The History of Modern Painting, Volume 3 (of 4)
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Title: The History of Modern Painting, Volume 3 (of 4)
Author: Richard Muther
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING, VOLUME 3 (OF 4) ***
THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING
[Illustration: ADOLF VON MENZEL. RESTAURANT AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION 1867.]
THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING
BY RICHARD MUTHER
PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY
AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF BRESLAU
IN FOUR
VOLUMES
[Illustration]
VOLUME
THREE
REVISED EDITION
CONTINUED BY THE AUTHOR
TO THE END OF THE XIX CENTURY
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. MCMVII
CONTENTS
PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
BOOK IV (_continued_)
THE REALISTIC PAINTERS AND MODERN IDEALISTS (_continued_)
CHAPTER XXVIII
REALISM IN ENGLAND
The mannerism of English historical painting: F. C. Horsley, J.
R. Herbert, J. Tenniel, E. M. Ward, Eastlake, Edward Armitage,
and others.--The importance of Ruskin.--Beginning of the efforts
at reform with William Dyce and Joseph Noël Paton.--The
pre-Raphaelites.--The battle against "beautiful form" and
"beautiful tone."--Holman Hunt.--Ford Madox Brown.--John Everett
Millais and Velasquez.--Their pictures from modern life opposed
to the anecdotic pictures of the elder _genre_ painters.--The
Scotch painter John Phillip 1
CHAPTER XXIX
REALISM IN GERMANY
Why historical painting and the anecdotic picture could no longer
take the central place in the life of German art after the
changes of 1870.--Berlin: Adolf Menzel, A. v. Werner, Carl
Güssow, Max Michael.--Vienna: August v. Pettenkofen.--Munich
becomes once more a formative influence.--Importance of the
impetus given in the seventies to the artistic crafts, and how it
afforded an incentive to an exhaustive study of the old
colourists.--Lorenz Gedon, W. Diez, E. Harburger, W. Loefftz,
Claus Meyer, A. Holmberg, Fritz August Kaulbach.--Good painting
takes the place of the well-told anecdote.--Transition from the
costume picture to the pure treatment of modern life.--Franz
Lenbach.--The Ramberg school.--Victor Müller brings into Germany
the knowledge of Courbet.--Wilhelm Leibl 39
CHAPTER XXX
THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE
The Paris International Exhibition of 1867 communicated to Europe
a knowledge of the Japanese.--A sketch of the history of Japanese
painting.--The "Society of the Jinglar," and the influence of the
Japanese on the founders of Impressionism 81
CHAPTER XXXI
THE IMPRESSIONISTS
Impressionism is Realism widened by the study of the
_milieu_.--Edouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred
Sisley, Claude Monet.--The Impressionist movement the final phase
in the great battle of liberation for modern art 105
CHAPTER XXXII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND
Rossetti and the New pre-Raphaelites: Edward Burne-Jones, R.
Spencer Stanhope, William Morris, J. M. Strudwick, Henry
Holliday, Marie Spartali-Stillman.--W. B. Richmond, Walter Crane,
G. F. Watts 151
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Arnold Boecklin, Hans von
Marées.--The resuscitation of biblical painting.--Review of
previous efforts from the Nazarenes to Munkacsy, E. von Gebhardt,
Menzel, and Leibermann.--Fritz von Uhde.--Other attempts: W.
Dürr, W. Volz.--L. von Hofmann, Julius Exter, Franz Stuck, Max
Klinger 210
BOOK V
A SURVEY OF EUROPEAN ART AT THE PRESENT TIME
INTRODUCTION 251
CHAPTER XXXIV
FRANCE
Bastien-Lepage, L'hermitte, Roll, Raffaelli, De Nittis, Ferdinand
Heilbuth, Albert Aublet, Jean Béraud, Ulysse Butin, Édouard
Dantan, Henri Gervex, Duez, Friant, Goeneutte,
Dagnan-Bouveret.--The landscape painters: Seurat, Signac,
Anquetin, Angrand, Lucien Pissarro, Pointelin, Jan Monchablon,
Montenard, Dauphin, Rosset-Granget, Émile Barau, Damoye, Boudin,
Dumoulin, Lebourg, Victor Binet, Réné Billotte.--The portrait
painters: Fantin-Latour, Jacques Émile Blanche, Boldini.--The
Draughtsmen: Chéret, Willette, Forain, Paul Renouard, Daniel
Vierge, Cazin, Eugène Carrière, P. A. Besnard, Agache, Aman-Jean,
M. Denis, Gandara, Henri Martin, Louis Picard, Ary Renan, Odilon
Redon, Carlos Schwabe 255
CHAPTER XXXV
SPAIN
From Goya to Fortuny.--Mariano Fortuny.--Official efforts for the
cultivation of historical painting.--Influence of Manet
inconsiderable.--Even in their pictures from modern life the
Spaniards remain followers of Fortuny: Francisco Pradilla Casado,
Vera, Manuel Ramirez, Moreno Carbonero, Ricardo Villodas, Antonio
Casanova y Estorach, Benliure y Gil, Checa, Francisco Amerigo,
Viniegra y Lasso, Mas y Fondevilla, Alcazar Tejeder, José
Villegas, Luis Jimenez, Martin Rico, Zamacois, Raimundo de
Madrazo, Francisco Domingo, Emilio Sala y Francés, Antonio Fabrés 307
CHAPTER XXXVI
ITALY
Fortuny's influence on the Italians, especially on the school of
Naples.--Domenico Morelli and his followers: F. P. Michetti,
Edoardo Dalbono, Alceste Campriani, Giacomo di Chirico, Rubens
Santoro, Edoardo Toffano, Giuseppe de Nigris.--Prominence of the
costume picture.--Venice: Favretto, Lonza.--Florence: Andreotti,
Conti, Gelli, Vinea.--The peculiar position of
Segantini.--Otherwise anecdotic painting still
preponderates.--Chierici, Rotta, Vannuttelli, Monteverde,
Tito.--Reasons why the further development of modern art was
generally completed not so much on Latin as on Germanic soil 326
CHAPTER XXXVII
ENGLAND
General characteristic of English painting.--The offshoots of
Classicism: Lord Leighton, Val Prinsep, Poynter, Alma
Tadema.--Japanese tendencies: Albert Moore.--The animal picture
with antique surroundings: Briton-Rivière.--The old _genre_
painting remodelled in a naturalistic sense by George Mason and
Frederick Walker.--George H. Boughton, Philip H. Calderon, Marcus
Stone, G. D. Leslie, P. G. Morris, J. R. Reid, Frank Holl.--The
portrait painters: Ouless, J. J. Shannon, James Sant, Charles W.
Furse, Hubert Herkomer.--Landscape painters.--Zigzag development
of English landscape painting.--The school of Fontainebleau and
French Impressionism rose on the shoulders of Constable and
Turner, whereas England, under the guidance of the
pre-Raphaelites, deviated in the opposite direction until
prompted by France to return to the old path.--Cecil Lawson,
James Clarke Hook, Vicat Cole, Colin Hunter, John Brett,
Inchbold, Leader, Corbett, Ernest Parton, Mark Fisher, John
White, Alfred East, J. Aumonier.--The sea painters: Henry Moore,
W. L. Wyllie.--The importance of Venice to English painting:
Clara Montalba, Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, Henry Woods.--French
influences: Dudley Hardy, Stott of Oldham, Stanhope Forbes, J. W.
Waterhouse, Byam Shaw, G. E. Moira, R. Anning Bell, Maurice
Greiffenhagen, F. Cayley Robinson, Eleanor Brickdale 341
BIBLIOGRAPHY 405
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES IN COLOUR
ADOLF VON MENZEL: Restaurant at the Paris Exhibition,
1867 _Frontispiece_
MILLAIS: The Vale of Rest _Facing_ p. 28
DEGAS: The Ballet Scene from _Robert the Devil_ " 118
MONET: A Study " 138
ROSSETTI: The Day-Dream " 160
BURNE-JONES: The Mill " 176
L'HERMITTE: The Pardon of Plourin " 266
RAFFAELLI: The Highroad to Argenteuil " 274
CARRIÈRE: School-Work " 304
SEGANTINI: Maternity " 338
ALMA-TADEMA: The Visit " 354
COLIN HUNTER: Their only Harvest " 394
IN BLACK AND WHITE
PAGE
ALMA TADEMA, LAURENS.
Sappho 354
AMAN-JEAN, EDMOND.
Sous la Guerlanda 303
AN UNKNOWN MASTER.
Harvesters resting 97
ANSDELL, RICHARD.
A Setter and Grouse 37
AUMONIER, M. J.
The Silver Lining to the Cloud 394
BASTIEN-LEPAGE, JULES.
Portrait of Jules Bastien-Lepage 256
Portrait of his Grandfather 257
The Flower Girl 258
Sarah Bernhardt 259
Mme. Drouet 260
The Hay Harvest 261
Le Père Jacques 262
Joan of Arc 263
The Beggar 264
The Pond at Damvillers 265
The Haymaker 266
BELL, R. ANNING.
Oberon and Titania with their Train 398, 399
BENLIURE Y GIL.
A Vision in the Colosseum 321
BESNARD, PAUL ALBERT.
Evening 299
Portrait of Mlles. D. 301
BOECKLIN, ARNOLD.
Portrait of Himself 227
A Villa by the Sea 229
A Rocky Chasm 231
The Penitent 232
Pan startling a Goat-Herd 234
The Herd 235
Venus despatching Cupid 237
Flora 241
In the Trough of the Waves 242
The Shepherd's Plaint 243
An Idyll of the Sea 244
Vita Somnium Breve 245
The Isle of the Dead 246
BOLDINI, GIOVANNI.
Giuseppe Verdi 290
BOUDIN, EUGÈNE LOUIS.
The Port of Trouville 289
BOUGHTON, GEORGE.
Green Leaves among the Sere 367
Snow in Spring 368
A Breath of Wind 369
The Bearers of the Burden 370
BRANGWYN.
Illustration to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 401
BROWN, FORD MADOX.
Portrait of Himself 10
Lear and Cordelia 11
Romeo and Juliet 13
Christ washing Peter's Feet 15
The Last of England 29
Work 31
BURNE-JONES, SIR EDWARD.
Chant d'Amour 169
The Days of Creation 170, 171
Circe 172
Pygmalion (the Soul attains) 173
Perseus and Andromeda 175
The Annunciation 176
The Enchantment of Merlin 177
The Sea Nymph 178
The Golden Stairs 179
The Wood Nymph 181
BUTIN, ULYSSE.
Portrait of Ulysse Butin 278
The Departure 279
CALDECOTT, RANDOLPH.
The Girl I left behind Me 363
CARRIÈRE, EUGÈNE.
Motherhood 297
CASADO DEL ALISAL.
The Bells of Huesca 323
CAZIN, JEAN CHARLES.
Judith 295
Hagar and Ishmael 296
CRANE, WALTER.
The Chariots of the Fleeting Hours 193
From _The Tempest_ 194
From _The Tempest_ 195
DAGNAN-BOUVERET, PASCAL ADOLPHE JEAN.
Consecrated Bread 284
Bretonnes au Pardon 285
The Nuptial Benediction 286
DANTAN, EDOUARD.
A Plaster Cast from Nature 280
DEGAS, HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGARD.
The Ballet in _Don Juan_ 119
A Ballet-Dancer 121
Horses in a Meadow 122
Dancing Girl fastening her Shoe 123
DIEZ, WILHELM.
Returning from Market 61
DUEZ, ERNEST.
On the Cliff 282
The End of October 283
DYCE, WILLIAM.
Jacob and Rachel 5
EASTLAKE, SIR CHARLES LOCK.
Christ blessing little Children 3
FAVRETTO, GIACOMO.
On the Piazzetta 331
Susanna and the Elders 333
FILDES, LUKE.
Venetian Women 396
FORAIN, J. L.
At the Folies-Bergères 293
FORBES, STANHOPE.
The Lighthouse 397
FORTUNY, MARIANO.
Portrait of Mariano Fortuny 309
The Spanish Marriage (La Vicaria) 310
The Trial of the Model 311
The Snake Charmers 312
Moors playing with a Vulture 313
The China Vase 314
At the Gate of the Seraglio 315
FURSE, CHARLES W.
Frontispiece to "Stories and Interludes" 381
GERVEX.
Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière 281
GÜSSOW, KARL.
The Architect 53
HARUNOBU.
A Pair of Lovers 101
HEILBUTH, FERDINAND.
Fine Weather 277
HERKOMER, HUBERT.
John Ruskin 382
Charterhouse Chapel 383
Portrait of his Father 384
Hard Times 385
The Last Muster 387
Found 389
HIROSHIGE.
The Bridge at Yeddo 93
A High Road 94
A Landscape 95
Snowy Weather 96
HIRTH, RUDOLF DU FRÉNES.
The Hop Harvest 70
HOKUSAI.
Hokusai in the Costume of a Japanese Warrior 82
Women Bathing 83
Fusiyama seen through a Sail 84
Fusiyama seen through Reeds 85
An Apparition 86
Hokusai sketching the Peerless Mountain 87
HOLL, FRANK.
"The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be
the Name of the Lord" 373
Leaving Home 374
Ordered to the Front 375
HUNT, WILLIAM HOLMAN.
The Scapegoat 8
The Light of the World 9
HUNTER, COLIN.
The Herring Market at Sea 393
KAULBACH, FRITZ AUGUST.
The Lute Player 64
KIYONAGA.
Ladies Boating 99
KORIN.
Landscape 89
Rabbits 91
LAWSON, CECIL.
The Minister's Garden 391
LEIBL, WILHELM.
Portrait of Wilhelm Leibl 71
In the Studio 72
The Village Politicians 73
The New Paper 74
In Church 75
A Peasant drinking 76
In the Peasant's Cottage 77
A Tailor's Workshop 79
LEIGHTON, LORD.
Portrait of Lord Leighton, P.R.A. 343
Captive Andromache 345
Sir Richard Burton 347
The Last Watch of Hero 348
The Bath of Psyche 349
LENBACH, FRANZ.
Portrait of Franz Lenbach 65
Portrait of Wilhelm I. 66
Portrait of Prince Bismarck 67
The Shepherd Boy 68
L'HERMITTE, LÉON.
Pay time in Harvest 267
Portrait of Léon L'Hermitte 268
MANET, ÉDOUARD.
Portrait of Édouard Manet 107
The Fifer 108
The Guitarero 109
Le Bon Bock 110
A Garden in Rueil 111
The Fight between the "Kearsarge" and "Alabama" 114
Boating 115
A Bar at the Folies Bergères 116
Spring: Jeanne 117
MASON, GEORGE HEMMING.
The End of the Day 365
MENZEL, ADOLF.
Portrait of Adolf Menze 40
From Kugler's _History of Friedrich the Great_ 41
The Coronation of King Wilhelm I. 43
From Kugler's _History of Friedrich the Great_ 45
The Damenstiftskirche at Munich 46
King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army 47
The Iron Mill 49
Sunday in the Tuileries Gardens 51
A Levee 52
MEYER, CLAUS.
The Smoking Party 63
MICHETTI, FRANCESCO PAOLO.
Going to Church 329
The Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti 330
MILLAIS, SIR JOHN EVERETT.
Portrait of Sir John Everett Millais 16
Lorenzo and Isabella 17
The North-West Passage 19
The Huguenot 20
Autumn Leaves 21
The Yeoman of the Guard 22
The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone 23
Yes or No 25
Mrs. Bischoffsheim 26
Thomas Carlyle 27
MONET, CLAUDE.
Portrait of Claude Monet 139
Monet's Home at Giverny 140
Morning on the Seine 141
A Walk in Grey Weather 143
The Church at Varangéville 144
River Scene 145
The Rocks at Bell-Isle 147
Hay-Ricks 148
A View of Rouen 149
MOORE, ALBERT.
Portrait of Albert Moore 355
Midsummer 356
Companions 357
Yellow Marguerites 359
Waiting to Cross 360
Reading Aloud 361
MOORE, HENRY.
Mount's Bay 395
MOREAU, GUSTAVE.
The Young Man and Death 213
Orpheus 214
Design for Enamel 215
The Plaint of the Poet 216
The Apparition 217
MORELLI, DOMENICO.
The Temptation of St. Anthony 327
NITTIS, GIUSEPPE DE.
Paris Races 276
OKIO.
A Carp 92
OULESS, WALTER WILLIAM.
Lord Kelvin 377
OUTAMARO.
Mother's Love 98
PATON, SIR JOSEPH NOËL.
The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania 7
PETTENKOFEN, AUGUST VON.
Portrait of August von Pettenkofen 56
A Woman Spinning 57
In the Convent Yard 59
PHILLIP, JOHN.
The Letter-Writer, Seville 33
Spanish Sisters 35
PISSARRO, CAMILLE.
Sitting up 133
Rouen 135
Sydenham Church 136
PISSARRO, LUCIEN.
Solitude 287
Ruth 288
POYNTER, EDWARD.
Idle Fear 350
The Ides of March 351
A Visit to Æsculapius 353
PRADILLA, FRANCISCO.
The Surrender of Granada 317
On the Beach 319
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES, PIERRE.
Portrait of Pierre de Chavannes 218
A Vision of Antiquity 219
The Beheading of John the Baptist 220
The Threadspinner 221
The Poor Fisherman 223
Summer 224
Autumn 225
RAFFAËLLI, FRANCISQUE JEAN.
Place St. Sulpice 271
The Midday Soup 272
The Carrier's Cart 273
Paris, 4K. 1 274
Le Chiffonier 275
RAMBERG, ARTHUR VON.
The Meeting on the Lake 69
REID, JOHN ROBERTSON.
Toil and Pleasure 371
RENOIR, FIRMIN AUGUSTE.
Supper at Bougival 125
The Woman with the Fan 126
Fisher Children by the Sea 127
The Woman with the Cat 129
A Private Box 130
The Terrace 131
ROBINSON, F. CAYLEY.
A Winter Evening 403
ROLL, ALFRED.
The Woman with a Bull 269
Manda Lamétrie, Fermière 270
ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL.
Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 153
Beata Beatrix 154
Monna Rosa 155
Ecce Ancilla Domini 157
Sancta Lilias 158
Astarte Syriaca 159
Study for Astarte Syriaca 161
Dante's Dream 163
Rosa Triplex 165
Sir Galahad 166
Mary Magdalene at the House of Simon the Pharisee 167
SANT, JAMES.
The Music Lesson 379
SISLEY, ALFRED.
Outskirts of a Wood 137
STANHOPE, R. SPENCER.
The Waters of Lethe 183
STRUDWICK, J. M.
Elaine 185
Thy Tuneful Strings wake Memories 186
Gentle Music of a bygone Day 187
The Ramparts of God's House 189
The Ten Virgins 191
TANYU.
The God Hoteï on a Journey 88
TITO, ETTORE.
The Slipper Seller 335
TOYOKUMI.
Nocturnal Reverie 103
VILLEGAS, JOSÉ.
Death of the Matador 320
WALKER, FREDERICK.
The Bathers 366
WATTS, GEORGE FREDERICK.
G. F. Watts in his Garden 196
Lady Lindsay 197
Hope 198
Paolo and Francesca 199
Love and Death 201
Ariadne 203
Orpheus and Eurydice 205
Artemis and Endymion 207
WILLETTE, ADOLFE.
The Golden Age 291
CHAPTER XXVIII
REALISM IN ENGLAND
The year 1849 was made famous by a momentous interruption in the quiet
course of English art brought about by the pre-Raphaelites. A movement,
recalling the Renaissance, laid hold of the spirit of painters. In all
studios artists spoke a language which had never been heard there
before; all great reputations were overthrown; the most celebrated
Cinquecentisti, whose names had hitherto been mentioned with respectful
awe, were referred to with a shrug as bunglers. A miracle seemed to have
taken place in the world, for the muse of painting was removed from the
pedestal on which she had stood for three centuries and set up in
triumph upon another.
To understand fully the aims of pre-Raphaelitism it is necessary to
recall the character of the age which gave it birth.
