, "The Hunter's Greeting" and "The Lathered Parson" may be
named. The latter is surprised by two pretty girls while shaving. To
these may be added "The Parson's Patch," a picture of a robust
housekeeper hastily mending a weak spot in the pastor's inexpressibles
just before service.
Shortly after Defregger had painted his picture of "Speckbacher," _Alois
Gabl_ came forward with his "Haspinger preaching Revolt," and followed
it up by smaller pictures with a humorous touch, representing a levy of
recruits in Tyrol, the dance at the inn interrupted by the entrance of
the parson, magnates umpiring at the shooting butts, a bar with laughing
girls, and the like.
In 1870, _Eduard Kurzbauer_, who died young, in his "Fugitives
Overtaken" executed a work representing an entire class of painted
illustrations. A young man who has eloped with a girl is discovered with
her by her mother in a village inn. The old lady is looking
reproachfully at her daughter, who is overwhelmed by shame and
penitence; the young man is much moved, the old servant grave and
respectful, the young landlady curious, and the postilion who has driven
the eloping pair has a sly smirk. Elsewhere Kurzbauer, who is a fresh
and lively anecdotist, painted principally episodes, arraying his
figures in the peasant garb of the Black Forest: a rejected suitor takes
a sad farewell of a perverse blonde who disdains his love; or the
engagement of two lovers is hindered by the interference of the father.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DEFREGGER. ANDREAS HOFER APPOINTED GOVERNOR OF THE TYROL.]
_Hugo Kauffmann_, the son of Hermann Kauffmann, planted himself in the
interior of village taverns or in front of them, and made his dressed-up
models figure as hunters, telling incredible tales, dancing to the
fiddle, or quarrelling over cards.
Another North German, _Wilhelm Riefstahl_, showed how the peasants in
Appenzell or Bregenz conduct themselves at mournful gatherings, at their
devotions in the open air, and at All Souls' Day Celebrations, and
afterwards extended his artistic dominion over Rügen, Westphalia, and
the Rhine country with true Mecklenburg thoroughness. He was a careful,
conscientious worker, with a discontent at his own efforts in his
composition, a certain ponderousness in his attempts at _genre_; but his
diligently executed pictures--full of colour and painted in a peculiarly
German manner--are highly prized in public galleries on account of their
instructive soundness.
After the various classes of the German peasantry had been naturalised
in the picture market by these narrative painters, _Eduard Grützner_,
when religious controversy raged in the seventies, turned aside to
discover drolleries in monastic life. This he did with the assistance of
brown and yellowish white cowls, and the obese and copper-nosed models
thereto pertaining. He depicts how the cellarer tastes a new wine, and
the rest of the company await his verdict with anxiety; how the entire
monastery is employed at the vintage, at the broaching of a wine cask or
the brewing of the beer; how they tipple; how bored they are over their
chess or their dice, their cards or their dominoes; how they whitewash
old frescoes or search after forbidden books in the monastery library.
This, according to Grützner, is the routine in which the life of monks
revolves. At times amidst these figures appear foresters who tell of
their adventures in the chase, or deliver hares at the cloister kitchen.
And the more Grützner was forced year after year to make up for his
decline as a colourist, by cramming his pictures with so-called humour,
the greater was his success.
It was only long afterwards that _genre_ painting in broad-cloth came
into vogue by the side of this _genre_ in peasant blouse and monastic
cowl, and stories of the exchange and the manufactory by the side of
village and monastic tales. Here Düsseldorf plays a part once more in
the development of art. The neighbourhood of the great manufacturing
towns on the Rhine could not but lead painters to these subjects.
_Ludwig Bokelmann_, who began by painting tragical domestic scenes--card
players, and smoking shop-boys, in the style of Knaus--made the pawnshop
a theme for art in 1875, and dexterously crowded into his picture all
the types which popular fancy brings into association with the
conception: business-like indifference, poverty ashamed, fallen
prosperity, bitter need, avarice, and the love of pleasure. In 1877,
when the failure of the house of Spitzeder made a sensation in the
papers, he painted his picture "The Savings Bank before the Announcement
of Failure," which gave him another opportunity for ranging in front of
the splendid building an assembly of deluded creditors of all classes,
and of showing how they expressed their emotion according to temperament
and education, by excited speeches, embittered countenances, gloomy
resignation, or vivid gesticulation. Much attention was likewise excited
by "The Arrest." In this picture a woman was being watched for by a
policeman, whilst the neighbours--male and female--loitered round with
the requisite expression of horror, indignation, sympathy, or
indifferent curiosity. The opening of a will, the last moments of an
electioneering struggle, scenes in the entrance hall of a court of
justice, the emigrants' farewell, the gaming-table at Monte Carlo, and a
village fire, were other newspaper episodes from the life of great towns
which he rendered in paint.
His earlier associate in Düsseldorf, _Ferdinand Brütt_, after first
painting _rococo_ pictures, owed his finest successes to the Stock
Exchange. It, too, had its types: the great patrician merchants and
bankers of solid reputation, the jobbers, break-neck speculators, and
decayed old stagers; and, as Brütt rendered these current figures in a
very intelligible manner, his pictures excited a great deal of
attention. Acquittals and condemnations, acts of mortgage, emigration
agents, comic electors, and prison visits, as further episodes from the
social, political, and commercial life of great towns, fill up the odd
corners of his little local chronicle.
Thus the German _genre_ painting ran approximately the same course as
the English had done at the beginning of the century. At that time the
kingdom of German art was not of this world. Classicism taught men to
turn their eyes on the art of a past age. Art in Germany had progressed
slowly, and at first with an uncertain and hesitating step, before it
learnt that what blossoms here, and thrives and fades, should be the
subject of its labours. Gradually it brought one sphere of reality after
the other into its domain. Observation took the place of abstraction,
and the discoverer that of the inventor. The painter went amongst his
fellow-creatures, opened his eyes and his heart to share their fortunes
and misfortunes, and to reproduce them in his own creation. He
discovered the peculiarities of grades of life and professional classes.
Every one of the beautiful German landscapes with its peasantry, every
one of the monastic orders and every manufacturing town found its
representative in _genre_ painting. The country was mapped out. Each one
took over his plot, which he superintended, conscientiously, like an
ethnographical museum. And just as fifty years before, Germany had been
fertilised by England, so it now gave in its turn the principles of
_genre_ painting to the powers of the second rank in art.
Even France was in some degree influenced. As if to indicate that Alsace
would soon become German once more, after 1850 there appeared in that
province certain painters who busied themselves with the narration of
anecdote from rustic life quite in the manner of Knaus and Vautier.
_Gustave Brion_, the grand-nephew of Frederica of Sesenheim, settled in
the Vosges, and there gave intelligence of a little world whose life
flowed by, without toil, in gentle, patriarchal quietude, interrupted
only by marriage feasts, birthdays, and funeral solemnities. He appears
to have been rather fond of melancholy and solemn subjects. His
interiors, with their sturdy and honest people, bulky old furniture, and
large green faïence stoves, which are so dear to him, are delightful in
their familiar homeliness and their cordial Alsatian and German
character, and recall Vautier; in fact, he might well be termed the
French Vautier. He lives in them himself--the quiet old man, who in his
last years occupied himself solely with the management of his garden and
the culture of flowers, or sat by the hour in an easy-chair at the
window telling stories to his old dog Putz. But pictorial unity of
effect must be asked from him as little as from Vautier.
_Charles Marchal_, too, was no painter, but an anecdotist, with a bias
towards the humorous or sentimental; and so very refined and superior
was he that he saw none but pretty peasant girls, who might easily be
mistaken for "young ladies," if they exchanged their kerchiefs and
bodices for a Parisian toilette. His chief picture was "The Hiring Fair"
of 1864: pretty peasant girls are standing in a row along the street,
bargaining with prospective masters before hiring themselves out.
[Illustration: GRÜTZNER. TWELFTH NIGHT.]
The most famous of this group of artists is _Jules Breton_, who after
various humorous and sentimental pieces placed himself in 1853 in the
front rank of the French painters of rustics by his "Return of the
Reapers" (Musée Luxembourg). His "Gleaners" in 1855, "Blessing the
Fields" in 1857, and "The Erection of the Picture of Christ in the
Churchyard" were pretty enough to please the public, and sufficiently
sound in technique not to be a stumbling-block to artists. After 1861 he
conceived an enthusiasm for sunsets, and was never weary of depicting
the hour when the fair forms of peasant maidens stand gracefully out
against the quiet golden horizon. Jules Breton wrote many poems, and a
vein of poetry runs through his pictures. They tell of the sadness of
the land when the fields sleep dreamily beneath the shadows of the
evening, touched by the last ray of the departing sun; but they tell of
it in verses where the same rhymes are repeated with wearisome monotony.
Breton is a charming and sympathetic figure, but he never quite
conquered Classicism. His gleaners moving across the field in the
evening twilight bear witness to an attentive, deliberate study of the
works of Leopold Robert; and unfortunately much of the emphasis and
classical style of Robert has been transmitted to Breton's rustic
maidens. They have most decidedly a lingering weakness for pose, and a
sharp touch of the formula of the schools. There is an affectation of
style in their garb, and their hands are those of _bonnes_ who have
never even handled a rake. Breton, as Millet said of him, paints girls
who are too beautiful to remain in the country. His art is a well-bred,
idyllic painting, with gilt edges; it is pleasing and full of delicate
figures which are always elegant and always correct, but it is a little
like flat lemonade; it is monotonous and only too carefully composed,
destitute of all masculinity and seldom avoiding the reef of
affectation.
Norway and Sweden were fructified from Düsseldorf immediately. When
Tidemand had shown the way, the academy on the Rhine was the high school
for all the sons of the North during the fifties. They set to
translating Knaus and Vautier into Swedish and Norwegian, and caught the
tone of their originals so exactly that they almost seem more
Düsseldorfian than the Düsseldorfers themselves.
_Karl D'Uncker_, who arrived in 1851 and died in 1866, was led by the
influence of Vautier to turn to little humorous incidents. After "The
Two Deaf Friends" (two old people very hard of hearing, who are making
comical efforts to understand each other) and "The Vagabond Musician and
his Daughter before the Village Magistrates" there followed in 1858 the
scene in "The Pawnshop," which divided the honours of the year with
Knaus's "Golden Wedding." He is an artistic compromise between Knaus and
Schroedter, a keen observer and a humorous narrator, who takes special
pleasure in the sharp opposition of characteristic figures. In his
"Pawnshop" and his "Third Class Waiting Room" vagabonds mingle in the
crowd beside honest people, beggars beside retired tradesmen, old
procuresses beside pure and innocent girls, and heartless misers beside
warm-hearted philanthropists. In these satirically humorous little
comedies Swedish costume has been rightly left out of sight. This
ethnographical element was the _forte of Bengt Nordenberg_, who as a
copyist of Tidemand gradually became the Riefstahl of the North. His
"Golden Wedding in Blekingen," his "Bridal Procession," his "Collection
of Tithes," "The Pietists," and "The Promenade at the Well," are of the
same ethnographical fidelity and the same anecdotic dryness. He gets his
best effects when he strikes an idyllic, childlike note or one of
patriarchal geniality. The "Bridal Procession" received in the village
with salvoes and music, "The Newly Married Pair" making a first visit to
the parents of one of them, the picture of schoolboys playing tricks
upon an old organist, that of children mourning over a lamb slain by a
wolf, are, in the style of the sixties, the works of a modest and
amiable anecdotist, who had a fine sense for the peaceful, familiar side
of everyday life in town and country.
[Illustration: BRION. JEAN VALJEAN.]
In _Wilhelm Wallander_, as in Madou, noise and frolic and jest have the
upper hand. His pictures are like saucy street ditties sung to a
barrel-organ. The crowd at the market-place, the gossip in the
spinning-room on a holiday evening, hop-pickings, dances, auctions on
old estates, weddings, and the guard turning out, are his favourite
scenes. Even when he came to Düsseldorf he was preceded by his fame as a
jolly fellow and a clever draughtsman, and when he exhibited his "Market
in Vingaker" he was greeted as another Teniers. His "Hop-Harvest" is
like a waxwork show of teasing lads and laughing lasses. He was an
incisive humorist and a spirited narrator, who under all circumstances
was more inclined to jest than to touch idyllic and elegiac chords. In
his pictures peasant girls never wander solitary across the country, for
some lad who is passing by always has a joke to crack with them; it
never happens that girls sit lonely by the hearth, there is always a
lover to peep out laughing from behind the cupboard door.
_Anders Koskull_ cultivated the _genre_ picture of children in a more
elegiac fashion; he has poor people sitting in the sun, or peasant
families in the Sunday stillness laying wreaths upon the graves of their
dear ones in the churchyard. _Kilian Zoll_, like Meyer of Bremen,
painted very childish pictures of women spinning, children with cats,
the joys of grandmother, and the like. _Peter Eskilson_ turned to the
representation of an idyllic age of honest yeomen, and has given in his
best known work, "A Game of Skittles in Faggens," a pleasant picture
from peasant life in the age of pig-tails. The object of _August
Jernberg's_ study was the Westphalian peasant with his slouching hat,
long white coat, flowered waistcoat, and large silver buttons. He was
specially fond of painting dancing bears surrounded by a crowd of amused
spectators, or annual fairs, for which a picturesque part of old
Düsseldorf served as a background. _Ferdinand Fagerlin_ has something
attractive in his simplicity and good-humour. If he laughs, as he
delights in doing, his laughter is cordial and kind-hearted, and if he
touches an elegiac chord he can guard against sentimentalism. In
contrast with D'Uncker and Wallander, who always hunted after character
pieces, he devotes himself to expression with much feeling, and
interprets it delicately even in its finer _nuances_. Henry Ritter, who
influenced him powerfully in the beginning of his career, drew his
attention to Holland, and Fagerlin's quiet art harmonises with the Dutch
phlegm. Within the four walls of his fishermen's huts there are none but
honest grey-beards and quiet women, active wives and busy maidens,
vigorous sailors and lively peasant lads. But his pictures are
sympathetic in spite of this one-sided optimism, since the sentiment is
not too affected nor the anecdotic points too heavily underlined.
Amongst the Norwegians belonging to this group is _V.
Stoltenberg-Lerche_, who with the aid of appropriate accessories adapted
the interiors of cloisters and churches to _genre_ pictures, such as
"Tithe Day in the Cloister," "The Cloister Library," and "The Visit of a
Cardinal to the Cloister," and so forth. _Hans Dahl_, a _juste-milieu_
between Tidemand and Emanuel Spitzer, carried the Düsseldorf village
idyll down to the present time. "Knitting the Stocking" (girls knitting
on the edge of a lake), "Feminine Attraction" (a lad with three peasant
maidens who are dragging a boat to shore in spite of his resistance), "A
Child of Nature" (a little girl engaged to sit as model to a painter
amongst the mountains, and running away in alarm), "The Ladies' Boarding
School on the Ice," "First Pay Duty," etc., are some of the witty titles
of his wares, which are scattered over Europe and America. Everything is
sunny, everything laughs, the landscapes as well as the figures; and if
Dahl had painted fifty years ago, his fair maidens with heavy blond
plaits, well-bred carriage, and delicate hands that have never been
disfigured by work, would undoubtedly have assured him no unimportant
place beside old Meyerheim in the history of the development of the
_genre_ picture.
An offshoot from the Munich painting of rustics shot up into a vigorous
sapling in Hungary. The process of refining the raw talents of the
Magyar race had been perfected on the shores of the Isar, and the
Hungarians showed gratitude to their masters by applying the principles
of the Munich _genre_ to Magyar subjects when they returned home. The
Hungarian rooms of modern exhibitions have consequently a very local
impress. Everything seems aboriginal, Magyar to the core, and purely
national. Gipsies are playing the fiddle and Hungarian national songs
ring forth, acrobats exhibit, slender sons of Pusta sit in Hungarian
village taverns over their tokay, muscular peasant lads jest with buxom,
black-eyed girls, smart hussars parade their irresistible charms before
lively damsels, and recruits endeavour to imbibe a potent enthusiasm for
the business of war from the juice of the grape. Stiff peasants, limber
gipsies, old people dancing, smart youths, the laughing faces of girls
and bold fellows with flashing eyes, quarrelsome heroes quick with the
knife, tipsy soldiers and swearing sergeants, drunkards, suffering women
and poor orphans, pawnshops and vagabonds, legal suits, electioneering
scenes, village tragedies and comic proposals, artful shop-boys, and
criminals condemned to death, the gay confusion of fairs and the merry
return from the harvest and the vintage, waxed moustaches, green and red
caps and short pipes, tokay, Banat wheat, Alfoeld tobacco, and Sarkad
cattle,--such are the elements worked up, as the occasion demanded,
either into little tales or great and thrilling romances. And the names
of the painters are as thoroughly Magyar as are the figures. Beside
_Ludwig Ebner_, _Paul Boehm_, and _Otto von Baditz_, which have a German
sound, one comes across such names as _Koloman Déry_, _Julius Aggházi_,
_Alexander Bihari_, _Ignaz Ruskovics_, _Johann Jankó_, _Tihamér
Margitay_, _Paul Vagó_, _Arpad Fessty_, _Otto Koroknyai_, _D.
Skuteczky_, etc.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MARCHAL. THE HIRING FAIR.]
But setting aside the altered names and the altered locality and garb,
the substance of these pictures is precisely the same as that of the
Munich pictures of twenty years before: dance and play, maternal
happiness, wooing, and the invitation to the wedding. Instead of the
_Schuhplattler_ they paint the Czarda, instead of the drover's cottage
the taverns of Pesth, instead of the blue Bavarian uniform the green of
the Magyar Hussars. Their painting is tokay adulterated with Isar
water, or Isar water with a flavour of tokay. What seems national is at
bottom only their antiquated standpoint. It is a typical development
repeating itself in the nineteenth century through all branches of art;
the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. Any other progress than
that of the gradual expansion of subject-matter cannot be established in
favour of the productions of all this _genre_ painting. In colour and in
substance they represent a phase of art which the leading countries of
Europe had already left behind about the middle of the century, and
which had to be overcome elsewhere, if painting was again to be what it
had been in the old, good periods.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
PETTENKOFEN. A HUNGARIAN VILLAGE (PENCIL DRAWING).]
For as yet all these _genre_ painters were the children of Hogarth;
their productions were the outcome of the same spirit, plebeian and
alien to art, which had come into painting when the middle classes began
to hold a more important position in society. Yet their artistic
significance ought not to be and cannot be contested. In an age which
was prouder of its antiquarian knowledge than of its own achievements,
which recognised the faithful imitation of the method of all past
periods, the mere performance of a delicate task, as the highest aim of
art, these _genre_ painters were the first to portray the actual man of
the nineteenth century; the first to desert museums and appeal to
nature, and thus to lay the foundation of modern painting. They wandered
in the country, looked at reality, sought to imitate it, and often
displayed in their studies a marvellous directness of insight. But these
vigorous initial studies were too modest to find favour and esteem with
a public as yet insufficiently educated for the appreciation of art.
Whilst in England the exhibitions of the Royal Academy and in France
those of the Paris Salon created, comparatively early, a certain ground
for the comprehension of art, the _genre_ painters of other countries
worked up to and into the sixties without the appropriate social
combinations. After 1828 the Art Unions began to usurp the position of
that refined society which had formerly played the Mæcenas as the
leading dictators of taste.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
BRETON. THE RETURN OF THE REAPERS.]
Albrecht Adam, who was chiefly responsible for the foundation of the
Munich Union, has himself spoken clearly in his autobiography of the
advantages and disadvantages of this step. "Often," he writes, "often
have I asked myself whether I have done good or not by this scheme, and
to this hour I have not been able to make up my mind. The cultivation of
art clearly received an entirely different bias from that which it had
in earlier days. What was formerly done by artistic and judicious
connoisseurs was now placed for the most part in the hands of the
people. Like so much else in the world, that had its advantages, but in
practice the shady side of the matter became very obvious." The
disadvantages were specially these: "the people" for a long time could
only understand such paintings as represented a story in a broad and
easy fashion; paintings which in the narrative cohesion of the subject
represented might be read off at a glance, since the mere art of reading
had been learnt at school, rather than those which deserved and required
careful study. The demand for anecdotic subject was only waived in the
case of ethnographical painting, in Italian and Oriental _genre_; for
here the singular types, pictorial costumes, and peculiar customs of
foreign countries were in themselves enough to provoke curiosity. What
was prized in the picture was merely something external, the subject of
representation, not the representation itself, the matter and not the
manner, that which concerned the theme, that which fell entirely beyond
the province of art. The illustrated periodicals which had been making
their appearance since the forties gave a further impetus to this phase
of taste. The more inducement there was to guess charades, the more
injury was done to the sensuous enjoyment of art; for the accompanying
text of the author merely translated the pictures back into their
natural element. Painters, however, were not unwilling to reconcile
themselves to the circumstances, because, as a result of their technical
insufficiency, they were forced, on their side, to try to lend their
pictures the adjunct of superficial interest by anecdotic additions.
Literary humour had to serve the purpose of pictorial humour, and the
talent of the narrator was necessary to make up for their inadequate
artistic qualities. As the historical painters conveyed the knowledge of
history in a popular style, the _genre_ painters set up as agreeable
tattlers, excellent anecdotists: they were in turn droll, meditative,
sentimental, and pathetic, but they were not painters.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BRETON. THE GLEANER.]
And painters, under these conditions, they could not possibly become.
For though it is often urged in older books on the history of art that
modern _genre_ painting far outstripped the old Dutch _genre_ in
incisiveness of characterisation, depth of psychological conception, and
opulence of invention, these merits are bought at the expense of all
pictorial harmony. In the days of Rembrandt the Dutch were painters to
their fingers' ends, and they were able to be so because they appealed
to a public whose taste was adequately trained to take a refined
pleasure in the contemplation of works of art which had sterling merits
of colour. Mieris painted the voluptuous ruffling of silken stuffs; Van
der Meer, the mild light stealing through little windows into quiet
chambers, and playing upon burnished vessels of copper and pewter, on
majolica dishes and silver chattels, on chests and coverings; De Hoogh,
the sunbeam streaming like a golden shaft of dust from some bright
lateral space into a darker ante-chamber. Each one set before himself
different problems, and each ran through an artistic course of
development.
[Illustration: WALLENDER. THE RETURN.]
The more recent masters are mature from their first appearance; the
Hungarians paint exactly like the Swedes and the Germans, and their
pictures have ideas for the theme, but never such as are purely
artistic. Like simple woodland birds, they sing melodies which are, in
some ways, exceedingly pretty; but their plumage is not equal to their
song. No man can be painter and _genre_ painter at the same time. The
principal difference between them is this: a painter sees his picture,
rather than what may be extracted from it by thought; the _genre_
painter, on the other hand, has an idea in his mind, an "invention," and
plans out a picture for its expression. The painter does not trouble his
head about the subject and the narrative contents; his poetry lies in
the kingdom of colour. There reigns in his works--take Brouwer, for
example--an authentic, uniformly plastic, and penetrative life welling
from the artist's soul. But the leading motive for the _genre_ painter
is the subject as such. For example, he will paint a children's festival
precisely because it is a children's festival. But one must be a Jan
Steen to accomplish such a task in a soundly artistic manner. The
observation of these more recent painters meanwhile ventured no further
than detail, and did not know what to do with the picture as a whole.
They got over their difficulties because they "invented" the scene, made
the children pose in the places required by the situation, and then
composed these studies. The end was accomplished when the leading heroes
of the piece had been characterised and the others well traced. The
colouring was merely an unessential adjunct, and in a purely artistic
sense not at all possible. For a picture which has come into being
through a piecing together from separate copies of set models, and of
costumes, vessels, interiors, etc., may be ever so true to nature in
details, but this mosaic work is bound systematically to destroy the
pictorial appearance, unity, and quietude of the whole. Knaus is
perhaps the only one who, as a fine connoisseur of colour, concealed
this scrap-book drudgery, and achieved a certain congruity of colour in
a really artistic manner by a subtilised method of harmony. But as
regards the pictures of all the others, it is clear at once that, as
Heine wrote, "they have been rather edited than painted." The
effectiveness of the picture was lost in the detail, and even the truth
of detail was lost in the end in the opulence of subject, seductive as
that was upon the first glance. For, as it was held that the incident
subjected to treatment--the more circumstantial the better--ought to be
mirrored through all grades and variations of emotion in the faces, in
the gestures of a family, of the gossips, of the neighbours, of the
public in the street, the inevitable consequence was that the artist, to
make himself understood, was invariably driven to exaggerate the
characterisation, and to set in the place of the unconstrained
expression of nature that which has been histrionically drilled into the
model. Not less did the attempt to unite these set figures as a
composition in one frame lead to an intolerable stencilling. The rules
derived from historical painting in a time dominated by that form of art
were applied to our chequered and many-sided modern life. Since the
structure of this composition prescribed laws from which the undesigned
manifestation of individual objects is free, the studies after nature
had to be readjusted in the picture according to necessity. There were
attitudes in a conventional sense beautiful, but unnatural and strained,
and therefore creating an unpleasing effect. An arbitrary construction,
a forced method of composition, usurped the place of what was flexible,
various, and apparently casual. The painters did not fit the separate
part as it really was into the totality which the coherence of life
demands: they arranged scenes of comedy out of realistic elements just
as a stage manager would put them together.
And this indicates the further course which development was obliged to
take. When Hogarth was left behind, painting had once more gained the
independence which it had had in the great periods of art. The painter
was forced to cease from treating secondary qualities--such as humour
and narrative power--as though they were of the first account; and the
public had to begin to understand pictures as paintings and not as
painted stories. An "empty subject" well painted is to be preferred to
an "interesting theme" badly painted. Pictures of life must drive out
_tableaux vivants_, and human beings dislodge character types which
curiosity renders attractive. Rather let there be a moment of breathing
reality rendered by purely artistic means of expression than the most
complete village tale defectively narrated; rather the simplest figure
rendered with actuality and no thought of self than the most suggestive
and ingenious characterisation. A conception, coloured by the
temperament of the artist, of what was simple and inartificial,
expressing nature at every step, had to take the place of laborious
composition crowded with figures, the plainness and truth of sterling
art to overcome what was overloaded and arbitrary, and the fragment of
nature seized with spontaneous freshness to supplant episodes put
together out of fragmentary observations. Only such painting as confined
itself, like that of the Dutch, "to the bare empirical observation of
surrounding reality," renouncing literary byplay, spirited anecdotic
fancies, and all those rules of beauty which enslave nature, could
really become the basis of modern art: and this the landscape painters
created. When once these masters resolved to paint from nature, and no
longer from their inner consciousness, there inevitably came a day when
some one amongst them wished to place in the field or the forest, which
he had painted after nature, a figure, and then felt the necessity of
bringing that figure into his picture just as he had seen it, without
giving it an anecdote mission or forcing it arbitrarily into his
compositions. The landscapist found the woodcutter in the forest, and
the woodcutter seemed to him the ideal he was seeking; the peasant
seemed to him to have the right to stand amid the furrows he had traced
with his plough. He no longer drove the fisher and the sailor from their
barks, and had no scruple in representing the good peasant woman, laden
with wood, striding forwards in his picture just as she strode through
the forest. And so entry was made into the way of simplicity; the
top-heavy burden of interesting subject-matter was thrown aside, and the
truth of figures and environments was gained. The age contained all the
conditions for bringing landscape painting such as this to maturity.
CHAPTER XXIII
LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN GERMANY
That landscape would become for the nineteenth century even more
important than it was for the Holland of the seventeenth century had
been clearly announced since the days of Watteau and Gainsborough, and
since this tendency, in spite of all coercive rules, could be only
momentarily delayed by Classicism, it came to pass that the era which
began with Winckelmann's conception of "vulgar nature" ended a
generation later with her apotheosis. The thirty years from 1780 to 1810
denoted no more than a brief imprisonment for modern landscape, the
luxuriantly blooming child being arbitrarily confined meanwhile in the
strait-waistcoat of history. At first the phrase of Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, which declared that landscape was no subject for painting
because it had no soul, held painters altogether back from injuring
their reputation by such pictures. And when, after the close of the
century, some amongst them overcame this dread, Poussin the Classicist
was of course set up as the only model. For an age which did not paint
men but only statues, nature was too natural. As the figure painter
subordinated everything to style and moulded the human body accordingly,
landscape became mannered to suit an historical idea, and was used
merely as a theatrical background for Greek tragedies. As the
draughtsmen of the age freed the human figure from all "individual
blemishes," and thereby abandoned the most essential points of life and
credibility which are bound up with personality, the landscapists wished
to purify nature from everything "accidental," with the result that
dreary commonplaces were produced from her, the infinitely manifold. As
the former sought the chief merit of their works in "well-balanced
composition," the latter regarded trees and mountains, temples and
palaces, clouds and rivers, merely as counters which only needed to be
changed in their mutual position according to acquired rules of
composition to make new pictures. They did not reflect that nature
possesses a more original force than the most able self-conscious work
of man, or, as Ludwig Richter has so well expressed it, that "what God
Almighty has made is always more beautiful than what men can invent."
There were summary rules for landscapes in the Poussin style, the beauty
of which was sought above all in an opulent play of noble lines,
corresponding to the fine and flowing lines of Carstens' figures. But
the conception was all the more pedantic whilst the drawing was hard and
dry and the colour feeble and vitreous. The most familiar of the group
is the old Tyrolese _Josef Anton Koch_, who came to Rome in 1796, and,
during two years, had an opportunity of allying himself with Carstens.
His pictures are usually composed with motives taken from the Sabine
Mountains. A landscape with "The Rape of Hylas" is possessed by the
Staedel Institute in Frankfort, a "Sacrifice of Noah" by the Museum in
Leipzig, and a landscape from the Sabine Mountains by the New Pinakothek
in Munich. All three show little promise in technique; it was only in
water-colour that he painted with more freedom.
[Illustration: JOSEF ANTON KOCH.]
Without a doubt nature in Italy is favourable to this "heroic" style of
landscape. In South Italy the country is at once magnificent and
peaceful. The naked walls of rock display their majestic lines with a
sharp contour; the sea is blue, and there is no cloud in the sky. As far
as the eye reaches everything is dead and nugatory in its colour, and
rigid and inanimate in form: a plastic landscape, full of style but
apparently devoid of soul. Nowhere is there anything either stupendous
or familiar, though, at the same time, there is no country on the earth
where there is such a sweep of proud majestic lines. It was not the
composition of Poussin, but the classic art of Claude--which aimed at
being nothing but the transparent mirror of sunny and transparent
nature--that gave perfect expression to this classic landscape; and in
the nineteenth century _Karl Rottmann_, according to what one reads, has
most completely represented this same classical form of art. His
twenty-eight Italian landscapes in the arcades of the Munich Hofgarten
are said to display a sense of the beauty of line and a greatness of
conception paralleled by few other landscape works of the century. And
those who draw their critical appreciations from books will probably
continue to make this statement, with all the greater right since the
world has been assured that the Arcade pictures are but a shadow of
earlier splendour. To a spectator who has not been primed and merely
judges with his own eyes without knowing anything about Rottmann's
celebrity, these pictures with their hard, inept colouring and their
pompous "synthetic" composition seem in the majority of cases to be
excessively childish, though it is not contested that before their
restoration by Leopold Rottmann and their present state of decay they
may very possibly have been good. Rottmann's Grecian landscapes in the
New Pinakothek are not ranked high even by his admirers. Standing in the
beginning entirely upon Koch's ground, he was led in these pictures to
give more importance to colour and light, and even to introduce unusual
phenomena, such as lowering skies, with rainbows, sunsets, moonlight
scenes, thunderstorms, and the like. This mixture of classical
principles of drawing with effect-painting in the style of Eduard
Hildebrandt brought a certain confusion into his compositions, to say
nothing of the fact that he never got rid of his harsh and heavy colour,
Bengal lights, and a crudeness of execution suggestive of tapestry. His
water-colours, probably, contain the only evidence from which it may be
gathered that Rottmann really had an eminent feeling for great
characteristic lines, and did not unsuccessfully go through the school
of Claude with his finely moulded, rhythmically perfected, and yet
simple conception of nature.
[Illustration: _Gräphische Künst._
KARL ROTTMANN.]
Otherwise _Friedrich Preller_ is the only one of all the stylists
deriving from Koch who rose to works consistent in execution. To him
only was it granted to assure his name a lasting importance by
exhaustively working out a felicitous subject. The _Odyssey_ landscapes
extend through his whole life. During a sojourn in Naples in 1830 he was
struck by the first idea. After his return home he composed for Doctor
Härtel in Leipzig the first series as wall decoration in tempera in
1832-34. Then there followed his journeys to Rügen and Norway, where he
painted wild strand and fell landscapes of a sombre austerity. After
this interruption, so profitably extending his feeling for nature, he
returned to the _Odyssey_. The series grew from seven to sixteen
cartoons, which were to be found in 1858 at the Munich International
Exhibition. The Grand Duke of Weimar then commissioned him to paint the
complete sequence for a hall in the Weimar Museum. In 1859-60 Preller
prepared himself afresh in Italy, and as an old man completed the work
which he had planned in youth. This Weimar series, executed in encaustic
painting, is artistically the maturest that he ever did. Of the entire
school he only had the secret of giving his figures a semblance of life,
and concealed the artificiality of his compositions. Nature in his
pictures has an austere, impressive sublimity, and is the worthy home of
gods and heroes. During his long life he had made so many and such
incessant studies of nature in North and South--even at seventy-eight he
was seen daily with his sketch-book in the Campagna--that he could
venture to work with great, simple lines without the danger of becoming
empty.
At the time when these pictures were painted the rendering of still-life
in landscape had in general been long buried, although even to-day it
has scattered representatives in the younger Preller, Albert Hertel, and
Edmund Kanoldt. As antique monuments came into fashion with Classicism,
German ruins became the mode at the beginning of the romantic period and
the return to the national past. For Koch and his followers landscape
was only of value when, as the background of classical works of
architecture, it directed one's thoughts to the antique: shepherds had
to sit with their flock around them on the ruins of the temple of Vesta,
or cows to find pasture between the truncated pillars of the Roman
Forum. But now it could only find its justification by allying itself
with mediæval German history, by the portrayal of castles and
strongholds.
[Illustration: ROTTMANN. THE COAST OF SICILY.]
"What is beautiful?--A landscape with upright trees, fair vistas,
atmosphere of azure blue, ornamental fountains, stately palaces in a
learned architectural style, with well-built men and women, and well-fed
cows and sheep. What is ugly?--Ill-formed trees with aged, crooked, and
cloven stems, uneven and earthless ground, sharp-cut hills and mountains
which are too high, rude or dilapidated buildings, with their ruins
lying strewn in heaps, a sky with heavy clouds, stagnant water, lean
cattle in the field, and ungraceful wayfarers."
In these words Gérard de Lairesse, the ancestor of Classicism, defined
his ideal of landscape, and in the last clause, where he speaks of
ugliness, he prophetically indicated the landscape ideal of the
Romanticists, as this is given for the first time in literature in
Tieck's _Sternbald_. For the young knight in _Sternbald_ who desires to
become a painter exclaims with enthusiasm: "Then would I depict lonely
and terrible regions, rotting and broken bridges, between two rough
cliffs facing a precipice, through which the forest stream forces its
foaming course, lost travellers whose garments flutter in the moist
wind, the dreaded figures of robbers ascending from the gully, waggons
fallen upon and plundered, and battle against the travellers." Which is
all exactly the opposite to what Lairesse demanded from the landscapist.
Alexander Humboldt has shown that the men of antiquity only found beauty
in nature so far as she was kindly, smiling, and useful to them. But to
the Romanticists nature was uncomely where she was the servant of
civilisation, and beautiful only in tameless and awe-inspiring
savageness. The light, therefore, was never to be that of simple day,
but the gloom of night and of the mountain glens. Such phenomena are
neither to be seen in Berlin nor in Breslau, and to be a Romanticist was
to love the opposite of all that one sees around one. Tieck, who lived
in the cold daylight of Berlin with its modern North German rationalism,
has therefore--and not by chance--first felt the yearning for moonlight
landscapes of primæval forest; _Lessing_, from Breslau, was the first to
give it pictorial expression.
[Illustration: K. ROTTMANN. LAKE KOPAÏS.]
Even in the twenties Koch's classical heroic landscapes, executed with
an ideal sweep of line, were contrasted with castle chapels, ruins, and
cloister courts composed in a similarly arbitrary manner. Landscape was
no longer to make its appeal to the understanding by lines, as in the
work of the Classicists, but to touch the spirit by colour. The various
hues of moonlight seemed specially made to awaken sombre emotions. But
as yet the technique of painting was too inadequately trained to express
this preconceived "mood" through nature itself. To make his intentions
clearer, therefore, the painter showed the effect of natural scenery on
the figures in his pictures, illustrating the "mood" of the landscape in
the "accessories." Lessing's early works represent in art that
self-consciously elegiac and melancholy sentimental rendering of a mood
introduced into literature by _Sternbald_, in his knights, squires,
noble maidens, and other romantic requisites. The melancholy lingers
upon rocks savagely piled upon each other, tumble-down chapels and
ruined castles, in swamps and sombre woods, in old, decaying trees,
half-obliterated paths, and ghostly gravestones; it veils the sky with a
dark grey cerement. Amid hills and glens with wayside crosses, mills,
and charcoal-burners' huts may be seen lonely wanderers, praying
pilgrims, priests hurrying from the cloister to bring the last
consolation to the dying, riders who have lost their way, and mercenary
soldiers lying dead. His first picture of 1828 revealed a desolate
churchyard beneath a dark and lowering heaven, from which a solitary
sunbeam bursts forth to illumine a grave-stead. Then followed the castle
by the sea standing upon strangely moulded cliffs heaped in confusion;
the churchyard in the snow where the nuns in the cloisters are following
a dead sister to the grave; the churchyard cloister, likewise in
snow, where an old man has dug a fresh grave; the cloister in the light
of evening with a priest visiting the sick; the landscape with the
weary, grey-headed crusader, riding on a weary horse through a lonely
mountain district, probably meant as an illustration to Uhland's ballad
_Das Rosennest_--
"Rühe hab ich nie gefunden,
Als ein Jahr im finstern Thurm";
and then came the desolate tableland with the robbers' den burnt to
ashes, and the landscape with the oak and the shrine of the Virgin,
before which a knight and noble lady are making their devotions. As yet
all these pictures were an arbitrary _potpourri_ from Walter Scott,
Tieck, and Uhland, and their ideal was the Wolf's Glen in the
_Freischütz_.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH PRELLER.]
The next step which Romanticism had to take was to discover such
primæval woodland scenes in actual nature, and as Italian landscape
seems, as it were, to have been made for Claude, nature, as she is in
Germany, makes a peculiar appeal to this romantic temperament. In
certain parts of Saxon Switzerland the rocks look as if giants of the
prime had played ball with them or piled them one on top of the other in
sport. Lessing found in 1832 a landscape corresponding to the romantic
ideal of nature in the Eifel district, whither he had been induced to go
by a book by Nöggerath, _Das Gebirge im Rheinland und Westfalen nach
Mineralogischem und Chemischem Bezuge_. Up to that time he had only
known the romantic ideal of nature through Scott, Tieck, and Uhland,
just as the Classicists had taken their ideal from Homer, Theocritus,
and Virgil: in the Eifel district it came before him in tangible form.
Flat, swampy tracts of shrub and spruce alternated with dark woods,
where gigantic firs, weird pines, and primæval oaks raised their
branches to the sky. At the same time he beheld the rude and lonely
sublimity of nature in union with a humanity which was as yet
uncultivated, and for that reason all the simpler and the healthier,
judged by the Romanticist's distaste for civilisation. Defiant cones of
rock and huge masses of mountain wildly piled upon each other overlooked
valleys in which a stalwart race of peasants passed their days in
patriarchal simplicity. Here, for the first time, a sense for actual
landscape was developed in him; hitherto it had been alloyed by a taste
for knights, robbers, and monks. "Oh, had I been born in the seventeenth
century," he wrote, "I would have wandered after the Thirty Years' War
throughout Germany, plundered, ruined, and run wild as she then was."
Hitherto only "composed" Italian landscapes had been painted, the soil
of home ostensibly offering no _sujets_, or, in other words, not suiting
those tendencies which subordinated everything to style: so Lessing was
now the first painter of German landscape. His "Eifel Landscape" in the
Berlin National Gallery, which was followed by a series of such
pictures, introduces the first period of German landscape painting. The
forms of the ground and of the rough sides of rock are rendered sharply
and decisively, from geological knowledge. On principle he became an
opponent of all artistic influence derived from Italy, and located
himself in the Eifel district. The landscapes which he painted there are
founded on immediate studies of nature, and are sustained by large and
earnest insight. He draws the picture of this quarter in strong and
simple lines: the sadness of the heath and the dark mist, the dull
breath of which rises from swampy moorland. Still he painted only scenes
in which nature had taken the trouble to be fantastic. The eye of the
painter did not see her bright side, approaching her only when she
looked gloomy or was in angry humour. Either he veils the sky with vast
clouds or plunges into the darkness of an untrodden forest. Gnarled
trees spread around, their branches stretching out fantastically
twisted; the unfettered tumult of the powers of nature, the dull sultry
atmosphere before the burst of the storm or its moaning subsidence, are
the only moments which he represents. But the whole baggage of
unseasonable Romanticism, the nuns and monks, pious knights and
sentimental robbers, at first used to embody the mood of nature, were
thrown overboard. A quieter and more melancholy though thoroughly manly
seriousness, something strong and pithy, lies in the representations of
Lessing. The Romanticists had lost all sense of the dumb silent life of
nature. They only painted the changing adornment of the earth: heroes
and the works of men, palaces, ruins, and classic temples. Nature served
merely as a stage scene: the chief interest lay in the persons, the
monuments, and the historical ideas associated with them. Even in the
older pictures of Lessing the mood was exclusively given by the lyrical
accessories. But now it was placed more and more in nature herself, and
rings in power like an organ peal, from the cloudy sky, the dim lights,
and the swaying tree-tops. For the first time it is really nature that
speaks from the canvas, sombre and forceful. In this respect his
landscapes show progress. They show the one-sidedness, but also the
poetry of the Romantic view of nature. And they are no less of an
advance in technique; for in making the discovery that his haunting
ideal existed in reality, Lessing first began to study nature apart from
preconceived and arbitrary rules of composition, and--learnt to paint.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
PRELLER. ULYSSES AND LEUCOTHEA.]
Up to 1840 there stood at his side a master no less powerful, the
refractory, self-taught _Karl Blechen_, who only took up painting when
he was five-and-twenty, and became one of the most original of German
landscapists, in spite of a ruined life prematurely closing in mental
darkness and suicide. He possessed a delicate feeling for nature,
inspiration, boldness, and a spirited largeness of manner, although his
technique was hard, awkward, and clumsy to the very end. He might be
called the Alfred Rethel of landscape painting. He was not moved by what
was kindly or formally beautiful in nature, but by loneliness,
melancholy, and solitude. Many of his landscapes break away from
peaceful melancholy, and are like the pictures in some horrible
nightmare, ghastly and terrifying; on the other hand, he often surprises
us by the pleasure he takes in homely everyday things, a characteristic
hitherto of rare occurrence. Whereas Lessing never crossed the Alps for
fear of losing his originality, Blechen was the first who saw even
modern Italy without the spectacles of ideal style. From his Italian
pictures it would not be supposed that he had previously studied the
landscapes of the Classicists, or that beside him in Berlin Schinkel
worked on the entirely abstract and ideal landscape. As a painter
Blechen has even discovered the modern world. For Lessing landscape
"with a purpose" was something hideous and insupportable. He cared
exclusively for nature untouched by civilisation, painted the murmuring
wood and the raging storm, here and there at most a shepherd who
indicated the simplest and the oldest employment on the earth's surface.
But the Blechen Exhibition of 1881 contained an entirely singular
phenomenon as regards the thirties, an evening landscape before the iron
works in Eberswald: a long, monotonous plain with a sluggish river,
behind which the dark outlines of vomiting manufactory chimneys rise
sullenly into the bright evening sky. Even in that day Blechen painted
what others scarcely ventured to draw: nature working in the service of
man, and thereby--to use Tieck's expression--"robbed of her austere
dignity."
[Illustration: CARL FRIEDRICH LESSING.]
Lessing's most celebrated follower, _Schirmer_, appears in general as a
weakened and sentimental Lessing. He began in 1828 with "A Primæval
German Forest," but a journey to Italy caused him in 1840 to turn aside
from this more vigorous path. Henceforth his efforts were directed to
nobility of form and line, to turning out Southern ideal landscapes with
classically romantic accessories. The twenty-six Biblical landscapes
drawn in charcoal, belonging to the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, the four
landscapes in oil with the history of the Good Samaritan in the
Kunsthalle of Carlsruhe, and the twelve pictures on the history of
Abraham in the Berlin National Gallery, are the principal results of
this second period--his period of ideal style. They are tame efforts at
a compromise between Lessing and Preller, and therefore of no
consequence to the history of the development of landscape painting.
Amongst the many who regarded him as a model, _Valentin Ruths_ of
Hamburg is one of the most natural and delicate. His pictures, however,
did not display any new impulse to widen the boundary by proceeding more
in the direction of healthy and honestly straightforward observation of
nature, or by emancipating himself from the school of regular
composition and the rendering of an arbitrary mood.
[Illustration: LESSING. THE WAYSIDE MADONNA.]
Meanwhile this impulse came from another quarter. At the very time when
the _genre_ artists were painting their earliest pictures of rustic life
under the influence of Teniers and Ostade, the landscapists also began
to return to the old Dutch masters, following Everdingen in particular.
Thus another strip of nature was conquered, another step made towards
simplicity. The landscape ideal of the Classicists had been
architecture, that of the Romanticists poetry; from this time forward it
became pure painting. Little Denmark, which fifty years before had
exercised through Carstens that fateful influence on Germany which led
painters from the treatment of contemporary life and sent them in
pursuit of the antique, now made recompense for the evil it had done.
During the twenties and thirties it produced certain landscapists who
guided the Germans to look with a fresh and unfettered gaze, undisturbed
by the ideal, at nature in their own country, after the aberrations of
Classicism and the one-sidedness of the Romanticists. Under Eckersberg
the Academy of Copenhagen was the centre of a healthy realism founded on
the Dutch, and some of the painters who received their training there
and laboured in later years in Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Munich spread
abroad the principles of this school.
[Illustration: SCHIRMER. AN ITALIAN LANDSCAPE.]
_J. C. Dahl_ taught as professor in the Academy of Dresden. At the
present time his Norwegian landscapes seem exceedingly old-fashioned,
but in the thirties they evidently must have been something absolutely
new, for they raised a hue and cry amongst the German painters as "the
most wild naturalism." In 1788 Johann Christian Clausen Dahl was born in
Bergen. He was the son of one of those Norwegian giants who are one day
tillers of the soil and on the morrow fishers or herdsmen and hunters,
who cross the sea in their youth as sailors and clear the waste land
when they return home. As he wandered with his father through the dense,
solitary pine forests, along abrupt precipices, sullen lakes, rushing
waterfalls, silvery shining glaciers, the majesty of Northern nature was
revealed to him, and he rendered them in little coloured drawings,
which, in spite of their awkward technique, bear witness to an
extraordinary freshness of observation. The course of study at the
Copenhagen Academy, whither he proceeded in his twentieth year, enabled
him to become acquainted with Everdingen and Ruysdael, and these two old
masters, who had also painted Norwegian landscapes, stimulated him to
further efforts.
Dahl became the first representative of Norwegian landscape painting,
and remained true to his country even when in 1819 he undertook a
professorship in Dresden. Italy and Germany occupied his brush as much
as Norway, but he was only himself when he worked amongst the Norwegian
cliffs. Breadth of painting and softness of atmosphere are wanting in
all his pictures. They are hard and dry in their effect, and not seldom
entirely conventional; especially the large works painted after 1830. In
them he gave the impression of a bewildering, babbling personality. They
have been swiftly conceived and swiftly painted, but without artistic
love and fine feeling. In his later years Dahl did not allow himself the
time to bury himself in nature quietly and with devotion, and
finally--especially in his moonlight pictures--took to using a
violet-blue, which has a very conventional effect. Everdingen sought by
preference for what was forceful and violently agitated in nature;
Ruysdael felt an enthusiasm for rushing mountain streams. But for Dahl
even these romantic elements of Northern nature were not enough. He
approached nature, not to interpret her simply, but to arrange his
effects. In his picture the wild Norwegian landscape had to be wilder
and more restless than in reality it is. Not patient enough to win all
its secrets from the savage mountain torrent, he forced together his
effects, made additions, brought confusion into his picture as a whole,
and a crudeness into the particular incidents. His large pictures have a
loud effect contrasted with the simple intuition of nature amongst the
Netherlanders. Many of them are merely fantastically irrational
compositions of motives which have been learned by heart.
But there were also years in which Dahl stood in the front rank of his
age, and even showed it the way to new aims. He certainly held that
position from 1820 to 1830 in those pictures in which, instead of making
romantic adaptations of Ruysdael and Everdingen, he resembled them by
rendering the weirdness and eeriness and the rough and wild features of
Norwegian scenery: red-brown heaths and brownish green turf-moors,
stunted oaks and dark pine forests, erratic blocks sown without design
amid the roots of trees, branches snapped by the storm and hanging as
they were broken, and trunks felled by the tempest and lying where they
fell. In certain pictures in the Bergen and Copenhagen Galleries he
pointed out the way to new aims. The tendency to gloom and seriousness
which reigns in those Dutch Romanticists has here yielded to what is
simple and familiar, to the homely joy of the people of the North in the
crisp, bright day and the wayward sunbeams. He loves the glimmer of
light upon the birch leaves and the peacefully rippling sea. Like Adrian
van der Neer, he studied with delight the wintry sky, the snow-clad
plains, and the night and the moonshine. He began to feel even the charm
of spring. Poor peasant cots are brightly and pleasantly perched upon
moist, green hills, as though he had quite forgotten what his age
demanded in "artistic composition." Or the summer day spreads opulent
and real between the cliffs, and the warm air vibrates over the fields.
