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Promenades of an Impressionist

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Title: Promenades of an Impressionist

Author: James Huneker


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST ***

PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST


By JAMES HUNEKER


1910




BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER

     Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


     Promenades of an Impressionist. 12mo, (_Postage_ 15 cents_),
       _net_, $1.50.

     Egoists: A Book of Supermen. 12mo, _net_, $1.50.

     Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists. 12mo, _net_, $1.50.

     Overtones: A Book of Temperaments. 12mo, _net_, $1.50.

     Mezzotints in Modern Music. 12mo, $1.50.

     Chopin: The Man and His Music. With Portrait. l2mo, $2.00.

     Visionaries. 12mo, $1.50.

     Melomaniacs. 12mo, $1.50





TO: FREDERICK JAMES GREGG

     -"Let us promenade our prejudices."--Stendhal(?)




CONTENTS


   I. PAUL CÉZANNE

  II. ROPS THE ETCHER

 III. MONTICELLI

  IV. RODIN

   V. EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE

  VI. DEGAS

 VII. BOTTICELLI

VIII. SIX SPANIARDS:

      "EL GRECO"

      "VELASQUEZ"

      GOYA

      FORTUNY

      SOROLLA

      ZULOAGA

  IX. CHARDIN

   X. BLACK AND WHITE:

      PIRANESI

      MERYON

      JOHN MARTIN

      ZORN

      BRANGWYN

      DAUMIER

      LALANNE

      LEGRAND

      GUYS

  XI. IMPRESSIONISM:

      MONET

      RENOIR

      MANET

 XII. A NEW STUDY OF WATTEAU

XIII. GAUGUIN AND TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

 XIV. LITERATURE AND ART

  XV. MUSEUM PROMENADES:

      PICTURES AT THE HAGUE

      THE MESDAG MUSEUM

      HALS OF HAARLEM

      PICTURES IN AMSTERDAM

      ART IN ANTWERP

      MUSEUMS OF BRUSSELS

      BRUGES THE BEAUTIFUL

      THE MOREAU MUSEUM

      PICTURES IN MADRID

      EL GRECO AT TOLEDO

      VELASQUEZ IN THE PRADO

CODA




PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST




I. PAUL CÉZANNE



After prolonged study of the art shown at the Paris Autumn Salon you
ask yourself: This whirlpool of jostling ambitions, crazy colours,
still crazier drawing and composition--whither does it tend? Is there
any strain of tendency, any central current to be detected? Is it
young genius in the raw, awaiting the sunshine of success to ripen its
somewhat terrifying gifts? Or is the exhibition a huge, mystifying
_blague_? What, you ask, as you apply wet compresses to your weary
eyeballs, blistered by dangerous proximity to so many blazing
canvases, does the Autumn Salon mean to French art?

There are many canvases the subjects of which are more pathologic than
artistic, subjects only fit for the confessional or the privacy of the
clinic. But, apart from these disagreeable episodes, the main note of
the Salon is a riotous energy, the noisy ebullition of a gang of
students let loose in the halls of art. They seem to rush by you,
yelling from sheer delight in their lung power, and if you are rudely
jostled to the wall, your toes trod upon and your hat clapped down on
your ears, you console yourself with the timid phrase: Youth must have
its fling.




PROMENADES



And what a fling! Largely a flinging of paint pots in the sacred
features of tradition. It needs little effort of the imagination to
see hovering about the galleries the faces of--no, not Gérôme, Bonnat,
Jules Lefèvre, Cabanel, or any of the reverend _seigneurs_ of the old
Salon--but the reproachful countenances of Courbet, Manet, Degas, and
Monet; for this motley-wearing crew of youngsters are as violently
radical, as violently secessionistic, as were their immediate
forebears. Each chap has started a little revolution of his own, and
takes no heed of the very men from whom he steals his thunder, now
sadly hollow in the transposition. The pretty classic notion of the
torch of artistic tradition gently burning as it is passed on from
generation to generation receives a shock when confronted by the
methods of the hopeful young anarchs of the Grand Palais. Defiance of
all critical canons at any cost is their shibboleth. Compared to their
fulgurant colour schemes the work of Manet, Monet, and Degas pales and
retreats into the Pantheon of the past. They are become classic.
Another king has usurped their throne--his name is Paul Cézanne.

No need now to recapitulate the story of the New Salon and the
defection from it of these Independents. It is a fashion to revolt in
Paris, and no doubt some day there will arise a new group that will
start the August Salon or the January Salon.

"Independent of the Independents" is a magnificent motto with which to
assault any intrenched organisation.




PAUL CÉZANNE



If riotous energy is, as I have said, the chief note of many of these
hot, hasty, and often clever pictures, it must be sadly stated that of
genuine originality there are few traces. To the very masters they
pretend to revile they owe everything. In vain one looks for a
tradition older than Courbet; a few have attempted to stammer in the
suave speech of Corot and the men of Fontainebleau; but 1863, the year
of the _Salon des Refusés_, is really the year of their artistic
ancestor's birth. The classicism of Lebrun, David, Ingres, Prudhon;
the romanticism of Géricault, Delacroix, Decamps; the tender poetry of
those true _Waldmenschen_, Millet, Dupré, Diaz, Daubigny, or of that
wild heir of Giorgione and Tiepolo, the marvellous colour virtuoso who
"painted music," Monticelli--all these men might never have been born
except for their possible impact upon the so-called "Batignolles"
school. Alas! such ingratitude must rankle. To see the major portion
of this band of young painters, with talent in plenty, occupying
itself in a frantic burlesque of second-hand Cézannes, with here and
there a shallow Monet, a faded Renoir, an affected Degas, or an
impertinent Gauguin, must be mortifying to the older men.

And now we reach the holy precincts. If ardent youths sneered at the
lyric ecstasy of Renoir, at the severe restraint of Chavannes, at the
poetic mystery of Carrière, their lips were hushed as they tiptoed
into the Salle Cézanne. Sacred ground, indeed, we trod as we gazed and
wondered before these crude, violent, sincere, ugly, and bizarre
canvases. Here was the very hub of the Independents' universe. Here
the results of a hard-labouring painter, without taste, without the
faculty of selection, without vision, culture--one is tempted to add,
intellect--who with dogged persistency has painted in the face of
mockery, painted portraits, landscapes, flowers, houses, figures,
painted everything, painted himself. And what paint! Stubborn, with an
instinctive hatred of academic poses, of the atmosphere of the studio,
of the hired model, of "literary," or of mere digital cleverness,
Cézanne has dropped out of his scheme harmony, melody,
beauty--classic, romantic, symbolic, what you will!--and doggedly
represented the ugliness of things. But there is a brutal strength, a
tang of the soil that is bitter, and also strangely invigorating,
after the false, perfumed boudoir art of so many of his
contemporaries.

Think of Bouguereau and you have his antithesis in Cézanne--Cézanne
whose stark figures of bathers, male and female, evoke a shuddering
sense of the bestial. Not that there is offence intended in his badly
huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, naked fashion the horrors
of some undressed humans. His landscapes are primitive though suffused
by perceptible atmosphere; while the rough architecture, shambling
figures, harsh colouring do not quite destroy the impression of
general vitality. You could not say with Walt Whitman that his stunted
trees were "uttering joyous leaves of dark green." They utter, if
anything, raucous oaths, as seemingly do the
self-portraits--exceedingly well modelled, however. Cézanne's
still-life attracts by its whole-souled absorption; these fruits and
vegetables really savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life
with realistic beauty; if he had ever painted an onion it would have
revealed a certain grace. When Paul Cézanne paints an onion you smell
it. Nevertheless, he has captured the affections of the rebels and is
their god. And next season it may be some one else.

It may interest readers of Zola's L'Oeuvre to learn about one of the
characters, who perforce sat for his portrait in that clever novel (a
direct imitation of Goncourt's Manette Salomon). Paul Cézanne bitterly
resented the liberty taken by his old school friend Zola. They both
hailed from Aix, in Provence. Zola went up to Paris; Cézanne remained
in his birthplace but finally persuaded his father to let him study
art at the capital. His father was both rich and wise, for he settled
a small allowance on Paul, who, poor chap, as he said, would never
earn a franc from his paintings. This prediction was nearly verified.
Cézanne was almost laughed off the artistic map of Paris. Manet they
could stand, even Claude Monet; but Cézanne--communard and anarchist
he must be (so said the wise ones in official circles), for he was
such a villainous painter! Cézanne died, but not before his apotheosis
by the new crowd of the Autumn Salon. We are told by admirers of Zola
how much he did for his neglected and struggling fellow-townsman; how
the novelist opened his arms to Cézanne. Cézanne says quite the
contrary. In the first place he had more money than Zola when they
started, and Zola, after he had become a celebrity, was a great man
and very haughty.

"A mediocre intelligence and a detestable friend" is the way the
prototype of Claude Lantier puts the case. "A bad book and a
completely false one," he added, when speaking to the painter Emile
Bernard on the disagreeable theme. Naturally Zola did not pose his old
friend for the entire figure of the crazy impressionist, his hero,
Claude. It was a study composed of Cézanne, Bazille, and one other, a
poor, wretched lad who had been employed to clean Manet's studio,
entertained artistic ambitions, but hanged himself. The conversations
Cézanne had with Zola, his extreme theories of light, are all in the
novel--by the way, one of Zola's most finished efforts. Cézanne, an
honest, hard-working man, bourgeois in habits if not by temperament,
was grievously wounded by the treachery of Zola; and he did not fail
to denounce this treachery to Bernard.

Paul Cézanne was born January 19, 1839. His father was a rich
bourgeois, and while he was disappointed when his son refused to
prosecute further his law studies, he, being a sensible parent and
justly estimating Paul's steadiness of character, allowed him to go to
Paris in 1862, giving him an income of a hundred and fifty francs a
month, which was shortly after doubled. With sixty dollars a month an
art student of twenty-three could, in those days, live comfortably,
study at leisure, and see the world. Cézanne from the start was in
earnest. Instinctively he realised that for him was not the rapid
ascent of the rocky path that leads to Parnassus. He mistrusted his
own talent, though not his powers of application. At first he
frequented the Académie Suisse, where he encountered as fellow-workers
Pissarro and Guillaumin. He soon transferred his easel to the
Beaux-Arts and became an admirer of Delacroix and Courbet. It seems
strange in the presence of a Cézanne picture to realise that he, too,
suffered his little term of lyric madness and wrestled with huge
mythologic themes--giant men carrying off monstrous women.
Connoisseurs at the sale of Zola's art treasures were astonished by
the sight of a canvas signed Cézanne, the subject of which was
L'Enlèvement, a romantic subject, not lacking in the spirit of
Delacroix. The Courbet influence persisted, despite the development of
the younger painter in other schools. Cézanne can claim Courbet and
the Dutchmen as artistic ancestors.

When Cézanne arrived in Paris the first comrade to greet him was Zola.
The pair became inseparable; they fought for naturalism, and it was to
Cézanne that Zola dedicated his _Salons_ which are now to be found in
a volume of essays on art and literature bearing the soothing title of
Mes Haines. Zola, pitching overboard many friends, wrote his famous
eulogy of Manet in the _Evenement_, and the row he raised was so
fierce that he was forced to resign as art critic from that journal.
The fight then began in earnest. The story is a thrice-told one. It
may be read in Théodore Duret's study of Manet and, as regards
Cézanne, in the same critic's volume on Impressionism. Cézanne
exhibited in 1874 with Manet and the rest at the impressionists'
salon, held at the studio of Nadar the photographer. He had earlier
submitted at once to Manet's magic method of painting, but in 1873, at
Auvers-sur-Oise, he began painting in the _plein air_ style and with
certain modifications adhered to that manner until the time of his
death. The amazing part of it all is that he produced for more than
thirty years and seldom sold a canvas, seldom exhibited. His solitary
appearance at an official salon was in 1882, and he would not have
succeeded then if it had not been for his friend Guillaumin, a member
of the selecting jury, who claimed his rights and passed in, amid
execrations, both mock and real, a portrait by Cézanne.

Called a _communard_ in 1874, Cézanne was saluted with the title of
anarchist in 1904, when his vogue had begun; these titles being a
species of official nomenclature for all rebels. Thiers, once
President of the French Republic, made a _bon mot_ when he exclaimed:
"A Romantic--that is to say, Communist!" During his entire career this
mild, reserved gentleman from Aix came under the ban of the critics
and the authorities, for he had shouldered his musket in 1871, as did
Manet, as did Bazille,--who, like Henri Regnault, was killed in a
skirmish.

His most virulent enemies were forced to admit that Edouard Manet had
a certain facility with the brush; his quality and beauty of sheer
paint could not be winked away even by Albert Wolff. But to Cézanne
there was no quarter shown. He was called the "Ape of Manet"; he was
hissed, cursed, abused; his canvases were spat upon, and as late as
1902, when M. Roujon, the Director of the Beaux-Arts, was asked by
Octave Mirbeau to decorate Cézanne, he nearly fainted from
astonishment. Cézanne! That barbarian! The amiable director suggested
instead the name of Claude Monet. Time had enjoyed its little
whirligig with that great painter of vibrating light and water, but
Monet blandly refused the long-protracted honour. Another anecdote is
related by M. Duret. William II of Germany in 1899 wished to examine
with his own eyes, trained by the black, muddy painting of Germany,
the canvases of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, and Manet, acquired
by Director Tschudi for the Berlin National Gallery. He saw them all
except the Cézanne. Herr Tschudi feared that the Parisian fat would be
in the imperial fire if the Cézanne picture appeared. So he hid it. As
it was his Majesty nodded in emphatic disapproval of the imported
purchases. If he had viewed the Cézanne!

At first blush, for those whose schooling has been academic, the
Cézanne productions are shocking. Yet his is a personal vision, though
a heavy one. He has not a facile brush; he is not a great painter; he
lacks imagination, invention, fantasy; but his palette is his own. He
is a master of gray tones, and his scale is, as Duret justly observes,
a very intense one. He avoids the anecdote, historic or domestic. He
detests design, prearranged composition. His studio is an open field,
light the chief actor of his palette. He is never conventionally
decorative unless you can call his own particular scheme decorative.
He paints what he sees without flattery, without flinching from any
ugliness. Compared with him Courbet is as sensuous as Correggio. He
does not seek for the correspondences of light with surrounding
objects or the atmosphere in which Eugène Carrière bathes his
portraits, Rodin his marbles. The Cézanne picture does not modulate,
does not flow; is too often hard, though always veracious--Cézannes
veracity, be it understood. But it is an inescapable veracity. There
is, too, great vitality and a peculiar reserved passion, like that of
a Delacroix _à ribbers_, and in his still-life he is as great even as
Manet.

His landscapes are real, though without the subtle poetry of Corot or
the blazing lyricism of Monet. He hails directly from the Dutch: Van
der Near, in his night pieces. Yet no Dutchman ever painted so
uncompromisingly, so close to the border line that divides the rigid
definitions of old-fashioned photography--the "new" photography hugs
closely the mellow mezzotint--and the vision of the painter. An
eye--nothing more, is Cézanne. He refuses to see in nature either a
symbol or a sermon. Withal his landscapes are poignant in their
reality. They are like the grill age one notes in ancient French
country houses--little caseate cut in the windows through which you
may see in vivid outline a little section of the landscape. Cézanne
marvellously renders certain surfaces, china, fruit, tapestry.

Slowly grew his fame as a sober, sincere, unaffected workman of art.
Disciples rallied around him. He accepted changing fortunes with his
accustomed equanimity. Maurice Denis painted for the Champ de Mars
Salon of 1901 a picture entitled Homage à Cézanne, after the
well-known _hommages_ of Fantin-Latour. This _homage_ had its uses.
The disciples became a swelling, noisy chorus, and in 1904 the Cézanne
room was thronged by overheated enthusiasts who would have offered
violence to the first critical dissident. The older men, the followers
of Monet, Manet, Degas, and Whistler, talked as if the end of the
world had arrived. Art is a serious affair in Paris. However, after
Cézanne appeared the paintings of that half-crazy, unlucky genius,
Vincent van Gogh, and of the gifted, brutal Gauguin. And in the face
of such offerings Cézanne may yet, by reason of his moderation,
achieve the unhappy fate of becoming a classic. He is certainly as far
removed from Van Gogh and Gauguin on the one side as he is from Manet
and Courbet on the other. Huysmans does not hesitate to assert that
Cézanne contributed more to accelerate the impressionist movement than
Manet. Paul Cézanne died in Aix, in Provence, October 23, 1906.

Emile Bernard, an admirer, a quasi-pupil of Cézanne's and a painter of
established reputation, discoursed at length in the _Mercure de
France_ upon the methods and the man. His anecdotes are interesting.
Without the genius of Flaubert, Cézanne had something of the great
novelist's abhorrence of life--fear would be a better word. He
voluntarily left Paris to immure himself in his native town of Aix,
there to work out in peace long-planned projects, which would, he
believed, revolutionise the technique of painting. Whether for good or
evil, his influence on the younger men in Paris has been powerful,
though it is now on the wane. How far they have gone astray in
imitating him is the most significant thing related by Emile Bernard,
a friend of Paul Gauguin and a member of his Pont-Aven school.

In February, 1904, Bernard landed in Marseilles after a trip to the
Orient. A chance word told him that there had been installed an
electric tramway between Marseilles and Aix. Instantly the name of
Cézanne came to his memory; he had known for some years that the old
painter was in Aix. He resolved to visit him, and fearing a doubtful
reception he carried with him a pamphlet he had written in 1889, an
eulogium of the painter. On the way he asked his fellow-travellers for
Cézanne's address, but in vain; the name was unknown. In Aix he met
with little success. Evidently the fame of the recluse had not reached
his birthplace. At last Bernard was advised to go to the Mayor's
office, where he would find an electoral list. Among the voters he
discovered a Paul Cézanne, who was born January 19, 1839, who lived at
25 Rue Boulegon. Bernard lost no time and reached a simple dwelling
house with the name of the painter on the door. He rang. The door
opened. He entered and mounted a staircase. Ahead of him, slowly
toiling upward, was an old man in a cloak and carrying a portfolio. It
was Cézanne. After he had explained the reason for his visit, the old
painter cried: "You are Emile Bernard! You are a maker of biographies!
Signac"--an impressionist--"told me of you. You are also a painter?"
Bernard, who had been painting for years, and was a friend of Signac,
was nonplussed at his sudden literary reputation, but he explained the
matter to Cézanne, who, however, was in doubt until he saw later the
work of his admirer.

He had another atelier a short distance from the town; he called it
"The Motive." There, facing Mount Sainte-Victoire, he painted every
afternoon in the open; the majority of his later landscapes were
inspired by the views in that charming valley. Bernard was so glad to
meet Cézanne that he moved to Aix.

In Cézanne's studio at Aix Bernard encountered some extraordinary
studies in flower painting and three death heads; also monstrous
nudes, giant-like women whose flesh appeared parboiled. On the streets
Cézanne was always annoyed by boys or beggars; the former were
attracted by his bohemian exterior and to express their admiration
shouted at him or else threw stones; the beggars knew their man to be
easy and were rewarded by small coin. Although Cézanne lived like a
bachelor, his surviving sister saw that his household was comfortable.
His wife and son lived in Paris and often visited him. He was rich;
his father, a successful banker at Aix, had left him plenty of money;
but a fanatic on the subject of art, ceaselessly searching for new
tonal combinations, he preferred a hermit's existence. In Aix he was
considered eccentric though harmless. His pride was doubled by a
morbid shyness. Strangers he avoided. So sensitive was he that once
when he stumbled over a rock Bernard attempted to help him by seizing
his arm. A terrible scene ensued. The painter, livid with fright,
cursed the unhappy young Parisian and finally ran away. An explanation
came when the housekeeper told Bernard that her master was a little
peculiar. Early in life he had been kicked by some rascal and ever
afterward was nervous. He was very irritable and not in good health.

In Bernard's presence he threw a bust made of him by Solari to the
ground, smashing it. It didn't please him. In argument he lost his
temper, though he recovered it rapidly. Zola's name was anathema. He
said that Daumier drank too much; hence his failure to attain
veritable greatness. Cézanne worked from six to ten or eleven in the
morning at his atelier; then he breakfasted, repaired to the "Motive,"
there to remain until five in the evening. Returning to Aix, he dined
and retired immediately. And he had kept up this life of toil and
abnegation for years. He compared himself to Balzac's Frenhofer (in
The Unknown Masterpiece), who painted out each day the work of the
previous day. Cézanne adored the Venetians--which is curious--and
admitted that he lacked the power to realise his inward vision; hence
the continual experimenting. He most admired Veronese, and was
ambitious of being received at what he called the "Salon de
Bouguereau." The truth is, despite Cézanne's long residence in Paris,
he remained provincial to the end; his father before becoming a banker
had been a hairdresser, and his son was proud of the fact. He never
concealed it. He loved his father's memory and had wet eyes when he
spoke of him.