After English art had had its beginning with the great national masters
and enjoyed a prime of real splendour, it became, about the middle of
the nineteenth century, the prey to a tedious disease. A series of crude
historical painters endeavoured to fathom the noble style of the Italian
Cinquecento, without rising above the level of intelligent plagiarism.
As brilliant decorative artists possessed of pomp and majesty, and
sensuously affected by plastic beauty, as worshippers of the nude human
form, and as modern Greeks, the Italian classic painters were the worst
conceivable guides for a people who in every artistic achievement have
pursued spiritual expression in preference to plastic beauty. But in
spite of the experiences gained since the time of Hogarth, they all went
on the pilgrimage to Rome, as to a sacred spring, drank their fill in
long draughts, and came back poisoned. Even Wilkie, that charming
"little master," who did the work of a pioneer so long as he followed
the congenial Flemish painters and the Dutch, even Wilkie lost every
trace of individuality after seeing Spain and Italy. As this imitation
of the high Renaissance period led to forced and affected sentiment, it
also developed an empty academical technique. In accordance with the
precepts of the Cinquecento, artists proceeded with an affected ease to
make brief work of everything, contenting themselves with a superficial
_façade_ effect. A painting based on dexterity of hand took the place of
the religious study of nature, and a banal arrangement after celebrated
models took the place of inward absorption.
It was to no purpose that certain painters, such as _F. C. Horsley_, _J.
R. Herbert_, _J. Tenniel_, _Edwin Long_, _E. M. Ward_, and _Eastlake_,
the English Piloty, by imitation of the Flemish and Venetian masters,
made more of a return from idealism of form to colour, and that _Edwin
Armitage_, who had studied in Paris and Munich, introduced Continental
influences. They are the Delaroche, Gallait, and Bièfve of England.
Their art was an imposing scene painting, their programme always that of
the school of Bologna--the mother of all academies, great and
small--borrowing drawing from Michael Angelo and colour from Titian;
taking the best from every one, putting it all into a pot, and shaking
it together. Thus English art lost the peculiar national stamp which it
had had under Reynolds and Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. It became
an insignificant tributary of the false art which then held sway over
the Continent, insincere towards nature, full of empty rhetorical
passion, and bound to the most vacant routine. And as the grand painting
became hollow and mannered, _genre_ painting grew Philistine and
decrepit. Its innocent childishness and conventional optimism had led to
a tedious anecdotic painting. It repeated, like a talkative old man, the
most insipid tales, and did so with a complacency that never wavered and
with an unpleasant motley of colour. The English school still existed in
landscape, but for everything else it was dead.
A need for reform became urgent all the sooner because literature too
had diverged into new lines. In poetry there was the influence of the
Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had simplicity, direct feeling
for nature, and a Rousseau-like pantheism inscribed as a device upon
their banner, and it came as a reaction against the dazzling imaginative
fervour of those great and forceful men of genius Byron and Shelley.
Keats had again uttered the phrase which had before been Shaftesbury's
gospel: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In the year 1843 John Ruskin
published the first volume of his _Modern Painters_, the æsthetic creed
of which culminated in the tenet that nature alone could be the source
of all true art.
This transitional spirit, which strove for liberty from the academical
yoke, though diffidently at first, is represented in painting by the
Scotch artist _William Dyce_. In England he pursued, though undoubtedly
with greater ability, a course parallel to that of the German Nazarenes,
whose faith he championed. Born in 1806, he had in Italy, in the year
1826, made the acquaintance of Overbeck, who won him over to Perugino
and Raphael. Protesting against the histrionic emptiness of English
historical painting, he took refuge with the Quattrocentisti and the
young Raphael. His masterpiece, the Westminster frescoes, with the
Arthurian legends as their subject, goes to some extent on parallel
lines with Schnorr's frescoes on the Nibelungen myths. The
representation of vigorous manhood and tempestuous heroism has been here
attempted without sentimentality or theatrical heroics. In his oil
pictures--Madonnas, "Bacchus nursed by the Nymphs," "The Woman of
Samaria," "Christ in Gethsemane," "St. John leading Home the Virgin,"
etc.--he makes a surprising effect by the graceful, sensuous charm of
his women, by his exquisite landscapes and his tender idyllic
characters. The charming work "Jacob and Rachel," which represents
him in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, might be ascribed to Führich, except that
the developed feeling for colour bears witness to its English origin.
With yearning the youth hastens to the maiden, who stands, leaning
against the edge of the well, with her eyes cast down, half repulsing
him in her austere chastity.
[Illustration: EASTLAKE. CHRIST BLESSING LITTLE CHILDREN.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
DYCE. JACOB AND RACHEL.]
Where the Nazarenes obtain a pallid, corpse-like effect, a deep and
luminous quality of colour delights one in his pictures. He is
essentially graceful, and with this grace he combines the pure and quiet
simplicity of the Umbrian masters. There is something touching in
certain of his Madonnas, who, in long, clinging raiment, appeal to the
Godhead with arms half lifted, devout lips parted in prayer, and mild
glances lost in infinity. A dreamy loveliness brings the heavenly
figures nearer to us. Dyce expresses the magic of downcast lids with
long, dark lashes. Like the Umbrians, he delights in the elasticity of
slender limbs and the chaste grace of blossoming maiden beauty. Many
German fresco painters have become celebrated who never achieved
anything equal in artistic merit to the Westminster pictures of Dyce.
Yet he is to be reckoned with the Flandrin-Overbeck family, since he
gives a repetition of the young Raphael, though he certainly does it
well; but he only imitates and has not improved upon him.
The pictures of another Scotchman, _Sir Joseph Noël Paton_, born in
1821, appear at a rather later date. Most of them--"The Quarrel of
Oberon and Titania," "The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania" in the
Edinburgh Gallery, and his masterpiece, "The Fairy Queen"--have, from
the æsthetic standpoint, little enjoyment to offer. The drawing is hard,
the composition overladen, the colour scattered and motley. As in Ary
Scheffer, all the figures have vapid, widely opened eyes. Elves, gnomes,
women, knights, and fantastic rocks are crowded so tightly together that
the frame scarcely holds them. But the loving study of nature in the
separate parts is extraordinary. It is possible to give a botanical
definition of each plant and each flower in the foreground, with so much
character and such care has Paton executed every leaf and every blossom,
even the tiny creeping things amid the meadow grass. Here and there a
fresh ray of morning sun breaks through the light green and leaps from
blade to blade. The landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer are recalled to
mind. Emancipation from empty, heroically impassioned emphasis,
pantheistic adoration of nature, even a certain effort--unsuccessful
indeed--after an independent sentiment for colour, are what his pictures
seem to preach in their naïve angularity, their loving execution of
detail, and their bright green motley.
This was the mood of the young artists who united to form the
pre-Raphaelite group of 1848. They were students at the Royal Academy of
from twenty to four-and-twenty years of age. The first of the group,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had already written some of his poems. The
second, Holman Hunt, had still a difficulty in overcoming the opposition
of his father, who was not pleased to see him giving up a commercial
career. John Everett Millais, the youngest, had made most progress as a
painter, and was one of the best pupils at the Academy. But they were
contented neither by the artistic achievement of their teachers nor by
the method of instruction. Etty, the most valued of them all, according
to the account of Holman Hunt, painted mythological pictures, full of
empty affectation; Mulready drew in a diluted fashion, and sacrificed
everything to elegance; Maclise had fallen into patriotic banalities;
Dyce had stopped short in his course and begun again when it was too
late. Thus they had of necessity to provide their own training for
themselves. All three worked in the same studio; and it so happened that
one day--in 1847 or 1848--chance threw into their hands some engravings
of Benozzo Gozzoli's Campo-Santo frescoes in Pisa. Nature and
truth--everything which they had dimly surmised, and had missed in the
productions of English art--here they were. Overcome with admiration for
the sparkling life, the intensity of feeling, and the vigorous form of
these works, which did not even shrink from the consequences of
ugliness, they were agreed in recognising that art had always stood on
the basis of nature until the end of the fifteenth century, or, more
exactly, until the year 1508, when Raphael left Florence to paint in the
Vatican in Rome. Since then everything had gone wrong; art had stripped
off the simple garment of natural truthfulness and fallen into
conventional phrases, which in the course of centuries had become more
and more empty and repellent by vapid repetition. Was it necessary that
the persons in pictures should, to the end of the world, stand and move
just as they had done a thousand times in the works of the
Cinquecentisti? Was it necessary that human emotions--love, boldness,
remorse, and renunciation--should always be expressed by the same turn
of the head, the same lift of the eyebrows, the same gesture of the
arms, and the same folded hands, which came into vogue through the
Cinquecentisti? Where in nature are the rounded forms which Raphael, the
first Classicist, borrowed from the antique? And in the critical moments
of life do people really form themselves into such carefully balanced
groups, with the one who chances to have on the finest clothes in the
centre?
[Illustration: _Annan, photo._
PATON. THE RECONCILIATION OF OBERON AND TITANIA.]
From this reaction against the Cinquecentisti and against the shallow
imitation of them, the title pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the secret,
masonic sign P.R.B., which they added to their signatures upon their
pictures, are rendered comprehensible. But whilst Dyce, to avoid the
Cinquecentisti, imitated the Quattrocentisti, the title here is only
meant to signify that these artists, like the Quattrocentisti, had
determined to go back to the original source of real life. The Academy
pupils Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, together with the young
sculptor Thomas Woolner, who had just left school, were at first the
only members of the Brotherhood. Later the _genre_ painter James
Collinson, the painter and critic F. G. Stephens, and Rossetti's
brother, William Michael Rossetti, were admitted to the alliance.
[Illustration: HOLMAN HUNT. THE SCAPEGOAT.
(_By Permission of Messrs. Henry Graves & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
Boldly they declared war against all conventional rules, described
themselves as beginners and their pictures as attempts, and announced
themselves to be, at any rate, sincere. The programme of their school
was truth; not imitation of the old masters, but strict and keen study
of nature such as the old masters had practised themselves. They were in
reaction against the superficial dexterity of technique and the beauty
of form and intellectual emptiness to which the English historical
picture had fallen victim; they were in reaction against the trivial
banality which disfigured English _genre_ painting. In the
representation of passion the true gestures of nature were to be
rendered, without regard to grace and elegance, and without the stock
properties of pantomime. The end for which they strove was to be true
and not to create what was essentially untrue by a borrowed idealism
which had an appearance of being sublime. In opposition to the negligent
painting of the artists of their age, they demanded slavishly faithful
imitation of the model by detail, carried out with microscopic
exactness. Nothing was to be done without reverence for nature; every
part of a picture down to the smallest blade or leaf was to be directly
painted from the original. Even at the expense of total effect every
picture was to be carried out in minutest detail. It was better to
stammer than to make empty phrases. A young and vigorous art, such as
had been in the fifteenth century, could win its way, as they believed,
from this conception alone.
In all these points, in the revolt against the emptiness of the _beauté
suprême_ and the flowing lines of the accepted routine of composition,
they were at one with Courbet and Millet. It was only in further
developments that the French and English parted company; English realism
received a specifically English tinge. Since every form of
Classicism--for to this point they were led by the train of their
ideas--declares the ideal completion of form, of physical presentment,
to be its highest aim, the standard-bearers of realism were obliged to
seek the highest aim of their art, founded exclusively on the study of
nature, in the representation of moral and intellectual life, in a
thoughtful form of spiritual creation. The blending of realism with
profundity of ideas, of uncompromising truth to nature in form with
philosophic and poetic substance, is of the very essence of the
pre-Raphaelites. They are transcendental naturalists, equally widely
removed from Classicism, which deals only with beautiful bodies, as from
realism proper, which only proposes to represent a fragment of nature.
From opposition to abstract beauty of form they insist upon what is
characteristic, energetic, angular; but their figures painted faithfully
from nature are the vehicles of a metaphysical idea. From the first they
saturated themselves with poetry. Holman Hunt has an enthusiasm for
Keats and the Bible, Rossetti for Dante, Millais for the mediæval poems
of chivalry.
[Illustration: HOLMAN HUNT. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
(_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.
(_By permission of Theodore Watts Dunton, Esq., the owner of the
picture._)]
All three appeared before the public for the first time in the year
1849. John Millais and Holman Hunt exhibited in the Royal Academy, the
one being represented by his "Lorenzo and Isabella," a subject drawn
from Keats, the other by his "Rienzi." Rossetti had his picture, "The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin," exhibited at the Free Exhibition, afterwards
known as the Portland Gallery. All three works excited attention and
also derision, and much shaking of heads. The three next works of
1850--"A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary," by
Holman Hunt; "The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,"
by Millais; and "The Annunciation" by Rossetti--were received with the
same amused contempt. When they exhibited for the third time--Holman
Hunt, a scene from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_; Millais, "The Return
of the Dove to the Ark" and "The Woodman's Daughter"--such a storm of
excitement broke forth that the pictures had to be removed from the
exhibition. A furious article appeared in _The Art Journal_; the
exhibitors, it was said, were certainly young, but they were too old to
commit such sins of youth. Even Dickens turned against them in
_Household Words_. The painters who had been assailed made their answer.
William Michael Rossetti laid down the principles of the Brotherhood by
an article in a periodical called _The Critic_, and smuggled a second
article into _The Spectator_. In 1850 they founded a monthly magazine
for the defence of their theories, _The Germ_, which on the third number
took the title _Art and Poetry_, and was most charmingly embellished
with drawings by Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and others. Stephens
published an essay in it, on the ways and aims of the early Italians,
which gave him occasion to discuss the works recently produced in the
spirit of simplicity known to these old masters. Madox Brown wrote a
paper on historical painting, in which he asserted that the true basis
of historical painting must be strict fidelity to the model, to the
exclusion of all generalisation and beautifying, and exact antiquarian
study of costumes and furniture in contradistinction to the fancy
history of the elder painters. But all these articles were written to no
purpose. After the fourth number the magazine was stopped, and in these
days it has become a curiosity for bibliomaniacs. But support came from
another side. Holman Hunt's picture dealing with a scene from
Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ received the most trenchant
condemnation in _The Times_. John Ruskin came forward as his champion
and replied on 13th May 1851. _The Times_ contained yet a second letter
from him on 30th May. And soon afterwards both were issued as a
pamphlet, with the title _Pre-Raphaelitism_, _its Principles, and
Turner_. These works, he said, did not imitate old pictures, but nature;
what alienated the public in them was their truth and rightness, which
had broken abruptly and successfully with the conventional sweep of
lines.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. LEAR AND CORDELIA.
(_By permission of Albert Wood, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
_Holman Hunt_ is the painter who has been most consistent in clinging
throughout his life to these original principles of the Brotherhood. He
is distinguished by a depth of thought which at last tends to become
entirely elusive, and often a depth of spirit more profound than diver
ever plumbed; but at the same time by an angular, gnarled realism which
has scarcely its equal in all the European art of the century.
"The Flight of Madeleine and Porphyro," from Keats' _Eve of St. Agnes_,
was the first picture, the subject being borrowed in 1848 from his
favourite poet. In the work through which he first acknowledged himself
a member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he has given a plain and
simple rendering of the scene in the introductory chapter of Bulwer
Lytton's _Rienzi_. He has chosen the moment when Rienzi, kneeling beside
the corpse of his brother, takes a vow of vengeance against the murderer
who is riding away. The composition avoids any kind of conventional
pyramidal structure. In the foreground every flower is painted and every
colour is frankly set beside its neighbour without the traditional
gradation. His third picture, "A Converted British Family sheltering a
Christian Missionary," is not to be reckoned amongst his best
performances. It is forced naïveté, suggesting the old masters, to unite
two entirely different scenes upon the same canvas: in the background
there are fugitives and pursuers, and a Druid, merely visible by his
outstretched arms, inciting the populace to the murder of a missionary;
in the foreground a hut open on all sides, which could really offer no
protection at all. Yet in this hut a priest is hiding, tended by
converted Britons. However, the drawing of the nude bodies is an
admirable piece of realism; admirable, also, is the way in which he has
expressed the fear of the inmates, and the fanatical bloodthirsty rage
of the pursuers, and this without any false heroics, without any
rhetoric based upon the traditional language of gesture. The picture
from Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, with the motto, "Death is
a fearful thing, and shamed life a hateful," is perhaps theatrical in
its arrangement, though it is likewise earnest and convincing in
psychological expression.
Microscopic fidelity to nature, which formed the first principle in the
programme of the Brotherhood, has been carried in Holman Hunt to the
highest possible point. Every flower and every ear of corn, every
feather and every blade of grass, every fragment of bark on the trees
and every muscle, is painted with scrupulous accuracy. The joke made
about the pre-Raphaelites has reference to Holman Hunt: it was said that
when they had to paint a landscape they used to bring to their studio a
blade of grass, a leaf, and a piece of bark, and they multiplied them
microscopically so many thousand times until the landscape was finished.
His works are a triumph of industry, and for that very reason they are
not a pleasure to the eye. A petty, pedantic fidelity to nature injures
the total effect, and the hard colours--pungent green, vivid yellow,
glaring blue, and glowing red--which Holman Hunt places immediately
beside each other, give his pictures something brusque, barbaric, and
jarring. But as a reaction against a system of painting by routine,
which had become mannered, such truth without all compromise, such
painstaking effort at the utmost possible fidelity to nature, was, in
its very harshness, of epoch-making significance.
With regard, also, to the transcendental purport of his pictures Holman
Hunt is perhaps the most genuine of the group. In the whole history of
art there are no religious pictures in which uncompromising naturalism
has made so remarkable an alliance with a pietistic depth of ideas. The
first, which he sent to the exhibition of 1854, "The Light of the
World," represents Christ wandering through the night in a
gold-embroidered mantle, with a lantern in His hand, like a Divine
Diogenes seeking men. Taine, who studied the picture impartially without
the catalogue, describes it, without further addition, as "Christ by
night with a lantern." But for Holman Hunt the meaning is Christianity
illuminating the universe with the mystic light of Faith and seeking
admission at the long-closed door of unbelief. It was because of this
implicit suggestion that the work made an indescribable sensation in
England; it had to go on pilgrimage from town to town, and hundreds of
thousands of copies of the engraving were sold. The pietistic feeling
of this ascetic preacher was so strong that he was able to venture on
pictures like "The Scapegoat" of 1856 without becoming comical.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
FORD MADOX BROWN. ROMEO AND JULIET.]
[Illustration: FORD MADOX BROWN. CHRIST WASHING PETER'S FEET.]
A striving to attain the greatest possible local truth had led Holman
Hunt to the East when he began these biblical pictures. He spent several
years in Palestine studying the topographical character of the land, its
buildings and its people, and endeavoured with the help of these actual
men and women and these landscape scenes to reconstruct the events of
biblical history with antiquarian fidelity. To paint "The Shadow of
Death" he searched in the East until he discovered a Jew who
corresponded to his idea of Christ, and painted him, a strong, powerful
man, the genuine son of a carpenter, with that astounding truth to
nature with which Hubert van Eyck painted his Adam. Even the hairs of
the breast and legs are as faithfully rendered as if one saw the model
in a glass. Near this naked carpenter--for He is clothed only with a
leather apron--there kneels a modern Eastern woman, bowed over a chest,
in which various Oriental vessels are lying. The ground is covered with
shavings of wood. Up to this point, therefore, it is a naturalistic
picture from the modern East. But here Holman Hunt's pietistic sentiment
is seen: it is the eve of a festival; the sun casts its last dying rays
into the room; the journeyman carpenter wearily stretches out His arms,
and the shadow of His body describes upon the wall the prophetic form of
the Cross.
Another picture represented the discovery of our Lord in the Temple, a
third the flock which has been astray following the Good Shepherd into
His Father's fold. On his picture of the flight into Egypt, or, as he
has himself called it, "The Triumph of the Innocents," he published a
pamphlet of twelve pages, in which he goes into all the historical
events connected with the picture with the loyalty of an historian; he
discusses everything--in what month the flight took place, and by what
route, how old Christ was, to what race the ass belonged, and what
clothes were worn by Saint Joseph and Mary. One might be forgiven for
thinking such a production the absurd effusion of a whimsical pedant
were it not that Hunt is so grimly in earnest in everything he does. In
spite of all his peculiarities it must be admitted that he gave a deep
and earnest religious character to English art, which before his time
had been so paltry; and this explains the powerful impression which he
made upon his contemporaries.
