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Title: The French Impressionists (1860-1900)
Author: Camille Mauclair
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THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (1860-1900)
by
CAMILLE MAUCLAIR
Author of _L'art en Silence_, _Les Mères Sociales_, etc.
Translated from the French text of Camille Mauclair, by P. G. Konody
London: Duckworth & Co.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
Turnbull and Spears, Printers, Edinburgh
1903
[Illustration: RENOIR
AT THE PIANO]
To
AUGUSTE BRÉAL
TO THE ARTIST AND TO THE FRIEND
AS A MARK OF GRATEFUL AFFECTION
C.M.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
It should be stated here that, with the exception of one reproduction
after the Neo-Impressionist Van Rysselberghe, the other forty-nine
engravings illustrating this volume I owe to the courtesy of M.
Durand-Ruel, from the first the friend of the Impressionist painters,
and later the most important collector of their works, a friend who has
been good enough to place at our disposal the photographs from which our
illustrations have been reproduced. Chosen from a considerable
collection which has been formed for thirty years past, these
photographs, none of which are for sale, form a veritable and unique
museum of documents on Impressionist art, which is made even more
valuable through the dispersal of the principal masterpieces of this art
among the private collections of Europe and America. We render our
thanks to M. Durand-Ruel no less in the name of the public interested in
art, than in our own.
CONTENTS
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I. THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM--THE
BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT, THE
ORIGIN OF ITS NAME
II. THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS--THE
DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS,
THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE--THE IDEAS OF THE
IMPRESSIONISTS ON SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON
THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY,
AND ON STYLE
III. EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
IV. EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
V. CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
VI. AUGUSTE RENOIR: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
VII. PISSARRO, SISLEY, CAILLEBOTTE,
CÉZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MARY CASSATT;
THE SECONDARY ARTISTS OF
IMPRESSIONISM--JONGKIND, BOUDIN
VIII. THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH
IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAËLLI, TOULOUSE-LAUTREC,
FORAIN, CHÉRET, ETC.
IX. NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: GAUGUIN, DENIS,
THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE--THE THEORY OF
POINTILLISM--SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE
THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC CHROMATISM--FAULTS
AND QUALITIES OF THE
IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE OWE
TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE
FRENCH SCHOOL--SOME WORDS ON ITS
INFLUENCE ABROAD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
RENOIR. At the Piano (Frontispiece)
MANET. Rest
MANET. In the Square
MANET. Young Man in Costume of Majo
MANET. The Reader
DEGAS. The Dancer at the Photographer's
DEGAS. Carriages at the Races
DEGAS. The Greek Dance--Pastel
DEGAS. Waiting
CLAUDE MONET. The Pines
CLAUDE MONET. Church at Vernon
RENOIR. Portrait of Madame Maitre
MANET. The Dead Toreador
MANET. Olympia
MANET. The Woman with the Parrot
MANET. The Bar at the Folies Bergère
MANET. Déjeuner
MANET. Portrait of Madame M. L.
MANET. The Hothouse
DEGAS. The Beggar Woman
DEGAS. The Lesson in the Foyer
DEGAS. The Dancing Lesson--Pastel
DEGAS. The Dancers
DEGAS. Horses in the Meadows
CLAUDE MONET. An Interior after Dinner
CLAUDE MONET. The Harbour, Honfleur
CLAUDE MONET. The Church at Varengeville
CLAUDE MONET. Poplars on the Epte in Autumn
CLAUDE MONET. The Bridge at Argenteuil
RENOIR. Déjeuner
RENOIR. In the Box
RENOIR. Young Girl Promenading
RENOIR. Woman's Bust
RENOIR. Young Woman in Empire Costume
RENOIR. On the Terrace
PISSARRO. Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen
PISSARRO. Boulevard Montmartre
PISSARRO. The Boildieaux Bridge at Rouen
PISSARRO. The Avenue de l'Opéra
SISLEY. Snow Effect
SISLEY. Bougival, at the Water's Edge
SISLEY. Bridge at Moret
CÉZANNE. Dessert
BERTHE MORISOT. Melancholy
BERTHE MORISOT. Young Woman Seated
MARY CASSATT. Getting up Baby
MARY CASSATT. Women and Child
JONGKIND. In Holland
JONGKIND. View of the Hague
THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE. Portraits of Madame van Rysselberghe and her
Daughter
NOTE TO LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The illustrations contained in this volume have been taken from
different epochs of the Impressionist movement. They will give but a
feeble idea of the extreme abundance of its production.