Bernard thinks that the vision of his master was defective; hence the
sometime shocking deformations he indulged in. "His _optique_ was more
in his brain than in his eye." He lacked imagination absolutely, and
worked slowly, laboriously, his method one of excessive complication.
He began with a shadow, then a touch, superimposing tone upon tone,
modelling his paint somewhat like Monticelli, but without a hint of
that artist's lyricism. Sober, without rhetoric, a realist, yet with a
singularly rich and often harmonious palette, Cézanne reported
faithfully what his eyes told him.

It angered him to see himself imitated and he was wrathful when he
heard that his still-life pictures were praised in Paris. "That stuff
they like up there, do they? Their taste must be low," he would
repeat, his eyes sparkling with malice. He disliked the work of Paul
Gauguin and repudiated the claim of being his artistic ancestor. "He
did not understand me," grumbled Cézanne. He praised Thomas Couture,
who was, he asserted, a true master, one who had formed such excellent
pupils as Courbet, Manet, and Puvis. This rather staggered Bernard, as
well it might; the paintings of Couture and Cézanne are poles apart.

He had, he said, wasted much time in his youth--particularly in
literature. A lettered man, he read to Bernard a poem in imitation of
Baudelaire, one would say very Baudelairian. He had begun too late,
had submitted himself to other men's influence, and wished for half a
century that he might "realise"--his favourite expression--his
theories. When he saw Bernard painting he told him that his palette
was too restricted; he needed at least twenty colours. Bernard gives
the list of yellows, reds, greens, and blues, with variations. "Don't
make Chinese images like Gauguin," he said another time. "All nature
must be modelled after the sphere, cone, and cylinder; as for colour,
the more the colours harmonise the more the design becomes precise."
Never a devotee of form--he did not draw from the model--his
philosophy can be summed up thus: Look out for the contrasts and
correspondence of tones, and the design will take care of itself. He
hated "literary" painting and art criticism. He strongly advised
Bernard to stick to his paint and let the pen alone. The moment an
artist begins to explain his work he is done for; painting is
concrete, literature deals with the abstract. He loved music,
especially Wagner's, which he did not understand, but the sound of
Wagner's name was sympathetic, and that had at first attracted him!
Pissarro he admired for his indefatigable labours. Suffering from
diabetes, which killed him, his nervous tension is excusable. He was
in reality an amiable, kind-hearted, religious man. Above all, simple.
He sought for the simple motive in nature. He would not paint a Christ
head because he did not believe himself a worthy enough Christian.
Chardin he studied and had a theory that the big spectacles and visor
which the Little Master (the Velasquez of vegetables) wore had helped
his vision. Certainly the still-life of Cézanne's is the only modern
still-life that may be compared to Chardin's; not Manet, Vollon, Chase
has excelled this humble painter of Aix. He called the Écoles des
Beaux-Arts the "Bozards," and reviled as farceurs the German
secessionists who imitated him. He considered Ingres, notwithstanding
his science, a small painter in comparison with the Venetians and
Spaniards.

A painter by compulsion, a contemplative rather than a creative
temperament, a fumbler and seeker, nevertheless Paul Cézanne has
formed a school, has left a considerable body of work. His optic nerve
was abnormal, he saw his planes leap or sink on his canvas; he often
complained, but his patience and sincerity were undoubted. Like his
friend Zola his genius--if genius there is in either man--was largely
a matter of protracted labour, and has it not been said that genius is
a long labour?

From the sympathetic pen of Emile Bernard we learn of a character
living in the real bohemia of Paris painters who might have figured in
any of the novels referred to, or, better still, might have been
interpreted by Victor Hugo or Ivan Turgenieff. But the Frenchman would
have made of Père Tanguy a species of poor Myriel; the Russian would
have painted him as he was, a saint in humility, springing from the
soil, the friend of poor painters, a socialist in theory, but a
Christian in practice. After following the humble itinerary of his
life you realise the uselessness of "literary" invention. Here was
character for a novelist to be had for the asking. The Crainquebille
of Anatole France occurs to the lover of that writer after reading
Emile Bernard's little study of Father Tanguy.

His name was Julien Tanguy. He was born in 1825 at Plédran, in the
north of France. He was a plasterer when he married. The young couple,
accustomed to hardships of all kinds, left Saint-Brieuc for Paris.
This was in 1860. After various vicissitudes the man became a colour
grinder in the house of Edouard, Rue Clauzel. The position was meagre.
The Tanguys moved up in the social scale by accepting the job of
concierge somewhere on the Butte Montmartre. This gave Père Tanguy
liberty, his wife looking after the house. He went into business on
his own account, vending colours in the quarter and the suburbs. He
traversed the country from Argenteuil to Barbizon, from Ecouen to
Sarcelle. He met Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, all youthful and
confident and boiling over with admiration for Corot, Courbet, and
Millet. They patronised the honest, pleasant pedlar of colours and
brushes, and when they didn't have the money he trusted them. It was
his prime quality that he trusted people. He cared not enough for
money, as his too often suffering wife averred, and his heart, always
on his sleeve, he was an easy mark for the designing. This supreme
simplicity led him into joining the Communists in 1871, and then he
had a nasty adventure. One day, while dreaming on sentry duty, a band
from Versailles suddenly descended upon the outposts. Père Tanguy lost
his head. He could not fire on a fellow-being, and he threw away his
musket. For this act of "treachery" he was sentenced to serve two
years in the galleys at Brest. Released by friendly intervention he
had still to remain without Paris for two years more. Finally,
entering his beloved quarter he resumed his tranquil occupation, and
hearing that the Maison Edouard had been moved from the Rue Clauzel he
rented a little shop, where he sold material to artists, bought
pictures, and entertained in his humble manner any friend or luckless
devil who happened that way. Cézanne and Vignon were his best
customers. Guillemin, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Oller,
Messurer, Augustin, Signac, De Lautrec, symbolists of the Pont-Aven
school, neo-impressionists, and the young _fumistes_ of schools as yet
unborn, revolutionaries with one shirt to their back, swearing at the
official _Salon_ and also swearing by the brotherhood of man (with a
capital), assembled in this dingy old shop. Tanguy was a rallying
point. He was full of the milk of human kindness, and robbed himself
to give a worthless fellow with a hard-luck story some of the sous
that should have gone to his wife. Fortunately she was a philosopher
as well as an admirable housekeeper. If the rent was paid and there
was some soup-meat for dinner she was content. More she could not
expect from a man who gave away with both hands. But--and here is the
curious part of this narrative of M. Bernard's--Tanguy was the only
person in Paris who bought and owned pictures by Cézanne. He had
dozens of his canvases stacked away in the rear of his
establishment--Cézanne often parted with a canvas for a few francs.
When Tanguy was hard up he would go to some discerning amateur and
sell for two hundred francs pictures that to-day bring twenty thousand
francs. Tanguy hated to sell, especially his Cézannes. Artists came to
see them. His shop was the scene of many a wordy critical battle.
Gauguin uttered the paradox, "Nothing so resembles a daub as a
masterpiece," and the novelist Elémir Bourges cried, "This is the
painting of a vintager!" Alfred Stevens roared in the presence of the
Cézannes, Anquetin admired; but, as Bernard adds, Jacques Blanche
bought. So did Durand-Ruel, who has informed me that a fine Cézanne
to-day is a difficult fish to hook. The great public won't have him,
and the amateurs who adore him jealously hold on to their prizes.

The socialism of Père Tanguy was of a mild order. He pitied with a
Tolstoyan pity the sufferings of the poor. He did not hate the rich,
nor did he stand at street corners preaching the beauties of torch and
bomb. A simple soul, uneducated, not critical, yet with an instinctive
_flair_ for the coming triumphs of his young men, he espoused the
cause of his clients because they were poverty-stricken, unknown, and
revolutionists--an æsthetic revolution was his wildest dream. He said
of Cézanne that "Papa Cézanne always quits a picture before he
finishes it. If he moves he lets his canvases lie in the vacated
studio." He no doubt benefited by this carelessness of the painter.
Cézanne worked slowly, but he never stopped working; he left nothing
to hazard, and, astonishing fact, he spent every morning at the
Louvre. There he practised his daily scales, optically speaking,
before taking up the brush for the day's work. Many of Vincent von
Gogh's pictures Tanguy owned. This was about 1886. The eccentric,
gifted Dutchman attracted the poor merchant by his ferocious
socialism. He was, indeed, a ferocious temperament, working like a
madman, painting with his colour tubes when he had no brushes, and
literally living in the _boutique_ of Tanguy. The latter always read
_Le Cri du Peuple_ and _L'Intransigeant_, and believed all he read. He
did not care much for Van Gogh's compositions, no doubt agreeing with
Cézanne, who, viewing them for the first time, calmly remarked to the
youth, "Sincerely, you paint like a crazy man." A prophetic note! Van
Gogh frequented a tavern kept by an old model, an Italian woman. It
bore the romantic title of The Tambourine. When he couldn't pay his
bills he would cover the walls with furious frescoes, flowers of
tropical exuberance, landscapes that must have been seen in a
nightmare. He was painting at this time three pictures a day. He would
part with a canvas at the extortionate price of a franc.

Tanguy was the possessor of a large portrait by Cézanne, done in his
earliest manner. This he had to sell on account of pressing need. Dark
days followed. He moved across the street into smaller quarters. The
old crowd began to drift away; some died, some had become famous, and
one, Van Gogh, shot himself in an access of mania. This was a shock to
his friend. A second followed when Van Gogh's devoted brother went
mad. Good Father Tanguy, as he was affectionately called, sickened. He
entered a hospital. He suffered from a cancerous trouble of the
stomach. One day he said to his wife, who was visiting him: "I am
bored here... I won't die here... I mean to die in my own home." He
went home and died shortly afterward. In 1894 Octave Mirbeau wrote a
moving article for the _Journal_ about the man who had never spoken
ill of any one, who had never turned from his door a hungry person.
The result was a sale organised at the Hôtel Drouot, to which
prominent artists and literary folk contributed works. Cazin,
Guillemet, Gyp, Maufra, Monet, Luce, Pissarro, Rochegrosse, Sisley,
Vauthier, Carrier-Belleuse, Berthe Morisot, Renoir, Jongkind,
Raffaelli, *Helleu, Rodin, and many others participated in this noble
charity, which brought the widow ten thousand francs. She soon died.

Van Gogh painted a portrait of Tanguy about 1886. It is said to belong
to Rodin. It represents the naïve man with his irregular features and
placid expression of a stoic; not a distinguished face, but
unmistakably that of a gentle soul, who had loved his neighbour better
than himself (therefore he died in misery). He it was who may be
remembered by those who knew him--and also a few future historians of
the futility of things in general--as the man who first made known to
Paris the pictures of the timid, obstinate Paul Cézanne. An odd fish,
indeed, was this same Julien Tanguy, little father to painters.




II. ROPS THE ETCHER



I

That personality in art counts, next to actual genius, heavier than
all other qualities, is such a truism that it is often forgotten. In
the enormous mass of mediocre work which is turned out annually by
artists of technical talent seldom is there encountered a strong,
well-defined personality. Imitation has been called the bane of
originality; suppress it as a factor, and nine-tenths of living
painters, sculptors, etchers would have to shut up shop. The stencil
is the support of many men who otherwise might have become useful
citizens, shoemakers, tailors, policemen, or vice-presidents. For this
reason the phrase "academic" should be more elastic in its meanings.
There are academic painters influenced by Corot or Monticelli, as well
as by David, Gros, or Meissonier. The "academic" Rodin has appeared in
contemporary sculpture; the great Frenchman found for himself his
formula, and the lesser men have appropriated it to their own uses.
This is considered legitimate, though not a high order of art;
however, the second-rate rules in the market-place, let the genius
rage as he will. He must be tamed. He must be softened; his divine
fire shaded by the friendly screens of more prudent, more conventional
talent. Even among men of genius up on the heights it is the
personality of each that enters largely into the equation of their
work. No one can confuse Whistler the etcher with the etcher
Rembrandt; the profounder is the Dutchman. Yet what individuality
there is in the plates of the American! What personality! Now,
Félicien Rops, the Belgian etcher, lithographer, engraver, designer,
and painter, occupies about the same relative position to Honoré
Daumier as Whistler does to Rembrandt. How seldom you hear of Rops.
Why? He was a man of genius, one of the greatest etchers and
lithographers of his century, an artist with an intense personal line,
a colossal workman and versatile inventor--why has he been passed over
and inferior men praised?

His pornographic plates cannot be the only reason, because his
representative work is free from licence or suggestion. Giulio
Romano's illustrations to Aretino's sonnets are not held up as the
representative art of this pupil of Raphael, nor are the vulgarities
of Rowlandson, Hogarth, George Morland set against their better
attempts. Collectors treasure the engravings of the eighteenth-century
_éditions des fermiers-généraux_ for their capital workmanship, not
for their licentious themes. But Rops is always the Rops of the
Pornocrates! After discussing him with some amateurs you are forced to
realise that it is his plates in which he gives rein to an
unparalleled flow of animal spirits and _gauloiserie_ that are the
more esteemed. Rops the artist, with the big and subtle style, the
etcher of the Sataniques, of Le Pendu, of La Buveuse d'Absinthe and
half a hundred other masterpieces, is set aside for the witty
illustrator, with the humour of a Rabelais and the cynicism of
Chamfort. And even on this side of his genius he has never been
excelled, the Japanese alone being his equals in daring of invention,
while he tops them in the expression of broad humour.

In the Luxembourg galleries there is a picture of an interesting man,
in an etcher's atelier. It is the portrait of Rops by Mathey, and
shows him examining at a window, through which the light pours in, a
freshly pulled proof. It depicts with skill the intense expression
upon his handsome face, the expression of an artist absolutely
absorbed in his work. That is the real Rops. His master quality was
intensity. It traversed like a fine keen flame his entire production
from seemingly insignificant tail-pieces to his agonised designs, in
which luxury and pain are inextricably commingled.

He was born at Namur, Belgium, July 10, 1833, and died at Essonnes,
near Paris, August 23,1898. He was the son of wealthy parents, and on
one side stemmed directly from Hungary. His grandfather was Rops
Lajos, of the province called Alfod. The Maygar predominated. He was
as proud and fierce as Goya. A fighter from the beginning, still in
warrior's harness at the close, when, "cardiac and impenitent," as he
put it, he died of heart trouble. He received at the hands of the
Jesuits a classical education. A Latinist, he was erudite as were few
of his artistic contemporaries. The mystic strain in him did not
betray itself until his third period. He was an accomplished humourist
and could generally cap Latin verses with D'Aurevilly or Huysmans.
Tertullian's De Cultu Feminarum he must have read, for many of his
plates are illustrations of the learned Bishop of Carthage's attitude
toward womankind. The hot crossings of blood, Belgian and Hungarian,
may be responsible for a peculiarly forceful, rebellious, sensual, and
boisterous temperament.

Doubtless the three stadia of an artist's career are the arbitrary
classification of critics; nevertheless they are well marked in many
cases. Balzac was a romantic, a realist, a mystic; Flaubert was
alternately romantic and realist. Tolstoi was never a romantic, but a
realist he was, and he is a mystic. Dostoïevski, from whom he absorbed
so much, taught him the formulas of his mysticism--though Tolstoi has
never felt the life of the soul so profoundly as this predecessor.
Ibsen passed through the three stages. Huysmans, never romantic, began
as a realistic pessimist and ended as a pessimistic mystic. Félicien
Rops could never have been a romantic, though the _macabre_
romanticism of 1830 may be found in his designs. A realist, brutal,
bitter, he was in his youth; he saw the grosser facts of life, so
often lamentable and tender, in the spirit of a Voltaire doubled by a
Rabelais. There is honest and also shocking laughter in these early
illustrations. A _fantaisiste_, graceful, delicate--and
indelicate--emerged after the lad went up to Paris, as if he had
stepped out of the eighteenth century. Rops summed up in his book
plates, title-pages, and wood-cuts, illustrations done in a furious
speed, all the elegance, the courtly corruption, and Boucher-like
luxuriousness that may be detected in the moral _marquetrie_ of the
Goncourts. He had not yet said, "Evil, be thou my Good," nor had the
mystic delirium of the last period set in. All his afternoons must
have been those of a faun--a faun who with impeccable solicitude put
on paper what he saw in the heart of the bosk or down by the banks of
secret rivers. The sad turpitudes, the casuistry of concupiscence, the
ironic discolourations and feverish delving into subterranean moral
stratifications were as yet afar. He was young, handsome, with a
lithe, vigorous body and the head of an aristocratic Mephistopheles, a
head all profile, like the heads of Hungary--Hungary itself, which is
all profile. Need we add that after the death of his father he soon
wasted a fortune? But the reckless bohemian in him was subjugated by
necessity. He set to work to earn his bread. Some conception of his
labours for thirty-five years may be gleaned from the catalogue of his
work by Erastène Ramiro (whose real name is Eugène Rodrigues). Nearly
three thousand plates he etched, lithographed, or engraved, not
including his paintings or his experiments in various mediums, such as
_vernis mou_ and wood-engraving.

The coarse legends of old Flanders found in Rops their pictorial
interpreter. Less cerebral in his abounding youth he made Paris laugh
with his comical travesties of political persons, persons in high
finance, and also by his shrewd eye for the homely traits in the life
of the people. His street scenes are miracles of detail, satire, and
fun. The one entitled Spring is the most noted. That legacy of hate,
inherited from the 1830 poets, of the bourgeois, was a merry play for
Rops. He is the third of the trinity of caricature artists, Daumier
and Gavarni being the other two. The liberal pinch of Gallic salt in
the earlier plates need not annoy one. Deliberately vulgar he never
is, though he sports with things hallowed, and always goes out of his
way to insult the religion he first professed. There is in this
Satanist a religious _fond_; the very fierceness of his attacks, of
his blasphemies, betrays the Catholic at heart. If he did not believe,
why should he have displayed such continual scorn? No, Rops was not as
sincere as his friends would have us believe. He made his Pegasus plod
in too deep mud, and often in his most winged flights he darkened the
blue with his satyr-like brutalities. But in the gay middle period his
pages overflow with decorative Cupids and tiny devils, joyful girls,
dainty amourettes, and Parisian _putti_--they blithely kick their legs
over the edges of eternity, and smile as if life were a snowball jest
or a game at forfeits. They are adorable. His women are usually
strong-backed, robust Amazons, drawn with a swirling line and a
Rubens-like fulness. They are conquerors. Before these majestic idols
men prostrate themselves.

In his turbulent later visions there is no suspicion of the opium that
gave its inspiration to Coleridge, Poe, De Quincey, James Thomson, or
Baudelaire. The city of dreadful night shown us by Rops is the city
through whose streets he has passed his life long. Not the dream
cities of James Ensor or De Groux, the Paris of Rops is at once an
abode of disillusionment, of mordant joys, of sheer ecstasy and morbid
hallucinations. The opium of Rops is his imagination, aided by a
manual dexterity that is extraordinary. He is a master of linear
design. He is cold, deadly cold, but correct ever. Fabulous and
absurd, delicious and abominable as he may be, his spirit sits
critically aloft, never smiling. Impersonal as a toxicologist, he
handles his poisonous acids with the gravity of a philosopher and the
indifference of a destroying angel. There is a diabolic spleen more
strongly developed in Rops than in any of his contemporaries, with the
sole exception of Baudelaire, who inspired and spurred him on to
astounding atrocities of the needle and acid. This diabolism, this
worship of Satan and his works, are sincere in the etcher. A relic of
rotten Romanticism, it glows like phosphorescent fire during his last
period. The Church has in its wisdom employed a phrase for frigid
depravity of the Rops kind, naming it "morose delectation." Morose
Rops became as he developed. His private life he hid. We know little
or nothing of it save that he was not unhappy in his companionships or
choice of friends. He loathed the promiscuous methods by which some
men achieve admiration. But secret spleen there must have been--a
twist of a painter's wrist may expose his soul. He became a solitary
and ate the bitter root of sin, for, cerebral as he is, his discovery
of the human soul shows it as ill at ease before its maker. Flaubert
has said that "the ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope." But no
man may sun himself on this slope by the flames of hell without his
soul shrivelling away. Rodin, who admires Rops and has been greatly
influenced by him; Rodin, as an artist superior to the Belgian, has
revealed less preoccupation with the ignoble; at least, despite his
excursions into questionable territory, he has never been carried
completely away. He always returns to the sane, to the normal life;
but over the volcanic landscapes of Rops are strewn many moral
abysses.