The artist most closely allied to him in technique is _Ford Madox
Brown_, who did not reckon himself officially with the pre-Raphaelites,
though he followed the same principles in what concerned the treatment
of detail. Only a little senior to the founders of the Brotherhood--he
was nine-and-twenty at the time--he is to be regarded as their more
mature ally and forerunner. Rossetti was under no illusion when, in the
beginning of his studies, he turned to him directly. In those years
Madox Brown was the only English painter who was not addicted to the
trivialities of paltry _genre_ painting or the theatrical heroics of
traditional history. He is a bold artist, with a gift of dramatic force
and a very rare capacity of concentration, and these qualities hindered
him from following the doctrine of the pre-Raphaelites in all its
consequences. If he had, in accordance with their programme, exclusively
confined himself to work from the living model, several of his most
striking and powerful pictures would never have been painted.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS.]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
MILLAIS. LORENZO AND ISABELLA.]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MILLAIS. THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.]
Madox Brown passed his youth on the Continent--in Antwerp with Wappers,
in Paris, and in Rome. The pictures which he painted there in the
beginning of the forties were produced, as regards technique, under the
influence of Wappers. The subjects were taken from Byron: "The Sleep of
Parisina" and "Manfred on the Jungfrau." It is only in the latter that
an independent initiative is perceptible. In contradistinction from the
generalities of the school of Wappers he aimed at greater depth of
psychology and accuracy of costume, while at the same time he
endeavoured, though without success, to replace the conventional studio
light by the carefully observed effect of free light. These three
things--truth of colour, of spiritual expression, and of historical
character--were from this time forth his principal care. And when his
cartoon of "Harold," painted in Paris in the year 1844, was exhibited in
Westminster Hall, it was chiefly this scrupulous effort at truth which
made such a vivid impression upon the younger generation. In the first
masterpiece which he painted after his return to London in 1848 he
stands out already in all his rugged individuality. "Lear and Cordelia,"
founded on a most tragic passage in the most tragic of the great dramas
of Shakespeare, is here treated with impressive cogency. It stood in
such abrupt opposition to the traditional historical painting that
perhaps nothing was ever so sharply opposed to anything so universally
accepted. The figures stand out stiff and parti-coloured like card
kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalised beauty. And
the colouring is just as incoherent. The brown sauce, which every one
had hitherto respected like a binding social law, had given way to a
bright joy of colour, the half-barbaric motley which one finds in old
miniatures. It is only when one studies the brilliant details, used
merely in the service of a great psychological effect, that this
outwardly repellent picture takes shape as a powerful work of art, a
work of profound human truth. Nothing is sacrificed to pose, graceful
show, or histrionic affectation. Like the German masters of the
fifteenth century, Madox Brown makes no attempt to dilute what is ugly,
nor did Holbein either when he painted the leprous beggars in his "Altar
to St. Sebastian." Every figure, whether fair or foul, is, in bearing,
expression, and gesture, a character of robust and rigorous hardihood,
and has that intense fulness of life which is compressed in those carved
wooden figures of mediæval altars: the aged Lear with his weather-beaten
face and his waving beard; the envious Regan; the cold, cruel, ambitious
Goneril; Albany, with his fair, inexpressive head; the gross, brutal
Cornwall; Burgundy, biting his nails in indecision; and Cordelia, in her
touching, bashful grace. And to this angular frankness of the primitive
masters he unites the profound learning of the modern historian. All the
archæological details, the old British costumes, jewels, modes of
wearing the hair, weapons, furniture, and hangings, have been studied
with the accuracy of Menzel. He knows nothing of the academic rules of
composition, and his robes fall naturally without the petty appendage of
fair folds and graceful motives.
[Illustration: MILLAIS. THE HUGUENOT.]
The picture in which he treated the balcony scene in Shakespeare's
_Romeo and Juliet_ is outwardly repellent, like "Lear and Cordelia," but
what a hollow effect is made by Makart's theatrical heroics beside this
aboriginal sensuousness, this intensity of expression! Juliet's dress
has fallen from her shoulders, and, devoid of will and thought, with
closed lids, half-naked, and thrilling in every fibre with the lingering
joy of the hours that have passed, she abandons herself to the last
fiery embraces of Romeo, who in stormy haste is feeling with one foot
for the ladder of ropes.
He has solved a yet more difficult problem in the picture "Elijah and
the Widow."
[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
MILLAIS. AUTUMN LEAVES.]
"See, thy son liveth," are the words in the Bible with which the hoary
Elijah brings the boy, raised from death and still enveloped in his
shroud, to the agonised mother kneeling at the foot of the sepulchre.
The woman makes answer: "Now by this I know that thou art a man of God."
In the embodiment of this scene likewise Madox Brown has aimed in
costume and accessories at a complete harmony between the figures and
the character of the epoch, and has set out with an entirely accurate
study of Assyrian and Egyptian monuments. Even the inscription on the
wall and the Egyptian antiquities correspond to ancient originals. At
the same time the figures have been given the breath of new life. Elijah
looks more like a wild aboriginal man than a saint of the Cinquecento.
The ecstasy of the mother, the astonishment of the child whose great
eyes, still unaccustomed to the light, gaze into the world again with a
dreamy effort, after having beheld the mysteries of death--these are
things depicted with an astonishing power. The downright but convincing
method in which Hogarth paints the soul has dislodged the hollow,
heroical ideal of beauty of the older historical painting. Madox Brown's
confession of faith, which he formulated as an author, culminates in the
tenet that truth is the means of art, its end being the quickening of
the soul. This he expresses in two words: "emotional truth."
While Holman Hunt and Madox Brown held fast throughout their lives to
the pre-Raphaelite principles, pre-Raphaelitism was for _John Everett
Millais_, the youngest of the three, merely a transitory phase, a stage
in his artistic development.
Sir John Millais was born 8th June 1829, in Southampton, where his
family had come from Jersey. Thus he is half a Frenchman by descent.
His childhood was passed in Dinant in Brittany, but when he was nine
years old he went to a London school of drawing. He was then the little
fair-haired boy in a holland blouse, a broad sash, and a large sailor's
collar, whom John Phillip painted in those days. When eleven he entered
the Royal Academy, probably being the youngest pupil there; at thirteen
he won a prize medal for the best drawing from the antique; at fifteen
he was already painting; and at seventeen he exhibited an historical
picture, "Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru," which was praised by the
critics as the best in the exhibition of 1846. With "Elgiva," a work
exhibited in 1847, this first period, in which he followed the lines of
the now forgotten painter Hilton, was brought to an end. His next work,
"Lorenzo and Isabella," now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, bore
the letters P.R.B., as a sign of his new confession of faith.
Microscopically exact work in detail has taken the place of the large
bravura and the empty imitation of the Cinquecentisti. The theme was
borrowed from one of Boccaccio's tales, _The Pot of Basil_--the tale on
which Keats founded _Isabella_. A company of Florentines in the costume
of the thirteenth century are assembled at dinner. Lorenzo, pale and in
suppressed excitement, sits beside the lovely Isabella, looking at her
with a glance of deep, consuming passion. Isabella's brother, angered at
it, gives a kick to her dog. All the persons at the table are
likenesses. The critic F. G. Stephens sat for the beloved of Isabella,
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the toper holding his glass to his lips
at the far right of the table. Even the ornaments upon the damask cloth,
the screen, and the tapestry in the background are painted, stroke after
stroke, with the conscientious devotion of a primitive painter. Jan van
Eyck's brilliancy of colour is united to Perugino's suavity of feeling,
and the chivalrous spirit of the _Decameron_ seized with the sureness of
a subtle literary scholar.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLAIS. THE YEOMAN OF THE GUARD.]
The work of 1850, "The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the
Carpenter," illustrated a verse in the Bible (Zechariah xiii. 6): "And
one shall say unto Him, What are these wounds in Thine hands? Then He
shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My
friends." The Child Jesus, who is standing before the joiner's bench,
has hurt Himself in the hand. St. Joseph is leaning over to look at the
wound, and Mary is kneeling beside the Child, trying to console Him
with her caresses, whilst the little St. John is bringing water in a
wooden vessel. Upon the other side of the bench stands the aged Anna, in
the act of drawing out of the wood the nail which has caused the injury.
A workman is labouring busily at the joiner's bench. The floor of the
workshop is littered with shavings, and tools hang round upon the walls.
The Quattrocentisti were likewise the determining influence in the
treatment of this subject. Ascetic austerity has taken the place of
ideal draperies, and angularity that of the noble flow of line. The
figure of Mary, who, with her yellow kerchief, resembled the wife of a
London citizen, was the cause of special offence.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
MILLAIS. THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE.
(_By permission of Messrs. Thomas Agnew & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
MILLAIS. YES OR NO?]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MILLAIS. MRS. BISCHOFFSHEIM.
(_By permission of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, the owner of the picture._)]
Up to the seventies Millais continued to paint such pictures out of the
Bible, or from English and mediæval poets, with varying success. One of
them, which in its brilliant colouring looked like an old picture upon
glass, represented the return of the dove to Noah's ark. The central
point was formed by two slender young women in mediæval costume, who
received the exhausted bird in their delicate hands. The picture, "The
Woodman's Daughter," was an illustration to a poem by Coventry Patmore,
on the love of a young noble for a poor child of the wood. In a
semicircular picture of 1852 he painted Ophelia as she floats singing in
the green pool where the white water-lilies cover her like mortuary
wreaths--floats with her parted lips flickering with a gentle smile of
distraction. The other picture of this year, "The Huguenot," represented
two lovers taking leave of each other in an old park upon the eve of St.
Bartholomew. She is winding a white scarf round his arm to save him from
death by this badge of the Catholics, whilst he is gently resisting. The
mood of the man standing before the dark gate of death, the moral
strength which vanquishes his fear, and all the solemnity of his
farewell to life are expressed in his glance. A world of love rests in
the eyes of the woman. Millais has often treated this problem of the
loving woman with earnest and almost sombre realism, that knows no touch
of swooning sentimentality. "The Order of Release" of 1853 shows a
jailor in the scarlet uniform of the eighteenth century opening a heavy
prison door to set at liberty a Highlander, whose release has been
obtained by his wife. A scene from the seventeenth century is treated in
"The Proscribed Royalist": a noble cavalier, hidden in a hollow tree, is
kissing the hand of a graceful, trembling woman, who has been daily
bringing him food at the risk of her life. "The Black Brunswicker" of
1856 closed this series of silent and motionless dramas. In the picture
of 1857, "Sir Isumbras at the Ford," an old knight is riding home
through the twilight of a sultry day in June. The dust of the journey
lies upon his golden armour. At a ford he has fallen in with two
children, and has lifted them up to carry them over the water. And "The
Vale of Rest," a picture deep and intense in its scheme of colour,
earnest and melancholy as a requiem, revealed--with a sentiment a little
like that of Lessing--a cloister garden where two nuns are silently
preparing a grave in the evening light; while "The Eve of Saint Agnes"
in 1863 illustrated the same poem of Keats to which ten years previously
Holman Hunt had devoted his work of early years. Madeleine has heard the
old legend, telling how girls receive the tender homage of their future
husbands if they go through their evening prayer supperless at midnight.
With her heart filled with the thoughts of love she quits the hall where
the guests are seated at a merry feast, and mounts to her room so
hastily that her thin taper is extinguished on the way. She enters her
little chamber, kneels down, repeats the prayer, and rises to her feet,
taking off her finery and loosening her hair. The clear moonlight
streams through the window, throwing a ghostly illumination over the
little images of saints in the room, falling like a caress upon the
tender young breast of the girl, playing upon her folded hands, and
touching her long, fair hair with a radiance like a vaporous glory. In
the shadow of the bed she sees him whom she loves. Motionless, as in a
dream, she stands, nor ventures to turn lest the fair vision should
vanish. "The Deliverance of a Heretic condemned to the Stake," "Joan of
Arc," "Cinderella," "The Last Rose," that dreamy picture of romantic
grace, "The Childhood of Sir Walter Raleigh," and the picture of the
hoary Moses, supported by Hur and Aaron, watching from the mountain-top
the victory of Joshua, were the principal works achieved in the later
years of the master. But when these pictures were executed England had
become accustomed to honour Millais, not as a pre-Raphaelite, but as her
greatest portrait painter.
[Illustration: MILLAIS. THOMAS CARLYLE.]
His portrait of himself explains this transformation. With his white
linen jacket and his fresh sunburnt face Sir John Millais does not look
in the least like a "Romanticist," scarcely like a painter; he has
rather the air of being a wealthy landowner. He was a man of a sound and
straightforward nature, a great and energetic master, conscious of his
aim, but a poet in Ruskin's sense of the word is what he has never been.
His pre-Raphaelitism was only a flirtation. His methods of thought were
too concrete, his hand too powerful, for him to have lingered always in
the world of the English poets, or endured the precise style of the
pre-Raphaelites. "Millais will 'go far' if he will only change his
boots," About had written on the occasion of the World Exhibition of
1855; when that of 1867 was opened Millais appeared in absolutely new
shoes. The great exhibition of 1857 in Manchester, which made known for
the first time how many of the works of Velasquez were hidden in English
private collections, had helped Millais to the knowledge of himself.
From the naturalism of the Quattrocentisti he made a transition to the
naturalism of Velasquez.
Millais was a born portrait painter. His cool and yet finely sensitive
nature, his simple, manly temperament, directed him to this department,
which rather gravitates to the observant and imitative than to the
creative pole of art. In his pictures he has the secret of enchanting
and of repelling; he has arrived at really definite issues in portrait
painting. His likenesses are all of them as convincing as they are
actual. Together with the Venetians and with Velasquez, Millais belongs
to the master spirits of the grand style, which relies upon the large
movement of lines, in figure and in face, upon the broad foundation of
surfaces, and the strict subordination of individual details. His
figures are characteristic and recognisable even in outline. He makes no
effort to render them interesting by picturesque attitudes, or to vivify
them by placing them in any situation. There they stand calm, and
sometimes stiff and cold; they make no attempt at conversation with the
spectator, nor come out of themselves, as it were, but fix their eyes
upon him with an air of well-bred composure and indifference. Even the
hands are not made use of for characterisation.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
MILLAIS. THE VALE OF REST.]
The extraordinary intensity of life which sparkles in his great figures,
so simply displayed, is almost exclusively concentrated in the heads.
Millais is perhaps the first master of characterisation amongst the
moderns. To bold and powerful exposition there is united a noble and
psychical gaze. The eyes which he paints are like windows through which
the soul is visible.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. THE LAST OF ENGLAND.]
Amongst his portraits of men, those of Gladstone and Hook stand in the
first rank: as paintings perhaps they are not specially eminent; both
have an opaque, sooty tone, from which Millais' works not unfrequently
suffer, but as a definition of complex personalities they are comparable
only with the best pictures of Lenbach. How firmly does the statesman
hold himself, despite his age, the old tree-feller, the stern idealist,
a genuine English figure chiselled out of hard wood. The play of light
centres all the interest on the fine, earnest, and puckered features,
the lofty forehead, the energetic chin, and the liquid, thoughtful eyes.
All the biography of Gladstone lies in this picture, which is simpler
and greater in intuition than that which Lenbach painted of him. Hook,
with his broad face, furrowed with wrinkles, looks like an apostle or a
fisher. Millais has looked into the heart of this man, who has in him
something rugged and faithful, massive and tender; the painter of
vigorous fishermen and vaporous sunbeams. Hook's landscapes have a
forceful, earnest, and well-nigh religious effect, and something
patriarchal and biblical lies in his gentle, reflective, and
contemplative glance.
In his portrait of the Duke of Westminster, painted in 1878, Millais
depicts him in hunting dress, red coat, white corduroys, and high,
flexible boots, as he stands and buttons on his glove. The same year
"The Yeoman of the Guard" was exhibited in Paris--the old type of
discipline and loyalty, who sits there in his deep red uniform, with
features cast in bronze, like a Velasquez of 1878. Disraeli, Cardinal
Newman, John Bright, Lord Salisbury, Charles Waring, Sir Henry Irving,
the Marquis of Lorne, and Simon Fraser are all worthy descendants of the
eminent men whom Reynolds painted a century before. The plastic effect
of the figures is increased by the vacant, neutral ground of the
picture. Like Velasquez, Millais has made use of every possible
background, from the simplest, from the nullity of an almost black or
bright surface, to richly furnished rooms and views of landscape.
Sometimes it is only indicated by a plain chair or table that the figure
is standing in a room, or a heavy crimson curtain falls to serve as a
_repoussoir_ for the head. With a noble abstention he avoids prettiness
of line and insipid motives, and remains true to this virile taste even
in his portraits of women. His women have curiously little of the
æsthetical trait which runs elsewhere through English portraits of
ladies. Millais renders them--as in the picture "Dummy Whist"--neither
sweet nor tender, gives them nothing arch, sprightly, nor triumphant.
Severe and sculptural in their mien, and full of character rather than
beauty, proud in bearing and upright in pose, their serious, energetic
features betray decision of character; and the glance of their brown
eyes--eyes like Juno's--is indifferent and almost hard. A straight and
liberal forehead, a beautifully formed and very determined mouth, and a
full, round chin complete this impression of earnest dignity, august
majesty, and chilling pride. To this regular avoidance of every trace of
available charm there is joined a strict taste in toilette. He prefers
to work with dark or subdued contrasts of colour, and he is also fond of
large-flowered silks--black with citron-yellow and black with dark red.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
FORD MADOX BROWN. WORK.
(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]
And this same stringent painter of character commands, as few others,
the soft light brush of a painter of children. No one since Reynolds and
Gainsborough has painted with so much character as Millais the dazzling
freshness of English youth; the energetic pose of a boy's head or the
beauty of an English girl--a thing which stands in the world alone: the
soft, glancing, silken locks, rippling to a _blonde cendrée_, pale,
delicate little faces, pouting little mouths, and great, shining blue,
dreamy, childish eyes. Sometimes they stand in rose-coloured dresses
embroidered with silver in front of a deep green curtain, or sit reading
upon a dark red carpet flowered with black. At other times they are
arrayed like the little Infantas of Velasquez, and play with a spaniel
like the Doge's children of Titian, or hold out with both hands an apron
full of flowers, which Millais paints with a high degree of finish. A
spray of pale red roses, chrysanthemums, or lilies stands near. One must
be a great master of characterisation to paint conscious, dignified, and
earnest feminine beauty like that of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, and at the same
time that fragrant perfume of the fresh and dewy spring of youth which
breathes from Millais' pictures of children.
[Illustration: PHILLIP. THE LETTER-WRITER, SEVILLE.]
Millais is one of those men in the history of nineteenth-century
painting who are as forcible and healthy as they are many-sided. I do
not know one who could have developed so swiftly from a style of the
most minute exactness to one of the most powerful breadth; not one who
could have united such poetry of conception with such an enormous
knowledge of human beings; not one who could have been so like Proteus
in variety--at one moment charming, at another dreamy, at another
entirely positive. In their firm structure and largeness of manner his
landscapes sometimes recall Théodore Rousseau. And now the
pre-Raphaelite is just a little evident in an excess of detail. He
paints every blade of grass and every small plant, though there is at
the same time a largeness in the midst of this scrupulous exactitude. He
does not merely see the isolated fact through a magnifying lens, but has
eyes that are sensitive to the poetry of the whole, and in spite of all
study of detail he sometimes reaches a total effect which is altogether
impressionist. His picture "Chill October" has an airy life, a grey,
vibrating atmosphere, such as only John Constable painted elsewhere.
Such a concrete study of nature as was made by the pre-Raphaelites of
necessity led at last to entirely realistic pictures from modern life.