Banished from the salons, exhibited in private galleries and sold direct
to art lovers, the Impressionist works have been but little seen. The
series left by Caillebotte to the Luxembourg Gallery is very badly shown
and is composed of interesting works which, however, date back to the
early period, and are very inferior to the beautiful productions which
followed later. Renoir is best represented. The private galleries in
Paris, where the best Impressionist works are to be found, are those of
MM. Durand-Ruel, Rouart, de Bellis, de Camondo, and Manzi, to which must
be added the one sold by MM. Théodore Duret and Faure, and the one of
Mme. Ernest Rouart, daughter of Mme. Morisot, the sister-in-law of
Manet. The public galleries of M. Durand-Ruel's show-rooms are the place
where it is easiest to find numerous Impressionist pictures.
In spite of the firm opposition of the official juries, a place of
honour was reserved at the Exposition of 1889 for Manet, and at that of
1900 a fine collection of Impressionists occupied two rooms and caused a
considerable stir.
Amongst the critics who have most faithfully assisted this group of
artists, I must mention, besides the early friends previously referred
to, Castagnary, Burty, Edouard de Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geffroy, Arsène
Alexandre, Octave Mirbeau, L. de Fourcaud, Clemenceau, Mallarmé,
Huysmans, Jules Laforgue, and nearly all the critics of the Symbolist
reviews. A book on "Impressionist Art" by M. Georges Lecomte has been
published by the firm of Durand-Ruel as an _edition-de-luxe_. But the
bibliography of this art consists as yet almost exclusively of articles
in journals and reviews and of some isolated biographical pamphlets.
Manet is, amongst many, the one who has excited most criticism of all
kinds; the articles, caricatures and pamphlets relating to his work
would form a considerable collection. It should be added that, with the
exception of Manet two years before his death, and Renoir last year at
the age of sixty-eight, no Impressionist has been decorated by the
French government. In England such a distinction has even less
importance in itself than elsewhere. But if I insist upon it, it is only
to draw attention to the fact that, through the sheer force of their
talent, men like Degas, Monet and Pissarro have achieved great fame and
fortune, without gaining access to the Salons, without official
encouragement, decoration, subvention or purchases for the national
museums. This is a very significant instance and serves well to complete
the physiognomy of this group of independents.
I
THE PRECURSORS OF IMPRESSIONISM--THE BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT AND THE
ORIGIN OF ITS NAME
It will be beyond the scope of this volume to give a complete history of
French Impressionism, and to include all the attractive details to which
it might lead, as regards the movement itself and the very curious epoch
during which its evolution has taken place. The proportions of this book
confine its aim to the clearest possible summing up for the British
reader of the ideas, the personalities and the works of a considerable
group of artists who, for various reasons, have remained but little
known and who have only too frequently been gravely misjudged. These
reasons are very obvious: first, the Impressionists have been unable to
make a show at the Salons, partly because the jury refused them
admission, partly because they held aloof of their own free will. They
have, with very rare exceptions, exhibited at special minor galleries,
where they become known to a very restricted public. Ever attacked, and
poor until the last few years, they enjoyed none of the benefits of
publicity and sham glory. It is only quite recently that the admission
of the incomplete and badly arranged Caillebotte collection to the
Luxembourg Gallery has enabled the public to form a summary idea of
Impressionism. To conclude the enumeration of the obstacles, it must be
added that there are hardly any photographs of Impressionist works in
the market. As it is, photography is but a poor translation of these
canvases devoted to the study of the play of light; but even this very
feeble means of distribution has been withheld from them! Exhibited at
some galleries, gathered principally by Durand-Ruel, sold directly to
art-lovers--foreigners mostly--these large series of works have
practically remained unknown to the French public. All the public heard
was the reproaches and sarcastic comments of the opponents, and they
never became aware that in the midst of modern life the greatest, the
richest movement was in progress, which the French school had known
since the days of Romanticism. Impressionism has been made known to them
principally by the controversies and by the fruitful consequences of
this movement for the illustration and study of contemporary life.
[Illustration: MANET
REST]
I do not profess to give here a detailed and complete history of
Impressionism, for which several volumes like the present one would be
required. I shall only try to compile an _ensemble_ of concise and very
precise notions and statements bearing upon this vast subject. It will
be my special object to try and prove that Impressionism is neither an
isolated manifestation, nor a violent denial of the French traditions,
but nothing more or less than a logical return to the very spirit of
these traditions, contrary to the theories upheld by its detractors. It
is for this reason that I have made use of the first chapter to say a
few words on the precursors of this movement.
No art manifestation is really isolated. However new it may seem, it is
always based upon the previous epochs. The true masters do not give
lessons, because art cannot be taught, but they set the example. To
admire them does not mean to imitate them: it means the recognition in
them of the principles of originality and the comprehension of their
source, so that this eternal source may be called to life in oneself,
this source which springs from a sincere and sympathetic vision of the
aspects of life. The Impressionists have not escaped this beautiful law.