Peasants and cattle, glimmering birches and village spires, stand
vigorously forth in the landscape; even the execution is so simple that
with all his richness of detail he succeeds in attaining a great effect.
It is felt that this painting has developed amid a virgin nature,
surrounded by the poetry of the fjord, the lofty cliff, and the torrent.
In the same measure the Dutch had not the feeling for quietude and
habitable, humble, and familiar places. And perhaps it was not by chance
that this reformer came from the most virgin country of Europe, from a
country that had had no share in any great artistic epoch of the past.
[Illustration: MORGENSTERN. A PEASANT COTTAGE (ETCHING).]
_Caspar David Friedrich_, that singular painter who carried on his
artistic work in Greifswald, and later in Dresden also, is, if anything,
almost more original and startling. Like Dahl, he studied under
Eckersberg, at the Academy in Copenhagen, and it was this elder artist
who opened his eyes to nature, in which he saw moods and humours as
romantic as they were modern. His work was not seen in a right light
until shown in the German Centenary Exhibition of 1906, when his just
place was first, in the history of art, assigned to him.
For Munich a similar importance was won by the Hamburg painter
_Christian Morgenstern_, who, like all artists of this group, imitated
the Dutch in the tone of his colour, though as a draughtsman he remained
a fresh and healthy son of nature. Even what he accomplished in all
naïveté between 1826 and 1829, through direct study of Hamburg
landscape, is something unique in the German production of that age. His
sketches and etchings of these years assure him a high place amongst the
earliest German "mood" painters, and show that as a landscapist he had
at that time made the furthest advance towards simplicity and intimacy
of feeling. A journey to Norway, undertaken in 1829, and a sojourn at
the Copenhagen Academy, where he worked up his Norwegian studies, only
extended his ability without altering his principles; and when he came
to Munich in the beginning of the thirties his new and personal
intuition of nature made a revolution in artistic circles. The landscape
painters learnt from him that Everdingen, Ruysdael, and Rembrandt were
contemporaries of Poussin, that foliage need not be an exercise of
style, and is able properly to indicate the nature of the tree. He
discovered the beauty of the Bavarian plateau for the Munich school.
Even the first picture that he brought with him from Hamburg displayed a
wide plain shadowed by clouds--a part of the Lüneberg heath--and to this
type of subject he remained faithful even in later days. Himself a child
of the plains, he sought for kindred motives in Bavaria, and found them
in rich store on the shore of the Isar, in the quarries near Polling, at
Peissenberg, and in the mossy region near Dachau. His pictures have not
the power of commanding the attention of an indifferent spectator, but
when they have been once looked into they are seen to be poetic, quiet,
harmless, sunny, and thoughtful. He delighted in whatever was ordinary
and unobtrusive, the gentle nature of the wood, the surroundings of the
village, everything homely and familiar. If Rottmann revelled in the
forms of Southern nature, Morgenstern abided by his native Germany;
where Lessing only listened to the rage of the hurricane, Morgenstern
hearkened to the quiet whisper of the breeze. The shadows of the clouds
and the radiance of the sun lie over the dark heath, the moonlight
streams dreamily over the quiet streets of the village, the waves break,
at one moment rushing noisily and at another gently caressing the shore.
Later, when he turned to the representation of the mountains, he lost
the intimacy of feeling which was in the beginning peculiar to him. In
mountain pictures, often as he attempted ravines, waterfalls, and snowy
Alpine summits, he never succeeded in doing anything eminently good.
These pictures have something petty and dismembered, and not the great,
simple stroke of his plains and skies.
What Morgenstern was for Munich, _Ludwig Gurlitt_ was for
Düsseldorf--the most eminent of the great Northern colony which migrated
thither in the thirties. His name is not to be found in manuals, and the
pictures of his later period which represent him in public galleries
seldom give a full idea of his importance. After a journey to Greece in
1859 he took to a brown tone, in which much is conventional. Moreover,
his retired life--he resided from 1848 to 1852 in a Saxon village, and
from 1859 to 1873 in Siebleben, near Gotha--contributed much to his
being forgotten by the world. But the history of art which seeks
operative forces must do him honour as the first healthy, realistic
landscape painter of Germany, and--still more--as one who opened the
eyes of a number of younger painters who have since come to fame.
Gurlitt was a native of Holstein, and, like Morgenstern, received his
first instruction in Hamburg, where at that time Bendixen, Vollmer, the
Lehmanns, and the Genslers formed an original group of artists. After
this, as in the case of Morgenstern also, there followed a longer
sojourn in Norway and Copenhagen. In Düsseldorf, where he then went, a
Jutland heath study made some sensation on his arrival. It was the first
landscape seen in Düsseldorf which had not been composed, and Schadow is
said to have come to Gurlitt's studio, accompanied by his pupils, to
behold the marvel. In 1836 he migrated to Munich, where Morgenstern had
worked before him, and here he produced a whole series of works, which
reveals an artist exceedingly independent in sentiment, and one who even
preserves his individuality in the presence of the Dutch. His pictures
were grey in tone, and not yellowish, like those of the Dutch; moreover,
they were less composed and less "intelligently" dressed out with
accessories than the pictures of Dahl; they were glances into nature
resulting from earnest, realistic striving. Even when he began to paint
Italian pictures, as he did after 1843, he preserved a straightforward
simplicity which was not understood by criticism in that age, though it
makes the more sympathetic appeal at the present day. The strength of
his realism lay, as was the case with all artists of those years, rather
in drawing; but at times he reaches, even in painting, a remarkable
clearness and delicacy, which at one time verges on the silver tone of
Canaletto, at another on the fine grey of Constable.
[Illustration: GURLITT. ON THE SABINE MOUNTAINS.]
Realism begins in German art with the entry of these Northern painters
into Düsseldorf and Munich. They were less affected by æsthetic
prejudices, and fresher and healthier than the Germans. Gurlitt was
specially their intellectual leader, the soul, the driving force of the
great movement which now followed. Roused by him, _Andreas Achenbach_
emancipated himself from the landscape of style, and, in the years from
1835 to 1839, painted Norwegian pictures even before he knew Norway.
Roused by Gurlitt, Achenbach set forth upon the pilgrimage thither, the
journey which was a voyage of discovery for German landscape painting.
Until Achenbach's death in 1905 he yearly exhibited works which were no
longer in touch with the surrounding efforts of younger men, and there
was an inclination to make little of his importance as a pioneer. What
is wanting in his pictures is artistic zeal; what he seems to have too
much of is routine. Andreas Achenbach is, as his portrait shows, a man
of great acuteness. From his clear, light blue eyes he looks sharply and
sagaciously into the world around; his short, thick-set figure, proud
and firm of carriage, in spite of years, bears witness to his tough
energy. His forehead, like Menzel's, is rather that of an architect than
of a poet; and his pictures correspond to his outward appearance. Each
one of his earlier good pictures was a battle fought and won. Realism
incarnate, a man from whom all visionary enthusiasm lay at a world-wide
distance, he conquered nature by masculine firmness and unexampled
perseverance. He appears as a _maître-peintre_, a man of cool, exact
talent with a clear and sober vision. The chief characteristic of his
organism was his eminent capacity for appreciating the artistic methods
of other artists, and adapting what was essential in them to his own
manner of production. One breathes more freely before the works of the
masters of Barbizon, and merely sees good pictures in those of
Achenbach. The former are captivating by their intimate penetration,
where he is striking by his bravura of execution. His landscapes have no
chance inspiration, no geniality. Everything is harmonised for the sake
of pictorial effect. The structure and scaffolding are of monumental
stability. Yet fine as his observation undoubtedly is, he has never
surprised the innermost working of nature, but merely turned her to
account for the production of pictures. For the French artists colour is
the pure expression of nature and of her inward humour, but for
Achenbach it is just the means for attaining an effectiveness similar to
that of the Dutch. Penetrating everything thoroughly with those
sparkling blue eyes of his, he learnt to render conscientiously and
firmly the forms of the earth and its outward aspect, but the moods of
its life appealing to the spirit like music were never disclosed to him.
The paintings of the Dutch attracted him to art, not the impulse to give
token to his own peculiar temperament. He thinks more of producing
pictures which may equal those of his forerunners in their merits than
of rendering the impression of nature which he has himself received. His
intelligence quickens at the study of the rules and theories set up by
the Dutch, and he seeks for spots in nature where he may exercise these
principles, but remains chill at the sight of sky and water, trees and
mountains. It is not mere love of nature that has guided his brush, but
a refined calculation of pictorial effect; and as he never went beyond
this endeavour after rounded expression, as it was understood by the
Dutch, though he certainly set German landscape free from a romantic
subjection to style like Schirmer's, he never led it to immediate
personal observation of nature. It is not the fragrance of nature that
is exhaled from his pictures, but the odour of oil and varnish; and as
the means he made use of to attain his effects never alter, the result
is frequently conventional and methodic.
[Illustration: ACHENBACH. SEA COAST AFTER A STORM.]
But this does not alter the fact that, when the development of German
landscape painting is in question, the name of Andreas Achenbach will be
always heard in connection with it. He united technical qualities of the
higher order with the capacity of impressing the public, and therefore
he completed the work that the Danes had begun. He was the reformer who
gave evidence that it was not alone by cliffs and baronial castles and
murmuring oaks that sentiment was to be awakened; he hated everything
unhealthy, mawkish, and vague, and by showing the claws of the lion of
realism in the very heart of the romantic period he came to have the
significance of a hero in German landscape painting. He forced demure
Lower German landscape to surrender to him its charms; he revealed the
fascination of Dutch canal scenes, with their quaint architecture and
their characteristic human figures; he went to the stormy, raging North
Sea, and opposed the giant forces of boisterous, unfettered nature to
the tame pictures of the school of Schirmer. Achenbach's earliest North
Sea pictures were exhibited at the very time when Heine's North Sea
series made its appearance, and they soon ousted the wrecks of the
French painter Gudin, which, up to that time, had dominated the picture
market. For the first time in the nineteenth century sea-pieces were so
painted that the water really seemed a fluent, agitated element, the
waves of which did not look as if they had been made of lead, and the
froth and foam of cotton wool. The things which he was specially
felicitous in painting were Rhine-land villages with red-tiled roofs,
Dutch canals with yellow sandbanks and running waves breaking at the
wooden buttresses of the harbour, Norwegian scenes with stubborn cliffs
and dark pines, wild torrents and roaring waterfalls. He did not paint
them better than Everdingen and Ruysdael had done, but he painted them
better than any of his contemporaries had it in their power to do.
As Gurlitt is connected with the present by Achenbach, Morgenstern is
connected with it by _Eduard Schleich_. The Munich picture rendering a
mood took the place of Rottmann's architectural pictures. Instead of the
fair forms of the earth's surface, artists began to study the play of
sunlight on the plain and amid the flight of the clouds, and instead of
the build of the landscape they turned to notice its atmospheric mood.
Through Morgenstern Schleich was specially directed to Ruysdael and
Goyen. In Ruysdael he was captivated by that profound seriousness and
that sombre observation of nature which corresponded to something in his
own humour; in Goyen by the pictorial harmony of sunlight, air, water,
and earth. Schleich has visited France, Belgium, Hungary, and Italy, yet
it is only by exception that he has painted anything but what the most
immediate vicinity of Munich might offer. He chose the plainest spot in
nature--a newly tilled field, a reedy pond, a stretch of brown moorland,
a pair of cottages and trees; and under the guidance of Goyen he
observed the changes of the sky with great care--the retreat of
thunderclouds, the sun shrouded by thin veils of haze, the tremulous
moonlight, or the hovering of the morning and evening mists. The Isar
district and the mossy Dachauer soil were his favourite places of
sojourn. He had a special preference for rain and moonlight and the mood
of autumn, in rendering which he toned brown and grey hues to fine Dutch
harmonies. His keynote was predominantly serious and elegiac, but he
also loved scenes in which there was a restless and violent change of
light. Over a wide plateau the sunlight spreads its radiance, whilst
from the side an army of dense thunderclouds approaches, threatening
storm and casting dark shadows. Over a monotonous plain, broken by
solitary clumps of trees, the warm summer rain falls dripping down.
Trees and shrubs throw light shadows, and the plain glistens in the
beams of the sun. Or else there is a wide expanse of moor. Darkling the
clouds advance, the rushes bend before the wind, and narrow strips of
moonlight glitter amid the slender reeds. By such works Schleich became
the head of the Munich school of landscape without having ever directed
the study of pupils. Through him and through Achenbach capacity for the
fresh observation of the life of nature was given to German painters.
[Illustration: ACHENBACH. FISHING BOATS IN THE NORTH SEA.]
Undoubtedly amongst the younger group of artists there was a great
difference in regard to choice of subject. The modern rendering of mood
has only had its origin in Germany; it could not finally develop itself
there. Just as figure painting, after making so vigorous a beginning
with Bürkel, turned to _genre_ painting in the hands of Enhuber and
Knaus, until it returned to its old course in Leibl, landscape also went
through the apprentice period of interesting subject, until it once more
recognised the poetry of simpleness. The course of civilisation itself
led it into these lines. When Morgenstern painted his first pictures the
post-chaise still rattled from village to village, but now the whistle
of the railway engine screams shrill as the first signal of a new age
throughout Europe. Up to that time the possibility of travelling had
been greatly circumscribed by the difficulties of traffic. But
facilitated arrangements of traffic brought with them such a desire for
travel as had never been before. In literature the revolution displayed
itself by the rise of books of travels as a new branch of fiction.
Hackländer sent many volumes of touring sketches into the market.
Theodor Mügge made Norway, Sweden, and Denmark the scene of his tales.
But America was the land where the Sesame was to be found, for Germany
had been set upon the war-trail with Cooper's Indians, it had Charles
Sealsfield to describe the grotesque mountain land of Mexico, the magic
of the prairie, and the landscapes of Susquehannah and the Mississippi,
and read Gerstäcker's, Balduin Möllhausen's, and Otto Ruppius'
transatlantic sketches with unwearying excitement. The painters who
found their greatest delight in seeing the world with the eyes of a
tourist also became cosmopolitan.
[Illusration: CALAME. LANDSCAPE.]
In Geneva _Alexander Calame_ brought Germany to the knowledge of what is
to be seen in Switzerland. Calame was, indeed, a dry, unpoetic
landscapist. He began as a young tradesman by making little coloured
views of Switzerland which foreigners were glad to bring away with them
as mementoes of their visits, just as they now do photographs. Even his
later pictures can only lay claim to the merit of such "mementoes of
Switzerland." His colour is insipid and monotonous, his atmosphere
heavy, his technique laborious. By painting he understood the
illumination of drawings, and his drawing was that of an engraver. An
excellent drawing-master, he possessed an unusual mastery of
perspective. On the other hand, all warmth and inward life are wanting
in his works. Sentiment has been replaced by correct manipulation, and
in the deep blue mirror of his Alpine lakes, as in the luminous red of
his Alpine summits, there is always to be seen the illuminator who has
first drawn the contours with a neat pencil and pedantic correctness.
His pictures are grandiose scenes of nature felt in a petty way--in
science too it is often the smallest spirit that seeks the greatest
heroes. "The Ruins of Pæstum," like "The Thunderstorm on the Handeck"
and "The Range of Monte-Rosa at Sunrise," merely attain an external,
scenical effect which is not improved by crude and unnatural contrasts
of light. And as, in later years, when orders accumulated, he fell a
victim to an astounding fertility, many of his works give one the
impression of a dexterous calligrapher incessantly repeating the same
ornamental letters. "_Un Calame, deux Calame, trois Calame--que de
calamités_," ran the phrase every year in the Paris Salon.
[Illustration: FLAMM. A SUMMER DAY.]
But if France remained cool he found the more numerous admirers in
Germany. When, in 1835, he exhibited his first pictures in Berlin, a
view of the Lake of Geneva, his appearance was at once hailed with the
warmest sympathy. The dexterity, the rounded form, the finish of his
pictures, were exactly what gave pleasure, and the distinctness of his
drawing made its impression. His lithograph studies of trees and his
landscape copies attained the importance of canonical value, and for
whole decades remained in use as a medium of instruction in drawing.
Amongst German painters _Carl Ludwig_, _Otto von Kameke_, and _Count
Stanislaus Kalkreuth_ were specially incited by Calame to turn to the
sublimity of Alpine nature. Desolate wastes of cliffs, still, clear blue
lakes, wild, plunging torrents, and mountain summits covered with
glaciers and glowing to rose colour in the reflection of the setting sun
are the elements of their pictures as of those of the Genevan master.
After Achenbach there came a whole series of artists from the North who
began to depict the mountains of their native Norway under the strong
colour effects of the Northern sun. The majestic formations of the
fjords, the emerald green walls of rock, the cloven valleys, the
terrible forest wildernesses, and the mountains of Norway dazzlingly
illuminated and reflecting themselves like glittering jewels in the
quiet waters of sapphire blue lakes, were interesting enough to afford
nourishment for more than one landscapist.
_Knud Baade_, who worked from 1842 in Munich, after a lengthy sojourn at
the Copenhagen Academy and with Dahl in Dresden, delighted in moonlight
scenes, gloomy fir forests, and midnight suns. The sea rises in waves
mountain high, and tosses mighty vessels like withered leaves or dashes
foaming against the cliffs of the shore. Fantastic clouds chase each
other across the sky, and the wan moonlight rocks unsteadily upon the
waves. More seldom he paints the sea lit up afar by the moon, or the
fjord with its meadows and silver birches; and in such plain pictures he
makes a far more attractive effect than in those which are wild and
ambitious, for his diffident, petty execution is, as a rule, but little
suited to restless and, as it were, dramatic scenes of nature.
Having come to Düsseldorf in 1841, _Hans Gude_ became the Calame of the
North. Achenbach taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly
and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of
colour. Schirmer, the representative of Italian still landscape, guided
him to the acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in
the structure of his pictures, to beauty of line and effective
disposition of great masses of light and shade. This quiet, sure-footed,
and robust realism, which had, at the same time, a gift of style, became
the chief characteristic of his Northern landscapes, in which, however,
the mutable and fleeting moods of nature were all the more neglected.
Here are Norwegian mountain landscapes with lakes, rivers, and
waterfalls, then pictures of the shore under the most varied phases of
light, or grand cliff scenery with a sombre sky and a sea in commotion.
Hans Gude, living from 1864 in Carlsruhe, and from 1880 in Berlin, is
one of those painters whom one esteems, but for whom it is not possible
to feel great enthusiasm--one of those conscientious workers who from
their very solidity run the risk of becoming tedious. His landscapes are
good gallery pictures, soberly and prosaically correct, and never
irritating, though at the same time they seldom kindle any warm feeling.
Like Gude, _Niels Björnson Möller_ devoted himself to pictures of the
shore and the sea. Undisturbed by men in his sequestered retreat,
_August Capellen_ gave way to the melancholy charms of the Norwegian
forest. He represented the tremulous clarity of the air above the
cliffs, old, shattered tree-trunks and green water plants, sleepy ponds,
and far prospects bounded by blue mountains; but he would have made an
effect of greater originality had he thought less of Schirmer's noble
line and compositions arranged in the grand style. _Morten-Müller_
became the specialist of the fir forest. His native woods where the
valleys stretch towards the high mountain region offered him motives,
which he worked up in large and excessively scenical pictures. His
strong point was the contrast between sunlight playing on the mountain
tops and mysterious darkness reigning in the forest depths, and his
pictures have many admirers on account of "their elegiac melancholy,
their minor key of touching sadness." The Norwegian spring changing the
earth into one carpet of moorland, broken by marshes, found its
delineator in _Erik Bodom_. _Ludwig Munthe_ became the painter of wintry
landscape in thaw, when the snow is riddled with holes and a dirty brown
crust of earth peeps from the dazzling mantle. A desolate field, a pair
of crippled trees stretching their naked branches to the dark-grey sky,
a swarm of crows and a drenched road marked with the tracks of wheels, a
tawny yellow patch of light gleaming through the cloud-bank and
reflected in the wayside puddles, such are the elements out of which one
of Munthe's landscapes is composed. Through _Eilert Adelsten Normann_
representations of the fjords gained currency in the picture market. His
specialty was the delineation of the steep and beetling rocky fastnesses
of Lofodden with their various reflections of light and colour, the
midnight sun glaring over the deep clear sea, the contrast between the
blue-black masses of the mountains and the gleaming fields of snow.
[Illustration: BAADE. MOONLIGHT NIGHT ON THE COAST.]
Others, such as _Ludwig Willroider_, _Louis Douzette_, and _Hermann
Eschke_, set themselves to observe the German heath and the German
forest from similar points of view; the one painted great masses of
mountain and giant trees, the other the setting sun, and the third the
sea. _Oswald Achenbach_, _Albert Flamm_, and _Ascan Lutteroth_ set out
once more on the pilgrimage to the South, where, in contrast to their
predecessors, they studied no longer the classic lines of nature in
Italy, but the splendour of varied effects of colour in the
neighbourhood of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. The most enterprising
turned their backs on Europe altogether, and began to paint the primæval
forests of South America, to which Alexander Humboldt had drawn
attention, the azure and scarlet wonders of the tropics, and the gleam
and sparkle of the icy world at the ultimate limits of the Polar
regions. _Ferdinand Bellermann_ was honoured as a new Columbus when in
1842 he returned home with his sketches, botanically accurate as they
were, of the marvels of the virgin forest. _Eduard Hildebrandt_, who in
1843 had already gone through the Canary Islands, Italy, Sicily, North
Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Sahara, and the Northern sea of ice, at the
mandate of Frederich Wilhelm IV in 1862 undertook a voyage round the
world "to learn from personal view the phenomena that the sea, the air,
and the solid earth bring forth beneath the most various skies." _Eugen
Bracht_ traversed Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, and returned with a
multitude of studies from the sombre and majestic landscape of the
desert, and from that world of ruins and mountains in the East, and
developed them at home into as many pictures.
A modicum of praise is due to all these masters for having continually
widened the circuit of subject-matter, and gradually disclosed the whole
world; and if their works cannot be reckoned as the products of a
delicate landscape painting, that is a result of the same taste which
prescribed anecdotic and narrative subjects to the _genre_ picture of
those years. The landscape painters conquered the earth, but, above all,
those parts of it which were geographically remarkable. This they did in
the interest of the public. They went with a Baedeker in their pocket
into every quarter of the globe, brought with them all the carmine
necessary for sunsets, and set up their easels at every place marked
with an asterisk in the guidebook. And in these fair regions they noted
everything that was to be seen with the said Baedeker's assistance.
Through satisfying the interest of the tourist by a rendering, faithful
to a hair's breadth, of topographically instructive points, they could
best reckon on the sale of their productions.
At the same time, their pictures betray that, during this generation,
historical painting was throned on a summit whence it could dictate the
æsthetic catechism. The historical picture represented a humanity that
carried about with it the consciousness of its outward presence, draped
itself in front of the glass, and made an artificial study of every
gesture and every expression of emotion. _Genre_ painting followed, and
rendered the true spirit of life, illustrating it histrionically, but
without surprising it in its unconstrained working. And so trees,
mountains, and clouds also were forced to lay aside the innocence of
unconscious being and wrap themselves in the cloak of affectation.
Simple reality in its quiet, delicate beauty, the homely "mood" of
nature, touching the forms of landscape with the play of light and air,
had nothing to tell an age overstrained by the heroics of history and
the grimaces of _genre_ painting. A more powerful stimulus was
necessary. So the landscapists also were forced to seek nature where she
was histrionic and came forth in blustering magnificence; they were
forced to send off brilliant pyrotechnics to fire out sun, moon, and
stars in order to be heard, or, more literally, seen.
Instruction or theatrical effect--the aim of historical painting--had
also to be that of the landscape painter. And as railroads are
cosmopolitan arrangements, he was in a position to satisfy both demands
with promptitude. As historical painters in the chase of striking
subjects directed their gaze to the farthest historical horizon, and the
_genre_ painters sought to take their public captive principally through
what was alien and strange, Oriental and Italian, the landscape
painters, too, found their highest aim in the widest possible expansion
of the geographical horizon. "Have these good people not been born
anywhere in particular?" asked Courbet, when he contemplated the German
landscapes in the Munich Exhibition of 1869. What would first strike the
inhabitant of a Northern country in foreign lands was made the theme of
the majority of the pictures. But as the historical painting, in
illustrating all the great dramatic scenes from the Trojan War to the
French Revolution, yielded at one time to a pædagogical doctrinaire
tendency and at another to theatrical impassionedness, so landscape
painting on its cosmopolitan excursions became partly a dry synopsis of
famous regions, only justifiable as a memento of travel, partly a
tricked-out piece of effect which, like everything obtrusive, soon lost
its charm. Pictures of the first description which chiefly borrowed
their motives from Alpine nature, so imposing in its impressiveness of
form--grand masses of rock, glaciers, snow-fields, and abrupt
precipices--only needed to have the fidelity of a portrait. Where that
was given, the public, guided by the instinct for what is majestic and
beautiful in nature, stood before them quite content, while Alpine
travellers instructed the laity that the deep blue snow of the picture
was no exaggeration, but a phenomenon of the mountain world which had
been correctly reproduced. In all these cases there can be no possible
doubt about geographical position, but there is seldom any need to make
inquiries after the artist. The interest which they excite is purely of
a topographical order; otherwise they bear the stamp of ordinary prose,
of the aridity and unattractiveness which always creeps in as a
consequence of pure objectivity. Works of the second description, which
depict exotic regions, striking by the strangeness of various phenomena
of light and the splendour and glow of colour, are generally irritating
by their professional effort to display "mood." The old masters revealed
"mood" without intending to do so, because they approached nature
piously and with a wealth of feeling. The new masters obtain a purely
external effect, because they strain after a "mood" in their painting
without feeling it; and though art does not exclude the choice of exotic
subjects, it is not healthy when a tendency of this sort becomes
universal. Really superior art will, from principle, never seek the
charm of what is strange and distant, since it possesses the magical
gift of bestowing the deepest interest on what lies nearest to it. In
addition to this, such effects are as hard to seize as the moment of
most intense excitement in the historical picture. As an historical
painter Delacroix could render it, and Turner as a landscape painter,
but geniuses like Delacroix and Turner are not born every day. As these
phenomena were painted at the time in Germany, the right "mood" was not
excited by them, but merely a frigid curiosity. Almost all landscapes of
these years create an effect merely through their subject; they are
entertaining, astonishing, instructive, but the poetry of nature has not
yet been aroused. It could only reveal itself when the preponderance of
interest in mere subject was no longer allowed. As the figure painters
at last disdained through narrative and "points" to win the applause of
those who had no sensitiveness for art, so the landscape painters were
obliged to cease from giving geographical instruction by the
representation of nature as beloved by tourists, and to give up forcing
a "mood" in their pictures by a subterfuge. The necessary degree of
artistic absorption could only go hand in hand with a revolt against
purely objective interest of motive, and with a strenuous effort at the
representation of familiar nature in the intimate charm of its moods of
light and atmosphere. It was necessary for refinement of taste to follow
on the expression of subject-matter; and this impulse had to bring
artists back to the path struck by Dahl, Morgenstern, and Gurlitt. To
unite the simple, moving, and tender observation of those older artists
with richer and more complex methods of expression was the task given to
the next generation in France, where _paysage intime_, the most refined
and delicate issue of the century, grew to maturity in the very years
when German landscape painting roamed through the world with the joy of
an explorer.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE BEGINNINGS OF "PAYSAGE INTIME"
How it was that the secrets of _paysage intime_ were reserved for our
own century--and this assuredly by no mere accident--can only be
delineated in true colours when some one writes a special history of
landscape painting, a book which at the present time would be the most
seasonable in the literature of art. Wereschagin once declared that in
the province of landscape the works of the old masters seem like the
exercises of pupils in comparison with the performances of modern art;
and certain it is that the nineteenth century, if it is inferior to
previous ages in everything else, may, at any rate, offer them an
equivalent in landscape. It was only city life that could produce this
passionately heightened love of nature. It was only in the century of
close rooms and over-population, neurosis and holiday colonies, that
landscape painting could attain to this fulness, purity, and sanctity.
It was only our age of hurry and work that made possible a relation
between nature and the human soul, which really has something of what
the Earth Spirit vouchsafed to Faust: "to gaze into her heart as into
the bosom of a friend."
In France also, the tendency which since the eighteenth century had made
itself felt in waves rising ever higher, had been for a short time
abruptly interrupted by Classicism. Of the pre-revolutionary
landscapists _Hubert Robert_ was the only one who survived into the new
era. His details of nature and his _rococo_ savour were pardoned to him
for the sake of his classic ruins. At first there was not one of the
newer artists who was impelled to enter this province. A generation
which had become ascetic, and which dreamed only of rude, manly virtue,
expressed through the plastic and purified forms of the human body, had
lost all sense for the charms of landscape. And when the first
landscapes appeared once more, after several years, they were, as in
Germany, solemn stage-tragedy scenes, abstract "lofty" regions such as
Poussin ostensibly painted. Only in Poussin a great feeling for nature
held together the conventional composition, in spite of all his
straining after style; whereas nothing but frigid rhetoric and sterile
formalism reigns in the works of these newer painters, works which were
created at second-hand. The type of the beautiful which had been
borrowed from the antique was worked into garden and forest with a
laboured effort at style, as it had been worked into the human form and
the flow of drapery. A _prix de Rome_ was founded for historical
landscapes.
_Henri Valenciennes_ was the Lenôtre of this Classicism, the admired
teacher of several generations. The beginner in landscape painting
modelled himself upon Valenciennes as the figure painter upon Guérin.
His _Traité élémentaire de perspective pratique_, in which he formulated
the principles of landscape, contains his personal views as well as the
æsthetics of the age. Although, as he premises, he "is convinced that
there is in reality only one kind of painting, historical painting, it
is true that an able historical painter ought not entirely to neglect
landscape." Rembrandt, of course, and the old Dutch painters were
without any sort of ideal, and only worked for people without soul or
intelligence. How far does a landscape with cows and sheep stand below
one with the funeral of Phocion, or a rainy day by Ruysdael below a
picture of the Deluge by Poussin! Hardly does Claude Lorrain find grace
in the eyes of Valenciennes. "He has painted with a pretty fidelity to
nature the morning and evening light. But just for that very reason his
pictures make no appeal to the intelligence. He has no tree where a
Dryad could dwell, no spring in which nymphs could splash. Gods,
demigods, nymphs, satyrs, even heroes are too sublime for these regions;
shepherds could dwell there at best." Claude, indeed, loved Italy, but
knew the old writers all too little, and they are the groundwork for
landscape painters. As David said to his pupil Gros, "Look through your
Plutarch," Valenciennes advised his own pupils to study Theocritus,
Virgil, and Ovid: only from these authors might be learnt what were the
regions suitable for gods and heroes.
"Vos exemplaria græca
Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna."
If, for example, the landscapist would paint Morning, let him portray
the moment when Aurora rises laughing from the arms of her aged spouse,
when the hours are yoking four fiery steeds to the car of the sun-god,
or Ulysses kneels imploring before Nausicaa. For Noon the myth of Icarus
or of Phaëton might be turned to account. Evening may be represented by
painting Phoebus hastening his course as he nears the horizon in flaming
desire to cast himself into the arms of Thetis. Having once got his
themes from the old poets, the landscape painter must know the laws of
perspective to execute his picture; he must be familiar with Poussin's
rules of composition, and occasionally he ought even to study nature.
Then he needs a weeping willow for an elegy, a rock for the death of
Phaëton, and an oak for the dance of the nymphs. To find such motives he
should make journeys to the famed old lands of civilisation; best of all
on the road which art itself has traversed--first to Asia Minor, then to
Greece, and then to Italy.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
HUBERT ROBERT. MONUMENTS AND RUINS.]
These æsthetics produced _Victor Bertin_ and _Xavier Bidault_, admired
by their contemporaries for "richness of composition and a splendid
selection of sites." Their methodical commonplaces, their waves and
valleys and temples, bear the same relation to nature as the talking
machine of Raimundus Lullus does to philosophy. The scholastic landscape
painter triumphed; a school it was which nourished itself on empty
formulas, and so died of anæmia. Bidault, who in his youth made very
good studies, is, with his stippled leaves and polished stems, his grey
skies looking sometimes like lead and sometimes like water, the peculiar
essence of a tiresome Classicism; and he is the same Bidault who, as
president of the hanging committee, for years rejected the landscapes of
Théodore Rousseau from the Salon. It is only the figure of _Michallon_,
who died young, that still survives from this group. He too belongs to
the school of Valenciennes, through his frigid, meagre, and pedantically
correct style; but he is distinguished from the rest, for he endeavoured
to acquire a certain truth to nature in the drawing of plants, and was
accounted a bold innovator at the time. He did not paint "the plant in
itself," but burs, thistles, dandelions, everything after its kind, and
through this botanical exactness he acquired in the beginning of the
century a fame which it is now hard to understand. In the persons of
_Jules Cogniet_ and _Watelet_ the gates of the school were rather more
widely opened to admit reality. Having long populated their classic
valleys with bloodless, dancing nymphs and figurants of divine race,
they abandoned historical for picturesque landscape, and "dared" to
represent scenes from the environs of Paris, castles and windmills. But
as they clung even here to the classical principles of composition, it
is only nature brushed and combed, trimmed and coerced by rules, that is
reflected in their painting. Even in 1822, when Delacroix exhibited his
"Dante's Bark," the ineffable Watelet shone in his full splendour.
Amongst his pictures there was a view of Bar-sur-Seine, which the
catalogue appropriately designated not simply as a _vue_, but as a _vue
ajustée_. Till his last breath Watelet was convinced that nature did not
understand her own business, and was always in need of a painter to
revise her errors and correct them.
Beside this group who adapted French localities for classical landscapes
there arose in the meantime another group, and they proceeded in the
opposite direction. Their highest aim was to go on pilgrimage to sacred
Italy, the classic land, which, with their literary training and their
one-sided æsthetics, they invariably thought more beautiful and more
worthy of veneration than any other. But they tried to break with
Valenciennes' arbitrary rules of composition, and to seize the great
lines of Italian landscape with fidelity to fact. In going back from
Valenciennes to Claude they endeavoured to pour new life into a style of
landscape painting which was its own justification, compromised as it
had been by the Classic school. They made a very heretical appearance in
the eyes of the strictly orthodox pupils of Valenciennes. They were
called the Gothic school, which was as much as to say Romanticists, and
the names of _Théodore Aligny_ and _Edouard Bertin_ were for years
mentioned with that of Corot in critiques. They brought home very pretty
drawings from Greece, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and Bertin did
this especially. Aligny is even not without importance as a painter. He
aimed at width of horizon and simplicity of line more zealously than the
traditional school had done. He is, indeed, a man of sombre, austere,
and earnest talent, and the solemn rhythm of his pictures would have
more effect if the colour were not so dry, and if a fixed and monotonous
light were not uniformly shed over everything in place of a vibrating
atmosphere.
_Alexandre Desgoffe_, _Paul Flandrin_, _Benouville_, _Bellel_, and
others drew from the same sources with similar conviction and varying
talent. Paul Flandrin, in particular, was in his youth a good painter in
the manner of 1690. His composition is noble and his execution certain,
recalling Poussin. Ingres, his master, said of him, "If I were not
Ingres I would be Flandrin." It was only later that the singular charm
of Claude Lorrain and the Roman majesty of Poussin were transformed
under the brush of Flandrin into arid still-life, into landscapes of
pasteboard and wadding.
But not from this quarter could the health of a school which had become
anæmic be in any way restored. French landscape had to draw a new power
of vitality from the French soil itself. It was saved when its eyes were
opened to the charms of home, and this revelation was brought about by
Romanticism. In the Salon notices, from 1822 onwards, the complaints of
critics are repeated with increasing violence--complaints that, instead
of fair regions, noble character, and monumental lines, nothing but
"malarious lakes, desolate wastes, and terrible cliffs" should be
painted, which, in the language of Classicism, means that French
landscape painting had taken firm hold of the soil in France. The day
when Racine was declared by the young Romanticists to be a maker of fine
phrases put an end to the whole school of David and to Classical
landscape at the same time. It fell into oblivion, as, sooner or later,
every artistic movement which does not rest on the nature and
personality of the artist inevitably must. The young revolutionaries no
longer believed that an alliance with mythological subjects and "grand
composition" could compensate for the lack of air and light. They were
tired of pompous, empty, and distant scenery. They only thought of
nature, and that amid which they lived seemed the less to forego its
charms the more Italy came under suspicion as the home of all these
ugly, unpleasant, and academical pictures. That was the birthday of
French landscape. At the very time when Delacroix renewed the
_répertoire_ of grand painting, enriching art with a world of feeling
which was not merely edited, a parallel movement began in landscape.
"Dante's Bark" was painted in 1822, "The Massacre of Chios" in 1824.
Almost at the same hour a tornado swept through the branches of the old
French oaks, and bent the rustling corn; the sky was covered with
clouds, and the waters, which had been hard-bound for so long, sped
purling once more along their wonted course. The little paper temples,
built on classic heights, toppled down, and there rose lowly rustic
cottages, from the chimneys of which the smoke mounted wavering to the
sky. Nature awoke from her wintry sleep, and the spring of modern
landscape painting broke with its sadness and its smiles.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
VICTOR HUGO. RUINS OF A MEDIÆVAL CASTLE ON THE RHINE.]
This is where the development of French art diverges from that of
German. After it had stood under the influence of Poussin, the German
long continued to have a suspicious preference for scenery that was
devoid of soul, for beautiful views, as the phrase is, and it penetrated
much later into the spirit of familiar nature. But as early as the
twenties this spirit had revealed itself to the French. It was only in
the province of poetry that they went through the period of enthusiasm
for exotic nature--and even there not to the same extent as Germany.
Only in Chateaubriand's _Atala_ are there to be found pompously
pictorial descriptions of strange landscapes which have been in no
degree inwardly felt. Chiefly it was the virgin forests of North America
that afforded material for splendid pictures, which he describes in
grandiloquent and soaring prose. A nature which is impressive and
splendid serves as the scenery of these dramas of human life. But with
Lamartine the reaction was accomplished. He is the first amongst the
poets of France who conceived landscape with an inward emotion, and
brought it into harmony with his moods of soul. His poetry was made
fervent and glorified by love for his home, for his own province, for
South Burgundy. Even in the region of art a poet was the first
initiator.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
MICHEL. A WINDMILL.]
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DE LA BERGE. LANDSCAPE.]
_Victor Hugo_, the father of Romanticism in literature, cannot be passed
over in the history of landscape painting. Since 1891, when that
remarkable exhibition of painter-poets was opened in Paris--an
exhibition in which Théophile Gautier, Prosper Merimée, the two de
Goncourts, and others were represented by more or less important
works--the world learnt what a gifted draughtsman, what a powerful
dramatist in landscape, was this great Romanticist. Even in the
reminiscences of nature--spirited and suggestive of colour as they
are--which he drew with a rapid hand in the margin of his manuscripts,
the fiery glow of Romanticism breaks out. The things of which he speaks
in the text appear in black shadows and ghostly light. Old castles stand
surrounded by clouds of smoke or the blinding glare of fire, moonrise
makes phantom silhouettes of the trees, waves lashed by the storm dash
together as they spout over vessels; and there are gloomy seas and dark
unearthly shores, fairy palaces, proud citadels, and cathedrals of
fabled story. Whenever one of his finished drawings is bequeathed to the
Louvre, Hugo is certain to receive a place in the history of art as one
of the champions of Romanticism.
The movement was so universal amongst the painters that it is difficult
at the present time to perceive the special part that each individual
played in the great drama. This is especially true of _Georges Michel_,
a genius long misunderstood, a painter first made known in wider circles
by the World Exhibition in 1889, and known to the narrower circle of art
lovers only since his death in 1843. At that time a dealer had bought at
an auction the works left behind by a half-famished painter--pictures
with no signature, and only to be identified because they collectively
treated motives from the surroundings of Paris. A large, wide horizon, a
hill, a windmill, a cloudy sky were his subjects, and all pointed to an
artist schooled by the Dutch. Curiosity was on the alert, inquiry was
made, and it was found that the painter was named Georges Michel, and
had been born in 1763; that at twelve years of age he had shirked school
to go drawing, had run away with a laundress at fifteen, was already the
father of five children when he was twenty, had married again at
sixty-five, and had worked hard to his eightieth year. Old men
remembered that they had seen early works of his in the Salon. It was
said that Michel had produced a great deal immediately after the
Revolution, but exceedingly tedious pictures, which differed in no
respect from those of the other Classicists; for instance, from Demarne
and Swebach, garnished with figures. It was only after 1814 that he
disappeared from the Salon; not, as has been now discovered, because he
had no more pictures to exhibit, but because he was rejected as a
revolutionary. During his later years Michel had been most variously
employed: for one thing, he had been a restorer of pictures.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
CABAT. LE JARDIN BEAUJON.]
In this calling many Dutch pictures had passed through his hands, and
they suggested to him the unseasonable idea of looking more closely into
nature in the neighbourhood than he had done in his youth--nature not as
she was in Italy, but in the environs of the city. While Valenciennes
and his pupils made so many objections to painting what lay under their
eyes, Georges Michel remained in the country, and was the first to light
on the idea of placing himself in the midst of nature, and not above
her; no longer to arrange and adapt, but to approach her by painting her
with directness. If any one spoke of travelling to Italy, he answered:
"The man who cannot find enough to paint during his whole life in a
circuit of four miles is in reality no artist. Did the Dutch ever run
from one place to another? And yet they are good painters, and not
merely that, but the most powerful, bold, and ideal artists." Every day
he made a study in the precincts of Paris, without any idea that he
would count in these times among the forerunners of modern art. He
shares the glory of having discovered Montmartre with Alphonse Karr,
Gérard de Nerval, and Monselet. After his death such studies were found
in the shops of all the second-hand dealers of the Northern Boulevard;
they were invariably without a frame, as they had never seemed worth
framing, and when they were very dear they were to be had for forty
francs. Connoisseurs appreciated his wide horizons, stormy skies, and
ably sketched sea-shores. For, in spite of his poverty, Michel had now
and then deserted Montmartre and found means to visit Normandy.
Painfully precise in the beginning, while he worked with Swebach and
Demarne, he had gradually become large and bold, and employed all means
in giving expression to what he felt. He was a dreamer, who brought into
his studies a unison of lights, and, now and then, beams of sun which
would have delighted Albert Cuyp. A genuine offspring of the old Dutch
masters--of the grand and broad masters, not of those who worked with a
fine brush--already he was aiming at _l'expression par l'ensemble_, and
since the Paris Universal Exhibition he has been fittingly honoured as
the forerunner of Théodore Rousseau. His pictures, as it seems, were
early received in various studios, and there they had considerable
effect in setting artists thinking. But as he ceased to date his
pictures after 1814 it is, nevertheless, difficult to be more precise in
determining the private influence which this Ruysdael of Montmartre
exerted on men of the younger generation.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ PAUL HUET.]
One after the other they began to declare the Italian pilgrimage to be
unnecessary. They buried themselves as hermits in the villages around
the capital. The undulating strip of country, rich in wood and water,
which borders on the heights of Saint-Cloud and Ville d'Avray, is the
cradle of French landscape painting. In grasping nature they proceeded
by the most various ways, whilst they drew everything scrupulously and
exactly which an observing eye may discern, or wedded their own
temperament with the moods of nature.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
HUET. THE INUNDATION AT ST. CLOUD.]
That remarkable artist _Charles de la Berge_ seems like a forerunner of
the English Pre-Raphaelite school. He declared the ideal of art to
consist in painting everything according to nature, and overlooking
nothing; in carrying drawing to the most minute point, and yet
preserving the impression of unison and harmony in the picture--which is
as easy to say as it is difficult to perform. His brief life was passed
in this struggle. His pictures are miracles of patience: to see that it
is only necessary to know the "Sunset" of 1839, in the Louvre. There is
something touching in the way this passionate worker had branches and
the bark of trees brought to his room, even when he lay on his deathbed,
to study the contortions of wood and the interweaving of fibres with all
the zeal of a naturalist. The efforts of de la Berge have something of
the religious devotion with which Jan van Eyck or Altdorfer gazed at
nature. But he died too young to effect any result. He copied the
smallest particulars of objects with the utmost care, and in the
reproduction even of the smallest aimed at a mathematical precision,
neutralising his qualities of colour, which were otherwise of serious
value, by such hair-splitting detail.
_Camille Roqueplan_, the many-sided pupil of Gros, made his first
appearance as a landscape painter with a sunset in 1822. He opposed the
genuine windmills of the old Dutch masters to those everlasting
windmills of Watelet, with their leaden water and their meagre
landscape. In his pictures a green plain, intersected by canals,
stretches round; a fresh and luminous grey sky arches above. That
undaunted traveller _Camille Flers_, who had been an actor and ballet
dancer in Brazil before his appearance as a painter, represented the
rich pastures of Normandy with truth, but was diffident in the presence
of nature where she is grand. His pupil, _Louis Cabat_, was hailed with
special enthusiasm by the young generation on account of his firm
harmonious style. His pictures showed that he had been a zealous student
of the great Dutch artists, and that it was his pride to handle his
brush in their manner, expressing as much as possible without injuring
pictorial effect. He is on many sides in touch with Charles de la Berge.
Later he even had the courage to see Italy with fresh eyes, and in a
simple manner to record his impressions without regard for the rules and
theories of the Classicists. But the risk was too great. He became once
more an admirer of imposing landscape, an adherent of Poussin, and as
such he is almost exclusively known to us of a younger generation.
[Illustration: _Baschet._ J. M. W. TURNER.]
_Paul Huet_ was altogether a Romanticist. In de la Berge there is the
greatest objectivity possible, in Huet there is impassioned expression.
His heart told him that the hour was come for giving passion utterance;
he wanted to render the energy of nature, the intensity of her life,
with the whole might of vivid colouring. In his pictures there is
something of Byronic poetry; the conception is rich and powerful, the
symphony of colour passionately dramatic. In every one of his landscapes
there breathes the human soul with its unrest, its hopelessness, and its
doubts. Huet was the child of an epoch, which at one moment exulted to
the skies and at another sorrowed to death in the most violent contrast;
and he has proclaimed this temper of the age with all the freedom and
power possible, where it is only earth and sky, clouds and trees that
are the medium of expression. Most of his works, like Romanticism in
general, have an earnest, passionate, and sombre character; nothing of
the ceremonial pompousness peculiar to Classical landscapes. He has a
passion for boisterous storms and waters foaming over, clouds with the
lightning flashing through them, and the struggle of humanity against
the raging elements. In this effort to express as much as possible he
often makes his pictures too theatrical in effect. In one of his
principal works, the "View of Rouen," painted in 1833, the breadth of
execution almost verges on emptiness and panoramic view. Huet was in the
habit of heaping many objects together in his landscapes. He delighted
in expressive landscapes in the sense in which, at that time, people
delighted in expressive heads. This one-sidedness hindered his success.
When he appeared in the twenties his pictures were thought bizarre and
melancholy. And later, when he achieved greater simplicity, he was
treated by the critics merely with the respect that was paid to the Old
Guard, for now a pleiad of much brighter stars beamed in the sky.
[Illustration: TURNER. A SHIPWRECK.]
[Illustration: J. M. W. TURNER. THE OLD TÉMÉRAIRE.]
But we must not forget that Michel and Huet showed the way. Rousseau and
his followers left them far behind, as Columbus threw into oblivion all
who had discovered America before him, or Gutenberg all who had
previously printed books. The step on which these initiators had stood
was more or less that of Andreas Achenbach and Blechen. They are good
and able painters, but they still kept the Flemish and Dutch masters too
much in their memory. It is easy to detect in them reminiscences of
Ruysdael and Hobbema and the studies of gallery pictures grown dim with
age. They still coloured objects brown, and made spring as mournful as
winter, and morning as gloomy as evening; they had yet no sense that
morning means the awakening of life, the youth of the sun, the
springtide of the day. They still composed their pictures and finished
and rounded them off for pictorial effect. The next necessary step was
no longer to look at Ruysdael and Cuyp, but at nature--to lay more
emphasis on sincerity of impression, and therefore the less upon
pictorial finish and rounded expression--to paint nature, not in the
style of galleries, but in its freshness and bloom. And the impulse to
this last step, which brought French landscape painting to its highest
perfection, was given by England.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TURNER. DIDO BUILDING CARTHAGE.]
The most highly gifted work produced in this province between the years
1800 and 1830 is of English origin. At the time when landscape painting
was in France and Germany confined in a strait-waistcoat by Classicism,
the English went quietly forward in the path trodden by Gainsborough in
the eighteenth century. In these years England produced an artist who
stands apart from all others as a peculiar and inimitable phenomenon in
the history of landscape painting, and at the same time it produced a
school of landscape which not only fertilised France, but founded
generally the modern conception of colour.
That phenomenon is _Joseph Mallord William Turner_, the great
pyrotechnist, one of the most individual and intellectual landscape
painters of all time. What a singular personality! And how vexatious he
is to all who merely care about correctness in art! Such persons divide
the life of Turner into two halves, one in which he was reasonable and
one in which he was a fool. They grant him a certain talent during the
first fifteen years of his activity, but from the moment when he is
complete master of his instrument, from the moment when the painter
begins in glowing enthusiasm to embody his personal ideal, they would
banish him from the kingdom of art, and lock him up in a madhouse. When
in the forties the Munich Pinakothek was offered a picture by Turner,
glowing with colour, people, accustomed to the contours of Cornelius,
knew no better than to laugh at it superciliously. It is said that in
his last days he sent a landscape to an exhibition. The committee,
unable to discover which was the top or which the bottom, hung it
upside-down. Later, when Turner came into the exhibition and the mistake
was about to be rectified, he said: "No, let it alone; it really looks
better as it is." One frequently reads that Turner suffered from a sort
of colour-blindness, and as late as 1872 Liebreich wrote an article
printed in _Macmillan_, which gave a medical explanation of the alleged
morbid affection of the great landscape painter's eyes. Only thus could
the German account for his pictures, which are impressionist, although
they were painted about the middle of the century. The golden dreams of
Turner were held to be eccentricities of vision, since no one was
capable of following this painter of momentary impressions in his
majesty of sentiment, and the impressiveness and poetry of his method of
expression.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
TURNER. JUMIÈGES.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TURNER. LANDSCAPE WITH THE SUN RISING IN A MIST.]