In their biblical and poetic pictures they had started from the
conviction that new life-blood could only be poured into the old
conventional types, which had gradually become meaningless by tactfully
drawing the models for them from popular life. They believed, as the
masters of Florence and Bruges had done before them, that there could be
no good painting without strict dependence on the model; that it was of
the utmost importance to give a poetic or legendary figure the stamp of
nature, the strong savour of individuality. All their creations are
based upon the elements of portrait painting, even when they illustrate
remote scenes from the New Testament or from mediæval poetry. And these
elements at last led them altogether to give up transposing such figures
into an alien _milieu_, and simply to paint what was offered by their
own surroundings. In this way they reached the goal which was arrived at
in French painting through Courbet and Ribot. It is due in the first
place to the pre-Raphaelites that the well-meant and moderately painted
_genre_ picture of the old style, which, with its wealth of pathetic
stories, was once a prime source of supposed artistic pleasure, was
finally vanquished in England, and made way for earnest and vigorous
painting,--painting which sought to make its effect by purely artistic
means, and proudly declined attempt to conceal intrinsic weakness in
"interesting" subject drawn from external sources. As early as 1855
Millais exhibited a picture in the Royal Academy which Ruskin called a
truly great work containing the elements of immortality--"The Rescue."
It represented a fireman who has carried three children from a burning
house and laid them in the arms of their parents. Narrative purport was
entirely renounced. The fireman was treated without sentimentality, and
in a way that suggested the cool fulfilment of a duty, and the agitation
of the parents was also rendered without any dash of melodrama. Then
there followed that masterpiece of exquisite and soft colouring, tender
and moving expression, and infinite grace, "The Gambler's Wife," sadly
taking up the cards which have brought her misery upon her. In 1874 was
painted "The North-West Passage," a sort of modern symbol of the
forceful, enterprising English people who have populated and subdued
half the world from their little island kingdom. "There is a passage to
the Pole, and England will find it--must find it." These are more or
less the words spoken by Trelawney, the old friend and comrade of Byron
in Greece. With a chart before him he is brooding over the plan of the
North-West Passage, and upon his own outstretched hand, which would fain
hold the future in its grasp, the hand of a youthful woman is soothingly
laid, as she sits at his feet reading to him the narrative of the last
voyage of discovery. The figure of the seaman with his white beard has
a strong, sinewy life, and the broad daylight streams through the room,
filled with charts and atlases. The sea and clear, bright sky gleam
through the open window. It is a powerful and moving picture, one of
those modern creations in which the ideas of the nineteenth century are
concentrated with simplicity and a renunciation of all hollow emphasis.
[Illustration: PHILLIP. SPANISH SISTERS.]
A few pictures of modern life which have nothing in common with the
older _genre_ painting may even be found among the works of the
devotionalist Holman Hunt. "Awakened Conscience," according to the
explanation of the painter, tells the story of a young woman seduced by
a cruel and light-minded man, and kept in a luxurious little
country-house. They are together. Seated at the piano he is playing the
old melody "Oft in the Stilly Night," and the strains of the song recall
to the frail maiden her youth, and the years of purity and innocence.
Thus even Hunt has not overcome the moralising tendencies of Hogarth,
though his taste is more discreet and delicate. He has struck deeper
chords of thought than the English public had heard before. And in
particular the painting is not a mere substratum for the story; it has
become the principal thing, and the story subsidiary. In another
picture, "May Morning on Magdalen Tower," he renounced all deeper
purpose altogether, and merely painted a number of Oxford dons and
students, who, in accordance with the old custom, usher in the May with
a hymn from the college tower.
But the most remarkable work of this description has been executed by
Madox Brown, the English Menzel, who has not merely reconstructed the
environment of past ages with the accuracy of an eye-witness, but has
looked upon the drama of modern life as an attentive observer. His first
picture, "The Last of England," was executed in the June of 1852, at a
time when emigration to America began to take serious proportions. A
married couple, humble, middle-class people, are sitting on the deck of
a ship. The man, in his thick cloth overcoat, with a soft felt hat on
his head, a pale face, and sunken eyes with dark rings underneath, casts
one more look upon his native-land, which vanishes in the hazy distance,
as he thinks bitterly of lost hopes and vain struggles. But the young
wife, in a light-coloured cloak and a pretty round bonnet with wide
strings, gazes before her with gentle resignation, from underneath a
great umbrella protecting her from the boisterous sea-wind.
In "Work," begun at the same period, and finished, after various
interruptions, in 1865, he has produced the first modern picture of
artisans after Courbet's "Stone-breakers." The painter, who was then
living in Hampstead, where extensive cuttings were being made for the
laying down of gas-pipes, daily saw the English artisan at labour in all
his thick-set strength. This gave him the theme for his picture. In
bright daylight on a glaring summer afternoon artisans are digging a
trench for gas-pipes in a busy street. Women and poor children are
standing near. Even the older _genre_ artists had painted men in their
working blouses, but only joking and making merry, never at work. Like
stage-managers who are sure of their public, they always set the same
troop of puppets dancing. Madox Brown's artisans are robust and
raw-boned figures; where the older artists affected to be witty with
their _genre_ painting, Madox Brown painted straightforwardly, without
humour and without making his figures beautiful. The composition of his
pictures is just as plain. No one poses, no one makes impassioned
gestures, no one thinks of grouping himself with his neighbour in fine
flowing lines. It is pleasant to think that this powerful symbol of work
has passed by presentation into the possession of one of the greatest
manufacturing towns in England, into the gallery of Manchester.
[Illustration: R. ANSDELL. A SETTER AND GROUSE.]
A Scotchman, born in Aberdeen, _John Phillip_ was the vigorous abettor
of the pre-Raphaelites in these realistic endeavours. He, too, was a
painter in the full meaning of the word, and he has therefore left works
with which the future will have to reckon. Velasquez had opened his eyes
as he had opened those of Millais. When Phillip went to Spain in 1851,
he was not the first who had trod the Museo del Prado. Wilkie had
painted in Spain before him, and Ansdell had been busy there at the same
time. But no one had been able to grasp in any degree the impressive
majesty of the old Spanish painters. John Phillip alone gained something
of the _verve_ of Velasquez, a broad, virile technique which
distinguishes him from all his English contemporaries. The impression
received from his pictures is one of opulence, depth, and weight; they
unite something of the strength of Velasquez to a more Venetian
splendour of colour. The streets of Seville, the Spanish port on the
Guadalquivir, the town where Velasquez and Murillo were born, were his
chief field of study. Here he saw those market-women, black as mulattoes
and sturdy as grenadiers, who sit in front of their fruit-baskets under
a great umbrella, and those water-carriers with sunburnt visages,
strongly built chests, and athletic arms.
After he had returned to Scotland he occasionally painted pictures of
ceremonies, "The House of Commons," "The Wedding of the Princess
Royal," and so forth, but he soon returned to subjects from Spanish
life. Gipsy-looking, cigarette-smoking women, with sparkling eyes and
jet-black hair, young folks dancing to the castanets, bull-fighters with
glittering silver-grey costume and flashing glances, dark-brown peasants
in citron-yellow petticoats, hollow-eyed manufactory girls, potters, and
glass-blowers.--such are the materials of Phillip's pictures. They give
no scope to anecdote; but they always reveal a fragment of reality which
emits a world of impressions and an opulence of artistic ability. As
painter _par excellence_, John Phillip stands in opposition to older
English _genre_ painters. Whilst they were, in the first place, at pains
to tell a story intelligibly, Phillip was a colourist, a _maître
peintre_, whose figures were developed from the colours, and whose
creations are so full of character that they will always assert their
place with the best that has ever been painted. Even in England, the
country of literary and narrative painting, art was no longer an
instrument for expressing ideas; it had become an end in itself, and had
discovered colour as its prime and most essential medium of expression.
CHAPTER XXIX
REALISM IN GERMANY
In Germany the realistic movement was carried out in much the same way
as in France, though it came into action two decades after its French
original. Here also it was recognised that the well-meant but badly
painted anecdote must give way to the well-painted picture: and if we
inquire who it was that gave to Germany the first serious paintings
inspired by the modern spirit the reply, without hesitation, must be
Adolf Menzel. The pioneering work of this great little man, who for
fifty years had embodied in their typical perfection all phases of
German art, is something fabulous: the greatest and, one might almost
say, the only historical painter of bygone epochs, the only one who knew
a previous period so intimately that he could venture on painting it,
was also the leader of the great movement which, in the seventies, aimed
at the representation of our own life. His first appearance was in the
time when the proud Titan Cornelius sought to take heaven by storm.
Little Menzel was no Titan in those days; he seems in that generation
like one bound to the earth, yet he belonged to the Cyclopean race. He
was a mighty architect with the powers of a giant; and this uncouth
Cyclops rough-hewed and chiselled the blocks, and, fitting each in its
place, raised an edifice to as lofty a height as the Romanticists had
reached on the perilous wings of Icarus. Having been first the
draughtsman and then the painter of Frederick the Great, he gave up
history after finishing the picture of the Battle of Hochkirch: his
talent was too modern, too much set upon what was concrete, to admit of
its being given full scope to the end by constructive work from a
_milieu_ that was not his own. Until his fortieth year he had celebrated
the glorious past of his country. When, with the death of Friedrich
Wilhelm IV, a great and decisive turn was given to the politics of the
Prussian state--one which put an end to the stagnation of civil life in
Prussia and Germany, and ushered in a new and brilliant period for the
realm and the heirs of Friedrich--the painter of Friedrich the Great
became the painter of the new realm. After he had already, in the first
half of the century, placed reality on the throne of art in the place of
rhetoric and a vague ideal, he went one step further in the direction of
keen and direct observation, and now painted what he saw around him--the
stream of palpitating life.
"The Coronation of King Wilhelm at Königsberg" is the great and
triumphant title-page to this section of his art. The effects of light,
the red tones of the uniforms, the shimmering white silk dresses, the
surging of the mass of people, the perfect ease with which all the
personages are individualised, the princes, the ministers, the
ambassadors, the men of learning, the instantaneousness in the movement
of the figures, the absolutely unforced and yet subtle and pictorial
composition, render this painting no picture of ceremonies, in the
traditional sense of the phrase, but a work of art at once intimate and
august in the impression which it makes. In the picture "King Wilhelm
setting out to join the Army"--the representation of the thrilling
moment, on the afternoon of 31st July 1870, when the King drove along
the linden avenue to the railway station--this phase, which he began
with the Coronation picture, was brought to a close. Everything surges
and moves, speaks and breathes, and glows with the palpitating life
which vibrates through all in this moment of patriotic excitement. But
the painter's course led him further.
[Illustration: ADOLF MENZEL.]
He first became entirely Menzel when he made the discovery of toiling
humanity. In 1867, in the year of the World Exhibition, he came to Paris
and became acquainted with Meissonier and Stevens. With Meissonier in
particular--whose portrait he painted--he entered into a close
friendship, and it was curious afterwards to see the two together at
exhibitions--the little figure of Menzel with his gigantic bald forehead
and the little figure of Meissonier with his gigantic beard, a Cyclops
and a Gnome, two kings in the realm of Liliput, of whom one was unable
to speak a word of German and the other unable to speak a word of
French, although they had need merely of a look, a shrug, or a movement
of the hand to understand each other entirely. He also came into the
society of Courbet, who had just made the famous separate exhibition of
his works, at the Café Lamartine, in the company of Heilbuth, Meyerheim,
Knaus, and others. Here in Paris he produced his first pictures of
popular contemporary life, and if as an historical painter he had
already been a leader in the struggle against theatrical art, he became
a pioneer in these works also. Everywhere he let in air and made free
movement possible for those who pressed forward in his steps. In the
course of years he painted and drew everything which excited in him
artistic impulse upon any ground whatever, and not one of these
endeavours was work thrown away. A universal genius amongst the painters
of real life, he combined all the qualities of which other men of
excellent talent merely possessed fragments separately apportioned
amongst them: the sharpest eye for every detail of form, the most
penetrative discrimination for the life of the spirit, and at times a
glistening play of colour possessed by none of his German predecessors.
[Illustration: MENZEL. FROM KUGLER'S "HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH THE GREAT."]
Catholic churches seem always to have had a great attraction for him, as
well as the people moving in them, and in this an echo of his _rococo_
enthusiasm is still perceptible. The quaint, _rococo_ churches in the
ornate style favoured by the Jesuits, which are still preserved intact
in Munich and the Tyrol, were those for which he had a peculiar
preference. He lost himself voluptuously in the thousand details of
sculpture, framework, organs, balustrades, and carved pulpits, dimly
outlined in the subdued light from stained-glass windows. In the gloom
it was all transformed into a forest of ornaments, expanding their
traceries like trees in a wood. Sick and infirm people, women in prayer
burying their faces in their hands, and lame men with crutches, kneel or
move amid the luxuriant efflorescence of stone and wood and gold, of
angels' heads and shrines, garlands of flowers, consoles, and fonts of
holy water. Twisted marble pillars, church banners, lamps and lustres
mount in a confusion of capricious outlines at once tasteful and piquant
to the vaulted dome, where the painted skies, blackened by the
ascending mist of incense, seem waywardly fantastic.
After the churches the salons appealed to him. There came his pictures
of modern society: ladies and cavaliers of the Court upon ballroom
balconies, the conversation of Privy Councillors in the salon, the
marvellous ball supper, where a mass of beautiful shoulders, splendid
uniforms, and rustling silken trains move amid mirrors, lustres,
colonnades, and gilded frames. "The Ball Supper" of 1870 is a vivid
picture, bathed in glistening light. The music has stopped. And from a
door of the brilliantly lighted ballroom the company is streaming into
the neighbouring apartment, where the supper-table has been laid, and
groups of ladies and men in animated conversation are beginning to
occupy the chairs and sofas. In 1879 there followed the famous "Levee":
the Emperor Wilhelm in the red Court uniform of the _Gardes du Corps_ is
talking with a lady, surrounded by a sea of heads, uniforms, and naked
bowing shoulders. Though it was always necessary in earlier
representations of the kind to have a _genre_ episode to compensate the
insufficient artistic interest of the work, in Menzel's pictures the
pictorial situation is grasped as a whole. They have the value of a
book; they neither falsify nor beautify anything, and they will hand
down to the future an encyclopædia of types of the nineteenth century.
From the salon he went to the street, from exclusive aristocratic
circles into the midst of the eddying crowd. For many years in
succession Menzel was a constant visitor at the small watering-places in
the Austrian and Bavarian Alps. The multitude of people at the concerts,
in the garden of the restaurant, on the promenade, at the open-air
services, were precisely the things to occupy his brush. The light
rippled through the leaves of the trees; women, children, and well-bred
men of the world listened to the music or the words of the preacher. One
person leaves a seat and another takes it; everything lives and moves.
Huge and lofty trees stretch out their arms, protecting the company from
the sun. Unusually striking was "The Procession in Gastein": in the
centre was the priest bearing the Host, then the choristers in their red
robes, in front the visitors and tourists who had hastened to see the
spectacle, and in the background the mountain heights. The bustle of
people gives Menzel the opportunity for a triumph. In Kissingen he
painted the promenade at the waters; in Paris the Sunday gaiety in the
garden of the Tuileries, the street life upon the boulevard, the famous
scene in the _Jardin des Plantes_, with the great elephants and the
vivid group of Zouaves and ladies; in Verona the Piazza d'Erbe, with the
swarm of people crowding in between the open booths and shouting at the
top of their voices. Many after him have represented such scenes,
although few have had the secret of giving their figures such seething
life, or painting them, like Menzel, as parts of one great, surging, and
many-headed multitude.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. THE CORONATION OF KING WILHELM I.]
People travelling have always been for him a source of much amusement:
men sitting in the corner of a railway carriage with their legs crossed
and their hats over their eyes, yawning or asleep; women looking out of
the windows or counting their ready money. Alternating with such themes
are those monotonous yet simple and therefore genial landscapes from the
suburbs of the great city, poor, neglected regions with machines and men
at their labour. Children bathing in a dirty stream bordered by little,
stunted willows; small craft gliding over a river, sailors leaping from
one vessel to another, men landing sacks or barrels, and great, heavy
cart-horses dragging huge waggons loaded with beer-barrels along the
dusty country road. Or the scaffolding of a house is being raised. Six
masons are at work upon it, and they are working in earnest. A green
bush waves (German fashion) above the scaffolding, and further off long
rows of houses stretch away, and the aqueducts and gas-works which
supply the huge crater of Berlin, and day-labourers are seen wheeling up
barrow-loads of stones. For the first time a German painter sings the
canticle of labour.
[Illustration: MENZEL. FROM KUGLER'S "HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH THE GREAT."]
From the streets he enters the work-places, and interprets the wild
poetry of roaring machines in smoky manufactories. The masterpiece of
this group is that bold and powerful picture, his "Iron Mill" of 1876.
The workshop of the great rail-forge of Königshütte in Upper Silesia is
full of heat and steam. The muscular, brawny figures of men with glowing
faces stand at the furnace holding the tongs in their swollen hands.
Their vigorous gestures recall Daumier. Upon the upper part of their
bodies, which is naked, the light casts white, blue, and dark red
reflections, and over the lower part it flickers in reddish, greenish,
and violet tinges, on the creases in their clothing. The smoke rising in
spirals is of a whitish-red, and the beams supporting the roof are lit
up with a sombre glow. Heat, sweat, movement, and the glare of fire are
everywhere. Dust and dirt, strong, raw-boned iron-workers washing
themselves, or exhausted with hard toil, snatching a hasty meal, a
confusion of belting and machinery, no pretty anecdote but sober
earnest, no story but pure painting--these were the great and decisive
achievements of this picture. Courbet's "Stone-breakers" of 1851, Madox
Brown's "Work" of 1852, and Menzel's "Iron Mill" are the standard works
in the art of the nineteenth century.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. THE DAMENSTIFTSKIRCHE AT MUNICH.]
Within German art Menzel has won an _enclave_ for himself, a rock amid
the sea. In France during the sixties he represented German art in
general. France offered him celebrity, and after this recognition he had
the fortune to be honoured in his native-land before he was overtaken by
old age. His realism was permitted to him at a time when realistic aims
were elsewhere reckoned altogether as æsthetic errors. This explains the
remarkable fact that Menzel's toil of fifty years had scarcely any
influence on the development of German painting; it would scarcely be
different from what it is now if he had never existed. When he might
have been an exemplar there was no one who dared to follow him. And
later, when German art as a whole had entered upon naturalistic lines,
the differences between him and the younger generation were more
numerous than their points of sympathy, so that it was impossible for
him to have a formative influence. He stood out in the new period merely
as a power commanding respect, like a hero of ancient times. Even the
isolated realistic onsets made in Berlin in the seventies are in no way
to be connected with him.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. KING WILHELM SETTING OUT TO JOIN THE ARMY.]
If realism consisted in the dry and sober illustration of selected
fragments of reality, if upright feeling, loyalty, and honest patriotism
were serviceable qualities in art, a lengthier consideration should
certainly be accorded to _Anton von Werner_. In his _genre_ pictures of
campaign life everything is spick and span, everything is in its right
place and in soldierly order: it is all typically Prussian art. His
portraits are casino pictures, and as such it is impossible to imagine
how they could better serve their purpose. From the spurs to the
cuirassier helmet everything is correct and in accordance with military
regulation; even the likeness has something officially prescribed which
would make any recruit form front if suddenly brought face to face with
such a person. In his pictures of ceremonies his ability was just
sufficient to chronicle the function in question with the
conscientiousness of a clerk in a law court. The intellectual capacity
for seeing more of a great man than his immaculately polished boots and
the immaculately burnished buttons of his uniform was denied him, as was
the artistic capacity of exalting a picture-sheet to the level of a
picture.