I shall speak of them impartially, without excessive enthusiasm; and it
will be my special endeavour to demonstrate in each of them the cult of
a predecessor, for there have been few artistic movements where the love
for, and one might say the hereditary link with, the preceding masters
has been more tenacious.
The Academy has struggled violently against Impressionism, accusing it
of madness, of systematic negation of the "laws of beauty," which it
pretended to defend and of which it claimed to be the official priest.
The Academy has shown itself hostile to a degree in this quarrel. It has
excluded the Impressionists from the Salons, from awards, from official
purchases. Only quite recently the acceptance of the Caillebotte
bequest to the Luxembourg Gallery gave rise to a storm of indignation
among the official painters. I shall, in the course of this book, enter
upon the value of these attacks. Meanwhile I can only say how
regrettable this obstinacy appears to me and will appear to every free
spirit. It is unworthy even of an ardent conviction to condemn a whole
group of artists _en bloc_ as fools, enemies of beauty, or as tricksters
anxious to degrade the art of their nation, when these artists worked
during forty years towards the same goal, without getting any reward for
their effort, but poverty and derision. It is now about ten years since
Impressionism has taken root, since its followers can sell their
canvases, and since they are admired and praised by a solid and
ever-growing section of the public. The hour has therefore arrived,
calmly to consider a movement which has imposed itself upon the history
of French art from 1860 to 1900 with extreme energy, to leave
dithyrambics as well as polemics, and to speak of it with a view to
exactness. The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of
beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art,
and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon
itself as the guardian of the national tradition, because it exercises
an hierarchic authority over the _Ecole de Rome_, the _Salons_, and the
_Ecole des Beaux Arts_. All the same, its ideals are of very mixed
origin and very little French. Its principles are the same by which the
academic art of nearly all the official schools of Europe is governed.
This mythological and allegorical art, guided by dogmas and formulas
which are imposed upon all pupils regardless of their temperament, is
far more international than national. To an impartial critic this
statement will show in an even more curious light the excommunication
jealously issued by the academic painters against French artists, who,
far from revolting in an absurd spirit of _parti-pris_ against the
genius of their race, are perhaps more sincerely attached to it than
their persecutors. Why should a group of men deliberately choose to
paint mad, illogical, bad pictures, and reap a harvest of public
derision, poverty and sterility? It would be uncritical to believe
merely in a general mystification which makes its authors the worst
sufferers. Simple common sense will find in these men a conviction, a
sincerity, a sustained effort, and this alone should, in the name of the
sacred solidarity of those who by various means try to express their
love of the beautiful, suppress the annoying accusations hurled too
light-heartedly against Manet and his friends.
[Illustration: MANET
IN THE SQUARE]
I shall define later on the ideas of the Impressionists on technique,
composition and style in painting. Meanwhile it will be necessary to
indicate their principal precursors.
Their movement may be styled thus: a reaction against the Greco-Latin
spirit and the scholastic organisation of painting after the second
Renaissance and the Italo-French school of Fontainebleau, by the century
of Louis XIV., the school of Rome, and the consular and imperial taste.
In this sense Impressionism is a protest analogous to that of
Romanticism, exclaiming, to quote the old verse: "_Qui nous délivrera
des Grecs et des Romains?_"[1] From this point of view Impressionism has
also great affinities with the ideas of the English Pre-Raphaelites,
who stepped across the second and even the first Renaissance back to the
Primitives.
[Footnote 1: Who will deliver us from the Greeks and the Romans.]
This reaction is superimposed by another: the reaction of Impressionism,
not only against classic subjects, but against the black painting of the
degenerate Romanticists. And these two reactions are counterbalanced by
a return to the French ideal, to the realistic and characteristic
tradition which commences with Jean Foucquet and Clouet, and is
continued by Chardin, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, Watteau, La Tour,
Fragonard, and the admirable engravers of the eighteenth century down to
the final triumph of the allegorical taste of the Roman revolution. Here
can be found a whole chain of truly national artists who have either
been misjudged, like Chardin, or considered as "small masters" and
excluded from the first rank for the benefit of the pompous Allegorists
descended from the Italian school.
Impressionism being beyond all a technical reaction, its predecessors
should first be looked for from this material point of view. Watteau is
the most striking of all. _L'Embarquement pour Cythère_ is, in its
technique, an Impressionist canvas. It embodies the most significant
of all the principles exposed by Claude Monet: the division of tones by
juxtaposed touches of colour which, at a certain distance, produce upon
the eye of the beholder the effect of the actual colouring of the things
painted, with a variety, a freshness and a delicacy of analysis
unobtainable by a single tone prepared and mixed upon the palette.