II

He had no illusions as to the intelligence and sincerity of those men
who, denying free-will, yet call themselves free-thinkers. Rops
frankly made of Satan his chief religion. He is the psychologist of
the exotic. Cruel, fantastic, nonchalant, and shivering atrociously,
his female Satan worshippers go to their greedy master in *fatidical
and shuddering attitudes; they submit to his glacial embrace. The
acrid perfume of Rops's maleficent genius makes itself manifest in his
Sataniques. No longer are his women the embodiment of Corbière's
"Éternel féminin de l'éternel jocrisse." Ninnies, simperers, and
simpletons have vanished. The poor, suffering human frame becomes a
horrible musical instrument from which the artist extorts exquisite
and sinister music. We turn our heads away, but the tune of cracking
souls haunts our ear. As much to Rops as to Baudelaire, Victor Hugo
could have said that he had evoked a new shudder. And singularly
enough Rops is in these plates the voice of the mediæval preacher
crying out that Satan is alive, a tangible being, going about the
earth devouring us; that Woman is a vase of iniquity, a tower of
wrath, a menace, not a salvation. His readings of the early fathers
and his pessimistic temperamental bent contributed to this truly
morose judgment of his mother's sex. He drives cowering to her corner,
after her earlier triumphs, his unhappy victim of love, absinthe, and
diabolism. Not for an instant does he participate personally in the
strained voluptuousness or terrific chastisements of his designs. He
has all the old monachal contempt of woman. He is cerebrally chaste.
Huysmans, in his admirable essay on Rops, wrote, "Car il n'y a de
réellement obscènes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of
special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of
a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a
more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he
writes, "from the metaphysical observer's point of view, neither
disease nor health of the soul; there are only psychological states."
The _états d'âmes_ of Félicien Rops, then, may or may not have been
morbid. But he has contrived that his wit in its effect upon his
spectators is too often profoundly depressing and morbid and
disquieting.

The triumphant chorus of Rops's admirers comprises the most critical
names in France and Italy: Barbey d'Aurevilly, J.K. Huysmans,
Pradelle, Joséphin Péladan--once the _Sâr_ of Babylonian fame--Eugène
Demolder, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian poet; Camille Lemonnier,
Champsaur, Arsène Alexandre, Fromentin, Vittorio Pica, De Hérédia,
Mallarmé, Octave Uzanne, Octave Mirbeau, the biographer Ramiro and
Charles Baudelaire. The last first recognised him, though he never
finished the projected study of him as man and artist. In the newly
published letters (1841-66) of Baudelaire there is one addressed to
Rops, who saw much of the unhappy poet during his disastrous sojourn
in Brussels. It was the author of Les Fleurs du Mal who made the
clever little verse about "Ce tant bizarre Monsieur Rops... Qui n'est
pas un grand prix de Rome, mais dont le talent est haut, comme la
pyramide de Chéops."

A French critic has called Rops "a false genius," probably alluding to
the malign characters of the majority of his engraved works rather
than to his marvellous and fecund powers of invention. Perverse
idealist as he was, he never relaxed his pursuit of the perfection of
form. He tells us that in 1862 he went to Paris, after much
preliminary skirmishing in Belgian reviews and magazines, to "learn
his art" with Bracquemond and Jacquemart, both of whom he never ceased
praising. He was associated with Daubigny, painter and etcher, and
with Courbet, Flameng, and Thérond.

He admired Calmatta and his school--Bal, Franck, Biot, Meunier,
Flameng. He belonged to the International Society of Aquafortistes. He
worked in aquatint and successfully revived the old process, _vernis
mou_. A sober workman, he spent at least fourteen hours a day at his
desk. Being musical, he designed some genre pieces, notably that of
the truthfully observed Bassoonist. And though not originating he
certainly carried to the pitch of the artistically ludicrous those
progressive pictures of goats dissolving into pianists; of Liszt
tearing passion and grand pianos into tatters. He has contributed to
the gaiety of nations with his celebrated design: Ma fille! Monsieur
Cabanel, which shows a harpy-like mother presenting her nude daughter
as a model for that painter. The malicious ingenuity of Rops never
failed him. He produced for years numerous anecdotes in black and
white. The elasticity of his line, its variety and richness, the
harmonies, elliptical and condensed, of his designs; the agile, fiery
movement, his handling of his velvety blacks, his tonal gradations,
his caressing touch by which the metal reproduced muscular crispations
of his dry-point and the fat silhouettes of beautiful human forms,
above all, his virile grasp which is revealed in his balanced
ensembles--these prove him to be one of the masters of modern etching.
And from his cynical yet truthful motto: "J'appelle un chat un chat,"
he never swerved.

A student and follower of Jean Francois Millet, several landscapes and
pastorals of Rops recall the French painter's style. In his Belgian
out-of-doors scenes and interiors the Belgian heredity of Rops
projects itself unmistakably. Such a picture as Scandal, for example,
might have been signed by Israels. Le Bout de Sillon is Millet, and
beautifully drawn. The scheme is trite. Two peasants, a young woman
and a young man holding a rope, exchange love vows. It is very simple,
very expressive. His portraits of women, Walloons, and of Antwerp are
solidly built, replete with character and quaint charm. Charming, too,
is the portrait of his great-aunt. Scandal is an ambitious design. A
group of women strongly differentiated as to types and ages are
enjoying over a table their tea and a choice morsel of scandal. The
situation is seized; it is a picture that appeals. Ghastly is his
portrait of a wretched young woman ravaged by absinthe. Her lips are
blistered by the wormwood, and in her fevered glance there is despair.
Another delineation of disease, a grinning, skull-like head with a
scythe back of it, is a tribute to the artist's power of rendering the
repulsive. His Messalina, Lassatta, La Femme au Cochon, and La Femme
au Pantin should be studied. He has painted scissors grinders, flower
girls, "old guards," incantations, fishing parties, the rabble in the
streets, broom-riding witches, apes, ivory and peacocks, and a notable
figure piece, An Interment in the Walloon Country, which would have
pleased Courbet.

It is in his incarnations of Satan that Rops is unapproachable. Satan
Sowing the Tares of Evil is a sublime conception, truly Miltonic. The
bony-legged demon strides across Paris. One foot is posed on Notre
Dame. He quite touches the sky. Upon his head is a broad-brimmed
peasant's hat, Quaker in shape. Hair streams over his skeleton
shoulders. His eyes are gleaming with infernal malice--it is the most
diabolic face ever drawn of his majesty; not even Franz Stuck's Satan
has eyes so full of liquid damnation. Scattering miniature female
figures, like dolls, to the winds, this monster passes over Paris, a
baleful typhoon. The moral is not far to seek; indeed, there is
generally a moral, sometimes an inverted one, in the Rops etchings.
Order Reigns at Warsaw is a grim commentary on Russian politics quite
opportune to-day. La Peine de Mort has been used by Socialists as a
protest against capital punishment. Les Diables Froids personifies the
impassible artist. It is a page torn from the book of hell. Rops had
read Dante; he knew the meaning of the lines: "As the rill that runs
from Bulicame to be portioned out amid the sinful women"; and more
than once he explored the frozen circles of Gehenna. Victor Hugo was
much stirred by the design, Le Pendu, which depicts a man's corpse
swinging under a huge bell in some vast and immemorial, raven-haunted,
decaying tower, whose bizarre and gloomy outlines might have been
created by the brain of a Piranesi. An apocalyptic imagination had
Félicien Rops.




III. MONTICELLI



I

Poor "Fada"! The "innocent," the inoffensive fool--as they christened
that unfortunate man of genius, Adolphe Monticelli, in the dialect of
the South, the slang of Marseilles--where he spent the last sixteen
years of his life. The richest colourist of the nineteenth century,
obsessed by colour, little is known of this Monticelli, even in these
days when an artist's life is subjected to inquisitorial methods. Few
had written of him in English before W.E. Henley and W.C. Brownell. In
France eulogised by Théophile Gautier, in favour at the court, admired
by Diaz, Daubigny, Troyon, and Delacroix, his hopes were cracked by
the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian war. He escaped to Marseilles,
there to die poor, neglected, half mad. Perhaps he was to blame for
his failures; perhaps his temperament was his fate. Yet to-day his
pictures are sought for as were those of Diaz two decades ago, though
there was a tacit conspiracy among dealers and amateurs not to drag
his merits too soon before the foot-lights. In 1900 at the Paris
Exposition a collection of his works, four being representative,
opened the eyes of critics and public alike. It was realised that
Monticelli had not received his proper ranking in the
nineteenth-century theatre of painting; that while he owed much to
Watteau, to Turner, to Rousseau, he was a master who could stand or
fall on his own merits. Since then the Monticelli pictures have been
steadily growing in favour.

There is a Monticelli cult. America can boast of many of his most
distinguished specimens, while the Louvre and the Luxembourg are
without a single one. The Musée de Lille at Marseilles has several
examples; the private collections of M. Delpiano at Cannes and a few
collections in Paris make up a meagre list. The Comparative Exhibition
in New York, 1904, revealed to many accustomed to overpraising Diaz
and Fromentin the fact that Monticelli was their superior as a
colourist, and a decorator of singularly fascinating characteristics,
one who was not always a mere contriver of bacchanalian riots of
fancy, but who could exhibit when at his best a _justesse_ of vision
and a controlled imagination.

The dictionaries offer small help to the student as to the doings of
this erratic painter. He was born October 24, 1824. He died June 29,
1886. He was of mixed blood, Italian and French. His father was a
gauger, though Adolphe declared that he was an authentic descendant of
the Crusader, Godefroy Monticelli, who married in 1100 Aurea Castelli,
daughter of the Duca of Spoleto. Without doubt his Italian blood
counted heavily in his work, but whether of noble issue matters
little. Barbey d'Aurevilly and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, two men of
letters, indulged in similar boasts, and no doubt in their poverty and
tribulations the oriflamme of aristocracy which they bravely bore into
the café life of Paris was a source of consolation to them. But it is
with brains, not blood, that painters mix their pigments, and the
legend of high birth can go with the other fictions reported by Henley
that Monticelli was an illegitimate offshoot of the Gonzagas; that he
was the natural son of Diaz; that Diaz kept him a prisoner for years,
to "steal the secret of his colours."

Like many another of his temperament, he had himself to thank for his
woes, though it was a streak of ill-luck for him when the Prussians
bore down on Paris. He was beginning to be known. A pupil of Raymond
Aubert (1781-1857), he was at first a "fanatic of Raphael and Ingres."
Delacroix and his violently harmonised colour masses settled the
future colourist. He met Diaz and they got on very well together. A
Southerner, handsome, passionate, persuasive, dashing, with the
eloquence of the meridional, Monticelli and his musical name made
friends at court and among powerful artists. In 1870 he started on his
walk of thirty-six days from Paris to Marseilles. He literally painted
his way. In every inn he shed masterpieces. Precious gold dripped from
his palette, and throughout the Rhone valley there are, it is
whispered--by white-haired old men the memory of whose significant
phrases awakes one in the middle of the night longing for the valley
of Durance--that if a resolute, keen-eyed adventurer would traverse
unostentatiously the route taken by Monticelli during his Odyssey the
rewards might be great. It is an idea that grips one's imagination,
but unfortunately it is an idea that gripped the imagination of others
thirty years ago. Not an _auberge_, hotel, or hamlet has been left
unexplored. The fine-tooth comb of familiar parlance has been
sedulously used by interested persons. If there are any Monticellis
unsold nowadays they are for sale at the dealers'.

In him was incarnate all that we can conceive as bohemian, with a
training that gave him the high-bred manner of a seigneur. He was a
romantic, like his friend Félix Ziem--Ziem, Marcellin, Deboutin, and
Monticelli represented a caste that no longer exists; bohemians, yes,
but gentlemen, refined and fastidious. Yet, after his return to his
beloved Marseilles, Monticelli led the life of an August vagabond. In
his velvet coat, a big-rimmed hat slouched over his eyes, he patrolled
the quays, singing, joking, an artless creature, so good-hearted and
irresponsible that he was called "Fada," more in affection than
contempt. He painted rapidly, a picture daily, sold it on the
_terrasses_ of the cafés for a hundred francs, and when he couldn't
get a hundred he would take sixty. Now one must pay thousands for a
canvas. His most loving critic, Camille Mauclair, who, above any one,
has battled valiantly for his art, tells us that Monticelli once took
eighteen francs for a small canvas because the purchaser had no more
in his pocket! In this manner he disposed of a gallery. He smoked
happy pipes and sipped his absinthe--in his case as desperate an enemy
as it had proved to De Musset. He would always doff his hat at the
mention of Watteau or Rubens. They were his gods.

When Monticelli arrived in Marseilles after his tramp down from Paris
he was literally in rags. M. Chave, a good Samaritan, took him to a
shop and togged him out in royal raiment. They left for a promenade,
and then the painter begged his friend to let him walk alone so as not
to attenuate the effect he was bound to produce on the passersby, such
a childish, harmless vanity had he. His delight was to gather a few
chosen ones over a bottle of old vintage, and thus with spasmodic
attempts at work his days rolled by. He was feeble, semi-paralysed.
With the advent of bad health vanished the cunning of his hand. His
paint coarsened, his colours became crazier. His pictures at this
period were caricatures of his former art. Many of the early ones were
sold as the productions of Diaz, just as to-day some Diazs are palmed
off as Monticellis. After four years of decadence he died, repeating
for months before his taking off: "Je viens de la lune." He was one
whose brain a lunar ray had penetrated; but this ray was transposed to
a spectrum of gorgeous hues. Capable of depicting the rainbow, he died
of the opalescence that clouded his glass of absinthe. _Pauvre Fada!_




II

It is only a coincidence, yet a curious one, that two such dissimilar
spirits as Stendhal and Monticelli should have predicted their future
popularity. Stendhal said: "About 1880 I shall be understood."
Monticelli said in 1870: "I paint for thirty years hence." Both
prophecies have been realised. After the exhibition at Edinburgh and
Glasgow in 1890 Monticelli was placed by a few discerning critics
above Diaz in quality of paint. In 1892 Mr. Brownell said of
Monticelli in his French Art--a book that every student and amateur of
painting should possess--that the touch of Diaz, patrician as it was,
lacked the exquisiteness of Monticelli's; though he admits the
"exaggeration of the decorative impulse" in that master. For Henley
Monticelli's art was purely sensuous; "his fairy meadows and enchanted
gardens are that sweet word 'Mesopotamia' in two dimensions." Henley
speaks of his "clangours of bronze and gold and scarlet" and admits
that "there are moments when his work is as infallibly decorative as a
Persian crock or a Japanese brocade." D.S. MacColl, in his study of
Nineteenth-Century Painting, gives discriminating praise:
"Monticelli's own exquisite sense of grace in women and invention in
grouping add the positive new part without which his art would be the
mannerising of Rousseau," while Arthur Symons in his Studies in Seven
Arts declares all Monticelli's art "tends toward the effect of
music... his colour is mood ... his mood is colour."

It remained, however, for Camille Mauclair, a Parisian critic in
sympathy with the arts of design, literature, and music, to place
Monticelli in his proper niche. This Mauclair has done with critical
tact. In his Great French Painters, the bias of which is evidently
strained in favour of the impressionistic school, in his
L'Impressionisme, and in his monograph on Watteau this critic declares
that Monticelli's art "recalls Claude Lorraine a little and Watteau
even more by its sentiment, and Turner and Bonington by its colour...
His work has the same subtlety of gradations, the same division into
fragments of tones (as in Watteau's 'Embarkment for Cythera'), the
same variety of execution, which has sometimes the opaqueness of china
and enamel and sometimes the translucence of precious stones or the
brilliancy of glass, metal, or oxides and seems to be the result of
some mysterious chemistry... Monticelli had an absolutely unique
perception of tonalities, and his glance took in certain shades which
had not been observed before, which the optic and chromatic science of
the day has placed either by proof or hypothesis between the principal
tones of the solar spectrum thirty years after Monticelli had fixed
them. There is magic and high lyric poetry in his art." I wrote of the
Monticellis exhibited at the Comparative Exhibition in New York: "At
the opposite end of the room there is A Summer Day's Idyll, upon which
Monticelli had squeezed all his flaming tubes. It seems orchestrated
in crushed pomegranate, the light suffusing the reclining figures like
a jewelled benediction. Marvellous, too, are the colour-bathed
creatures in this No Man's Land of drugged dreams... Do not the walls
fairly vibrate with this wealth of fairy tints and fantasy?" But it
must not be forgotten that he struck other chords besides blazing
sun-worshipping. We often encounter landscapes of vaporous melancholy,
twilights of reverie.
8888
Monticelli once told an admiring young amateur that in his canvases
"the objects are the decorations, the touches are the scales, and the
light is the tenor," thereby acknowledging himself that he felt colour
as music. There was hyperæsthesia in his case; his eyes were
protuberant and, like the ears of violinists, capable of
distinguishing quarter tones, even sixteenths. There are affiliations
with Watteau; the same gem-like style of laying on the thick pâte, the
same delight in fairy-like patches of paint to represent figures. In
1860 he literally resuscitated Watteau's manner, adding a personal
note and a richness hitherto unknown to French paint. Mauclair thinks
that to Watteau can be traced back the beginnings of modern
Impressionism; the division of tones, the juxtaposition of tonalities.
Monticelli was the connecting link between Watteau and Monet. The same
critic does not hesitate to name Monticelli as one of the great
quartet of harmonists, Claude, Turner, Monet being the other three.
Taine it was who voiced the philosophy of Impressionism when he
announced in his Philosophie de l'Art that the principal personage in
a picture is the light in which all things are plunged. Eugène
Carrière also asserted that a "picture is the logical development of
light." Monticelli before him had said: "In a painting one must sound
the _C_. Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, all the great ones have sounded
the C." His C, his key-note, was the magic touch of luminosity that
dominated his picture. Like Berlioz, he adored colour for colour's
sake. He had a touch all Venetian in his relation of tones; at times
he went in search of chromatic adventures, returning with the most
marvellous trophies. No man before or since, not even those
practitioners of dissonance and martyrs to the enharmonic scale,
Cézanne, Gauguin, or Van Gogh, ever matched and modulated such widely
disparate tints; no man before could extract such magnificent
harmonies from such apparently irreconcilable tones. Monticelli
thought in colour and was a master of orchestration, one who went
further than Liszt.

The simple-minded Monticelli had no psychology to speak of--he was a
reversion, a "throw back" to the Venetians, the decorative Venetians,
and if he had possessed the money or the leisure--he hadn't enough
money to buy any but small canvases--he might have become a French
Tiepolo, and perhaps the greatest decorative artist of France. Even
his most delicate pictures are largely felt and sonorously executed;
not "finished" in the studio sense, but complete--two different
things.

Fate was against him, and the position he might have had was won by
the gentle Puvis de Chavannes, who exhibited a genius for decorating
monumental spaces. With his fiery vision, his brio of execution, his
palette charged with jewelled radiance, Monticelli would have been the
man to have changed the official interiors of Paris. His energy at one
period was enormous, consuming, though short-lived--1865-75. His lack
of self-control and at times his Italian superficiality, never backed
by a commanding intellect, produced the Monticelli we know. In truth
his soul was not complicated. He could never have attacked the
psychology of Zarathustra, Hamlet, or Peer Gynt. A Salome from him
would have been a delightfully decorative minx, set blithely dancing
in some many-hued and enchanted garden of Armida. She would never have
worn the air of hieratic lasciviousness with which Gustave Moreau
inevitably dowered her. There was too much joy of the south in
Monticelli's bones to concern himself with the cruel imaginings of the
Orient or the grisly visions of the north. He was Oriental _au fond_;
but it was the Orientalism of the Thousand and One Nights. He painted
scenes from the Decameron, and his _fêtes galantes_ may be matched
with Watteau's in tone. His first period was his most graceful;
ivory-toned languorous dames, garbed in Second Empire style, languidly
stroll in charming parks escorted by fluttering Cupids or stately
cavaliers. The "decorative impulse" is here at its topmost. In his
second period we get the Decameron series, the episodes from Faust,
the Don Quixote--recall, if you can, that glorious tableau with its
Spanish group and the long, grave don and merry, rotund squire
entering on the scene, a fantastic sky behind them.

Painted music! The ruins, fountains, statues, and mellow herbage
abound in this middle period. The third is less known. Extravagance
began to rule; scarlet fanfares are sounded; amethysts and emeralds
sparkle; yet there is more thematic variety. Voluptuous, perfumed, and
semi-tragic notes were uttered by this dainty poet of the carnival of
life. The canvas glowed with more reverberating and infernal lights,
but lyric ever. Technique, fabulous and feverish, expended itself on
flowers that were explosions of colours, on seductive marines, on
landscapes of a rhythmic, haunting beauty--the Italian temperament had
become unleashed. Fire, gold, and purple flickered and echoed in
Monticelli's canvases. Irony, like an insinuating serpent, began to
creep into this paradise of melting hues. The masterful gradations of
tone became bewildered. Poison was eating the man's nerves. He
discarded the brush, and standing before his canvas he squeezed his
tubes upon it, literally modelling his paint with his thumb until it
almost assumed the relief of sculpture. What a touch he had! What a
subtle prevision of modulations to be effected by the careless scratch
of his nail or the whip of a knife's edge! Remember, too, that
originally he had been an adept in the art of design; he could draw as
well as his peers. But he sacrificed form and observation and
psychology to sheer colour. He, a veritable discoverer of tones--aided
thereto by an abnormal vision--became the hasty improviser, who at the
last daubed his canvases with a pasty mixture, as hot and crazy as his
ruined soul. The end did not come too soon. A chromatic genius went
under, leaving but a tithe of the gleams that illuminated his brain.
Alas, poor Fada!