Equipped with a healthy though trivial feeling for reality, _Carl
Güssow_ ventured to approach nature in a sturdy and robust fashion in
some of his works, and exhibited in Berlin a few life-sized figures,
"Pussy," "A Lover of Flowers," "Lost Happiness," "Welcome," "The Oyster
Girl," and so forth. Through these he opened for a brief period in
Berlin the era of yellow kerchiefs and black finger-nails, and on the
strength of them was exalted by the critics as a pioneer of realism or
else anathematised, according to their æsthetic creed. He had a robust
method of painting muscles and flesh and clothes of many colours, and of
setting green beside red and red beside yellow, yet even in these first
works--his only works of artistic merit--he never got beyond the banal
and barbaric transcript of a reality which was entirely without
interest.
_Max Michael_ seems to be somewhat influenced by Bonvin. Like the
latter, he was attracted by the silent motions of nuns, juicy
vegetables, dark-brown wainscoting, and the subdued light of interiors.
He was, like Ribot in France, although with less artistic power, a good
representative of that "school of cellar skylights" which imitated in a
sound manner the tone of the old Spanish masters. One of his finest
pictures, which hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, represents a girls'
school in Italy. A nun is presiding over the sewing-lesson; the
background is brown; the light comes through the yellow glass of a high
and small window (like that of an attic), and throws a brown dusky tone
over the room, in which the gay costumes of the little Italian girls,
with their white kerchiefs, make exceedingly pretty and harmonious spots
of colour. No adventure is hinted at, no episode related, but the
picturesque appearance of the little girls, and their tones in the
space, are all the more delicately rendered. A refined scheme of colour
recalling the old masters compensates for the want of incident.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. THE IRON MILL.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. SUNDAY IN THE TUILERIES GARDENS.]
In Vienna _August von Pettenkofen_ made a transition from the ossified,
antediluvian _genre_ painting to painting which was artistically
delicate. While the successors of Gauermann and Danhauser indulged in
heart-breaking scenes or humorous episodes, Pettenkofen was the first to
observe the world from a purely pictorial point of view. Alfred Stevens
had opened his eyes in Paris in 1851. Troyon's pictures and Millet's
confirmed him in his efforts. He was brought up on a property belonging
to his father in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before he
turned to painting: horses, peasants, and oxen are the simple figures of
his pictures. In the place of episodic, ill-painted stories he set the
meagre plains of lonely Pusta, sooty forges, gloomy cobblers' work
shops, dirty courtyards with middens and rubbish-heaps, gipsy
encampments, and desolate garrets. There is no pandering to
sentimentality or the curiosity excited by _genre_ painting. There are
delicate chords of colour, and that is enough. The artist was in the
habit of spending the summer months in the little town of Spolnok on the
Theiss, to the east of Pesth. Here he wandered about amongst the little
whitewashed houses, the booths of general dealers, and the
fruit-sellers' stalls. A lazily moving yoke of oxen with a lad asleep,
dark-eyed girls fetching water, poor children playing on the ground, old
men dreaming in the sun in a courtyard, are generally the only breathing
beings in his pictures. Here is a sandy village-square with low,
white-washed houses; there is a wain with oxen standing in the street,
or a postilion trotting away on his tired nag. Like Menzel, Pettenkofen
paints busy humanity absorbed in their toil, simple beings who do not
dream of leaving off work for the sake of those who frequent picture
galleries. What differentiates him from the Berlin painter is a more
lyrical impulse, something tender, thoughtful, and contemplative. Menzel
gives dramatic point to everything he touches; he sets masses in
movement, depicts a busy, noisy crowd, pressing together and elbowing
one another, forcing their way at the doors of theatres or the windows
of cafés in a multifarious throng. Pettenkofen lingers with the petty
artisan and the solitary sempstress. In Menzel's "Iron Mill" the sparks
are flying and the machines whirring, but everything is peaceful and
quiet in the cobblers' workshops and the sunny attics visited by
Pettenkofen. Menzel delights in momentary impressions and quivering
life; Pettenkofen in rest and solitude. In the former every one is
thinking and talking and on the alert; in the latter every one is
yawning or asleep. If Menzel paints a waggon, the driver cracks his whip
and one hears the team rattling over the uneven pavement; in Pettenkofen
the waggon stands quietly in a narrow lane, the driver enjoys a midday
rest, and an enervating, sultry heat broods overhead. Menzel has a love
for men and women with excitement written on their faces; Pettenkofen
avoids painting character, contenting himself with the reproduction of
simple actions at picturesque moments. The Berlin artist is
epigrammatically sharp; the Viennese is elegiac and melancholy. Menzel's
pictures have the changing glitter of rockets; those of Pettenkofen are
harmonised in the tone of a refined amateur. They have only one thing in
common: neither has found disciples; they are not culminating peaks in
Berlin or Vienna art so much as boulders wedged into another system.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
MENZEL. A LEVEE.]
Whilst the realistic movement in both towns was confined to particular
masters, Munich had once again the mission of becoming a guiding
influence. Here all the tendencies of modern art have left the most
distinct traces, all movements were consummated with most consistency.
The heroes of Piloty followed the divinities of Cornelius, and these
were in turn succeeded by the Tyrolese peasants of Defregger, and amid
all this difference of theme one bond connected these works: for
interesting subject was the matter of chief importance in them, and the
purely pictorial element was something subordinate. The efforts of the
seventies had for their object the victory of this pictorial element. It
was recognised that the talent for making humorous points and telling
stories, which came in question as the determining quality in the
pictures of monks and peasants of the school of Defregger and Grützner,
was the expression of no real faculty for formative art--that it was
merely technical incompleteness complacently supported by the lack of
artistic sensibility in the public which had produced this narrative
painting. It was felt that the task of formative art did not consist in
narrative, but in representation, and in representation through the most
sensuous and convincing means which stood at its disposal. A renewed
study of the old masters made this recognition possible.
[Illustration: GÜSSOW. THE ARCHITECT.
(_By permission of M. H. Salomonson, Esq., the owner of the
picture._)]
Up to this time the most miserable desolation had also reigned over the
province of the artistic crafts. But, borne up by the rekindled
sentiment of nationality, and favoured by the high tide of the milliards
paid by France, since 1870, that eventful movement bearing the words
"Old German" and "Fine Style" on its programme had become an
accomplished fact. The German Renaissance, which research had been
hitherto neglected, was discovered afresh. Lübke explored it thoroughly
and systematically; Woltmann wrote on Hans Holbein, Thausing on Dürer;
Eitelberger founded the Austrian Industrial Museum; Georg Hirth brought
out his _Deutsches Zimmer_, and began the publication of the
_Formenschatz_. The national form of art of the German Renaissance was
taken up everywhere with a proud consciousness of patriotism: here, it
was thought, was a panacea. Those who followed the artistic crafts
declared open war against everything pedestrian and tedious. _Lorenz
Gedon_ in particular--in union with Franz and Rudolf Seitz--was the soul
of the movement. With his black, curly hair, his little, fiery, dark
eyes, his short beard, his negligent dress, and his two great hands
expert in the exercise of every description of art, he had himself
something of the character of an old German stone-cutter. His manner of
expressing himself corresponded to this appearance. In every thing it
was original, saturated with his own personal conception of the world.
As the son of a dealer in old pictures and curiosities, he was familiar
with the old masters from his childhood, and followed them in the method
of his study. He was far from confining himself to one branch. The
façades of houses, the architecture of interiors, tavern rooms and
festal decorations, furniture and state carriages, statues and
embellishments in stone, bronze, wood, and iron, portrait busts in wax,
clay, and marble, models for ornaments, for iron lattices, for the
adornment of ships and the fittings of cabins, all objects that were
wayward, fantastic, quaint, and curious lay in his province; and for the
execution of each in turn this remarkable man felt that he had in him an
equal capacity. And, at the same time, the temperament of a collector
was united in him with that of an artist in an entirely special way. In
the bushy wilderness of a garden before his house in the Nymphenburger
Strasse countless stone fragments of mediæval sculpture were strewn
about, up to the very hedge dividing it from the street. Rusty old
trellises of wrought iron slanted in front of the windows, and in the
house itself the most precious objects, which artists ten years before
had passed without heed, stood in masses together. As Gedon was taken
from his work when he was forty his artistic endeavour never got beyond
efforts of improvisation, but the impulse which he gave was very
powerful. Through his initiative the whole province of the artistic
crafts was brought under observation from a pictorial point of view. The
bald Philistine style of decoration gave way and a blithe revel of
colour was begun. The great carnival feasts arranged by him on the model
of the Renaissance period are an important episode in the history of
culture in Munich, and have contributed in no unessential manner to the
refinement of taste in the toilette of women. The Munich Exhibition of
the Arts and Crafts in 1876 (before the entrance of which he had erected
that great portal made of old fragments of architecture, wood-carving,
and splendid stuffs, and bearing the inscription "The Works of our
Fathers") indicated the zenith of that movement in the handicrafts which
was flooding all Germany in those days.
The course which was run by this movement in the following years is well
known, and it is well known how the imitation of the German Renaissance
soon became as wearisome as in the beginning it had been attractive.
After it had been a little overdone another step was taken, and from the
Renaissance people went to the _baroque_ period, and soon afterwards the
_rococo_ period followed. In these days sobriety has taken the place of
this fever for ornamentation, and the mania for style has resulted in a
surfeit, a weariness and a desire for simplicity and quietude.
Nevertheless the beneficial influence of the movement on the general
elevation of taste is undeniable, and indirectly it was of service to
painting.
[Illustration: _Seeman, Leipzig._ AUGUST VON PETTENKOFEN.]
In rooms where the owner was the only article of the inventory repugnant
to the conception of style, only those pictures were admitted which had
been executed in the exact manner of the old masters. Works of art were
regarded as tasteful furniture, and were obliged to harmonise correctly
with the other appointments of the room; they had, moreover, to be
themselves legitimate "imitations of the Works of our Fathers." And, in
this way, the movement in the handicrafts gave an impulse to a renewed
study of the old masters, carried out with far more refinement than had
hitherto been the case. Amongst the costume painters spread over all
Germany, the experts in costume, working in Munich during the seventies,
form a really artistic race of able painters who were peculiarly
sensitive to colour. They were the historians of art, the connoisseurs
of colour in the ranks of the painters. Piloty did not satisfy them;
they buried themselves in the study of old masters with a delicately
sensitive appreciation of them; they began to mix soft, luxuriant, and
melting colours upon their palettes, and to feel the peculiar joy of
painting. Whilst they imitated the exquisite "little masters" of former
ages, in dimly lighted studios hung with Gobelins, imitating at the same
time the beautifying rust of centuries, they gradually abandoned all
their own tricks of art; and whilst they devoted themselves to detail
they brought about the Renaissance of oil-painting. Compared with
earlier works, their pictures are like rare dainties. They no longer
recognised the end of their calling, as the _genre_ painters had done,
in a one-sided talent for characterisation, but tried once more to lay
chief weight upon the pictorial and artistic appearance of their
pictures. They were conscious of a presentiment that there were higher
spheres of art than the commonplace humour of _genre_ painting, and this
recognition had a very wide bearing. Pictorial point took the place of
narrative humour. If artists had previously painted thoughts they now
began to paint things, and even if the things were bundles of straw,
mediæval hose, and the old robes of cardinals, they were no longer
"invented," but something which had been seen as a whole. It was a
transition towards ultimately painting what had actually taken place
before the artist's eyes.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
PETTENKOFEN. A WOMAN SPINNING.]
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
PETTENKOFEN. IN THE CONVENT YARD.]
That sumptuous, healthy artist of such pictorial ability, _Diez_, the
Victor Scheffel of painting, stands at the head of the group. From his
youth upwards his chief place of resort had been the cabinet of
engravings where he studied Schongauer, Dürer, and Rembrandt, and all
the boon-companions and vagabonds etched or cut in copper or wood, and
on the model of these he painted his own marauders, robber-barons,
peasants in revolt, old German weddings and fairs. His picture "To the
Church Consecration" recalls Beham, his "Merry Riding" Schongauer, and
his "Ambuscade" Dürer, whilst Teniers served as model for his fairs.
Diez knows the period from Dürer and Holbein to Rubens, Rembrandt,
Wouwerman, and Brouwer as thoroughly as an historian of art, and
sometimes--for instance in his "Picnic in the Forest"--he has even drawn
the eighteenth century into the circle of his studies. His pictures had
an unrivalled delicacy of tone, and could certainly hang beside their
Dutch models in the Pinakothek without losing anything by such
proximity.
Something of Brouwer or Ostade revived once more in _Harburger_, the
talented draughtsman of _Fliegende Blätter_, the undisputed monarch
of the kingdom of slouching hats, old mugs, and Delft pipes. Pictures
like "The Peasants' Doctor," "The Card-players," "The Grandmother," "By
the Quiet Fireside," "In the Armchair," and "Easy-going Folk" were
masterpieces of delicate Dutch painting: the tone of his pictures shows
distinction and temperament; they have deep and fine _chiaroscuro_, and
are soft and fluent in execution. _Loefftz_ with his picture "Love and
Avarice" appeared as Quentin Matsys _redivivus_, and then attached
himself in turn to Holbein and Van Dyck; and exercised, like Diez, a
great influence on the younger generation by his activity as a teacher.
_Claus Meyer_, who became one of the best known amongst the young Munich
painters by his "Sewing School in the Nunnery" of 1883, is worthy of
remark inasmuch as he acquired a method of painting which was full of
_nuances_, through modelling himself upon Pieter de Hoogh and Van der
Meer of Delft. Through the windows hung with thin curtains the warm,
quiet daylight falls into the room, glancing on the clean boards of the
floor, on the polished tops of the tables, the white pages of the books,
and the blond and brown hair of the children, playing round it like a
golden nimbus. Another sunbeam streams through the door, which is not
entirely closed, and quivers over the floor in a bright and narrow strip
of light. The intimate representation of peaceful scenes of modest life,
the entirely pictorial representation of peaceful and congenial events,
has taken the place of the adventures dear to _genre_ painting. Old
gentlemen with a glass of beer and a clay pipe, servant-girls peeling
potatoes in the kitchen, pupils at the cloister sitting over their books
in the library, drinkers, smokers, and dicers--such were the quiet,
passive, and silent figures of his later pictures. The mild sunshine
breaks in and plays over them. Light clouds of tobacco smoke float in
the air. Everything is homely and pleasant, touched with a breath of
pictorial charm, comfortable warmth, and poetic fragrance. A hundred
years hence his works will be sold as flawlessly delicate and genuine
old Dutch pictures. _Holmberg_ became the historian of cardinals. A
window, consisting of rounded, clumpy panes, with little glass pictures
let in, forms the background of the room, and in the subdued oil-light
which beams over splendid vessels and ornaments, chests and Gobelins,
the white satin dresses of ladies in the mode of 1640, or the lilac and
purple robes of cardinals from the artist's rich wardrobe, are
displayed, together with the appropriate models.
In _Fritz August Kaulbach_, the most versatile of the group in his
adoption of various manners, the essence of this whole tendency is to be
found. He did not belong to the specialists who restricted themselves,
in a one-sided fashion, to the imitation of the Flemish or the Dutch
masters, but appeared like old Diterici, Proteus-like, now in one and
now in another mask; and, whether he assumed the features of Holbein,
Carlo Dolci, Van Dyck, or Watteau, he had the secret of being invariably
graceful and _chic_.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
DIEZ. RETURNING FROM MARKET.]
[Illustration: CLAUS MEYER. THE SMOKING PARTY.]
When the German Renaissance was at its zenith he painted in the
Renaissance style: harmless _genre_ pictures _à la_ Beyschlag--the joys
of love and of the family circle--but not being so banal as the latter
he painted them with more delicate colouring and finer poetic charm.
Certain single figures were found specially acceptable--for instance,
the daughters of Nuremberg patricians, and noble ladies in the old
German caps, dark velvet gowns, and long plaits like Gretchen's, with
their eyes sometimes uplifted and sometimes lowered, and their hands at
one moment folded and at another carrying a shining covered goblet.
Occasionally these single figures were portraits, but none the less were
they transformed into "ladies in old German costume"; and Kaulbach
understood how to paint, to the utmost satisfaction of his patrons, the
black caps, no less well than the little veil and the net of pearls, and
the greenish-yellow silk of the puffed sleeves, no less well than the
plush border of the dark gown and the antique red Gretchen pocket. Many
of them held a lute and stood amid a spring landscape, before a
streamlet, or a silver-birch, such as Stevens delighted in painting ten
years previously. At that time Fritz August Kaulbach, with greater
softness in his treatment, occupied in Germany the place which Florent
Willems had occupied in Belgium. Since then he has brought nearer to the
public the most various old and modern masters, and he has done so with
fine artistic feeling: in his "May Day" he has revived the pastoral
scenes of Watteau with a felicitous cleverness; in his "St. Cecilia" he
created a total effect of great grace by going arm in arm with Carlo
Dolci and Gabriel Max; his "Pietà" he composed with "the best figures of
Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Titian," just as Gerard de Lairesse
had once recommended to painters. Intermediately he painted frail
flower-like girls _à la_ Gabriel Max, charming little angels _à la_
Thoma, children in Pierrot costume _à la_ Vollon, and little landscapes
_à la_ Gainsborough. He did not find in himself the plan for a new
edifice in erecting his palace of art, but built according to any plans
that came in his way; he simply chose from all existing forms the most
graceful, the most elegant, the most precious, culled from their
beauties only the flowers, and bound them into a tasteful bouquet. In
his modern portraits of women, which in recent years have been his chief
successes, he placed himself between Van Dyck and the English. Of
course, a really _chic_ painter of women, like Sargent, is not to be
thought of in this connection; but for Germany these portraits were in
exceedingly fine taste, had an interesting Kaulbachian trace of
indifferent health, and breathed an _odeur de femme_ which found very
wide approval. In his "Lieschen, the Waitress of the Shooting Festival"
he risked a fresh attempt at treating popular life, and made of it such
a graceful picture that it might almost have been painted by Piglhein;
while in a series of spirited caricatures he even succeeded in
being--Kaulbach. The history of art is wide, and since Fritz August
Kaulbach knows it extremely well, he will certainly find much to paint
that is pleasing and attractive, "_s'il continue à laisser errer son
imagination à travers les formes diverses créées par l'art de tous les
temps_," as the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ said of him on the occasion of
the Vienna World Exhibition of 1878.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
KAULBACH. THE LUTE PLAYER.]
After all, these pictures will have little that is novel for an
historian of the next century. "_Être maître_," says W. Bürger, "_c'est
ne ressembler à personne._" But these were the works of painters who
merely announced the dogma of the infallibility of universal
eclecticism, as the Caracci had done in their familiar sonnets: they
were spirited imitators, whose connection with the nineteenth century
will be known in after years only by the dates of their pictures. As
old masters called back to life, they have enriched the history of art,
as such, by nothing novel. Yet, in replacing superficial imitations by
imitations which were excellent and congenial, they have nevertheless
advanced the history of art in the nineteenth century in another way.
[Illustration: FRANZ LENBACH.]
By the labour of his life each one of them helped to make a place in
Germany for the art of oil-painting, which had been forgotten under the
influence of Winckelmann and Carstens, and in this sense their works
were very important stations, as one might say, on the great
thoroughfare of art. Through systematic imitation of the finest old
masters, the Munich school had in a comparatively short time regained
the appreciation of colour and treatment which had so long been lost. At
a hazy distance lay those times when the distinctive peculiarity of
German painting lay in its wealth of ideas, its want of any sense for
colour, and its clumsy technique, whilst the æsthetic spokesmen praised
these qualities as though they were national virtues. These views had
been altogether renounced, and a decade of strenuous work had been
devoted to the extirpation of all such defects. Such an achievement was
sufficiently great, and sufficiently important and gratifying. This last
resuscitation of the old masters was capable of being turned into a
bridge leading to new regions.
A feeling arose that the limit had been reached, and it arose in those
very men who had advanced furthest in pictorial accomplishment, adapting
and making their own all the ability of the old masters. Painters
believed that they had learnt enough of technique to be able to treat
subjects from modern life in the spirit of these old masters, not
handling them any longer as laboriously composed _genre_ pictures, but
as real works of art. And a group of realists came forward as they had
done in France, and began to seek truth with scientific rigour and an
avoidance of any kind of anecdotic by-play.