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
TURNER. VENICE.]
In reality Turner was the same from the beginning. He circled round the
fire like a moth, and craved, like Goethe, for more light; he wanted to
achieve the impossible and paint the sun. To attain his object nothing
was too difficult for him. He restrained himself for a long time; placed
himself amongst the followers of the painter of light _par excellence_;
studied, analysed, and copied Claude Lorrain; completely adopted his
style, and painted pictures which threw Claude into eclipse by their
magnificence and luminous power of colour. The painting of "Dido
building Carthage" is perhaps the most characteristic of this phase of
his art. One feels that the masses of architecture are merely there for
the sake of the painter; the tree in the foreground has only been
planted in this particular way so that the background may recede into
farther distance. The colour is splendid, though still heavy. By the
union of the principles of classic drawing with an entirely modern
feeling for atmosphere something chaotic and confused is frequently
introduced into the compositions of these years. But at the hour when it
was said to him, "You are the real Claude Lorrain," he answered, "Now I
am going to leave school and begin to be Turner." Henceforth he no
longer needs Claude's framework of trees to throw the light beaming into
the corners of his pictures. At first he busied himself with the
atmospheric phenomena of the land of mist. Then when the everlasting
grey became too splenetic for him he repaired to the relaxing, luxuriant
sensuousness of Southern seas, and sought the full embodiment of his
dreams of light in the land of the sun. It is impossible in words to
give a representation of the essence of Turner; even copies merely
excite false conceptions. "Rockets shot up, shocks of cannon thundered,
balls of light mounted, crackers meandered through the air and burst,
wheels hissed, each one separately, then in pairs, then altogether, and
even more turbulently one after the other and together." Thus has
Goethe described a display of fireworks in _The Elective Affinities_,
and this passage perhaps conveys most readily the impression of Turner's
pictures. To collect into a small space the greatest possible quantity
of light, he makes the perspective wide and deep and the sky boundless,
and uses the sea to reflect the brilliancy. He wanted to be able to
render the liquid, shining depths of the sky without employing the earth
as an object of comparison, and these studies which have merely the sky
as their object are perhaps his most astonishing works. Everywhere, to
the border of the picture, there is light. And he has painted all the
gradations of light, from the silvery morning twilight to the golden
splendour of the evening red. Volcanoes hiss and explode and vomit forth
streams of lava, which set the trembling air aglow, and blind the eyes
with flaring colours. The glowing ball of the sun rises behind the mist,
and transforms the whole ether into fine golden vapour; and vessels sail
through the luminous haze. In reality one cannot venture on more than a
swift glance into blinding masses of light, but the impression remained
in the painter's memory. He painted what he saw, and knew how to make
his effect convincing. And at the same time his composition became ever
freer and easier, the work of his brush ever more fragrant and
unfettered, the colouring and total sentiment of the picture ever more
imaginative and like those of a fairy-tale. His world is a land of sun,
where the reality of things vanishes, and the light shed between the eye
and the objects of vision is the only thing that lives. At one time he
took to painting human energy struggling with the phenomena of nature,
as in "Storm at Sea," "Fire at Sea," and "Rain, Steam, and Speed"; at
another he painted poetic revels of colour born altogether from the
imagination, like the "Sun of Venice." He is the greatest creator in
colour, the boldest poet amongst the landscape painters of all time! In
him England's painting has put forth its greatest might, just as in
Byron and Shelley, those two great powers, the English imagination
unrolled its standard of war most proudly and brilliantly. There is only
one Turner, and Ruskin is his prophet.
[Illusration: _L'Art._
OLD CROME. A VIEW NEAR NORWICH.]
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ JOHN CONSTABLE.]
As a man, too, he was one of those original characters seldom met with
nowadays. He was not the fastidious _gourmet_ that might have been
expected from his pictures, but an awkward, prosaic, citizen-like being.
He had a sturdy, thick-set figure, with broad shoulders and tough
muscles, and was more like a captain in the merchant service than a
disciple of Apollo. He was sparing to the point of miserliness, unformed
by any kind of culture, ignorant even of the laws of orthography, silent
and inaccessible. Like most of the great landscape painters of the
century, he was city-bred. In a gloomy house standing back in a foggy
little alley of Old London, in the immediate vicinity of dingy,
monotonous lodging-houses, he was born, the son of a barber, on 23rd
April 1775. His career was that of a model youth. At fifteen he
exhibited in the Royal Academy; when he was eighteen, engravings were
already being made after his drawings. At twenty he was known, and at
twenty-seven he became a member of the Academy. His first earnings he
gained by the neat and exact preparation of little views of English
castles and country places--drawings which, at the time, took the place
of photographs, and for which he received half a crown apiece and his
supper. Thus he went over a great part of England, and upon one of his
excursions he is said to have had a love-affair _à la_ Lucy of
Lammermoor, and to have so taken it to heart that he resolved to remain
a bachelor for the rest of his life. In 1808 he became Professor of
Perspective at the Academy, and delivered himself, it is said, of the
most confused utterances on his subjects. His father had now to give up
the barber's business and come to live with him, and he employed him in
sawing, planing, and nailing together boards, which were painted yellow
and used as frames for his pictures. The same miserly economy kept him
from ever having a comfortable studio. He lived in a miserable lodging
where he received nobody, had his meals at a restaurant of the most
primitive order, carried his dinner wrapped up in paper when he went on
excursions, and was exceedingly thankful if any one added to it a glass
of wine. His diligence was fabulous. Every morning he rose on the stroke
of six, locked his door, and worked with the same dreadful regularity
day after day. His end was as unpoetic as his life. After being several
times a father without ever having had a wife, he passed his last years
with an old housekeeper, who kept him strictly under the yoke. If he was
away from the house for long together he pretended that he was
travelling to Venice for the sake of his work, until at last the honest
housekeeper learnt, from a letter which he had put in his overcoat
pocket and forgotten, that the object of all these journeys was not
Venice at all, but Chelsea. There she found him in an attic which he had
taken for another mistress, and where he was living under the name of
Booth. In this little garret, almost more miserable than the room in the
back street where he was born, the painter of light ended his days; and,
to connect an atom of poetry with so sad a death, Ruskin adds that the
window looked towards the sunset, and the dying eyes of the painter
received the last rays of the sun which he had so often celebrated in
glowing hymns. He left countless works behind him at his death, several
thousands of pounds, and an immortal fame. This thought of glory after
death occupied him from his youth. Only thus is it possible to
understand why he led the life of a poor student until his end, why he
did things which bordered on trickery in the sale of his _Liber
Studiorum_, and kept for himself all those works by which he could have
made a fortune. He left them--taken altogether, three hundred and
sixty-two oil-paintings and nineteen thousand drawings--to the nation,
and £20,000 to the Royal Academy, and merely stipulated that the two
best pictures should be hung in the National Gallery between two Claude
Lorrains. Another thousand pounds was set aside for the erection of a
monument in St. Paul's. There, in that temple of fame, he lies buried
near Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great ancestor of English painting, and
he remains a phenomenon without forerunners and without descendants.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. WILLY LOTT'S HOUSE.]
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. CHURCH PORCH, BERGHOLT.]
For it does not need to be said that Turner, with his marked
individuality, could have no influence on the further development of
English painting. The dramatic fervour of Romanticism was here expressed
just as little as Classicism. It was only the poets who fled into the
wilderness of nature, and sang the splendour and the mysteries of the
mountains, the lightning and the storm, the might of the elements. In
painting there is no counterpart to Scott's descriptions of the
Highlands or Wordsworth's rhapsodies upon the English lakes, or to the
tendency of landscape painting which was represented in Germany by
Lessing and Blechen. Wordsworth is majestic and sublime, and English
painting lovely and full of intimate emotion. It knows neither ancient
Alpine castles nor the sunsets of Greece. Turner, as a solitary
exception, represented nature stately, terrible, stormy, glorious,
mighty, grand, and sublime; all the others, like Gainsborough, loved
simplicity, modest grace, and virginal quietude. England has nothing
romantic. At the very time when Lessing painted his landscapes, Ludwig
Tieck experienced a bitter disappointment when he trod the soil where
Shakespeare wrote the witch scenes in _Macbeth_. A sombre, melancholy,
primæval maze was what he had expected, and there lay before him a soft,
luxuriant, and cultivated country. What distinguishes English landscape
is a singular luxuriance, an almost unctuous wealth of vegetation. Drive
through the country on a bright day on the top of a coach, and look
around you; in all directions as far as the eye can reach an endless
green carpet is spread over gentle valleys and undulating hills;
cereals, vegetables, clover, hops, and glorious meadows with high rich
grasses stretch forth; here and there stand a group of mighty oaks
flinging their shadows wide, and around are pastures hemmed in by
hedges, where splendid cattle lie chewing the cud. The moist atmosphere
surrounds the trees and plants like a shining vapour. There is nothing
more charming in the world, and nothing more delicate than these tones
of colour; one might stand for hours looking at the clouds of satin, the
fine ærial bloom, and the soft transparent gauze which catches the
sunbeams in its silver net, softens them, and sends them smiling and
toying to the earth. On both sides of the carriage the fields extend,
each more beautiful than the last, in constant succession, interwoven
with broad patches of buttercups, daisies, and meadowsweet. A strange
magic, a loveliness so exquisite that it is well-nigh painful, escapes
from this inexhaustible vegetation. The drops sparkle on the leaves like
pearls, the arched tree-tops murmur in the gentle breeze. Luxuriantly
they thrive in these airy glades, where they are ever rejuvenated and
bedewed by the moist air of the sea. And the sky seems to have been made
to enliven the colours of the land. At the tiniest sunbeam the earth
smiles with a delicious charm, and the bells of flowers unfold in rich,
liquid colour. The English look at nature as she is in their country,
with the tender love of the man nurtured in cities, and yet with the
cool observation of the man of business. The merchant, enveloped the
whole day long in the smoke of the city, breathes the more freely of an
evening when the steam-engine brings him out into green places. With a
sharp practical glance he judges the waving grain, and speculates on the
chances of harvest. And this spirit of attentive, familiar observation
of nature, which is in no sense romantic, reigns also in the works of
the English landscape painters. They did not think of becoming
cosmopolitan like their German comrades, and of presenting remarkable
points, the more exotic the better, for the instruction of the public.
Like Gainsborough, they relied upon the intimate charm of places which
they knew and loved. And as a centre Norwich first took the place of
Suffolk, which Gainsborough had glorified.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. DEDHAM VALE.]
_John Crome_, known as Old Crome, the founder of the powerful Norwich
school of landscape, is a healthy and forcible master. Born poor, in a
provincial town a hundred miles from London, in 1769, and at first an
errand boy to a doctor, whose medicines he delivered to the patients,
and then an apprentice to a sign-painter, he lived completely cut off
from contemporary England. Norwich was his native town and his life-long
home. He did not know the name of Turner, nor anything of Wilson, and
perhaps never heard the name of Gainsborough. Thus his pictures are
neither influenced by the contemporary nor by the preceding English art.
Whatever he became he owed to himself and to the Dutch. Early married,
and blessed with a numerous family, he tried to gain his bread by
drawing-lessons, given in the great country-houses in the neighbourhood,
and in this way had the opportunity of seeing many Dutch pictures. In
later life he came to know Paris at a time when all the treasures of the
world were collected in the Louvre, and this enthusiasm for the Dutch
found fresh nourishment. Even on his deathbed he spoke of Hobbema.
"Hobbema," he said, "my dear Hobbema, how I have loved you!" Hobbema is
his ancestor, the art of Holland his model.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
CONSTABLE. THE ROMANTIC HOUSE.]
His pictures were collectively "exact" views of places which he loved,
and neither composed landscapes nor paintings of "beautiful regions."
Crome painted frankly everything which Norfolk, his own county, had to
offer him--weather-beaten oaks, old woods, fishers' huts, lonely pools,
wastes of heath. The way he painted trees is extraordinary. Each has its
own physiognomy, and looks like a living thing, like some gloomy
Northern personality. Oaks were his peculiar specialty, and in later
years they only found a similarly great interpreter in Théodore
Rousseau. At the same time his pictures of the simplest scenes have a
remarkable largeness of conception, and a subtlety of colour recalling
the old masters, and reached by no other painter in that age. An
uncompromising realist, he drew his portraits of nature with almost
pedantic pains, but preserved their relation of colour throughout. And
as a delicate adept in colouring he finally harmonised everything in the
manner of the Dutch to a juicy brown tone, which gives his beautiful
wood and field pictures a discreet and refined beauty, a beauty in
keeping with the art of galleries.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
CONSTABLE. THE CORNFIELD.]
Crome took a long time before he made a way for himself. His whole life
long he sold his work merely at moderate prices: for no picture did he
ever receive more than fifty pounds. Even his end was uneventful. He had
begun as a manual worker, and he died in 1821 as a humble townsman whose
only place of recreation was the tavern, and who passed his leisure in
the society of sailors, shopkeepers, and artisans. Yet the principles of
his art survived him. In 1805 he had founded in Norwich, far from all
Academies, a society of artists, who gave annual exhibitions and had a
common studio, which each used at fixed hours. _Cotman_, whose specialty
was ash-trees, _the younger Crome_, _Stark_, and _Vincent_, are the
leading representatives of the vigorous school of Norwich; and by them
the name of this town became as well known as an art-centre in Europe as
Delft and Haarlem had been in former times.
Their relation to the Dutch was similar to that of Georges Michel in
France, or that of Achenbach in Germany. They painted what they saw,
rounded it with a view to pictorial effect, and harmonised the whole in
a delicate brown tone. They felt more attracted by the form of objects
than by their colour; the latter was, in the manner of the Dutch, merely
an epidermis delicately toned down. The next step of the English
painters was that they became the first to get the better of this Dutch
phase, and to found that peculiarly modern landscape painting which no
longer sets out from the absolutely concrete reality of objects, but
from the _milieu_, from the atmospheric effect; which values in a
picture less what is ready-made and perfectly rounded in drawing than
the freshly seized impression of nature.
Hardly twenty years have gone by since "open-air painting" was
introduced into Germany. At present, things are no longer painted as
they are in themselves but as they appear in their atmospheric
environment. Artists care no longer for landscapes which float in a
neutral brown sauce; they represent objects flooded with light and air.
People no longer wish for brown trees and meadows, for the eye has
perceived that trees and meadows are green. The world is no longer
satisfied with the indeterminate light of the studio and the
conventional tone of the picture gallery; it requires some indication of
the hour of the day, since it is felt that the light of morning is
different from the light of noon. And it is the English who made these
discoveries, which have lent to modern landscape painting its most
delicate and fragrant charm.
The very mist of England, the damp and the heaviness of the atmosphere,
necessarily forced English landscape painters, earlier than those of
other nations, to the observation of the play of light and air. In a
country where the sky is without cloud, in a pure, dry, and sparkling
air, nothing is seen except lines. Shadow is wanting, and without shadow
light has no value. For that reason the old classical masters of Italy
were merely draughtsmen; they knew how to prize the value of sunshine no
more than a millionaire the value of a penny. But the English understood
the charm even of the most scanty ray of light which forces its way like
a wedge through a wall of clouds. The entire appearance of nature, in
their country, where a damp mist spreads its pearly grey veil over the
horizon even upon calm and beautiful summer days, guided them to see the
vehicle of some mood of landscape in the subtlest elements of light and
air. The technique of water-colour painting which, at that very time,
received such a powerful impetus, encouraged them to give expression to
what they saw freshly and simply even in their oil-paintings, and to do
so without regard for the scale of colour employed by the old masters.
_John Robert Cozens_, "the greatest genius who ever painted a
landscape," had been the first to occupy himself with water-colour
painting as understood in the modern sense. _Tom Girtin_ had
experimented with new methods. _Henry Edridge_ and _Samuel Prout_ had
come forward with their picturesque ruins, _Copley Fielding_ and _Samuel
Owen_ with sea-pieces, _Luke Clennel_ and _Thomas Heaphy_ with graceful
portrayals of country life, _Howitt_ and _Robert Hills_ with their
animal pictures. From 1805 there existed a Society of Painters in
Water-Colours, and this extensive pursuit of water-colour painting could
not fail to have an influence upon oil-painting also. The technique of
water-colour accustomed English taste to that brightness of tone which
at first seemed so bizarre to the Germans, habituated as they were to
the prevalence of brown. Instead of dark, brownish-green tones, the
water-colour painters produced bright tones. Direct study of nature, and
the completion of a picture in the presence of nature and in the open
air, guided their attention to light and atmosphere more quickly than
that of the oil-painters. An easier technique, giving more scope for
improvisation, of itself suggested the idea that rounded finish with a
view to pictorial effect was not the final aim of art, but that it was
of the most immediate importance to catch the first freshness of
impression, that flower so hard to pluck and so prone to wither.
The first who applied these principles to oil-painting was _John
Constable_, one of the greatest pioneers in his own province and one of
the most powerful individualities of the century.
East Bergholt, the pretty little village where Constable's cradle stood,
is fourteen miles distant from Sudbury, the birthplace of Gainsborough.
Here he was born on 11th June 1776, at the very time when Gainsborough
settled in London. His father was a miller, a well-to-do man, who had
three windmills in Bergholt. The other famous miller's son in the
history of art is Rembrandt. At first a superior career was chosen for
him; it was intended that he should become a clergyman. But he felt more
at home in the mill than in the schoolroom, and became a miller like his
fathers before him. Observation of the changes of the sky is an
essential part of a miller's calling, and this occupation of his youth
seems to have been not without influence on the future artist; no one
before him had observed the sky with the same attention.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. COTTAGE IN A CORNFIELD.]
A certain Dunthorne, an eccentric personage to whom the boy often came,
gave him--always in the open air--his first instruction; and another of
his patrons, Sir George Beaumont, as an æsthetically trained
connoisseur, criticised what he painted. When Constable showed him a
study he asked: "Where do you mean to place your brown tree?" For the
first law in his æsthetics was this: a good painting must have the
colour of a good fiddle; it must be brown. Sojourn in London was without
influence on Constable. He was twenty-three years of age, a handsome
young fellow with dark eyes and a fine expressive countenance, when, in
1799, he wrote to his teacher Dunthorne: "I am this morning admitted a
student at the Royal Academy; the figure which I drew for admittance was
the Torso. I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, No.
23." He was known to the London girls as "the handsome young miller of
Bergholt." He undertook the most varied things, copied pictures of
Reynolds, and painted an altar-piece, "Christ blessing Little Children,"
which was admired by no one except his mother. In addition he studied
Ruysdael, whose works made a great impression on him, in the National
Gallery. In 1802 he appears for the first time in the Catalogue of the
Royal Academy as the exhibitor of a landscape, and from this time to the
year of his death, 1837, he was annually represented there, contributing
altogether one hundred and four pictures. In the earliest--windmills and
village parties--every detail is carefully executed; every branch is
painted on the trees, and every tile on the houses; but as yet one can
breathe no air in these pictures and see no sunshine.
But he writes, in 1803, a very important letter to his old friend
Dunthorne. "For the last two years," he says, "I have been running after
pictures, and seeking the truth at second-hand. I have not endeavoured
to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set
out, but have rather tried to make my performance look like the work of
other men. I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this
summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace people. I shall return to
Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of
representing the scenes that may employ me. There is little or nothing
in the exhibition worth looking up to. _There is room enough for a
natural painter._" He left London accordingly, and worked, in 1804, the
whole summer "quite alone among the oaks and solitudes of Helmingham
Park. I have taken quiet possession of the parsonage, finding it empty.
A woman comes from the farmhouse, where I eat, and makes my bed, and I
am left at liberty to wander where I please during the day." And having
now returned to the country he became himself again. "Painting," he
writes, "is with me but another word for feeling; and I associate 'my
careless boyhood' with all that lies upon the banks of the Stour; those
scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." He had passed his whole
youth amid the lovely valleys and luxuriant meadows of Bergholt, where
the flocks were at pasture and the beetles hummed; he had wandered about
the soft banks of the Stour, in the green woods of Suffolk, amongst old
country-houses and churches, farms and picturesque cottages. This
landscape which he had loved as a boy he also painted. He was the
painter of cultivated English landscape, the portrayer of country life,
of canals and boats, of windmills and manor-houses. He had a liking for
all simple nature which reveals everywhere the traces of human
activity--for arable fields and villages, orchards and cornfields. A
strip of meadow, a watergate with a few briars, a clump of branching,
fibrous trees, were enough to fill him with ideas and feelings.
Gainsborough had already painted the like; but Constable denotes an
advance beyond Gainsborough as beyond Crome. Intimate in feeling as
Gainsborough undoubtedly was, he had a tendency to beautify the objects
of nature; he selected and gave them a delicacy of arrangement and a
grace of line which in reality they did not possess. Constable was the
first to renounce every species of adaptation and arbitrary arrangement
in composition. His boldness in the rendering of personal impressions
raises him above Crome. Crome gets his effect principally by his
accuracy: he represented what he saw; Constable showed how he saw the
thing. While the former, following Hobbema, has an air reminiscent of
galleries and old masters, Constable saw the world with his own eyes,
and was the first entirely independent modern landscape painter. In his
young days he had made copies after Claude, Rubens, Reynolds, Ruysdael,
Teniers, and Wilson, which might have been mistaken for the originals,
but later he had learnt much from Girtin's water-colour paintings. From
that time he felt that he was strong enough to trust his own eyes. He
threw to the winds all that had hitherto been considered as the chief
element of beauty, and gave up the rounding of his pictures for
pictorial effect; cut trees right through the middle to get into his
picture just what interested him, and no more.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
CONSTABLE. THE VALLEY FARM.]
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
COX. CROSSING THE SANDS.]
He set himself right in the midst of verdure; the nightingales sang, the
leaves murmured, the meadows grew green, and the clouds gleamed. In the
fifteenth-century art there were the graceful spring trees of Perugino;
in the seventeenth, the bright spring days of those two Flemings Jan
Silberecht and Lucas Uden; in the nineteenth, Constable became the first
painter of spring. If Sir George Beaumont now asked him where he meant
to put his brown tree, he answered: "Nowhere, because I don't paint
brown trees any more." He saw that foliage is green in summer,
and--painted it so; he saw that summer rain and morning dew makes the
verdure more than usually intense, and--he painted what he saw. He
noticed that green leaves sparkle, gleam, and glitter in the sun--and
painted them accordingly; he saw that the light, when it falls upon
bright-looking walls, dazzles like snow in the sunshine--and painted it
accordingly. There was a good deal of jeering at the time about
"Constable's snow," and yet it was not merely all succeeding English
artists who continued to put their faith in this painting of light, but
the masters of Barbizon too, and Manet afterwards.
[Illustration: _Mansell_
BONINGTON. LA PLACE DES MOULARDS, GENEVA.]
The problem of painting light and air, which the older school had left
unsolved, was taken up by him first in its complete extent. Crome had
shown great reserve in approaching the atmospheric elements. Constable
was the first landscape painter who really saw effects of light and air
and learnt to paint them. His endeavour was to embody the impression of
a mood of light with feeling, without lingering on the reproduction of
those details which are only perceptible to an analytical eye. Whereas
in the old Dutch masters the chief weight is laid on the effect of the
drawing of objects, here it rests upon light, no matter upon what it
plays. Thus Constable freed landscape painting from the architectonic
laws of composition. They were no longer needed when the principle was
once affirmed that the atmospheric mood gave greater value to the
picture than subject. He not only studied the earth and foliage in their
various tones, according as they were determined by the atmosphere, but
observed the sky, the air, and the forms of cloud with the
conscientiousness of a student of natural philosophy. The comments which
he wrote upon them are as subtle as those in Ruskin's celebrated
treatise on the clouds. A landscape, according to him, is only beautiful
in proportion as light and shadow make it so; in other words, he was the
first to understand that the "mood" of a landscape, by which it appeals
to the human spirit, depends less on its lines and on objects in
themselves than on the light and shadow in which it is bathed, and he
was the first painter who had the secret of painting these subtle
gradations of atmosphere. In his pictures the wind is heard murmuring in
the trees, the breeze is felt as it blows over the corn, the sunlight is
seen glancing on the leaves and playing on the clear mirror of the
waters. Thus Constable for the first time painted nature in all its
freshness. His principle of artistic creation is entirely opposed to
that which was followed by the Pre-Raphaelites at a later date. Whilst
the latter tried to reconstruct a picture of nature by a faithful,
painstaking execution of all details--a process by which the expression
of the whole usually suffers--Constable's pictures are broadly and
impressively painted, often of rude and brutal force, at times solemn,
at times elegant, but always cogent, fresh, and possessing a unity of
their own.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
COX. THE SHRIMPERS.]
A genius in advance of its age is only first recognised in its full
significance when following generations have come abreast with it. And
that Constable was made to feel. In 1837 he died in poverty at
Hampstead, in the modest "country retreat" where he spent the greatest
part of his life. He said that his painting recalled no one, and was
neither polished nor pretty, and asked: "How can I hope to be popular?
I work only for the future." And that belonged to him.
[Illustration: _Portfolio._
MÜLLER. THE AMPHITHEATRE AT XANTHUS.]
Constable's powerful individuality has brought forth enduring fruit, and
helped English landscape painting to attain that noble prime which it
enjoyed during the forties and fifties.
With his rich, brilliant, bold, and finely coloured painting, _David
Cox_ stands out as perhaps the greatest of Constable's successors. Like
Constable, he was a peasant, and observed nature with the simplicity of
one who was country-bred. He was born in 1783, the son of a blacksmith,
in a humble spot near Birmingham, and, after a brief sojourn in London,
migrated with his family to Hereford, and later to Harborne, also in the
neighbourhood of Birmingham. The strip of country which he saw from his
house was almost exclusively his field of study. He knew that a painter
can pass his life in the same corner of the earth, and that the scene of
nature spread before him will never be exhausted. "Farewell, pictures,
farewell," he is reported to have said when he took his last walk, on
the day before his death, round the walls of Harborne. He has treated of
the manner in which he understood his art in his _Treatise on Landscape
Painting_, written in 1814. His ideal was to see the most cogent effect
in nature, and leave everything out which did not harmonise with its
character; and in Cox's pictures it is possible to trace the steps by
which he drew nearer to this ideal the more natural he became. The magic
of his brush was never more captivating than in the works of his last
years, when, fallen victim to a disease of the eye, he could no longer
see distinctly and only rendered an impression of the whole scene.
Cox is a great and bold master. The townsman when he first comes into
the country, after being imprisoned for months together in a wilderness
of brick and mortar, does not begin at once to count the trees, leaves,
and the stones lying on the ground. He draws a long breath and exclaims,
"What balm!" Cox, too, has not painted details in the manner of the
Pre-Raphaelites. He represented the soft wind sweeping over the English
meadows, the fresh purity of the air, the storms that agitate the
landscape of Wales. A delicate silver-grey is spread over most of his
pictures, and his method of expression is powerful and nervous. By
preference he has celebrated, both in oil-paintings and in boldly
handled water-colours, the boundless depths of the sky in its thousand
variations of light, now deep blue in broad noon and now eerily gloomy
and disturbed. The fame of being the greatest of English water-colour
painters is his beyond dispute, yet if he had painted in oils from his
youth upwards he would probably have become the most important English
landscapist. His small pictures are pure and delicate in colour, and
fresh and breezy in atmospheric effect. It is only in large pictures
that power is at times denied him. In his later years he began to paint
in oils, and in this medium he is a less important artist, though a very
great painter. _William Müller_, who died young, stood as leader at his
side.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
DE WINT. NOTTINGHAM.]
He was one of the most dexterous amongst the dexterous, next to Turner
the greatest adept of English painting. Had he been simpler and quieter
he might be called a genius of the first order. But he has sometimes a
touch of what is theatrical; it does not always break out, but it does
so occasionally. He has an inclination for pageantry, and nothing of
that self-sufficiency and quiet tenderness with which Constable and Cox
devoted themselves to home scenery. He was at pains to give a trace of
largeness and sublimity to modest and unpretentious English landscape,
to give to the most familiar subject a tinge of preciosity. His pictures
are grandiose in form, and show an admirable lightness of hand, but
light and air are wanting in them, the local colour of England and its
atmosphere. As a foreigner--he was the son of a Danzig scholar, who had
migrated to Bristol--Müller has not seen English landscape with
Constable's native sentiment. He was not content with an English
cornfield or an English village; the familiar homeliness of the country
in its work-a-day garb excited no emotion in him.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BONINGTON. THE WINDMILL OF SAINT-JOUIN.]
Something in Müller's imagination, which caused him to love decided
colours and sudden contrasts rather than delicate gradations, attracted
him to Southern climes. His natural place was in the East, which had not
at that time been made the vogue. Here, like Decamps and Marilhat, he
found those vivid rather than delicate effects which appealed to his
eye. He was twice in the South--the first time in Athens and Egypt in
1838, and once again in Smyrna, Rhodes, and Lycia in 1843-44. In the
year during which he had yet to live he collected those Oriental
pictures which form his legacy, containing the best that he did. Certain
of them, such as "The Amphitheatre at Xanthus," are painted with
marvellous verve; they are not the work of a day, but of an hour. All
these mountain castles upon abrupt cliffs, these views of the Acropolis
and of Egypt, are real masterpieces of broad painting, their colour
clear and their light admirable. Not one of the many Frenchmen who were
in the South at this time has represented its sunshine and its brilliant
atmosphere with such flattering, voluptuous tones.
_Peter de Wint_, who was far more true and simple, was, like Constable
and Cox, entirely wedded to his own birthplace. At any rate, his sojourn
in France lasted only for a short time, and left no traces in his art.
From youth to age he was the painter of England in its work-a-day
garb--of the low hills of Surrey, of the plains of Lincolnshire, or of
the dark canals of the Thames, which he specially portrayed in
unsurpassable water-colour paintings. His ancestor in art is Philips de
Koning, the pupil of Rembrandt, the master of Dutch plains and wide
horizons.
[Illustration: _Studio._
BONINGTON. READING ALOUD.]
After Cox and de Wint came _Creswick_, more laborious, more patient,
more studious of detail, furnished perhaps with a sharper eye for the
green tones of nature, though with less feeling for atmosphere. It
cannot be said that he advanced art, but merely that he added a regard
for light and sunshine, unknown to the period before 1820, to the study
of Hobbema and Waterloo. With those who would not have painted as they
did but for Constable, _Peter Graham_ and _Dawson_ may be likewise
ranked; and these artists peculiarly devoted themselves to the study of
sky and water. Henry Dawson painted the most paltry and unpromising
places--a reach of the Thames close to London, or a quarter in the smoky
precincts of Dover, or Greenwich; but he painted them with a power such
as only Constable possessed. In particular he is unequalled in his
masterly painting of clouds. Constable had seldom done this in the same
way. He delighted in an agitated sky, in clouds driven before the wind
and losing their form in indeterminate contours; in nature he saw merely
reflections of his own restless spirit, striving after colour and
movement. Dawson painted those clouds which stand firm in the sky like
piles of building--cloud-cathedrals, as Ruskin has called them. There
are pictures of his consisting of almost nothing but great clouds. But
that wide space, the earth, which our eyes regard as their own peculiar
domain, is wanting. Colours and forms are nowhere to be seen, but only
clouds and undulating yellowish mist in which objects vanish like pallid
spectres. _John Linnell_ carried the traditions of this great era on to
the new period: at first revelling in golden light, in sunsets and rosy
clouds of dusk, and at a later time, in the manner of the
Pre-Raphaelites, bent on the precise execution of bodily form.
The young master, who died at twenty-seven, _Richard Parkes Bonington_,
unites these English classic masters with the French. An Englishman by
birth and origin, but trained as a painter in France, where he had gone
when fifteen years of age, he seems from many points of view one of the
most gracious products of the Romantic movement in France, though at the
same time he has qualities over which only the English had command at
that period, and not the French. He entered Gros's studio in France,
which was then the favourite meeting-place of all the younger men of
revolutionary tendencies, but repeated journeys to London did not allow
him to forget Constable. In Normandy and Picardy he painted his first
landscapes, following them up with a series of Venetian sea-pieces and
little historical scenes. Then consumption seized him and took but a
brief time in striking him down. On 23rd September 1828 he died in
London, whither he had gone to consult a specialist. In consequence of
his early death his talent never ripened, but he was a simple, natural,
pure, and congenial artist for all that. "I knew him well and loved him
much. His English composure, which nothing could disturb, robbed him of
none of the qualities which make life pleasant. When I first came across
him I was myself very young, and was making studies in the Louvre. It
was about 1816 or 1817. He was in the act of copying a Flemish
landscape--a tall youth who had grown rapidly. He had already an
astonishing dexterity in water-colours, which were then an English
novelty. Some which I saw later at a dealer's were charming, both in
colour and composition. Other modern artists are perhaps more powerful
and more accurate than Bonington, but no one in this modern school,
perhaps no earlier artist, possessed the ease of execution which makes
his works, in a certain sense, diamonds by which the eye is pleased and
fascinated, quite independently of the subject and the particular
representation of nature. And the same is true of the costume pictures
which he painted later. Even here I could never grow weary of marvelling
at his sense of effect, and his great ease of execution. Not that he was
quickly satisfied; on the contrary, he often began over again perfectly
finished pieces which seemed wonderful to us. But his dexterity was so
great that in a moment he produced with his brush new effects, which
were as charming as the first." With these words his friend and comrade,
the great Eugène Delacroix, drew the portrait of Bonington. Bonington
was at once the most natural and the most delicate in that Romantic
school in which he was one of the first to make an appearance. He had a
fine eye for the charm of nature, saw grace and beauty in her
everywhere, and represented the spring and the sunshine in bright and
clear tones. No Frenchman before him has so painted the play of light on
gleaming costumes and succulent meadow grasses. Even his lithographs
from Paris and the provinces are masterpieces of spirited, impressionist
observation--qualities which he owed, not to Gros, but to Constable. He
was the first to communicate the knowledge of the great English classic
painters to the youth of France, and they of Barbizon and Ville d'Avray
continued to spin the threads which connect Constable with the present.
[Illustration: RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON.]
CHAPTER XXV
LANDSCAPE FROM 1830
That same Salon of 1822 in which Delacroix exhibited his "Dante's Bark"
brought to Frenchmen a knowledge of the powerful movement which had
taken place on the opposite side of the Channel. English water-colour
painting was brilliantly represented by Bonington, who sent his "View of
Lillebonne" and his "View of Havre." Copley Fielding, Robson, and John
Varley also contributed works; and these easy, spirited productions,
with their skies washed in broadly and their bright, clear tones, were
like a revelation to the young French artists of the period. The horizon
was felt to be growing clear. In 1824, at the time when Delacroix's
"Massacre of Chios" appeared, the sun actually rose, bringing a flood of
light. The English had learnt the way to France, and took the Louvre by
storm. John Constable was represented by three pictures, and Bonington,
Copley Fielding, Harding, Samuel Prout, and Varley were also accorded a
place. This exhibition gave the deathblow to Classical landscape
painting. Michallon had died young in 1822; and men like Bidault and
Watelet could do nothing against such a battalion of colourists.
Constable alone passed sentence upon them of eternal condemnation.
Familiar neither with Georges Michel nor with the great Dutch painters,
the French had not remarked that a landscape has need of a sky
expressive of the spirit of the hour and the character of the season.
Even what was done by Michel seemed a kind of diffident calligraphy when
set beside the fresh strand-pieces of Bonington, the creations of the
water-colour artists, bathed as they were in light, and the bold
pictures of the Bergholt master, with their bright green and their
cloudy horizon. The French landscape painters, who had been so timid
until then, recognised that their painting had been a convention,
despite all their striving after truth to nature.
Constable had been the first to free himself from every stereotyped
rule, and he was an influence in France. The younger generation were in
ecstasies over this intense green, the agitated clouds, this
effervescent power inspiring everything with life. Though as yet but
little esteemed even in England, Constable received the gold medal in
Paris, and from that time took a fancy to Parisian exhibitions, and
still in 1827 exhibited in the Louvre by the side of Bonington, who had
but one year more in which to give admirable lessons by his bright
plains and clear shining skies. At the same time Bonington's friend and
compatriot, William Reynolds, then likewise domiciled in Paris,
contributed some of his powerful and often delicate landscape studies,
the tender grey notes of which are like anticipations of Corot. This
influence of the English upon the creators of _paysage intime_ has long
been an acknowledged fact, since Delacroix himself, in his article
"Questions sur le Beau" in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ in 1854, has
affirmed it frankly.
The very next years announced what a ferment Constable had stirred in
the more restless spirits. The period from 1827 to 1830 showed the
birth-throes of French landscape painting. In 1831 it was born. In this
year, for ever marked in the annals of French, and indeed of European
art, there appeared together in the Salon, for the first time, all those
young artists who are now honoured as the greatest in the century: all,
or almost all, were children of Paris, the sons of small townsmen or of
humble artisans; all were born in the old quarter of the city or in its
suburbs, in the midst of a desolate wilderness of houses, and destined
for that very reason to be great landscape painters. For it is not
through chance that _paysage intime_ immediately passed from London, the
city of smoke, to Paris, the second great modern capital, and reached
Germany from thence only at a much later time.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
THÉODORE ROUSSEAU.]
"Do you remember the time," asks Bürger-Thoré of Théodore Rousseau in
the dedicatory letter to his _Salon_ of 1844,--"do you still recall the
years when we sat on the window-ledges of our attics in the Rue de
Taitbout, and let our feet dangle at the edge of the roof, contemplating
the chaos of houses and chimneys, which you with a twinkle in your eye
compared to mountains, trees, and outlines of the earth? You were not
able to go to the Alps, into the cheerful country, and so you created
picturesque landscapes for yourself out of these horrible skeletons of
wall. Do you still recall the little tree in Rothschild's garden, which
we caught sight of between two roofs? It was the one green thing that we
could see; every fresh shoot of the little poplar wakened our interest
in spring, and in autumn we counted the falling leaves."
From this mood sprang modern landscape painting with its delicate
reserve in subject, and its vigorously heightened love of nature. Up to
the middle of the century nature was too commonplace and ordinary for
the Germans; and it was therefore hard for them to establish a
spiritual relationship with her. Landscape painting recognised its
function in appealing to the understanding by the execution of points of
geographical interest, or exciting a frigid curiosity by brilliant
fireworks. But these children of the city, who with a heartfelt sympathy
counted the budding and falling leaves of a single tree descried from
their little attic window; these dreamers, who in their imagination
constructed beautiful landscapes from the moss-crusted gutters of the
roof and the chimneys and chimney smoke, were sufficiently schooled,
when they came into the country, to feel the breath of the great mother
of all, even where it was but faintly exhaled. Where a man's heart is
full he does not think about geographical information, and no roll of
tom-toms is needed to attract the attention of those whose eyes are
opened. Their spirit was sensitive, and their imagination sufficiently
alert to catch with ecstasy, even from the most delicate and reserved
notes, the harmony of that heavenly concert which nature executes on all
its earthly instruments, at every moment and in all places.
[Illustration: ROUSSEAU. MORNING.]
[Illustration: ROUSSEAU. LANDSCAPE, MORNING EFFECT.]
Thus they had none of them any further need for extensive pilgrimage; to
seek impulse for work they had not far to go. Croissy, Bougival,
Saint-Cloud, and Marly were their Arcadia. Their farthest journeys were
to the banks of the Oise, the woods of L'Isle Adam, Auvergne, Normandy,
and Brittany. But they cared most of all to stay in the forest of
Fontainebleau, which--by one of those curious chances that so often
recur in history--played for a second time a highly important part in
the development of French art. A hundred years before, it was the
brilliant centre of the French Renaissance, the resort of those Italian
artists who found in the palace there a second Vatican, and in Francis I
another Leo X. In the nineteenth century, too, the Renaissance of French
painting was achieved in Fontainebleau, only it had nothing to do with a
school of mannered figure painters, but with a group of the most
delicate landscape artists. From a sense of one's duty to art one
studies in the palace the elegant goddesses of Primaticcio, the laughing
bacchantes of Cellini, and all the golden, festal splendour of the
Cinquecento; but the heart is not touched till one stands outside in the
forest on the soil where Rousseau and Corot and Millet and Diaz painted.
How much may be felt and thought when one saunters of a dreamy evening,
lost in one's own meditations, across the heath of the _plateau de la
Belle Croix_ and through the arching oaks of _Bas Bréau_ to Barbizon,
the Mecca of modern art, where the secrets of _paysage intime_ were
revealed to the Parisian landscape painters by the nymph of
Fontainebleau! There was a time when men built their Gothic cathedrals
soaring into the sky, after the model of the majestic palaces of the
trees. The dim and sacred mist of incense hovered about the lofty
pointed arches, and through painted windows the broken daylight shone,
inspiring awe; the fair picture of a saint beckoned from above the
altar, touched by the gleam of lamps and candles; gilded carvings
glimmered strangely, and overwhelming strains from the fugues of Bach
reverberated in the peal of the organ throughout the consecrated space.
But now the Gothic cathedrals are transformed once more into palaces of
trees. The towering oaks are the buttresses, the tracery of branches the
choir screen, the clouds the incense, the wind sighing through the
boughs the peal of the organ, and the sun the altar-piece. Man is once
more a fire-worshipper, as in his childhood; the church has become the
world, and the world has become the church.
How the spirit soars at the trill of a blackbird beneath the leafy roof
of mighty primæval oaks! One feels as though one had been transplanted
into the Saturnian age, when men lived a joyous, unchequered life in
holy unison with nature. For this park is still primæval, in spite of
all the carriage roads by which it is now traversed, in spite of all the
guides who lounge upon the granite blocks of the hollows of Opremont.
Yellowish-green ferns varying in tint cover the soil like a carpet. The
woods are broken by great wastes of rock. Perhaps there is no spot in
the world where such splendid beeches and huge majestic oaks stretch
their gnarled branches to the sky--in one place spreading forth in
luxuriant glory, and in another scarred by lightning and bitten by the
wintry cold. It is just such scenes of ravage that make the grandest,
the wildest, and the most sombre pictures. The might of the great forces
of nature, striking down the heads of oaks like thistles, is felt
nowhere in the same degree.
Barbizon itself is a small village three miles to the north of
Fontainebleau, and, according to old tradition, founded by robbers who
formerly dwelt in the forest. On both sides of the road connecting it
with the charming little villages of Dammarie and Chailly there stretch
long rows of chestnut, apple, and acacia trees. There are barely a
hundred houses in the place. Most of them are overgrown with wild vine,
shut in by thick hedges of hawthorn, and have a garden in front, where
roses bloom amid cabbages and cauliflowers. At nine o'clock in the
evening all Barbizon is asleep, but before four in the morning it awakes
once more for work in the fields.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
ROUSSEAU. THE VILLAGE OF BECQUIGNY IN PICARDY.]
Historians of after-years will occupy themselves in endeavouring to
discover when the first immigration of Parisian painters to this spot
took place. It is reported that one of David's pupils painted in the
forest of Fontainebleau and lived in Barbizon. The only lodging to be
got at that time was in a barn, which the former tailor of the place, a
man of the name of Ganne, turned into an inn in 1823. Here, after 1830,
Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Brascassat, and many others alighted when they
came to follow their studies in Barbizon from the spring to the autumn.
Of an evening they clambered up to their miserable bedroom, and fastened
to the head of the bed with drawing-pins the studies made in the course
of the day. It was only later that Père Copain, an old peasant, who had
begun life as a shepherd with three francs a month, was struck with the
apt idea of buying in a few acres and building upon them small houses to
let to painters. By this enterprise the man became rich, and gradually
grew to be a capitalist, lending money to all who, in spite of their
standing as celebrated Parisian artists, did not enjoy the blessings of
fortune. But the general place of assembly was still the old barn
employed in Ganne's establishment, and in the course of years its walls
were covered with large charcoal drawings, studies, and pictures. Here,
in a patriarchal, easy-going, homely fashion, artists gathered together
with their wives and children of an evening. Festivities also were held
in the place, in particular that ball when Ganne's daughter, a godchild
of Madame Rousseau, celebrated her wedding. Rousseau and Millet were the
decorators of the room; the entire space of the barn served as
ball-room, the walls being adorned with ivy. Corot, always full of fun
and high spirits, led the polonaise, which moved through a labyrinth of
bottles placed on the floor.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
ROUSSEAU. LA HUTTE.]
They painted in the forest. But they did not take the trouble to carry
the instruments of their art home again. They kept breakfast, canvas,
and brushes in holes in the rocks. Never before, probably, have men so
lost themselves in nature. At every hour of the day, in the cool light
of morning, at sunny noon, in the golden dusk, even in the twilight of
blue moonlight nights, they were out in the field and the forest,
learning to surprise everlasting nature at every moment of her
mysterious life. The forest was their studio, and revealed to them all
its secrets.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
ROUSSEAU. EVENING.]
The result of this life _en plein air_ became at once the same as it had
been with Constable. Earlier artists worked with the conception and the
technique of Waterloo, Ruysdael, and Everdingen, and believed themselves
incapable of doing anything without gnarled, heroic oaks. Even Michel
was hard-bound in the gallery style of the Dutch, and for Decamps
atmosphere was still a thing unknown or non-existent. He placed a harsh
light, opaque as plaster, against a background as black as coal. Even
the colours of Delacroix were merely tones of the palette; he wanted to
create preconceived decorative harmonies, and not simply to interpret
reality. Following the English, the masters of Fontainebleau made the
discovery of air and light. They did not paint the world, like the other
Romanticists, in exuberantly varying hues recalling the old masters:
they saw it _entouré d'air_, and tempered by the tones of the
atmosphere. And since their time the "harmony of light and air with that
of which they are the life and illumination" has become the great
problem of painting. Through this art grew young again, and works of art
received the breathing life, the fresh bloom, and the delicate harmony
which are to be found everywhere in nature itself, and which are only
reached with much difficulty by any artificial method of tuning into
accord. After Constable they were the first who recognised that the
beauty of a landscape does not lie in objects themselves, but in the
lights that are cast upon them. Of course, there is also an
articulation of forms in nature. When Boecklin paints a grove with tall
and solemn trees in the evening, when he forms to himself a vision of
the mysterious haunts of his "Fire-worshippers," there is scarcely any
need of colour. The outline alone is so majestically stern that it makes
man feel his littleness utterly, and summons him to devotional thoughts.
But the subtle essence by which nature appeals either joyously or
sorrowfully to the spirit depends still more on the light or gloom in
which she is bathed; and this mood is not marked by an inquisitive eye:
the introspective gaze, the imagination itself, secretes it in nature.
And here a second point is touched.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
ROUSSEAU. SUNSET.]
The peculiarity of all these masters, who on their first appearance were
often despised as realists or naturalists, consists precisely in this:
they never represented, at least in the works of their later period in
which they thoroughly expressed themselves,--they never represented
actual nature in the manner of photography, but freely painted their own
moods from memory, just as Goethe when he stood in the little house in
the Kikelhahn near Ilmenau, instead of elaborating a prosaic description
of the Kikelhahn, wrote the verses _Ueber allen Wipfeln ist Ruh_. In
this poem of Goethe one does not learn how the summits looked, and there
is no allusion to the play of light, and yet the forest, dimly
illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, is presented clearly to the
inward eye. Any poet before Goethe's time would have made a broad and
epical description, and produced a picture by the addition of details;
but here the very music of the words creates a picture of rest and
quietude. The works of the Fontainebleau artists are Goethe-like poems
of nature in pigments. They are as far removed from the æsthetic
aridness of the older landscape of composition, pieced together from
studies, as from the flat, prosaic fidelity to nature of that "entirely
null and void, spuriously realistic painting of the so-called guardians
of woods and waters." They were neither concerned to master nature and
compose a picture from her according to conventional rules, nor
pedantically to draw the portrait of any given region. They did not
think of topographical accuracy, or of preparing a map of their country.
A landscape was not for them a piece of scenery, but a condition of
soul. They represent the victory of lyricism over dry though inflated
prose. Impressed by some vision of nature, they warm to their work and
produce pictures that could not have been anticipated. And thus they
fathomed art to its profoundest depths. Their works were fragrant poems
sprung from moods of spirit which had risen in them during a walk in the
forest. Perhaps only Titian, Rubens, and Watteau had previously looked
upon nature with the same eyes. And as in the case of these artists, so
also in that of the Fontainebleau painters, it was necessary that a
genuine realistic art, a long period of the most intimate study of
nature, should have to be gone through before they reached this height.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
ROUSSEAU. THE LAKE AMONG THE ROCKS AT BARBIZON.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
ROUSSEAU. A POND, FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU.]
In the presence of nature one saturates one's self with truth; and after
returning to the studio one squeezes the sponge, as Jules Dupré
expressed it. Only after they had satiated themselves with the knowledge
of truth, only after nature with all her individual phenomena had been
interwoven with their inmost being, could they, without effort, and
without the purpose of representing determined objects, paint from
personal sentiment, and give expression to their humour, in the mere
gratification of impulse. Thence comes their wide difference from each
other. Painters who work according to fixed rules resemble one another,
and those who aim at a distinct copy of nature resemble one another no
less. But each one of the Fontainebleau painters, according to his
character and his mood for the time being, received different
impressions from the same spot in nature, and at the same moment of
time. Each found a landscape and a moment which appealed to his
sentiment more perceptibly than any other. One delighted in spring and
dewy morning, another in a cold, clear day, another in the threatening
majesty of storm, another in the sparkling effects of sportive sunbeams,
and another in evening after sundown, when colours have faded and forms
are dim. Each one obeyed his peculiar temperament, and adapted his
technique to the altogether personal expression of his way of seeing
and feeling. Each one is entirely himself, each one an original mind,
each picture a spiritual revelation, and often one of touching
simplicity and greatness: _homo additus naturæ_. And having dedicated
themselves, more than all their predecessors, to personality creating in
and for itself, they have become the founders of the new creed in art.