[Illustration: MANET
YOUNG MAN IN COSTUME OF MAJO]
Claude Lorrain, and after him Carle Vernet, are claimed by the
Impressionists as precursors from the point of view of decorative
landscape arrangement, and particularly of the predominance of light in
which all objects are bathed. Ruysdael and Poussin are, in their eyes,
for the same reasons precursors, especially Ruysdael, who observed so
frankly the blue colouring of the horizon and the influence of blue upon
the landscape. It is known that Turner worshipped Claude for the very
same reasons. The Impressionists in their turn, consider Turner as one
of their masters; they have the greatest admiration for this mighty
genius, this sumptuous visionary. They have it equally for Bonington,
whose technique is inspired by the same observations as their own. They
find, finally, in Delacroix the frequent and very apparent application
of their ideas. Notably in the famous _Entry of the Crusaders into
Constantinople_, the fair woman kneeling in the foreground is painted in
accordance with the principles of the division of tones: the nude back
is furrowed with blue, green and yellow touches, the juxtaposition of
which produces, at a certain distance, an admirable flesh-tone.
And now I must speak at some length of a painter who, together with the
luminous and sparkling landscapist Félix Ziem, was the most direct
initiator of Impressionist technique. Monticelli is one of those
singular men of genius who are not connected with any school, and whose
work is an inexhaustible source of applications. He lived at Marseilles,
where he was born, made a short appearance at the Salons, and then
returned to his native town, where he died poor, ignored, paralysed and
mad. In order to live he sold his small pictures at the cafés, where
they fetched ten or twenty francs at the most. To-day they sell for
considerable prices, although the government has not yet acquired any
work by Monticelli for the public galleries. The mysterious power alone
of these paintings secures him a fame which is, alas! posthumous. Many
Monticellis have been sold by dealers as Diaz's; now they are more
eagerly looked for than Diaz, and collectors have made fortunes with
these small canvases bought formerly, to use a colloquial expression
which is here only too literally true, "for a piece of bread."
Monticelli painted landscapes, romantic scenes, "fêtes galantes" in the
spirit of Watteau, and still-life pictures: one could not imagine a more
inspired sense of colour than shown by these works which seem to be
painted with crushed jewels, with powerful harmony, and beyond all with
an unheard-of delicacy in the perception of fine shades. There are tones
which nobody had ever invented yet, a richness, a profusion, a subtlety
which almost vie with the resources of music. The fairyland atmosphere
of these works surrounds a very firm design of charming style, but, to
use the words of the artist himself, "in these canvases the objects are
the decoration, the touches are the scales, and the light is the tenor."
Monticelli has created for himself an entirely personal technique which
can only be compared with that of Turner; he painted with a brush so
full, fat and rich, that some of the details are often truly modelled in
relief, in a substance as precious as enamels, jewels, ceramics--a
substance which is a delight in itself. Every picture by Monticelli
provokes astonishment; constructed upon one colour as upon a musical
theme, it rises to intensities which one would have thought impossible.
His pictures are magnificent bouquets, bursts of joy and colour, where
nothing is ever crude, and where everything is ruled by a supreme sense
of harmony.
[Illustration: MANET
THE READER]
Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the
descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet. In all matters concerning
technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism. As regards
design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of
beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the
old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour,
Largillière, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen. It
has resolutely held aloof from mythology, academic allegory, historical
painting, and from the neo-Greek elements of Classicism as well as from
the German and Spanish elements of Romanticism. This reactionary
movement is therefore entirely French, and surely if it deserves
reproach, the one least deserved is that levelled upon it by the
official painters: disobedience to the national spirit. Impressionism is
an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose
followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting
philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the
consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation,
and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We
shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters,
that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French
blood.
Impressionism has, then, hitherto been very badly judged. It is
contained in two chief points: search after a new technique, and
expression of modern reality. Its birth has not been a spontaneous
phenomenon. Manet, who, by his spirit and by the chance of his
friendships, grouped around him the principal members, commenced by
being classed in the ranks of the Realists of the second Romanticism by
the side of Courbet; and during the whole first period of his work he
only endeavoured to describe contemporary scenes, at a time when the
laws of the new technique were already dawning upon Claude Monet.
Gradually the grouping of the Impressionists took place. Claude Monet is
really the first initiator: in a parallel line with his ideas and his
works Manet passed into the second period of his artistic life, and with
him Renoir, Degas and Pissarro. But Manet had already during his first
period been the topic of far-echoing polemics, caused by his realism and
by the marked influence of the Spaniards and of Hals upon his style; his
temperament, too, was that of the head of a school; and for these
reasons legend has attached to his name the title of head of the
Impressionist school, but this legend is incorrect.