IV. RODIN



I

Rodin, the French sculptor, deserves well of our new century; the old
one did so incontinently batter him. The anguish of his own Hell's
Portal he endured before he moulded its clay between his thick
clairvoyant fingers. Misunderstood, therefore misrepresented, he with
his pride and obstinacy aroused--the one buttressing the other--was
not to be budged from his formulas and practice of sculpture. Then the
world of art swung unwillingly and unamiably toward him, perhaps more
from curiosity than conviction. Rodin became famous. And he is more
misunderstood than ever. His very name, with its memory of Eugène
Sue's romantic rancour--you recall that impossible and diabolic Jesuit
Rodin in The Mysteries of Paris?--has been thrown in his teeth. He has
been called _rusé_, even a fraud; while the wholesale denunciation of
his work as erotic is unluckily still green in our memory. The
sculptor, who in 1877 was accused of "faking" his life-like Age of
Brass--now at the Luxembourg--by taking a mould from the living model,
also experienced the discomfiture of being assured some years later
that, not knowing the art of modelling, his statue of Balzac was only
an evasion of difficulties. And this to the man who had in the interim
wrought so many masterpieces.

To give him his due he stands prosperity not quite as well as he did
poverty. In every great artist there is a large area of self-esteem;
it is the reservoir which he must, during years of drought and defeat,
draw upon to keep his soul fresh. Without the consoling fluid of
egoism, genius must perish in the dust of despair. But fill this
source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic
deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been called, fatuously, the second
Michael Angelo--as if there could ever be a replica of any human. He
has been hailed as a modern Praxiteles. And he is often damned as a
myopic decadent whose insensibility to pure line and deficiency in
constructional power have been elevated by his admirers into sorry
virtues. Yet is Rodin justly appraised? Do his friends not overdo
their glorification, his critics their censure? Nothing so stales a
demigod's image as the perfumes burned before it by his worshippers;
the denser the smoke the sooner crumble the feet of their idol.

However, in the case of Rodin the fates have so contrived their
malicious game that at no point of his career has he been without the
company of envy, chagrin, and slander. Often, when he had attained a
summit, he would find himself thrust down into a deeper valley. He has
mounted to triumphs and fallen to humiliations, but his spirit has
never been quelled, and if each acclivity he scales is steeper, the
air atop has grown purer, more stimulating, and the landscape spreads
wider before him. He can say with Dante: "La montagna che drizza voi
che il mondo fece torti." Rodin's mountain has always straightened in
him what the world made crooked. The name of his mountain is Art. A
born non-conformist, Rodin makes the fourth of that group of
nineteenth-century artists--Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, and Edouard
Manet--who taught a deaf and blind world to hear and see and think and
feel.

Is it not dangerous to say of a genius that his work alone should
count, that his life is negligible? Though Rodin has followed
Flaubert's advice to artists to lead ascetic lives that their art
might be the more violent, nevertheless his career, colourless as it
may seem to those who better love stage players and the watery
comedies of society--this laborious life of a poor sculptor--is not to
be passed over if we are to make any estimate of his art. He, it is
related, always becomes enraged at the word "inspiration," enraged at
the common notion that fire descends from heaven upon the head of the
favoured neophyte of art. Rodin believes in but one
inspiration--nature. He swears he does not invent, but copies nature.
He despises improvisation, has contemptuous words for "fatal
facility," and, being a slow-moving, slow-thinking man, he admits to
his councils those who have conquered art, not by assault, but by
stealth and after years of hard work. He sympathises with Flaubert's
patient toiling days, he praises Holland because after Paris it seemed
slow. "Slowness is a beauty," he declared. In a word, Rodin has
evolved a theory and practice of his art that is the outcome--like all
theories, all techniques--of his own temperament. And that temperament
is giant-like, massive, ironic, grave, strangely perverse at times;
and it is the temperament of a magician doubled by that of a
mathematician.

Books are written about him. De Maupassant describes him in Notre
Coeur with picturesque precision. He is tempting as a psychologic
study. He appeals to the literary, though he is not "literary." His
modelling arouses tempests, either of dispraise or idolatry. To see
him steadily, critically, after a visit to his studios in Paris or
Meudon, is difficult. If the master be there then you feel the impact
of a personality that is as cloudy as the clouds about the base of a
mountain and as impressive as the mountain. Yet a pleasant,
unassuming, sane man, interested in his clay--absolutely--that is,
unless you discover him to be more interested in humanity. If you
watch him well you may find yourself well watched; those peering eyes
possess a vision that plunges into your soul. And the soul this master
of marbles sees as nude as he sees the human body. It is the union of
artist and psychologist that places Rodin apart. These two arts he
practises in a medium that has hitherto not betrayed potentialities
for such almost miraculous performances. Walter Pater is quite right
in maintaining that each art has its separate subject-matter;
nevertheless, in the debatable province of Rodin's sculpture we find
strange emotional power, hints of the art of painting and a rare
musical suggestiveness. But this is not playing the game according to
the rules of Lessing and his Laocoön.

Let us drop this old æsthetic rule of thumb and confess that during
the last century a new race of artists sprang up from some strange
element and, like flying-fish, revealed to a wondering world their
composite structures. Thus we find Berlioz painting with his
instrumentation; Franz Liszt, Tschaikowsky, and Richard Strauss
filling their symphonic poems with drama and poetry, and Richard
Wagner inventing an art which he believed to embrace the seven arts.
And there is Ibsen, who used the dramatic form as a vehicle for his
anarchistic ideas; and Nietzsche, who was such a poet that he was able
to sing a mad philosophy into life; and Rossetti, who painted poems
and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had
resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No
sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the
syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art--is it
not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of
the cemetery. What Mallarmé attempted to do with French poetry Rodin
accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present
emotion, are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and
substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse "the
silent thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon from the vasty
deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, despair, sin, beauty, ecstasy;
above all, ecstasy. Now the primal gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon
few. In our age Keats had it, and Shelley; Byron, despite his passion,
missed it, and so did Wordsworth. We find it in Swinburne, he had it
from the first; but few French poets have it. Like the "cold devils"
of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the blasts of hell about
them, Charles Baudelaire can boast the dangerous attribute. Poe and
Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt also; Wagner was the master adept of his
century. Tschaikowsky followed him close; and in the tiny piano scores
of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul often rapt to
heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown a rare variation on the
theme of ecstasy; voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tormented
by stranger nuances.

Rodin is of this tormented choir; he is master of its psychology. It
may be the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the
parts against the whole. The same was said of Beethoven by the
followers of Haydn, and the successors of Richard Strauss will be
surely abused quite as violently as the Wagnerites abuse Strauss
to-day--employing against him the same critical artillery employed
against Wagner. That this ecstasy should be aroused by pictures of
love and death, as in the case of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and
Strauss, must not be adjudged as a black crime. In the Far East they
hypnotise neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of
art, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, there are many mansions. Possibly it
was a relic of his early admiration and study of Baudelaire that set
Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of death and
love; and no doubt the temperament which seeks such combinations--a
temperament commoner in mediæval days than ours--was inherent in
Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing mournfully and madly over a corpse
and, throwing herself upon the dead body of Tristan, die shaken by the
sweet cruel pains of love. Richard Strauss closely patterns after
Wagner in his Salome, there is the head of a dead man, and there is
the same dissolving ecstasy. Both men play with similar counters--love
and death, and death and love. And so Rodin. In Pisa we may see
(attributed by Vasari) Orcagna's fresco of the Triumph of Death. The
sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are inextricably blended
in Rodin's Gate of Hell. His principal reading for forty years has
been Dante and Baudelaire. The Divine Comedy and Les Fleurs du Mal are
the key-notes in this white symphony of Auguste Rodin's. Love and life
and bitterness and death rule the themes of his marbles. Like
Beethoven and Wagner he breaks the academic laws of his art, but then
he is Rodin, and where he achieves magnificently lesser men would
miserably perish. His large tumultuous music is for his chisel alone
to ring out and sing.



II

The first and still the best study of Rodin as man and thinker is to
be found in a book by Judith Cladel, the daughter of the novelist
(author of Mes Paysans). She named it Auguste Rodin, pris sur la vie,
and her pages are filled with surprisingly vital sketches of the
workaday Rodin. His conversations are recorded; altogether this little
picture has much charm and proves what Rodin asserts--that women
understand him better than men. There is a fluid, feminine, disturbing
side to his art and nature very appealing to emotional women. Mlle.
Cladel's book has also been treasure-trove for the anecdote hunters;
all have visited her pages. Camille Mauclair admits his indebtedness;
so does Frederick Lawton, whose big volume is the most complete life
(probably official) that has thus far appeared, either in French or
English. It is written on the side of Rodin, like Mauclair's more
subtle study, and like the masterly criticism of Roger Marx. Born at
Paris in 1840--the natal year of his friends Claude Monet and
Zola--and in humble circumstances, not enjoying a liberal education,
the young Rodin had to fight from the beginning, fight for bread as
well as an art schooling. He was not even sure of a vocation. An
accident determined it. He became a workman in the atelier of
Carrier-Belleuse, the sculptor, but not until he had failed at the
Beaux-Arts (which was a stroke of luck for his genius) and after he
had enjoyed some tentative instruction under the great animal
sculptor, Barye. He was never a steady pupil of Barye, nor did he long
remain with him. He went to Belgium and "ghosted" for other sculptors;
indeed, it was a privilege, or misfortune, to have been the
"ghost"--anonymous assistant--for half a dozen sculptors. He learned
his technique by the sweat of his brow before he began to make music
upon his own instrument.

How his first work, The Man With the Broken Nose, was refused by the
Salon jury is history. He designed for the Sèvres porcelain works; he
made portrait busts, architectural ornaments for sculptors,
caryatides; all styles that are huddled in the yards and studios of
sculptors he had essayed and conquered. No man knew his trade better,
although we are informed that with the chisel of the _practicien_
Rodin was never proficient--he could not or would not work at the
marble _en bloc_. His works to-day are in the leading museums of the
world and he is admitted to have "talent" by the academic men. Rivals
he has none, nor will he have successors. His production is too
personal. Like Richard Wagner, Rodin has proved a Upas tree for many
lesser men--he has reflected or else absorbed them. His closest
friend, the late Eugène Carrière, warned young sculptors not to study
Rodin too curiously. Carrière was wise, but his own art of portraiture
was influenced by Rodin; swimming in shadow, his enigmatic heads have
a suspicion of the quality of sculpture--Rodin's--not the mortuary art
of so much academic sculpture.

A profound student of light and of movement, Rodin, by deliberate
amplification of the surfaces of his statues, avoiding dryness and
harshness of outline, secures a zone of radiancy, a luminosity, which
creates the illusion of reality. He handles values in clay as a
painter does his tones. He gets the design of the outline by movement
which continually modifies the anatomy--the secret, he believes, of
the Greeks. He studies his profiles successively in full light,
obtaining volume--or planes--at once and together; successive views of
one movement. The light plays with more freedom upon his amplified
surfaces--intensified in the modelling by enlarging the lines. The
edges of certain parts are amplified, deformed, falsified, and we see
that light-swept effect, that appearance as if of luminous emanations.
This deformation, he declares, was practised by the great sculptors to
snare the undulating appearance of life. Sculpture, he asserts, is the
"art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled
figures." Finish kills vitality. Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph
for you if he so wills, but her flesh will ripple and run in the
sunlight. His art is one of accents. He works by profile in depth, not
by surfaces. He swears by what he calls "cubic truth"; his pattern is
a mathematical figure; the pivot of art is balance, _i.e._, the
oppositions of volume produced by movement. Unity haunts him. He is a
believer in the correspondences of things, of the continuity in
nature; a mystic as well as a geometrician. Yet such a realist is he
that he quarrels with any artist who does not see "the latent heroic
in every natural movement."

Therefore he does not force the pose of his model, preferring
attitudes or gestures voluntarily adopted. His sketch-books, as
copious, as vivid as the drawings of Hokusai--he is very studious of
Japanese art--are swift memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses
its normal muscular motions. Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprising and
original as Rodin, sculptor. He will study a human foot for months,
not to copy it, but to possess the secret of its rhythms. His drawings
are the swift notations of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied,
whose desire to pin on paper the most evanescent movements of the
human machine is almost a mania. The French sculptor avoids studied
poses. The model tumbles down anywhere, in any contortion or
relaxation he or she wishes. Practically instantaneous is the method
adopted by Rodin to preserve the fleeting attitudes, the first shiver
of surfaces. He draws rapidly with his eye on the model. It is a mere
scrawl, a few enveloping lines, a silhouette. But vitality is in it;
and for his purposes a mere memorandum of a motion. A sculptor has
made these extraordinary drawings not a painter. It will be well to
observe the distinction. He is the most rhythmic sculptor of them all.
And rhythm is the codification of beauty. Because he has observed with
a vision quite virginal he insists that he has affiliations with the
Greeks. But if his vision is Greek his models are Parisian, while his
forms are more Gothic than the pseudo-Greek of the academy. As W.C.
Brownell wrote years ago: "Rodin reveals rather than constructs
beauty... no sculptor has carried expression further; and expression
means individual character completely exhibited rather than
conventionally suggested." Mr. Brownell was also the first critic to
point out that Rodin's art was more nearly related to Donatello than
to Michael Angelo. He is in the legitimate line of French sculpture,
the line of Goujon, Puget, Rude, Barye. Dalou did not hesitate to
assert that the Dante portal is "one of the most, if not the most,
original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth
century."

This Dante Gate, begun more than twenty years ago, not finished yet,
and probably never to be, is an astounding fugue, with death, the
devil, hell, and the passions as a horribly beautiful four-voiced
theme. I saw the composition a few years ago at the Rue de
l'Université atelier. It is as terrifying a conception as the Last
Judgment; nor does it miss the sonorous and sorrowful grandeur of the
Medici Tombs. Yet how different, how feverish, how tragic! Like all
great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the
old technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as plastically
as does sound a musical composer. A deep lover of music, his inner ear
may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms--his marbles are ever
musical; not "frozen music" as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but
silent swooning music. This gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply
significant of modern aspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is
the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. Dante inspired this
monstrous and ennobled masterpiece, but Baudelaire filled many of its
chinks and crannies with writhing ignoble shapes; shapes of dusky fire
that, as they tremulously stand above the gulf of fears, wave
ineffectual desperate hands. Heine in his Deutschland asks:

     Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht,
       Die schreckliche Terzetten?
     Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt
       Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.

And from the "singing flames" of Rodin there is no rescue.

But he is not all tragedy and hell fire. Of singular delicacy, of
exquisite proportions are his marbles of youth, of springtide, and the
desire of life. In 1900, at his special exhibition, Paris, Europe, and
America awoke to these haunting visions. Not since Keats or Swinburne
has love been sung so sweetly, so romantically, so fiercely. Though he
disclaims understanding the Celtic spirit, one could say that there is
Celtic magic, Celtic mystery in his work. He pierces to the core the
frenzy and joy of love and translates them in beautiful symbols.
Nature is for him the sole theme; his works are but variations on her
promptings. He knows the emerald route and all the semitones of
sensuousness. Fantasy, passion, even paroxysmal madness there are; yet
what elemental power in his Adam as the gigantic first _homo_
painfully heaves himself up from the earth to that posture which
differentiates him from the beasts. Here, indeed, the two natures are
at strife. And Mother Eve, her expression suggesting the sorrows and
shames that are to be the lot of her seed; her very loins seem crushed
by the ages that are hidden within them. You may walk freely about the
burghers of Calais, as did Rodin when he modelled them; that is one
secret of the group's vital quality. About all his statues you may
walk--he is not a sculptor of one attitude, but a hewer of men and
women. Consider the Balzac. It is not Balzac the writer of novels, but
Balzac the prophet, the seer, the great natural force--like Rodin
himself. That is why these kindred spirits converse across the years,
as do the Alpine peaks in that striking parable of Turgenieff's. No
doubt in bronze the Balzac will arouse less wrath from the
unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of some surging
monolith of snow.

As a portraitist of his contemporaries Rodin is the unique master of
character. His women are gracious, delicious masks; his men cover many
octaves in virility and variety. That he is extremely short-sighted
has not been dealt with in proportion to the significance of this
fact. It accounts for his love of exaggerated surfaces, his formless
extravagance, his indefiniteness in structural design; possibly, too,
for his inability, or let us say lack of sympathy, for the monumental.
He is essentially a sculptor of the intimate emotions; he delineates
passion as a psychologist; and while we think of him as a cyclops
wielding a huge hammer destructively, he is often ardent in his search
of subtle nuance. But there is breadth even when he models an eyelid.
Size is only relative. We are confronted by the paradox of an artist
as torrential, as apocalyptic as Rubens and Wagner, carving with a
style wholly charming a segment of a baby's back so that you exclaim,
"Donatello come to life!" His slow, defective vision, then, may have
been his salvation; he seems to rely as much on his delicate tactile
sense as on his eyes. His fingers are as sensitive as a violinist's.
At times he seems to model tone and colour. A marvellous poet, a
precise sober workman of art, with a peasant strain in him like
Millet, and, like Millet, very near to the soil; a natural man, yet
crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a
sensibility exalted, and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as
introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, very close to
the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's alter
ego in his vast grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate
fling at nature; withal a sculptor, always profound and tortured,
translating rhythm and motion into the terms of sculpture. Rodin is a
statuary who, while having affinities with both the classic and
romantic schools, is the most startling artistic apparition of his
century. And to the century he has summed up so plastically and
emotionally he has also propounded questions that only the unborn
years may answer. He has a hundred faults to which he opposes one
imperious excellence--a genius, sombre, magical, and overwhelming.




V. EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE



Death has consecrated the genius of three great painters happily
neglected and persecuted during their lifetime--Manet, Monticelli, and
Carrière. Though furiously opposed, Manet was admitted to the
Luxembourg by the conditions of the Caillebotte legacy. There that
ironic masterpiece, Olympe--otherwise known as the Cat and
Cocotte--has hung for the edification of intelligent amateurs, though
it was only a bequest of triumphant hatred in official eyes. And now
the lady with her cat and negress is in the Louvre, in which
sacrosanct region she, with her meagre, subtle figure, competes among
the masterpieces. Yet there were few dissenting voices. Despite its
temperamental oscillations France is at bottom sound in the matter of
art. Genius may starve, but genius once recognised, the apotheosis is
logically bound to follow. No fear of halls of fame with a French Poe
absent.

Eugène Carrière was more fortunate than his two famous predecessors.
He toiled and suffered hardship, but before his death he was
officially acknowledged though never altogether approved by the Salon
in which he exhibited; approved or understood. He fought under no
banner. He was not an impressionist. He was not a realist. Certainly
he could be claimed by neither the classics nor romantics. A
"solitary" they agreed to call him; but his is not the hermetic art of
such a solitary as Gustave Moreau. Carrière, on the contrary, was a
man of marked social impulses, and when in 1889 he received the Legion
of Honour, he was enabled to mingle with his equals--he had been
almost unknown until then. He was the most progressive spirit among
his brethren. Nowadays he is classed as an Intimist, in which category
and with such men as Simon Bussy, Ménard, Henri le Sidaner, Emile
Wéry, Charles Cottet, Lucien Simon, Edouard Vuillard, the Griveaus,
Lomont, Lobre, and others, he is still their master, still the
possessor of a highly individualised style, and in portraiture the
successor to such diverse painters as Prudhon, Ricard, and Whistler.

Gabriel Seailles has written a study, Eugène Carrière, l'Homme et
l'Artiste, and Charles Morice has published another, Eugène Carrière.
The latter deals with the personality and ideas of one of the most
original thinkers among modern French painters. We have spoken of the
acerbity of Degas, of his wit, so often borrowed by Whistler and
Manet; we have read Eugène Fromentin's delightful, stimulating studies
of the old masters, but we doubt if Fromentin was as profound a
thinker as Carrière. Degas is not, though he deals in a more acid and
dangerous form of aphorism. It is one of the charms of the eulogy of
M. Morice to find embalmed therein so many phrases and speeches of the
dead painter. He was both poet and philosopher, let us call him a
seer, for his work fully bears out this appellation. A grand
visionary, he well deserves Jean Dolent's description of his pictures
as "realities having the magic of a dream."

Carrière's career was in no wise extraordinary. He fled to no exotic
climes as did Paul Gauguin. His only tragedy was the manner of his
death. For three years previous he suffered the agonies of a cancer.
His bravery was admirable. No one heard him complain. He worked to the
last, worked as he had worked his life long, untiringly. Morice gives
a "succinct biography" at the close of his study. From it we learn
that Eugène Carrière was born January 29, 1849, at Gournay
(Seine-Inférieure); that he made his first steps in art at the
Strasbourg Academy; in 1869 he entered the Beaux-Arts, in Cabanel's
class. Penniless, he earned a precarious existence in designing
industrial objects. In 1870 he was made prisoner by the Prussians,
with the garrison of Neuf-Brisach, and taken to Dresden, where he was
confined in prison. After peace had been declared he resumed his
studies at the Beaux-Arts. In 1877 he married--an important event in
his art; thenceforward Madame Carrière and the children born to them
were his continual models, both by preference and also by force of
circumstances--he was too poor in the beginning to hire professional
models. He spent six months in London, which may or may not account
for his brumous colour; and in 1879, when he was thirty years old, he
exposed in the Salon of that year his Young Mother, the first of a
long series of Maternities. He was violently attacked by the critics,
and as violently defended. During the same year he attempted to win
the "prix de Rome" and gained honours for his sketch. Luckily he did
not attain this prize; and, still more luck, he left the school.