That strong and firmly rooted master _Théodore Rousseau_ was the epic
poet, the plastic artist of the Pleïades. "_Le chêne des roches_" was
one of his masterpieces, and he stands himself amid the art of his time
like an oak embedded in rocks. His father was a tailor who lived in the
Rue Neuve-Saint Eustache, Nr. 4 _au quatrième_. As a boy he is said to
have specially devoted himself to mathematics, and to have aimed at
becoming a student at the Polytechnic Institute. Thus the dangerous,
doctrinaire tendency, which beset him in his last years, of making art
more of a science than is really practicable, and of referring
everything to some law, lay even in his boyish tastes. He grew up in the
studio of the Classicist Lethière, and looked on whilst the latter
painted both his large Louvre pictures, "The Death of Brutus" and "The
Death of Virginia." He even thought himself of competing for the _Prix
de Rome_. But the composition of his "historical landscape" was not a
success. Then he took his paint-boxes, left Lethière's studio, and
wandered over to Montmartre. Even his first little picture, "The
Telegraph Tower" of 1826, announced the aim which he was tentatively
endeavouring to reach.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ CAMILLE COROT.]
At the very time when Watelet's metallic waterfalls and zinc trees were
being drawn up in line, when the pupils of Bertin hunted the Calydonian
boar, or drowned Zenobia in the waves of the Araxes, Rousseau, set free
from the ambition of winning the _Prix de Rome_, was painting humble
plains within the precincts of Paris, with little brooks in the
neighbourhood which had nothing that deserved the name of waves.
His first excursion to Fontainebleau occurred in the year 1833, and in
1834 he painted his first masterpiece, the "Côtés de Grandville," that
picture, replete with deep and powerful feeling for nature, which seems
the great triumphant title-page of all his work. A firm resolve to
accept reality as it is, and a remarkable eye for the local character of
landscape and for the structure and anatomy of the earth--all qualities
revealing the Rousseau of later years--were here to be seen in their
full impressiveness and straightforward actuality. He received for this
work a medal of the third class. At the same time his works were
excluded from making any further appearance in the Salon for many years
to come. Concession might be made to a beginner; but the master seemed
dangerous to the academicians. Two pictures, "Cows descending in the
Upper Jura" and "The Chestnut Avenue," which he had destined for the
Salon of 1835, were rejected by the hanging committee, and during twelve
years his works met with a similar fate, although the leading critical
intellects of Paris, Thoré, Gustave Planché, and Théophile Gautier,
broke their lances in his behalf. Amongst the rejected of the present
century, Théodore Rousseau is probably the most famous. At that period
he was selling his pictures for five and ten louis-d'or. It was only
after the February Revolution of 1848, when the Academic Committee had
fallen with the _bourgeois_ king, that the doors of the Salon were
opened to him again, and in the meanwhile his pictures had made their
way quietly and by their unassisted merit. In the sequestered solitude
of Barbizon he had matured into an artistic individuality of the highest
calibre, and become a painter to whom the history of art must accord a
place by the side of Ruysdael, Hobbema, and Constable.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COROT. THE BRIDGE OF ST. ANGELO, ROME.]
He painted everything in Barbizon--the plains and the hills, the river
and the forest, all the seasons of the year and all the hours of the
day. The succession of his moods is as inexhaustible as boundless nature
herself. Skies gilded by the setting sun, phases of dewy morning, plains
basking in light, woods in the russet-yellow foliage of autumn: these
are the subjects of Théodore Rousseau--an endless procession of poetic
effects, expressed at first by the mere instinct of emotion and later
with a mathematical precision which is often a little strained, though
always irresistibly forcible. Marvellous are his autumn landscapes with
their ruddy foliage of beech; majestic are those pictures in which he
expressed the profound sentiment of solitude as it passes over you in
the inviolate tangle of the forest, inviting the spirit to commune with
itself; but especially characteristic of Rousseau are those plains with
huge isolated trees, over which the mere light of common day rests
almost coldly and dispassionately.
[Illustration: COROT AT WORK.]
It is an artistic or psychological anomaly that in this romantic
generation a man could be born in whom there was nothing of the
Romanticist. Théodore Rousseau was an experimentalist, a great worker, a
restless and seeking spirit, ever tormented and unsatisfied with itself,
a nature wholly without sentimentality and impassionless, the very
opposite of his predecessor Huet. Huet made nature the mirror of the
passions, the melancholy and the tragic suffering which agitate the
human spirit with their rage. Whilst he celebrated the irresistible
powers and blind forces, the elemental genii which rule the skies and
the waters, he wanted to waken an impression of terror and desolation in
the spirit of the beholder. He piled together masses of rock, lent
dramatic passion to the clouds, and revelled with delight in the
sharpest contrasts. Rousseau's pervasive characteristic is absolute
plainness and actuality. Such a simplicity of shadow had never existed
before. Since the Renaissance artists had systematically heightened the
intensity of shadows for the sake of effect; Rousseau relied on the true
and simple doctrine that may be formulated in the phrase: the more light
there is the fainter and more transparent are the shadows, not the
darker, as Decamps and Huet painted them. Or, to speak more generally,
in nature the intensity of shadows stands in an inverse relation to the
intensity of the light.
[Illustration: COROT. DAPHNIS AND CHLOE.]
Rousseau does not force on the spectator any preconceived mood of his
own, but leaves him before a picture with all the freedom and capacity
for personal feeling which he would have received from the spectacle of
nature herself. The painter does not address him directly, but lets
nature have free play, just as a medium merely acts as the vehicle of a
spirit. So personal in execution and so absolutely impersonal in
conception are Rousseau's pictures. Huet translated his moods by the
assistance of nature; Rousseau is an incomparable witness, confining
himself strictly to the event, and giving his report of it in brief,
virile speech, in clear-cut style. Huet puts one out of humour, because
it is his own humour which he is determined to force. Rousseau seldom
fails of effect, because he renders the effect which has struck him,
faithfully and without marginal notes. Only in the convincing power of
representation, and never in the forcing of a calculated mood, does the
"mood" of his landscape lie. Or, to take an illustration from the
province of portrait painting, when Lenbach paints Prince Bismarck, it
is Lenbach's Bismarck; as an intellectual painter he has given an
entirely subjective rendering of Bismarck, and compels the spectator so
to see him. Holbein, when he painted Henry VIII, proceeded in the
opposite way: for him characterisation depended on his revealing his own
character as little as possible; he completely subordinated himself to
his subject, surrendered himself, and religiously painted all that he
saw, leaving it to others to carry away from the picture what they
pleased. And Théodore Rousseau, too, was possessed by the spirit of the
old German portrait painter. He set his whole force of purpose to the
task of letting nature manifest herself, free from any preconceived
interpretation. His pictures are absolutely without effective point, but
there is so much power and deep truth, so much simplicity, boldness, and
sincerity in his manner of seeing and painting nature, and of feeling
her intense and forceful life, that they have become great works of art
by this alone, like the portraits of Holbein. More impressive tones,
loftier imagination, more moving tenderness, and more intoxicating
harmonies are at the command of other masters, but few had truer or more
profound articulation, and not one has been so sincere as Théodore
Rousseau. Rousseau saw into the inmost being of nature, as Holbein into
Henry VIII, and the impression he received, the emotion he felt, is a
thing which he communicates broadly, boldly, and entirely. He is a
portrait painter who knows his model through and through; moreover, he
is a connoisseur of the old masters who knows what it is to make a
picture. Every production of Rousseau is a deliberate and
well-considered work, a cannon-shot, and no mere dropping fusilade of
small arms; not a light _feuilleton_, but an earnest treatise of strong
character. Though a powerful colourist, he works by the simplest means,
and has at bottom the feeling of a draughtsman; which is principally the
reason why, at the present day, when one looks at Rousseau's pictures,
one thinks rather of Hobbema than of Billotte and Claude Monet.
His absolute mastery over drawing even induced him in his last years to
abandon painting altogether. He designated it contemptuously as
falsehood, because it smeared over the truth, the anatomy of nature.
[Illustration: COROT. VUE DE TOSCANE.]
In Rousseau there was even more the genius of a sculptor than of a
portrait painter. His spirit, positive, exact, like that of a
mathematician, and far more equipped with artistic precision than
pictorial qualities, delighted in everything sharply defined, plastic,
and full of repose: moss-grown stones, oaks of the growth of centuries,
marshes and standing water, rude granite blocks of the forest of
Fontainebleau, and trees bedded in the rocks of the glens of Opremont.
In a quite peculiar sense was the oak his favourite tree--the mighty,
wide-branching, primæval oak which occupies the centre of one of his
masterpieces, "A Pond," and spreads its great gnarled boughs to the
cloudy sky in almost every one of his pictures. It is only Rembrandt's
three oaks that stand in like manner, firm and broad of stem, as though
they were living personalities of the North, in a lonely field beneath
the hissing rain. To ensure the absolute vitality of organisms was for
Rousseau the object of unintermittent toil.
[Illustration: COROT. AT SUNSET.]
Plants, trees, and rocks were not forms summarily observed and clumped
together in an arbitrary fashion; for him they were beings gifted with a
soul, breathing creatures, each one of which had its physiognomy, its
individuality, its part to play, and its distinction of being in the
great harmony of universal nature. "By the harmony of air and light with
that of which they are the life and the illumination I will make you
hear the trees moaning beneath the North wind and the birds calling to
their young." To achieve that aim he thought that he could not do too
much. As Dürer worked seven times on the same scenes of the Passion
until he had found the simplest and most speaking expression, so
Rousseau treated the same motives ten and twenty times. Restless are his
efforts to discover different phases of the same subject, to approach
his model from the most various points of view, and to do justice to it
on every side. He begins an interrupted picture again and again, and
adds something to it to heighten the expression, as Leonardo died with
the consciousness that there was something yet to be done to his
"Joconda." Sometimes a laboured effect is brought into his works by this
method, but in other ways he has gained in this struggle with reality a
power of exposition, a capacity of expression, a force of appeal, and
such a remarkable insight for rightness of effect that every one of his
good pictures could be hung without detriment in a gallery of old
masters; the nineteenth century did not see many arise who could bear
such a proximity in every respect. His landscapes are as full of sap as
creation itself; they reveal a forcible condensation of nature. The only
words which can be used to describe him are strength, health, and
energy. "It ought to be: in the beginning was the Power."
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
COROT. THE RUIN.]
From his youth upwards Théodore Rousseau was a masculine spirit; even as
a stripling he was a man above all juvenile follies--one might almost
say, a philosopher without ideals. In literature Turgenief's conception
of nature might be most readily compared with that of Rousseau. In
Turgenief's _Diary of a Sportsman_, written in 1852, everything is so
fresh and full of sap that one could imagine it was not so much the work
of a human pen as a direct revelation from the forest and the steppes.
Though men are elsewhere habituated to see their joys and sorrows
reflected in nature, the sentiment of his own personality falls from
Turgenief when he contemplates the eternal spectacle of the elements. He
plunges into nature and loses the consciousness of his own being in
hers; and he becomes a part of what he contemplates. For him the majesty
of nature lies in her treating everything, from the worm to the human
being, with impassiveness. Man receives neither love nor hatred at her
hands; she neither rejoices in the good that he does nor complains of
sin and crime, but looks beyond him with her deep, earnest eyes because
he is an object of complete indifference to her. "The last of thy
brothers might vanish off the face of the earth and not a needle of the
pine branches would tremble." Nature has something icy, apathetic,
terrible; and the fear which she can inspire through this indifference
of hers ceases only when we begin to understand the relationship in
which we are to our surroundings, when we begin to comprehend that man
and animal, tree and flower, bird and fish, owe their existence to this
one Mother. So Turgenief came to the same point as Spinoza.
[Illustration: COROT. EVENING.]
And Rousseau did the same. The nature of Théodore Rousseau was devoid of
all excitable enthusiasm. Thus the world he painted became something
austere, earnest, and inaccessible beneath his hands. He lived in it
alone, fleeing from his fellows, and for this reason human figures are
seldom to be found in his pictures. He loved to paint nature on cold,
grey impassive days, when the trees cast great shadows and forms stand
out forcibly against the sky. He is not the painter of morning and
evening twilight. There is no awakening and no dawn, no charm in these
landscapes and no youth. Children would not laugh here, nor lovers
venture to caress. In these trees the birds would build no nests, nor
their fledglings twitter. His oaks stand as if they had so stood from
eternity.
"Die unbegrieflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag."
Like Turgenief, Rousseau ended in Pantheism.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
COROT. AN EVENING IN NORMANDY.]
He familiarised himself more and more with the endless variety of plants
and trees, of the earth and the sky at the differing hours of the day:
he made his forms even more precise. He wished to paint the organic life
of inanimate nature--the life which heaves unconsciously everywhere,
sighing in the air, streaming from the bosom of the earth, and vibrating
in the tiniest blade of grass as positively as it palpitates through the
branches of the old oaks. These trees and herbs are not human, but they
are characterised by their peculiar features, just as though they were
men. The poplars grow like pyramids, and have green and silvered leaves,
the oaks dark foliage and gnarled far-reaching boughs. The oaks stand
fixed and immovable against the storm, whilst the slender poplars bend
pliantly before it. This curious distinction in all the forms of nature,
each one of which fulfils a course of existence like that of man, was a
problem which pursued Rousseau throughout his life as a vast riddle.
Observe his trees: they are not dead things; the sap of life mounts
unseen through their strong trunks to the smallest branches and shoots,
which spread from the extremity of the boughs like clawing fingers. The
soil works and alters; every plant reveals the inner structure of the
organism which produced it. And this striving even became a curse to him
in his last period. Nature became for him an organism which he studied
as an anatomist studies a corpse, an organism all the members of which
act one upon the other according to logical laws, like the wheels of a
machine; and for the proper operation of this machine the smallest
plants seemed as necessary as the mightiest oaks, the gravel as
important as the most tremendous rock.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
COROT. THE DANCE OF THE NYMPHS.]
Convinced that there was nothing in nature either indifferent or without
its purpose, and that everything had a justification for its existence
and played a part in the movement of universal life, he believed also
that in everything, however small it might be, there was a special
pictorial significance; and he toiled to discover this, to make it
evident, and often forgot the while that art must make sacrifices if it
is to move and charm. In his boundless veneration for the logical
organism of nature he held, as a kind of categorical imperative, that it
was right to give the same importance to the infinitely small as to the
infinitely great. The notion was chimerical, and it wrecked him. In his
last period the only things that will preserve their artistic reputation
are his marvellously powerful drawings. No one ever had such a feeling
for values, and thus he knew how to give his drawings--quite apart from
their pithy weight of stroke--an effect of light which was forcibly
striking. Just as admirable were the water-colours produced under the
influence of Japanese picture-books. The pictures of petty detail which
belong to these years have only an historical interest, and that merely
because it is instructive to see how a great genius can deceive himself.
One of his last works, the view of Mont Blanc, with the boundless
horizon and the countless carefully and scrupulously delineated planes
of ground, has neither pictorial beauty nor majesty. In the presence of
this bizarre work one feels astonishment at the artist's endurance and
strength of will, but disappointment at the result. He wanted to win the
secret of its being from every undulation of the ground, from every
blade of grass, and from every leaf; he was anxiously bent upon what he
called _planimétrie_, upon the importance of horizontal planes, and he
accentuated detail and accessory work beyond measure. His pantheistic
faith in nature brought Théodore Rousseau to his fall. Those who did not
know him spoke of his childish stippling and of the decline of his
talent. Those who did know him saw in this stippling the issue of the
same endeavours which poor Charles de la Berge had made before him, and
of the principles on which the landscape of the English Pre-Raphaelites
was being based about this time. If one looks at his works and then
reads his life one almost comes to have for him a kind of religious
veneration. There is something of the martyr in this insatiable
observer, whose life was one long struggle, and to whom the study of the
earth's construction and the anatomy of branches was almost a religion.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
COROT. A DANCE.]
[Illustration: J. B. C. COROT. LANDSCAPE.]
At first he had to struggle for ten years for bread and recognition. It
seems hardly credible that his landscapes, even after 1848, when they
had obtained entry into the Salon, were a source of irritation there for
years, simply because they were green. The public was so accustomed to
brown trees and brown grass, that every other colour in the landscape
was an offence against decency, and before a green picture the
Philistine immediately cried out, "Spinage!" "_Allez, c'était dur
d'ouvrir la brêche_," said he, in his later years. And at last, at the
World Exhibition of 1855, when he had made it clear to Europe who
Théodore Rousseau was, the evening of his life was saddened by pain and
illness. He had married a poor unfortunate creature, a wild child of the
forest, the only feminine being that he had found time to love during
his life of toil. After a few years of marriage she became insane, and
whilst he tended her Rousseau himself fell a victim to an affection of
the brain which darkened his last years. Death came to his release in
1867. As he lay dying his mad wife danced and trilled to the screaming
of her parrot. He rests "_dans le plain calme de la nature_" in the
village churchyard at Chailly, near Barbizon, buried in front of his
much-loved forest. Millet erected the headstone--a simple cross upon an
unhewn block of sandstone, with a tablet of brass on which are inscribed
the words:
[Illustration: _Hanjstaengl._
COROT. LA ROUTE D'ARRAS.]
THÉODORE ROUSSEAU, PEINTRE.
"_Rousseau c'est un aigle. Quant à moi, je ne suis qu'une alouette qui
pousse de petites chansons dans mes nuages gris._" With these words
_Camille Corot_ has indicated the distinction between Rousseau and
himself. They denote the two opposite poles of modern landscape. What
attracted the plastic artists, Rousseau, Ruysdael, and Hobbema--the
relief of objects, the power of contours, the solidity of forms--was not
Corot's concern. Whilst Rousseau never spoke about colour with his
pupils, but as _ceterum censeo_ invariably repeated, "_Enfin, la forme
est la première chose à observer_," Corot himself admitted that drawing
was not his strong point. When he tried to paint rocks he was but
moderately effective, and all his efforts at drawing the human figure
were seldom crowned with real success, although in his last years he
returned to the task with continuous zeal. Apart from such peculiar
exceptions as that wonderful picture "The Toilet," his figures are
always the weakest part of his landscapes, and only have a good effect
when in the background they reveal their delicate outlines, half lost in
rosy haze. He was not much more felicitous with his animals, and in
particular there often appear in his pictures great heavy cows, which
are badly planted on their feet, and which one wishes that he had left
out. Amongst trees he did not care to paint the oak, the favourite tree
with all artists who have a passion for form, nor the chestnut, nor the
elm, but preferred to summon, amid the delicate play of sunbeams, the
aspen, the poplar, the alder, the birch with its white slender stem and
its pale, tremulous leaves, and the willow with its light foliage. In
Rousseau a tree is a proud, toughly knotted personality, a noble,
self-conscious creation; in Corot it is a soft tremulous being rocking
in the fragrant air, in which it whispers and murmurs of love and joy.
His favourite season was not the autumn, when the turning leaves, hard
as steel, stand out with firm lines, quiet and motionless, against the
clear sky, but the early spring, when the farthest twigs upon the boughs
deck themselves with little leaves of tender green, which vibrate and
quiver with the least breath of air. He had, moreover, a perfectly
wonderful secret of rendering the effect of the tiny blades of grass and
the flowers which grow upon the meadows in June; he delighted to paint
the banks of a stream with tall bushes bending to the water, and he
loved water itself in undetermined clearness and in the shifting glance
of light, leaving it here in shadow and touching it there with
brightness; the sky in the depths beneath wedded to the bright border of
the pool or the vanishing outlines of the bank, and the clouds floating
across the sky, and here and there embracing a light shining fragment of
the blue. He loved morning before sunrise, when the white mists hover
over pools like a light veil of gauze, and gradually disperse as the sun
breaks through, but he had a passion for evening which was almost
greater: he loved the soft vapours which gather in the gloom, thickening
until they become pale grey velvet mantles, as peace and rest descend
upon the earth with the drawing on of night.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ JULES DUPRÉ.]
In contradistinction from Rousseau his specialty was everything soft and
wavering, everything that has neither determined form nor sharp lines,
and that, by not appealing too clearly to the eye, is the more conducive
to dreamy reveries. It is not the spirit of a sculptor that lives in
Corot, but that of a poet, or still better, the spirit of a musician,
since music is the least plastic of the arts. It is not surprising to
read in his biography that, like Watteau, he had almost a greater
passion for music than for painting, and that when he painted he had
always an old song or an opera aria upon his lips, that when he spoke of
his pictures he had a taste for drawing comparisons from music, and that
he had a season-ticket at the _Conservatoire_, never missed a concert,
and played upon the violin himself. Indeed, there is something of the
tender note of this instrument in his pictures, which make such a
sweetly solemn appeal through their delicious silver tone. Beside
Rousseau, the plastic artist, Père Corot is an idyllic painter of
melting grace; beside Rousseau, the realist, he seems a dreamy musician;
beside Rousseau, the virile spirit earnestly making experiments in art,
he appears like a bashful schoolgirl in love. Rousseau approached nature
in broad daylight, with screws and levers, as a cool-headed man of
science; Corot caressed and flattered her, sung her wooing love-songs
till she descended to meet him in the twilight hours, and whispered to
him, her beloved, the secrets which Rousseau was unable to wring from
her by violence.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ THE HOUSE OF JULES DUPRÉ AT L'ISLE-ADAM.]
_Corot_ was sixteen years senior to Rousseau. He still belonged to the
eighteenth century, to the time when, under the dictatorship of David,
Paris transformed herself into imperial Rome. David, Gérard, Guérin, and
Prudhon, artists so different in talent, were the painters whose works
met his first eager glances, and no particular acuteness is needed to
recognise in the Nymphs and Cupids with which Corot in after-years,
especially in the evening of his life, dotted his fragrant landscapes,
the direct issue of Prudhon's charming goddesses, the reminiscences of
his youth nourished on the antique. He, too, was a child of old Paris,
with its narrow streets and corners. His father was a hairdresser in the
Rue du Bac, number 37, and had made the acquaintance of a girl who lived
at number 1 in the same street, close to the Pont Royal, and was
shop-girl at a milliner's. He carried on his barber's shop until 1778,
when Camille, the future painter, was two years old. Then Madame Corot
herself undertook the millinery establishment in which she had once
worked. There might be read on the front of the narrow little house,
number 1 of the Rue du Bac, _Madame Corot, Marchande de Modes_. M.
Corot, a polite and very correct little man, raised the business to
great prosperity. The Tuileries were opposite, and under Napoleon I
Corot became Court "modiste." As such he must have attained a certain
celebrity, as even the theatre took his name in vain. A piece which was
then frequently played at the Comédie Française contains the passage: "I
have just come from Corot, but could not speak to him; he was locked up
in his private room occupied in composing a new spring hat."
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
DUPRÉ. THE SETTING SUN.]
Camille went to the high school in Rouen, and was then destined,
according to the wish of his father, to adopt some serious calling "by
which money was to be made." He began his career with a yard-measure in
a linen-draper's establishment, ran through the suburbs of Paris with a
book of patterns under his arm selling cloth--_Couleur olive_--and in
his absence of mind made the clumsiest mistakes. After eight years of
opposition his father consented to his becoming a painter. "You will
have a yearly allowance of twelve hundred francs," said old Corot, "and
if you can live on that you may do as you please." At the Pont Royal,
behind his father's house, he painted his first picture, amid the
tittering of the little dressmaker's apprentices who looked on with
curiosity from the window, but one of whom, Mademoiselle Rose, remained
his dear friend through life. This was in 1823, and twenty years went
by before he returned to French soil in the pictures that he painted.
Victor Bertin became his teacher; in other words, Classicism, style, and
coldness. He sought diligently to do as others; he drew studies,
composed historical landscapes, and painted as he saw the academicians
painting around him. To conclude his orthodox course of training it only
remained for him to make the pilgrimage to Italy, where Claude Lorrain
had once painted and Poussin had invented the historical landscape. In
1825--when he was twenty-eight--he set out with Bertin and Aligny,
remained long in Rome, and came to Naples. The Classicists, whose circle
he entered with submissive veneration, welcomed him for his cheerful,
even temper and the pretty songs which he sang in fine tenor voice.
Early every morning he went into the Campagna, with a colour-box under
his arm and a sentimental ditty on his lips, and there he drew the ruins
with an architectural severity, just like Poussin. In 1827, after a
sojourn of two years and a half in Italy, he was able to make an
appearance in the Salon with his carefully balanced landscapes. In 1835
and 1843 he stayed again in Italy, and only after this third pilgrimage
were his eyes opened to the charms of French landscape.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ THE BRIDGE AT L'ISLE-ADAM.]
One can pass rapidly over this first section of Corot's work. His
pictures of this period are not without merit, but to speak of them with
justice they should be compared with contemporary Classical productions.
Then one finds in them broad and sure drawing, and can recognise a
powerful hand and notice an astonishing increase of ability. Even on his
second sojourn in Italy he painted no longer as an ethnographical
student, and no longer wasted his powers on detail. But it is in the
pictures of his last twenty years that Corot first becomes the
Theocritus of the nineteenth century. The second Corot has spoilt one's
enjoyment for the first. But who would care to pick a quarrel with him
on that score! Beside his later pictures how hard are those studies from
Rome, which the dying painter left to the Louvre, and which, as his
maiden efforts, he regarded with great tenderness all through his life.
How little they have of the delicate, harmonious light of his later
works! The great historical landscape with Homer in it, where light and
shadow are placed so trenchantly beside each other, the landscape
"Aricia," "Saint Jerome in the Desert," the picture of the young girl
sitting reading beside a mountain stream, "The Beggar" with that team in
mad career which Decamps could not have painted with greater
virtuosity,--they are all good pictures by the side of those of his
contemporaries, but in comparison with real Corots they are like the
exercises of a pupil, in their hard, dry painting, their black, coarse
tones, and their chalky wall of atmosphere. There is neither breeze nor
transparency nor life in the air; the trees are motionless, and look as
if they were heavily cased in iron.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DUPRÉ. NEAR SOUTHAMPTON.
(_By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture._)]
Corot was approaching his fortieth year, an age at which a man's ideas
are generally fixed, when the great revolution of French landscape
painting was accomplished under the influence of the English and of
Rousseau. Trained in academical traditions, he might have remained
steadfast in his own province. To follow the young school he had
completely to learn his art again, and alter his method of treatment
with the choice of subjects, and this casting of his slough demanded
another fifteen years. When he passed from Italian to French landscape,
after his return from his third journey to Rome in 1843, his pictures
were still hard and heavy. He had already felt the influence of
Bonington and Constable, by the side of whose works his first exhibited
picture had hung in 1827. But he still lacked the power of rendering
light and air, and his painting had neither softness nor light. Even in
the choice of subject he was still undecided, returning more than once
to the historical landscape and working on it with unequal success. His
masterpiece of 1843, "The Baptism of Christ," in the Church of Saint
Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, is no more than a delicate imitation of
the old masters. The "Christ upon the Mount of Olives" of 1844, in the
Museum of Langres, is the first picture which seems like a convert's
confession of faith. In the centre of the picture, before a low hill,
Christ kneels upon the ground praying; His disciples are around Him, and
to the right, vanishing in the shadows, the olive trees stretch their
gnarled branches over the darkened way. A dark blue sky, in which a star
is flickering, broods tremulously over the landscape. One might pass the
Christ over unobserved; but for the title He would be hard to recognise.
But the star shining far away, the transparent clearness of the night
sky, the light clouds, and the mysterious shadows gliding swiftly over
the ground,--these have no more to do with the false and already
announce the true Corot. From this time he found the way on which he
went forward resolute and emancipated.
[Illustration: DUPRÉ. THE PUNT.]
For five-and-twenty years it was permitted to him to labour in perfect
ripeness, freedom, and artistic independence. One thinks of Corot as
though he had been a child until he was fifty and then first entered
upon his adolescence. Up to 1846 he took from his father the yearly
allowance of twelve hundred francs given him as a student, and in that
year, when he received the Cross of the Legion of Honour, M. Corot
doubled the sum for the future, observing: "Well, Camille seems to have
talent after all." About the same time his friends remarked that he went
about Barbizon one day more meditatively than usual. "My dear fellow,"
said he to one of them, "I am inconsolable. Till now I had a complete
collection of Corots, and it has been broken to-day, for I have sold one
for the first time." And even at seventy-four he said: "How swiftly
one's life passes, and how much must one exert one's self to do anything
good!" The history of art has few examples to offer of so long a spring.
Corot had the privilege of never growing old; his life was a continual
rejuvenescence. The works which made him Corot are the youthful works of
an old man, the matured creations of a grey-headed artist, who--like
Titian--remained for ever young; and for their artistic appreciation it
is not without importance to remember this.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DUPRÉ. SUNSET.
(_By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture._)]
Of all the Fontainebleau painters Corot was the least a realist: he was
the least bound to the earth, and he was never bent upon any exact
rendering of a part of nature. No doubt he worked much in the open air,
but he worked far more in his studio; he painted many scenes as they lay
before him, but more often those which he only saw in his own mind. He
is reported to have said on his deathbed: "Last night I saw in a dream a
landscape with a sky all rosy. It was charming, and still stands before
me quite distinctly; it will be marvellous to paint." How many
landscapes may he not have thus dreamed, and painted from the
recollected vision!
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DUPRÉ. THE HAY-WAIN.]
For a young man this would be a very dangerous method. For Corot it was
the only one which allowed him to remain Corot, because in this way no
unnecessary detail disturbed the pure, poetic reverie. He had spent his
whole life in a dallying courtship with nature, ever renewed. As a child
he looked down from his attic window upon the wavering mists of the
Seine; as a schoolboy in Rouen he wandered lost in his own fancies along
the borders of the great river; when he had grown older he went every
year with his sister to a little country-house in Ville d'Avray, which
his father had bought for him in 1817. Here he stood at the open window,
in the depth of the night, when every one was asleep, absorbed in
looking at the sky and listening to the plash of waters and the rustling
of leaves. Here he stayed quite alone. No sound disturbed his reveries,
and unconsciously he drank in the soft, moist air and the delicate
vapour rising from the neighbouring river. Everything was harmoniously
reflected in his quick and eager spirit, and his eyes beheld the
individual trait of nature floating in the universal life. He began not
merely to see nature, but to feel her presence, like that of a beloved
woman, to receive her very breath and to hear the beating of her heart.
One knows the marvellous letter in which he describes the day of a
landscape painter to Jules Dupré: "_On se lève de bonne heure, à trois
heures du matin, avant le soleil; on va s'asseoir au pied d'un arbre, on
regarde et on attend. On ne voit pas grand'chose d'abord. La nature
ressemble à une toile blanchâtre où s'esquissent à peine les profils de
quelques masses: tout est embaumé, tout frisonne au souffle fraîchi de
l'aube. Bing! le soleil s'éclaircit ... le soleil n'a pas encore déchiré
la gaze derrière laquelle se cachent la prairie, le vallon, les collines
de l'horizon.... Les vapeurs nocturnes rampent encore commes des flocons
argentés sur les herbes d'un vert transi. Bing!... Bing!... un premier
rayon de soleil ... un second rayon de soleil.... Les petites fleurettes
semblent s'éveiller joyeuses.... Elles out toutes leur goutte de rosée
qui tremble ... les feuilles frileuses s'agitent au souffle du matin ...
dans la feuillée, les oiseaux invisibles chantent.... Il semble que ce
sont les fleurs qui font la prière. Les Amours à ailes de papillons
s'ébattent sur la prairie et font onduler les hautes herbes.... On ne
voit rien ... tout y est. Le paysage est tout entier derrière la gaze
transparente du brouillard, qui, au reste ... monte ... monte ... aspiré
par le soleil ... et laisse, en se levant, voir la rivière lamée
d'argent, les prés, les arbres, les maisonettes, le lointain fuyant....
On distingue enfin tout ce que l'on divinait d'abord._"
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DUPRÉ. THE OLD OAK.]
At the end there is an ode to evening which is perhaps to be reckoned
amongst the most delicate pages of French lyrics: "_La nature s'assoupit
... cependant l'air frais du soir soupire dans les feuilles ... la rosée
emperle le velours des gazons.... Les nymphes fuient ... se cachent ...
et désirent être vues.... Bing! une étoile du ciel qui pique une tête
dans l'étang.... Charmante étoile, dont le frémissement de l'eau
augmente le scintillement, tu me regardes ... tu me souris en clignant
de l'oeil.... Bing! une seconde étoile apparaît dans l'eau; un second
oeil s'ouvre. Soyez les bienvenues, fraîches et charmantes étoiles....
Bing! Bing! Bing! trois, six, vingt étoiles.... Toutes les étoiles du
ciel se sont donné rendez-vous dans cet heureux étang.... Tout
s'assombrit encore.... L'étang seul scintille.... C'est un fourmillement
d'étoiles.... L'illusion se produit.... Le soleil étant couché, le
soleil intérieur de l'âme, le soleil de l'art se lève.... Bon! voilâ mon
tableau fait_."
[Illustration: DUPRÉ. THE POOL.]
Any one who has never read anything about Corot except these lines may
know him through them alone. Even that little word "Bing" comprises and
elucidates his art by its clear, silvery resonance. The words vibrate
like the strings of a violin that have been gently touched, and they
want Mozart's music as an accompaniment. I do not know any one who has
described all the feminine tenderness of nature, the dishevelled leaves
of the birches, the heaving bosom of the air, the fresh virginity of
morning, the weary, sensuous charm of evening, with such seductive
tenderness and such highly strung feeling, so voluptuously and yet so
coyly.
To these impressions of Rouen, Ville d'Avray, and Barbizon were added
finally those of Paris. For Corot was born in Paris, and, often as he
left it, he always came back; he passed the greatest part of his life
there, and there it was, perhaps, that in his last period he created his
most poetic works. In these years he had no more need of actual
landscapes; he needed only a sky and they rose before him. Every evening
after sundown he left his studio just at the time when the dusk fell
veiling everything. He raised his eyes to the sky, the only part of
nature which remained visible. And how often does this twilight sky of
Paris recur in Corot's pictures! At the end of his life he could really
give himself over to a dream. The drawings and countless studies of his
youth bear witness to the care, patience, and exactitude of his
preparation. They gave him in after-years, when he was sure of his
hand, the right to simplify, because he knew everything thoroughly. Thus
Boecklin paints his pictures without a model, and thus Corot painted his
landscapes. The hardest problems are solved apparently as if he were
improvising; and for that very reason the sight of a Corot gives such
unspeakable pleasure, such an impression of charming ease. It is only a
hand which has used a brush for forty years that can paint thus. All
effects are attained with the minimum expenditure of strength and
material. The drawing lies as if behind colour that has been blown on to
the canvas; it is as if one looked through a thin gauze into the
distance. Whoever has studied reality so many years, with patient and
observant eye, as Corot did, whoever has daily satiated his imagination
with the impressions of nature, may finally venture on painting, not
this or that scenery, but the fragrance, the very essence of things, and
render merely his own spirit and his own visions free from all earthly
and retarding accessories. There is a temptation to do honour to Corot's
pictures merely as "the confessions of a beautiful soul."
[Illustration: _L'Art._ NARCISSE DIAZ.]
But Corot was as great and strong as a Hercules. In his blue blouse,
with his woollen cap and the inevitable short Corot pipe in his mouth--a
pipe which has become historical--one would have taken him for a carter
rather than a celebrated painter. At the same time he remained during
his whole life--a girl: twenty years senior to all the great landscape
painters of the epoch, he was at once a patriarch in their eyes and
their younger comrade. His long white hair surrounded the innocent face
of a ruddy country girl, and his kind and pleasant eyes were those of a
child listening to a fairy-tale. In 1848, during the fighting on the
barricades, he asked with childish astonishment: "What is the matter?
Are we not satisfied with the Government?" And during the war in 1870
this great hoary-headed child of seventy-four bought a musket, to join
in fighting against Germany. Benevolence was the joy of his old age.
Every friend who begged for a picture was given one, while for money he
had the indifference of a hermit who has no wants and neither sows nor
reaps, but is fed by his Heavenly Father. He ran breathlessly after an
acquaintance to whom, contrary to his wont, he had refused five thousand
francs: "Forgive me," he said; "I am a miser, but there they are." And
when a picture-dealer brought him ten thousand francs he gave him the
following direction: "Send them," he said, "to the widow of my friend
Millet; only, she must believe that you have bought pictures from
_him_." His one passion was music, his whole life "an eternal song."
Corot was a happy man, and no one more deserved to be happy. In his
kind-hearted vivacity and even good spirits he was a favourite with all
who came near him and called him familiarly their Papa Corot. Everything
in him was healthy and natural; his was a harmonious nature, living and
working happily. This harmony is reflected in his art. And he saw the
joy in nature which he had in himself.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DIAZ. THE DESCENT OF THE BOHEMIANS.]
Everything that was coarse or horrible in nature he avoided, and his own
life passed without romance or any terrible catastrophes. He has no
picture in which there is a harassed tree vexed by the storm. Corot's
own spirit was touched neither by passions nor by the strokes of fate.
There is air in his landscapes, but never storm; streams, but not
torrents; waters, but not floods; plains, but not rugged mountains. All
is soft and quiet as his own heart, whose peace the storm never
troubled.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DIAZ. AMONG THE FOLIAGE.]
No man ever lived a more orderly, regular, and reasonable life. He was
only spendthrift where others were concerned. No evening passed that he
did not play a rubber of whist with his mother, who died only a little
before him, and was loved by the old man with the devoted tenderness of
a child. From an early age he had the confirmed habits which make the
day long and prevent waste of time. The eight years which he passed in
the linen-drapery establishment of M. Delalain had accustomed him to
punctuality. Every morning he rose very early, and at three minutes to
eight he was in his studio as punctually as he had been in earlier years
at the counter, and went through his daily task without feverish haste
or idleness, humming with that quietude which makes the furthest
progress.
For that reason he had also an aversion to everything passionate in
nature, to everything irregular, sudden, or languid, to the feverish
burst of storm as to the relaxing languor of summer heat. He loved all
that is quiet, symmetrical, and fresh, peaceful and blithe, everything
that is enchanting by its repose: the bright, tender sky, the woods and
meadows tinged with green, the streamlets and the hills, the regular
awakening of spring, the soft, quiet hours of evening twilight, the dewy
laughing morning, the delicate mists which form slowly the over surface
of still waters, the joy of clear, starry nights, when all voices are
silent and every breeze is at rest; and the cheerfulness of his own
spirit is reflected in everything.
[Illustration: DIAZ. A TREE TRUNK.]
One might go further, and say that Corot's goodness is mirrored in his
pictures. Corot loved humanity and wished it well, and he shrank from no
sacrifice in helping his friends. And even so did he love the country,
and wished to see it animated, enlivened, and blest by human beings.
That is the great distinction between him and Chintreuil, who is
otherwise so like him. Chintreuil also painted nature when she quivers
smiling beneath the gentle and vivifying glance of spring, but figures
are wanting in his pictures. As a timid, fretful, unsociable man, he
imagined that nature also felt happiest in solitude. The scenery in
which Chintreuil delighted was thick, impenetrable copse, lonely haunts
in the tangle of the thicket, from which now and then a startled hind
stretches out its head, glancing uneasily. Corot, who could not endure
solitude, being always the centre of a cheery social gathering, made
nature a sociable being. Men, women, and children give animation to his
woods and meadows. And at times he introduces peasants at work in the
fields, but how little do they resemble the peasants of Millet! The
rustics of the master of Gruchy are as hard and rough as they are
actual; the burden of life has bowed their figures and lined their faces
prematurely; they are old before their time, and weary every evening.
Corot's labourers never grow weary: lightly touched in rather than
painted, dreamt of rather than seen, they carry on an ethereal existence
in the open air, free and contented; they have never suffered, just as
Corot himself knew no sufferings. But as a rule human beings were
altogether out of place in the happy fields conjured up by his fairy
fantasy; and then came the moment when Prudhon lived again. The nymphs
and bacchantes whom he had met as a youth by the tomb of Virgil visited
him in the evening of life in the forest of Fontainebleau and in the
meadows of Ville d'Avray.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DIAZ. FOREST SCENE.]
In his pictures he dreamed of pillars and altars near which mythical
figures moved once more, dryads sleeping by the stream, dancing fauns,
_junctæque nymphis gratiæ decentes_ in classical raiment. In this sense
he was a Classicist all his life. His nymphs, however, are no mere
accessories; they have nothing in common with the faded troop of classic
beings whose old age in the ruins of forsaken temples was so long tended
by the Academy. In Corot they are the natural habitants of a world of
harmony and light, the logical complement of his visions of nature: in
the same way Beethoven at the close of the Ninth Symphony introduced the
human voice. No sooner has he touched in the lines of his landscapes
than the nymphs and tritons, the radiant children of the Greek idyllic
poets, desert the faded leaves of books to populate Corot's groves, and
refresh themselves in the evening shadows of his forests.
[Illustration: CHARLES FRANÇOIS DAUBIGNY.]
For the evening dusk, the hour after sunset, is peculiarly the hour of
Corot; his very preference for the harmonious beauty of dying light was
the effluence of his own harmonious temperament. When he would, Corot
was a colourist of the first order. The World Exhibition of 1889
contained pictures of women by his hand which resembled Feuerbach in
their strict and austere beauty of countenance, and which recalled
Delacroix in the liquid fulness of tone and their fantastic and
variously coloured garb. But, compared with the orgies of colour
indulged in by Romanticism, his works are generally characterised by the
most delicate reserve in painting. A bright silvery sheet of water and
the ivory skin of a nymph are usually the only touches of colour that
hover in the pearly grey mist of his pictures. As a man Corot avoided
all dramas and strong contrasts; everything abrupt or loud was repellent
to his nature. Thus it was that the painter, too, preferred the clear
grey hours of evening, in which nature envelops herself as if in a
delicate, melting veil of gauze. Here he was able to be entirely Corot,
and to paint without contours and almost without colours, and bathe in
the soft, dusky atmosphere. He saw lines no longer; everything was
breath, fragrance, vibration, and mystery. "_Ce n'est plus une toile et
ce n'est plus un peintre, c'est le bon Dieu et c'est le soir._" Elysian
airs began to breathe, and the faint echo of the prattling streamlet
sounded gently murmuring in the wood; the soft arms of the nymphs clung
round him, and from the neighbouring thicket tender, melting melodies
chimed forth like Æolian harps--
"Rege dich, du Schilfgeflüster;
Hauche leise, Rohrgeschwister;
Säuselt, leichte Weidensträuche;
Lispelt, Pappelzitterzweige
Unterbroch'nen Träumen zu."
His end was as harmonious as his life and his art. "_Rien ne trouble sa
fin, c'est le soir d'un beau jour._" His sister, with whom the old
bachelor had lived, died in the October of 1874, and Corot could not
endure loneliness. On 23rd February 1875--when he had just completed his
seventy-ninth year--he was heard to say as he lay in bed drawing with
his fingers in the air: "_Mon Dieu_, how beautiful that is; the most
beautiful landscape I have ever seen." When his old housekeeper wanted
to bring him his breakfast he said with a smile: "To-day Père Corot will
breakfast above." Even his last illness robbed him of none of his
cheerfulness, and when his friends brought him as he lay dying the medal
struck to commemorate his jubilee as an artist of fifty years' standing,
he said with tears of joy in his eyes: "It makes one happy to know that
one has been so loved; I have had good parents and dear friends. I am
thankful to God." With those words he passed away to his true home, the
land of spirits--not the paradise of the Church, but the Elysian fields
he had dreamt of and painted so often: "_Largior hic campos æther et
lumine vestit purpureo._"
[Illustration: _L'Art._
DAUBIGNY. SPRINGTIME.]
When they bore him from his house in the Faubour-Poissonière and a
passer-by asked who was being buried, a fat shopwoman standing at the
door of her house answered: "I don't know his name, but he was a good
man." Beethoven's Symphony in C minor was played at his funeral,
according to his own direction, and as the coffin was being lowered a
lark rose exulting to the sky. "The artist will be replaced with
difficulty, the man never," said Dupré at Corot's grave. On 27th May
1880 an unobtrusive monument to his memory was unveiled at the border of
the lake at Ville d'Avray, in the midst of the dark forest where he had
so often dreamed. He died in the fulness of his fame as an artist, but
it was the forty pictures collected in the Centenary Exhibition of 1889
which first made the world fully conscious of what modern art possessed
in Corot: a master of immortal masterpieces, the greatest poet and the
tenderest soul of the nineteenth century, as Fra Angelico was the
tenderest soul of the fifteenth, and Watteau the greatest poet of the
eighteenth.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
DAUBIGNY. A LOCK IN THE VALLY OF OPTEVOZ.]
_Jules Dupré_, a melancholy spirit, who was inwardly consumed by a
lonely existence spent in passionate work, stands as the Beethoven of
modern painting beside Corot, its Mozart. If Théodore Rousseau was the
epic poet of the Fontainebleau school, and Corot the idyllic poet, Dupré
seems its tragic dramatist. Rousseau's nature is hard, rude, and
indifferent to man. For Corot God is the great philanthropist, who
wishes to see men happy, and lets the spring come and the warm winds
blow only that children may have their pleasure in them. His soul is, as
Goethe has it in _Werther_, "as blithe as those of sweet spring
mornings." Jules Dupré has neither Rousseau's reality nor Corot's
tenderness; his tones are neither imperturbable nor subdued. "_Quant
derrière un tronc d'arbre ou derrière une pierre, vous ne trouvez pas un
homme à quoi ça sert-il de faire du paysage._" In Corot there is a charm
as of the light melodies of the _Zauberflöte_; in Dupré the ear is
struck by the shattering notes of the _Sinfonie Eroica_. Rousseau looks
into the heart of nature with widely dilated pupils and a critical
glance. Corot woos her smiling, caressing, and dallying; Dupré courts
her uttering impassioned complaint and with tears in his eyes. In him
are heard the mighty fugues of Romanticism. The trees live, the waves
laugh and weep, the sky sings and wails, and the sun, like a great
conductor, determines the harmony of the concert. Even the two pictures
with which he made an appearance in the Salon in 1835, after he had left
the Sèvres china manufactory and become acquainted with Constable
during a visit to England--the "Near Southampton" and "Pasture-land in
the Limousin"--displayed him as an accomplished master. In "Near
Southampton" everything moves and moans. Across an undulating country a
dark tempest blusters, like a wild host, hurrying and sweeping forward
in the gloom, tearing and scattering everything in its path, whirling
leaves from the slender trees. Clouds big with rain hasten across the
horizon as if on a forced march. The whole landscape seems to partake in
the flight; the brushwood seems to bow its head like a traveller. In the
background a few figures are recognisable: people overtaken by the storm
at their work; horses with their manes flying in the wind; and a rider
seeking refuge for himself and his beast. A stretch of sluggish water
ruffles its waves as though it were frowning. Everything is alive and
quaking in this majestic solitude, and in the mingled play of confused
lights, hurrying clouds, fluttering branches, and trembling grass.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DAUBIGNY. ON THE OISE.]
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
DAUBIGNY. SHEPHERD AND SHEPHERDESS.]
"Pasture-land in the Limousin" had the same overpowering energy; it was
an admirable picture in 1835, and it is admirable still. The fine old
trees stand like huge pillars; the grass, drenched with rain, is of an
intense green; nature seems to shudder as if in a fever. And through his
whole life Dupré was possessed by the lyrical fever of Romanticism. As
the last champion of Romanticism he bore the banner of the proud
generation of 1830 through well-nigh two generations, and until his
death in 1889 stood on the ground where Paul Huet had first placed
French landscape; but Huet attained his pictorial effects by combining
and by calculation, while Dupré is always a great, true, and convincing
poet. Every evening he was seen in L'Isle Adam, where he settled in
1849, wandering alone across the fields, even in drenching rain. One of
his pupils declares that once, when they stood at night on the bridge of
the Oise during a storm, Dupré broke into a paroxysm of tears at the
magnificent spectacle. He was a fanatic rejoicing in storms, one who
watched the tragedies of the heaven with quivering emotion, a passionate
spirit consumed by his inward force, and, like his literary counterpart
Victor Hugo, he sought beauty of landscape only where it was wild and
magnificent. He is the painter of nature vexed and harassed, and of the
majestic silence that follows the storm. The theme of his pictures is at
one time the whirling torture of the yellow leaves driven before the
wind in eddying confusion; tormented and quivering they cleave to the
furrows in the mad chase, fall into dykes, and cling against the trunks
of trees, to find refuge from their persecutor. At another time he
paints how the night wind whistles round an old church and whirls the
screaming weather-cock round and round, how it moans and rattles with
invisible hand against the doors, forces its way through the windows,
and, once shut in its stony prison, seeks a way out again, howling and
wailing. He paints sea-pieces in which the sea rages and mutters like
some hoarse old monster; the colour of the water is dirty and pallid;
the howling multitude of waves storms on like an innumerable army before
which every human power gives way. Stones are torn loose and hurled
crashing upon the shore. The clouds are dull and ghostly, here black as
smoke, there of a shining whiteness, and swollen as though they must
burst. He celebrates the commotion of the sky, nature in her angry
majesty, and the most brilliant phenomena of atmospheric life.