To conclude, the very name "Impressionism" is due to Claude Monet. There
has been much serious arguing upon this famous word which has given rise
to all sorts of definitions and conclusions. In reality this is its
curious origin which is little known, even in criticism. Ever since
1860 the works of Manet and of his friends caused such a stir, that they
were rejected _en bloc_ by the Salon jury of 1863. The emperor, inspired
by a praiseworthy, liberal thought, demanded that these innovators
should at least have the right to exhibit together in a special room
which was called the _Salon des Refusés_. The public crowded there to
have a good laugh. One of the pictures which caused most derision was a
sunset by Claude Monet, entitled _Impressions_. From this moment the
painters who adopted more or less the same manner were called
_Impressionists_. The word remained in use, and Manet and his friends
thought it a matter of indifference whether this label was attached to
them, or another. At this despised Salon were to be found the names of
Manet, Monet, Whistler, Bracquemont, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour, Renoir,
Legros, and many others who have since risen to fame. Universal ridicule
only fortified the friendships and resolutions of this group of men, and
from that time dates the definite foundation of the Impressionist
school. For thirty years it continued to produce without interruption
an enormous quantity of works under an accidental and inexact
denomination; to obey the creative instinct, without any other dogma
than the passionate observation of nature, without any other assistance
than individual sympathies, in the face of the disciplinary teaching of
the official school.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE DANCER AT THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S]
II
THE THEORY OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS--THE DIVISION OF TONES, COMPLEMENTARY
COLOURS, THE STUDY OF ATMOSPHERE--THE IDEAS OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON
SUBJECT-PICTURES, ON THE BEAUTY OF CHARACTER, ON MODERNITY, AND ON STYLE
It should be stated from the outset that there is nothing dogmatic about
this explanation of the Impressionist theories, and that it is not the
result of a preconceived plan. In art a system is not improvised. A
theory is slowly evolved, nearly always unknown to the author, from the
discoveries of his sincere instinct, and this theory can only be
formulated after years by criticism facing the works. Monet and Manet
have worked for a long time without ever thinking that theories would be
built upon their paintings. Yet a certain number of considerations will
strike the close observer, and I will put these considerations before
the reader, after reminding him that spontaneity and feeling are the
essentials of all art.
[Illustration: DEGAS
CARRIAGES AT THE RACES]
The Impressionist ideas may be summed up in the following manner:--
In nature no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the objects is a
pure illusion: the only creative source of colour is the sunlight which
envelopes all things, and reveals them, according to the hours, with
infinite modifications. The mystery of matter escapes us; we do not know
the exact moment when reality separates itself from unreality. All we
know is, that our vision has formed the habit of discerning in the
universe two notions: form and colour; but these two notions are
inseparable. Only artificially can we distinguish between outline and
colour: in nature the distinction does not exist. Light reveals the
forms, and, playing upon the different states of matter, the substance
of leaves, the grain of stones, the fluidity of air in deep layers,
gives them dissimilar colouring. If the light disappears, forms and
colours vanish together. We only see colours; everything has a colour,
and it is by the perception of the different colour surfaces striking
our eyes, that we conceive the forms, _i.e._ the outlines of these
colours.
The idea of distance, of perspective, of volume is given us by darker or
lighter colours: this idea is what is called in painting the sense of
values. A value is the degree of dark or light intensity, which permits
our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer than
another. And as painting is not and cannot be the _imitation_ of nature,
but merely her artificial interpretation, since it only has at its
disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only means that
remain for expressing depth on a flat surface.
Colour is therefore the procreatrix of design. Or, colour being simply
the irradiation of light, it follows that all colour is composed of the
same elements as sunlight, namely the seven tones of the spectrum. It is
known, that these seven tones appear different owing to the unequal
speed of the waves of light. The tones of nature appear to us therefore
different, like those of the spectrum, and for the same reason. The
colours vary with the intensity of light. There is no colour peculiar
to any object, but only more or less rapid vibration of light upon its
surface. The speed depends, as is demonstrated by optics, on the degree
of the inclination of the rays which, according to their vertical or
oblique direction, give different light and colour.
The colours of the spectrum are thus recomposed in everything we see. It
is their relative proportion which makes new tones out of the seven
spectral tones. This leads immediately to some practical conclusions,
the first of which is, that what has formerly been called _local colour_
is an error: a leaf is not green, a tree-trunk is not brown, and,
according to the time of day, _i.e._ according to the greater or smaller
inclination of the rays (scientifically called the angle of incidence),
the green of the leaf and the brown of the tree are modified. What has
to be studied therefore in these objects, if one wishes to recall their
colour to the beholder of a picture, is the composition of the
atmosphere which separates them from the eye. This atmosphere is the
real subject of the picture, and whatever is represented upon it only
exists through its medium.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE GREEK DANCE--PASTEL.]