In 1884 he received an honourable mention for a child's portrait; in
1885 a medal for his Sick Child, bought by the State; in 1886 Le
Premier voile was bought by the State and he was proposed for a medal
of honour and--singular dream of Frenchmen--he was decorated in 1889.
He died March 27, 1906. Not a long, but a full life, a happy one, and
at the last, glory--"_le soleil des morts_," as Balzac said--and a
competence for his dear ones. And it is to the honour of such writers
as Roger Marx, Anatole France, Hamel, Morice, Mauclair, Verhaeren,
Geffroy, that they recognised the genius of Carrière from the
beginning. In 1904 Carrière was made honorary president of the Autumn
Salon and was the chief guest of these young painters, who really
adored Paul Cézanne, and not the painter of an illusive psychology. I
wrote at that time: "Carrière, whose delicately clouded portraits, so
intimate in their revelation of the souls of his sitters, was not seen
at his best. He offered a large decorative panel for the Mairie of the
Thirteenth Arrondissement, entitled Les Fiancés, a sad-looking
betrothal party ... the landscape timid, the decorative scheme not
very effective... His tender notations of maternity, and his heads,
painted with the smoky enchantments of his pearly gray and soft
russet, are more credible than this _panneau_." Was Carrière a
decorative painter by nature--setting aside training? We doubt it,
though Morice does not hesitate to name him after Puvis de Chavannes
in this field. The trouble is that he did not make many excursions
into the larger forms. He painted a huge canvas, Les Théâtres
Populaires, in which the interest is more intimate than epical. He
also did some decorations for the Hotel de Ville, The Four Ages for a
Mairie, and the Christ at the Luxembourg and a view of Paris.
Nevertheless, it is his portraits that will live.

Carrière was, first and last, a symbolist. There he is related to the
Dutch Seer, Rembrandt; both men strove to seek for the eternal
correspondence of things material and spiritual; both sought to bring
into harmony the dissonance of flesh and the spirit. Both succeeded,
each in his own way--though we need not couple their efforts on the
technical side. Rembrandt was a prophet. There is more of the
reflective poet in Carrière. He is a mystic. His mothers, his
children, are dreams made real--the magic of which Dolent speaks is
always there. To disengage the personality of his sitter was his first
idea. Slowly he built up those volumes of colour, light, and shadow,
the solidity of which caused Rodin to exclaim: "Carrière is also a
sculptor!" Slowly and from the most unwilling sitter he extorted the
secret of a soul. We speak of John Sargent as the master psychologist
among portraitists, a superiority he himself has never assumed; but
that magnificent virtuoso, an aristocratic Frans Hals, never gives us
the indefinite sense of things mystic beneath the epidermis of poor,
struggling humanity as does Eugène Carrière. Sargent is too
magisterial a painter to dwell upon the infinite little soul-stigmata
of men and women. Who can tell the renunciations made by the Frenchman
in his endeavour to wrest the enigma of personality from its abysmal
depths?

As Canaille Mauclair says: "Carrière was first influenced by the
Spaniards, then by Ver Meer and Chardin ... formerly he coloured his
canvas with exquisite delicacy and with a distinction of harmonies
that came very near to Whistler's. Now he confines himself to bistre,
black and white, to evoke those dream pictures, true images of souls,
which make him inimitable in our epoch and go back to Rembrandt's
chiaroscuro." Colour went by the board at the last, and the painter
was dominated by expression alone. His gamut of tones became
contracted. "Physical magnetism" is exactly the phrase that
illuminates his later methods. Often cavernous in tone, sooty in his
blacks, he nevertheless contrives a fluid atmosphere, the shadows
floating, the figure floating, that arrests instant attention. He
became almost sculptural, handled his planes with imposing breadth,
his sense of values was strong, his gradations and degradation of
tones masterly; and he escaped the influences of the new men in their
researches after luminosity at all hazards. He considered
impressionism a transition; after purifying muddy palettes of the
academics, the division-of-tones painters must necessarily return to
lofty composition, to a poetic simplicity with nature, to a more
rarefied psychology.

Carrière, notwithstanding his nocturnal reveries, his sombre
colouring, was not a pessimist. Indeed, the reverse. His philosophy of
life was exalted--an exalted socialism. He was, to employ Nietzsche's
pithy phrase, a "Yes-Sayer"; he said "Yes" to the universe. A man of
vigorous affirmations, he worshipped nature, not for its pictorial
aspects, but for the god which is the leaf and rock and animal, for
the god that beats in our pulses and shines in the clear sunlight. Nor
was it vague, windy pantheism, this; he was a believer--a glance at
his Christ reveals his reverence for the Man of Sorrows--and his
religious love and pity for mankind was only excelled by his hatred of
wrong and oppression. He detested cruelty. His canvases of childhood,
in which he exposes the most evanescent gesture, exposes the
unconscious helplessness of babyhood, are so many tracts--if you
choose to see them after that fashion--in behalf of mercy to all
tender and living things. He is not, however, a sentimentalist. His
family groups prove the absence of theatrical pity. Because of his
subtle technical method, his manner of building up his heads in a
misty medium and then abstracting their physical non-essentials, his
portraits have a metaphysical meaning--they are a _Becoming_, not a
_Being_, tangible though they be. Their fluid rhythms lend to them
almost the quality of a perpetual rejuvenescence. This may be an
illusion, but it tells us of the primary intensity of the painter's
vision. Withal, there is no scene of the merely spectral, no optical
trickery. The waves of light are magnetic. The picture floats in
space, seemingly compelled by its frame into limits. Gustave Geffroy
once wrote that, in common with the great masters, Carrière, on his
canvas, gives a sense of volume and weight. Whatever he sacrificed, it
was not actuality. His draughtsmanship never falters, his touch is
never infirm.

I have seen his portraits of Verlaine, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt,
Geffroy, of the artist himself and many others. The Verlaine is a
veritable evocation. It was painted at one _séance_ of several hours,
and the poet, it is said, did not sit still or keep silence for a
moment. He was hardly conscious that he was being painted. What a
head! Not that of the old faun and absinthe-sipping vagabond of the
Latin quarter, but the soul that lurked somewhere in Verlaine; the
dreamer, not the mystifier, the man crucified to the cross of
aspiration by his unhappy temperament. Musician and child, here is the
head of one of those pious, irresponsible mendicants who walked dusty
roads in the Middle Ages. It needed an unusual painter to interpret an
unusual poet.

The Daudet face is not alone full of surface character, but explains
the racial affinities of the romancer. Here he is David, not Daudet.
The head of De Goncourt gives in a few touches--Carrière is ever
master of the essential--the irritable pontiff of literary
impressionism. Carrière was fond of repeating: "For the artist the
forms evoke ideas, sensations, and sentiments; for the poet,
sensations, ideas, sentiments evoke forms." Never expansively lyrical
as was Monticelli, Carrière declared that a picture is the logical
development of light. And on the external side his art is a continual
variation with light as a theme. Morice contends that he was a
colourist; that the blond of Rubens and the russet of Carrière are not
monochromes; that polychromy is not the true way of seeing nature
coloured. Certainly Carrière does not sacrifice style, expression,
composition for splashing hues. Yet his illuminating strokes appear to
proceed from within, not from without. He interrogates nature, but her
answer is a sober, not a brilliant one. Let us rather say that his
colouring is adequate--he always asserted that a sense of proportion
was success in art. His tone is peculiarly personal; he paints
expressions, the fleeting shades that cross the face of a man, a
woman, a child. He patiently awaits the master trait of a soul and
never misses it, though never displaying it with the happy cruelty of
Sargent and always judging mercifully. Notwithstanding his humble
attitude in the presence of nature, he is the most self-revealing of
painters. Few before him ever interpreted maternity as he has done.

Carrière is not a virtuoso. He is an initiator--a man of rare
imagination. Above all, he escapes the rhetoric of the schools. His
apprehension of character is that of sympathetic genius. He divines
the emotions, especially in those souls made melancholy by sorrow;
uneasy, complex, feverish souls; them that hide their griefs, and
souls saturated with the ennuis of existence--to all he is interpreter
and consoler. He has pictured the _Weltschmerz_ of his age; and
without morbid self-enjoyment. A noble soul, an elevating example to
those artists who believe that art and life may be dissociated.
Carrière has left no school, though his spiritual influence has been
great. A self-contained artist, going his own way, meditating deeply
on art, on life, his canvases stand for his singleness and purity of
purpose. On the purely pictorial side he is, to quote M. Mauclair, "an
absolutely surprising painter of hands and glances."

In the sad and anxious rectitude of his attire the artistic interest
in modern man is concentrated upon his head and hands; and upon these
salient points Carrière focussed his art. Peaceful or disquieted, his
men and women belong to our century. Spiritually Eugène Carrière is
the lineal descendant of the Rembrandt school--but one who has read
Dostoïevsky.




VI. DEGAS



Let us suppose that gay old misogynist Arthur Schopenhauer persuaded
to cross the Styx and revisiting the earth. Apart from his disgust if
forced to listen to the music of his self-elected disciple Richard
Wagner, what painted work would be likely to attract him? Remember he
it was who named Woman the knock-kneed sex--since the new woman is
here it matters little if her figure conforms to old-fashioned,
stupid, masculine standards of beauty. But wouldn't the nudes of Degas
confirm the Frankfort philosopher in his theories regarding the
"long-haired, short-brained, unæsthetic sex," and also confirm his
hatred for the exaggerations of poet and painter when describing or
depicting her? We fear that Schopenhauer would smile his malicious
smile and exclaim: "At last the humble truth!" It is the presentation
of the humble truth that early snared the affections of Degas, who has
with a passionate calm pursued the evanescent appearances of things
his entire life. No doubt death will find him pencil in hand. You
think of Hokusai, the old man mad with paint, when the name of Degas
is mentioned. He was born in Paris July 19, 1834--his full name is
Hilaire Germain Edgard (or Edgar)--and there is one phrase that will
best describe his career: He painted. Like Flaubert, he never married,
but lived in companionship with his art. Such a mania could have been
described by Balzac. Yet no saner art ever issued from a Parisian
atelier; sane, clear, and beautiful.

Degas is a painter's painter. For him the subject is a peg upon which
to hang superb workmanship. In amazement the public asked: How could a
man in the possession of his powers shut himself up in a studio to
paint ballet girls, washerwomen, jockeys, drabs of Montmartre,
shopgirls, and horses? Even Zola, who should have known better, would
not admit that Degas was an artist fit to be compared with such men as
Flaubert and Goncourt; but Zola was never the realist that is Degas.
Now it is difficult to keep asunder the names of Goncourt and Degas.
To us they are too often unwisely bracketed. The style of the painter
has been judged as analogous to the novelist's; yet, apart from a
preference for the same subjects for the "modernity" of Paris, there
is not much in Degas that recalls Goncourt's staccato, febrile,
sparkling, "decomposed", impressionistic prose. Both men are
brilliant, though not in the same way. Pyrotechnics are abhorrent to
Degas. He has the serenity, sobriety, and impersonality of the great
classic painters. He is himself a classic.

His legend is slender. Possessing a private income, he never was
preoccupied with the anxieties of selling his work. He first entered
the atelier of Lamotte, but his stay was brief. In the studio of
Ingres he was, so George Moore declares, the student who carried out
the lifeless body of the painter when Ingres fell in his fatal fit.
There is something peculiarly interesting about this anecdote for the
tradition of Ingres has been carried on by Degas. The greatest master
of pure line, in his portraits and nudes--we have forgotten his chilly
_pastiches_ of Raphael--of the past century, Ingres has been and still
is for Degas a god on the peaks of Parnassus. Degas is an Ingres who
has studied the Japanese. Only such men as Pollajuolo and Botticelli
rank with Degas in the mastery of rhythmic line. He is not academic,
yet he stems from purest academic traditions. He is not of the
impressionists, at least not in his technical processes, but he
associated with them, exhibited with them (though rarely), and is as a
rule confused with them. He never exhibited in the Salons, he has no
disciples, yet it is doubtful if any painter's fashion of seeing
things has had such an influence on the generation following him. The
name of Degas, the pastels of Degas, the miraculous draughtsmanship of
Degas created an imponderable fluid which still permeates Paris.
Naturally, after the egg trick was discovered we encounter scores of
young Columbuses, who paint ballet girls' legs and the heads of
orchestral musicians and scenes from the racing paddock.

Degas had three painters who, if any, might truthfully call themselves
his pupils. These are Mary Cassatt, Alexis Rouart, and Forain. The
first has achieved solid fame. The last is a remarkable illustrator,
who "vulgarised" the austere methods of his master for popular
Parisian consumption. That Renoir, Raffaelli, and Toulouse-Lautrec owe
much to Degas is the secret of Polichinello. This patient student of
the Tuscan Primitives, of Holbein, Chardin, Delacroix, Ingres, and
Manet--the precepts of Manet taught him to sweeten the wiriness of his
modelling and modify his tendency to a certain hardness--was willing
to trust to time for the verdict of his rare art. He associated daily
with Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Whistler, Duranty, Fantin-Latour, and the
crowd that first went to the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles--hence
the derisive nickname, "The Batignolles School"; later to the Nouvelle
Athènes, finally to the Café de la Rochefoucauld. A hermit he was
during the dozen hours a day he toiled, but he was a sociable man,
nevertheless, a cultured man fond of music, possessing a tongue that
was feared as much as is the Russian knout. Mr. Moore has printed many
specimens of his caustic wit. Whistler actually kept silent in his
presence--possibly expecting a repetition of the _mot_: "My dear
friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at
all." Manet good-naturedly took a browbeating, but the Academic set
were outraged by the irreverence of Degas. What hard sayings were his!
Poor Bastien-Lepage, too, came in for a scoring. Barricaded in his
studio, it was a brave man who attempted to force an entrance. The
little, round-shouldered artist, generally good-tempered, would pour a
stream of verbal vitriol over the head of the unlucky impertinent.

In 1860 or thereabout he visited America, and in New Orleans he saw
the subject of his Interior of a Cotton Factory, which was shown as an
historical curiosity at the Paris exposition in 1900. While it is
implacably realistic there is little hint of the future Degas. The
name of the painter was in every French painter's mouth, and the
brilliant article of Huysmans concentrated his fame. Huysmans it was
who first saw that Degas had treated the nude as Rembrandt would if he
had been alive--making allowances for temperamental variations. Degas
knew that to grasp the true meaning of the nude it must be represented
in postures, movements which are natural, not studio attitudes. As
Monet exposed the fallacy of studio lighting, so Degas revealed the
inanity of its poses. Ibsen said the stage should be a room with the
fourth wall removed; Degas preferred the key-hole through which we
seem to peep upon the privacy of his ugly females bathing or combing
their hair or sleeping, lounging, yawning, quarrelling, and walking.
The simian and frog-like gestures and sprawling attitudes are far from
arousing amiable sensations. These poor, tired women, hard-working
laundresses, shopgirls, are not alluring, though they are not as
hideous as the women of Cézanne or Edvard Münch; but the veracity of
the "human document" (overworked phrase!) is there. Charles Morice has
said that to Cézanne a potato was as significant as a human
countenance. The pattern interested him in both. For Degas the beauty
of life lies in the moving line. He captures with ease the swift,
unconscious gesture. His models are never posed. They are nature
caught in the act. There is said to be a difference between the
epidermis of the professional model and the human who undresses only
to go to bed. Degas has recorded this difference. What an arraignment
of the corset are the creased backs and gooseflesh of his nudes! What
lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! _Voilà l'animale!_
he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some
girl. How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine "truths" of Degas!
Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant. He is a
douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayadères
and of drawing-room portraiture.

Pity is deeply rooted in his nature. He is never tender, yet there is
veiled sympathy in the ballet-girl series. Behind the scenes, in the
waiting-rooms, at rehearsal, going home with the hawk-eyed mother, his
girls are all painfully real. No "glamour of the foot-lights,"
generally the prosaic side of their life. He has, however, painted the
glorification of the danseuse, of that lady grandiloquently described
as _prima donna assoluta_. What magic he evokes as he pictures her
floating down stage! The pastel in the Luxembourg, L'Etoile, is the
reincarnation of the precise moment when the aerial creature on one
foot lifts graceful arms and is transfigured in the glow of the
lights, while about her beats--you are sure--the noisy, insistent
music. It is in the pinning down of such climaxes of movement that
Degas stirs our admiration. He draws movement. He can paint rhythms.
His canvases are ever in modulation. His sense of tactile values is
profound. His is true atmospheric colour. A feeling of exhilaration
comes while contemplating one of his open-air scenes with jockeys,
race-horses, and the incidental bustle of a neighbouring concourse.
Unexcelled as a painter of horses, as a delineator of witching
horsemanship, of vivid landscapes--true integral decorations--and of
the casual movements and gestures of common folk, Degas is also a
psychologist, an ironical commentator on the pettiness and ugliness of
daily life, of its unheroic aspects, its comical snobberies and
shocking hypocrisies; and all expressed without a melodramatic
elevation of the voice, without the false sentimentalism of Zola or
the morbidities of Toulouse-Lautrec. There is much Baudelaire in
Degas, as there is also in Rodin. All three men despised academic
rhetoric; all three dealt with new material in a new manner.

It is the fashion to admire Degas, but it is doubtful if he will ever
gain the suffrage of the general. He does not retail anecdotes, though
to the imaginative every line of his nudes relates their history. His
irony is unremitting. It suffuses the ballet-girl series and the nude
sets. Irony is an illuminating mode, but it is seldom pleasant; the
public is always suspicious of an ironist, particularly of the Degas
variety. Careless of reputation, laughing at the vanity of his
contemporaries who were eager to arrive, contemptuous of critics and
criticism, of collectors who buy low to sell high (in the heart of
every picture collector there is a bargain counter), Degas has defied
the artistic world for a half-century. His genius compelled the
Mountain to come to Mahomet. The rhythmic articulations, the volume,
contours, and bounding supple line of Degas are the despair of
artists. Like the Japanese, he indulges in abridgments, deformations,
falsifications. His enormous faculty of attention has counted heavily
in his synthetical canvases. He joys in the representation of
artificial light; his theatres are flooded with it, and he is equally
successful in creating the illusion of cold, cheerless daylight in a
salle where rehearse the little "rats" and the older coryphées on
their wiry, muscular, ugly legs. His vast production is dominated by
his nervous, resilient vital line and by supremacy in the handling of
values.

The Degas palette is never gorgeous, consisting as it does of cool
grays, discreet blues and greens, Chardin-like whites and
Manet-blacks. His procedure is all his own. His second manner is a
combination of drawing, painting, and pastel. "He has invented a kind
of engraving mixed with wash drawing, pastel crayon crushed with
brushes of special pattern."




VII. BOTTICELLI



The common identity of the arts was a master theory of Richard Wagner,
which he attempted to put into practice. Walter Pater in his essay on
The School of Giorgione has dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music
the archetype of the arts. In his Essays Speculative John Addington
Symonds said some pertinent things on this subject. Camille Mauclair
in his Idées Vivantes proposes in all seriousness a scheme for the
fusion of the seven arts, though he deplored Wagner's efforts to reach
a solution. Mauclair's theory is that the fusion can only be a
cerebral one, that actually mingling sculpture, architecture, music,
drama, acting, colour, dancing can never evoke the sensation of unity.
Synthesis is not thus to be attained. It must be in the _idea_ of the
arts rather than their material realisation. A pretty chimera! Yet one
that has piqued the world of art in almost every century. It was the
half-crazy E.T.W. Hoffmann, composer, dramatist, painter, poet, stage
manager, and a dozen other professions, including that of genius and
drunkard, who set off a train of ideas which buzzed in the brains of
Poe, Baudelaire, and the symbolists. People who hear painting, see
music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are
now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though
such notions are as old as literature. Suarez de Mendoza in his
L'Audition Colorée has said that the sensation of colour hearing, the
faculty of associating tones and colours, is often a consequence of an
association of ideas established in youth. The coloured vowels of
Arthur Rimbaud, which must be taken as a poet's crazy prank; the
elaborate treatises by René Ghil, which are terribly earnest; the
remarks that one often hears, such as "scarlet is like a trumpet
blast"; certain pages of Huysmans, all furnish examples of this
curious muddling of the senses and mixing of genres. Naturally, it has
invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery, sometimes seeks to
transfer the technical terms of one art to another.