Rousseau's highest aim was to avoid painting for effect, and Corot only
cared for grace of tone; a picture of his consists "of a little grey and
a certain _je ne sais quoi_." Jules Dupré is peculiarly the colour-poet
of the group, and sounds the most resonant notes in the romantic
concert. His light does not beam in gently vibrating silver tones, but
is concentrated in glaring red suns. "_Ah, la lumière, la lumière!_"
Beside the flaming hues of evening red he paints the darkest shadows. He
revels in contrasts. His favourite key of colour is that of a ghostly
sunset, against which a gnarled oak or the dark sail of a tiny vessel
rises like a phantom.
Trembling and yet with ardent desire he looks at the tumult of waters,
and hears the roll and resonance of the moon-silvered tide. He delights
in night, rain, and storm. Corot's gentle rivulets become a rolling and
whirling flood in his pictures, a headlong stream carrying all before
it. The wind no longer sighs, but blusters across the valley, spreading
ruin in its path. The clouds which in Corot are silvery and gentle, like
white lambs, are in Dupré black and threatening, like demons of hell. In
Corot the soft morning breeze faintly agitates the tender clouds in the
sky; in Dupré a damp, cold wind of evening blows a spectral grey mist
into the valley, and the hurricane tears apart the thunderclouds.
"Wenn ich fern auf nackter Haide wallte,
Wo aus dämmernder Geklüfte Schooss
Der Titanensang der Ströme schallte
Und die Nacht der Wolken mich umschloss,
Wenn der Sturm mit seinen Wetterwogen
Mir vorüber durch die Berge fuhr
Und des Himmels Flammen mich umflogen,
Da erscheinst du, Seele der Natur."
[Illustration: DAUBIGNY. LANDSCAPE: EVENING.]
[Illustration: _Baschet._
CHINTREUIL. LANDSCAPE: MORNING.]
The first of the brilliant pleiad who did not come from Paris itself is
_Diaz_, who in his youth worked with Dupré in the china manufactory of
Sèvres. Of noble Spanish origin--Narciso Virgilio Diaz de la Peña ran
his high-sounding name in full--he was born in Bordeaux in 1807, after
his parents had taken refuge from the Revolution across the Pyrenees,
and in his landscapes, too, perhaps, his Spanish blood betrays him now
and then. Diaz has in him a little of Fortuny. Beside the great genius
wrestling for truth and the virile seriousness of Rousseau, beside the
gloomy, powerful landscapes of Dupré with their deep, impassioned
poetry, the sparkling and flattering pictures of Diaz seem to be rather
light wares. For him nature is a keyboard on which to play capricious
fantasies. His pictures have the effect of sparkling diamonds, and one
must surrender one's self to this charm without asking its cause;
otherwise it evaporates. Diaz has perhaps rather too much of the talent
of a juggler, the sparkle of a magic kaleidoscope. "You paint stinging
nettles, and I prefer roses," is the characteristic expression which he
used to Millet. His painting is piquant and as iridescent as a peacock's
tail, but in this very iridescence there is often an unspeakable charm.
It has the rocket-like brilliancy and the glancing chivalry which were
part of the man himself, and made him the best of good company, the
_enfant terrible_, the centre of all that was witty and spirited in the
circle of Fontainebleau.
He, too, was long acquainted with poverty, as were his great
brother-artists Rousseau and Dupré. Shortly after his birth he lost his
father. Madame Diaz, left entirely without means, came to Paris, where
she supported herself by giving lessons in Spanish and Italian. When he
was ten years old the boy was left an orphan alone in the vast city. A
Protestant clergyman in Bellevue then adopted him. And now occurred the
misfortune which he was so fond of relating in after-years. In one of
his wanderings through the wood he was bitten by a poisonous insect, and
from that time he was obliged to hobble through life with a wooden leg,
which he called his _pilon_. From his fifteenth year he worked, at first
as a lame errand boy, and afterwards as a painter on china, together
with Dupré, Raffet, and Cabat, in the manufactory of Sèvres. Before long
he was dismissed as incompetent, for one day he took it into his head to
decorate a vase entirely after his own taste. Then poverty began once
more. Often when the evening drew on he wandered about the boulevards
under cover of the darkness, opened the doors of carriages which had
drawn up at the pavement, and stretched out his hand to beg. "What does
it matter?" he said; "one day I shall have carriages and horses, and a
golden crutch; my brush will win them for me." He exhibited a picture on
speculation at a picture-dealer's, in the hope of making a hundred
francs; it was "The Descent of the Bohemians," that picturesque band of
men, women, and children, who advance singing, laughing, and shouting by
a steep woodland road, to descend on some neighbouring village like a
swarm of locusts. A Parisian collector bought it for fifteen hundred
francs. Diaz was saved, and he migrated to the forest of Fontainebleau.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
HARPIGNIES. MOONRISE.]
His biography explains a great deal in the character of the painter's
art. His works are unequal. In his picture "Last Tears," which appeared
in the World Exhibition of 1855, and which stands to his landscapes as a
huge block of copper to little ingots of gold, he entered upon a course
in which he wandered long without any particular artistic result. He
wanted to be a figure-painter, and with this object he concocted a style
of painting by a mixture of various traditions, seeking to unite
Prudhon, Correggio, and Leonardo. From the master of Cluny he borrowed
the feminine type with a snub nose and long almond-shaped eyes, treated
the hair like da Vinci, and placed over it the _sfumato_ of Allegri. His
drawing, usually so pictorial in its light sweep, became weak in his
effort to be correct, and his colouring grew dull and monotonous by its
imitation of the style of the Classicists. But during this period Diaz
made a great deal of money, sold his pictures without intermission, and
avenged himself, as he had determined to do, upon his former poverty.
He, who had begged upon the boulevards, was able to buy weapons and
costumes at the highest figure, and build himself a charming house in
the Place Pigalle. In all that concerns his artistic position these
works, which brought him an income of fifty thousand francs, and, for a
long time, the fame of a new Prudhon, are nevertheless without
importance. Faltering between the widely divergent influences of the old
masters, he did not get beyond a wavering eclecticism, and was too weak
in drawing to attain results worth mentioning. It is as a landscape
painter that he will be known to posterity. He is said to have been the
terror of all game as long as he was the house-mate of Rousseau and
Millet in Fontainebleau, and wandered through the woods there with a gun
on his arm to get a cheap supper. It is reported, too, that when his
pictures were rejected by the Salon in those days he laughingly made a
hole in the canvas with his wooden leg, saying: "What is the use of
being rich? I can't have a diamond set in my _pilon_!" It was however in
the years before 1855, when he had nothing to do with any
picture-dealer, that the immortal works of Diaz were executed.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ CONSTANT TROYON.]
The mention of his name conjures up before the mind the recesses of a
wood, reddened by autumn, a wood where the sunbeams play, gilding the
trunks of the trees; naked white forms repose amid mysterious lights, or
on paths of golden sand appear gaily draped odalisques, their rich
costume glittering in the rays of the sun. Few have won from the forest,
as he did, its beauty of golden sunlight and verdant leaves. Others
remained at the entrance of the forest; he was the first who really
penetrated to its depths. The branches met over his head like the waves
of the sea, the blue heaven vanished, and everything was shrouded. The
sunbeams fell like the rain of Danaë through the green leaves, and the
moss lay like a velvet mantle on the granite piles of rock. He settled
down like a hermit in his verdant hollow. The leaves quivered green and
red, and covered the ground, shining like gold in the furtive rays of
the evening sun. Nothing was to be seen of the trees, nothing of the
outline of their foliage, nothing of the majestic sweep of their boughs,
but only the mossy stems touched by the radiance of the sun. The
pictures of Diaz are not landscapes, for the land is wanting; they are
"tree scapes," and their poetry lies in the sunbeams which dance playing
round them. "Have you seen my last stem?" he would himself inquire of
the visitors to his studio.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TROYON. IN NORMANDY: COWS GRAZING.]
These woodland recesses were the peculiar specialty of Diaz, and he but
seldom abandoned them to paint warm, dreamy pictures of summer. For,
like a true child of the South, he only cared to see nature on beautiful
days. He knows nothing of spring with its light mist, and still less of
the frozen desolation of winter. The summer alone does he know, the
summer and the autumn; and the summers of Diaz are an everlasting song,
like the springs of Corot. Beautiful nymphs and other beings from the
golden age give animation to his emerald meadows and his sheltered woods
bathed in the sun: here are little, homely-looking nixies, and there are
pretty Cupids and Venuses and Dianas of charming grace. And none of
these divinities think about anything or do anything; they are not
piquant, like those of Boucher and Fragonard, and they know neither
coquetry nor smiles. They are merely goddesses of the palette; their
wish is to be nothing but shining spots of colour, and they love nothing
except the silvery sunbeams which fall caressingly on their naked skin.
If the painter wishes for more vivid colour they throw around them
shining red, blue, yellowish-green, or gold-embroidered clothes, and
immediately are transformed from nymphs into Oriental women, as in a
magic theatre. A fragment of soft silk, gleaming with gold, and a red
turban were means sufficient for him to conjure up his charming and
fanciful land of Turks. Sometimes even simple mortals--wood-cutters,
peasant girls, and gipsies--come into his pictures, that the sunbeams
may play upon them, while their picturesque rags form piquant spots of
colour.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TROYON. CROSSING THE STREAM.]
Diaz belongs to the same category as Isabey and Fromentin, a fascinating
artist, a great _charmeur_, and a feast to the eyes.
When in the far South, amid the eternal summer of Mentone, he closed his
dark, shining eyes for ever, at dawn on 18th November 1876, a breath of
sadness went through the tree-tops of the old royal forest of
Fontainebleau. The forest had lost its hermit, the busy woodsman who
penetrated farthest into its green depths; and it preserves his memory
gratefully. Only go, in October, through the copse of Bas Bréau, lose
yourself amid the magnificent foliage of these century-old trees that
glimmer with a thousand hues like gigantic bouquets, dark green and
brown, or golden and purple, and at the sight of this brilliant gleam of
autumn tones you can only say, A Diaz!
The youngest of the group, _Daubigny_, came when the battle was over,
and plays a slighter _rôle_, since he cannot be reckoned any longer
among the discoverers; nevertheless he has a physiognomy of his own, and
one of peculiar charm. The others were painters of nature; Daubigny is
the painter of the country. If one goes from Munich to Dachau to see the
apple trees blossom and the birches growing green, to breathe in the
odour of the cow-house and the fragrance of the hay, to hear the tinkle
of cow-bells, the croaking of frogs, and the hum of gnats, one does not
say, "I want to see nature," but "I am going into the country." Jean
Jacques Rousseau was the worshipper of nature, while Georges Sand, in
certain of her novels, has celebrated country life. In this sense
Daubigny is less an adorer of nature than a man fond of the country. His
pictures give the feeling one has in standing at the window on a country
excursion, and looking at the laughing and budding spring. One feels no
veneration for the artist, but one would like to be a bird to perch on
those boughs, a lizard to creep amongst this green, a cockchafer to fly
humming from tree to tree.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TROYON. THE RETURN TO THE FARM.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
TROYON. A COW SCRATCHING HERSELF.]
Daubigny, possibly, has not the great and free creative power of the
older artists, their magnificent simplicity in treating objects: the
feminine element, the susceptibility to natural beauty, preponderates in
him, and not the virile, creative power of embodiment, which at once
discovers in itself a telling force of expression for the image received
from nature. He seeks after no poetic emotions, like Dupré; he has not
the profound, penetrative eye for nature, like Rousseau; in his charm
and amiability he approaches Corot, except that mythological beings are
no longer at home in his landscapes. They would take no pleasure in this
odour of damp grass, the smell of the cow-byres, and the dilapidated old
skiffs which rock, in Daubigny's pictures, fastened to a swampy bank.
Corot, light, delicate, and simple as a boy, sitting on a school-bench
all his life, is always veiled and mysterious. Daubigny, heavier and
technically better equipped, has more power and less grace; he dreams
less and paints more. Corot made the apotheosis of nature: his silvery
grey clouds bore him to the Elysian fields, where nothing had the
heaviness of earth and everything melted in poetic vapour. Daubigny,
borne by no wings of Icarus, seems like Antæus beside him; he is bodily
wedded to the earth. Dupré made the earth a mirror of the tears and
passions of men. Corot surprised her before the peasant is up of a
morning, in the hours when she belongs altogether to the nymphs and the
fairies. In Daubigny the earth has once more become the possession of
human beings. It is not often that figures move in his pictures. Even
Rousseau more often finds a place in his landscapes for the rustic, but
nature in him is hard, unapproachable, and deliberately indifferent to
man. She looks down upon him austerely, closing and hardening her heart
against him. In Daubigny nature is familiar with man, stands near him,
and is kindly and serviceable. The skiffs rocking at the river's brink
betray that fishers are in the neighbourhood; even when they are empty
his little houses suggest that their inhabitants are not far off, that
they are but at work in the field and may come back at any moment. In
Rousseau man is merely an atom of the infinite; here he is the lord of
creation. Rousseau makes an effect which is simple and powerful, Dupré
one which is impassioned and striking, Corot is divine, Diaz charming,
and Daubigny idyllic, intimate, and familiar. He closed a period and
enjoyed the fruits of what the others had called into being. One does
not admire him--one loves him.
He had passed his youth with his nurse in a little village, surrounded
with white-blossoming apple trees and waving fields of corn, near L'Isle
Adam. Here as a boy he received the impressions which made him a painter
of the country, and which were too strong to be obliterated by a sojourn
in Italy. The best picture that he painted there showed a flat stretch
of land with thistles. A view of the island of St. Louis was the work
with which he first appeared in the Salon in 1838.
Daubigny is the painter of water, murmuring silver-grey between ashes
and oaks, and reflecting the clouds of heaven in its clear mirror. He is
the painter of the spring in its fragrance, when the meadows shine in
the earliest verdure, and the leaves but newly unfolded stand out
against the sky as bright green patches of colour, when the limes
blossom and the crops begin to shoot. A field of green corn waving
gently beneath budding apple trees in the breeze of spring, still rivers
in which banks and bushy islands are reflected, mills beside little
streams rippling in silvery clearness over shining white pebbles,
cackling geese, and washerwomen neatly spreading out their linen, are
things which Daubigny has painted with the delicate feeling of a most
impressionable lover of nature. At the same time he had the secret of
shedding over his pictures the most marvellous tint of delicate,
vaporous air; especially in those representations, at once so poetic and
so accurate, of evening by the water's edge, or of bright moonlight
nights, when all things are sharply illuminated, and yet softly shrouded
with a dream-like exhalation. His favourite light was that of cool
evening dusk, after the sun and every trace of the after-glow has
vanished from the sky. Valmandois, where he passed his youth, and
afterwards the Oise, with its green banks and vineyards and hedged
gardens, the most charming and picturesque river in North France, are
most frequently rendered in his pictures. Every day, when nature put on
her spring garb, he sailed along the banks in a small craft, with his
son Charles. His most vigorous works were executed in the cabin of this
vessel: spirited sketches of regions delicately veiled in mist and bound
with a magical charm of peace, regions with the moon above them,
shedding its clear, silver light--refined etchings which assure him a
place of honour in the history of modern etching. The painter of the
banks of the Oise saw everything with the curiosity and the love of a
child, and remained always a naïve artist in spite of all his dexterity.
[Illustration: ROSA BONHEUR. THE HORSE-FAIR.
(_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: ROSA BONHEUR. PLOUGHING IN NIVERNOIS.]
After these great masters had opened up the path a tribe of landscape
painters set themselves to render, each in his own way, the vigorous
power, the tender charm, and the plaintive melancholy of the earth. Some
loved dusk and light, the simple reproduction of ordinary places in
their ordinary condition; others delighted in the struggle of the
elements, the violent scudding of clouds, the parting glance of the sun,
the sombre hours when nature shrouds her face with the mourning veil of
a widow.
Although he never tasted the pleasures of fame, _Antoine Chintreuil_ was
the most refined of them all--an excessively sensitive spirit, who
seized with as much delicacy as daring swiftly transient effects of
nature, such as seldom appear: the moment when the sun casts a fleeting
radiance in the midst of clouds, or when a shaft of light quivers for an
instant through a dense mist; the effect of green fields touched by the
first soft beams of the sun, or that of a rainbow spanning a fresh
spring landscape. His pupil _Jean Desbrosses_ was the painter of hills
and valleys. _Achard_ followed Rousseau in his pictures of lonely,
austere, and mournful regions. _Français_ painted familiar corners in
the neighbourhood of Paris with grace, although more heavily than Corot,
and without the shining light which is poured through the works of that
rare genius. The pictures of _Harpignies_ are rather dry, and betray a
heavy hand. He is rougher than his great predecessors, less seductive
and indeed rather staid, but he has a convincing reality, and is loyal
and simple. He is valuable as an honest, genial artist, a many-sided and
sure-footed man of talent, somewhat inclined to Classicism. _Émile
Breton_, the brother of Jules, delighted in the agitation of the
elements, wild, out-of-the-way regions, and harsh climate. His
execution is broad, his tones forcible, and he has both simplicity and
largeness. Apart from his big, gloomy landscapes, _Léonce Chabry_ has
also painted sea-pieces, with dark waves dashing against the cleft
rocks.
[Illustration: VAN MARCKE. LA FALAISE.]
The representation of grazing animals plays a great part in the art of
almost all of these painters. Some carried the love of animal painting
so far that they never painted a landscape without introducing into the
foreground their dearly loved herds of cows or flocks of sheep. The key
of the landscape, the cheerful and sunny brilliancy of colour or the
still melancholy of the evening dusk, is harmoniously repeated in the
habits and being of these animals. Thus, too, new paths were opened to
animal painting, which had suffered, no less than landscape, from the
yoke of conventionality.
Up to the close of the eighteenth century French artists had contented
themselves with adapting to French taste the light and superficial art
of Nicolaus Berghem. Demarne, one of the last heirs of this Dutch
artist, brought, even in the period of the Revolution, a little
sunshine, blitheness, and country air amongst the large pictures in the
classical manner. The animal painting of the _ancien régime_ expired in
his arms, and the "noble style" of Classicism obstructed the rise of the
new animal painting. The fact that the great Jupiter, father of gods and
men, assumed the form of a four-footed creature when he led weak,
feminine beings astray had no doubt given a certain justification to
the animal picture during the reign of the school of David. But the
artists preferred to hold aloof from it, either because animals are hard
to idealise in themselves, or because the received antique sculpture of
animals was difficult to employ directly in pictures. In landscapes,
which gods and heroes alone honoured with their presence, idealised
animals would have been altogether out of place. Only animals which are
very difficult to draw correctly, such as sphinxes, sirens, and winged
horses--beings which the old tragedians were fond of turning to
account--are occasionally allowed to exist in the pictures of Bertin and
Paul Flandrin. _Carle Vernet_, who composed cavalry charges and hunting
scenes, had not talent enough seriously to make a breach, or to find
disciples to follow his lead. _Géricault_, the forerunner of
Romanticism, was likewise the first eminent painter of horses; and
although his great "Raft of the Medusa" is heavily fettered by the
system of Classicism, his jockey pictures and horse races are as fresh,
as vivid, and as unforced as if they had been painted yesterday instead
of seventy years ago. In dashing animation, verve, and temperament
Géricault stands alone in these pictures; he is the very opposite of
Raymond Brascassat, who was the first specialist of animal pieces with a
landscape setting, and was much praised in the thirties on account of
his neat and ornamental style of treatment. _Brascassat_ was the
Winterhalter of animal painting, neither Classicist nor Romanticist nor
Realist, but the embodiment of mediocrity; a man honestly and sincerely
regarding all nature with the eyes of a Philistine. His fame, which has
so swiftly faded, was founded by those patrons of art who above all
demand that a picture should be the bald, banal reproduction of fact,
made with all the accuracy possible.
[Illustration: CHARLES JACQUE. THE RETURN TO THE BYRE (ETCHING).
(_By permission of M. Frédéric Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
CHARLES JACQUE. A FLOCK OF SHEEP ON THE ROAD.
(_By permission of M. Frédéric Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]
It was only when the landscape school of Fontainebleau had initiated a
new method of vision, feeling, and expression that France produced a new
great painter of animals. As Dupré and Rousseau tower over their
predecessors Cabat and Flandrin in landscape, so _Constant Troyon_ rises
above Brascassat in animal painting. In the latter there may be found a
scrupulous pedantic observation in union with a thin, polished,
academic, and carefully arranged style of painting; in the former, a
large and broad technique in harmony with wild nature, and a directness
and force of intuition without parallel in the history of art.
Brascassat belongs to the same category as Denner, Troyon to that of
Frans Hals and Brouwer.
There would be no purpose in saying anything of his labours in the china
manufactory of Sèvres, of his industrial works, and of the little
classical views with which he made a first appearance in the Salon in
1833, or of the impulse which he received from Roqueplan. He first found
his own powers when he made the acquaintance of Théodore Rousseau and
Jules Dupré, and migrated with them into the forest of Fontainebleau. At
the headquarters of the new school his ideas underwent a revolution.
Here, in the first instance, as a landscape painter, he was attracted by
the massive forms of cattle, which make such a harmonious effect of
colour in the atmosphere and against verdure, and the philosophic
quietude of which gives such admirable completion to the dreamy spirit
of nature. A journey to Holland and Belgium in 1847, in the course of
which he became more familiar with the old animal painters, confirmed
him in the resolve of devoting himself exclusively to this province. He
was captivated not so much by Paul Potter as by Albert Cuyp, with his
rich and powerful colouring, and his technique, which is at once so
virile and so easy. But above all Rembrandt became his great ideal, and
filled him with wonder. In his first masterpiece of 1849, "The Mill,"
the influence of the great Dutch artist is clearly recognisable, and
from that time up to 1855 it remained dominant. In this year, during a
prolonged sojourn in Normandy, he became Troyon, and painted "Oxen going
to their Work," that mighty picture in the Louvre which displays him in
the zenith of his creative power. Till then no animal painter had
rendered with such a combination of strength and actuality the long,
heavy gait, the philosophical indifference, and the quiet resignation of
cattle, the poetry of autumnal light, and the mist of morning rising
lightly from the earth and veiling the whole land with grey, silvery
hues. The deeply furrowed smoking field makes an undulating ascent, so
that one seems to be looking at the horizon over the broad face of the
earth. A primitive, Homeric feeling rests over it.
Troyon is perhaps not so correct as Potter, nor so lucid as Albert Cuyp,
but he is more forcible and impressive than either. No one has ever
seized the poetry of these heavy masses of flesh, with their strong
colour and largeness of outline, as he has done. What places him far
above the old painters is his fundamental power as a landscapist, a
power unequalled except in Rousseau. His landscapes have always the
smell of the earth, and they smack of rusticity. At one time he paints
the atmosphere, veiling the contours of objects with a light mist
recalling Corot, and yet saturated with clear sunshine; at another he
sends his heavy, fattened droves in the afternoon across field-paths
bright in the sunlight and dark green meadows, or places them beneath a
sky where dense thunderclouds are swiftly rolling up. Troyon is no poet,
but a born painter, belonging to the irrepressibly forceful family of
Jordaens and Courbet, a _maître peintre_ of strength and plastic genius,
as healthy as he is splendid in colour. His "Cow scratching Herself" and
his "Return to the Farm" will always be counted amongst the most
forcible animal pictures of all ages.
When he died in 1865, after passing twelve years with a clouded
intellect, _Rosa Bonheur_ sought to fill the place which he had left
vacant. She had already won the sympathies of the great public, as she
united in her pictures all the qualities which were missed in Troyon,
and had the art of pleasing where he was repellent. For a long time
Troyon's works were held by _amateurs_ to be wanting in finish. They did
not acknowledge to themselves that "finish" in artistic creations is,
after all, only a work of patience, rather industrial than artistic, and
at bottom invented for the purpose of enticing half-trained
connoisseurs. Rosa Bonheur had this diligence, and is indebted to it for
the spread of her fame through all Europe, when Troyon was only known
as yet to the few. The position has now been altered. Without doubt it
is a pleasure to look at her fresh and sunny maiden picture of 1840,
"Ploughing in Nivernois," with its yoke of six oxen, its rich red-brown
soil turned up into furrows, and its wide, bright, simple, and laughing
landscape beneath the clear blue sky. She had all the qualities which
may be appreciated without one's being an epicure of art--great
anatomical knowledge, dexterous technique, charming and seductive
colouring. And it is an isolated fact in the history of art that a woman
has painted pictures so good as the "Hay Harvest in Auvergne" of 1853,
with its brutes which are almost life-size, or the "Horse Fair" of 1855,
which is perhaps her most brilliant work, and for which she made
studies, going in man's clothes for eighteen months, at all the Parisian
_manèges_, amongst stable-boys and horse-dealers. Until her death, from
the Château By, between Thomery and Fontainebleau, she carried on an
extensive transpontine export, and her pictures are by no means the
worst of those which find their way from the Continent to England and
America. She was perhaps the only feminine celebrity of the century who
painted her pictures, instead of working at them like knitting. But
Troyon is a strong master who suffers no rival. His landscapes, with
their deep verdure, their powerful animals, and their skies traversed by
heavy clouds, are the embodiment of power. Rosa Bonheur is an admirable
painter with largeness of style and beauty of drawing, whose artistic
position is between Troyon and Brascassat.
Troyon's only pupil was _Émile van Marcke_, half a Belgian, who met the
elder master in Sèvres, and for a long time worked by his side at
Fontainebleau. He united the occupation of a painter with that of a
landed proprietor. The cattle which he bred on an extensive scale at his
property, Bouttencourt in Normandy, had a celebrity amongst French
landowners, as he had the reputation of rearing the best fat cattle. He
too had not the impressiveness of Troyon, though he was, none the less,
a healthy and forcible master. His animals have no passions, no
movement, and no battles. They seem lost in endless contemplation,
gravely and sedately chewing the cud. Around them stretch the soft green
Norman pastures, and above them arches the wide sky, which at the
horizon imperceptibly melts into the sea.
_Jadin_ is a painter of horses and dogs who had once a great reputation,
though to-day his name is almost, if not entirely forgotten. He was fond
of painting hunting scenes, and is not wanting in life and movement; but
he is too impersonal to play a part in the history of painting. Having
named him, some mention must likewise be made of _Eugène Lambert_, the
painter of cats, and _Palizzi_, who painted goats. Lambert, who was fond
of introducing his little heroes as the actors of comical scenes, is by
admission the chief amongst all those who were honoured amongst the
different nations with the title of "Raphaels of the Cat." Palizzi, an
incisive master of almost brutal energy, a true son of the wild Abruzzo
hills, delighted, like his compatriots Morelli and Michetti, in the
blazing light of noon, shining over rocky heights, and throwing a
dazzle of gold on the dark green copse. _Lançon_, a rather arid painter,
though a draughtsman with a broad and masculine stroke, was the greatest
descendant of Delacroix in the representation of tigers, lions, bears,
and hippopotamuses. An unobtrusive artist, though one of very genial
talent, was _Charles Jacque_, the Troyon of sheep. He has been compared
with the _rageur_ of Bas Bréau, the proud oak which stands alone in a
clearing. A man of forcible character, over whom age had no power, he
survived until 1894 as the last representative of the noble school of
Barbizon. He has painted sheep in flocks or separately, in the pasture,
on the verge of the field-path, or in the fold; and he loved most of all
to paint them in the misty hours of evening twilight, at peace and amid
peaceful nature. But in spirited etchings he has likewise represented
old weather-beaten walls, the bright films of spring, the large outlines
of peasant folk, the tender down of young chickens, the light play of
the wind upon the sea, murmuring brooks, and quiet haunts of the wood.
Like Millet, he had in an eminent degree the gift of simplification, the
greatest quality that an artist can have. With three or four strokes he
could plant a figure on its feet, give life to an animal, or construct a
landscape. He was the most intimate friend of Jean François Millet, and
painted part of what Millet painted also.
CHAPTER XXVI
JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
Whence has _Millet_ come?
It was the time when art, still blind to the life around, could find no
subjects worthy of it except in the past and in the distance. Then
Millet came and overthrew an art vegetating in museums or astray in
tropical countries. It was the time when Leopold Robert in Italy tested
the noble pose of the school of David upon the peasant, and when the
German painters of rustics recognised in the labourer an object for
pleasantries and pathetic little scenes. Then Millet stepped forward and
painted, with profound simplicity, the people at work in the field, or
in their distress, without sentimentality and without beautifying or
idealising them. That great utterance, "I work," the utterance of the
nineteenth century, is here spoken aloud for the first time. Rousseau
and his fellow-artists were the painters of the country. Millet became
the painter of the labourer. He, the great peasant, is the creator of
that painting of peasants which is entwined with the deepest roots of
intimate landscape. Misunderstood in the beginning, it proclaimed for
the first time the new gospel of art before which the people of all
nations bow at the present date. What others did later was merely to
advance on the path opened by Millet. And as time passes the figure of
this powerful man shines more and more brilliantly. The form of Jean
François Millet rises so powerfully, so imperiously, and so suddenly
that one might almost imagine him to have come from Ibsen's third
kingdom; for he is without forerunners in art. An attempt has been made
to bring him into relation with the social and political movement of
ideas in the forties, but certainly this is unjust. Millet was in no
sense revolutionary. During his whole life he repudiated the designs
which some of the democratic party imputed to him, as well as the
conclusions which they drew from his works.
Millet's life in itself explains his art. Never have heart and hand, a
man and his work, tallied with each other as they did in him. He does
not belong to those painters who, even when one admires them, give one
nevertheless a sense that they could just as easily have produced
something different. Let any one consider his works and read the letters
published in Sensier's book: the man whom one knows from the letters
lives in his works, and these works are the natural illustration of the
book in which the man has depicted himself. In the unity of man and
artist lies the source of his strength, the secret of his greatness.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._
JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
Even the circumstances over which he triumphed necessitated his being
the painter that he actually was, if he became one at all. He was not
born in a city where a child's eyes are everywhere met by works of
art--pictures which no doubt early awaken the feeling for art, but which
just as easily disturb a free outlook into nature. Moreover, he did not
spring from one of those families where art is itself practised, or
where art is discussed and taste early guided upon definite lines. He
was a peasant, whose father and grandfather were peasants before him,
and whose brothers were farm labourers. He was born in 1814, far away
from Paris, in a little Norman village hard by the sea, and there he
grew up. The regular and majestic plunge of the waves against the
granite rocks of the coast, the solemn murmurs of the ebb and flow of
the sea, the moaning of the wind in the apple trees and the old oaks of
his father's garden, were the first sounds which struck upon the ear in
Gruchy, near Cherbourg. It has been adduced that his father loved music,
and had had success as the leader of the village choir. But though there
may have always been a dim capacity for art in the youngster's blood,
there was nothing calculated to strengthen it in his education. Millet's
sturdy father had no idea of making an artist of his son; the boy saw no
artist at work in the neighbourhood; nature and instinct guided him
alone.
For a man brought up in a city and trained at an academy all things
become hackneyed. Many centuries of artistic usage have dimmed their
original freshness; and he finds a ready-made phrase coined for
everything. Millet stood before the world like the first man in the day
of creation. Everything seemed new to him; he was charmed and
astonished, and a wild flood of impressions burst in upon him. He did
not come under the influence of any tradition, but approached art like
the man in the age of stone who first scratched the outline of a mammoth
on a piece of ivory, or like the primæval Greek who, according to the
legend, invented painting by making a likeness of his beloved with a
charred stick upon a wall. No one encouraged him in his first attempts.
No one dreamt that this young man was destined to any life other than
that of a peasant. From the time he was fourteen until he was eighteen
he did every kind of field labour upon his father's land in the same way
as his brothers--hoeing, digging, ploughing, mowing, threshing, sowing
the seed, and dressing the ground. But he always had his eyes about him;
he drew upon a white patch of wall, without guidance, the picture of a
tree, an orchard, or a peasant whom he had chanced to meet on a Sunday
when going to church. And he drew so correctly that every one recognised
the likenesses. A family council was held upon the matter. His father
brought one of his son's drawings to a certain M. Mouchel in Cherbourg,
a strange personage who had once been a painter and had the reputation
of being a connoisseur; and he was to decide whether François "had
really enough talent for painting to gain his bread by it." So Millet,
the farm-hand, was twenty when he received his first lessons in drawing.
He was learning the A B C of art, but humanly speaking he was already
Millet. What had roused his talent and induced him to take a stump of
charcoal in his hand was not the study of any work of art, but the sight
of nature--nature, the great mother of all, who had embraced him, nature
with whom and through whom he lived. Through her, visions and emotions
were quickened in him, and he felt the secret impulse to give them
expression.
[Illustration: MILLET. THE HOUSE AT GRUCHY.]
Of what concerned the manual part of his art he understood nothing, and
his two teachers in Cherbourg, Mouchel and Langlois, who were
half-barbarians themselves, gave him the less knowledge, as only two
months later, in 1835, his father died, and the young man returned to
his own people as a farm-labourer once more. And it was only after an
interruption of three years that a subsidy from the community of
Cherbourg, which was collected by his teacher Langlois, and a small sum
saved by his parents--six hundred francs all told--enabled him to
journey up to Paris. He was twenty-three years of age, a broad-chested
Hercules in stature, for till that time he had breathed nothing but the
pure, sharp sea air; his handsome face was framed in long fair locks,
which fell wildly about his shoulders. What had this peasant to do in
the capital! In Delaroche's school he was called _l'homme des bois_. He
had all the awkwardness of a provincial, and the artist was only to be
surmised from the fire in the glance of his large dark blue eyes. At
first Delaroche took peculiar pains with his new pupil. But to submit to
training is to follow the lead of another person. A man like Millet, who
knew what he wanted, was no longer to be guided upon set lines. The
pictures of Delaroche made no appeal to him. They struck him as being
"huge vignettes, theatrical effects without any real sentiment." And
Delaroche soon lost patience with the clumsy peasant, whom he--most
unfairly--regarded as stiff-necked and obstinate.
Other aims floated before Millet, and he _could_ not now learn to
produce academical compositions, so, as these were alone demanded in the
school of Delaroche, he never cleared himself from a reputation for
mediocrity. It was the period of the war between the Classicists and the
Romanticists. "An Ingres, a Delacroix!" was the battle-cry that rang
through the Parisian studios. For Millet neither of these movements had
any existence. His memory only clung to the plains of Normandy, and the
labourers, shepherds, and fishermen of his home, with whom he mingled in
spirit once more. Incessantly he believed himself to hear what he has
called "_le cri de la terre_," and neither Romanticists nor Classicists
caught anything of this cry of the earth. He lived alone with his own
thoughts, associating with none of his fellow-artists, and indeed
keeping out of their way. Always prepared for some scornful attempt at
witticism, he turned his easel round whenever he was approached, or
gruffly cut all criticism short with the remark: "What does my painting
matter to you? I don't trouble my head about your bread and grease."
Thus it was that Delaroche certainly taught him very little of the
technique of painting, though, at the same time, he taught him no
mannerism. He did not learn to paint pretty pictures with beautiful
poses, flattering colour, and faces inspired with intellect. He left the
studio as he had entered it in 1837, painting with an awkward, thick,
heavy, and laborious brush, though with the fresh, untroubled vision
which he had had in earlier days. He was still the stranger, the
incorrigible Norman peasant.
For a time he exerted himself to make concessions to the public. At
seven-and-twenty he had married a Cherbourg girl, who died of
consumption three years afterwards. Without acquaintances in Paris, and
habituated to domestic life from his youth upwards, he married a second
time in 1845. He had to earn his bread, to please, to paint what would
sell. So he toiled over pretty pictures of nude women, like those which
Diaz had painted with such great success--fair shepherdesses and gallant
herdsmen, and bathing girls, in the _genre_ of Boucher and Fragonard.
And he who did this spoke of both of them afterwards as pornographists.
But the attempt was vain, for he satisfied neither others nor himself.
The peasant of Gruchy could not be piquant, easy, and charming; on the
contrary, he remained helpless, awkward, and crude. "Your women bathing
come from the cow-house" was the appropriate remark of Diaz in reference
to these pictures. When Burger-Thoré, who was the first to take notice
of Millet, declared, on the occasion of "The Milkmaid" being exhibited
in 1844, that Boucher himself was surpassed in this picture, the critic
took a literary licence, because he had a human pity for the poor
painter. How little the picture has of the fragrance of the old masters!
how laboured it seems! how obvious it is that it was painted without
pleasure! Millet was not long at pains to conceal his personality. An
"Oedipus" and "The Jewish Captives in Babylon" were his last rhetorical
exercises. In 1848 he came forward with a manifesto--"The Winnower," a
peasant in movement and bearing, in his whole character and in the work
on which he is employed. Millet returns here to the thoughts and
feelings of his youth; for the future he will paint nothing but peasants
in all the situations of their rude and simple life. In 1849 he made a
great resolve.
[Illustration: F. JACQUE. MILLET AT WORK IN HIS STUDIO.
(_By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]
The sale of his "Winnower" had brought him five hundred francs, and
these five hundred francs gave him courage to defy the world. "Better
turn bricklayer than paint against conviction." Charles Jacque, the
painter of animals, who lived opposite to him in the Rue Rochechouard,
wanted to quit Paris in 1849 on account of the outbreak of cholera. He
proposed that Millet should go with him into the country for a short
time; he did so, and the peasant's son of former times became once more
a peasant, to end his days amongst peasants. "In the middle of the
forest of Fontainebleau," said Jacque, "there is a little nest, with a
name ending in 'zon'--not far off and cheap,--Diaz has been telling me a
great deal about it." Millet consented. One fine June day they got into
a heavy, rumbling omnibus, with their wives and their five children, and
they arrived in Fontainebleau that evening after two hours' journey.
"To-morrow we are going in search of our 'zon.'" And the next day they
went forward on foot to Barbizon, Millet with his two little girls upon
his shoulders, and his wife carrying in her arms the youngest child, a
boy of five months old, having her skirt drawn over her head as a
protection against the rain.
[Illustration: F. JACQUE. MILLET'S HOUSE AT BARBIZON.
(_By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]
As yet the forest had no walks laid out as it has to-day; it was virgin
nature, which had never been disturbed. "_Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, que c'est
beau!_" cried Millet, exulting. Once more he stood in the presence of
nature, the old love of his youth. The impressions of childhood rushed
over him. Born in the country, he had to return to the country to be
himself once again. He arrived at Ganne's inn just as the dinner-hour
had assembled twenty persons at the table, artists with their wives and
children. "New painters! The pipe, the pipe!" was the cry which greeted
the fresh arrivals. Diaz rose, and, in spite of his wooden leg, did the
honours of the establishment to the two women with the dignity of a
Spanish nobleman, and then turned gravely to Millet and Jacque, saying:
"Citizens, you are invited to smoke the pipe of peace." Whenever the
colony of Barbizon received an addition this was always taken down from
its sacred place above the door. An expressly appointed jury had then to
decide from the ascending rings of smoke whether the new-comer was to be
reckoned amongst the "Classicists" or the "Colourists." Jacque was with
one voice declared to be a "Colourist." As to Millet's relation to the
schools, there was a discrepancy of opinion. "_Eh bien_," said Millet,
"_si vous êtes embarrassés, placez-moi dans la mienne_." Whereupon
Diaz, as the others would not let this pass, cried: "Be quiet; it is a
good retort, and the fellow looks powerful enough to found a school
which will bury us all." He was right, even though it was late before
his prophecy was fulfilled.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
MILLET. THE WINNOWER.
(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]
Millet was thirty-five when he settled in Barbizon; he had reached the
age which Dante calls the middle point of life. He had no further tie
with the outward world; he had broken all the bridges behind him, and
relied upon himself. He only went back to Paris on business, and he
always did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. He lived
at Barbizon in the midst of nature and in the midst of his models, and
to his last day unreservedly gave himself up to the work which in youth
he had felt himself called to fulfil. Neither criticism, mockery, nor
contempt could lead him any more astray; even if he had wished it, he
would have been incapable of following the paths of official art. "_Mes
critiques_," said he as though by way of excuse, "_sont gens instruits
et de goût, mais je ne peux me mettre dans leur peau, et comme je n'ai
jamais vu de ma vie autre chose que les champs, je tâche de dire comme
je peux ce que j'y ai éprouvé quand j'y travaillais_." When such a man
triumphs, when he succeeds in forcing upon the world his absolutely
personal art, it is not Mahomet who has come to the mountain, but the
mountain to Mahomet.
Millet's life has been, in consequence, a continuous series of
renunciations. It is melancholy to read in Sensier's biography that such
a master, even during his Paris days, was forced to turn out copies at
twenty francs and portraits at five, and to paint tavern signs or
placards for the booths of rope-dancers and horse-dealers, each one of
which brought him in a roll of thick sous. When the Revolution of June
broke out his capital consisted of thirty francs, which the owner of a
small shop had paid him for a sign, and on this he and his family lived
for a fortnight. In Barbizon he boarded with a peasant and lived with
his family in a tiny room where wheat was stored and where bread was
baked twice in the week; then he took a little house at a hundred and
sixty francs a year. In winter he sat in a workroom without a fire, in
thick straw shoes and with an old horse-cloth over his shoulders. Living
like this he painted "The Sower," that marvellous strophe in his great
poem on the earth. By the produce of a vegetable garden he endeavoured
to increase his income, lived on credit with grocer and butcher, and at
last had creditors in every direction--in particular Gobillot, the baker
of Chailly, from whom he often hid at his friend Jacque's.
He was forced to accept a loaf from Rousseau for his famishing family,
and small sums with which he was subsidised by Diaz. "I have received
the hundred francs," he writes in a letter to Sensier, "and they came
just at the right time; neither my wife nor I had tasted food for
four-and-twenty hours. It is a blessing that the little ones, at any
rate, have not been in want."
[Illustration: _Neurdein Frères, photo._
MILLET. A MAN MAKING FAGGOTS.]
[Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._
MILLET. THE GLEANERS.]
All his efforts to exhibit in Paris were vain. Even in 1859 "Death and
the Woodcutter" was rejected by the Salon. The public laughed, being
accustomed to peasants in a comic opera, and, at best, his pictures were
honoured by a caricature in a humorous paper. Even the most delicate
connoisseurs had not the right historical perspective to appreciate the
greatness of Millet, so far was it in advance of the age. And all this
is so much the sadder when one thinks of the price which his works
fetched at a later period, when one reads that drawings for which he
could get with difficulty from twenty to forty francs are the works for
which as many thousands are now offered. It was only from the middle of
the fifties that he began to sell at the rate of from two hundred and
fifty to three hundred francs a picture. Rousseau was the first to offer
him a large sum, buying his "Woodcutter" for four thousand francs, on
the pretext that an American was the purchaser. Dupré helped him to
dispose of "The Gleaners" for two thousand francs. An agreement which
the picture-dealer Arthur Stevens, brother of Stevens the painter,
concluded with him had to be dissolved six months afterwards, since
Millet's time had not yet come. At last, in 1863, when he painted four
large decorative pictures--"The Four Seasons," which are, by the way,
his weakest works--for the dining-room of the architect Feydau,
superfluity came in place of need. He was then in a position, like
Rousseau and Jacque, to buy himself a little house in Barbizon, close to
the road by which the place is entered and opposite Ganne's inn. Wild
vine, ivy, and jessamine clambered round it, and two bushes of white
roses twisted their branches around the window. It was surrounded by a
large garden, in which field-flowers bloomed amongst vegetables and
fruit-trees, whilst a border of white roses and elders led to another
little house which he used as a studio. Behind was a poultry-yard, and
behind that again a thickly grown little shrubbery. Here he lived,
simple and upright, with his art and his own belongings, as a peasant
and a father of a family, like an Old Testament patriarch. His father
had had nine children, and he himself had nine. While he painted the
little ones played in the garden, the elder daughters worked, and when
the younger children made too much noise, Jeanne, who was seven years
old, would say with gravity, "_Chut! Papa travaille._" After the
evening meal he danced his youngest boy upon his knee and told Norman
tales, or they all went out together into the forest, which the children
called _la forêt noire_, because it was so wild, gloomy, and
magnificent.
Millet's poverty was not quite so great as might be supposed from
Sensier's book. Chintreuil, Théodore Rousseau, and many others were
acquainted with poverty likewise, and bore it with courage. It may even
be said that, all things considered, success came to Millet early. The
real misfortune for an artist is to have had success, to have been rich,
and later to see himself forgotten when he is stricken with poverty.
Millet's course was the opposite. From the beginning of the sixties his
reputation was no longer in question. At the World Exhibition of 1867 he
was showered with all outward honours. He was represented by nine
pictures and received the great medal. The whole world knew his name,
subsistence was abundantly assured to him, and all the younger class of
artists honoured him like a god. In the Salon of 1869 he was on the
hanging committee. The picture-dealers, who had passed him by in earlier
days, now beset his doors; he lived to see his "Woman with the Lamp" for
which he had received a hundred and fifty francs, sold for thirty-eight
thousand five hundred at Richard's sale. "_Allons, ils commencent à
comprendre que c'est de la peinture serieuse._" M. de Chennevières
commissioned him to take part in the paintings in the Panthéon, and he
began the work. But strength was denied him; he was prostrated by a
violent fever, and on 20th January 1875, at six o'clock in the morning,
Millet was dead. He was then sixty.
[Illustration: _Mansell & Co._
MILLET. THE WOOD SAWYERS.]
His funeral, indeed, was celebrated with no great parade, for it took
place far from Paris. It was a cold, dull morning, and there was mist
and rain. Not many friends had come, only a few painters and critics. At
eleven o'clock the procession was set in order. And it moved in the rain
quickly over the two _centimètres_ from Barbizon to Chailly. Even those
who had hastened from various villages, drawn by curiosity, could not
half fill the church. But in Paris the announcement of death raised all
the greater stir. When forty newspapers were displayed in a
picture-dealer's shop on the morning after his demise, all Paris
assembled and the excitement was universal. In the critical notices he
was named in the same breath with Watteau, Leonardo, Raphael, and
Michael Angelo. The auction which was held soon afterwards in the Hôtel
Drouot for the disposal of the sketches which he had left behind him
brought his family three hundred and twenty-one thousand francs. And in
these days, the very drawings and pastels which were bought for six
thousand francs immediately after his death have on the average risen in
value to thirty thousand, while the greater number of his pictures rose
to a figure beyond the reach of European purchasers, and passed across
the ocean to the happy land of dollars. Under such circumstances to
speak any longer of Millet being misunderstood, or to sing hymns of
praise upon him as a counterblast to the undervaluation of Millet in the
beginning, would be knocking at an open door. It is merely necessary
to inquire in an entirely objective spirit what position he occupies in
the history of modern painting, and what future generations will say of
him.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLET. VINE-DRESSER RESTING.
(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]
Millet's importance is to some extent ethical; he is not the first who
painted peasants, but he is the first who has represented them
truthfully, in all their ruggedness, and likewise in their
greatness--not for the amusement of others, but as they claim a right to
their own existence. The spirit of the rustic is naturally grave and
heavy, and the number of his ideas and emotions is small. He has neither
wit nor sentimentalism. And when in his leisure moments he sometimes
gives way to a broad, noisy merriment, his gaiety often resembles
intoxication, and is not infrequently its consequence. His life, which
forces him to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, always reminds
him of the hard fundamental conditions of existence. He looks at
everything in a spirit of calculation and strict economy. Even the earth
he stands on wakens in him a mood of seriousness. It is gravely sublime,
this nature with its wide horizon and its boundless sky. At certain
seasons it wears a friendly smile, especially for those who have escaped
for a few hours from town. But for him who always lives in its midst it
is not the good, tender mother that the townsman fancies. It has its
oppressive heats in summer and its bitter winter frosts; its majesty is
austere. And nowhere more austere than in Millet's home, amid those
plains of Normandy, swept by the rude wind, where he spent his youth as
a farm labourer.
From this peasant life, painting, before his time, had collected merely
trivial anecdotes with a conventional optimism. It was through no very
adequate conception of man that peasants, in those earlier pictures, had
always to be celebrating marriages, golden weddings, and baptisms,
dancing rustic dances, making comic proposals, behaving themselves
awkwardly with advocates, or scuffling in the tavern for the amusement
of those who frequent exhibitions. They had really won their right to
existence by their labour. "The most joyful thing I know," writes Millet
in a celebrated letter to Sensier in 1851, "is the peace, the silence,
that one enjoys in the woods or on the tilled lands. One sees a poor,
heavily laden creature with a bundle of faggots advancing from a narrow
path in the fields. The manner in which this figure comes suddenly
before one is a momentary reminder of the fundamental condition of human
life, toil. On the tilled land around one watches figures hoeing and
digging. One sees how this or that one rises and wipes away the sweat
with the back of his hand. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread.' Is that merry, enlivening work, as some people would like to
persuade us? And yet it is here that I find the true humanity, the great
poetry."
Perhaps in his conception of peasant life Millet has been even a little
too serious; perhaps his melancholy spirit has looked too much on the
sad side of the peasant's life. For Millet was altogether a man of
temperament and feelings. His family life had made him so even as a boy.
To see this, one needs only to read in Sensier's book of his old
grandmother, who was his godmother likewise, to hear how he felt in
after-years the news of his father's death and of his mother's, and how
he burst into tears because he had not given his last embrace to the
departed. Of course, a man who was so sad and dreamy might be expected
to lay special stress on the dark side of rustic life, its toil and
trouble and exhaustion. He had not that easy spirit which _amara lento
temperat risu_. The passage beneath the peasant-picture in Holbein's
"Dance of Death" might stand as motto for his whole work--
"À la sueur de ton visage
Tu gagneras ta pauvre vie;
Après travail et long usage
Voici la mort qui te convie."
[Illustration: _Mansell, photo._
MILLET. AT THE WELL.]
[Illustration: _Neudein Frères, photo._
MILLET. BURNING WEEDS.]