A second consequence of this analysis of light is, that shadow is not
absence of light, but light of _a different quality_ and of different
value. Shadow is not a part of the landscape, where light ceases, but
where it is subordinated to a light which appears to us more intense. In
the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with different speed.
Painting should therefore try to discover here, as in the light parts,
the play of the atoms of solar light, instead of representing shadows
with ready-made tones composed of bitumen and black.
The third conclusion resulting from this: the colours in the shadow are
modified by _refraction_. That means, _f.i._ in a picture representing
an interior, the source of light (window) may not be indicated: the
light circling round the picture will then be composed of the
_reflections_ of rays whose source is invisible, and all the objects,
acting as mirrors for these reflections, will consequently influence
each other. Their colours will affect each other, even if the surfaces
be dull. A red vase placed upon a blue carpet will lead to a very
subtle, but mathematically exact, interchange between this blue and this
red, and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two
colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite
reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two
principal colours. The science of optics can work out these
complementary colours with mathematical exactness. If _f.i._ a head
receives the orange rays of daylight from one side and the bluish light
of an interior from the other, green reflections will necessarily appear
on the nose and in the middle region of the face. The painter Besnard,
who has specially devoted himself to this minute study of complementary
colours, has given us some famous examples of it.
The last consequence of these propositions is that the blending of the
spectral tones is accomplished by a _parallel_ and _distinct_ projection
of the colours. They are artificially reunited on the crystalline: a
lens interposed between the light and the eye, and opposing the
crystalline, which is a living lens, dissociates again these united
rays, and shows us again the seven distinct colours of the atmosphere.
It is no less artificial if a painter mixes upon his palette different
colours to compose a tone; it is again artificial that paints have been
invented which represent some of the combinations of the spectrum, just
to save the artist the trouble of constantly mixing the seven solar
tones. Such mixtures are false, and they have the disadvantage of
creating heavy tonalities, since the coarse mixture of powders and oils
cannot accomplish the action of light which reunites the luminous waves
into an intense white of unimpaired transparency. The colours mixed on
the palette compose a dirty grey. What, then, is the painter to do, who
is anxious to approach, as near as our poor human means will allow, that
divine fairyland of nature? Here we touch upon the very foundations of
Impressionism. The painter will have to paint with only the seven
colours of the spectrum, and discard all the others: that is what Claude
Monet has done boldly, adding to them only white and black. He will,
furthermore, instead of composing mixtures on his palette, place upon
his canvas touches of none but the seven colours _juxtaposed_, and leave
the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain
distance, so as to act like sunlight itself upon the eye of the
beholder.
[Illustration: DEGAS
WAITING]
This, then, is the theory of the _dissociation of tones_, which is the
main point of Impressionist technique. It has the immense advantage of
suppressing all mixtures, of leaving to each colour its proper strength,
and consequently its freshness and brilliancy. At the same time the
difficulties are extreme. The painter's eye must be admirably subtle.
Light becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the
object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes
a purely optic art, a search for harmonies, a sort of natural poem,
quite distinct from expression, style and design, which were the
principal aims of former painting. It is almost necessary to invent
another name for this special art which, clearly pictorial though it be,
comes as near to music, as it gets far away from literature and
psychology. It is only natural that, fascinated by this study, the
Impressionists have almost remained strangers to the painting of
expression, and altogether hostile to historical and symbolist painting.
It is therefore principally in landscape painting that they have
achieved the greatness that is theirs.
Through the application of these principles which I have set forth very
summarily, Claude Monet arrived at painting by means of the infinitely
varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour spots which dissociate the
tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the
arabesque of their vibrations. A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind
of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, _f.i._),
and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This
investigation is added to the habitual preoccupations of the landscapist
study of the character peculiar to the scene, style of the trees or
houses, accentuation of the decorative side--and to the habitual
preoccupations of the figure painter in the portrait. The canvases of
Monet, Renoir and Pissarro have, in consequence of this research, an
absolutely original aspect: their shadows are striped with blue,
rose-madder and green; nothing is opaque or sooty; a light vibration
strikes the eye. Finally, blue and orange predominate, simply because in
these studies--which are more often than not full sunlight
effects--blue is the complementary colour of the orange light of the
sun, and is profusely distributed in the shadows. In these canvases can
be found a vast amount of exact grades of tone, which seem to have been
entirely ignored by the older painters, whose principal concern was
style, and who reduced a landscape to three or four broad tones,
endeavouring only to explain the sentiment inspired by it.
And now I shall have to pass on to the Impressionists' ideas on the
style itself of painting, on Realism.