The greatest pupil of the old masters, _Franz Lenbach_, stands in a
close and most important relationship with these endeavours of modern
art, through some of his youthful works.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
LENBACH. PORTRAIT OF WILHELM I.]
The public has accustomed itself to think of him only as a portrait
painter, and he is justly honoured as the greatest German portraitist of
the century. But posterity may one day regard it as a special favour of
the gods that Lenbach should have been born at the right time, and that
his progress to maturity fell in the greatest epoch of the century. His
gallery of portraits has been called an epic in paint upon the heroes of
our age. The greatest historical figures of the century have sat to him,
the greatest conquerors and masters in the kingdom of science and art.
Nevertheless this gallery would be worthless to posterity if Lenbach had
not had at his disposal one quality possessed by none of his immediate
predecessors, a sacred respect for nature. At a time when rosy tints,
suave smiles, and idealised drawing were the requirements necessary in
every likeness, at a time when Winterhalter painted great men, not as
they were, but as, in his opinion, they ought to have been--without
reflecting that God Almighty knows best what heads are appropriate for
great men--Lenbach appeared with his brusque veracity of portraiture.
That alone was an achievement in which only a man of original
temperament could have succeeded. If a portrait painter is to prevail
with society a peculiar combination of faculties is necessary, apart
from his individual capacity for art. Lenbach had not only an eye and a
hand, but likewise elbows and a tongue which placed him _hors concours_.
He could be as rude as he was amiable, and as deferential as he was
proud; half boor and half courtier, at once a great artist and an
accomplished _faiseur_, he succeeded in doing a thing which has brought
thousands to ruin--he succeeded in forcing upon society his own taste,
and setting genuine human beings of strong character in the place of the
smiling automatons of fashionable painters. In comparison with the works
of earlier portrait painters it might be said that a touch of pantheism
and nature-worship goes through Lenbach's pictures.
[Illustration: _Seeman, Leipzig._
LENBACH. PRINCE BISMARK.]
And what makes this so invaluable is that his greatness depends really
less upon artistic qualities than upon his being a highly gifted man who
understands the spirit of others. It is not merely artistic technique
that is essential in a portrait, but before everything a psychical grasp
of the subject. No artist, says Lessing, is able to interpret a power
more highly spiritual than that which he possesses himself. And this is
precisely the weak side in so many portrait painters, since a man's art
is by no means always in any direct relationship with the development of
his spiritual powers. In this respect a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach
stands to one by Anton von Werner, as an interpretation of Goethe by
Hehn stands to one by Düntzer. To speak of the congenial conception in
Lenbach's pictures of Bismarck is a safe phrase. There will always
remain something wanting, but since Lenbach's works are in existence one
knows, at any rate, that this something can be reduced to a far lower
measure than it has been by the other Bismarck portraits. "_Bien
comprendre son homme_," says Bürger-Thoré, "_est la première qualité du
portraitiste_," and this faculty of the gifted psychologist has made
Lenbach the historian elect of a great period, the active recorder of a
mighty era. It even makes him seem greater than most foreign portrait
painters. How solid, but at the same time how matter-of-fact, does
Bonnat seem by Lenbach's side! One should not look at a dozen Bonnats
together; a single one arrests attention by the plastic treatment of the
person, but if you see several at the same time all the figures have
this same plastic character, all of them have the same pose, and they
all seem to have employed the same tailor. Lenbach has no need of all
that characterisation by means of accessories in which Bonnat delights.
He only paints the eyes with thoroughness, and possibly the head; but
these he renders with a psychological absorption which is only to be
found amongst modern artists, perhaps in Watts. In a head by Lenbach
there glows a pair of eyes which burn themselves into you. The
countenance, which is the first zone around them, is more or
less--generally less--amplified; the second zone, the dress and hands,
is either still less amplified, or scarcely amplified at all. The
portrait is then harmonised in a neutral tone which renders the lack of
finish less obvious. In this sketchy treatment and in his striking
subjectivity Lenbach is the very opposite of the old masters. Holbein,
and even Rubens--who otherwise sets upon everything the stamp of his own
personality--characterised their figures by a reverent imitation of
every trait given in nature. They produced, as it were, real documents,
and left it to the spectator to interpret them in his own way.
[Illustration: LENBACH. THE SHEPHERD BOY.]
Lenbach, less objective, and surrendering himself less absolutely to his
subject, emphasises one point, disregards another, and in this way
conjures up the spirit by his faces, just as he sees it. It may be open
to dispute which kind of portraiture is the more desirable; but Lenbach,
at any rate, has now forced the world to behold its great men through
his eyes. He has given them the form in which they will survive. No one
has the same secret of seizing a fleeting moment; no one turned more
decisively away from every attempt at idealising glorification or at
watering down an individual to a type. He takes counsel of photography,
but only as Molière took counsel of his housekeeper: he uses it merely
as a medium for arriving at the startling directness, the instantaneous
impression of life, in his pictures. Works like the portraits of King
Ludwig I, Gladstone, Minghetti, Bishop Strossmayer, Prince Lichtenstein,
Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Paul Heyse, Wilhelm Busch, Schwind,
Semper, Liphart, Morelli, and many others have no parallel as analyses
of the character of complex personalities. Some of his Bismarck
portraits, as well as his last pictures of the old Emperor Wilhelm, will
always stand amongst the greatest achievements of the century in
portraiture. In the one portrait is indestructible power, as it were the
shrine built for itself by the mightiest spirit of the century; in the
other the majesty of the old man, already half alienated from the earth,
and glorified by a trace of still melancholy, as by the last radiance of
the evening sun. In these works Lenbach appears as a wizard calling up
spirits, an _évocateur d'âmes_, as a French critic has named him.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
RAMBERG. THE MEETING ON THE LAKE.]
But what the history of art has forgotten in estimating the fame of the
portrait painter Lenbach is, that in the beginning of his career this
very man paved the way for the "Realistic" movement in German painting
which later he confronted so haughtily and with so much reserve. The
first of these works of his, which have for Germany much the same
significance as the early works of Courbet have for France, is the
well-known "Shepherd Boy" in the Schack Gallery. Stretched on his back,
he lies in the high grass where flowers grow thickly, and looks up while
butterflies and dragon-flies flutter through the dusty air of a Roman
summer day. Such a frank, an audacious, naked realism, breaking away
from everything traditional in its representation of fact, was something
entirely novel and surprising in Germany in the year 1856. Up to this
time no one had seen a fragment of nature depicted with such unqualified
veracity. The tanned shepherd lad, with his naked sunburnt feet, covered
by a dark crust of mire from the damp earth, seemed to be lying there in
the flesh, plastically thrown into relief by the glowing midday sun. The
next of these pictures, "Peasants taking Refuge from the Weather," which
appeared in the exhibition of 1858, called down a storm of indignation
on account of its "trivial realism." Every figure was painted after
nature with blunt and rigorous sincerity, and no anecdotic incident was
devised in it.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
HIRTH. THE HOP HARVEST.]
After the sixties the influence of Courbet began to be directly felt. In
the days when he worked in Couture's studio _Victor Müller_ had taken up
some of the ideas of the master of Ornans, and when he settled in 1863
in Munich, Müller communicated to the painters there the first knowledge
of the works of the great Frenchman. He did not follow Courbet, however,
in his subjects. "The Man in the Heart of the Night lulled to Sleep by
the Music of a Violin," "Venus and Adonis," "Hero and Leander," "Hamlet
in the Churchyard," "Venus and Tannhäuser," "Faust on the Promenade,"
"Romeo and Juliet," "Ophelia by the Stream"--such are the titles of his
principal works. But how far they are removed from the anæmic, empty
painting of beauty which reigned in the school of Couture! Though a
Romanticist of the purest water in his subjects, Müller appears, in the
manner in which he handles them, as a Realist on whom there is no speck
of the academical dust of the schools. The dominant features of Victor
Müller's pictures are the thirst for life and colour, full-blooded
strength, haughty contempt for every species of hollow exaggeration and
all outward pose, genuine human countenances and living human forms
inspired with tameless passion, an audacious rejection of all the
traditional rules of composition, and, even in colour, a veracity which
in that age, given up to an ostentatious painting of material, must have
had an effect that was absolutely novel. In 1863 the blooming flesh of
his "Wood Nymph" excited the Munich public to indignation, just as the
nude female figures of Courbet had roused indignation about the same
time in Paris. Pictures painted with singular sureness of hand were
executed by him during the few years that he yet had to live--portraits
of dogs, landscapes of a flaming glow of colour, single figures of
red-haired Bacchantes and laughing flower-girls, old men dying, and
charming fairy pictures. The nearer he came to his death the more his
powers of work seemed to increase. The most remarkable ideas came into
his head. He drew, and painted without intermission designs which had
occupied him for years. "I feel," he said, "like an architect who has
been commissioned to carry out a great building, and I cannot do it: I
must die."
But the impulse which he had given in more than one direction had
further issues. As Hans Thoma in later years continued the work of the
great Frankfort master in the province of fairy-tale, _Wilhelm Leibl_
realised Müller's realistic programme.
[Illustration: WILHELM LEIBL. _Kunst für Alle._]
Wilhelm Leibl, son of the conductor of music in the cathedral, was born
at Cologne on 23rd October 1844. At Munich he entered the studio of
_Arthur van Ramberg_, that unjustly forgotten master who, both by his
own work and by his activity as a teacher, exercised upon the younger
Munich school a far healthier influence than Piloty. Ramberg was a
modern man, was always eager to come into immediate contact with life
and break the fetters of tradition which hung everywhere upon that
generation. He was an aristocrat and a dandy, and, having occupied
himself in the beginning with romantic fairy subjects, he painted, soon
after his migration to Munich, a series of pictures from modern
life--"Dachau Girls on Sunday," "The Return from the Masked Ball," "A
Walk with the Tutor," "The Meeting on the Lake," "The Invitation to
Boat," and others, which rose above the mass of contemporary productions
by their great distinction, fragrance, and grace. At a time when others
held nothing but the smock-frock fit for representation, Ramberg painted
the fashionable modern costume of women. And when others devoted
themselves to clumsy _genre_ episodes, he created songs without words
that were full of fine reserve, nobility, and delicate feeling.
_Rudolf Hirth_, who made a stir with his "Hop Harvest"; _Albert Keller_,
the tasteful painter of fashionable life; _Karl Haider_, the sincere and
conscientious miniature painter whose energy of manner had a suggestion
of the old masters, together with Wilhelm Leibl, all issued from
Ramberg's school, not from Piloty's.
The young student from Cologne was thus saved, in the beginning, from
occupying himself with history, and he had no need to addict himself to
narrative _genre_ painting, since his entire organisation preordained
him to painting pure and simple. Wilhelm Leibl was in those days a
handsome fellow, with powerful limbs and shining brown eyes. He was
realism incarnate--rather short, but strongly made, and with a frame
almost suggesting a beast of burden, broad in the chest,
high-shouldered, and bull-necked. His arms were thick and his feet
large. His gait was slow, heavy, and energetic, and he made with his
arms liberal gestures which took up a good deal of room. He had not the
fiery spirit of Courbet, being more prosaic, sober, and deliberate, but
he resembled him both in appearance and in the artistic faculty of eye
and hand. "He had," as a French critic wrote of him, "one of those
organisations which are predestined for painting, as Courbet had amongst
us Frenchmen. Such men extract the most remarkable things from
painting."
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
LEIBL. IN THE STUDIO.]
[Illustration: _American Art Review._
LEIBL. THE VILLAGE POLITICIANS.]
Even his first picture, exhibited in 1869, and representing his two
fellow-pupils Rudolf Hirth and Haider looking at an engraving, had a
soft, full golden harmony, which left all the products of conventional
_genre_ painting far behind it, and came into direct competition with
the refined works of the Dutch painter Michael Swert. His second
picture, a portrait of Frau Gedon, made an impression even in Paris by
its Rembrandtesque beauty of tone, and was awarded there in 1870 the
gold medal which the judges had not ventured to give him the year before
at Munich, because he was still an Academy pupil. Yet 1869 was the
decisive year in Leibl's life. The Munich Exhibition gave at that time
an opportunity for learning the importance of French art upon a scale
previously unknown. Over four hundred and fifty pictures were
accessible, and the works of the smooth, conventional historical
painters were the minority. Troyon was to be seen there, and Millet and
Corot. But Courbet, to whose works the committee had devoted an entire
room, was chiefly the hero, and one over whom there was much conflict.
Opinions were violently at odds about him in the painters' club. The
official circle greeted the master of Ornans with the same hoot of
indignation which had been accorded him in France. But for Leibl he
became an adored and marvellous ideal. His eyes sparkled when he sat
opposite him at the _Deutsches Haus_, and in default of any other means
of making himself understood he assured Courbet of his veneration by
sturdily drinking to him: "Prosit Courbet--Prosit Leibl." He stretched
his powerful limbs, and threw himself into vigorous attitudes to evince
in sanguinary quarrels, when necessary, his enthusiasm for the great
Frenchman. How false and paltry seemed the whole school of Piloty, with
its rose-coloured insipidity and its conventional bloom of the palette,
when set against the downright veracity and the masterly painting of
these works!
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
LEIBL. THE NEW PAPER.]
In the same year he went to Paris, special occasion for the journey
being given by a commission for a portrait which he received from the
Duc Tascher de la Pagerie. There he painted "La Cocotte," the portrait
of a fat Frenchwoman seated upon a sofa and watching the clouds of smoke
from her clay pipe. In its massive realism, and in the exuberant power
of its broad, liquid painting, it might have been signed "Courbet," and
Leibl told afterwards with pride how Courbet slapped him on the shoulder
when he was at his work, saying: "_Il faut que vous restez à Paris._"
The breaking out of the war brought his residence in Paris to an end
more quickly than he had foreseen, but though he was there only nine
months that was long enough to give for ever a firm direction to the
efforts of the painter. Leibl became the apostle of Courbet in Germany,
and in his outward life the German Millet. Back once more in Bavaria, he
migrated in 1872 to Grasolfingen, then to Schondorf on the Ammersee,
then to Berbling near Aibling, and in 1884 to Aibling itself; he became
a peasant, and, like Millet, he painted pictures of peasants.
The poetic and biblical, the august and epical bias which characterises
the works of Millet, is not to be expected in Leibl. A spirit bent upon
what is great and heroic speaks out of Millet's pictures. A
Rembrandtesque feeling for space, the great line, the simplification,
the intellectual restraint from anecdotic triviality of form, are the
things which constitute his style. Leibl is at his best when he buries
himself with delight in the hundred little touches of nature. He
triumphs when he has to paint the faces of old peasant women, full of
wrinkles, and furrowed with care; the ruddy cheeks of girls, sparkling
in all their natural rustic freshness; figured dresses, the material and
texture of which are clearly recognisable; flowered silk kerchiefs worn
round the neck, coarse woollen bodices, and heavy hobnail shoes. He is
to Millet what Holbein is to Michael Angelo.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
LEIBL. IN CHURCH.]
Nor can he be called an artist of intimate feeling in the sense in which
the Scandinavians are amongst the moderns. In Viggo Johansen the painter
disappears; what he paints has not the effect of a picture, but of a
moment of existence, a memory of something clear and familiar--something
which has been lived and seen, but not fashioned with deliberate
intention. His figures are like the sudden appearance of actual persons,
spied upon, as if one were looking through the window into a strange
room under cover of night. One feels that there is no occasion to pay
the artist a compliment; but one would like to sit in such a warm, cosy
room, impregnated with tobacco smoke, to inhale the fine cloud of steam
issuing from the tea-kettle, to hear the water bubbling and humming upon
the glimmering fire. But the painter is always seen in Leibl's pictures.
A communicative spirit, something which touches the heart and sets one
dreaming, is precisely what is not expressed in them. The spectator
invariably thinks, in the first place, of the astonishing ability, the
incredible patience, which went to the making of them. And with all
their photographic fidelity he is, moreover, conscious that the painter
himself was less concerned in seizing the poetry of a scene, the
instantaneous charm of an impression of nature, than in forcing into the
foreground particular evidences of his technical powers which he has
reserved for display. For instance, newspapers in which, if it is
possible, a fragment of the leading article may be deciphered, earthen
vessels, bottles, and brandy glasses, play in his pictures a _rôle_
similar to that assumed by the little caskets with brass covers that
catch the flashing lights, the overturned settles, the tapestry, and
the globe in works of the school of Piloty.
Wilhelm Leibl is a good workman, like Courbet, a man of fresh, vigorous,
and energetic nature and robust health, very material, and at times
matter-of-fact and prosaic. Painting is as natural to him as breathing
and walking are to the rest of us. He goes his way like an ox in the
plough, steadily and without tiring, without vibration of the nerves,
and without the touch of poetry. He goes where his instinct leads him
and paints with a muscular flexibility of hand whatever appeals to his
eye or suits his brush. Opposed to the neurotic and hurrying moderns, he
has something of a mediæval monk who sits quietly in his cell, without
counting the hours, the days, and the years, and embellishes the pages
of his service-book with artistic miniatures, to depart in peace when he
has set "Amen, Finis" at the bottom of the last page. But he has, too,
all the capacity and all the boundless veneration for nature of these
old artists. He is the greatest _maître peintre_ that Germany has had in
the course of the century, and in this sense his advent was of
epoch-making importance.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
LEIBL. A PEASANT DRINKING.]
[Illustration: LEIBL. IN THE PEASANT'S COTTAGE.]
Even Defregger had observed peasant life altogether from a narrative and
anecdotic point of view. In Leibl this narrative _genre_ has been
overcome. He had ability enough to give artistic attractions even to an
"empty subject." To avoid exaggerated characterisation, to avoid the
expression of anything divided into _rôles_, he consistently painted
people employed in the least exciting occupations--peasants reading a
newspaper, sitting in church, or examining a gun. Pains are taken to
avoid the slightest movement of the figures. Whilst all his predecessors
were romance writers, Leibl is a painter. His themes--simple scenes of
daily life--are a matter of indifference; the beauty of his pictures
lies in their technique. They are works of which it may be said that
every attempt to give an impression of them in words is useless, for
they have not proceeded from delight in anecdotic theme, but, as in the
good periods of art, from the discipline of the sense for colour and
from an eminent capacity for drawing: they are pictures in which mere
interest in subject is lost in the consideration of their artistic
value, while the matter of what is represented is entirely thrown into
the background by the manner in which it is carried out. The chief aim
of the historical as of the _genre_ painters had been to draw a fluent
cartoon based upon single studies, to mix the colours nicely upon the
palette, lay them upon the canvas according to the rules, blend them and
let them dry, so as then to attain the proper harmony of colour by
painting over again and finally glazing. Leibl's mastery, which of
itself resulted in an astonishing truth to nature, lay in seizing an
impression as quickly as possible, taking hold of the reality rightly at
the first glance, and transferring the colours to his canvas with
decision and sureness, in clear accord with the hues of the original.
Lessing's maxim, "From the eyes straight to the arm and the brush," has
been realised here for the first time in Germany.
As yet no German had, in the same measure, what the painter calls
qualities, and even in France two apparently heterogeneous faculties
have seldom been united in one master in the same measure as they were
in Leibl: a broad and large technique, a bold _alla prima_ painting,
and, on the other hand, a joy in work of detail with a fine brush, such
as was known by Quentin Matsys, the smith of Antwerp. "The Village
Politicians" of 1879 was the chief work that he painted in Schondorf.
What would Knaus, the king of illustration and the ruler over the
province of vignettes, have made out of this theme! By a literary
evasion he would have subordinated the interest of the picture to his
ideas. One would have learnt what it is that peasants read, and received
instruction as to their political allegiance to party and their offices
and honours in the village: that would be the magistrate, that the
smith, and that the tailor. In Leibl there are true and simple peasants,
who, by way of relaxation from the toil of the week, listen stupidly and
indifferently to the reading of a Sunday paper, in which one of them is
endeavouring to discover the village news and the price of crops. They
are harsh-featured and common, but they have been spared theatrical
embellishment and impertinent satire; they are not artistically grouped,
though they sit there in all the rusticity of their physiognomies, and
all the angularity of their attitudes, without polish or Sunday state.