Whistler with his nocturnes, notes, symphonies in rose and silver, his
colour-sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical phrases, that in
their new estate took on fresher meanings even if remaining knee-deep
in the kingdom of the nebulous. It must be confessed modern composers
have retaliated. Musical impressionism is having its vogue, while
poets are desperately pictorial. Soul landscapes and etched sonnets
are not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much? There
was a time when to say a "sweet voice" would arouse a smile. What has
sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this confusing of
terminologies; yet, once in a while, it strikes sparks. There is a
deeply rooted feeling in us that the arts have a common matrix, that
they are emotionally akin. "Her slow smile" in fiction has had marked
success with young people, but a "slow landscape" is still regarded
suspiciously. The bravest critic of art was Huysmans. He pitched
pell-mell into the hell-broth of his criticism any image that
assaulted his fecund brain. He forced one to _see_ his picture--for he
was primarily concerned not with the ear, but the eye.

And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a "comprehensive"--as those with the
sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso? Botticelli,
beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle),
ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy. His canvases have
a rare, mysterious power of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro
Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers
Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than
paint and pattern and subject. A palimpsest may be discerned by the
imaginative--or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set
forth the categories--whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily,
yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist on the flat
surface of his picture. He painted the usual number of Madonnas, like
any artist of his period; yet he did not convince his world, or the
generations succeeding, that this piety was orthodox. Suspected during
his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of
Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely
ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic.
Doesn't the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us
exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when
Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured
life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the
impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The lurking secrets of the
"new learning"--doctrines that made for damnation, such as the
recrudescence of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host,
neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the
starry hosts--were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its
note is in Città di Vita, in the heresy of the Albigenses, and it goes
as far back as Origen. Those who read his paintings, and there were
clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence, could make of them what
they would. Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy.
Matteo Palmieri is said to have dragged Botticelli with him into dark
corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of
intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of
the young. It was more savage and cunning when Machiavelli, shrewdest
of men, wrote and lived. A nature like Botticelli's, which surrendered
frankly to ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, could not fail
to have been swept away in the eddying cross-currents of Florentine
intellectual movements. Never mere instinct, for he was a sexless sort
of man, moved him from his moral anchorage. Always the vision! He did
not palter with the voluptuousness of his fellow-artists, yet his
canvases are feverishly disquieting; the sting of the flesh is remote;
love is transfigured, not spiritually and not served to us as a barren
parable, but made more intense by the breaking down of the thin
partition between the sexes; a consuming emotion not quite of this
world nor of the next. The barren rebellion which stirred Botticelli's
bosom never quite assumed the concrete. His religious subjects are
Hellenised, not after Mantegna's sterner and more inflexible method,
but like those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended
Dante. Yet the illustrations show us a different Dante, one who would
not have altogether pleased the gloomy exile. William Blake's
transpositions of the Divine Comedy seem to sound the depths;
Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his "baby centaurs" and the
wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the two.

His life, veiled toward the last, was not a happy one, though he was
recognised as a great painter. Watteau concealed some cankering
secret; so Botticelli. Both belong to the band of the Disquieted.
Melancholy was at the base of the Florentine's work. He created as a
young man in joy and freedom, but the wings of Dürer's bat were
outstretched over his head: Melencolia! There is more poignant music
in the Primavera, in the weary, indifferent countenances of his lean,
neuropathic Madonnas--Pater calls them "peevish"--in his Venus of the
Uffizi, than in the paintings of any other Renaissance artist. The
veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite art missing in
the lacerated realistic holy people of the Flemish Primitives.
Joyfulness cannot be denied Botticelli, but it is not the golden joy
of Giorgione. An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad,
restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of the senses.
Music? Yes, here is the "coloured hearing" of Mendoza. These canvases
of Botticelli seem to give forth the opalescent over-tones of an
unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin
whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor at the
head of an invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely
impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of
maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance whose music we
but overhear. Garlanded with blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with
the pulsing atmospheric moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows
her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered floor of the earth.
The light filters through the thick trees; its rifts are as rigid as
candles. The nymph in the brake is threatening. Another epicene
creature flies by her. Love shoots his bolt in midair. Is it from
Paphos or Mitylene! What the fable! Music plucked down from the
vibrating skies and made visible to the senses. A mere masque laden
with the sweet, prim allegories of the day it is not. Vasari, blunt
soul, saw but its surfaces. Politian, the poet, got closer to the
core. Centuries later our perceptions, sharpened by the stations of
pain and experience traversed, lend to this immortal canvas a more
sympathetic, less literal interpretation.

Music, too, in the Anadyomene of the Uffizi. Still stranger music.
Those sudden little waves that lap an immemorial strand; that
shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging to the parted feet of the
goddess; her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that
serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into
delicious arms; the Japanese group, blowing tiny, gem-like buds with
puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle
to Venus; and enveloping them all vernal breezes, unseen, yet sensed
on every inch of the canvas--what are these things but the music of an
art original at its birth and never since reborn? The larger rhythms
of the greater men do not sweep us along with them in Botticelli. But
his voice is irresistible.

Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau, Chopin, or Shelley, he
is no less ethereal than any one of these three; ethereal and also
realistic. We may easily trace his artistic ancestry; what he became
could never have been predicted. Technically, as one critic has
written, "he was the first to understand the charm of silhouettes, the
first to linger in expressing the joining of the arm and body, the
flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the shoulders, the elegance
of the leg, the little shadow that marks the springing of the neck,
and above all the carving of the hand; but even more he understood 'le
prestige insolent des grands yeux.'"

For Pater his colour was cold, cadaverous, "and yet the more you come
to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is
no mere delightful quality of natural things but a spirit upon them by
which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you like this
peculiar quality of colour." Bernard Berenson goes further. For him
the entire picture, Venus Rising From the Sea, presents us with the
quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch
and movement... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life
communicating movement, is always there. And writing of the Pallas in
the Pitti he most eloquently said: "As to the hair--imagine shapes
having the supreme life of line you may see in the contours of licking
flames and yet possessed of all the plasticity of something which
caresses the hand that models it to its own desire!"

And after speaking of Botticelli's stimulating line, he continues:
"Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of
movement-values and you will have something that holds the same
relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this art
exists and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro
Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never!... He is the greatest master of lineal design that
Europe ever had."

Again music, not the music nor the symbolism of the emotions, but the
abstract music of design. Botticelli's appeal is also an auditive one.
Other painters have spun more intricate, more beautiful scrolls of
line; other painters sounded more sensuous colour music, but the
subtle sarabands of Botticelli they have not composed. There is here a
pleasing problem for the psychiatrist. Manifestations in paint of this
species may be set down to some mental lesion; that is how Maurice
Spronck classifies the sensation in writing about the verbal
sensitivity of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The latter, you may
remember, said that Salammbo was purple to him, and L'Education
Sentimentale gray. Carthage and Paris--a characteristic fancy! But why
is it that these scientific gentlemen who account for genius by
eye-strain do not reprove the poets for their sensibility to the sound
of words, the shape and cadences of the phrase? It appears that only
prose-men are the culpable ones when they hear the harping of
invisible harps from Ibsen steeplejacks, or recognise the colour of
Zarathustra's thoughts. In reality not one but thousands sit listening
in the chill galleries of Florence because of the sweet, sick, nervous
music of Botticelli; this testimony of the years is for the dissenters
to explain.

_Fantastico, Stravaganie_, as Vasari nicknamed Botticelli, has
literally created an audience that has learned to see as he did,
fantastically and extravagantly. He passed through the three stages
dear to arbitrary criticism. Serene in his youthful years; troubled,
voluptuous, visionary during the Medicean period; sombre, mystic, a
convert to Savonarola at the end. He passed through, not untouched, a
great crisis. Certain political assassinations and the Pazzi
conspiracy hurt him to the quick. He noted the turbulence of Rome and
Florence, saw behind the gay-tinted arras of the Renaissance the
sinister figures of its supermen and criminals. He never married. When
Tommaso Soderini begged him to take a wife, he responded: "The other
night I dreamed I was married. I awoke in such horror and chagrin that
I could not fall asleep again. I arose and wandered about Florence
like one possessed." Evidently not intended by nature as a husband or
father. Like Watteau, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the
other side of the dear common joys of life, these men were not tempted
by the usual baits of happiness. The great Calumnia in the Uffizi
might be construed as an image of Botticelli's soul. Truth, naked and
scorned--again we note the matchless silhouette of his
Venus--misunderstood and calumniated, stands in the hall of a great
palace. She points to the heavens; she is an interrogation mark,
Pilate's question. Botticelli was adored. But understood? An enigmatic
malady ravaged his being. He died poor and alone, did this composer of
luminous chants and pagan poems, this moulder of exotic dreams and of
angels who long for other gods than those of Good and Evil. A
grievously wounded, timid soul, an intruder at the portals of
paradise, but without the courage to enter or withdraw. He had visions
that rapt him up into the seventh heaven, and when he reported them in
the speech of his design his harassed, divided spirit chilled the
ardours of his art. And thus it is that many do not worship at his
shrine as at the shrine of Raphael, for they see the adumbration of a
paganism long since dead, but revived by a miracle for a brief
Botticellian hour. Madonna and Venus! The Christ Child and Bacchus!
Under which king? The artist never frankly tells us. The legends of
fauns turned monks, of the gods at servile labour in a world that had
forgotten them, are revived, but with more sublimated ecstasy than by
Heine, when we stand before Botticelli and listen to his pallid, muted
music.

He was born at Florence in 1446; he died May 27, 1510; in 1515,
according to Vasari. A study of him is by Emile Gebhart, late of the
French Academy. It is erudite, although oddly enough it ignores the
researches of Morelli and Berenson. Gebhart attributes to Alessandro
di Mariano Filipepi about eighty-five pictures, many of which were
long ago in Morelli's taboo list--that terrible Morelli, the learned
iconoclast who brought many sleepless nights to Dr. Wilhelm Bode of
Berlin. Time has vindicated the Bergamese critic. Berenson will allow
only forty-five originals to Botticelli's credit. Furthermore, Gebhart
does not mention in his catalogue the two Botticellis belonging to
Mrs. Gardner of Boston, a lamentable oversight for a volume brought
out in 1907. Need we add that this French author by no means sees
Botticelli in the musical sense? He is chiefly concerned with his
historic environment. Gebhart's authorities are the Memoriale of
Francesco Albertini; Anonyme Gaddiano, the manuscript of the
Magliabecchiana, which precedes the Vasari edition; the Life of
Botticelli, by Vasari, and many later studies, the most complete, he
avers, being that of Hermann Ulmann of Munich, whose Sandro
Botticelli, which appeared in 1893, is rigorously critical.
Nevertheless, it is not as critical as Morelli's Italian Painters.
Details about the typical ears, hands, and noses of the painter may be
found therein. The last word concerning Botticelli will not be uttered
until his last line has vanished. And, even then, his archaic
harmonies may continue to sound in the ears of mankind.




VIII. SIX SPANIARDS



"EL GRECO"



Large or small, there has been a Greco cult ever since the
Greek-Spanish painter died, April 7, 1614, but during the last decade
it has grown into a species of worship. One hears the names of
Velasquez and El Greco coupled. His profound influence on the greatest
of the realists is blithely assumed, and for these worshippers,
Ribera, Zurbaran, Murillo are hardly to be ranked with the painter of
the Burial of the Count of Orgáz. While this undiscriminating
admiration may be deplored, there are reasons enough for the
canonisation of El Greco in the church of art. Violent to exaggeration
in composition, morbidly mystic, there are power and emotional quality
revealed in his work; above all else he anticipated Velasquez in his
use of cool gray tones, and as a pupil or at least a disciple of
Titian he is, as his latest biographer, Señor Manuel B. Cossio, names
him, "the last epigone of the Italian Renaissance." But of the man we
know almost nothing.

We read his exhaustive study, a big book of over seven hundred pages
fortified by a supplementary volume containing one hundred and
ninety-three illustrations, poor reproductions of El Greco's
accredited works (El Greco, por Manuel B. Cossio). Señor Cossio has so
well accomplished his task that his book may be set down as
definitive. A glance at the bibliography he compiled shows that not
many writers on art have seen fit to pay particular attention to El
Greco. A few Spaniards, Señor Beruete heading them; Max Boehm, Carl
Justi (in his Diego Velasquez); Paul Lafond, William Ritter, Arthur
Symons, William Stirling, Signor Venturi, Louis Viardot, Wyzewa,
Havelock Ellis, and the inimitable Théophile Gautier--whose Travels in
Spain, though published in 1840, is, as Mr. Ellis truthfully remarks,
still a storehouse of original exploration. But the Cossio work,
naturally, tops them all. He is an adorer, though not fanatical, of
his hero, and it is safe to assert that all that is known to-day of El
Greco will be found in these pages. The origins of the painter, his
visit to Italy, his arrival at Toledo, are described with references
to original documents--few as they are.

Then follows a searching and vivid exposition of the pictures in
Madrid, Toledo, and elsewhere, a technical and psychological analysis
which displays vast research, critical acumen, and the sixth sense of
sympathy. No pictures, sketches, sculptures, or _retablos_ escape
Cossio. He considers El Greco in his relations to Velasquez and modern
art. He has all the authorities at his tongue's tip; he views the man
and artist from every angle.

"Domenico El Greco died at Toledo two years before his contemporary
Cervantes," says Cossio. Domenicos Theotocopoulos was his original
name, which was softened into Domenico Theotocopuli--which, no doubt
proving too much of a tongue-twister for the Spaniards, was quickly
superseded by a capital nickname, "The Greek." His birthplace was the
island of Crete and his birth-year between 1545 and 1550. Justi was
the first to demonstrate his Cretan ancestry, which was corroborated
in 1893 by Bikelas. In 1570, we learn through a letter written by
Giulio Clovio to Cardinal Farnese, El Greco had astonished Roman
artists by his skill in portraiture. He was said to be a pupil of
Titian, on Clovio's authority. Why he went to Spain has not been
discovered. He had a son, Jorge Manuel Theotocopuli, a sculptor and
architect. Who the mother was history does not say. The painter took
up his abode in Toledo and is not known to have left Spain thereafter.
Pacheco visited him at Toledo and reported him to be as singular as
his paintings and of an extravagant disposition. He was also called a
wit and a philosopher. He wrote on painting, sculpture, and
architecture, it is said. He made money; was, like most of his adopted
countrymen, fond of litigation; lived well, loved music--and at his
meals!--and that is all we may ever record of a busy life; for he
painted many pictures, a careful enumeration of which makes Cossio's
book valuable.

There are Grecos scattered over Europe and the two Americas. Madrid
and Toledo boast of his best work, but as far as St. Petersburg and
Bucharest he is represented. In the United States there are eleven
examples, soon to be increased by Mr. Archer M. Huntington's recent
acquisition from the Kann collection. In Boston at the Museum there is
the portrait of Fray Paravicino, a brilliant picture. (The worthy monk
wrote four sonnets in glorification of the painter, whom he calls
"Divino Griego." Quoted in one of the Cossio appendices.) There is an
Assumption of the Virgin in Chicago at the Art Institute, and an
Apostle, belonging to Charles Deering. In Philadelphia Mr. "J. Widner"
(read P.A.B. Widener) owns a St. Francis, and at the Metropolitan
Museum, hanging in Gallery 24, there is The Adoration of the
Shepherds, a characteristic specimen of Greco's last manner, and in
excellent condition. The gallery of the late H.O. Havemeyer contains
one of the celebrated portraits of the Cardinal Inquisitor D. Fernando
Nino de Guevara, painted during the second epoch, 1594 to 1604. It
furnishes a frontispiece for the Cossio volume. The same dignitary was
again painted, a variant, which Rudolph Kann owned, and now in the
possession of Mrs. Huntington. The cardinal's head is strong,
intellectual, and his expression proud and cold. Mr. Frick, at a
private club exhibition, showed his Greco, St. Jerome, a subject of
which the painter was almost as fond as of St. Francis (of Assisi).
The National Gallery, London, owns a St. Jerome, Madrid another. Mr.
Frick's example belongs to the epoch of 1584 to 1594. Mr. Erich in New
York possesses three pictures, St. Jerome, a portrait of St. Domingo
de Guzman and a Deposition. El Greco is a painter admired by painters
for his salt individualism. Zuloaga, the Spaniard, has several; Degas,
two; the critic Duret, two; John S. Sargent, one--a St. Martin.
Durand-Ruel once owned the Annunciation, but sold it to Mrs. H.O.
Havemeyer, and the Duveens in London possess a Disrobing of Christ. At
the National Gallery there are two.

Gautier wrote that El Greco surpassed Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe in
his pell-mell of horrors; "extravagant and bizarre" are the adjectives
he employs (said of most painters whose style is unfamiliar or out of
the beaten track). In the Baptism of Christ he finds a depraved
energy, a maleficent puissance; but the ardent colours, the tonal
vivacity, and the large, free handling excite the Frenchman's
admiration. Justi avers that Greco's "craving for originality
developed incredible mannerisms. In his portraits he has delineated
the peculiar dignity of the Castilian hidalgos and the beauty of
Toledan dames with a success attained by few." R.A. Stevenson devotes
to him a paragraph in his Velasquez. Referring to the influence of El
Greco upon the greater painter, he wrote: "While Greco certainly
adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither that nor his modelling
was ever subtle or thoroughly natural... Velasquez ripened with age
and practice; Greco was rather inclined to get rotten with facility."
Mr. Ricketts says that "his pictures might at times have been painted
by torchlight in a cell of the Inquisition." Richard Ford in his
handbook of Spain does not mince words: "Greco was very unequal... He
was often more lengthy and extravagant than Fuseli, and as leaden as
cholera morbus." Ritter speaks of his "symphonies in blue minor"
(evidently imitating Gautier's poem, Symphony in White-Major). In
Havelock Ellis's suggestive The Soul of Spain there is mention of
Greco--see chapter Art of Spain. Ellis says: "In his more purely
religious and supernatural scenes Greco was sometimes imaginative, but
more often bizarre in design and disconcerting in his colouring with
its insistence on chalky white, his violet shadows on pale faces, his
love of green. [Mr. Ellis finds this 'predilection for green'
significant as anticipating one of the characteristics of the Spanish
palette.] His distorted fever of movement--the lean, twisted bodies,
the frenzied, gesticulating arms, the mannerism of large calves that
taper down to pointed toes--usually fails to convince us. But in the
audacities of his colouring he revealed the possibilities of new
harmonies, of higher, brighter, cooler keys." The Count Orgaz burial
scene at Toledo Mr. Ellis does not rank among the world's great
pictures.

There is often a depressing morbidity in Greco; Goya is sane and
healthy by comparison. Greco's big church pieces are full of religious
sentiment, but enveloped in the fumes of nightmare. Curious it was
that a stranger from Greece should have absorbed certain not
particularly healthy, even sinister, Spanish traits and developed them
to such a pitch of nervous intensity. As Arthur Symons says, his
portraits "have all the brooding Spanish soul with its proud
self-repression." Señor Cossio sums up in effect by declaring that
Venice educated Greco in his art; Titian taught him technique;
Tintoretto gave him his sense of dramatic form; Angelo his virility.
But of the strong personality which assimilated these various
influences there is no doubt when confronted with one of his canvases,
every inch of which is signed El Greco.




"VELASQUEZ"



Why so well-known and authoritative a work as Velasquez, by Aureliano
de Beruete, should have been so long in reaching America is a puzzle
when you consider the velocity with which the Atlantic Ocean is
traversed by so many mediocre books on art. The first Spanish edition
of the Beruete monograph appeared about 1897; the same year saw it in
French, and from the latter tongue it was translated into English by
Hugh E. Poynter in 1906. Señor Beruete is considered with reason as
the prime living authority on the great Spanish realist, though his
study is not so voluminous as that of Carl Justi. The Bonn professor,
however, took all Spain for his province. Velasquez and His Times is
the title of his work, the first edition of which came out in 1888,
the second in 1903. Beruete (whose portrait by Sorolla was one of that
master's most characteristic pictures at the recent Hispanic Society
exhibition in New York) is not at odds on many points with Justi; but
more sceptical he is, and to R.A.M. Stevenson's list of Velasquez
pictures, two hundred and thirty-four, Beruete opposes the
comparatively meagre number of eighty-nine. He reduces the number of
sketches and waves away as spurious the Velasquez "originals" in
Italy, several in the Prado, the very stronghold of the collection;
and of the eleven in that famous cabinet of the Vienna Imperial
Museum--to which we went as to a divine service of eye and soul--he
allows only seven as authentic. The portrait of Innocent X in the
Doria palace, Rome, is naturally a masterpiece, as is the bust
portrait of the same subject at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg; but the
Boston Museum full-length of Philip IV is discredited as a copy, only
the Prince Don Baltasar Carlos Attended by a Dwarf being admitted in
the company of the true Velasquezes.