This grave and sad trait in Millet's character sets him, for example, in
abrupt contrast with Corot. Corot had a cheerful temperament, which
noticed what was kindly in nature everywhere. His favourite hour was
morning, when the sun rises and the lark exults, when the mists are
dissipated and the shining dew lies upon the grass like pearls. His
favourite season was spring, bringing with the new leaves life and joy
upon the earth. And if he sometimes peopled this laughing world with
peasant lads and maidens in place of the joyous creatures of his fancy,
they were only those for whom life is a feast rather than a round of
hard toil. Compared with so sanguine a man as Corot, Millet is
melancholy all through; whilst the former renders the spring, the latter
chooses the oppressive and enervating sultriness of summer. From
experience he knew that hard toil which makes men old before their time,
which kills body and spirit, and turns the image of God into an ugly,
misshapen, and rheumatic thing; and perhaps he has been one-sided in
seeing only this in the life of the peasant. Nevertheless, it is
inapposite to cite as a parallel to Millet's paintings of the peasant
that cruel description of the rustic made in the time of Louis XIV by
Labruyère: "One sees scattered over the field dwarfed creatures that
look like some strange kind of animal, black, withered, and sun-burnt,
fastened to the earth, in which they grub with invincible stubbornness;
they have something resembling articulate language, and when they raise
themselves they show a human countenance,--as a matter of fact they are
men. At night they retire to their holes, where they live on black
bread, water, and roots. They save other men the trouble of sowing,
ploughing, and gathering in the harvest, and so gain the advantage of
not themselves being in want of the bread that they have sown." Yes,
Millet's peasants toil, and they toil hard, but in bowing over the earth
at their work they are, in a sense, proudly raised by their whole
peasant nature. Millet has made human beings out of the manikins of
illustrated humour, and in this lies his ethical greatness.
As his whole life passed without untruth or artificiality, so his whole
endeavour as an artist was to keep artificiality and untruth at a
distance. After a period of _genre_ painting which disposed of things in
an arbitrary manner, he opened a way for the new movement with its
unconditional devotion to reality. The "historical painters" having
conjured up the past with the assistance of old masterpieces, it was
something to the credit of the _genre_ painters that, instead of looking
back, they began to look around them. Fragments of reality were
arranged--in correspondence with the principle of Classical landscape
painting--according to the rules of composition known to history to make
_tableaux vivants_ crowded with figures; and such pictures related a
cheerful or a moving episode of the painter's invention. Millet's virtue
is to have set emotion in the place of invention, to have set a part of
nature grasped in its totality with spontaneous freshness in the place
of composition pieced together from scattered observation and forcing
life into inconsistent relations--to have set painting in the place of
history and anecdote. As Rousseau and his fellows discovered the poetry
of work-a-day nature, Millet discovered that of ordinary life. The
foundation of modern art could only be laid on painting which no longer
subjected the world to one-sided rules of beauty, but set itself piously
to watch for the beauty of things as they were, and renounced all
literary episodes. Millet does not appear to think that any one is
listening to him; he communes with himself alone. He does not care to
make his ideas thoroughly distinct and salient by repetitions and
antitheses; he renders his emotion, and that is all. And thus painting
receives new life from him: his pictures are not compositions that one
sees, but emotions that one feels; it is not a painter who speaks
through them, but, a man. From the first he had the faculty of seeing
things simply, directly, and naturally; and to exercise himself in this
faculty he began with the plainest things: a labourer in the field,
resting upon his spade and looking straight before him; a sower amid the
furrows, on which flights of birds are settling down; a man standing in
a ploughed field, putting on his coat; a woman stitching in a room; a
girl at the window behind a pot of marguerites. He is never weary of
drawing land broken up for cultivation, and oftener still he draws
huddled flocks of sheep upon a heath, their woolly backs stretching with
an undulatory motion, and a shepherd lad or a girl in their midst.
"The Sower" (1850), "The Peasants going to their Work," "The
Hay-trussers," "The Reapers," "A Sheep-shearer," "The Labourer grafting
a Tree" (1855), "A Shepherd," and "The Gleaners" (1857) are his
principal works in the fifties. And what a deep intuition of nature is
to be found in "The Gleaners"! They have no impassioned countenances,
and their movements aim at no declamatory effect of contrast. They do
not seek compassion, but merely do their work. It is this which gives
them loftiness and dignity. They are themselves products of nature,
plants of which the commonest is not without a certain pure and simple
beauty. Look at their hands. They are not hands to be kissed, but to be
cordially pressed. They are brave hands, which have done hard work from
youth upwards--reddened with frost, chapped by soda, swollen with toil,
or burnt by the sun.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
MILLET. THE ANGELUS.
(_By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright._)]
"The Labourer grafting a Tree" of 1855 is entirely idyllic. In the midst
of one of those walled-in spaces which are half courtyard and half
garden, separating in villages the barns from the house, there is
standing a man who has cut a tree and is grafting a fresh twig. His wife
is looking on, with their youngest child in her arms. Everything around
bears the mark of order, cleanliness, and content. Their clothes have
neither spot nor hole, and wear well under the anxious care of the wife.
Here is the old French peasant, true to the soil, and living and dying
in the place of his birth: it is a picture of patriarchal simplicity. In
1859 appeared "The Angelus," that work which chimes like a low-toned and
far-off peal of bells. "I mean," he said--"I mean the bells to be heard
sounding, and only natural truth of expression can produce the effect."
Nothing is wanting in these creations, neither simplicity nor truth. The
longer they are looked at, the more something is seen in them which goes
beyond reality. "The Man with the Mattock," the celebrated picture of
1863, is altogether a work of great style; it recalls antique statues
and the figures of Michael Angelo, without in any way resembling them.
In his daring veracity Millet despised all the artificial grace and
arbitrary beatification which others introduced into rustic life; and
while, in turning from it, he rested only on the most conscientious
reverence for nature, his profound draughtsmanlike knowledge of the
human form has given a dignity and a large style to the motions of the
peasant which no one discovered before his time. There is a simplicity,
a harmony, and a largeness in the lines of his pictures such as only the
greatest artists have had. He reached it in the same way as Rousseau and
Corot reached their style in landscape: absorbed and saturated by
reality, he was able, in the moment of creation, to dispense with the
model without suffering for it, and to attain truth and condensation
without being hindered by petty detail.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLET. THE SHEPHERDESS AND HER SHEEP.
(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]
He himself went about in Barbizon like a peasant. And he might have been
seen wandering over the woods and fields with an old, red cloak, wooden
shoes, and a weather-beaten straw hat. He rose at sunrise, and wandered
about the country as his parents had done. He guarded no flocks, drove
no cows, and no yokes of oxen or horses; he carried neither mattock nor
spade, but rested on his stick; he was equipped only with the faculty of
observation and poetic intuition. He went about like the people he met,
roamed round the houses, entered the courtyards, looked over the hedges,
knew the gleaners and reapers, the girls who took care of the geese, and
the shepherds in their big cloaks, as they stood motionless amongst
their flocks, resting on a staff. He entered the wash-house, the
bake-house, and the dairies where the butter was being churned. He
witnessed the birth of a calf or the death of a pig, or leant with
folded arms on the garden wall and looked into the setting sun, as it
threw a rosy veil over field and forest. He heard the chime of vesper
bells, watched the people pray and then return home. And he returned
also, and read the Bible by lamplight, while his wife sewed and the
children slept. When all was quiet he closed the book and began to
dream. Once more he saw all that he had come across in the course of the
day. He had gone out without canvas or colours; he had merely noted down
in passing a few motives in his sketch-book: as a rule he never took his
pencil from his pocket, but merely meditated, his mind being compelled
to notice all that his eye saw. Then he went through it again in his
memory. On the morrow he painted.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
MILLET. THE SHEPHERD AT THE PEN AT NIGHTFALL.
(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]
His study seems to have been an incessant exercise of the eye to see and
to retain the essential, the great lines in nature as in the human body.
Advancing upon Daumier's path, he divested figures of all that is merely
accidental, and simplified them, to bring the character and ground-note
more into relief. This simplification, this marvellous way of expressing
forcibly as much as possible with the smallest means, no one has ever
understood like Millet. There is nothing superfluous, nothing petty, and
everything bears witness to an epic spirit attracted by what is great
and heroic. His drawing was never encumbered by what was subsidiary and
anecdotic; his mind was fixed on the decisive lines which characterise a
movement, and give it rhythm. It was just this feeling for rhythm which
his harmonious nature possessed in the very highest degree. He did not
give his peasants Grecian noses, and he never lost himself in arid and
trivial observation; he simplified and sublimated their outlines, making
them the heroes and martyrs of toil. His figures have a majesty of
style, an august grandeur; and something almost resembling the antique
style of relief is found in his pictures. It is no doubt characteristic
that the only works of art which he had in his studio were plaster casts
of the metopes of the Parthenon. He himself was like a man of antique
times, both in the simplicity of his life and in his outward
appearance--a peasant in wooden shoes who had, set upon his shoulders,
the head of the Zeus of Otricoli. And as his biography reads like an
Homeric poem, so his great and simple art sought for what was primitive,
aboriginal, and heroic. Note the Michelangelesque motions of "The
Sower." The peasant, striding on with a firm tread, seems to show by his
large movements his consciousness of the grandeur of his daily toil: he
is the heroic embodiment of man, swaying the earth, making it fruitful
and subservient to his own purposes.
"Il marche dans la plaine immense,
Va, vient, lance la graine au loin,
Rouvre sa main et recommence;
Et je médite, obscur témoin,
Pendant que déployant ses voiles
L'ombre où se mêle une rumeur
Semble élargir jusqu'aux étoiles
Le geste auguste du semeur."
Note the epical quietude of "The Gleaners," the three Fates of poverty,
as Gautier called them, the priestly dignity of "The Woodcutter," the
almost Indian solemnity of "The Woman leading her Cow to Grass." She
stands in her wooden shoes as if on a pedestal, her dress falls into
sculpturesque folds, and a grave and melancholy hebetude is imprinted on
her countenance. Millet is the Michael Angelo of peasants. In their
large simplicity his pictures make the appeal of religious painting, at
once plastic and mystical.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLET. A WOMAN FEEDING CHICKENS.]
But it is in no sense merely through instinct that Millet has attained
this altitude of style. Although the son of a peasant, and himself a
peasant and the painter of peasants, he knew thoroughly well what he
wanted to do; and this aim of his he has not only formulated practically
in his pictures, but has made theoretically clear in his letters and
treatises. For Millet was not simply a man who had a turn for dreaming;
he had, at the same time, a brooding, philosophic mind, in which the
ideas of a thinker were harboured beside the emotions of a poet. In the
portrait of himself, given on the title-page of Sensier's book, a
portrait in which he has something sickly, something ethereal and tinged
with romance, only one side of his nature is expressed. The great
medallion of Chappu reveals the other side: the keen, consecutive
thinker, to be found in the luminous and remorselessly logical letters.
In this respect he is the true representative of his race. In opposition
to the _esprit_ and graceful levity of the Parisian, a quieter and more
healthy human understanding counts as the chief characteristic of the
Norman; and this clear and precise capacity for thought was intensified
in Millet by incessant intellectual training.
[Illustration: _Mansell, photo._
MILLET. THE SHEPHERDESS.]
Even as a child he had received a good education from his uncle, who was
an ecclesiastic, and he learnt enough Latin to read the _Georgics_ of
Virgil and other ancient authors in the original text. He knows them
almost by heart, and cites them continually in his letters. When he came
to Paris he spent long hours in the galleries, not copying this or that
portion of a picture, but fathoming works of art to their inmost core
with a clear eye. In Cherbourg he devoured the whole of Vasari in the
library, and read all he could find about Dürer, Leonardo, Michael
Angelo, and Poussin. Even in Barbizon he remained throughout his whole
life an eager reader. Shakespeare fills him with admiration; Theocritus
and Burns are his favourite poets. "Theocritus makes it evident to me,"
he says, "that one is never more Greek than when one simply renders
one's own impressions, let them come whence they may." When not painting
or studying nature he had always a book in his hand, and knew no more
cordial pleasure than when a friend increased his little library by the
present of a fresh one. Though in his youth he tilled the ground and
ploughed, and in later days lived like a peasant, he was better
instructed than most painters; he was a philosopher, a scholar. His
manner in speaking was leisurely, quiet, persuasive, full of conviction,
and impregnated by his own peculiar ideas, which he had thoroughly
thought out.
"My dear Millet," wrote a critic, "you must sometimes see good-looking
peasants and pretty country girls." To which Millet replied: "No doubt;
but beauty does not lie in the face. It lies in the harmony between man
and his industry. Your pretty country girls prefer to go up to town; it
does not suit them to glean and gather faggots and pump water. Beauty is
expression. When I paint a mother I try to render her beautiful by the
mere look she gives her child." He goes on to say that what has been
once clearly seen is beautiful if it is simply and sincerely
interpreted. Everything is beautiful which is in its place, and nothing
is beautiful which appears out of place. Therefore no emasculation of
characters is ever beautiful. Apollo is Apollo and Socrates is Socrates.
Mingle them and they both lose, and become a mixture which is neither
fish nor flesh. This was what brought about the decadence of modern art.
"_Au lieu de naturaliser l'art, ils artialisent la nature._" The
Luxembourg Gallery had shown him that he ought not to go to the theatre
to create true art. "_Je voudrais que les êtres que je représente aient
l'air voués à leur position; et qu'il soit impossible d'imaginer qu'il
leur puisse venir à l'idée d'être autre chose que ce qu'ils sont. On est
dans un milieu d'un caractère ou d'un autre, mais celui qu'on adopte
doit primer. On devrait être habitué à ne recevoir de la nature ses
impressions de quelque sorte qu'elles soient et quelque temperament
qu'on ait. Il faut être imprégné et saturé d'elle, et ne penser que ce
qu'elle vous fait penser. Il faut croire qu'elle est assez riche pour
fournir à tout. Et où puiserait-on, sinon à la source? Pourquoi donc à
perpétuité proposer aux gens, comme but suprême à atteindre, ce que de
hautes intelligences ont découvert en elle. Voila donc qu'on rendrait
les productions de quelques-uns le type et le but de toutes les
productions à venir. Les gens de génie sont comme doués de la baguette
divinatoire; les uns découvrent que, dans la nature, ici se trouve cela,
les autres autre chose ailleurs, selon le temperament de leur flair.
Leurs productions vous assurent dans cette idée que celui-là trouve qui
est fait pour trouver, mais il est plaisant de voir, quand le trésor est
déterré et enlevé, que des gens viennent à perpétuité gratter à cette
place-là. Il faut savoir découvrir où il y a des truffes. Un chien qui
n'a pas de flair ne peut que faire triste chasse, puisqu'il ne va qu'en
voyant chasser celui qui sent la bête et qui naturellement va le
premier.... Un immense orgueil ou une immense sottise seulement peut
faire croire à certains hommes qu'ils sont de force à redresser les
prétendus manques de goût et les erreurs de la nature. Les oeuvres que
nous aimons, ce n'est qu'à cause qu'elles procèdent d'elle. Les autres
ne sont que des oeuvres pédantes et vides. On peut partir de tous les
points pour arriver au sublime, et tout est propre à l'exprimer, si on a
une assez haute visée. Alors ce que vous aimez avec le plus
d'emportement et de passion devient votre beau à vous et qui s'impose
aux autres. Que chacun apporte le sien. L'impression force l'expression.
Tout l'arsenal de la nature est à la disposition des hommes. Qui oserait
décider qu'une pomme de terre est inférieure à une grenade._"
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
MILLET. THE LABOURER GRAFTING A TREE.
(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]
Thus he maintains that when a stunted tree grows upon sterile soil it is
more beautiful in this particular place, because more natural, than a
slender tree artificially transplanted. "The beautiful is that which is
in keeping. Whether this is to be called realism or idealism I do not
know. For me, there is only one manner of painting, and that is to paint
with fidelity." In what concerns poetry old Boileau has already
expressed this in the phrase: "Nothing is beautiful except truth"; and
Schiller has thrown it into the phrase, "Let us, ultimately, set up
truth for beauty." For the art of the nineteenth century Millet's words
mean the erection of a new principle, of a principle that had the effect
of a novel force, that gave the consciousness of a new energy of
artistic endeavour, that was a return to that which the earth was to
Antæus. And by formulating this principle--the principle that
everything is beautiful so far as it is true, and nothing beautiful so
far as it is untrue, that beauty is the blossom, but truth the tree--by
clearly formulating this principle for the first time, Millet has become
the father of the new French and, indeed, of European art, almost more
than by his own pictures.
For--and here we come to the limitations of his talent--has Millet as a
painter really achieved what he aimed at? No less a person than
Fromentin has put this question in his _Maîtres d'autrefois_. On his
visit to Holland he chances for a moment to speak of Millet, and he
writes:--
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLET. A WOMAN KNITTING.
(_By permission of M. Charles Millet._)]
"An entirely original painter, high-minded and disposed to brooding,
kind-hearted and genuinely rustic in nature, he has expressed things
about the country and its inhabitants, about their toil, their
melancholy, and the nobleness of their labour, which a Dutchman would
never have discovered. He has represented them in a somewhat barbaric
fashion, in a manner to which his ideas gave a more expressive force
than his hand possessed. The world has been grateful for his intentions;
it has recognised in his method something of the sensibility of a Burns
who was a little awkward in expression. But has he left good pictures
behind him or not? Has his articulation of form, his method of
expression, I mean the envelopment without which his ideas could not
exist, the qualities of a good style of painting, and does it afford an
enduring testimony? He stands out as a deep thinker if he is compared
with Potter and Cuyp; he is an enthralling dreamer if he is opposed to
Terborch and Metsu, and he has something peculiarly noble compared with
the trivialities of Steen, Ostade, and Brouwer. As a man he puts them
all to the blush. Does he outweigh them as a painter?"
[Illustration: _Neurdein Frères, photo._
MILLET. THE RAINBOW.]
If any one thinks of Millet as a draughtsman he will answer this
question without hesitation in the affirmative. His power is firmly
rooted in the drawings which constitute half his work. And he has not
merely drawn to make sketches or preparations for pictures, like
Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Watteau, or Delacroix; his drawings
were for him real works of art complete in themselves; and his enduring
and firmly grounded fame rests upon them. Michael Angelo, Raphael,
Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Prudhon, Millet; that is, more or less, the
roll of the greatest draughtsmen in the history of art. His pastels and
etchings, his drawings in chalk, pencil, and charcoal, are astonishing
through their eminent delicacy of technique. The simpler the medium the
greater is the effect achieved. "The Woman Churning" in the Louvre; the
quietude of his men reaping, and of his woman-reaper beside the heaps of
corn; "The Water Carriers," who are like Greek kanephoræ; the peasant
upon the potato-field, lighting his pipe with a flint and a piece of
tinder; the woman sewing by the lamp beside her sleeping child; the
vine-dresser resting; the little shepherdess sitting dreamily on a
bundle of straw near her flock at pasture,--in all these works in black
and white he is as great as he is as a colourist and as a painter in
open air. There are no sportive and capricious sunbeams, as in Diaz.
Millet's sun is too serious merely to play over the fields; it is the
austere day-star, ripening the harvest, forcing men to sweat over their
toil and with no time to waste in jest. And as a landscape painter he
differs from Corot in the same vital manner.
Corot, the old bachelor, dallies with nature; Millet, nine times a
father, knows her only as the fertile mother, nourishing all her
children. The temperament of the brooding, melancholy man breaks out in
his very conception of nature: "Oh, if they knew how beautiful the
forest is! I stroll into it sometimes of an evening, and always return
with a sense of being overwhelmed. It has a quiet and majesty which are
terrible, so that I have often a feeling of actual fear. I do not know
what the trees talk about amongst themselves, but they say to each other
something which we do not understand, because we do not speak the same
language. That they are not making bad jokes seems certain." He loved
what Corot has never painted--the sod, the sod as sod, the sod which
steams beneath the rays of the fertilising sun. And yet, despite all
difference of temperament, he stands beside Corot as perhaps the
greatest landscape painter of the century. His landscapes are vacant and
devoid of charm; they smell of the earth rather than of jessamine, yet
it is as if the Earth-Spirit itself were invisibly brooding over them. A
few colours enable him to attain that great harmony which is elsewhere
peculiar to Corot alone, and which, when his work was over, he so often
discussed with his neighbour Rousseau. With a few brilliant and easily
executed shadings he gives expression to the vibration of the
atmosphere, the lustre of the sky at sunset, the massive structure of
the ground, the blissful tremor upon the plain at sunrise. At one time
he renders the morning mist lying over the fields, at another the haze
of sultry noon, veiling and as it were absorbing the outlines and
colours of all objects, the light of sunset streaming over field and
woodland with a tender, tremulous glimmering, the delicate silver tone
which veils the landscape on clear moonlight nights.
There is not another artist of the century who renders night as Millet
does in his pastels. One of the most charming and poetic works is the
biblical and mystical night-piece "The Flight into Egypt." As he strides
forward Saint Joseph holds upon his arm the Child, whose head is
surrounded by a shining halo, whilst the Mother moves slowly along the
banks of the Nile riding upon an ass. The stars twinkle, the moon throws
its tremulous light uncertainly over the plain. Joseph and Mary are
Barbizon peasants, and yet these great figures breathe of the Sistine
Chapel and of Michael Angelo. And which of the old masters has so
eloquently rendered the sacred silence of night as Millet has done in
his "Shepherd at the Pen"? The landscapes which he has drawn awaken the
impression of spaciousness as only Rembrandt's etchings have done, and
that of fine atmosphere as only Corot's pictures. A marvellously
transparent and tender evening sky rests over his picture of cows coming
down to drink at the lake, and a liquid moonlight washes over the crests
of the waves around "The Sailing Boat." The garden in stormy light with
a high-lying avenue spanned by a rainbow--the motive which he developed
for the well-known picture in the Louvre--is found again and again in
several pastels, which progress from a simple to a more complicated
treatment of the theme. Everything is transparent and delicate, full of
air and light, and the air and light are themselves full of magic and
melting charm.
[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ THE BARBIZON STONE.]
But it is a different matter when one attempts to answer Fromentin's
question in the form in which it is put. For without in any way
detracting from Millet's importance, one may quietly make the
declaration: No, Millet was _not_ a good painter. Later generations,
with which he will no longer be in touch through his ethical greatness,
if they consider his paintings alone, will scarcely understand the high
estimation in which he is held at present. For although many works which
have come into private collections in Boston, New York, and Baltimore
are, in their original form, withdrawn from judgment, they are certainly
not better than the many works brought together in the Millet Exhibition
of 1886 or the World Exhibition of 1889. And these had collectively a
clumsiness, and a dry and heavy colouring, which are not merely
old-fashioned, primitive, and antediluvian in comparison with the works
of modern painters, but which fall far below the level of their own time
in the quality of colour. The conception in Millet's paintings is always
admirable, but never the technique; he makes his appeal as a poet only,
and never as a painter. His painting is often anxiously careful, heavy,
and thick, and looks as if it had been filled in with masonry; it is
dirty and dismal, and wanting in free and airy tones. Sometimes it is
brutal and hard, and occasionally it is curiously indecisive in effect.
Even his best pictures--"The Angelus" not excepted--give no æsthetic
pleasure to the eye. The most ordinary fault in his painting is that it
is soft, greasy, and woolly. He is not light enough with what should be
light, nor fleeting enough with what is fleeting. And this defect is
especially felt in his treatment of clothes. They are of a massive,
distressing solidity, as if moulded in brass, and not woven from flax
and wool. The same is true of his air, which has an oily and material
effect. Even in "The Gleaners" the aspect is cold and gloomy; it is
without the intensity of light which is shed through the atmosphere, and
streams ever changing over the earth.
And this is a declaration of what was left for later artists to achieve.
The problem of putting real human beings in their true surroundings was
stated by Millet, solved in his pastels, and left unsolved in his oil
paintings. This same problem had to be taken up afresh by his
successors, and followed to its furthest consequences. At the same time,
it was necessary to widen the choice of subject.
For it is characteristic of Millet, the great peasant, that his art is
exclusively concerned with peasants. His sensitive spirit, which from
youth upwards had compassion for the hard toil and misery of the country
folk, was blind to the sufferings of the artisans of the city, amid whom
he had lived in Paris in his student days. The _ouvrier_, too, has his
poetry and his grandeur. As there is a cry of the earth, so is there
also a cry, as loud and as eloquent, which goes up from the pavement of
great cities. Millet lived in Paris during a critical and terrible time.
He was there during the years of ferment at the close of the reign of
Louis Philippe. Around him there muttered all the terrors of Socialism
and Communism. He was there during the February Revolution and during
the days of June. While the artisans fought on the barricades he was
painting "The Winnower." The misery of Paris and the sufferings of the
populace did not move him. Millet, the peasant, had a heart only for the
peasantry. He was blind to the sufferings, blind to the charms of modern
city life. Paris seemed to him a "miserable, dirty nest." There was no
picturesque aspect of the great town that fascinated him. He felt
neither its grace, its elegance and charming frivolity, nor remarked the
mighty modern movement of ideas and the noble humanity which set their
seal upon that humanitarian century. The development of French art had
to move in both of these directions. It was partly necessary to take up
afresh with improved instruments the problem of the modern conception of
colour, touched on by Millet; it was partly necessary to extend from the
painting of peasants to modern life the principle formulated by Millet,
"_Le beau c'est le vrai_," to transfer it from the forest of
Fontainebleau to Paris, from the solitude to life, from the evening
gloom to sunlight, from the softness of romance to hard reality.
* * * * *
The fourth book of this work will be devoted to the consideration of
those masters who, acting on this principle, extended beyond the range
of Millet and brought the art which he had created to fuller fruition.
BOOK IV
THE REALISTIC PAINTERS AND THE MODERN IDEALISTS
CHAPTER XXVII
REALISM IN FRANCE
To continue in Paris what Millet had begun in the solitude of the forest
of Fontainebleau there was need of a man of the unscrupulous animal
power of _Gustave Courbet_. The task assigned to him was similar to that
which fell to Caravaggio in the seventeenth century. In that age, when
the eclectic imitation of the Cinquecento had reached the acme of
mannerism, when Carlo Dolci and Sassoferato devoted themselves in
mythological pictures to watering down the types of Raphael by
idealising, Caravaggio painted scenes amongst dregs of the people and
the unbridled soldiery of his age. At a period when these artists
indulged in false, artificial, and doctrinaire compositions, which, on a
barren system, merely traced the performances of classic masters back to
certain rules of art, Caravaggio created works which may have been
coarse, but which had an earnest and fruitful veracity, and gave the
entire art of the seventeenth century another direction by their healthy
and powerful naturalism.
When Courbet appeared the situation was similar: Ingres, in whose frigid
works the whole Cinquecento had been crystallised, was at the zenith of
his fame. Couture had painted his "Decadent Romans" and Cabanel had
recorded his first successes. Beside these stood that little Neo-Grecian
school with Louis Hamon at its head--a school whose prim style of china
painting had the peculiar admiration of the public. Courbet, with all
his brutal weight, pushed between the large symmetrical figures of the
thoroughbred Classicists and the pretty confectionery of the Neo-Grecian
painters of beauty. But the old panacea is never without effect: in all
periods when art has overlived its bloom and falls into mannerism it is
met by a strong cross-current of realism pouring into it new life-blood.
In painting, nature had been made artificial, and it was time for art to
be made natural. Painters still strayed in the past, seeking to awaken
the dead, and give life once more to history. The time had come for
accentuating the claims of the present more sharply than before, and for
setting art amid the seething life of modern cities: it was a
development naturally and logically following that of political life; it
is historically united with the unintermittent struggle for universal
suffrage. Courbet merely fought the decisive battle in the great fight
which Jeanron, Leleux, Octave Tassaert, and others had begun as
skirmishing outposts. As a painter he towered over these elder artists,
whose sentimental pictures had not been taken seriously as works of
art, and challenged attention all the more by painting life-size. In
this manner the last obstacle was removed which had stood in the way of
the treatment of modern subjects. Scanty notice had been taken of
Millet's little peasant figures, which were merely reckoned as
accessories to the landscape. But Courbet's pictures first taught the
Academy that the "picture of manners," which had seemed so harmless, had
begun to usurp the place of historical painting in all its pride.
At the same time--and this made Courbet's appearance of still more
consequence than that of his predecessors--a most effective literary
propaganda went hand in hand with that which was artistic. Millet had
been silent and was known only by his friends. He had never arranged for
an exhibition of his works, and quietly suffered the rejections of the
hanging committee and the derision of the public. Courbet blustered,
beat the big drum, threw himself into forcible postures like a strong
man juggling with cannon-balls, and announced in the press that he was
the only serious artist of the century. No one could ever _embêter le
bourgeois_ with such success, no one has called forth such a howl of
passion, no one so complacently surrendered his private life to the
curiosity of the great public, with the swaggering attitude of an
athlete displaying his muscles in the circus. As regards this method of
making an appearance--a method by which he became at times almost
grotesque--one may take whatever view one pleases; but when he came he
was necessary. In art revolutions are made with the same brutality as in
life. People shout and sing, and break the windows of those who have
windows to break. For every revolution has a character of inflexible
harshness. Wisdom and reason have no part in the passions necessary for
the work of destruction and rebuilding. Caravaggio was obliged to take
to his weapons, and make sanguinary onslaughts. In our civilised
nineteenth century everything was accomplished according to law, but not
with less passion. One has to make great demands to receive even a
little; this has been true in all times, and this is precisely what
Courbet did. He was a remarkable character striving for high aims, an
eccentric man of genius, a modern Narcissus for ever contemplating
himself in his vanity, and yet he was the truest friend, the readiest to
sacrifice himself; for the crowd a cynic and a reckless talker; at home
an earnest and mighty toiler, bursting out like a child and appeased the
very next moment; outwardly as brutal as he was inwardly sensitive, as
egotistic as he was proud and independent; and being what he was, he
formulated his purposes as incisively by his words as in his works. Full
of fire and enthusiasm, destroying and inciting to fresh creation--a
nature like Lorenz Gedon, whom he also resembled in appearance--he
became the soul and motive power of the great realistic movement which
flooded Europe from the beginning of the fifties. Altogether he was the
man of whom art had need at that time: a doctor who brought health with
him, shed it abroad, and poured blood into the veins of art. Both as man
and artist his entry upon the arena is in some degree like the breaking
in of an elemental force of nature. He comes from the country in wooden
shoes, with the self-reliance of a peasant who is afraid of nothing. He
is a great and powerful man, as sound and natural as the oxen of his
birthplace. He had broad shoulders, with which he pushed aside
everything standing in his way. His was an instinct rather than a
reflecting brain, a _peintre-animal_, as he was called by a Frenchman.
And such a plebeian was wanted to beat down the academic Olympus. In
making him great and strong, nature had herself predestined him for the
part he had to play: a man makes a breach the more easily for having big
muscles. Furnished with the strength of a Samson wrecking the temple of
the Philistines, he was himself "The Stone-breaker" of his art, and,
like the men he painted, he has done a serviceable day's work.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ GUSTAVE COURBET.]
Gustave Courbet, the strong son of Franche-Comté, was born in 1819, in
Ornans, a little town near Besançon. Like his friend and
fellow-countryman Proudhon, the socialist, he had a strain of German
blood in his veins, and in their outward appearance it gave them both
something Teutonic, rugged, and heavy, contrasting with French ease and
elegance. On his massive frame was set a thick, athletic neck, and a
broad countenance with black hair, and big, strong eyes like those of a
lion-tamer, which sparkled like black diamonds. A strong man, who had
never been stinted, he was of medium height, broad-shouldered, bluff,
ruddy like a slaughterman, and, as the years passed, disposed to acquire
a more liberal circumference of body. He went about working like
Sisyphus, and never without a short pipe in his mouth, the classic
_brûle-gueule_, loaded with strong caporal. His movements were broad and
heavy, and, being a little short in his breathing, he wheezed when he
was excited, and perspired over his painting. His dress was comfortable,
but not elegant; and his head was formed for a cap rather than the
official tall hat. In speech he was cynical, and often broke into a
contemptuous laugh. Both in his studio and at his tavern he moved more
freely in his shirt-sleeves, and at the Munich Exhibition of 1869 he
seemed to the German painters like a thorough old Bavarian, when he sat
down to drink with them at the _Deutsches Haus_ in his jovial way, and,
by a rather Teutonic than Latin capacity for disposing of beer, threw
the most inveterate of the men of Munich into the shade.
Originally destined for the law, he determined in 1837 to become a
painter, and began his artistic studies under Flageoulot, a mediocre
artist of the school of David, who had drifted into the provinces, and
boastfully called himself _le roi du dessin_. In 1839 he came to Paris,
already full of self-reliance, fire and strength. On his first turn
through the Luxembourg Gallery he paused before Delacroix's "Massacre of
Chios," glowing as it is in colour, and said it was not bad, but that he
could do that style of thing whenever he liked. After a short time he
acquired a power of execution full of bravura by studying the old
masters in the Louvre. Self-taught in art, he was in life a democrat and
in politics a republican. In 1848, during a battle in June, he had a
fair prospect of being shot with a party of insurgents whom he had
joined, if certain "right-minded" citizens had not interceded for their
neighbour, who was popular as a man and already much talked about as a
painter. In the beginning of the fifties he was to be found every
evening at a _brasserie_ much frequented by artists and students in the
Rue Hautefeuille in the _Quartier Latin_, in the society of young
authors of the school of Balzac. He had his studio at the end of the
street, and is said to have been at the time a strong, fine, spirited
young man, who made free use of the drastic slang of the studios.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COURBET. THE MAN WITH A LEATHER BELT.
PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AS A YOUTH.]
"His notable features," writes Théophile Silvestre of Courbet at this
time,--"his notable features seem as though they had been modelled from
an Assyrian bas-relief. His well-shaped and brilliant dark eyes,
shadowed by long silken lashes, have the soft quiet light of an
antelope's. The moustache, scarcely traceable beneath his slightly
curved aquiline nose, is joined by a fan-shaped beard, and borders his
thick, sensuous lips; his complexion is olive-brown, but of a changing,
sensitive tone. The round, curiously shaped head and prominent
cheek-bones denote stubbornness, and the flexible nostrils passion."
A great dispute over realism usually took the place of dessert at
meal-times. Courbet never allowed himself to be drawn into controversy.
He threw his opinion bluntly out, and when he was opposed cut the
conversation short in an exceedingly forcible manner. It was another
murder of the innocents when he spoke of the celebrities of his time. He
designated historical painting as nonsense, style as humbug, and blew
away all ideals, declaring that it was the greatest impudence to wish to
paint things which one has never seen, and of the appearance of which
one cannot have the faintest conception. Fancy was rubbish, and reality
the one true muse.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
COURBET. A FUNERAL AT ORNANS.]
"Our century," he says, "will not recover from the fever of imitation by
which it has been laid low. Phidias and Raphael have hooked themselves
on to us. The galleries should remain closed for twenty years, so that
the moderns might at last begin to see with their own eyes. For what can
the old masters offer us? It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez
that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein, I
feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has
painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him.
And the artistic kin, the heirs, or more properly the slaves of this
great man, are really preceptors of the lowest art. What do they teach
us? Nothing. A good picture will never come from their _École des
Beaux-Arts_. The most precious thing is the originality, the
independence of an artist. Schools have no right to exist; there are
only painters. Independently of system and without attaching myself to
any party, I have studied the art of the old masters and of the more
modern. I have tried to imitate the one as little as I have tried to
copy the other, but out of the total knowledge of tradition I have
wished to draw a firm and independent sense of my own individuality. My
object was by gaining knowledge to gain in ability; to have the power of
expressing the ideas, the manners, and the aspect of our epoch
according to an appreciation of my own, not merely to be a painter, but
a man also--in a word, to practise living art is the compass of my
design. I am not only a socialist, but also a democrat and a
republican--that is to say, a supporter of every revolution; and
moreover, a sheer realist, which means a loyal adherent to the _vérité
vraie_. But the principle of realism is the negation of the ideal. And
following all that comes from this negation of the ideal, I shall arrive
at the emancipation of the individual, and, finally, at democracy.
Realism, in its essence, is democratic art. It can only exist by the
representation of things which the artist can see and handle. For
painting is an entirely physical language, and an abstract, invisible,
non-existent object does not come within its province. The grand
painting which we have stands in contradiction with our social
conditions, and ecclesiastical painting in contradiction with the spirit
of the century. It is nonsensical for painters of more or less talent to
dish up themes in which they have no belief, themes which could only
have flourished in some epoch other than our own. Better paint railway
stations with views of the places through which one travels, with
likenesses of great men through whose birthplace one passes, with
engine-houses, mines, and manufactories; for these are the saints and
miracles of the nineteenth century."
These doctrines fundamentally tallied with those which the Neapolitan
and Spanish naturalists vindicated in the seventeenth century against
the eclectics. For men like Poussin, Leseur, and Sassoferato, Raphael
was "an angel and not a man," and the Vatican "the academy of painters."
But Velasquez when he came to Rome found it wearisome. "What do you say
of our Raphael? Do you not think him best of all, now that you have seen
everything that is fair and beautiful in Italy?" Don Diego inclined his
head ceremoniously, and observed: "To confess the truth, for I like to
be candid and open, I must acknowledge that I do not care about Raphael
at all." There are reported utterances of Caravaggio which correspond
almost word for word with those of Courbet. He, too, declaimed against
the antique and Raphael, in whose shadow he saw so many shallow
imitators sitting at their ease, and he declared, in a spirit of sharp
opposition, that the objects of daily life were the only true teachers.
He would owe all to nature and nothing to art. He held painting without
the model to be absurd. So long as the model was out of sight, his hands
and his spirit were idle. Moreover, he called himself a democratic
painter, who brought the fourth estate into honour; he "would rather be
the first of vulgar painters than second amongst the superfine." And
just as these naturalists in the seventeenth century were treated by the
academical artists as rhyparographists, Courbet's programme did not on
the whole facilitate his acceptance in formal exhibitions as he desired
that it should. A play must be acted, a manuscript printed, and a
picture viewed. So Courbet had no desire to remain an outsider. When the
picture committee of the World Exhibition of 1855 gave his pictures an
unfavourable position, he withdrew them and offered them to public
inspection separately in a wooden hut in the vicinity of the Pont de
Jena, just at the entry of the exhibition. Upon the hut was written in
big letters: REALISM--G. COURBET. And in the interior the theories which
he had urged hitherto by his tongue and his pen, at the tavern and in
his pamphlets, were demonstrated by thirty-eight large pictures, which
elucidate his whole artistic development.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
COURBET. THE STONE-BREAKERS.]
"Lot's Daughters" and "Love in the Country" were followed in 1844 by the
portrait of himself and the picture of his dog, in 1845 by "A
Guitarrero," in 1846 by the "Portrait of M. M----," and in 1847 by "The
Walpurgisnacht"; all works in which he was still groping his way. "The
Sleeping Bathers," "The Violoncello Player," and a landscape from his
native province, belonging to the year 1848, made a nearer approach to
his realistic aim, and with the date 1849 there are seven portraits,
landscapes, and pictures from popular national life: "The Painter," "M.
H. T---- looking over Engravings," "The Vintage in Ornans below the
Roche du Mont," "The Valley of the Bue seen from the Roche du Mont,"
"View of the Château of Saint-Denis," "Evening in the Village of
Scey-en-Varay," and "Peasants returning from Mass near Flagey." All
these works had passed the doors of the Salon without demur.
The first picture which brought about a collision of opinion was "A Fire
in Paris," and, according to the account given by contemporaries, it
must have been one of his finest works. Firemen, soldiers, artisans in
jacket and blouse, were exerting themselves, according to Paul d'Abrest
who describes the picture, around a burning house; even women helped in
the work of rescue, and formed part of the chain handing buckets from
the pump. Opposite stood a group of young dandies with girls upon their
arms looking inactively upon the scene. An artillery captain, who was
amongst Courbet's acquaintances, had through several nights sounded the
alarm for his men and exercised them on the scaffolding of a wall, so
that the painter could make his studies. Courbet transferred his studio
to the barracks and made sketches by torch-light. But he had reckoned
without the police; scarcely was the picture finished before it was
seized, as the Government recognised in it, for reasons which did not
appear, "an incitement to the people of the town." This was after the
_coup d'état_ of 1851.
So Courbet's manifesto was not "The Fire in Paris." "The
Stone-breakers," two men in the dress of artisans, in a plain evening
landscape, occupied once more the first place in the exhibition of 1855,
having already made the effect, amongst its classical surroundings in
the Salon of 1851, of a rough, true, and honest word, spoken amid
elaborate society phrases. There was also to be seen "Afternoon at
Ornans,"--a gathering of humble folk sitting after meal-time at a table
laid out in a rustic kitchen. A picture which became celebrated under
the title of "Bonjour, M. Courbet" dealt with a scene from Courbet's
native town. Courbet, just arrived, is alighting from a carriage in his
travelling costume, looking composedly about him with a pipe in his
mouth. A respectable prosperous gentleman, accompanied by a servant in
livery, who is carrying his overcoat, is stretching out his hand to him.
This gentleman is M. Bryas, the Mæcenas of Ornans, who for long was
Courbet's only patron, and who had a whim for having his portrait taken
by forty Parisian painters in order to learn the "manners" of the
various artists. And there was further to be seen the "Demoiselles de
Village" of 1852, three country beauties giving a piece of cake to a
peasant-girl. Finally, as masterpieces, there were "The Funeral at
Ornans," which now hangs in the Louvre, and that great canvas,
designated in the catalogue as "a true allegory," "My Studio after Seven
Years of Artistic Life," the master himself painting a landscape. Behind
him is a nude model, and in front of him a beggar-woman with her child.
Around are portrait figures of his friends, and the heroes of his
pictures, a poacher, a parson, a sexton, labourers, and artisans.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
COURBET. THE RETURN FROM MARKET.]
The exhibition was, at all events, a success with young painters, and
Courbet set up a teaching studio, at the opening of which he again
issued a kind of manifesto in the _Courrier du Dimanche_. "Beauty," he
wrote, "lies in nature, and it is to be met with under the most various
forms. As soon as it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the
artist who discovers it. But the painter has no right to add to this
expression of nature, to alter the form of it and thereby weaken it. The
beauty offered by nature stands high above all artistic convention. That
is the basis of my views of art." It is said that his first model was an
ox. When his pupils wanted another, Courbet said: "Very well, gentlemen,
next time let us study a courtier." The break-up of the school is
supposed to have taken place when one day the ox ran away and was not to
be recaptured.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COURBET. THE BATTLE OF THE STAGS.]
Courbet did not trouble himself over such ridicule, but painted quietly
on, the many-sidedness of his talent soon giving him a firm seat in
every saddle. After the scandal of the separate exhibition of 1855 he
was excluded from the Salon until 1861, and during this time exhibited
in Paris and Besançon upon his own account. "The Funeral at Ornans" was
followed by "The Return from Market," a party of peasants on the
high-road, and in 1860 by "The Return from the Conference," in which a
number of French country priests have celebrated their meeting with a
hearty lunch and set out on the way back in a condition which is far too
jovial. In 1861, when the gates of the Champs Elysées were thrown open
to him once more, he received the medal for his "Battle of the Stags,"
and regularly contributed to the Salon until 1870. In these years he
attempted pictures with many figures less frequently, and painted by
preference hunting and animal pieces, landscapes, and the nude figures
of women. "The Woman with the Parrot," a female figure mantled with
long hair, lying undressed amid the cushions of a couch playing with her
gaudily feathered favourite, "The Fox Hunt," a coast scene in Provence,
the portrait of Proudhon and his family, "The Valley of the Puits-Noir,"
"Roche Pagnan," "The Roe Hunt," "The Charity of a Beggar," the picture
of women bathing in the gloom of the forest, and "The Wave," afterwards
acquired by the Luxembourg, belong to his principal works in the
sixties.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COURBET. A WOMAN BATHING.
(_By permission of M. Sainctelette, of Brussels, the owner of the
picture._)]
These works gradually made him so well known that after 1866 his
pictures came to have a considerable sale. The critics began to take him
seriously. Castagnary made his début in the _Siècle_ with a study of
Courbet; Champfleury, the apostle of literary realism, devoted to him a
whole series of _feuilletons_ in the _Messager de l'Assemblée_, and from
his intercourse with him Proudhon derived the fundamental principles of
his book on Realism. The son of Franche-Comté triumphed, and there was a
beam in his laughing eyes, always like those of a deer. His talent began
more and more to unfold its wings in the sun of success, and his power
of production seemed inexhaustible. When the custom arose of publishing
in the Parisian papers accounts of the budget of painters, he took care
to communicate that in six months he had made a hundred and twenty-three
thousand francs. Incessantly busy, he had in his hand at one moment the
brush and at another the chisel. And when he gave another special
exhibition of his works in 1867, at the time of the great World
Exhibition--he had a mania for wooden booths--he was able to put on view
no less than a hundred and thirty-two pictures in addition to numerous
pieces of sculpture. In 1869 the committee of the Munich Exhibition set
apart a whole room for his works. With a self-satisfied smile he put on
the Order of Michael, and was the hero of the day whom all eyes followed
upon the boulevards.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COURBET. DEER IN COVERT.]
The nature of the bullfighter was developed in him more strongly than
before, and he stretched his powerful limbs, prepared to do battle
against all existing opinions. Naturally the events of the following
years found no idle spectator in such a firebrand as Courbet; and
accordingly he rushed into those follies which embittered the evening of
his life. The _maître peintre d'Ornans_ became Courbet _le colonnard_.
First came the sensational protest with which he returned to the Emperor
Napoleon the Order of the Legion of Honour. Four weeks after Courbet had
plunged into this affair the war broke out. Eight weeks later came Sedan
and the proclamation of the Republic, and shortly afterwards the siege
of Paris and the insurrection. On 4th September 1870 the Provisional
Government appointed him Director of the Fine Arts. Afterwards he became
a member of the Commune, and dominated everywhere, with the
_brûle-gueule_ in his mouth, by the power of his voice; and France has
to thank him for the rescue of a large number of her most famous
treasures of art. He had the rich collections of Thiers placed in the
Louvre, to protect them from the rough and ready violence of the
populace. But to save the Luxembourg he sacrificed the column of the
Vendôme. When the Commune fell, however, Courbet alone was held
responsible for the destruction of the column. He was brought before the
court-martial of Versailles, and, although Thiers undertook his
defence, he was condemned to six months' imprisonment. Having undergone
this punishment he received his freedom once more, but the artist had
still to suffer a mortal blow. The pictures which he had destined for
the Salon of 1873 were rejected by the committee, because Courbet was
held morally unworthy to take part in the exhibition.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
COURBET. GIRLS LYING ON THE BANK OF THE SEINE.]
Soon after this an action was brought against him, on the initiative of
certain reactionary papers, for the payment of damages connected with
the overthrow of the Vendôme column, and the painter lost his case. For
the recovery of these damages, which were assessed at three hundred and
thirty-four thousand francs, the Government brought to the hammer his
furniture and the pictures that were in his studio, at a compulsory sale
at the Hôtel Drouot, where they fetched the absurdly trifling figure of
twelve thousand one hundred and eighteen francs fifty centimes. The loss
of his case drove him from France to Switzerland. He gave the town of
Vevay, where he settled, a bust of Helvetia, as a mark of his gratitude
for the hospitality it had extended towards him. But the artist was
crushed in him. "They have killed me," he said; "I feel that I shall
never do anything good again." And thus the jovial, laughing Courbet,
that honoured leader of a brilliant pleiad of disciples, the friend and
companion of Corot, Decamps, Gustave Planché, Baudelaire, Théophile
Gautier, Silvestre, Proudhon, and Champfleury; the enthusiastic patriot
and idol of the fickle Parisians, passed his last years in melancholy
solitude, forgotten by his adherents and scorned by his adversaries. He
was attacked by a disease of the liver, and privation, disillusionment,
and depression came all at once. Moreover, the French Government began
again to make claims for indemnification. His heart broke in a prolonged
mortal struggle. Shortly before his death he said to a friend: "What am
I to live upon, and how am I to pay for the column? I have saved Thiers
more than a million francs, and the State more than ten millions, and
now they are at my heels--they are baiting me to death. I can do no
more. To work one must have peace of spirit, and I am a ruined man." And
Champfleury writes, referring to the last visit which he paid to the
dying exile on 19th December 1877: "His beard and hair were white, and
all that remained of the handsome, all-powerful Courbet whom I had known
was that notable Assyrian profile, which he raised to the snow of the
Alps, as I sat beside him and saw it for the last time. The sight of
such pain and misery as this premature wreck of the whole man was
overwhelming."
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COURBET. A RECUMBENT WOMAN.]
The Lake of Geneva, over which he looked from his window in Vevay, was
the subject of the last picture that he painted in Switzerland. Far from
home and amid indifferent strangers he closed his eyes, which had once
been so brilliant, in endless grief of spirit. The apostle of Realism
died of a broken heart, the herculean son of Franche-Comté could not
suffer disillusionment. Courbet passed away, more or less forgotten,
upon New Year's Eve in 1877, in that chilly hour of morning when the
lake which he had learnt to love trembles beneath the first beams of the
sun. It was only in Belgium, where he had often stayed and where his
influence was considerable, that the intelligence of his death woke a
painful echo. In Paris it met with no word of sympathy. Courbetism was
extinguished; as impressionists and independents his adherents had
gathered round new flags. Zola has done him honour in _L'Oeuvre_ in the
person of old Bongrand, that half-perished veteran who is only mentioned
now and then with veneration.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COURBET. BERLIOZ.]
And the course of development has indeed been so rapid since Courbet's
appearance that in these days one almost fails to understand, apart from
historical reasons, the grounds which in 1855 made his separate
exhibition of his works an event of epoch-making importance. It was not
Cham alone who at that time devoted a large cartoon to Courbet, as he
did in "The Opening of Courbet's Studio and Concentrated Realism." All
the comic journals of Paris were as much occupied with him as with the
crinoline, the noiseless pavement, the new tramways, or the balloon.