Leibl renders the reality without altering it, but he renders it fully
and entirely. The fidelity to nature held fast on the canvas surpassed
everything that had hitherto been seen, and it was gained, moreover, by
the soundest and the simplest means. Whereas Lenbach, in his effort to
reproduce the colour-effects of the old masters, destroyed the
durability of his pictures even while he worked upon them, Leibl seemed
to have chosen as his motto the phrase which Dürer once used in writing
to Jacob Heller: "I know that, if you preserve the picture well, it will
be fresh and clean at the end of five hundred years, for it has not been
painted as pictures usually are in these days."
He took a further step in the direction of truth when he made a
transition from the Dutch towards the old German masters. After he had,
in his earlier productions, worked very delicately at the tone of his
pictures, and, for a time, had particularly sought to attain specific
effects of _chiaroscuro_, attaching himself to Rembrandt, he took up an
independent position in his conception of colour, painting everything
not as one of the old masters might have seen it, but as he had seen it
himself. All the tricks of painting and sleights of virtuosity were
despised, special emphasis being scarcely laid upon pictorial unity of
effect. Everything was simple and true to nature, and had a sincerity
which is not to be surpassed.
The picture of the three peasant women, "In Church," is the masterpiece
in this "second manner" of his, and when it appeared in the Munich
International Exhibition of 1883 it was an event. From that date Leibl
was established--at any rate in the artistic circles of Munich--as the
greatest German _painter_ of his time. That Leibl painted the picture
without sketching for himself an outline, that he began with the eye of
the peasant girl and painted bit by bit, like fragments of a mosaic, was
a feat of technique in which there were few to imitate him. The young
generation in Munich studied the pages of the service-book and the
squares of the gingham dress, the girl's jug and the carvings of the
pew, with astonishment, as though they were the work of magic. They were
beside themselves with delight over such unheard-of strength, power, and
delicacy of modelling, the fusion of colour suggesting Holbein, and the
intimate study of nature. They perpetually discovered new points that
came upon them as a surprise, and many felt as Wilkie did when he sat in
Madrid before the drinkers of Velasquez, and at last rose wearily with a
sigh.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
LEIBL. A TAILOR'S WORKSHOP.]
Leibl did for Germany what the pre-Raphaelites did for England. Men and
women were represented with astonishing pains just as they sat and
suffered themselves to be painted. He was determined to give the whole,
pure truth, and he gave it; that, and nothing more and nothing less. He
reproduced nature in her minutest traits and in her finest movements,
bringing the imitative side of art to the highest perfection
conceivable. In virtue of these qualities he was a born portrait
painter; and although he never had "conception," as Lenbach had, his
portraits belong, with those of Lenbach, to the best German
performances of the century. Only Holbein when he painted his "Gysze"
had this remorseless manner of analysing the human countenance in every
wrinkle. Leibl once more taught the German painters to go into detail,
and led them constantly to hold nature as the only source of art; and
that has been the beginning of every renaissance.
His works were pictorially the most complete expression of the aims of
the Munich school in colour. As a representative of the efforts of the
decade from 1870 he is as typical as Cornelius for the art of the
thirties, Piloty for that of the fifties, and as Liebermann became later
as a representative of the efforts of the eighties.
CHAPTER XXX
THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE
Courbet and Ribot for France, Holman Hunt and Madox Brown for England,
Stevens for Belgium, Menzel, Lenbach, and Leibl for Germany, are the
great names of modern Realism, the names of the men who subjected modern
life to art, and subjected art to the nineteenth century.
One point, however, the question of colour, still remained unsolved: as
the preceding generation took their form, so these painters took their
colour, not from nature, but from the treasury of old art.
Courbet announced it as his programme to express the manners, ideas, and
aspect of his age--in a word, to create living art. He described himself
as the sincere lover of _la vérité vraie_: "_la véritable peinture doit
appeler son spectateur par la force et par la grande vérité de son
imitation_." But one may question how far his figures, and the
environment of them, are true in colour? Where there is a delightful
subtlety of fleeting _nuances_ in nature, an oppressive opaque heaviness
is found in this modern Caravaggio of Franche-Comté. He certainly
painted modern stone-breakers, but it was in the tone of saints of the
Spanish school of the seventeenth century. His pictures of artisans have
the odour of the museum. The home of his men and women is not the open
field of Ornans, but that room in the Louvre where hang the pictures of
Caravaggio.
_Alfred Stevens_ made a great stride by painting modern _Parisiennes_.
Whereas the costume picture had up to his time sought the truth of the
old masters only in the matter of the skirts which the fashion of their
age prescribed, Stevens was the first to dress his women in the garb of
1860, just as Terborg painted his in the costume of 1660 and not of
1460. But the very atmosphere in which the _Parisienne_ of the
nineteenth century lived is no longer that in which the women of de
Hoogh moved. The whole of life is brighter. The studios in which
pictures are painted are brighter, and the rooms in which they are
destined to hang. Van der Meer of Delft, the greatest painter of light
amongst the Dutch, still worked behind little casements; and in dusky
patrician dwellings, "where the very light of heaven breaks sad through
painted window," his pictures were ultimately hung. The old masters paid
special attention to these conditions of illumination. The golden
harmony of the Italian Renaissance came into being from the character of
the old cathedrals furnished with glass windows of divers colours; the
half-light of the Dutch corresponded to the dusky studios in which
painters laboured, and the gloomy, brown-wainscoted rooms for which
their pictures were destined. The nineteenth century committed the
mistake even here of regarding what was done to meet a special case as
something absolute. Rooms had long become bright when studios were
artificially darkened, and artists still sought, by means of coloured
windows and heavy curtains, to subdue the light, so as to be able to
paint in tones dictated by the old masters. Stevens shed over a modern
woman, a _Parisienne_, sitting in a drawing-room in the Avenue de Jena,
the light of Gerard Dow, without reflecting that this illumination,
filtered through little lattice-windows, was quite correct in Holland
during the seventeenth century, but no longer proper in the Paris of
1860, in a salon where the windows had great cross-bars and clear white
panes which were not leaded. It is chiefly this that makes his pictures
untrue, lending them an old Flemish heaviness, something earthy,
savouring of the clay, and not in keeping with the fresh fragrance of
the modern _Parisienne_. Her modernity is seen through the yellowish
glass which the old Flemish masters seemed to hold between Stevens and
his model.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI IN THE COSTUME OF A JAPANESE WARRIOR.]
Considered as a separate personality _Ribot_, too, is a great artist;
his works are masterpieces. Yet when young men spoke of him as the last
representative of the school of cellar-windows there was an atom of
truth in what they said. Like Courbet, he continued the art of
galleries. The master of a style and yet the servant of a manner, he
marks the summit of a tendency in which the great traditions of Frans
Hals and Ribera were once more embodied. When he paints subjects
resembling the themes of these old masters he is as great as they are,
as genuine and as much a master of style; but as soon as he turns to
other subjects the imitative mannerist is revealed. Even things as
tender and unsubstantial as the flowers of the field seem as if they
were made of wax. His disdain for what is light, fluent, and fickle,
like air and water, is evident in his sea-pieces. His steamers plough
their way through a greyish-black sea beneath a thick black stormy sky,
as though through grey deserts. Nature quivering in the air and bathed
in light is not so heavy and compact, nor has it such plasticity of
appearance. His women reading are the _ne plus ultra_ of painting; only
it is astonishing that any human being can read in such a dark room.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI. WOMEN BATHING.]
Ribot's parallel in Germany is _Lenbach_, who had less pictorial and
greater intellectual power. As a painter of copies, particularly copies
of the artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he formed and
perfected a school for the understanding of the old masters, as none of
his contemporaries had done. The copies which he made as a young man for
Count Schack in Italy and Spain are probably the best translations by
the brush that have ever been executed. He has reproduced Titian and
Rubens, Velasquez and Giorgione, with equal magic; no other painter has
entered into all the subtleties of their technique with such
intelligence and keenness; and by the aid of these sleights of art,
which he learnt as a copyist from classic masterpieces, he communicated
to his own works that impress which qualifies them for the gallery and
suggests the old masters with such refinement. His pictures mark the
summit of ability reached in Germany in the pictorial style of the old
artists.
But, at the same time, his weakness lies in this very eminence. The man
who had passed through the high-school of the old masters with the
greatest success was entered as a student for life, and never took the
professorial chair himself. Helferich has called him the impersonated
spirit of the galleries, the spirit which is centuries old.
This indicates the direction which must be taken by the further
development of painting. A really new and independent art must finally
emancipate itself from the Renaissance colouring, the tone of Church
painting, and the _chiaroscuro_ of pictures painted behind the
variegated panes of lattice-windows. It must be evident that the methods
of the old Spanish and old Dutch schools, excellent in themselves, were
fully in keeping with strange scenes of martyrdom or quiet interiors
with peasants and fat matrons, but that they could not possibly be
employed in pictures of artisans beneath the free sky, nor in those of
elegant interiors of our own days, nor of pale and delicate
_Parisiennes_ attired in silks, beings of a new epoch. A different
period necessitates different methods. It is not merely that the
subjects of art change, but the way in which they are handled must bear
the marks of the period. Nature should no longer be studied through the
prism of old pictures, and the phrase _beau par la vérité_ must be
exalted to a principle applying to colour also.
The pre-Raphaelites and Menzel were the first to become alive to the
problem. They were never taken captive by the tones of the early
masters, but placed themselves always in conscious opposition to the
artists of older ages. The battle against "brown sauce" even formed an
essential point in the programme of the Brotherhood. They protested
against conventional colouring as violently as against the sweeping line
taught by traditional rules of beauty.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI. FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH A SAIL.]
But, as so often happens in the nineteenth century, though the English
found the jewel, they did not understand how to cut it. The
pre-Raphaelites had a quickening influence, in exciting a feeling for
hue and tint, and rendering it keener by their own insistence on the
elementary effects of colour. They sought to free themselves from brown
sauce and to be just to local tones, through straightforward,
independent observation. They painted the trees green, the earth grey,
the sky blue, the sunbeams yellow, in sharply accentuated colours, as
little blended as possible. But in most cases the result was not
particularly pleasant; there was almost always a hard, motley colouring
which produced a most unpleasant, glaring effect. Their audacity was
somewhat barbaric. There was a want of warmth and softness, the
atmosphere did not combine the whole by its mitigating and harmonising
power. Even Madox Brown's "Work" is an offensive chaos of crying
colours. The bright clothes, the blue blouses, the red uniforms have a
gaudy and unquiet effect. The problem was attacked, but the solution was
harsh and crude.
[Illustration: HOKUSAI. FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH REEDS.]
Of _Menzel's_ pictures the same is true, though not perhaps in the same
degree. In pictorial conception he also has not quite reached the
summit. His method of painting is sometimes sparkling and full of
spirit, holding the mean, more or less, between the quiet and plain
painting of Meissonier and the crisp, glittering style of Fortuny; he
lets off a flickering, dazzling, rocket-like firework, but at bottom he
has been cut from the block from which draughtsmen are made. Sometimes
it is astonishing how his brush sweeps over costumes, ornaments, and
buildings, but he does not think in colour; it is supplementary to the
drawing, and not of earlier origin, nor even of equal birth. Much as he
tried to paint smoke and steam in his "Iron Mill," he had no
understanding for atmospheric life; for this reason harsh and glaring
tones almost invariably make a disturbing effect in his works. His
"Piazza d'Erbe" as well as his "King Wilhelm setting out to join the
Army" have a motley and restless effect in the picture, and only in
photography or black and white do they acquire something of the
simplicity which is to be desired in the originals. The best of his
drawings may stand beside the sketches of Dürer without detriment; to
place his pictures on the same level is impossible, because quietude and
pure harmony are wanting in them.
So extremes meet. Courbet, Ribot, and Lenbach are greater connoisseurs
of colour than Europe had seen previous to their appearance, but this
they are at the expense of truth; they have identified themselves with
the old masters, and not arrived at any personal conception of colour.
Menzel and the pre-Raphaelites despised the old masters, but their
conception of colour had something primitive, jarring, and
undisciplined.
The note of truth was still missing in the mighty orchestra. By what
possible means could it be supplied? How bring to perfection that great
harmony which is ever the end and aim of all true artistic effort. It
was not until the art of the Far East was unfolded before the eyes of
Western painters that this disquieting problem reached its solution.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HOKUSAI. AN APPARITION.]
In the year in which Millet exhibited his "Winnower" and Courbet painted
his "Stone-breakers" a man died in the Far East whose name was Hokusai.
He was the last great representative of an art of painting more than a
thousand years old--one which had no Raphael, Correggio, or Titian,
though it was, nevertheless, art in the loftiest meaning of the word.
Marco Polo, the great traveller of the Middle Ages, had told of a
remarkable land "towards the sunrise," the soil of which it was not
permitted to him to tread. And the artistic views of the eighteenth
century were revolutionised when the first Japanese porcelain and
lacquer-work arrived at the Courts of Dresden and Paris. The aged Louis
XIV himself began to find pleasure in idols, pagodas, and "stuffs
printed with flowers." In a short time these works formed an important
part of superior collections, and led to the movement against the
inflexible despotism of the pompous Lebrun style. For the Japanese gave
Europe the unfettered principles of a freer intuition of beauty; they
excited a preference for things which were unsymmetrical, capricious,
full of movement, for everything by which the charming Louis XV style is
to be distinguished from the tiresome academic art of Louis XIV. In the
sixties of the nineteenth century Japan exerted, for the second time, a
revolutionary influence on the development of European painting. If
Japanese productions were in earlier days regarded as curiosities, for
which place was to be found in cabinets of rarities, as trifles the
artistic value of which was less prized than the dexterity of their
construction, it was reserved for the present age to do justice to
Japanese art as such.
[Illustration: HOKUSAI. HOKUSAI SKETCHING THE PEERLESS MOUNTAIN.]
As is well known, oil-painting exists neither in China nor Japan. Just
as the Japanese choose the slightest material for building, so
everything in their painting bears a trace of extreme lightness.
Japanese pictures, _kakemonos_, are painted in water colour or Chinese
ink upon framed silk or paper; but this paper has an advantage over the
European article in its unsurpassed toughness, its remarkable softness
and pliability, its surface which has either a dull, silky lustre, or
may only be compared with the finest parchment. And the pictures
themselves are kept rolled up, and only hung, as occasion offers, in
the Tokonama, the little closet near the reception-room, and according
to very refined rules. Only a few are hung at a time, and only such as
harmonise. When a visit is expected the taste of the guest determines
the selection. Fresh and variously coloured flowers and branches, placed
near them in vases, are obliged to harmonise in colour with the
pictures.
[Illustration: TANYU. THE GOD HOTEÏ ON A JOURNEY.]
As an instrument for painting use is only made of the pliant brush of
hair, which executes everything with a free and fluent effect. Pen,
crayon, or chalk, and all hard mediums which offer resistance, are
consistently excluded. The subject-matter of these pictures is
surprisingly rich, and assumes for their proper understanding some
acquaintance with Japanese literature. An opulent folk-lore, in which
cannibals and heroes like Tom Thumb live and move and have their being,
just as in European fairy stories, stands at the disposal of the artist.
Historical representations from the life of fabulous national heroes,
ghosts, and apparitions half man and half bird, alternate with simple
landscapes and scenes from daily life. And in all pictures, whether they
are fanciful or plain renderings of fact, attention is riveted by the
same keenness of observation, the same refinement of taste, in the
highest sense of the word by pictorial charm. After the Japanese have
been long recognised as the first decorative artists in the world, after
the highest praise has been accorded to them in the industrial crafts
taken jointly--in lacquer-work and bronze work, weaving, embroidery,
and pottery--they are now likewise celebrated as the most spirited
draughtsmen in existence.
[Illustration: _Studio._
KORIN. LANDSCAPE.]
[Illustration: _Studio._
KORIN. RABBITS.]
The Japanese artist lives with nature and in her as no artist of any
other country has ever done. Life in the open air creates a relation to
nature suggestive of the doctrines of Rousseau; it makes earth, sky, and
water as familiar to man as are the beings that move in them. Every
house, even in the centre of towns, has a garden laid out with fine
taste, and combining beautiful flowers, trees, and cascades, everything
incidental to the soil. The form of trees, the shape and colour of
flowers, the ripple of leaves, and the gleaming mail of insects are so
imprinted in the memory of the painter that his fancy can summon them at
pleasure without the need of fresh study. The most fleeting moment of
the life of nature is held as firmly in his mind as the everlasting form
of rocks and gigantic trees shadowing the temple groves of Nippon. Every
one of these artists works with the unfettered falcon glance of the
child of nature. His keen eye sees in the flight of birds turns and
movements first revealed to us by instantaneous photography. This
quickness of eye and this astonishing exercise of memory enable him to
obtain the most striking effects with the slightest means. If a Japanese
executes figures, race, station, age, business, personality are all
seized with the keenest vision, and pregnantly rendered in their
essential features. Robes and unclad forms, heads and limbs, animated
and still nature, are all reproduced with the same reality. Yet little
as the doctrine ever gained ground that to create works of art nature
should be mastered upon a system, trivial realism was just as little at
any time the vogue.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
OKIO. A CARP.]
The love of nature is born in the Japanese, but the photographic
imitation, the servile reproduction of reality, is never his ultimate
aim. Geoffroy has noted with much subtlety the resemblance which exists
between Japanese poets and painters in this respect. Their poets never
describe, but only endeavour to express a spiritual feeling, to hold a
memory fast--the blitheness of smiling pleasure, the mournfulness of
vanished joy. They sing of the mist passing over the mountain summits,
the fishing boats, the reeds by the seashore, the plash of waves, the
flying streaks of cloud, the sunset streaming purple over the weary
world. The same economy of means, the same sureness in the choice of
characteristic features, and a similar rapidity in striking the keynote
are peculiar to the painters. They, too, express themselves by the
scantiest means, shrink from saying too much, and aim only at a rapid
and right expression of total effect, leaving to the imagination the
task of supplementing and amplifying what is given. The heaviness of
matter is overcome, the absurd pretence of reality not attempted. Like
the French of the eighteenth century, the Japanese possess the sportive
grace, the _esprit_ of the brush hovering over objects, extracting
merely their bloom and essence, and using them as the basis for free and
independent caprices of beauty. They have the remarkable faculty of
being synthetic and discarding every ponderous and disturbing element,
without losing the local accent in a landscape or a figure. They fasten
upon the most vivid impression of things, but in great, comprehensive
lines, subordinating every peculiarity to the light which shines upon
them and the shadow in which they are muffled. Their handwriting is at
once broad and precise, graceful and bizarre. What a nonchalant,
fragile, piquant, or coquettish effect have their feminine figures! And
but a few firm strokes sufficed to create the impression. A dexterous
sweep of the brush was all that was necessary for the modelling, all
that was wanted to summon the idea of the velvet softness of the flesh
and the firmness of the bosom. Or surging waves have been painted, or
foaming cataracts. But with what consummate mastery, with what peculiar
knowledge, the swirl and eddying of the waters have been represented.
And how slight are the means which have been employed! Everything has
the freshness of life, and the sheer, intangible movement of objects has
been caught by a simple and decisive line. A few dashes of Chinese ink
are made, and the forcible strokes unite without effort in forming a
mountain path or a hillside stream foaming over rocks and trees. Or the
prow of a vessel is represented. Nothing is to be seen of the water, and
yet it is as if the waves were rocking the ship. The billow swells,
rises, and sinks, suggesting the wide sea, the rhythm in the universe.
The lines in which the motives are executed render only what is
essential. But combined with this striving after simplified form there
is a sense of space which of itself, as it were, controls everything,
producing the poetic illusion of distance.
[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. THE BRIDGE AT YEDDO.]