Of the "supposed portrait of Cardinal Pamphili," a real Velasquez, now
hanging in the Hispanic Society, 156th Street, Beruete writes: "In the
winter of 1902 there appeared in Paris a bust portrait of a cardinal
brought from Italy by Messrs. Trotty & Co., which had been alluded to
by Professor A. Venturi of Rome in _L'Art_. It is life size,
representing a person about thirty years of age in the dress of a
cardinal, with smiling face and black hair, moustache and pointed
beard, good carriage and a touch of levity not in keeping with the
dignity and austerity of a prince of the Church. The beretta and cape,
of a fine red colour, the latter painted in a uniform tone and without
a crease, harmonise with the roseate hue of the features, and the
plain gray background. Every detail reveals the hand of Velasquez, and
it can be classed without hesitation among the characteristic works of
his second style. It is on that ground that I make mention of it here.
However, in Rome, at the house in which this picture was found, it was
held to be the portrait of Cardinal Pamphili, nephew of Innocent X,
who according to Palomino was painted in Rome by Velasquez at the same
time as the Pontiff, that is in 1650."

Beruete believes Palomino was wrong in declaring that Velasquez
painted the young cardinal in Rome; Madrid was the likelier city. The
style proves an earlier date than 1650. The cardinal withdrew from the
cardinalate after three years, 1644-47 > and married. The portrait was
acquired by the American artist the late Francis Lathrop. Stevenson
grants to the Metropolitan Museum a fruit-piece by Velasquez. Not so
Beruete. J. H. McFadden of Philadelphia once owned the Doña Mariana of
Austria, second wife of Philip IV, in a white-and-black dress, gold
chain over her shoulder, hair adorned with red bows and red-and-white
feather, from the Lyne-Stephens collection in the New Gallery,
1895--and is so quoted by Stevenson; but he sold the picture and
Beruete has lost track of it.

Whereas Stevenson in his invaluable book studies his subject broadly
in chapters devoted to the dignity of the Velasquez technique, his
colour, modelling, brushwork, and his impressionism, Beruete follows a
more detailed yet simpler method. Picture by picture, in each of the
three styles--he adopts Justi's and Stevenson's classification--he
follows the painter, dealing less with the man than his work. Not that
biographical data are missing--on the contrary, there are many pages
of anecdotes as well as the usual facts--but Beruete is principally
concerned with the chronology and attribution of the pictures. He has
dug up some fresh material concerning the miserable pay Velasquez
received, rather fought for, at the court of Philip, where he was on a
par with the dwarfs, barbers, comedians, servants, and other
dependants of the royal household.

The painter has been criticised for his attachment to the king; but as
he was not of a religious nature and did not paint religious pieces
with the gusto of his contemporaries, the court was his only hope of
existence; either court or church. He made his choice early, and while
we must regret the enormous wasting of the hours consequent upon the
fulfilment of his duties as a functionary, master of the revels, and
what not, we should not forget how extremely precarious would have
been his lot as a painter without royal favour in the Spain of those
days. He had his bed, board, house, and though he died penniless--his
good wife Juana only survived him seven days--he had the satisfaction
of knowing that he owed no man, and that his daughter had married his
pupil Mazo. Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599; died at Madrid,
1660. His real name was Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez. He was a
Silva--for the "de" was acquired from the king after much pettifoggery
on the part of that monarch with the prognathic jaw--and he was of
Portuguese blood. He signed Velasquez--a magic grouping of letters for
the lovers of art--though born as he was in Spain his forefathers came
from Portugal. The mixed blood has led to furious disputes among
hot-headed citizens of the two kingdoms. As if it much mattered.
Velasquez's son-in-law, by the way, Juan Mazo, was the author of a
number of imitations and forgeries. He was a true friend of the
picture-dealers.

Velasquez belonged to that rare family of sane genius. He was
eminently the painter of daylight and not a nocturnal visionary, as
was Rembrandt. Shakespeare, who had all the strings to his lyre, had
also many daylight moments. Mozart always sang them, and how blithely!
No one, not Beethoven, not Raphael, not Goethe--to name three widely
disparate men of genius--saw life as steadily as the Spaniard. He is a
magnificent refutation of the madhouse doctors who swear to you that
genius is a disease. Remember, too, that the limitations of Velasquez
are clearly defined. Imagination was denied to him, asserts Beruete;
he had neither the turbulent temperament of Rubens nor possessed the
strained, harsh mysticism of El Greco--a painter of imagination and
the only painter allowed by Beruete to have affected the Velasquez
palette. In a word, Velasquez was a puzzling comminglement of the
classic and the realist. He had the repose and the firm, virile line
of the classics, while his vision of actuality has never been
surpassed. The Dutch Terburg, Vermeer, Van der Helst, Frans Hals saw
as vividly the surfaces of things material; the last alone was the
match of Velasquez in brushwork, but not Rembrandt recorded in his
Anatomy Lesson the facts of the case as did Velasquez.

Señor Beruete wittily remarks that Los Borrachos (The Topers) of
Velasquez is the truer anatomy lesson of the two. A realist, an
impressionist, as Stevenson has it, the Spaniard was; but he was also
something more. He had a magic hand to define, the rendering of the
magical mystery of space and atmosphere. Grant that he was not a
colourist in the sense the Venetians were, or Rubens, yet how much
more subtle, more noble, more intellectual, is his restricted tonal
gamut. Those silver-grays, resonant blacks, browns, blues, and reds
sing in your memory long after you have forgotten the tumultuous
golden waves breaking upon the decorative coasts of Rubens. We are
constrained to question the easy way Beruete and other critics deny
the attributes of imagination and poetry to Velasquez. There is,
perhaps, a more sublimated poetry in his pictures than in the obvious
religious and mythological and allegorical set pieces of Rubens,
Murillo, and how many others. His realism did not run to seed in the
delineation of subject. He was as natural as Cervantes--the one great
man of Spain who may be compared to him--and he saw the larger
patterns of life, while never forgetting that the chief function of a
painter is to paint, not to "think," not to rhapsodise, not to be
"literary" on canvas. His cool, measuring eye did more than record
sordid facts. He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as
beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only.
Stevenson rages at those who say that Velasquez was not a
colourist--and Beruete is of them, though he quotes with considerable
satisfaction the critical pronouncement of Royal Cortissoz (in
_Harper's Magazine_, May, 1895) that Las Meninas is "the most perfect
study of colour and values which exists."

The truth is, Stevenson, Cortissoz, and Beruete are all three in the
right. That Velasquez, when in Rome, studied the pictures there; that
he didn't care for Raphael; that he had very much admired the
Venetians, Titian, Tintoretto; that he had admired Rubens, with whom
he associated daily on the occasion of the Flemish master's visit of
nine months to Madrid--these are truths not to be denied. Beruete
claims that the Rubens influence is not to be seen in Velasquez, only
El Greco's. Every object, living or inanimate, that swam through the
eyeballs of the Spaniard--surely the most wonderful pair of eyes in
history--was never forgotten. His powers of assimilation were
unexcelled. He saw and made note of everything, but when he painted
his spectators saw nothing of any other man, living or dead. Was not
the spiritual impulse missing in this man? He couldn't paint angels,
because he only painted what he saw; and as he never saw angels he
only painted mankind. Life, not the "subject," appealed to him. He had
little talent, less taste, for the florid decorative art of Rubens and
the Venetians; but give him a simple, human theme (not pretty or
sentimental) and he recreated it, not merely interpreted the scene; so
that Las Meninas, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), the hunting pictures,
the various portraits of royalty, buffoons, beggars, outcasts, are the
chronicles of his time, and he its master psychologist.

Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; "El
Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the
flesh." Hot, hard, and dry in his first period (Borrachos), he becomes
more fluid and atmospheric in the Breda composition (The Lances), and
in the third period he has attained absolute mastery of his material.
His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628. Even Haydn
and Mozart did better as menials. Yet some historians speak of the
liberality of Philip IV. An "immortal employee" indeed, as Beruete
names his idol. Luca Giordano called Las Meninas the "theology of
painting." Wilkie declared that the Velasquez landscapes possessed
"the real sun which lights us, the air which we breathe, and the soul
and spirit of nature." "To see the Prado," exclaims Stevenson, "is to
modify one's opinion of the novelty of recent art." To-day the
impressionists and realists claim Velasquez as their patron saint as
well as artistic progenitor. The profoundest master of harmonies and
the possessor of a vision of the real world not second to Leonardo's,
the place of the Spaniard in history will never be taken from him.

Velasquez is more modern than all the moderns; more modern than
to-morrow. That sense of the liberation of the spirit which Mr.
Berenson is fond of adducing as the grandest attribute of the Space
Composers, Raphael and the rest, may be discovered in Las Meninas, or
in The Spinners, space overhead, with mystery superadded. The brumous
North was the home of mysticism, of Gothic architecture. The note of
tragic mystery was seldom sounded by the Italians. Faith itself seems
more real in the North. It remained for Rembrandt to give it out in
his chords of _chiaroscuro_. And is there more noble, more virile
music in all art than The Surrender of Breda?

Mr. Berenson refers only once to Velasquez and then as an "impersonal"
painter. As a counterblast to his theory of impersonality let us quote
a few lines from R.A.M. Stevenson's Velasquez (that most inspiring of
all art monographs): "Is it wonderful," he asks, "that you can apply
Morelli's principles of criticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Italian
schools; that you can point to the thumbs, fingers, poses of the head,
ovals of the face and schemes of colour that the painters learned by
heart, and can even say from whom they learned? The later Venetians
broke away, and when you come to Velasquez the system holds good as
little as it can in our own day." But this charge holds good for many
painters of the Renaissance, painters of patterns. Velasquez, like the
great prose-master of France, Gustave Flaubert, is always in
modulation. No two canvases are rhythmically alike, except in the
matter of masterfulness. He, too, was a master of magnificent prose
painting, painting worth a wilderness of makers of frozen mediæval
patterns. Mr. Henry B. Fuller, the author of the Chevalier di
Pensieri-Vani, once spoke of the "cosy sublimity" in Raphael's Vision
of Ezekiel; one might paraphrase the epigram by describing the
pictures of Velasquez as boxed-in eternities. Dostoïevsky knew such a
sensation when he wrote of "a species of eternity within the space of
a square foot." But there are many connoisseurs who find evidences of
profounder and more naïve faith in the angular loveliness of the
Flemish Primitives than in all the religious art of Italy or Spain.




GOYA



I

Goya was a Titan among artists. He once boasted that "Nature,
Velasquez, and Rembrandt are my masters." It was an excellent
self-criticism. He not only played the Velasquez gambit in his
portraits, the gambit of Rembrandt in his sombre imaginative pieces,
but he boldly annexed all Spain for his sinister and turbulent art. He
was more truly Spanish in the range and variety of his performances
than any Spanish-born painter since Velasquez. Without the sanity,
solidity, nobility of Velasquez, whose vision and voice he never
possessed; without the luscious sweetness of Murillo, whose sweetness
he lacked, he had something of El Greco's fierceness, and much of the
vigour of Ribera. He added to these influences a temperament that was
exuberant, fantastic, morose, and pessimistic yet humorous, sarcastic,
sometimes melting, and ever masterful. He reminds one of an
overwhelming force. The man dominates the painter. A dozen comparisons
force themselves upon you when the name of Goya is pronounced: comets,
cataracts, whirlwinds, and wild animals. Anarch and courtier, atheist
and decorator of churches, his "whole art seems like a bullfight,"
says Richard Muther. One might improve on this by calling him a subtle
bull, a Hercules who had read Byron. "Nature, Velasquez, and
Rembrandt!" cries MacColl in a too brief summary. "How inadequate the
list! Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Legion had a hand in the teaching."

Goya incarnated the renaissance of old Spain and its art. Spanish art
has always come from without, for its foundations were northern and
Flemish. The Van Eycks and Van der Weyden were studied closely; Jan
Van Eyck visited Madrid. The Venetian influence was strong, and El
Greco his life long, and a pupil of Titian as he was, this gloomy
painter with the awkward name of Theotocopoulo endeavoured to forget
his master and became more Spanish than the Spanish. Ribera,
emotional, dramatic, realistic, religious, could sound the chords of
tenderness without the sentimentalism of Murillo. Goya stems more from
Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa than from any of his predecessors, except
Velasquez. The presence of Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, in
Spain may have influenced him. Certainly Raphael Mengs, the "Saxon
pedant," did not--Mengs associated with Tiepolo at Madrid. It is in
company with the bravos of the brush, Caravaggio and Rosa, that Goya
is closely affiliated. We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like
violence of temperament; both men painted _con furia_; both were
capable of debauches in work; Goya could have covered the walls of
hell with diabolic frescoes. In music three men are of a like ilk:
Berlioz, Paganini, Liszt. Demoniacal, charged with electric energy,
was this trinity, and Goya could have made it a quartet.

But if Spain was not a country of original artists--as was Italy, for
example--she developed powerful and astounding individualities.
Character is her _leit motìv_ in the symphony of the nations. The rich
virility and majestic seriousness of her men, their aptitudes for war,
statesmanship, and drama, are borne out in her national history.
Perhaps the climate plays its part. Havelock Ellis thinks so. "The
hard and violent effects, the sharp contrasts, the strong colours, the
stained and dusky clouds, looking as if soaked in pigment, may well
have affected the imagination of the artist," he writes. Certainly the
landscapes of Velasquez could not be more Spanish than they are; and,
disagreeing with those who say that he had no feeling for nature, the
bits of countryside and mountain Goya shows are truly peninsular in
their sternness. It may be well to remark here that the softness of
Tuscany is not to be found in the lean and often arid aspects of
Spain. Spain, too, is romantic--but after its own fashion. Goya
revived the best traditions of his country's art; he was the last of
the great masters and the first of the moderns. Something neurotic,
modern, disquieting, threads his work with devilish irregularity. He
had not the massive temper of Velasquez, of those men who could paint
day after day, year after year, until death knocked at their ateliers.
As vigorous as Rubens in his sketches, Goya had not the steady, slow
nerves of that master. He was very unequal. His life was as disorderly
as Hals's or Steen's, but their saving phlegm was missing. In an
eloquent passage--somewhere in his English Literature--Taine speaks of
the sanity of genius as instanced by Shakespeare. Genius narrowly
escapes nowadays being a cerebral disorder, though there was Marlowe
to set off Shakespeare's serene spirit, and even of Michael Angelo's
mental health and morals his prime biographer, Parlagreco, does not
speak in reassuring terms. Goya was badly balanced, impulsive, easily
angered, and not slow to obey the pull of his irritable motor centres
when aroused. A knife was always within reach. He drove the Duke of
Wellington from his presence because the inquisitive soldier asked too
many questions while his portrait was being blocked out. A sword or a
dagger did the business; but Wellington returned to the studio and, as
Mr. Rothenstein tells us, the portrait was finished and is now at
Strathfieldsaye. A sanguine is in the British Museum. His exploits in
Rome may have been exaggerated, though he was quite capable of eloping
with a nun from a convent, as is related, or going around the top of
the Cecilia Metella tomb supported only by his thumbs. The agility and
strength of Goya were notorious, though in a land where physical
prowess is not the exception. He was picador, matador, banderillero by
turns in the bull ring. After a stabbing affray he escaped in the
disguise of a bull-fighter.

If he was a _dompteur_ of dames and cattle, he was the same before his
canvas. Anything that came to hand served him as a brush, an old brown
stick wrapped up in cloth, a spoon--with the latter he executed that
thrilling Massacre, May 2, 1808, in the Prado. He could have painted
with a sabre or on all fours. Reckless to the degree of insanity, he
never feared king or devil, man or the Inquisition. The latter reached
out for him, but he had disappeared, after suffering a dagger-thrust
in the back. When on the very roof of his prosperity, he often slipped
downstairs to the company of varlets and wenches; this friend of the
Duchess of Alba seemed happier dicing, drinking, dancing in the
suburbs with base-born people and gipsies. A _genre_ painter, Goya
delighted in depicting the volatile, joyous life of a now-vanished
epoch. He was a historian of manner as well as of disordered souls,
and an avowed foe of hypocrisy.

Not "poignantly genteel," to use a Borrovian phrase, was he. Yet he
could play the silken courtier with success. The Arabs say that "one
who has been stung by a snake shivers at a string," and perhaps the
violence with which the painter attacked the religious may be set down
to the score of his youthful fears and flights when the Inquisition
was after him. He was a sort of Voltaire in black and white. The
corruption of churchmen and court at this epoch seems almost
incredible. Goya noted it with a boldness that meant but one
thing--friends high in power. This was the case. He was admired by the
king, Charles IV, and admired--who knows how much!--by his queen,
Marie Louise of Parma, Goya painted their portraits; also painted the
portraits of the royal favourite and prime minister and Prince de la
Paz, Manuel Godoy--favourite of both king and queen. Him, Goya left in
effigy for the scorn of generations to come. "A grocer's family who
have won the big lottery prize," was the witty description of
Théophile Gautier when he saw the picture of the royal family.

Curiously enough, this Goya, who from the first plucked success from
its thorny setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840
recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical
literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard.
And Gautier's sketch of a few pages still remains the most
comprehensive estimate. From it all have been forced to borrow;
Richard Muther in his briskly enthusiastic monograph and the section
in his valuable History of Modern Painting; Charles Yriarte, Will
Rothenstein, Lafond, Lefort, Condé de la Vinaza--all have read Gautier
to advantage. Valerian von Loga has devoted a study to the etchings,
and Don Juan de la Rada has made a study of the frescoes in the church
of San Antonio de la Florida; Carl Justi, Stirling Maxwell, C.G.
Hartley should also be consulted. Yriarte is interesting, inasmuch as
he deals with the apparition of Goya in Rome, an outlaw, but a blithe
one, who, notebook in hand, went through the Trastevere district
sketching with ferocious rapidity the attitudes and gestures of the
vivacious population. A man after Stendhal's heart, this Spaniard. And
in view of his private life one is tempted to add--and after the
heart, too, of Casanova. Notwithstanding, he was an unrivalled
interpreter of child-life. Some of his painted children are of a
dazzling sweetness.



GOYA



II

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born March 30 (or 31), 1746, at
Fuentetodos, near Saragossa, Aragon. He died at Bordeaux, France,
where he had gone for his health, April 16, 1828--Calvert, possibly by
a pen slip, makes him expire a month earlier. He saw the beginnings of
French romanticism, as he was himself a witness of the decadence of
Spanish art. But his spirit has lived on in Manet and Zuloaga.
Decadent he was; a romantic before French romanticism, he yet had
borrowed from an earlier France. Some of his gay Fêtes Champêtres
recall the influence of Watteau--a Watteau without the sweet elegiac
strain. He has been called a Spanish Hogarth--not a happy simile.
Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a
pen stroke the didactic side. His youth was not extraordinary in
promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. The story of his
discovery by a monk of Saragosela--Father Felix Salvador of the
Carthusian convent of Aula Dei--is not missing. He studied with José
Martinez. He ran away in 1766. He remained, say some, in Italy from
1769 to 1774; but in 1771 he appeared in Saragossa again, and the year
1772 saw him competing for the painting about to be undertaken in the
cathedral. He married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the court painter.
He has told us what he thought of his jealous, intriguing
brother-in-law in a portrait. In 1775 he was at Madrid. From 1776 he
executed forty-six tapestry cartoons. In 1779 he presented to the king
his etchings after Velasquez. His rise was rapid. He painted the
queen, with her false teeth, false hair, and her infernal simper, and
this portrait was acclaimed a masterpiece.

His religious frescoes, supposed to be _ad majorem Dei gloriam_, were
really for the greater glory of Goya. They are something more than
secular, often little short of blasphemous. That they were tolerated
proves the cynical temper of his times. When the fat old scoundrel of
a Bourbon king ran away with all his court and the pusillanimous
Joseph Bonaparte came upon the scene, Goya swerved and went through
the motions of loyalty, a thing that rather disturbs the admirers of
the supposedly sturdy republican. But he was only marking time. He
left a terrific arraignment of war and its horrors. Nor did he spare
the French. Callot, Hell-Breughel, are outdone in these swift, ghastly
memoranda of misery, barbarity, rapine, and ruin. The hypocrite
Ferdinand VII was no sooner on the throne of his father than Goya, hat
in hand but sneer on lip and twinkle in eye, approached him, and after
some parleying was restored to royal favour. Goya declared that as an
artist he was not personally concerned in the pranks of the whirligig
politic. Nevertheless he was bitterly chagrined at the twist of
events, and, an old man, he retired to his country house, where he
etched and designed upon its walls startling fancies. He died
disillusioned, and though nursed by some noble countrymen, his career
seemed to illustrate that terrifying picture of his invention--a
skeleton lifts its gravestone and grinningly traces with bony finger
in the dust the word _Nada_--Nothing! Overtaxed by the violence of his
life and labours--he left a prodigious amount of work behind
him--soured by satiety, all spleen and rage, he was a broken-down
Lucifer, who had trailed his wings in the mud. But who shall pass
judgment upon this unhappy man? Perhaps, as he saw the "glimmering
square" grow less, the lament of Cardinal Wolsey may have come to a
brain teeming with memories. Goya had always put his king before his
God. But in his heart he loved the old romantic faith--the faith that
hovered in the background of his art. Goya is not the first son of his
mother church who denied her from sheer perversity. What a nation!
Cervantes and Lope da Vega, Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada--most glorious
of her sex, saint and genius--and Goya! Spain is the land of great and
diverse personalities. But with Calderon we must now say: "Let us to
our ship, for here all is shadowy and unsettled."