Haussard, the principal representative of criticism, in discussing "The
Funeral at Ornans," spoke of "these burlesque masks with their fuddled
red noses, this village priest who seems to be a tippler, and the
harlequin of a veteran who is putting on a hat which is too big for
him." All this, he continued, suggested a masquerade funeral, six metres
long, in which there was more to laugh at than to weep over. Even Paul
Mantz declared that the most extravagant fancy could not descend to such
a degree of jejune triviality and repulsive hideousness. In a _revue
d'année_ produced at the Odéon, the authors, Philoxène Hoyer and
Théodore de Banville, make "a realist" say--
"Faire vrai ce n'est rien pour être réaliste,
C'est faire laid qu'il faut! Or, monsieur, s'il vous plait,
Tout ce que je dessine est horriblement laid!
Ma peinture est affreuse, et, pour qu'elle soit vraie,
J'en arrache le beau comme on fait de l'ivraie.
J'aime les teints terreux et les nez de carton,
Les fillettes avec de la barbe au menton,
Les trognes de Varasque et de coquecigrues,
Les dorillons, les cors aux pieds et les verrues!
Voilà le vrai!"
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
COURBET. THE HIND ON THE SNOW.]
So it went on through the sixties also. When the Empress Eugénie passed
through the exhibition on the opening day of the Salon of 1866, with an
elegant walking-stick in her hand, she was so indignant at Courbet's
"Naked Women" that the picture had to be immediately removed. In the
beginning of the seventies, when he exhibited in Germany, a few young
Munich painters recognised in his pictures something like the cry of a
conscience. But otherwise "artists and laymen shook their heads, not
knowing what to make of them. Some smiled and went indifferently on,
while others were indignant in their condemnation of this degradation of
art." For "Courbet went to the lowest depths of society, and took his
themes from a class where man really ceases to be man, and the image of
God prolongs a miserable existence as a moving mass of flesh. Living
bodies with dead souls, which exist only for the sake of their animal
needs; in one place sunk in misery and wretchedness, and in another
having never risen from their brutal savagery--that is the society from
which Courbet chooses his motives, to gloss over the debility of his
imagination and his want of any kind of training. Had he possessed the
talent for composition, then perhaps his lifeless technique would have
become interesting; as it is he offers a merely arbitrary succession of
figures in which coherence is entirely wanting." In "The Stone-breakers"
it was an offence that he should have treated such "an excessively
commonplace subject" at all as mere artisans in ragged and dirty
clothes. And by "The Funeral at Ornans" it was said that he meant to
sneer at the religious ceremony, since the picture had a defiant and
directly brutal vulgarity. The painter was alleged to have taken pains
to expose the repulsive, ludicrous, and grotesque elements in the
members of the funeral party, and to have softened no feature which
could excite an unseasonable merriment. In the "Demoiselles de Village"
the design had been to contrast the stilted, provincial nature of these
village misses with the healthy simplicity of a peasant child. In the
picture, painted in 1857, of the two grisettes lying in the grass on the
bank of the Seine he had "intentionally placed the girls in the most
unrefined attitudes, that they might appear as trivial as possible." And
umbrage was taken at his two naked wrestlers because he "had not painted
wrestlers more or less like those of classic times, but the persons who
exhibit the strength of their herculean frames at the Hippodrome," and
therefore given "the most vulgar rendering of nudity that was at all
possible." And in his naked women it was said that this love of ugly and
brutal forms became actually base.
All these judgments are characteristic symptoms of the same sort of
taste which rose in the seventeenth century against Caravaggio. Even his
principal work, the altar-piece to St. Matthew, which now hangs in the
Berlin Museum, excited so much indignation that it had to be removed
from the Church of St. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Annibale Carracci has
a scornful caricature in which the Neapolitan master appears as a hairy
savage, with a dwarf at his side and two apes upon his knees, and, in
this fashion, intended to brand the hideousness of his rival's art and
his ape-like imitation of misshapen nature. Francesco Albani called him
the "Antichrist of Painting," and "a ruination to art." And Baglione
adds: "Now a number of young men sit down to copy a head after nature;
they study neither the foundations of drawing, nor concern themselves
about the more profound conditions of art, merely contenting themselves
with a crude reproduction of nature, and therefore they do not even know
how to group two figures appropriately, nor to bring any theme into an
artistic composition. No one any longer visits the temples of art, but
every one finds his masters and his models for a servile imitation of
nature in the streets and open places." The nineteenth century formed a
different estimate of Caravaggio. In opposing his fortune-telling
gipsies, his tipplers, gamblers, musicians, and dicing mercenaries to
the noble figures of the academical artists, with their generalised and
carefully balanced forms, their trivial, nugatory countenances, and
their jejune colouring, he accomplished the legitimate and necessary
reaction against a shallow and empty idealistic mannerism. No one is
grateful to the eclectic artists for the learned efforts which it cost
them to paint so tediously: in Caravaggio there is the fascination of a
strong personality and a virile emphasis in form, colour, and light. The
Carracci and Albani were the issue of their predecessors; Caravaggio is
honoured as a fearless pioneer who opened a new chapter in the history
of art.
[Illustration: COURBET. MY STUDIO AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF ARTISTIC LIFE.]
Courbet met with a similar fate.
If one approaches him after reading the criticisms of his pictures
already cited, a great disillusionment is inevitable. Having imagined a
grotesque monster, one finds to one's astonishment that there is not the
slightest occasion either for indignation or laughter in the presence of
these powerful, sincere, and energetic pictures. One has expected
caricatures and a repulsive hideousness, and one finds a broad and
masterly style of painting. The heads are real without being vulgar, and
the flesh firm and soft and throbbing with powerful life. Courbet is a
personality. He began by imitating the Flemish painters and the
Neapolitans. But far more did he feel himself attracted by the actual
world, by massive women and strong men, and wide fertile fields smelling
of rich, rank earth. As a healthy and sensuously vigorous man he felt a
voluptuous satisfaction in clasping actual nature in his herculean arms.
Of course, by the side of his admirable pictures there are others which
are heavy and uncouth. But if one is honest one paints according to
one's inherent nature, as old Navez, the pupil of David, was in the
habit of saying. Courbet was honest, and he was also a somewhat unwieldy
being, and therefore his painting too has something bluff and cumbrous.
But where in all French art is there such a sound painter, so sure of
his effects and with such a large bravura, a _maître peintre_ who was so
many-sided, extending his dominion as much over figure-painting as
landscape, over the nude as over _nature morte_? There is no artist so
many of whose pictures may be seen together without surfeit, for he is
novel in almost every work. He has painted not a few pictures of which
it may be said that each one is _sui generis_, and on the variations of
which elsewhere entire reputations might have been founded. With the
exception of Millet, no one had observed man and nature with such
sincere and open eyes. With the great realists of the past Courbet
shares the characteristic of being everywhere and exclusively a portrait
painter. A pair of stone-breakers, kneeling as they do in his picture,
with their faces protected by wire-masks, were figures which every one
saw working at the street corner, and Courbet represented the scene as
faithfully as he could, as sincerely and positively as was at all
possible. "Afternoon in Ornans" is a pleasant picture, in which he took
up again the good tradition of Lenain. And in "The Funeral at Ornans" he
has painted exactly the manner in which such ceremonies take place in
the country. The peasants and dignitaries of a little country
town--portrait figures such as the masters of the fifteenth century
brought into their religious pictures--have followed the funeral train,
and behave themselves at the grave just as peasants would. They make no
impassioned gesticulations, and form themselves into no fine groups, but
stand there like true rustics, sturdy and indifferent. They are men of
flesh and blood, they are like the people of real life, and they have
been subjected to no alteration: on the one side are the women tearfully
affected by the words of the preacher, on the other are the men bored by
the ceremony or discussing their own affairs. In the "Demoiselles de
Village" he gives a portrait of his own sisters, as they went to a dance
of a Sunday afternoon. The "Girls lying on the Bank of the Seine" are
grisettes of 1850, such as Gavarni often drew; they are both dressed in
doubtful taste, one asleep, the other lost in a vacant reverie. His
naked women make a very tame effect compared with the colossal masses of
human flesh in that cascade of nude women of the plumpest description
who in Rubens' "Last Judgment" plunge in confusion into hell, like fish
poured out from a bucket. But they are amongst the best nude female
figures which have been created in the nineteenth century. Courbet was a
painter of the family of Rubens and Jordaens. He had the preference
shown by the old Flemish artists for healthy, plump, soft flesh, for
fair, fat, and forty, the three F's of feminine beauty, and in his
works he gave the academicians a lesson well worth taking to heart; he
showed them that it was possible to attain a powerful effect, and even
grace itself, by strict fidelity to the forms of reality.
[Illustration: _Neuerdein, photo._
COURBET. THE WAVE.]
His portraits--and he had the advantage of painting Berlioz and
Baudelaire, Champfleury and Proudhon--are possibly not of conspicuous
eminence as likenesses. As Caravaggio, according to Bellori, "had only
spirit, eyes and diligence for flesh-tints, skin, blood, and the natural
surface of objects," a head was merely a _morceau_ like anything else
for Courbet too, and not the central point of a thinking and sensitive
being. The physical man, Taine's human animal, was more important in his
eyes than the psychical. He painted the epidermis without giving much
suggestion of what was beneath. But he painted this surface in such a
broad and impressive manner that the pictures are interesting as
pictorial masterpieces if not as analyses of character.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
STEVENS. THE LADY IN PINK.]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
STEVENS. LA BÊTE À BON DIEU.]
To these his landscapes and animal pieces must be added as the works on
which his talent displayed itself in the greatest purity and most
inherent vigour: "The Battle of the Stags," that most admirable picture
"The Hind on the Snow," "Deer in Covert," views of the moss-grown rocks
and sunlit woods of Ornans and the green valleys of the Franche-Comté.
He had the special secret of painting with a beautiful tone and a broad,
sure stroke dead plumage and hunting-gear, the bristling hide of
wild-boars, and the more delicate coat of deer and of dogs. As a
landscape painter he does not belong to the family of Corot and Dupré.
His landscapes are green no doubt, but they have limitations; the leaves
hang motionless on the branches, undisturbed by a breath of wind.
Courbet has forgotten the most important thing, the air. Whatever the
time of the year or the day may be, winter or summer, evening or
morning, he sees nothing but the form of things, regarding the sun as a
machine which has no other purpose than to mark the relief of objects by
light and shade. Moreover, the lyricism of the Fontainebleau painters
was not in him. He paints without reverie, and knows nothing of that
tender faltering of the landscape painter in which the poet awakes, but
has merely the equanimity of a good and sure worker. In regard to
nature, he has the sentiments of a peasant who tills his land, is never
elegiac or bucolic, and would be most indignant if a nymph were to tread
on the furrows of his fields. He paints with a pipe in his mouth and a
spade in his hand, the plain and the hills, potatoes and cabbages, rich
turf and slimy rushes, oxen with steaming nostrils heavily ploughing the
clods, cows lying down and breathing at ease the damp air of the meadows
drenched with rain. He delights in fertile patches of country, and in
the healthy odour of the cow-house. A material heaviness and a prosaic
sincerity are stamped upon all. But his painting has a solidity
delightful to the eye. It is inspiriting to meet a man who has such a
resolute and simple love of nature, and can interpret her afresh in
powerful and sound colour without racking his brains. His attachment to
the spot of earth where he was born is a leading characteristic of his
art. He borrowed from Ornans the motives of his most successful
creations, and was always glad to return to his parents' house. The
patriotism of the church-spire, provincialism, and a touching and vivid
sense of home are peculiar to all his landscapes. But in his sea-pieces,
to which he was incited by a residence in Trouville in the summer of
1865, he has opened an altogether new province to French art. _Eugène Le
Poittevin_, who exhibited a good deal in Berlin in the forties, and
therefore became very well known in Germany, cannot count as a painter.
_Théodore Gudin_, whose signature is likewise highly valued in the
market, was a frigid and rough-and-ready scenical painter. His little
sea-pieces have a professional manner, and the large naval battles and
fires at sea which he executed by the commission of Louis Philippe for
the Museum of Versailles are frigid, pompous, and spectacular sea-pieces
parallel with Vernet's battle-pieces. _Ziem_, who gave up his time to
Venice and the Adriatic, is the progenitor of Eduard Hildebrandt. His
water and sky take all the colours of the prism, and the objects
grouped between these luminous elements, houses, ships, and men, equally
receive a share of these flattering and iridescent tones. This gives
something seductive and dazzling to his sketches, until it is at last
perceived that he has only painted one picture, repeating it
mechanically in all dimensions. Courbet was the first French painter of
sea-pieces who had a feeling for the sombre majesty of the sea. The
ocean of Gudin and Ziem inspires neither wonder nor veneration; that of
Courbet does both. His very quietude is expressive of majesty; his peace
is imposing, his smile grave; and his caress is not without a menace.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
STEVENS. THE JAPANESE MASK.]
Courbet has positively realised the programme which he issued in that
pamphlet of 1855. When he began his activity, eclectic idealism had
overgrown the tree of art. But Courbet stripped off the parasitic
vegetation to reach the firm and serviceable timber. And having once
grasped it he showed the muscles of an athlete in making its power felt.
Something of the old Flemish sturdiness lived once more in his bold
creations. If he and Delacroix were united, the result would be Rubens.
Delacroix had the fervour and passionate tamelessness, while Courbet
contributed the Flemish weight. Each made use of blood, purple, thrones,
and Golgothas in composing the dramas they had imagined. The latter
pictured creation with the absolutism of complete objectivity. Delacroix
rose on the horizon like a brilliant meteor catching flame from the
light of vanished suns; he reflected their radiance, had almost their
magnitude, and followed the same course amid the same coruscation and
blaze of light. Courbet stands firm and steady upon the earth. The
former had the second sight known to visionaries, the latter opened his
eyes to the world that can be felt and handled. Neurotic and
distempered, Delacroix worked feverishly. As a sound, full-blooded being
Courbet painted, as a man drinks, digests, and talks, with an activity
that knows no exertion, a force that knows no weariness. Delacroix was a
small, weakly man, and his whole power rested in his huge head. That of
Courbet, as in animals of beauty and power, was dispersed through his
whole frame; his big arms and athletic hands render the same service to
his art as his eyes and his brain. And as, like all sincere artists, he
rendered himself, he was the creator of an art which has an
irrepressible health and overflows with an exuberant opulence. His
pictures brought a savour of the butcher's shop into French painting,
which had become anæmic. He delighted in plump shoulders and sinewy
necks, broad breasts heaving over the corset, the glow of the skin
dripping with warm drops of water in the bath, the hide of deer and the
coat of hares, the iridescent shining of carp and cod-fish. Delacroix,
all brain, caught fire from his inward visions; Courbet, all eye and
maw, with the sensuousness of an epicure and the satisfaction of a
_gourmet_, gloats over the shining vision of things which can be
devoured--a Gargantua with a monstrous appetite, he buried himself in
the navel of the generous earth. Plants, fruit, and vegetables take
voluptuous life beneath his brush. He triumphs when he has to paint a
_déjeuner_ with oysters, lemons, turkeys, fish, and pheasants. His mouth
waters when he heaps into a picture of still-life all manner of
delicious eatables. The only drama that he has painted is "The Battle of
the Stags," and this will end in brown sauce amid a cheerful clatter of
knives and forks.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
STEVENS. THE VISITORS.
(_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)]
Even as a landscape painter he is luxurious and phlegmatic. In his
pictures the earth is a corpulent nurse, the trees fine and well-fed
children, and all nature healthy and contented. His art is like a
powerful body fed with rich nourishment. In such organisms the capacity
for enthusiasm and delicacy of sentiment are too easily sacrificed to
their physical satisfaction, but their robust health ensures them the
longer life. Here is neither the routine and external technique and the
correct, academic articulation of form belonging to mannerists, nor the
strained, neurotic, sickly refinement of the decadents, but the
powerful utterance of inborn, instinctive talent, and the strong cries
of nature which rise out of it will be understood at all times, even the
most distant. It is hardly necessary to add that the appearance of a
genius of this kind was fraught with untold consequences to the further
development of French painting.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
RICARD. MADAME DE CALONNE.]
What is held beautiful in nature must likewise be beautiful in pictorial
art when it is faithfully represented, and nature is beautiful
everywhere. In announcing this and demonstrating it in pictures of
life-size, Courbet won for art all the wide dominion of modern life
which had hitherto been so studiously avoided--the dominion in which it
had to revel if it was to learn to see with its own eyes. One fragment
of reality after another would then be drawn into the sphere of
representation, and no longer in the form of laboriously composed
_genre_ pictures, but after the fashion of really pictorial works of
art.
What Millet had done for the peasant, and Courbet for the artisan,
_Alfred Stevens_ did for "society": he discovered the _Parisienne_.
Until 1850 the graceful life of the refined classes, which Gavarni,
Marcellin, and Cham had so admirably drawn, found no adequate
representation in the province of painting. The _Parisienne_, who is so
_chic_ and piquant, and can hate and kiss with such fervour, fascinated
every one, but Grecian profile was a matter of prescription. _Auguste
Toulmouche_ painted little women in fashionable toilette, but less from
any taste he had for the graceful vision than from delight in _genre_
painting. They were forced to find forbidden books in the library, to
resist worldly marriages, or behave in some such interesting fashion, to
enter into the kingdom of art. It was reserved for a foreigner to reveal
this world of beauty, _chic_, and grace.
Alfred Stevens was a child of Brussels. He was born in the land of
Flemish matrons on 11th May 1828, and was the second of three children.
Joseph, the elder brother, became afterwards the celebrated painter of
animals; Arthur, the youngest, became an art-critic and a
picture-dealer; he was one of the first who brought home to the public
comprehension the noble art of Rousseau, Corot, and Millet. Stevens'
father fought as an officer in the great army at the battle of Waterloo,
and is said to have been an accomplished critic. Some of the ablest
sketches of Delacroix, Devéria, Charlet, and Roqueplan found their way
into his charming home. Roqueplan, who often came to Brussels, took the
younger Stevens with him to his Parisian studio. He was a tall, graceful
young man, who, with his vigorous upright carriage, his finely chiselled
features, and his dandified moustache, looked like an officer of
dragoons or cuirassiers. He was a pleasure-loving man of the world, and
was soon the lion of Parisian drawing-rooms. The grace of modern life in
great cities became the domain of his art. The _Parisienne_, whom his
French fellow-artists passed by without heed, was a strange, interesting
phenomenon to him, who was a foreigner--an exotic and exquisitely
artistic _bibelot_, which he looked upon with eyes as enraptured as
those with which Decamps had looked upon the East.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
CHAPLIN. THE GOLDEN AGE.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
His very first picture, exhibited in 1855, was called "At Home." A
charming little woman is warming her feet at the fire; she has returned
from visiting a friend, and it has been raining or snowing outside. Her
delicate hands are frozen in spite of her muff, her cheeks have been
reddened by the wind, and she has a pleasant sense of comfort as her
rosy lips breathe the warm air of the room. From the time of this
picture women took possession of Stevens' easel. His way was prescribed
for him, and he never left it. Robert Fleury, the president of the
judging committee in the Salon, said to him: "You are a good painter,
but alter your subjects; you are stifling in a sphere which is too
small; how wide and grand is that of the past!" Whereon Stevens is said
to have showed him a volume of photographs from Velasquez. "Look here at
Velasquez," he said. "This man never represented anything but what he
had before his eyes--people in the Spanish dress of the seventeenth
century. And as the justification of my _genre_ may be found in this
Spanish painter, it may be found also in Rubens, Raphael, Van Dyck, and
all the great artists. All these masters of the past derived their
strength and the secret of their endurance from the faithful
reproduction of what they had themselves seen: it gives their pictures a
real historical as well as an artistic value. One can only render
successfully what one has felt sincerely and seen vividly before one's
eyes in flesh and blood." In these sentences he is at one with Courbet,
and by not allowing himself to be led astray into doing sacrifice to the
idols of historical painting he continues to live as the historical
painter of the _Parisienne_.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
CHAPLIN. PORTRAIT OF COUNTESS AIMERY DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.]
In his whole work he sounds a pæan to the delicate and all-powerful
mistress of the world, and it is significant that it was through woman
that art joined issue with the interests of the present. Millet, the
first who conquered a province of modern life, was at the same time the
first great painter of women in the century. Stevens shows the other
side of the medal. In Millet woman was a product of nature; in Stevens
she is the product of modern civilisation. The woman of Millet lives a
large animal life, in the sweat of her brow, bowed to the earth. She is
the primæval mother who works, bears children, and gives them
nourishment. She stands in the field like a caryatid, like a symbol of
fertile nature. In Stevens woman does not toil and is seldom a mother.
He paints the woman who loves, enjoys, and knows nothing of the great
pangs of child-birth and hunger. The one woman lives beneath the wide,
open sky, _dans le grand air_; the other is only enveloped in an
atmosphere of perfume. She is ancient Cybele in the pictures of Millet;
in those of Stevens the holy Magdalene of the nineteenth century, to
whom much will be forgiven, because she has loved much. The pictures of
Stevens represent, for the first time, the potent relations of woman to
the century. Whilst most works of this time are silent concerning
ourselves, his art will speak of our weaknesses and our passions. In a
period of archaic painting he upheld the banner of modernity. On this
account posterity will honour him as one of the first historians of the
nineteenth century, and will learn from his pictures all that Greuze has
revealed to the present generation about the civilisation of the
eighteenth century.
[Illustration: _Baschet._
GAILLARD. PORTRAIT.]
And perhaps more, for Stevens never moralised--he merely painted.
Painter to his finger tips, like Delacroix, Roqueplan, and Isabey, he
stood in need of no anecdotic substratum as an adjunct. The key of his
pictures was suggested by no theme of one sort or another, but by his
treatment of colour. The picture was evolved from the first tone he
placed upon the canvas, which was the ground-note of the entire scale.
He delighted in a thick pasty handling, in beautiful hues, and in finely
chased detail. And he was as little inclined to sentimentality as to
pictorial novels. Everything is discreet, piquant, and full of charm. He
was a delicate spirit, avoiding tears and laughter. Subdued joy,
melancholy, and everything delicate and reserved are what he loves; he
will have nothing to do with stereotyped arrangement nor supernumerary
figures, but although a single person dominates the stage he never
repeats himself. He has followed woman through all her metamorphoses--as
mother or in love, weary or excited, proud or humbled, fallen or at the
height of success, in her morning-gown or dressed for visiting or a
promenade, now on the sea-shore, now in the costume of a Japanese, or
dallying with her trinkets as she stands vacantly before the glass. The
surroundings invariably form an accompaniment to the melody. A world of
exquisite things is the environment of the figures. Rich stuffs,
charming _petit-riens_ from China and Japan, the most delicate ivory and
lacquer-work, the finest bronzes, Japanese fire-screens, and great vases
with blossoming sprays, fill the boudoir and drawing-room of the
_Parisienne_. In the pictures of Stevens she is the fairy of a paradise
made up of all the most capricious products of art. A new world was
discovered, a painting which was in touch with life; the symphony of the
salon was developed in a delicate style. A tender feminine perfume,
something at once melancholy and sensuous, was exhaled from the pictures
of Stevens, and by this shade of _demi-monde haut-goût_ he won the great
public. They could not rise to Millet and Courbet, and Stevens was the
first who gave general pleasure without paying toll to the vicious taste
for melodramatic, narrative, and humorous _genre_ painting. Even in the
sixties he was appreciated in England, France, Germany, Russia, and
Belgium, and represented in all public and private collections; and
through the wide reception offered to his pictures he contributed much
to create in the public a comprehension for good painting.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
DUBOIS. PORTRAIT OF MY SONS.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
In the same way _James Tissot_ achieved the representation of the modern
woman. Stevens, a Belgian, painted the _Parisienne_; Tissot, a
Frenchman, the Englishwoman. It was not till they went into foreign
countries that these artists perceived the grace of what was not deemed
suitable to art at home. In Paris from the year 1859 Tissot had painted
scenes from the fifteenth century, to which he was moved by Leys, and he
studied with archæological accuracy the costume and furniture of the
late Gothic period. When he migrated to England in 1871 he gave up the
romantic proclivities of his youth, and devoted himself to the
representation of fashionable society. His oil paintings fascinate us by
their delicate feeling for cool transparent tone values, whilst his
water-colours--restaurant, theatre, and ball scenes--assure him a place
among the pioneers of modernity.
At first Stevens found no successors amongst Parisian painters. A few,
indeed, painted interiors in graceful Paris, but they were only frigid
compositions of dresses and furniture, without a breath of that delicate
aroma which exhales from the works of the Belgian. The portrait painters
alone approached that modern grace which still awaited its historian and
poet.
An exceedingly delicate artist, _Gustave Ricard_, in whose portraits the
art of galleries had a congenial revival, was called the modern Van Dyck
in the sixties. Living nature did not content him; he wished to learn
how it was interpreted by the old masters, and therefore frequented
galleries, where he sought counsel sometimes from the English
portrait-painters, sometimes from Leonardo, Rubens, and Van Dyck. In
this way Ricard became a _gourmet_ of colour, who knew the technique of
the old masters as few others have done, and his works have an
attractive golden gallery-tone of great distinction.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ CAROLUS DURAN.]
In _Charles Chaplin_ Fragonard was revived. He was the specialist of
languishing flesh and _poudre de riz_, the refined interpreter of
aristocratic beauty, one on whose palette there might still be found a
delicate reflection of the _fêtes galantes_ of the eighteenth century.
In Germany he was principally known by those dreamy, frail, and sensual
maidens, well characterised by the phrase of the Empress Eugénie. "M.
Chaplin," she said, "I admire you. Your pictures are not merely
indecorous, they are more." But Chaplin had likewise the other qualities
of the _rococo_ painter. He was a decorative artist of the first rank,
and, like Fragonard, he carelessly scattered round him on all sides
grace and beauty, charm and fascination. In 1857 he decorated the _Salon
des Fleurs_ in the Tuileries, in 1861-65 the bathroom of the Empress in
the _Palais de l'Elysée_, and from 1865 a number of private houses in
Paris, Brussels, and New York; and there is in all these works a refined
_haut-goût_ of modern Parisian elegance and fragrant _rococo_ grace. He
revived no nymphs, and made no pilgrimage to the island of Cythera; he
was more of an epicurean. But Fragonard's fine tones and Fragonard's
sensuousness were peculiar to him. He had a method of treating the hair,
of introducing little patches, of setting a dimple in the chin, and
painting the arms and bosom, which had vanished since the _rococo_
period from the power of French artists. Rosebuds and full-blown roses
blossom like girls _à la_ Greuze, and fading beauties, who are all the
more irresistible, are the elements out of which his refined,
indecorous, and yet fragrant art is constituted.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BONNAT. ADOLPHE THIERS.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
The great engraver _Gaillard_ brought Hans Holbein once more into
honour. He was the heir of that method of painting, the eternal matrix
of which Jan van Eyck left to the world in unapproachable perfection.
His energetic but conscientiously minute brush noted every wrinkle of
the face, without doing injury to the total impression by this labour of
detail. Indeed, his pictures are as great in conception and as powerful
in characterisation as they are small in size. Gaillard is a profound
physiognomist who attained the most vivid analysis of character by means
of the utmost precision.
_Paul Dubois_ takes us across the Alps; in his portraits he is the same
great quattrocentist that he was from the beginning in his plastic
works. His ground is that of the excellent and subtle period when
Leonardo, who had been in the beginning somewhat arid, grew delicate and
allowed a mysterious sphinx-like smile to play round the lips of his
women. Manifestly he has studied Prudhon and had much intercourse with
Henner in those years when the latter, after his return from Italy,
directed attention once more to the old Lombards. From the time when he
made his début in 1879, with the portrait of his sons, he received great
encouragement, and stands out in these days as the most mature painter
of women that the present age has to show. Only the great English
portrait painters Watts and Millais, who are inferior to him in
technique, have excelled him in the embodiment of personalities.
As the most skilful painter of drapery, the most brilliant decorator of
feminine beauty, _Carolus Duran_ was long celebrated. The studies which
he had made in Italy had not caused him to forget that he took his
origin from across the Flemish border; and when he appeared with his
first portraits, in the beginning of the seventies, it was believed that
an eminent colourist had been born to French painting. At that time he
had a fine feeling for the eternal feminine and its transitory phases of
expression, and he was as dexterous in seizing a fleeting gesture or a
turn of the head as he was in the management of drapery and the play of
its hues. Then, again, he made a gradual transition from delicate and
discreetly coquettish works to the crude arts of upholstery. Yet even in
his last period he has painted some masculine portraits--those of
Pasteur, and of the painters Français, Fritz Thaulow, and René
Billotte--which are striking in their vigorous simplicity and unforced
characterisation after the glaring virtuosity of his pictures of women.
[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
BONNAT. VICTOR HUGO.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
_Léon Bonnat_, the pupil of Madrazos, brought about the fruitful
connection between French painting and that of the old Spaniards. By
this a large quantity of the fresh blood of naturalism was poured into
it once more. Born in the South of France and educated in Spain, he had
conceived there a special enthusiasm for Ribera, and these youthful
impressions were so powerful that he remained faithful to them in Paris.
As early as his residence in Italy, which included the three years from
1858 to 1860, his individuality had been fortified in a degree which
prevented him from wasting himself on large academical compositions like
the holders of the _Prix de Rome_; on the contrary, he painted scenes
from the varied life of the Roman people. Several religious pictures,
such as "The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew" (1863), "Saint Vincent de Paul"
(1866), and the "Job" of the Luxembourg, showed that he was steadily
progressing on the road paved by Spagnoletto. He had a virtuosity in
conjuring on to the canvas visages furrowed by the injustices of
life--grey hair, waving grey beards, and the starting sinews and muscles
of old weather-beaten frames. In the beginning of the seventies, when he
had to paint a Crucifixion for the jury-chamber in the Paris Palais de
Justice, he executed a virile figure, the muscles and anatomy of which
were as clearly marked as the buttresses in a Gothic cathedral. As in
the paintings of Caravaggio, a sharp, glaring light fell upon certain
parts of the body, whilst others remained dark and colourless in the
gloomy background. He applied the same principles to his portraits. A
French Lenbach, he painted in France a gallery of celebrated men. With
an almost tangible reality he painted Hugo, Madame Pasta, Dumas, Gounod,
Thiers, Grévy, Pasteur, Puvis de Chavannes, Jules Ferry, Carnot,
Cardinal Lavigerie, and others. Over two hundred persons, famous or not,
have sat to him, and he has painted them with an exceedingly intelligent
power, masculine taste, and a learning which never loses itself in
unnecessary detail.
[Illustration: _L'Art._ ANTOINE VOLLON.]
The delicate physiognomy of women, the _frou-frou_ of exquisite
toilettes, the dreaminess, the fragrance, the coquetry of the modern
Sphinx, were no concern of his. On the other hand, his masculine
portraits will always keep their interest, if only on historical
grounds. In all of them he laid great stress on characteristic
accessories, and could indicate in the simplest way the thinker, the
musician, the scholar, and the statesman. One remembers his pictures as
though they were phrases uttered with conviction, though a German does
not hesitate to place Lenbach far above Bonnat as a psychologist. The
latter has not the power of seizing the momentary effect, the intimacy,
the personal note, the palpitating life peculiar to Lenbach. With the
intention of saying all things he often forgets the most important--the
spirit of the man and the grace of the woman. His pictures are great
pieces of still-life--exceedingly conscientious, but having something of
the conscientiousness of an actuary copying a tedious protocol. The
portrait of Léon Cogniet, the teacher of the master, with his aged face,
his spectacled eyes, and his puckered hands (Musée Luxembourg), is
perhaps the only likeness in which Bonnat rivals Lenbach in depth of
characterisation. His pictorial strength is always worthy of respect;
but, for the sake of variety, the _esprit_ is for once on the side of
the German.
Ruled by a passion for the Spanish masters, such as Bonnat possessed,
_Roybet_ painted cavaliers of the seventeenth century, and other
historical pictures of manners, which are distinguished, to their
advantage, from older pictures of their type, because it is not the
historical anecdote but the pictorial idea which is their basis. All the
earlier painters were rather bent upon archæological accuracy than on
pictorial charm in the treatment of such themes. Roybet revelled in the
rich hues of old costumes, and sometimes attained, before he strained
his talent in the Procrustean bed of pictures of great size, a bloom and
a strong, glowing tone which rival the old masters.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
VOLLON. A CARNIVAL SCENE.]
In all periods which have learnt to see the world through a pictorial
medium, still-life has held an important place in the practice of art. A
technical instinct, which is in itself art, delights in investing
musical instruments, golden and silver vessels, fruit and other
eatables, glasses and goblets, coverings of precious work, gauntlets and
armour, all imaginable _petit-riens_, with an artistic magic, in
recognising and executing pictorial problems everywhere. After the
transition from historical and _genre_ painting had been made to
painting proper there once more appeared great painters of still-life in
France as there did in Chardin's days.
Yet _Blaise Desgoffe_, who painted piecemeal and with laborious patience
goldsmith's work, crystal vases, Venetian glass, and such things, is
certainly rather petty. In France he was the chief representative of
that precise and detailed painting which understands by art a deceptive
imitation of objects, and sees its end attained when the holiday public
gathers round the pictures as the birds gathered round the grapes of
Zeuxis.
It is as if an old master had revived in _Philippe Rousseau_. He had the
same earnest qualities as the Dutch and Flemish Classic masters--a
broad, liquid, pasty method of execution, a fine harmony of clear and
powerful tones--and with all this a marvellous address in so composing
objects that no trace of "composition" is discernible. His work arose
from the animal picture. His painting of dogs and cats is to be ranked
with the best of the century. He makes a fourth with Gillot, Chardin,
and Decamps, the great painters of monkeys. As a decorator of genius,
like Hondekoeter, he embellished a whole series of dining-halls with
splendidly coloured representations of poultry, and, like Snyders, he
heaped together game, dead and living fowl, fruit, lobsters, and oysters
into huge life-size masses of still-life. Behind them the cook may be
seen, and thievish cats steal around. But, like Kalf, he has also
painted, with an exquisite feeling for colour, Japanese porcelain bowls
with bunches of grapes, quinces, and apricots, metal and ivory work,
helmets and fiddles, against that delicate grey-brown-green tone of
background which Chardin loved.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BONVIN. THE COOK.]
_Antoine Vollon_ became the greatest painter of still-life in the
century. Indeed, Vollon is as broad and nervous as Desgoffe is precise
and pedantic. Flowers, fruit, and fish--they are all painted in with a
firm hand, and shine out of the dark background with a full liquid
freshness of colour. He paints dead salt-water fish like Abraham van
Beyeren, grapes and crystal goblets like Davids de Heem, dead game like
Frans Snyders, skinned pigs like Rembrandt and Maes. He is a master in
the representation of freshly gathered flowers, delicate vegetables,
copper kettles, weapons, and suits of armour. Since Chardin no painter
depicted the qualities of the skin of fresh fruit, its life and its play
of colour, and the moist bloom that rests upon it, with such fidelity to
nature. His fish in particular will always remain the wonder of all
painters and connoisseurs. But landscapes, Dutch canal views, and
figure-pictures are also to be found amongst his works. He has painted
everything that is picturesque, and the history of art must do him
honour as, in a specifically pictorial sense, one of the greatest in the
century. A soft grey-brown wainscoting, a black and white Pierrot
costume, and a white table-cloth and dark green vegetables--such is the
harmony of colour which he chiefly loved in his figure-pictures.
On the same purely pictorial grounds nuns became very popular in
painting, as their white hoods and collars standing out against a black
dress gave the opportunity for such a fine effect of tone. This was the
province in which poor _François Bonvin_ laboured. Deriving from the
Dutch, he conceived an enthusiasm for work, silence, the subdued shining
of light in interiors, cold days, the slow movements and peaceful faces
of nuns, and painted kitchen scenes with a strong personal accent.
Before he took up painting he was for a long time a policeman, and was
employed in taking charge of the markets. Here he acquired an eye for
the picturesqueness of juicy vegetables, white collars, and white hoods,
and when he had a day free he studied Lenain and Chardin in the Louvre.
Bonvin's pictures have no anecdotic purport. Drinkers, cooks, orphan
children in the schoolroom, sempstresses, choristers, sisters of mercy,
boys reading, women in church, nuns conducting a sewing-class--Bonvin's
still, picturesque, congenial world is made up of elements such as
these. What his people may think or do is no matter: they are only meant
to create an effect as pictorial tones in space. During his journey to
Holland he had examined Metsu, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh, Terborg, and
Van der Meer with an understanding for their merits, but it was Chardin
in both his phases--as painter of still-life and of familiar events--who
was in a special sense revived in Bonvin. All his pictures are simple
and quiet; his figures are peaceful in their expression, and have an
easy geniality of pose; his hues have a beauty and fulness of tone
recalling the old masters.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BONVIN. THE WORK-ROOM.]
Even _Théodule Ribot_, the most eminent of the group, one of the most
dexterous executants of the French school, a master who for power of
expression is worthy of being placed between Frans Hals and Ribera, made
a beginning with still-life. He was born in 1823, in a little town of
the department of Eure. Early married and poor, he supported himself at
first by painting frames for a firm of mirror manufacturers, and only
reserved the hours of the evening for his artistic labours. In
particular he is said to have accustomed himself to work whole nights
through by lamplight, while he nursed his wife during a long illness,
watching at her bedside. The lamplight intensified the contrasts of
light and shadow. Thus Ribot's preference for concentrated light and
strong shadows is partially due, in all probability, to what he had
gone through in his life, and in later days Ribera merely bestowed upon
him a benediction as his predecessor in the history of art.
[Illustration: RIBOT. THE STUDIO.]
His first pictures from the years 1861 to 1865 were, for the most part,
scenes from household and kitchen life: cooks, as large as life,
plucking poultry, setting meat before the fire, scouring vessels, or
tasting sauces; sometimes, also, figures in the streets; but even here
there was a strong accentuation of the element of still-life. There were
men with cooking utensils, food, dead birds, and fish. Then after 1865
there followed a number of religious pictures which, in their hard,
peasant-like veracity and their impressive, concentrated life, stood in
the most abrupt contrast with the conventionally idealised figures of
the academicians. His "Jesus in the Temple," no less than "Saint
Sebastian" and "The Good Samaritan"--all three in the Musée
Luxembourg--are works of simple and forceful grandeur, and have a
thrilling effect which almost excites dismay. Sebastian is no smiling
saint gracefully embellished with wounds, but a suffering man, with the
blood streaming from his veins, stretched upon the earth; yet
half-raising himself, a cry of agony upon his lips, and his whole body
contorted by spasms of pain. In his "Jesus in the Temple," going on
parallel lines with Menzel, he proclaims the doctrine that it is only
possible to pour new life-blood into traditional figures by a tactful
choice of models from popular life around. And in "The Good Samaritan,"
also, he was only concerned to paint, with naturalistic force, the body
of a wounded man lying in the street, a thick-set French peasant robbed
of his clothes. From the seventies his specialty was heads--separate
figures of weather-beaten old folk, old women knitting or writing, old
men reading or lost in thought; and these will always be ranked with the
greatest masterpieces of the century. Ribot attains a remarkable effect
when he paints those expressive faces of his, which seem to follow you
with their looks, and are thrown out from the darkness of his canvas. A
black background, in which the dark dresses of his figures are
insensibly lost, a luminous head with such eyes as no one of the
century has ever painted, wrinkled skin and puckered old hands rising
from somewhere--one knows not whence--these are things which all lend
his figures something phantasmal, superhuman, and ghostly. Ribot is the
great king of the under-world, to which a sunbeam only penetrates by
stealth. Before his pictures one has the sense of wandering in a deep,
deep shaft of some mine, where all is dark and only now and then a
lantern glimmers. No artist, not even Ribera, has been a better painter
of old people, and only Velasquez has painted children who have such
sparkling life. Ribot worked in Colombes, near Paris, to which place he
had early withdrawn, in a barn where only tiny dormer-windows let in two
sharp rays of light.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
RIBOT. AT A NORMAN INN.]
By placing his canvas beneath one window and his model beneath the
other, in a dim light which allowed only one golden ray to fall upon the
face, he isolated it completely from its surroundings, and in this way
painted the parts illuminated with the more astonishing effect. No one
had the same power in modelling a forehead, indicating the bones beneath
the flesh, and rendering all the subtleties of skin. A terrible and
intense life is in his figures. His old beggars and sailors especially
have something kingly in the grand style of their noble and quiet faces.
An old master with a powerful technique, a painter of the force and
health of Jordaens, has manifested himself once more in Ribot.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
RIBOT. KEEPING ACCOUNTS.]
Courbet's principles, accordingly, had won all down the line, in the
course of a few years. "It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that
I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein I feel
veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted
some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him." In
these words he had prophesied as early as 1855 the course which French
art would take in the next decade. When Courbet appeared the grand
painting stood in thraldom to the _beauté suprême_, and the æsthetic
conceptions of the time affected the treatment of contemporary subjects.
Artists had not realism enough to give truth and animation to these
themes. When Cabanel, Hamon, and Bouguereau occasionally painted beggars
and orphans, they were bloodless phantoms, because by beautifying the
figures they deprived them of character in the effort to give them,
approximately, the forms of historical painting. Because painters did
not regard their own epoch, because they had been accustomed to consider
living beings merely as elements of the second and third rank, they
never discovered the distinctiveness of their essential life. Like a
traveller possessed by one fixed mania, they made a voyage round the
world, thinking only how they might adapt living forms to those which
their traditional training recommended as peculiarly right and alone
worthy of art. Even portrait painting was dominated by this false
method, of rendering figures as types, of improving the features and the
contour of bodies, and giving men the external appearance of fair, ideal
figures.
But now the sway of the Cinquecento has been finally broken. A fresh
breeze of realism from across the Pyrenees has taken the place of the
sultry Italian sirocco. From the pictures of the Neapolitans, the
Spaniards, and the Dutch it has been learnt that the joys and sorrows of
the people are just as capable of representation as the actions of gods
and heroes, and under the influence of these views a complete change in
the cast has taken place.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
RIBOT. ST. SEBASTIAN, MARTYR.]
The figures which in 1855 filled Courbet's picture "The
Studio"--beggar-women, agricultural labourers, artisans, sailors,
tippling soldiers, buxom girls, porters, rough members of the
proletariat of uncouth stature--now crowd the stage of French art, and
impart even to the heroes of history, bred through centuries from
degenerated gods, something of their full-blooded, rough, hearty, and
plebeian force of life. The artists of Italian taste only gave the
rights of citizenship to "universal forms"; every reminiscence of
national customs or of local character was counted vulgar; they did not
discover the gold of beauty in the rich mines of popular life, but in
the classic masters of foreign race. But now even what is unearthly is
translated into the terms of earth. If religious pictures are to be
painted, artists take men from the people for their model, as Caravaggio
did before them--poor old peasants with bones of iron, and bronzed,
weather-beaten faces, porters with figures bowed and scarred by labour,
men of rough, common nature, though of gnarled and sinewy muscles. The
pictures of martyrs, once artificial compositions of beautiful gesture
and vacant, generalised countenances, receive a tone local to the
scaffold, a trait of merciless veracity--the heads the energy of a
relief, the gestures force and impressiveness, the bodies a science in
their modelling which would have rejoiced Ribera. As Caravaggio said
that the more wrinkles his model had the more he liked him, so no one
is any longer repelled by horny hands, tattered rags, and dirty feet. In
the good periods of art it is well known that the beauty or uncomeliness
of a work has nothing to do with the beauty or uncomeliness of the
model, and that the most hideous cripple can afford an opportunity for
making the most beautiful work. The old doctrine of Leonardo, that every
kind of painting is portrait painting, and that the best artists are
those who can imitate nature in the most convincing way, comes once more
into operation. The apotheosis of the model has taken the place of
idealism. And during these same years England reached a similar goal by
another route.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER XVI
Leopold Boilly:
Jules Houdoy: "L'Art," 1877, iv 63, 81.
On the History of Caricature in General:
J. P. Malcolm: An Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing.
London, 1813.
Th. Wright: A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and
Art. London, 1875.
Arsène Alexandre: L'Art du rire. Paris, 1892.
E. Bayard: La caricature et les caricaturistes. Paris, 1900.
Fuchs und Krämer: Die Karikatur der europäischen Völker vom Altertum
bis zur Neuzeit. Berlin, 1901.
On the English Caricaturists:
Victor Champier: La caricature anglaise contemporaine, "L'Art," 1875,
i 29, 293, ii 300, iii 277 and 296.
Ernest Chesneau: Les livres à caricatures en Angleterre, "Le Livre,"
Novembre 1881.
Augustin Filon: La caricature en Angleterre, W. Hogarth, "Revue des
Deux Mondes," 15 Janvier 1885.
Graham Everitt: English Caricaturists and Graphic Humorists of the
Nineteenth Century. How they illustrated and interpreted their Times.
With 67 Illustrations. London, 1886.
Rowlandson:
C. M. Westmacott: The Spirit of the Public Journals. 3 vols.
1825-1826.
Joseph Grego: Thomas Rowlandson, the Caricaturist. A selection from
his works, with anecdotal descriptions of his famous Caricatures and a
sketch of his Life, Times, and Contemporaries. With about 400
Illustrations. 2 vols. London, 1880.
F. G. Stephens: Thomas Rowlandson the Humorist, "Portfolio," 1891,
141.
Cruikshank:
Cruikshankiana. Engravings by Richard Dighton. London, 1855.
F. G. Stephens: G. Cruikshank, "Portfolio," 1872, 77.
G. W. Reid: Complete Catalogue of the Engraved Works of George
Cruikshank. London, 1873.
G. A. Sala: George Cruikshank, a Life Memory, "Gentleman's Magazine,"
1878.
William Bates: George Cruikshank, the Artist, the Humorist, and the
Man. With Illustrations and Portraits. London and Birmingham, 1878.
Frederick Wedmore: Cruikshank, "Temple Bar," April 1878.
W. B. Jerrold: The Life of George Cruikshank. 2 vols. 1882.
H. Thornber: The Early Work of George Cruikshank. 1887.
F. G. Stephens: A Memoir of George Cruikshank. London, 1891.
R. F. H. Douglas: Catalogue of Works by Cruikshank. London, 1903.
John Leech:
Ernest Chesneau: Un humoriste anglais, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1875,
i 532.
John Brown: John Leech, and Other Papers. Edinburgh, 1882.
F. G. Kitton: John Leech, Artist and Humorist. London, 1884.
George Du Maurier:
"L'Art," 1876, iv 279. See also English Society at Home. Fol. London,
1880.
Charles Keene:
Claude Phillips: Charles Keene, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1891, i 327.
G. L. Layard: The Life and Letters of Charles Keene. London, 1892.
On the German Draughtsmen:
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Caricatur, "Zeitschrift für Museologie,"
1881, 13 ff.
J. Grand-Carteret: Les moeurs et la caricature en Allemagne, en
Autriche, en Suisse. Paris, 1885.
R. v. Seydlitz: Die moderne Caricatur in Deutschland, "Zur guten
Stunde," Mai 1891.
Hermann: Die deutsche Karikatur im 19 Jahrhundert. Bielefeld, 1901.
Johann Christian Erhard:
Alois Apell: Das Werk von Johann Christian Erhard. Leipzig, 1866-75.
Johann Adam Klein:
F. M.: Verzeichniss der von Johann Adam Klein gezeichneten und
radirten Blätter. Stuttgart, 1853.
John: Das Werk von Johann Adam Klein. Munich, 1863.
Ludwig Richter:
Richter-Album. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1861.
Jahn, in Richter-Album, and in the Biographische Aufsätze. Leipzig,
1867.
W. Heinrichsen: Ueber Richters Holzschnitte. Carlsruhe, 1870.
Johann F. Hoff: Adrian Ludwig Richter, Maler und Radirer. List and
description of his works, with a biographical sketch by H. Steinfeld.
Dresden, 1871.
L. Richter's Landschaften. Text by H. Lücke. Leipzig, 1875.
Georg Scherer: Aus der Jugendzeit. Leipzig, 1875. Ernst und Scherz.
Leipzig, 1875.
Deutsche Art und Sitte. Published by G. Scherer. Leipzig, 1876.
Friedrich Pecht: Deutsche Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts, i. Nördlingen,
1877, pp. 57 ff.
A. Springer: Zum 80 Geburtstag Ludwig Richter's, "Zeitschrift für
bildende Kunst," 1883, pp. 377-386.
J. E. Wessely: Adrian Ludwig Richter zum 80 Geburtstag. A Monograph.
"Graphische Künste," 1884, vi 1.
Obituary: "Allgemeine Zeitung," 1884, No. 175; "Allgemeine
Kunst-Chronik," 1884, 26; G. Weisse, "Deutsches Künstlerblatt," iii 1.
Lebenserinnerungen eines deutschen Malers: Autobiography of Ludwig
Richter. Published by Heinrich Richter. Frankfurt a. M., 1886.
Robert Waldmüller: Ludwig Richter's religiöse Entwickelung.
"Gegenwart," 37, pp. 198, 218.
Veit Valentin: Kunst, Künstler, und Kunstwerke. 1889.
Richard Meister: Land und Leute in Ludwig Richter's
Holzschnitt-Bildern. Leipzig, 1889.
Die vervielfältigende Kunst der Gegenwart. Edited by C. v. Lützow.
Vol. i. Woodcut Engravings. Wien, 1890.
H. Gerlach: Ludwig Richters Leben, dem deutschen Volke erzählt.
Dresden, 1891.
Budde: Ludwig Richter, "Preussische Jahrbücher." Bd. 87. Berlin, 1897.
P. Mohn: Ludwig Richter, "Künstlermonographien," Edited by Knackfuss.
Bd. 14. 2 Aufl. Bielefeld, 1898.
J. Erler: Ludwig Richter, der Maler des deutschen Hauses. Leipzig,
1898.
David Ludwig Koch: Ludwig Richter. Stuttgart, 1903.
Albert Hendschel:
J. E. Wessely: Aus Albert Hendschels Bildermappe, "Vom Fels zum Meer,"
1883, iii 3.
Obituary: "Le Portefeuille," 1884, 30.