The Japanese are masters of the art of enlarging a narrow picture frame
to a great expanse, and indicating by a few strokes the distance between
foreground and horizon. There is often nothing, or next to nothing, in
the wide space, but proximity and distance are so correctly related that
all the geological structure is clear, whilst light air is pervasive,
giving the eye a vision of boundless perspective. The spur of a
headland, the bank of a river, or a cleft between two mountains enables
the eye to measure far landscapes. In the presence of their works one
dreams, one has the presentiment of infinite distances. They divest
objects of their earthiness by bold simplifications, and transform
reality into dreamland. It is the spirit of things, their smile, and
their intangible perfume which live in these veiled masterpieces which
are yet so precise.
The bold irregularity of Japanese works, which know nothing of the
stiffness of symmetrical composition, contributes much to this
impression. Their pictures are never "composed" in our sense of the
word, but rather resemble the instantaneous pictures of photographers.
A bird is seen to dart past, only half visible, a cluster of trees is a
chance slice from the forest, as it is seen out of the window of a
railway train whizzing past. Or it is merely the bough of a tree with a
bird upon it that stretches into the picture, which is otherwise filled
with a fragment of blue sky. Without appearing to concern themselves
about it, they compose little poems of grace and freshness, with a frog,
a butterfly, and a blossoming apple-branch sprouting out of a vase. They
play with beetles, grasshoppers, tortoises, crabs, and fish as did the
artists of the Renaissance with Cupids and angels.
[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. A HIGH ROAD.]
And in everything, as regards colour too, the Japanese have a strain of
refinement peculiar to themselves. It is as though they were controlled
by the finest tact, as by a _force majeure_, even in their intuition of
colour. That great harmony of which Théodore Rousseau spoke, and to
which it was the aim of his life to attain, is reached by the Japanese
artist almost instinctively. The most vivid effects of red and green
trees, yellow roads, and blue sky are represented; the most refined
effects of light are rendered--illuminated bridges, dark firmaments, the
white sickle of the moon, glittering stars, the bright and rosy blossoms
of spring, the dazzling snow as it falls upon trim gardens; and there
are discords nowhere. How heavy and motley our colouring is compared
with these delicious chords, set beside each other so boldly, and
invariably so harmonious. Is it that our eyes are by nature less
delicate? or is everything in the Japanese only the result of a more
rational training? We have not the same intense force of perception,
this instinctive and sensuous gift of colour. Their colouring is a
delight to the eyes, a magic potion. Offence is nowhere given by a
glaring or an entirely crude tone; everything is finely calculated,
delicately indicated, and has that melting softness so enchanting in
Japanese enamel. The simplest chords of colour are often the most
effective; nothing can be more charming than the delicate duet of grey
and gold. And the cheapest wood-cut has often all these refinements in
common with the most costly _kakemono_. Even here, where they turn to
lowly things, their art is never vulgar, but maintains itself at such an
aristocratic height that we barbarians of the West, blessed with
oleographs and Academies of Art, can only look up with envy to this
nation of connoisseurs.
[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. A LANDSCAPE.]
The oldest of these Japanese artists working in wood-cut engraving was
Matahei, who lived in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and
executed scenes from the theatres and Japanese family and street life.
Icho and Moronobu followed at the close of the seventeenth century, the
one being a spirited caricaturist, the other a genuine _baroque_ artist
of noble and classic reserve. Through the masters of the eighteenth
century, as through Eisen, Fragonard, and Boucher, this reproductive art
took fresh development. The soft girls of Soukénobu with their delicate
round faces, the graceful beauties of Harunobu arrayed in costly
toilettes, the tall feminine forms of the marvellous Outamaro in all
their provocative charm, the vivid scenes from popular life of the great
colourist Shunsho, are works pervaded with a delicate perfume of which
Edmond de Goncourt alone could render any impression in words.
Outamaro, the poet of women, was, in a special sense, the Watteau of
aristocratic life in Japan. He knew the life of the Japanese woman as no
other has ever done--her domestic occupations, her walks and her
charming graces, her vanities and her love affairs. He knew also the
scenes of nature which she contemplated, the streets through which she
passed, and the banks along which she sauntered with an undulating step.
His women are slender beings, isolated like idols, and standing
motionless in poses hieratically august; æsthetic souls, who swoon and
grow pale under the sway of disquieting visions; fading flowers, forms
roaming wearily by the verge of a lonely sea or a sluggish stream, or
flitting timidly, like bats, through the soft brilliancy of lights amid
a festival by night. And in killing what is fleshly and physical he
renders the faces visionary and dreamy, renders the hands and the
gestures finer, and at the same time subdues and mitigates the colours
and the splendour of the clothes, taking pleasure in dying chords, in
deep black and tender white, in fine, pallid _nuances_ of rose-colour
and lilac. Every one of his pupils became a fresh chronicler of
aristocratic life. Toyohami painted night festivals; Toyoshiru, animated
crowds; Toyokumi, scenes of the theatre; Kunisada, women upon their
walks; Kunioshi, melodramatic representations full of pomp, with
marvellous fantastic landscapes.
[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
HIROSHIGE. SNOWY WEATHER.]
The nineteenth century brought the widest popularisation of art,
corresponding more or less to the "resort to popular national life," as
the beginning of modern _genre_ painting and of the modern art of
illustration was called in Germany. The refined son of Nippon shrugs his
shoulders over these last creations of Japanese reproduction in colours;
he prefers those earlier charming masters of grace, and misses the
aristocratic _cachet_ in the new men, with as much justification as the
refined European collector has when he does not care to place the plates
of Granville or Doré in a portfolio with those of Eisen or Fragonard.
Nevertheless amongst the draughtsmen who followed the popular tendency
there was at any rate one great genius, one of the most important
artists of his country, who became more familiar to Europe than any of
his other compatriots: this was _Hokusai_.
[Illustration: AN UNKNOWN MASTER. HARVESTERS RESTING.]
All the qualities of Japanese art are united in him as in a focus. His
work is the encyclopædia of a whole nation, and in his technical
qualities he stands by the side of the greatest men in Europe. He is the
most attentive observer, a painter of manners as no other has ever been;
he takes strict measure of everything, analysing the slightest
movements. He draws the solid things of earth, the immovable rocks, the
everlasting primæval mountains, and yet follows the changing phenomena
of light and shade upon its surface. He has, in the highest degree, that
peculiarly Japanese quality of giving tangible expression to the
movements of things and living creatures. His men and women gesticulate,
his animals run, his birds fly, his reptiles crawl, his fish swim; the
leaves on the trees, the water of the rivers, and the sea and the clouds
of the sky move gently. He is a magnificent landscape painter,
celebrating all the seasons, from blossoming spring to ice-bound winter.
In his designs he maps out orchards, fields, and woods, follows the
winding course of rivers, summons a fine mist from the sea, sends the
waves surging forward, and the billows racing up against the rocks and
losing themselves as murmuring rivulets in the sand. But he is also a
philosopher and a poet of wide flight, who makes the boldest journeys
into the land of dreams. His imagination rises above the work-a-day
world, rides upon the chimera, bodies forth a new life, creates
monsters, and tells visions of terrible poetry. The deep feeling of the
primitive masters revives in him, and he appears as a strange mystic,
when he paints his blithe ethereal goddesses, or that old Buddhist who,
when banished, came every day across the sea, as the legend tells, to
behold once more Fuji, the sacred mountain.
[Illustration: _Studio._
OUTAMARO. MOTHER'S LOVE.]
Hokusai was born in 1760, amid flowery gardens in a quiet corner of
Yeddo, fourteen years after Goya and twelve years after David. His
father was purveyor of metallic mirrors to the Court. Hokusai took
lessons from an illustrator, but does not seem to have been much known
until his fortieth or fiftieth year. In 1810 he first founded an
industrial school of art, which attracted numbers of young people. To
provide them with a compendium of instruction in drawing he published in
1810 the first volume of his _Mangwa_. From that time he was recognised
as the head of a school. When his fame began to spread he changed his
residence almost every month to protect himself from troublesome
visitors. And just as often did he alter his name. Even that under which
he became famous in Europe is only a pseudonym, like "Gavarni": amongst
various _noms de guerre_ it was that which he bore the longest and by
which he was definitely recognised.
As a painter he was only active in his youth. The achievement of his
life is not his pictures, but a magnificent series of illustrated books,
a life's work richer than that of any of his compatriots. Like Titian
and Corot, fate had predestined him to reach a very great age without
ever growing old.
"From my sixth year," he writes in the preface to one of his books, "I
had a perfect mania for drawing every object that I saw. When I had
reached my fiftieth year I published a vast quantity of drawings; but I
am unsatisfied with all that I have produced before my seventieth year.
At seventy-three I had some understanding of the form and real nature of
birds, fish, and plants. At eighty I hope to have made further progress,
and at ninety to have discovered the ultimate foundation of things. In
my hundredth year I shall rise to yet higher spheres unknown, and in my
hundred and tenth, every stroke, every point, and in short everything
that comes from my hand will be alive." Hokusai certainly did not reach
so great an age as that. He died at eighty-nine, on 13th April 1849, and
is buried in the temple at Yeddo. During the period between 1815 and
1845 he published about eighty great works, altogether over five hundred
volumes.
"I rose from my seat at the window, where I had idled the whole day long
... softly, softly.... Then I was up and away.... I saw the countless
green leaves tremble in the densely embowered tops of the trees; I
watched the flaky clouds in the blue sky, collecting fantastically into
shapes torn and multiform.... I sauntered here and there carelessly,
without aim or volition.... Now I crossed the Bridge of Apes and
listened as the echo repeated the cry of the wild cranes.... Now I was
in the cherry-grove of Owari.... Through the mists shifting along the
coast of Miho I descried the famous pines of Suminoye.... Now I stood
trembling upon the Bridge of Kameji and looked down in astonishment at
the gigantic Fuki plants.... Then the roar of the dizzy waterfall of Ono
resounded in my ear. A shudder ran through me.... It was only a dream
which I dreamed, lying in bed near my window with this book of pictures
by the master as a cushion beneath my head."
[Illustration: KIYONAGA. LADIES BOATING.]
In these words a learned Japanese has indicated the great range of
subject, the unspeakably rich material of the works of the master. By
preference he leads us to the work-places of artisans, to woodcarvers,
smiths, workers in metal, dyers, weavers, and embroiderers. Then come
the pleasures of the nobility, who are displayed in their refinement,
reserve, and dignity; the country-folk at their daily avocations, or
making merry upon holidays; the fantastic shapes of fabulous animals and
demons, who figure in the life of Japanese national heroes, mighty with
the sword; apparitions, drunken men, wrestlers, street figures of every
conceivable description, mythical reptiles, snow-clad mountain tops,
waving rice-fields lashed by the wind, woodland glens, strange gateways
of rock, far views over waters with cliffs clothed with pine.
The most celebrated of those works which contain landscapes exclusively
are the views, published in three volumes in 1834-36, of the mountain of
Fuji, the great volcano rising close by Yeddo, and from old time playing
a part in the works of Japanese landscape painters. In Hokusai's book
the cone of the mountain is sometimes seen rising clear in a cloudless
sky, whilst it is sometimes shrouded by clouds of various shapes. Its
beautiful outline glimmers through the meshes of a net, through the
spindrift of snow falling in great flakes, or through a curtain of rain
splashing vertically down. It rises from misty valleys coloured by the
rays of the evening sun, or is reflected--itself out of sight--in the
smooth surface of a lake, upon the reedy shores of which the wild geese
cackle, or it stands in ghostly outlines against the night sky flooded
with silver moonlight. Summer breezes and winter storms drive over it,
rattling showers of hail, lashed by the wind, or light falls of snow
descend round it. In spring the blossoms of peach and plum-trees flutter
to the earth, like swarms of white and rosy butterflies. Only famished
wolves or dragons, which popular superstition has located in the
mountain of Fuji, occasionally animate the grandiose solitude of the
landscape.
"Never," says Gonse, "has a more dexterous hand rested upon paper. It is
impossible to study his plates without an excited feeling of pleasure,
for they are absolute perfection, the highest that Japanese art has
produced in freshness, brilliancy, life, and originality. Hokusai's
capacity of giving the impression of relief and colour with a stroke of
the brush has nothing like it except in Rembrandt, Callot, and Goya.
Men, animals, landscapes, and everything in his drawings are reduced to
their simplest expression. Groups are seen in motion, priests in
procession, soldiers on the march, and often a single stroke is
sufficient to render an individual or create the impression of life and
movement. Every plate is a masterpiece of coloured woodcut engraving, of
singular flavour in colour, delightful in its gravely harmonised chord
of golden yellow, faded green, and fiery red, to which are sometimes
added golden, silvern, and other metallic tones."
After the beginning of the sixties Paris came under the captivating
influence of Japan. And there is no doubt that as the English influenced
the landscape painters of Fontainebleau, the Venetians Delacroix, and
the Neapolitan masters Courbet and Ribot, the newest phase of French
art, which took its departure from Manet, was inaugurated by the
enthusiasm for things Japanese. From the moment when the peculiar
isolation of Japan was ended by the breaking up of the Japanese feudal
state, Paris was flooded by splendid works of Japanese art. A painter
discovered amongst the mass of articles newly arrived albums, colour
prints, and pictures. Their drawing, colouring, and composition deviated
from everything hitherto accounted as art, and yet the æsthetic
character of these works was too artistic to permit of any one smiling
over them as curiosities. Whether the discoverer was Alfred Stevens or
Diaz, Fortuny, James Tissot, or Alphonse Legros, the enthusiasm for the
Japanese swept over the studios like a storm. The artistic world never
wearied of admiring the capricious ability of these compositions, the
astonishing power of drawing, the fineness in tone, the originality of
pictorial effect, nor of wondering at the refined simplicity of the
means by which these results were achieved. Japanese art made itself
felt by its fresh and tender charm, its creative opulence, its lightness
and delicacy of observation; it arrested attention because directness,
unfailing tact, and inherent distinction were of the essence of its
conception; and it was recognised as the production of a nation of
artists combining the subtilised taste of an originally refined
civilisation with the freshness of feeling peculiar to primitive people.
Colour prints, now to be had for a few francs at every bazaar, were
bought at the highest figures. Every new consignment was awaited with
feverish impatience. Old ivory, enamel, porcelain and embellished
pottery, bronzes and wood and lacquer-work, ornamented stuffs,
embroidered silks, albums, books of wood-cuts, and knick-knacks were
scarcely unpacked in the shop before they found their way into the
studios of artists and the libraries of scholars. In a short time great
collections of the artistic productions of Japan passed into the hands
of the painters Manet, James Tissot, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Degas,
Carolus Duran, and Monet; of the engravers Bracquemond and Jules
Jacquemart; of the authors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Champfleury,
Philippe Burty, and Zola; and of the manufacturers Barbedienne and
Christofle.
[Illustration: HARUNOBU. A PAIR OF LOVERS.]
The International Exhibition of 1867 brought Japan still more into
fashion, and from this year must be dated the peculiar influence of the
West upon the East and the East upon the West. The Japanese came over to
study at the European polytechnic institutes, universities, and military
academies. On the other hand, we became the pupils of the Japanese in
art. Even during the course of the Exhibition a group of artists and
critics founded a Japanese society of the "Jinglar," which met every
week in Sèvres at the house of Solon, the director of the manufactory.
They used a Japanese dinner-service, designed by Bracquemond, and
everything except the napkins, cigars, and ash-trays was Japanese. One
of the members, Dr. Zacharias Astruc, published in _L'Étendard_ a series
of articles upon "The Empire of the Rising Sun," which made a great
sensation. Soon afterwards the Parisian theatres brought out Japanese
ballets and fairy plays. Ernest d'Hervilly wrote his Japanese piece _La
Belle Saïnara_, which Lemère printed for him in Japanese fashion and
paged from right to left, giving it a yellow cover designed by
Bracquemond. A Japanese ballet was performed at the opera, and a
Japanese turn was given to the toilettes of women.
For painters Japanese art was a revelation. Here was uttered the word
that hovered on so many lips, and that no one had dared to pronounce.
With what a fleeting touch, and yet with what precision, with what
incomparable sureness, lightness, and grace, was everything carried out.
How intuitive and spontaneous, how imaginative and how full of
suggestion, how effortless and how rich in surprises, was this strange
art. How happily was industry united with caprice, and nonchalance with
endeavour at the highest finish. How suggestive was this disregard for
symmetry, this piquant method of introducing a flower, an insect, a
frog, or a bird here and there, merely as a pictorial spot in the
picture. How the Japanese understood the art of expressing much with few
means, where the Europeans toiled with a great expenditure of means to
express little.
It would certainly have been an exceedingly false move if a direct
imitation of the Japanese had been thought of. Japanese art is the
product of a sensuous people, and European art that of intellectual
nations. The latter is greater and more serious; it is nobler, and it
reaches heights of expression not attained by the grotesque and terrible
distortions and the morbidly droll or melancholy outbursts of sentiment
known to the Japanese. Our imagination is alien to that of these
children of the sensuous world, who quake and tremble for joy, horrify
themselves with their masks, and pass from convulsive laughter to sheer
terror, and from the shudder of hallucination to ecstatic bliss. Had
Japanese art been coarsely transposed by imitators it would have led to
caricature.
But if its poetics were little suitable for Europe in the specialised
case, they nevertheless contained general laws better fitted for modern
art than those which had been hitherto borrowed from Greece. All arts,
music as well as poetry, were then striving for the dissolution of
simple, tyrannical rhythms. The recurrence of unyielding measures beaten
out with unwavering repetition no longer corresponded with the
complicated, neurotic emotions of the new age. In painting, likewise,
exertions were being made to burst the old shell, and a style was sought
after for the treatment of modern life which had been violently handled
in the effort to force it to fit the Procrustean bed of traditional
rules. Then came the Japanese with their astonishing, rapid, and
pictorial sketches, and revealed a new method for the interpretation of
nature. At a time when the symmetrical balance of lines, borrowed from
the works of the Renaissance masters, became wearisome in its monotony,
they taught a much freer architecture of form, and one which was broken
by charming caprices. Where there had been rhythm, tension, clarity,
largeness, and quietude in the old European painting, there was in them
a nervous freedom, an artful carelessness, and life and charm. Art was
concealed beneath the fancy shown in their facile construction, which
seemed to have been improvised by nature herself. An artistic method of
deviating from geometrical arrangement, freedom of distribution,
unforced and unsymmetrical structure, in the place of balance and
construction according to rules, were learnt from the Japanese in the
matter of composition.
[Illustration: TOYOKUMI. NOCTURNAL REVERIE.]
At the same time, they threw light upon what had been flat and trivial
in Courbet's realism. These spirited narrators never told a story for
the sake of telling it; they never painted to give a prosaic copy of
some particle of reality. They liberated European painting from the
heaviness of matter, and rendered it tender and delicate. They taught
that art of not saying everything, which says so much, the method of
compendious drawing, the secret of expanding distance by a special
treatment of lines, the touch thrown rapidly in, the unforeseen, the
surprise, the fleeting hint, the way of increasing effect by the
incompletion of motive, the suggestion of the whole by a part. Artists
learnt from them another manner of drawing and modelling, a manner of
giving the impression of the object without the need for the whole of it
being executed, so that one knows that it is there only through one's
knowledge. They brought in the taste for pithy sketches dealing only
with essentials, the consciousness of the endless catalogue of what may
be contained--in life, reality, and fancy--by one fluent outline. They
introduced the preference for perspective bird's-eye views, the
disposition to throw groups, dense masses, and crowds more into the
distance, and render them more animated and vivid by a relief of the
foreground, which (though confirmed by photography) is apparently
improbable.
The influence of Japan on colouring is just as visible as upon
composition and drawing. It had been clearly shown in Courbet's pictures
of artisans that the rules of the Bolognese school, with their brown
sauce and their red shadows, could not possibly be applied to objects in
the open air. It was therefore necessary to discover a new principle of
colour for modern subjects, a principle by which oil-painting would be
divested of its oil, and light and air would come to their r
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