From the outset it must not be forgotten that Impressionism has been
propagated by men who had all been Realists; that means by a reactionary
movement against classic and romantic painting. This movement, of which
Courbet will always remain the most famous representative, has been
_anti-intellectual_. It has protested against every literary,
psychologic or symbolical element in painting. It has reacted at the
same time against the historical painting of Delaroche and the
mythological painting of the _Ecole de Rome_, with an extreme violence
which appears to us excessive now, but which found its explanation in
the intolerable tediousness or emphasis at which the official painters
had arrived. Courbet was a magnificent worker, with rudimentary ideas,
and he endeavoured to exclude even those which he possessed. This
exaggeration which diminishes our admiration for his work and prevents
us from finding in it any emotion but that which results from technical
mastery, was salutary for the development of the art of his successors.
It caused the young painters to turn resolutely towards the aspects of
contemporary life, and to draw style and emotion from their own epoch;
and this intention was right. An artistic tradition is not continued by
imitating the style of the past, but by extracting the immediate
impression of each epoch. That is what the really great masters have
done, and it is the succession of their sincere and profound
observations which constitutes the style of the races.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
THE PINES]
Manet and his friends drew all their strength from this idea. Much finer
and more learned than a man like Courbet, they saw an aspect of
modernity far more complex, and less limited to immediate and grossly
superficial realism. Nor must it be forgotten that they were
contemporaries of the realistic, anti-romantic literary movement, a
movement which gave them nothing but friends. Flaubert and the Goncourts
proved that Realism is not the enemy of refined form and of delicate
psychology. The influence of these ideas created first of all Manet and
his friends: the technical evolution (of which we have traced the chief
traits) came only much later to oppose itself to their conceptions.
Impressionism can therefore be defined as a _revolution of pictorial
technique together with an attempt at expressing modernity_. The
reaction against Symbolism and Romanticism happened to coincide with the
reaction against muddy technique.
The Impressionists, whilst occupying themselves with cleansing the
palette of the bitumen of which the Academy made exaggerated use, whilst
also observing nature with a greater love of light, made it their object
to escape in the representation of human beings the laws of _beauty_,
such as were taught by the School. And on this point one might apply to
them all that one knows of the ideas of the Goncourts and Flaubert, and
later of Zola, in the domain of the novel. They were moved by the same
ideas; to speak of the one group is to speak of the other. The longing
for truth, the horror of emphasis and of false idealism which paralysed
the novelist as well as the painter, led the Impressionists to
substitute for _beauty_ a novel notion, that of _character_. To search
for, and to express, the true character of a being or of a site, seemed
to them more significant, more moving, than to search for an exclusive
beauty, based upon rules, and inspired by the Greco-Latin ideal. Like
the Flemings, the Germans, the Spaniards, and in opposition to the
Italians whose influence had conquered all the European academies, the
French Realist-Impressionists, relying upon the qualities of lightness,
sincerity and expressive clearness which are the real merits of their
race, detached themselves from the oppressive and narrow preoccupation
with the beautiful and with all the metaphysics and abstractions
following in its train.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
CHURCH AT VERNON]
This fact of the substitution of _character_ for _beauty_ is the
essential feature of the movement. What is called Impressionism is--let
it not be forgotten--a technique which can be applied to any subject.
Whether the subject be a virgin, or a labourer, it can be painted with
divided tones, and certain living artists, like the symbolist Henri
Martin, who has almost the ideas of a Pre-Raphaelite, have proved it by
employing this technique for the rendering of religious or philosophic
subjects. But one can only understand the effort and the faults of the
painters grouped around Manet, by constantly recalling to one's mind
their predeliction for _character_. Before Manet a distinction was made
between _noble_ subjects, and others which were relegated to the domain
of _genre_ in which no great artist was admitted to exist by the School,
the familiarity of their subjects barring from them this rank. By the
suppression of the _nobleness_ inherent to the treated subject, the
painter's technical merit is one of the first things to be considered in
giving him rank. The Realist-Impressionists painted scenes in the
ball-room, on the river, in the field, the street, the foundry, modern
interiors, and found in the life of the humble immense scope for
studying the gestures, the costumes, the expressions of the nineteenth
century.