F. Luthmer: Albert Hendschel. "Vom Fels zum Meer," December 1884.
W. Busch:
Paul Lindau: "Nord und Süd," 1878, iv 257.
Eduard Daelen: W. Busch, "Kunst für Alle," 1887, ii 217.
See Busch-Album, Humoristischer Hausschatz. Collection of the twelve
most popular works, with 1400 pictures. München, 1885.
Adolf Oberländer:
Adolf Bayersdorfer: Adolf Oberländer, "Kunst für Alle," 1888, iv 49.
Robert Stiassny: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Caricatur, "Neue Freie
Presse," 20th August 1889.
Hermann Essenwein: Adolf Oberländer, "Moderne Illustratoren." Bd. 5.
Munich, 1903.
See Oberländer-Album. 7 vols. Munich, Braun & Schneider, 1881-89.
On the French Draughtsmen:
Champfleury: Histoire générale de la caricature. 5 vols. Paris,
1856-80.
J. Grand-Carteret: Les moeurs et la caricature en France. Paris, 1888.
Armand Dayot: Les Maîtres de la caricature au XIX siècle. 115
facsimilés de grand caricatures en noir, 5 facsimilés de lithographies
en couleurs. Paris, 1888.
Henri Béraldi: Les graveurs du XIX siècle. Paris, 1885.
Paul Mantz: La caricature moderne, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1888, i
286.
Augustin de Buisseret: Les caricaturistes français, "L'Art," 1888, ii
91.
Moreau:
J. F. Mahérault: L'oeuvre de Moreau le jeune. Paris, 1880.
A. Moureau: Les Moreau in "Les artistes célèbres." 1903.
Emanuel Bocher: Jean Michel Moreau le jeune. Paris, 1882.
Debucourt:
Roger Portalis and Henri Béraldi: Les graveurs du XVIII siècle, vol.
i. Paris, 1880.
Henri Bouchot, in "Les artistes célèbres." 1905.
Carle Vernet:
Amédée Durande: Joseph Carle, et Horace Vernet. Paris, 1865.
A. Genevay: Carle Vernet, "L'Art," 1877, i 73, 96.
Henri Monnier:
Philippe Burty: "L'Art," 1877, ii 177.
Champfleury: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1877, i 363.
Champfleury: Henri Monnier, sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris, 1879.
Daumier:
Champfleury: L'oeuvre de Daumier, Essai de catalogue, "L'Art," 1878,
ii 217, 252, 294.
Eugène Montrosier: La caricature politique, H. Daumier, "L'Art," 1878,
ii 25.
H. Billung: H. Daumier, "Kunstchronik," 24, 1879.
Arsène Alexandre: Honoré Daumier, l'homme et son oeuvre. Paris, 1890.
H. Frantz: Daumier and Gavarni. London, 1904.
Erich Klossowski: H. Daumier. Stuttgart, 1906.
Guys:
Baudelaire: Le peintre de la vie moderne, in the volume "L'Art
romantique" of his complete works. Paris, 1869.
Gavarni:
Manières de voir et façons de penser, par Gavarni, précédé d'une étude
par Charles Yriarte. Paris, 1869.
Edmond et Jules de Goncourt: Gavarni, l'Homme et l'Oeuvre. Paris,
1873.
Armelhault et Bocher: Catalogue raisonné de l'Oeuvre de Gavarni.
Paris, 1873.
G. A. Simcox: "Portfolio," 1874, p. 56.
Georges Duplessis: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1875, ii 152, 211.
Georges Duplessis: Gavarni, Étude, ornée de 14 dessins inédits. Paris,
1876.
Ph. de Chennevières: Souvenirs d'un Directeur des Beaux-Arts, IIIième
partie. Paris, 1876.
Bruno Walden: "Unsere Zeit," 1881, ii 926.
Eugène Forgues: Gavarni, in "Les artistes célèbres." Paris, 1887.
See also Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis. Henri Béraldi, Graveurs du XIX
siècle. Oeuvres choisies de Gavarni. 4 vols. Paris, 1845-48.
Gustave Doré:
K. Delorme, Gustave Doré, peintre, sculpteur, dessinateur, graveur.
Avec gravures et photographies hors texte. Paris, Baschet, 1879.
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 105.
Obituary: "Magazine of Art," March 1883; Fernand Brouet: "Revue
artistique," March 1883; Dubufe: "Nouvelle Revue," March and April
1883; A. Michel: "Revue Alsacienne," February 1883; "Chronique des
Arts," 1883, p. 4; "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1883; A. Hustin,
"L'Art," 1883, p. 424.
Van Deyssel: Gustave Doré, "De Dietsche Warande," iv 5.
Blanche Roosevelt: Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré. London,
1885.
Claude Phillips: Gustave Doré, "Portfolio," 1891, p. 249.
Cham:
Marius Vachon: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1879, ii 443.
Felix Ribeyre: Cham, sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris, 1884.
Cham-Album. 3 vols. Paris. Without date.
Grévin:
Ad. Racot: Portraits d'aujourd'hui. Paris, 1891.
CHAPTER XVII
Barry:
The Works of James Barry, Esq.--to which is prefixed some account of
the Life and the Writings of the Author. 2 vols. London, 1809.
J. J. Hittorf: Notice historique et biographique de Sir J. Barry.
1860.
Alfred Barry: The Life and Works of Sir J. Barry. London, 1867.
Sidney Colvin: James Barry, "Portfolio," 1873, p. 150.
H. Trueman Wood: Pictures of James Barry at the Society of Arts.
London, 1880.
Benjamin West:
John Galt: The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West. London,
1820. Second Edition, 1826.
Sidney Colvin: "Portfolio," 1873, p. 150.
See also Cornelius Gurlitt: Die amerikanische Malerei in Europa, "Die
Kunst unserer Zeit," 1893.
Fuseli:
J. Knowles: Life and Works of Henry Fuseli. 3 vols. London, 1831.
Sidney Colvin: Henry Fuseli, "Portfolio," 1873, p. 50.
Stothard:
Anna Eliza Bray: Life of Thomas Stothard. London, 1851.
Opie:
John J. Rogers: Opie and his Works, being a Catalogue of 760 Pictures
by John Opie, R. A. Preceded by a biographical sketch. London, 1878.
Claude Phillips: John Opie, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1892, i 299.
Northcote:
John Thackeray Bunce: James Northcote, R. A., "Fortnightly Review,"
June 1876.
Copley:
A. T. Perkins: A Sketch of the Life and a List of the Works of John
Singleton Copley. London, 1873.
Haydon:
Life of B. R. Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography,
edited by Tom Taylor. 3 vols. London, 1853.
Maclise:
James Dafforne: Pictures by Maclise. London, 1871.
James Dafforne: Leslie and Maclise. London, 1872.
Etty:
A. Gilchrist: Life of W. Etty, R. A. 2 vols. London, 1855.
P. G. Hamerton: Etty, "Portfolio," 1875, p. 88.
W. C. Monkhouse: Pictures by William Etty, with Descriptions. London,
1874.
Edward Armitage:
J. Beavington-Atkinson: "Portfolio," 1870, p. 49.
Romney:
William Hagley: The Life of George Romney. London, 1809.
Rev. John Romney (son of the painter): Memoirs of the life and
Writings of George Romney. London, 1830.
P. Selvatico: Il pittore Sir Giorgio Romney ed Emma Lyon, "Arte ed
Artisti," p. 143. Padova, 1863.
Sidney Colvin: George Romney, "Portfolio," 1873, pp. 18 and 34.
Lord Ronald Gower: Romney and Lawrence. London, 1882.
T. H. Ward and W. Roberts: Romney, A biographical and critical essay,
with a catalogue raisonné of his works. London, 1904.
G. Paston: George Romney, etc. (Little Books on Art). London, 1903.
Thomas Lawrence:
D. E. Williams: The Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence. 2
vols. With 3 Portraits. London, 1831.
F. Lewis: Imitations of Sir Thomas Lawrence's Finest Drawings. 1 vol.
Reproductions in crayon. London, 1839.
A. Genevay: "L'Art," 1875, iii 385.
Th. de Wyzewa: Thomas Lawrence et la Société anglaise de son temps,
"Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1891, i 119, ii 112, 335.
Lord Ronald Gower: Romney and Lawrence. London, 1882.
Raeburn:
Portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn, photographed by Thomas Asman, with
biographical sketches. Fol. Edinburgh. No date.
Exhibition of Portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn, "Art Journal," 1876, p.
349.
Alexander Fraser: Henry Raeburn, "Portfolio," 1879, p. 200.
Andrew William Raeburn: Life of Sir Henry Raeburn. With 2 Portraits.
London, 1886.
Sir W. Armstrong: Sir Henry Raeburn, etc. London, 1901.
George Morland:
John Hassell: Life of the late George Morland. London, 1804.
William Collins, Memoirs of George Morland. London, 1806.
F. W. Blagdon: Authentic Memoirs of the late George Morland. London,
1806.
G. Dawe: The Life of George Morland. London, 1807.
Walter Armstrong: George Morland, "Portfolio," 1885, p. 1.
Some Notes on George Morland: From the Papers of James Ward, R. A.,
"Portfolio," 1886, p. 98.
Other Biographies by R. Richardson, 1895. J. T. Nettleship, 1898; and
Williamson, 1904.
James Ward:
F. G. Stephens: "Portfolio," 1886, pp. 8, 32, 45.
Landseer:
F. G. Stephens: The Early Works of Edwin Landseer. 16 Photographs.
London, 1869. New Edition under the title: Memoirs of Sir Edwin
Landseer. London, 1874.
F. G. Stephens: "Portfolio," 1871, p. 165.
James Dafforne: Pictures by Sir Edwin Landseer, R. A. With
descriptions and a biographical sketch of the painter. London, 1873.
James Dafforne: Studies and Sketches by Sir Edwin Landseer, "Art
Journal," 1875, passim.
Catalogue of the Works of Sir Edwin Landseer, "Art Journal," 1875, p.
317.
J. Beavington-Atkinson: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1875, pp.
129 and 163.
M. M. Heaton: "Academy," 1879, p. 378.
Edw. Leonidas: Sir Edwin Landseer, "Nederlandsche Kunstbode," 1881, p.
50.
F. G. Stephens: Sir Edwin Landseer. London, 1881.
F. G. Stephens: Landseer, the Dog Painter, "Portfolio," 1885, p. 32.
J. A. Manson: Sir Edwin Landseer. London, 1902.
On the English Genre Painters:
Frederick Wedmore: The Masters of Genre Painting. With 16
Illustrations. London, 1880.
Wilkie:
Allan Cunningham: Life of Wilkie. 3 vols. London, 1843.
Mrs. C. Heaton: The Great Works of Sir David Wilkie. 26 Photographs.
London and Cambridge, 1868.
A. L. Simpson: The Story of Sir David Wilkie. London, 1879.
J. W. Mollet: Sir David Wilkie. London, 1881.
Feuillet de Conches: Sir David Wilkie, "Artiste," August 1883.
F. Rabbe, in "Les artistes célèbres."
E. Pinnington: Sir David Wilkie, etc. (Famous Scots Series). London,
1900.
W. Bayne: Sir David Wilkie, etc. (Makers of British Art). London,
1903.
William Collins:
W. Wilkie Collins: Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq. 2
vols. London, 1848.
William Powell Frith:
My Autobiography and Reminiscences. London, 1887.
Further Reminiscences. London, 1898.
Mulready:
Sir Henry Cole: Biography of William Mulready, R. A. Notes of
Pictures, etc. No date.
F. G. Stephens: Memorials of Mulready. 14 Photographs. London, 1867.
James Dafforne: Pictures by Mulready. London, 1873.
F. G. Stephens: William Mulready, "Portfolio," 1887, pp. 85 and 119.
R. Liebreich: Turner and Mulready. London, 1888.
Leslie:
James Dafforne: Pictures by Leslie. Plates. London, 1873.
Autobiographical recollections, edited by Tom Taylor. London, 1860.
CHAPTER XVIII
In General:
Arsène Alexandre: Histoire de la peinture militaire en France. Paris,
1890.
Horace Vernet:
L. Ruutz-Rees: Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche. Illustrations.
London, 1879.
Amédée Durande: Josephe, Carle, et Horace Vernet, Correspondence et
Biographies. Paris, 1865.
Theophile Silvestre: Les artistes français, p. 355.
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains. Paris, 1873, p.
65.
A. Dayot: Les Vernet. Paris, 1898.
Charlet:
De la Combe: Charlet, sa vie et ses lettres. Paris, 1856.
Eugène Veron: "L'Art," 1875, i 193, 217.
F. L'homme, in "Les artistes célèbres." Paris, 1893.
Raffet:
Auguste Bry: Raffet, sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris, 1874.
Georges Duplessis: "L'Art," 1879, i 76.
Notes et croquis de Raffet, mis en ordre et publiés par Auguste Raffet
fils. Paris, Amand-Durand, 1879.
Henri Béraldi: Raffet, Peintre National. Paris, 1891.
F. L'homme, in "Les artistes célèbres."
A. Dayot: Raffet et son oeuvre, etc. Paris, 1892.
On the Young Military Painters:
Eugène Montrosier: Les Peintres militaires, contenant les biographies
de Neuville, Detaille, Berne-Bellecour, Protais, etc. Paris, 1881.
Jules Richard: En campagne. Tableaux et dessins de Meissonier,
Detaille, Neuville, etc. 2 vols. Paris, 1889.
Bellangé:
Francis Wey: Exposition des oeuvres d'Hippolyte Bellangé, Étude
biographique. Paris, 1867.
Jules Adeline: Hippolyte Bellangé et son oeuvre. Paris, 1880.
Protais:
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains. Paris, 1873, p.
150.
Pils:
L. Becq de Fouquières: Isidore Pils, sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris,
1876.
Roger-Ballu: L'oeuvre de Pils, "L'Art," 1876, i 232-258.
Neuville:
Alfred de Lostalot: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1885, ii 164.
Detaille:
Jules Claretie: L'Art et les artistes français contemporains. Paris,
1876, p. 56.
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 249.
G. Goetschy: Les jeunes peintres militaires. Paris, 1878.
Régamey:
E. Chesneau: Notice sur G. Régamey. Paris, 1870.
Eugène Montrosier: "L'Art," 1879, ii 25.
Albrecht Adam:
Albrecht Adam: Autobiography, 1786-1862. Edited by H. Holland.
Stuttgart, 1886.
Das Werk der Münchener Künstlerfamilie Adam. Reproductions after
originals by the painters Albrecht, Benno, Emil, Eugen, Franz and
Julius Adam. Text by H. Holland. Nuremberg, Soldan, 1890.
P. Hess:
H. Holland: P. v. Hess. München, 1871. Originally in "Oberbayerisches
Archiv," vol. xxxi.
F. Krüger:
A. Rosenberg: Aus dem alten Berlin, Franz Krüger-Ausstellung,
"Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1881, xvi 337.
H. Mackowski, in "Das Museum," vi 41. See Vor 50 Jahren,
Porträtskizzen berühmter und bekannter Persönlickkeiten von F. Krüger.
Berlin, 1883.
Franz Adam:
Friedrich Pecht: Franz Adam, "Kunst für Alle," 1887, ii 120.
Théodor Horschelt:
Ed. Ille: Zur Erinnerung an den Schlachtenmaler Théodor Horschelt.
München, 1871.
H. Holland: Théodor Horschelt, sein Leben und seine Werke. München,
1889.
Heinrich Lang:
H. E. von Berlepsch: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1892.
On the more recent Düsseldorf Painters:
Adolf Rosenberg: Düsseldorfer Kriegs- und Militärmaler, "Zeitschrift
für bildende Kunst," 1889, xxiv 228.
CHAPTER XIX
Leopold Robert:
E. J. Delécluze: Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Leopold Robert.
Paris, 1838.
Feuillet de Conches: Leopold Robert, sa vie, ses oeuvres, et sa
correspondance. Paris, 1848.
Charles Clement: Leopold Robert d'après sa correspondance inédite.
Paris, 1875.
Riedel:
H. Holland, in the "Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie," 1889, and books
which are there cited.
On the Painters of the East in General:
Charles Gindriez: L'Algérie et les artistes, "L'Art," 1875, iii 396;
1876, i 133.
Hermann Helferich: Moderne Orientmaler, "Freie Bühne," 1892.
Decamps:
Marius Chaumelin: Decamps, sa vie et son oeuvre. Marseilles, 1861.
Ernest Chesneau: Mouvement moderne en peinture: Decamps. Paris, 1861.
Ad. Moreau: Decamps et son oeuvre, avec des gravures en facsimilé des
planches originales les plus rares. Paris, 1869.
M. E. Im-Thurn: Scheffer et Decamps. Nîmes, 1876. (Extr. des Mém. de
l'Académie du Gard, année 1875.)
Charles Clement, in "Les artistes célèbres." Paris, 1886.
Marilhat:
G. Gonnot: Marilhat et son oeuvre. Clermont, 1884.
Fromentin:
Jean Rousseau: "L'Art," 1877, i 11, 25.
L. Gonse: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1878-1880. Published separately
under the title "Eugène Fromentin peintre et écrivain. Ouvrage
augmenté d'un Voyage en Egypte et d'autres notes et morçeaux inédits
de Fromentin, et illustré de 16 gravures hors texte et 45 dans le
texte." Paris, Quantin, 1881.
Guillaumet:
Paul Leroi: "L'Art," 1882, iii 228.
Exposition des oeuvres de Guillaumet. Préface par Roger-Ballu. Paris,
1888.
Gustave Guillaumet: Tableaux algériens. Précédé d'une notice sur la
vie et les oeuvres de Guillaumet. Paris, 1888.
Adolphe Badin: "L'Art," 1888, i 3, 39, 53.
Ary Renan: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1887, i 404.
Wilhelm Gentz:
L. v. Donop: Ausstellung der Werke von Gentz in der Berliner
Nationalgalerie. Berlin, Mittler, 1890.
Obituary in "Chronique des Arts," 1890, 29.
Adolf Rosenberg: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1891, p. 8.
Adolf Schreyer:
Richard Graul: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1888, xxiii 153.
Richard Graul, in "Graphische Künste," 1889, xii 121, and in "Velhagen
und Klasings Monatshefte," 1893.
CHAPTER XX
H. Bürkel:
C. A. R.: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1870, v 161.
Alfred Lichtwark: Hermann Kauffmann und die Kunst in Hamburg. München,
1893.
Spitzweg:
C. A. Regnet: "Münchener Künstler," 1871, ii 268-276.
Graf Schack: "Meine Gemäldegalerie," 1881, pp. 189-191.
O. Berggruen: "Graphische Künste," 1883, v.
F. Pecht, Supplement "Allgemeine Zeitung," October 1885, and
"Geschichte der Münchener Kunst," 1888, p. 154.
"Münchener Kunstvereinsbericht," 1885, p. 69.
C. A. Regnet: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1886, xxi 77.
Spitzweg-Album. München, Hanfstaengl, 1890.
Spitzweg-Mappe, with preface by F. Pecht. München, Braun & Schneider,
1890.
H. Holland: Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, 1893.
Hermann Kauffmann:
Alfred Lichtwark: Hermann Kauffmann und die Kunst in Hamburg,
1800-1850. München, 1893.
Eduard Meyerheim:
Autobiography, supplemented by P. Meyerheim. Introduction by L.
Pietsch. With preface by B. Auerbach and the likeness of Eduard
Meyerheim. Berlin, Stilke, 1880.
A. Rosenberg: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1881, xvi 1.
Ludwig Pietsch: Die Künstlerfamilie Meyerheim, "Westermanns
Monatshefte," 1889, p. 397.
Enhuber:
Friedrich Pecht: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1868, iii 53
On the Viennese Genre Picture:
C. v. Lützow: Geschichte der k. k. Akademie der bildenden Künste.
Vienna, 1877.
R. v. Eitelberger: Das Wiener Genrebild vor dem Jahre 1848,
"Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1877, xii 106. Also in his collected
studies on the history of art, i 66.
Dr. Cyriak Bodenstein: Hundert Jahre Kunstgeschichte Wiens, 1788-1888.
Wien, 1888.
Albert Ilg: Kunstgeschichtliche Charakterbilder aus Oesterreich-Ungarn
(The Nineteenth Century, by A. Nossig). Wien, 1893.
Ludwig Hevesi: Die österreichische Kunst im 19 Jahrhundert. Leipzig,
1902.
Danhauser:
Albert Ilg: Raimund und Danhauser, in Kabdebo's
"Osterreichisch-ungarische Kunstchronik." Vienna, 1880, iii 161.
Waldmüller:
"Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1866, i 33.
Oskar Berggruen: "Graphische Künste," x 57.
R. v. Eitelberger: J. Danhauser und Ferdinand Waldmüller, in "Kunst
und Künstler Wiens," p. 73. (Vol. i of his works on the history of
art. Vienna, 1879.)
Gauermann:
R. v. Eitelberger: Friedrich Gauermann, in "Kunst und Künstler Wiens,"
1878, p. 92. (Vol. i of his works on the history of art. Vienna,
1879.)
Schrödter:
Obituary by Kaulen in the "Deutsches Kunstblatt," 1884, 11 and 12.
M. G. Zimmermann, in the "Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie."
Hasenclever:
A. Fahne: Hasenclevers Illustrationen zur Jobsiade. Bonn, 1852.
Rudolf Jordan:
Friedrich Pecht: "Kunst für Alle," 1887, ii 241.
Tidemand:
C. Dietrichson: Adolf Tidemand, hans Liv og hans Vaerker. 2 vols.
Christiania, 1878-79.
Adolf Tidemand, utvalgte Vaerker. 24 etchings by L. H. Fischer.
Christiania, 1878.
Madou:
Camille Lemonnier: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1870, i 385.
Ferdinand de Braekeleer:
L. v. Keymeulen: Ferdinand de Braekeleer, "Revue artistique," 1883,
pp. 170, 171.
Biard:
L. Boivin: Notice sur M. Biard, ses aventures, son voyage en Japonie
avec Mme. Biard, Examen critique de ses tableaux. Paris, 1842.
Obituary in the "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," ix 1874.
Supplementary Sheet, p. 769.
CHAPTER XXI
In General:
Emil Reich: Die bürgerliche Kunst und die besitzlosen Klassen.
Leipzig, 1892.
Tassaert:
Bernard Prost: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1886, i 28.
Carl Hübner:
M. Blanckarts: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," xv 1312.
Wiertz:
Louis Labarre: Antoine Wiertz, étude biographique. Brussels, 1866.
Ed. F.: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1866, i 273.
H. Grimm: Der Maler Wiertz, in "15 Essays," New Series, Berlin, 1875,
p. 1.
J. Beavington-Atkinson: "Portfolio," 1875, pp. 124, 133, 152.
C. E. Clement: Antoine Jos. Wiertz, "American Art Review," 1881, 13.
Catalogue du Musée Wiertz, précédé d'une notice biographique par Em.
de Laveleye. Brussels, 1882.
L. Schulze Waldhausen: Anton Wiertz, "Deutsches Kunstblatt," 1882, 5;
1883, 12.
W. Claessens: Wiertz. Brussels, L. Hochsteyn, 1883.
L. Dietrichson: En abnorm Kunstner. Fra Kunstverden, Kopenhagen, 1885,
p. 209.
Max Nordau: Vom Kreml bis zur Alhambra. Leipzig, 1886, pp. 201-250.
Robert Mielke: Antoine Wiertz, "Das Atelier," 1893, No. 66.
CHAPTER XXII
Knaus:
Alfred de Lostalot: Louis Knaus, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1882, i
269, 316.
V. K. Schembera: Louis Knaus, "Die Heimath," vii 40.
L. Pietsch: Ludwig Knaus. Photographs after originals by the master.
Berlin Photographische Gesellschaft.
Friedrich Pecht: Zu Knaus 60 Geburtstag, "Kunst für Alle," 1890, v 65.
G. Voss: "Tägliche Rundschau," 1889, p. 233.
L. Pietsch, Louis Knaus in the "Künstlermonographien," ed. by
Knackfuss. Bielefeld, 1896.
Vautier:
Friedrich Pecht: Deutsche Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts. Third Series.
Nördlingen, 1881, p. 351.
E. Heilbuth: Knaus und Vautier. Text to Behrens' work upon the
gallery, reprinted in "Kunst für Alle," 1892, 2.
Adolf Rosenberg, Vautier in the "Künstlermonographien," ed. by
Knackfuss. Bd. 23. Bielefeld, 1897.
Defregger:
P. K. Rosegger: Wie Defregger Maler wurde. "Oesterr.-ungarische
Kunstchronik," 1879, iii 2.
Friedrich Pecht: Franz Defregger, sein Leben und Wirken, "Vom Fels zum
Meer," iii 1.
K. Raupp: Franz Defregger und seine Schule, "Wartburg," viii 4, 5.
Ludwig Pietsch: Franz Defregger, "Westermanns Monatshefte," February
1889.
F. Pecht: Deutsche Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts. München, 1888.
Adolf Rosenberg, in the "Künstlermonographien," ed. by Knackfuss. Bd.
18. Bielefeld, 1893.
Franz Hermann Meissner in the "Kunstlerbuch." Berlin, 1901.
See also Karl Stieler und F. Defregger, Von Dahoam. München, 1888.
Riefstahl:
H. Holland: Wilhelm Riefstahl. Altenburg, 1889.
M. Haushofer: "Kunst für Alle," 1889, iv 97.
W. Lübke: "Nord und Süd," 1890, 163.
H. E. v. Berlepsch: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1890, 8.
Grützner:
G. Ramberg: "Vom Fels zum Meer," 1890, 2.
Friedrich Pecht: "Kunst für Alle," 1890, 12.
J. Janitsch: "Nord und Süd," 1892, 182.
Fritz von Ostini, in the "Künstlermonographien," ed. by Knackfuss. Bd.
58. Leipzig, 1902.
Bokelmann:
Adolf Rosenberg: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1892.
Gustave Brion:
Paul Leroi: "L'Art," 1878, i 10.
Jules Breton:
Autobiography. Vie d'un artiste. Paris, 1891.
The Swedish Genre Painters:
Georg Nordensvan: Svensk Konst och Svenska Konstnärer i 19^de
Arhundradet. Stockholm, 1892. (German Translation:) Die schwedische
Kunst im 19 Jahrhundert. Leipzig, 1903.
The Hungarian Genre Painters:
A. Ipolyi: Die bildende Kunst in Ungarn, "Ungarische Revue," 1882, 5.
Szana Tamáz: Magyar Müvészek. Budapest, 1887.
Heinrich Glücksmann: Die ungarische Kunst der Gegenwart, "Kunst für
Alle," 1892, vii 129, 145.
CHAPTER XXIII
J. A. Koch:
David Friedrich Strauss: Kleine Schriften biographischen,
literarischen, und kunstgeschichtlichen Inhalts. Leipzig, 1862, p.
303.
Th. Frimmel, in Dohmes Kunst und Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts, No. 9.
Leipzig, 1884.
C. v. Lützow: Aus Kochs Jugendzeit, "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst,"
1874, ix 65.
See also J. A. Koch: Moderne Kunstchronik. Briefe zweier Freunde in
Rom und in der Tartarei über das moderne Kunstleben. Karlsruhe, 1834.
Reinhart:
Otto Baisch: Johann Christian Reinhart und seine Kreise, ein Lebens-
und Kulturbild. Leipzig, 1882.
Friedrich Schiller und der Maler Johann Christian Reinhart. Supplement
to the "Leipziger Zeitung," 1883, 89, 90.
Rottmann:
A. Teichlein: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1869, iv 7, 72.
A. Bayersdorfer: Karl Rottmann. München, 1871. Reprinted in A.
Bayersdorfer's Leben und Schriften. München, 1902.
O. Berggruen: Die Galerie Schack, "Graphische Künste," v 1.
Friedrich Pecht: Deutsche Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts. Nördlingen,
1879, ii pp. 1-26.
C. A. Regnet, in Dohmes Kunst und Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts, No.
10.
See also Rottmann's Italienische Landschaften. After the Frescoes in
the Arcades of the Royal Garden in Munich, carried out by Steinbock.
München, Bruckmann, 1876.
Preller:
R. Schöne: Fr. Preller's Odysseelandschaften. Leipzig, 1863.
L. v. Donop: Der Genelli-Fries von Fr. Preller. "Zeitschrift für
bildende Kunst," 1874, ix 321.
Friedrich Pecht: Deutsche Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts. Nördlingen,
1877, vol. i pp. 271-289.
C. Ruland: Zur Erinnerung an Friedrich Preller. Weimar, 1878.
Obituary in "Unsere Zeit," 1879, 8.
M. Jordan: Katalog der Preller Ausstellung in der Berliner
Nationalgalerie, 1879.
A. Dürr: Preller und Goethe, "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1881,
xvi 357-365.
J. Beavington-Atkinson: Frederick Preller, "Art Journal," 1881, 9.
W. Lübke: Friedrich Preller, "Allgemeine Zeitung," 1882, No. 117.
Preller und Goethe, "Allgemeine Zeitung," 1882, No. 342.
O. Roquette: Preller und Goethe, "Gegenwart," 1883, 42.
Friedrich J. Frommann: Zur Charakteristik Friedrich Prellers,
"Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1884, No. 31.
See also Homer's Odyssee mit 40 Original compositionen von Friedrich
Preller. Leipzig, 1872. Popular edition with biography, Leipzig, 1881.
Italienisches Landschaftsbuch, zehn Originalzeichnungen von Friedrich
Preller. Carried out in wood-cut by H. Kaeseberg and K. Oertel, with
Text by Max Jordan. Leipzig, 1875. Friedrich Prellers Figurenfries zur
Odyssee. 16 Compositions reproduced in 24 coloured lithographs.
Leipzig, 1875.
K. F. Lessing:
Karl Koberstein: Karl Friedrich Lessing, "Nord und Süd," 14, 1880, p.
312.
K. F. Lessing's Briefe mitgetheilt von Th. Frimmel, "Zeitschrift für
bildende Kunst," 1881, 6.
Rudolf Redtenbacher: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1881, xvi 2.
M. Schasler: "Unsere Zeit," 1880, 10.
W. Dohme: "Westermanns illustrierte Monatshefte," 1880, ix 729.
A. Rosenberg: Lessing-Ausstellung in der Berliner Nationalgalerie,
"Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1880, No. 5.
Friedrich Pecht: Deutsche Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts, iii.
Nördlingen, 1881, p. 294.
Blechen:
Robert Dohme, in "Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie," 1875.
Ludwig Pietsch: Wie ich Schriftsteller wurde. Berlin, 1893, _passim_.
H. Mackowsky, in the "Museum," viii. Berlin, Spemann.
Schirmer:
Johann Wilhelm Schirmer: Düsseldorfer Lehrjahre, "Deutsche Rundschau,"
1878.
Alfred Woltmann, in "Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie." Works cited in
it.
Dahl:
Andreas Aubert: Maleren Professor Dahl 1788-1857, et Stykke av
aarhundredets Kunst- og Kulturhistorie. Kristiania, Aschehoug, 1893.
Morgenstern:
Obituary by Pecht: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1867, ii 80.
Alfred Lichtwark: Hermann Kauffmann und die Kunst in Hamburg von 1800
_bis_ 1850. München, 1893.
Andreas Achenbach:
Ludwig Pietsch: "Nord und Süd," 1880, xv 381.
Friedrich Pecht: Deutsche Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts. Third Series.
Nördlingen, 1881, p. 328.
Theodor Levin: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1886, xxi, No. 1.
Eduard Schleich:
C. A. Regnet: Zu Eduard Schleichs Gedächtniss, "Zeitschrift für
bildende Kunst," 1874, ix 161.
O. Berggruen: Die Galerie Schack, "Graphische Künste," v 1.
Alexander Calame:
E. H. Gaullier: Alexander Calame. Genève, 1854. (Le Musée Suisse, vol.
i.)
H. Delaborde: La peinture de paysage en Suisse; Alexander Calame:
"Revue des Deux Mondes," Février, 1865.
J. M. Ziegler: Mittheilungen über den Landschaftsmaler Alexander
Calame. Zurich, 1866.
C. Meyer: Alexander Calame, "Dioskuren." Stuttgart, 1866.
A. Bachelin: Alexander Calame. Lausanne, 1880.
Wilhelm Rossmann, in the text to work of engravings from the Dresden
Gallery. 1881, etc.
E. Rambert: Alexander Calame, sa vie et son oeuvre d'après les sources
originales. Paris, 1884.
Adolf Rosenberg: "Grenzboten," 1884, ii 371.
Gude:
A. Rosenberg: Die Düsseldorfer Schule. "Grenzboten," 1881, 35.
Af. Dietrichson: H. Gude liv og voerker. Kristiania, 1899.
Eduard Hildebrandt:
Bruno Meyer: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1869, iv 261, 336.
F. Arndt: Eduard Hildebrandt, der Maler des Kosmos, Sein Leben und
seine Werke. Second Edition. Berlin, 1869.
Ada Pinelli: Hildebrandt und Schirmer. Berlin, 1871.
Louis Douzette:
Adolf Rosenberg: "Graphische Künste," 1891, xiv 13.
CHAPTER XXIV
In General:
Victor de Laprade: Le sentiment de la nature chez les modernes. Second
Edition. Paris, 1870.
Aligny:
Aligny et la paysage historique, "L'Art," 1882, i 251; ii 33.
See also the etchings Vues des Sites les plus célèbres de la Grèce
antique. Paris, 1845.
Victor Hugo:
Les dessins de Victor Hugo, "L'Art," 1877, i 50.
H. Helferich: Malende Dichter, "Kunst für Alle," 1891, 21.
Paul Huet:
Philippe Burty: Paul Huet, Notice biographique. Paris, 1869.
E. Legouvé: Notice sur Paul Huet. Paris, 1878.
Ernest Chesneau: Peintres et statuaires romantiques. Paris, 1880.
Léon Mancino: Un précurseur, "L'Art," 1883, i 49.
On the English:
William Bell Scott: Our British Landscape-Painters, from Samuel Scott
to D. Cox. With 16 Engravings. London, 1876.
J. Comyns Carr: Modern Landscape. With Illustrations. Paris and
London, 1883.
Turner:
Alice Watts: J. M. W. Turner. London, 1851.
John Burnet and Peter Cunningham: Turner and his Works. London, 1852.
Edition of Henry Murray. London, 1859.
John Ruskin: Notes on the Turner Collection. London, 1857.
Walter Thornbury: J. M. W. Turner. 2 vols. London, 1862. New Edition,
1897.
Philip G. Hamerton: Turner et Claude Lorrain, "L'Art," 1876, iv pp.
270, 289.
Philip G. Hamerton: Turner, "Portfolio," 1876, pp. 28-188; 1877, pp.
44-145; 1878, pp. 2-178.
A. Brunet-Desbaines: The Life of Turner. London, 1878.
John Ruskin: Notes on his Collection of Drawings by the late J. M. W.
Turner, also a list of the engraved works of that master. London. Fine
Art Society, 1878.
F. Wedmore: Turner's Liber Studiorum, "Academy," 1879, Nos. 377, 389,
399, and in "L'Art," 1879, 232-234.
Philip G. Hamerton: J. M. W. Turner. London, 1879.
Cosmo Monkhouse: J. M. W. Turner. London, 1879.
Hart: Turner, the Dream-Painter. London, 1879.
A. W. Hunt: Turner in Yorkshire, "Art Journal," 1881, New Series, 1,
2.
W. G. Rawlinson: Turner's Liber Studiorum, "Art Journal," 1881, New
Series, 4.
James Dafforne: The Works of J. M. W. Turner. With a biographical
sketch. London, 1883.
G. Radford: Turner in Wharfedale, "Portfolio," May, 1884.
Philip G. Hamerton: J. M. W. Turner, in "Les artistes célèbres."
Paris, 1889.
Robert de la Sizeranne: Deux heures à la Turner Gallery. Paris, 1890.
F. Wedmore: Turner and Ruskin. 2 vols. London, 1900.
_Reproductions:_
The Harbours of England. London, 1856.
Liber Studiorum, illustrative of Landscape Composition. London,
1858-59.
The Turner Gallery. London, 1862.
Turner's Celebrated Landscapes. Reproduced by the Autotype Process.
London, 1870.
A. W. Callcott:
Sir A. W. Callcott's Italian and English Landscapes. Lithographed by
T. C. Dibdin. London, 1847.
James Dafforne: Pictures by Sir A. W. Callcott, R. A. With
descriptions and a biographical sketch of the painter. London. No
date.
John Crome:
Etchings of Views in Norfolk. With a biographical memoir by Dawson
Turner. Norwich, 1838.
J. Wodderspoon: John Crome and his Works. Norwich, 1858.
Frederick Wedmore: John Crome, "L'Art," 1876, iii 288.
Mary M. Heaton: John Crome, "Portfolio," 1879, pp. 33 and 48.
R. L. Binyon: John Crome and John Sell Colman. London, 1897.
On English Water-Colour Painting:
Cosmo Monkhouse: The Earlier English Water-Colour Painters. London,
Seeley & Co., 1890.
John Lewis Roget: A History of the "Old Water-Colour Society." 2 vols.
London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1891.
Samuel Palmer:
The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher. Edited by
A. H. Palmer. With Illustrations. 1891.
Constable:
Charles Robert Leslie: The Memoirs of John Constable. London, 1845.
H. Perrier: De Hugo v. d. Goes à Constable, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts,"
March, 1873.
Frederick Wedmore, "L'Art," 1878, ii 169.
G. M. Brock-Arnold: Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, in
"Illustrated Biographies of the Great Artists." London, Low, 1881.
P. G. Hamerton: Constable's Sketches, "Portfolio," 1890, p. 162.
Robert Hobart: in "Les artistes célèbres."
_Reproductions:_
Various subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery, from
pictures painted by John Constable. 22 Plates. London, 1830. Second
Edition, London, 1833.
English Landscape, from pictures painted by John Constable. 20 Plates
engraved by D. Lucas. London. No date.
English Landscape Scenery: 40 mezzotinto engravings from pictures
painted by John Constable. Fol. London, 1855.
David Cox:
N. Neal Solly: Memoir of the Life of David Cox. London, 1873.
Basil Champneys: David Cox, "Portfolio," 1873, p. 89.
J. Beavington-Atkinson, "Portfolio," 1876, p. 9.
Frederick Wedmore: "Gentleman's Magazine," March, 1878.
W. Hall: David Cox. London, 1881.
William J. Muller:
N. Neal Solly: Memoir of the Life of William James Muller. London,
1875.
J. Beavington-Atkinson: William Muller, "Portfolio," 1875, pp. 164,
185.
Frederick Wedmore: W. Muller and his Sketches, "Portfolio," 1882, p.
7.
Peter de Wint:
Walter Armstrong: Memoir of Peter de Wint. Illustrated by 24
Photogravures. London, Macmillan & Co., 1888.
Henry Dawson:
Alfred Dawson: The Life of Henry Dawson, Landscape Painter, 1811-1878.
London, 1891.
John Linnell:
F. G. Stephens: "Portfolio," 1872, p. 45.
Bonington:
Al. Bouvenne: Catalogue de l'oeuvre gravé et lithographié de R. P.
Bonington. Paris, 1873.
Paul Mantz: "Gazette des Beaux Arts," 1876, ii 288.
Edmond Saint-Raymond: Bonington et les côtes normandes de Saint Jouin,
"L'Art," 1879, i 197.
P. G. Hamerton: A Sketchbook of Bonington at the British Museum,
"Portfolio," 1881, p. 68.
CHAPTER XXV
In General:
Roger-Ballu: Le paysage français au XIX siècle, "Nouvelle Revue,"
1881.
John W. Mollet: The Painters of Barbizon. (1. Corot, Daubigny, Dupré;
2. Millet, Rousseau, Diaz.) In "Illustrated Biographies of the Great
Artists." London, Low, 1890.
David Croal Thomson: The Barbizon School of Painters: Corot, Rousseau,
Diaz, Millet, Daubigny, etc. With One Hundred and Thirty
Illustrations. London, 1891.
See also the articles by G. Gurlitt in "Die Gegenwart," 1891, the Text
of H. Helferich to Behrens' work on the gallery, etc.
Théodore Rousseau:
A. Teichlein: Théodore Rousseau und die Anfänge des Paysage intime,
"Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1868, iii 281.
Alfred Sensier: Souvenirs sur Théodore Rousseau, suivis d'une
conférence sur le Paysage et orné du portrait du maître. Paris, 1872.
Philippe Burty: Théodore Rousseau, paysagiste, "L'Art," 1881, p. 374.
Emile Michel, in "Les artistes célèbres."
Walter Gensel: Millet und Rousseau, Bd. 57 in the
"Künstlermonographien" ed. by Knackfuss. Bielefeld, 1902.
Corot:
Edmond About: Voyage à travers L'Exposition des Beaux-Arts. Paris,
1855.
Henri Dumesnil: Corot, souvenirs intimes: avec un portrait dessiné par
Aimé Millet, gravé par Alphonse Leroy. Paris, Rapilly, 1875.
Charles Blanc: Les Artistes de mon temps. Paris, 1879.
Leleux: Corot à Montreux, "Bibliothèque universelle et Revue suisse,"
September 1883.
Alfred Robaut: Corot, peintures décoratives, "L'Art," 1883, p. 407.
Jean Rousseau: Camille Corot: avec gravures. Paris, 1884.
Armand Silvestre: Galerie Durand-Ruel: avec 28 gravures à l'eauforte
d'après des tableaux de Corot. Paris. No date.
Albert Wolff: La capitale de l'Art. Paris, 1886.
Charles Bigot: Peintres contemporains. Paris, 1888.
L. Roger-Milès: Corot, in "Les artistes célèbres." Paris, 1891.
Album classique des chefs d'oeuvre de Corot. Paris, 1896.
Julius Meier-Gräfe: Corot und Courbet. Stuttgart, 1906.
Dupré:
Les hommes du jour: M. Jules Dupré, 1811-1879, par un critique d'art.
Paris, 1879.
R. Ménard: "L'Art," 1879, iii 311; iv 241.
A. Michel: "L'Art," 1883, p. 460.
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 177.
A. Hustin, in "Les artistes célèbres."
Diaz:
Jules Claretie: Narcisse Diaz, "L'Art," 1875, iii 204.
Exposition des oeuvres de Narcisse Diaz à l'école des Beaux-Arts.
Notice biographique par M. Jules Claretie. Paris, 1877.
Roger-Ballu: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1877, i 290.
Jean Rousseau: "L'Art," 1877, i 49.
T. Chasrel: L'exposition de Narcisse Diaz, "L'Art," 1877, ii 189.
Hermann Billung: Narcisse Virgilio Diaz, ein Lebensbild, "Zeitschrift
für bildende Kunst," 1879, xiv 97.
A. Hustin, in "Les artistes célèbres."
Daubigny:
Karl Daubigny: Ch. Daubigny et son oeuvre. Paris, 1875.
Frédéric Henriet: Charles Daubigny et son oeuvre. Paris, 1878.
Frédéric Henriet, in "L'Art," 1881, p. 330.
A. Hustin, in "Les artistes célèbres."
Robert J. Wickenden: Charles François Daubigny, "Century Magazine,"
July 1892.
Chintreuil:
Frédéric Henriet: Chintreuil: Esquisse biographique. Paris, 1858.
A. de la Fisèliere, Champfleury, et F. Henriet: La vie et l'oeuvre de
Chintreuil. Paris, 1874.
"Portfolio," 1874, p. 99.
Harpignies:
Charles Tardieu: Henry Harpignies, "L'Art," 1879, xvi 269, 281.
Français:
J. G. Prat: François Louis Français, "L'Art," 1882, i 48, 81, 368.
Brascassat:
M. Cabat: Notice sur Brascassat. Paris, 1862.
Charles Marionneau: R. Brascassat, sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris, 1872.
Troyon:
Henri Dumesnil: Constant Troyon, Souvenirs intimes. Paris, 1888.
A. Hustin: "L'Art," 1889, i 77; ii 85.
A. Hustin, in "Les artistes célèbres." Paris, 1893.
Rosa Bonheur:
Laruelle: Rosa Bonheur, sa vie, ses oeuvres. Paris, 1885.
René Peyrol: Rosa Bonheur, her Life and Work. With three engraved
Plates and Illustrations, "The Art Annual." London, 1889.
Roger-Milès: Rosa Bonheur. Paris, 1901.
Emile van Marcke:
Emile Michel: "L'Art," 1891, i 145.
Eugène Lambert:
Chiens et chats, Text by G. de Cherville. Paris, 1888.
Lancon:
Alfred de Lostalot: Un peintre animalier, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts,"
1887, ii 319.
Charles Jacque:
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 297.
CHAPTER XXVI
Ernest Chesneau: Jean François Millet, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1875,
i 429.
Ph. L. Couturier: Millet et Corot. Saint-Quentin, 1876.
A. Piedagnel: Jean François Millet. Souvenirs de Barbizon. Avec 1
portrait, 9 Eaux-fortes, et un facsimilé d'autographe. Paris, 1876.
A. Sensier: La vie et l'oeuvre de Jean François Millet. Manuscrit
publié par P. Mantz, avec de nombreux fascimilés, 12 heliographies
hors texte, et 48 gravures. Paris, Quantin, 1881.
W. E. H.: Millet as an Art-Critic, "Magazine of Art," 1883, p. 27.
Charles Yriarte: Jean François Millet. Portrait et 24 Gravures. Paris,
1885.
André Michel: Jean François Millet et l'exposition de ses oeuvres a
l'école des Beaux-Arts, "Gazette des Beaux Arts," 1887, ii 5.
Charles Bigot: Peintres contemporains. Paris, 1888.
R. Graul: Jean François Millet, "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," New
Series, ii 29.
Le livre d'or de Jean François Millet. Illustré de 17 Eaux-fortes par
Frédéric Jacque. Paris, 1892.
Emile Michel, in "Les artistes célèbres."
H. Naegely: Millet and Rustic Art. London, 1897.
W. Gensel: Millet und Rousseau. Leipzig, 1902.
Julia Cartwright: Jean François Millet, His Life and Letters. London,
1901. German Edition. Leipzig, 1902.
Arthur Thomson: Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School. London,
1903.
Richard Muther in his series "Die Kunst." Berlin, 1904.
CHAPTER XXVII
Courbet:
Champfleury: Grandes figures d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. (Balzac, Wagner,
Courbet.) Paris, Poulet-Malassis, 1861.
Th. Silvestre: Les artistes français, p. 109. Paris, 1878.
P. d'Abrest: Artistische Wanderungen durch Paris, "Zeitschrift für
bildende Kunst," 1876, xi 183, 209.
Comte H. d'Jdeville: Gustave Courbet: Notes et documents sur sa vie et
son oeuvre. Paris, 1878.
T. Chasrel: "L'Art," 1878, i 145.
Paul Mantz: Gustave Courbet, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1878, i 514; ii
17, 371.
Émile Zola: Mes Haines. Proudhon et Courbet. Paris, 1879, p. 21.
Gros-Kost: Courbet, Souvenirs intimes. Paris, 1880.
H. Billung: Supplement to the "Allgemeine Zeitung," 1880, p. 240.
Eug. Véron: G. Courbet, Un enterrement à Ornans, "L'Art," 1882, i 363,
390; ii 226.
A. de Lostalot: L'exposition des oeuvres de Courbet, "Gazette des
Beaux-Arts," 1882, i 572.
Carl v. Lützow: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1889.
Camille Lemonnier: Les peintres de la vie. Cap. I, Courbet et son
oeuvre. Paris, 1888.
Abel Patoux, in "Les artistes célèbres."
Julius Meier-Gräfe: Corot und Courbet. Stuttgart, 1906.
Stevens:
Paul d'Abrest: Artistische Wanderungen durch Paris. Ein Besuch bei
Alfred Stevens, "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1875, x 310.
L. Cardon: Les modernistes: Alfred Stevens, "La fédération
artistique," 23-26.
Camille Lemonnier: Alfred Stevens, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1878, i
160, 335.
Camille Lemonnier: Les peintres de la vie. Cap. II, Alfred Stevens.
Paris, 1888.
Ricard:
Moriz Hartmann: Büsten und Bilder. Frankfurt-a-M., 1860.
Paul de Musset: Notice sur la vie de Gustave Ricard. Paris, 1873.
Louis Brés: Gustave Ricard et son oeuvre. Paris, 1873.
Bonvin:
L. Gauchez, "L'Art," 1888, i 249, ii 41, 61.
Paul Lefort: Philippe Rousseau et François Bonvin, "Gazette des
Beaux-Arts," 1888, i 132.
Charles Chaplin:
Paul Lefort: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1891, i 246.
Gaillard:
G. Dargenty: "L'Art," 1887, i 149, 179.
L. Gonse: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1887, i 221.
V. Guillemin: F. Gaillard, graveur et peinture, originaire de la
Franche-Comté, 1834-1887. Notice sur sa vie et son oeuvre. Besançon,
1891.
Georges Duplessis, in "Les artistes célèbres."
Bonnat:
Roger Ballu: Les peintures de M. Bonnat, "L'Art," 1876, iii p. 122.
B. Day: L'atelier Bonnat, "Magazine of Art," 1881, p. 6.
Jules Claretie, Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 129.
Carolus Duran:
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 153.
Vollon:
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 201.
Philippe Rousseau:
Paul Lefort: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1888, i 132.
Paul Dubois:
Jules Claretie: Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, II Série. Paris,
1884, p. 321.
Delaunay:
Georges Lafenestre: Elie Delaunay, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1891, ii
353, 484.
Ribot:
E. Véron: Théodule Ribot, Exposition générale de ses oeuvres, "L'Art,"
1880, p. 281.
Firmin Javel: Théodule Ribot, "Revue des Musées," 1890, iii 55.
L. Fourcaud: Maîtres modernes: Théodule Ribot, sa vie et ses oeuvres.
With Illustrations. Paris, 1890.
Paul Lefort: Théodule Ribot, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1891, ii 298.
_Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
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