Goya, as Baudelaire pointed out more than half a century ago, executed
his etchings by combining aquatint and the use of the dry point. A few
years before his death he took up lithography, then a novelty. His
Caprices, Proverbs, and Horrors of War may outlive his paintings. His
colour scheme was not a wide one, blacks, reds, browns, and yellows
often playing solo; but all modern impressionism may be seen on his
canvases--harsh dissonances, dots, dabs, spots, patches, heavy planes,
strong rhythmic effects of lighting, heavy impasto, luminous
atmosphere, air, sunshine, and vibrating movements; also the
strangeness of his material. Manet went to him a beginner. After
studying the Maja desnuda at the Prado Museum he returned to France
and painted the Olympe, once of the Luxembourg, now in the Louvre. The
balcony scenes of Goya, with their manolas--old-fashioned
grisettes--must have stirred Manet; recall the Frenchman's Balcony.
And the bull-fights? Oh! what an iron-souled master was there--Goya
when he slashed a bull in the arena tormented by the human brutes!
None of his successors matches him. The same is the case with that
diverting, devilish, savoury, and obscene series he called Caprices.
It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in
Paris who secured a set of these rare plates. The witch's sabbaths and
the modern version of them, prostitution and its symbolism, filled the
brain of Goya. He always shocks any but robust nerves with his hybrid
creatures red in claw and foaming at mouth as they fight in midair,
hideous and unnamable phantoms of the dark. His owls are theologians.
The females he often shows make us turn aside our head and shudder.
With implacable fidelity he displayed the reverse of war's heroic
shield. It is something more than hell.

Sattler, Charlet, Raffet, James Ensor, Rethel, De Groux, Rops, Edvard
Münch (did you ever see his woman wooed by a skeleton?), and the rest
of these delineators of the morbid and macabre acknowledge Goya as
their progenitor. He must have been a devil-worshipper. He pictures
the goat devil, horns and hoofs. Gautier compares him to E.T.W.
Hoffmann--Poe not being known in Paris at that time--but it is a
rather laboured comparison, for there was a profoundly human side to
the Spaniard. His perception of reality was of the solidest. He had
lived and loved and knew before Flaubert that if the god of the
Romantics was an upholsterer the god of eighteenth-century Spain was
an executioner. The professed lover of the Duchess of Alba, he painted
her nude, and then, hearing that the Duke might not like the theme so
handled, he painted her again, and clothed, but more insolently
uncovered than before. At the Spanish museum in New York you may see
another portrait of this bold beauty with the name of Goya scratched
in the earth at her feet. Her attitude is characteristic of the
intrigue, which all Madrid knew and approved. At home sat Mrs. Goya
with her twenty children.

Goya was a man of striking appearance. Slender in youth, a graceful
dancer, in middle life he had the wide shoulders and bull neck of an
athlete. He was the terror of Madrileñan husbands. His voice had
seductive charm. He could twang the guitar and fence like ten devils.
A gamester, too. In a word, a figure out of the Renaissance, when the
deed trod hard on the heels of the word. One of his self-portraits
shows him in a Byronic collar, the brow finely proportioned, marked
mobile features, sombre eyes--the ideal Don Juan Tenorio to win the
foolish heart of an Emma Bovary or a bored noblewoman. Another, with
its savage eye--it is a profile--and big beaver head-covering, recalls
Walt Whitman's "I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out." A giant
egoist, and as human, all too human, a fellow as Spain ever begot,
Goya is only hinted at in Baudelaire's searching quatrain beginning:
"Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues." _Fleurs du Mal_ would be
a happy title for the work of Francisco Goya if to "The Flowers of
Evil" were added "and Wisdom." Goya is often cruel and lascivious and
vulgar, but he is as great a philosopher as painter. And to offset his
passionate gloom there are his visions of a golden Spain no longer in
existence; happy, gorgeous of costume, the Spain of sudden coquetries,
of fans, masques, bull-fights, and fandangos, of a people dancing on
the rim of a fire-filled mountain, pious, capricious, child-like,
romantic, and patriotic--the Spain of the eighteenth century. Goya is
its spokesman, as is Velasquez the mirror of Philip's more spacious
times. Velasquez--Goya! poles asunder, yet both born to the artistic
purple. And the stately aristocrat who signed himself Velasquez is not
more in tune with the twentieth-century _Zeitgeist_ than that
coarse-fibred democrat of genius, Francisco Goya.




FORTUNY



Mariano Fortuny: what a magic-breeding name! The motto of this lucky
Spanish painter might have been "Fortuny Fortunatus." Even his sudden
death, at the early age of thirty-six, came after he had executed a
number of masterpieces, an enormous quantity of water-colours,
etchings, ceramics, damascene swords and chased ornaments; it followed
on the heels of sudden glory. His name was in the mouth of artistic
Europe, and the sale of the contents of his studio at Rome in 1875
brought eight hundred thousand francs. Yet so slippery is fame that
Fortuny's name to-day is seldom without a brace of epithets, such as
"garish," or "empty." His work is neither. He is a virtuoso. So was
Tiepolo. He is a Romantic; so the generation preceding him. The
Orientalist par excellence, he has somehow been confounded with
Meissonier and Gérôme, has been called glittering like the former,
hard as was the latter. It is true there are no emotional undertones
in his temperament, the brilliant overtones predominating; but it is
also true that when he died his manner was changing. He had said that
he was tired of the "gay rags" of the eighteenth century, and his
Strand of Portici shows a new line of departure. Edouard Manet made
special appeal to Fortuny; Manet, who had derived from Goya, whose
Spanish _fond_ is undeniable. Perhaps the thrice-brilliant Fortuny's
conscience smote him when he saw a Frenchman so successfully absorbing
the traditions of Goya; but it was not to be. He passed away at the
very top of his renown, truly a favourite of the gods. He was admired,
imitated, above all parodied; though, jealously as are his pictures
guarded, he has been put on the shelf like one of the amazing painted
bibelots in his work.

The injustice of this is patent. Between Fortuny and Meissonier there
lies the gulf that separates the genius and the hard-working man of
talent. Nevertheless Meissonier's statue is in the garden of the
Louvre, Meissonier is extolled as a master, while Fortuny is usually
described in patronising terms as a facile trifler. The reverse is the
truth. No one has painted sunlight with more intensity; he was an
impressionist before the word was coined. He is a colourist almost as
sumptuous as Monticelli, with a precision of vision never attained by
the Marseilles rhapsodist. His figures are as delicious as Watteau's
or Debucourt's--he recalls the latter frequently--and as an
Orientalist he ranks all but a few. Gérôme, Guillaumet, Fromentin,
Huguet are not to be mentioned in the same breath with Fortuny as to
the manipulation of material; and has Guillaumet done anything
savouring more of the mysterious East than Fortuny's At the Gate of
the Seraglio? The magician of jewelled tones, he knew all the subtler
modulations. His canvases vibrate, they emit sparks of sunlight, his
shadows are velvety and warm. Compared with such a picture as The
Choice of a Model, the most laboriously minute Meissonier is as cold
and dead as a photograph--Meissonier, who was a capital fan painter, a
patient miniaturist without colour talent, a myopic delineator of
costumes, who, as Manet said, pasted paper soldiers on canvas and
called the machine a battle-field.

The writer recalls the sensations once evoked by a close view of
Fortuny's Choice of a Model at Paris years ago, and at that time in
the possession of Mr. Stewart. Psychology is not missing in this
miracle of virtuosity; the nude posing on the marble table, the
absolute beauty of the drawing, the colouring, the contrast of the
richly variegated marble pillars in the background, the
eighteenth-century costumes of the Academicians so scrupulously yet so
easily set forth, all made a dazzling ensemble. Since Fortuny turned
the trick a host of spurious pictures has come overseas, and we now
say "Vibert" at the same time as "Fortuny," just as some enlightened
persons couple the names of Ingres and Bouguereau. In the kingdom of
the third rate the mediocre is conqueror.

Listen to this description of La Vicaria (The Spanish Wedding), which
first won for its painter his reputation. Begun in 1868, it was
exhibited at Goupil's, Paris, the spring of 1870 (some say 1869), when
the artist was thirty-two years old. Théophile Gautier--whose genius
and Théodore de Banville's have analogies with Fortuny's in the matter
of surfaces and astounding virtuosity--went up in the air when he saw
the work, and wrote a feuilleton that is still recalled by the old
guard. The following, however, is not by Gautier, but from the pen of
Dr. Richard Muther, the erudite German critic: "A marriage is taking
place in the sacristy of a rococo church in Madrid. The walls are
covered with faded Cordova leather hangings figured in gold and dull
colours, and a magnificent rococo screen separates the sacristy from
the middle aisle. Venetian lustres are suspended from the ceiling,
pictures of martyrs, Venetian glasses in carved oval frames hang on
the wall, richly ornamented wooden benches and a library of missals
and gospels in sparkling silver clasps, and shining marble tables and
glistening braziers form part of the scene in which the marriage
contract is being signed. The costumes are those of the time of Goya.
An old beau is marrying a young and beautiful girl. With affected
grace and a skipping minuet step, holding a modish three-cornered hat
under his arm, he approaches the table to put his signature in the
place which the _escribano_ points out with an obsequious bow. He is
arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is wearing a white silk
dress trimmed with flowered lace and has a wreath of orange blossoms
in her luxuriant black hair. As a girl friend is talking to her she
examines with abstracted attention the pretty little pictures upon her
fan, the finest she ever possessed. A very piquant little head she
has, with her long lashes and black eyes. Then, in the background,
follow the witnesses, and first of all a young lady in a swelling silk
dress of the brightest rose colour. Beside her is one of the
bridegroom's friends in a cabbage-green coat with long flaps and a
shining belt, from which a gleaming sabre hangs. The whole picture is
a marvellous assemblage of colours in which tones of Venetian glow and
strength, the tender pearly gray beloved of the Japanese, and a
melting neutral brown each sets off the other and gives a shimmering
effect to the entire mass."

Fortuny was a gay master of character and comedy as well as of
bric-a-brac. Still life he painted as no one before or after him; if
Chardin is the Velasquez of vegetables, Fortuny is the Rossini of the
rococo; such lace-like filigrees, _fiorturi_, marbles that are of
stone, men and women that are alive, not of marble (like
Alma-Tadema's). The artificiality of his work is principally in the
choice of a subject, not in the performance. How luminous and silky
are his blacks may be noted at the Metropolitan Museum in his portrait
of a Spanish lady. There is nothing of the _petit-maître_ in the
sensitive and adroit handling of values. The rather triste expression,
the veiled look of the eyes, the _morbidezza_ of the flesh tones, and
the general sense of amplitude and grace give us a Fortuny who knew
how to paint broadly. The more obvious and dashing side of him is
present in the Arabian Fantaisie of the Vanderbilt Gallery. It must be
remembered that he spent some time copying, at Madrid, Velasquez and
Goya, and as Camille Mauclair enthusiastically declares, these copies
are literal "identifications." They are highly prized by the Marquise
Carcano (who owned the Vicaria), Madrazo, and the Baron Davillieu--the
last named the chief critical authority on Fortuny.

In the history of the arts there are cases such as Fortuny's, of
Mozart, Chopin, Raphael, and some others, whose precocity and
prodigious powers of production astonished their contemporaries.
Fortuny, whose full name was Mariano José Maria Bernardo Fortuny y
Carbó, was born at Reus, a little town in the province of Tarragona,
near Barcelona. He was very poor, and at the age of twelve an orphan.
His grandfather, a carpenter, went with the lad on foot through the
towns of Catalonia exhibiting a cabinet containing wax figures painted
by Mariano and perhaps modelled by him. He began carving and daubing
at the age of five; a regular little fingersmith, his hands were never
idle. He secured by the promise of talent a pension of forty-two
francs a month and went to Barcelona to study at the Academy. Winning
the prize of Rome in 1857, he went there and copied old masters until
1860, when, the war between Spain and Morocco breaking out, he went to
Morocco on General Prim's staff, and for five or six months his brain
was saturated with the wonders of Eastern sunlight, exotic hues,
beggars, gorgeous rugs, snake-charmers, Arabs afoot or circling on
horseback with the velocity of birds, fakirs, all the huge glistening
febrile life he was later to interpret with such charm and exactitude.

He returned to Rome. He made a second trip to Africa. He returned to
Spain. Barcelona gave him a pension of a hundred and thirty-two francs
a month, which amount was kept up later by the Duke de Rianzarès until
1867. He went to Paris in 1866, was taken up by the Goupils, knew
Meissonier and worked occasionally with Gérôme. His rococo pictures,
his Oriental work set Paris ablaze. He married the daughter of the
Spanish painter Federigo Madrazo, and visited at Madrid, Granada,
Seville, Rome, and, in 1874, London. He contracted a pernicious fever
at Rome and died there, November 21, 1874, at the age of thirty-six.
His funeral was imposing, many celebrities of the world of art
participating. He was buried in the Campo Varano.

In 1866 at Rome he began etching, and in fifteen months finished a
series of masterpieces. His line, surprisingly agile and sinuous, has
the finesse of Goya--whom he resembled at certain points. He used
aquatint with full knowledge of effects to be produced, and at times
he recalls Rembrandt in the depth of his shadows. His friend the
painter Henri Regnault despaired in the presence of such versatility,
such speed and ease of workmanship. He wrote: "The time I spent with
Fortuny is haunting me still. What a magnificent fellow he is! He
paints the most marvellous things, and is the master of us all. I wish
I could show you the two or three pictures he has in his hand or his
etchings and water-colours. They inspired me with a real disgust of my
own. Ah, Fortuny, you spoil my sleep!"

Standing aloof from the ideas and tendencies of his times and not a
sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the
pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a
brainless technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which
Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius
as a museum panorama. Let us not be misled by the worship of the
elephantine. It is characteristic of his temperament that the big
battle piece he was commissioned by the Barcelona Academy to paint was
never finished. Not every one who goes to Rome does as the Romans do.
Dowered by nature with extraordinary acuity of vision, with a
romantic, passionate nature and a will of steel, Fortuny was bound to
become a great painter. His manual technique bordered on the fabulous;
he had the painter's hand, as his fellow-countryman Pablo de Sarasate
had the born hand of the violinist. That he spent the brief years of
his life in painting the subjects he did is not a problem to be posed,
for, as Henry James has said, it is always dangerous to challenge an
artist's selection of subject. Why did Goya conceive his _Caprichos_?
The love of decorative beauty in Fortuny was not bedimmed by
criticism. He had the lust of eye which not the treasures of Ormuz and
Ind, or ivory, apes, and peacocks, could satisfy. If he loved the
kaleidoscopic East, he also knew his Spain. We have seen at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts a tiny picture, the court-yard of a
Spanish inn through which passes a blinding shaft of sunlight, which
would make envious Señor Sorolla. Fortuny has personal charm, a
quality usually missing nowadays, for painters in their desire to be
truthful are tumbling head over heels into the prosaic. Individuality
is vanishing in the wastes of an over-anxious realism. If Fortuny is a
daring virtuoso on one or two strings, his palette is ever enchanting.
Personally he was a handsome man, with a distinguished head, his body
broad and muscular and capable of enduring fatigues that would have
killed most painters. Allied to this powerful physique was a seductive
sensibility. This peasant-born painter was an aristocrat of art. Old
Mother Nature is an implacable ironist.




SOROLLA Y BASTIDA



We might say of the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida that he
was one of those who came into the world with a ray of sunshine in
their brains--altering the phrase of Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Señor
Sorolla is also one of the half-dozen (are there so many?) great
living painters. He belongs to the line of Velasquez and Goya, and he
seldom recalls either. Under the auspices of the Hispanic Society of
America there was an exhibition of his works in 1909, some two hundred
and fifty in all, hung in the museum of the society, West 156th
Street, near Broadway. The liveliest interest was manifested by the
public and professional people in this display. Those who saw
Sorolla's art at the Paris Exposition, 1900, and at the Georges Petit
Gallery, Paris, a few years ago need not be reminded of his virile
quality and masterly brush-work. Some art lovers in this city are
aware of his Sad Inheritance, the property of Mr. John E. Berwind,
which has been hung in the Sunday-school room of the Ascension Church,
Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. It is one of the artist's few pictures
in which he feels the _Weltschmerz_. His is a nature bubbling over
with health and happiness.

He is a Valencian, was born in 1863 of poor parents, and by reason of
his native genius and stubborn will power he became what he is--the
painter of vibrating sunshine without equal. Let there be no mincing
of comparisons in this assertion. Not Turner, not Monet painted so
directly blinding shafts of sunlight as has this Spaniard. He is an
impressionist, but not of the school of Monet. His manner is his own,
cunningly compounded as it is of the proceeds of half a dozen artists.
His trip to Rome resulted in nothing but a large eclectic canvas
without individuality; what had this pagan in common with saints or
sinners! He relates that in Paris Bastien-Lepage and Menzel affected
him profoundly. This statement is not to be contradicted; nevertheless
Sorolla is the master of those two masters in his proper province of
the portrayal of outdoor life. Degas was too cruel when he called
Bastien the "Bouguereau of the modern movement"; Bastien academicised
Manet and other moderns. He said nothing new. As for Menzel, it would
be well here to correct the notion bandied about town that he
discovered impressionism before the French. He did not. He went to
Paris in 1867. Meissonier at first, and later Courbet, influenced him.
His Rolling Mill was painted in 1876. It is very Courbet. The Paris
Exposition, 1867, picture shows the influence of Monet--who was in the
Salon of 1864; and Monet was begat by Boudin, who stemmed from
Jongkind; and Jongkind studied with Isabey; and they came from Turner,
idolater of the Sun. Remember, too, that Corot and Courbet called
Eugène Boudin "roi des ciels." Monet not only studied with him but
openly admitted that he had learned everything from him, while Boudin
humbly remarked that he had but entered the door forced by the
Dutchman Jongkind. Doubtless Sorolla found what he was looking for in
Bastien, though it would be nearer the truth to say that he studied
the Barbizons and impressionists and took what he needed from them
all.

He is a temperament impressionable to the sun, air, trees, children,
women, men, cattle, landscapes, the ocean. Such swift, vivid notation
of the fluid life about him is rare; it would be photographic were it
not the personal memoranda of a selecting eye; it would be transitory
impressionism were it not for a hand magical in its manipulation of
pigments. Brain and brush collaborate with an instantaneity that does
not perplex because the result is so convincing. We do not intend to
quote that musty flower of rhetoric which was a favourite with our
grandfathers. It was the fashion then to say that
Nature--capitalised--took the brush from the hand of the painter,
meaning some old duffer who saw varnish instead of clear colour, and
painted the picture for him. Sorolla is receptive; he does not attempt
to impose upon nature an arbitrary pattern, but he sees nature with
his own eyes, modified by the thousand subtle experiences in which he
has steeped his brain. He has the tact of omission very well
developed. After years of labour he has achieved a personal vision. It
is so completely his that to copy it would be to perpetrate a
burlesque. He employs ploys the divisional _taches_ of Monet, spots,
cross-hatchings, big sabre-like strokes à la John Sargent, indulges in
smooth sinuous silhouettes, or huge splotches, refulgent patches,
explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily
surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You
can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other
hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It
sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient
in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his
_entrain_, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he
is less satisfactory; it is the first impression or nothing in his
art. Apart from his luscious, tropical colour, he is a sober narrator
of facts. Ay, but he is a big chap, this amiable little Valencian with
a big heart and a hand that reaches out and grabs down clouds, skies,
scoops up the sea, and sets running, wriggling, screaming a joyful
band of naked boys and girls over the golden summer sands in a sort of
ecstatic symphony of pantheism.

How does he secure such intensity of pitch in his painting of
atmosphere, of sunshine? By a convention, just as the falsification of
shadows by rendering them darker than nature made the necessary
contrasts in the old formula. Brightness in clear-coloured shadows is
the key-note of impressionistic open-air effects. W.C.
Brownell--French Art--puts it in this way: "Take a landscape with a
cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old sense of the term,
and observe the effect upon it of a sudden burst of sunlight. What is
the effect where considerable portions of the scene are suddenly
thrown into marked shadow, as well as others illuminated with intense
light? Is the absolute value of the parts in shadow lowered or raised?
Raised, of course, by reflected light. Formerly, to get the contrast
between sunlight and shadow in proper scale the painter would have
painted the shadows darker than they were before the sun appeared.
Relatively they are darker, since their value, though heightened, is
raised infinitely less than the parts in sunlight. Absolutely, their
value is raised considerably. If, therefore, they are painted lighter
than they were before the sun appeared they in themselves seem truer.
The part of Monet's pictures that is in shadow is measurably true, far
truer than it would have been if painted under the old theory of
correspondence, and had been unnaturally darkened to express the
relation of contrast between shadow and sunlight."

Like Turner, Monet forced the colour of his shadows, as MacColl points
out, and like Monet, Sorolla forces the colour of his shadows--but
what a compeller of beautiful sh

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