Their effort had its bearing upon the way of representing persons, upon
what is called, in the studio language, the "_mise en cadre_." There,
too, they overthrew the principles admitted by the School. Manet, and
especially Degas, have created in this respect a new style from which
the whole art of realistic contemporary illustration is derived. This
style had been hitherto totally ignored, or the artists had shrunk from
applying it. It is a style which is founded upon the small painters of
the eighteenth century, upon Saint-Aubin, Debucourt, Moreau, and,
further back, upon Pater and the Dutchmen. But this time, instead of
confining this style to vignettes and very small dimensions, the
Impressionists have boldly given it the dimensions and importance of big
canvases. They have no longer based the laws of composition, and
consequently of style, upon the ideas relative to the subjects, but upon
values and harmonies. To take a summary example: if the School composed
a picture representing the death of Agamemnon, it did not fail to
subordinate the whole composition to Agamemnon, then to Clytemnestra,
then to the witnesses of the murder, graduating the moral and literary
interest according to the different persons, and sacrificing to this
interest the colouring and the realistic qualities of the scene. The
Realists composed by picking out first the strongest "value" of the
picture, say a red dress, and then distributing the other values
according to a harmonious progression of their tonalities. "The
principal person in a picture," said Manet, "is the light." With Manet
and his friends we find, then, that the concern for expression and for
the sentiments evoked by the subject, was always subordinated to a
purely pictorial and decorative preoccupation. This has frequently led
the Impressionists to grave errors, which they have, however, generally
avoided by confining themselves to very simple subjects, for which the
daily life supplied the grouping.
[Illustration: RENOIR
PORTRAIT OF MADAME MAITRE]
One of the reforms due to their conception has been the suppression of
the professional model, and the substitution for it of the natural
model, seen in the exercise of his occupation. This is one of the most
useful conquests for the benefit of modern painting. It marks a just
return to nature and simplicity. Nearly all their figures are real
portraits; and in everything that concerns the labourer and the
peasant, they have found the proper style and character, because they
have observed these beings in the true medium of their occupations,
instead of forcing them into a sham pose and painting them in disguise.
The basis of all their pictures has been first of all a series of
landscape and figure studies made in the open air, far from the studio,
and afterwards co-ordinated. One may wish pictorial art to have higher
ambitions; and one may find in the Primitives an example of a curious
mysticism, an expression of the abstract and of dreams. But one should
not underrate the power of naïve and realistic observation, which the
Primitives carried into the execution of their works, subordinating it,
however, to religious expression, and it must also be admitted that the
Realist-Impressionists served at least their conception of art logically
and homogeneously. The criticism which may be levelled against them is
that which Realism itself carries in its train, and we shall see that
esthetics could never create classifications capable of defining and
containing the infinite gradations of creative temperaments.
In art, classifications have rarely any value, and are rather damaging.
Realism and Idealism are abstract terms which cannot suffice to
characterise beings who obey their sensibility. It is therefore
necessary to invent as many words as there are remarkable men. If
Leonardo was a great painter, are Turner and Monet not painters at all?
There is no connection between them; their methods of thought and
expression are antithetical. Perhaps it will be most simple, to admire
them all, and to renounce any further definition of the painter,
adopting this word to mark the man who uses the palette as his means of
expression.
Thus preoccupation with contemporary emotions, substitution of character
for classic beauty (or of emotional beauty for formal beauty), admission
of the _genre_-painter into the first rank, composition based upon the
reciprocal reaction of values, subordination of the subject to the
interest of execution, the effort to isolate the art of painting from
the ideas inherent to that of literature, and particularly the
instinctive move towards the "symphonisation" of colours, and
consequently towards music,--these are the principal features of the
aesthetic code of the Realist-Impressionists, if this term may be
applied to a group of men hostile towards esthetics such as they are
generally taught.
III
EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
As I have said, Edouard Manet has not been entirely the originator of
the Impressionist technique. It is the work of Claude Monet which
presents the most complete example of it, and which also came first as
regards date. But it is very difficult to determine such cases of
priority, and it is, after all, rather useless. A technique cannot be
invented in a day. In this case it was the result of long
investigations, in which Manet and Renoir participated, and it is
necessary to unite under the collective name of Impressionists a group
of men, tied by friendship, who made a simultaneous effort towards
originality, all in about the same spirit, though frequently in very
different ways. As in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, it was first of
all friendship, then unjust derision, which created the solidarity of
the Impressionists. But the Pre-Raphaelites, in aiming at an idealistic
and symbolic art, were better agreed upon the intellectual principles
which permitted them at once to define a programme. The Impressionists
who were only united by their temperaments, and had made it their first
aim to break away from all school programmes, tried simply to do
something new, with frankness and freedom.
Manet was, in their midst, the personality marked out at the same time
by their admiration, and by the attacks of the critics for the post of
standard-bearer. A little older than his friends, he had already, quite
alone, raised heated discussions by the works in his first manner. He
was considered an innovator, and it was by instinctive admiration that
his first friends, Whistler, Legros, and Fantin-Latour, were gradually
joined by Marcelin Desboutin, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro,
Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, the young painter Bazille, who met his
premature death in 1870, and by the writers Gautier, Banville,
Baudelaire (who was a passionate admirer of Manet's); then later by
Zola, the Goncourts, and Stéphane Mallarmé. This was the first nucleus
of a public which was to increase year by year. Manet had the personal
qualities of a chief; he was a man of spirit, an ardent worker, and an
enthusiastic and generous character.
[Illustration: MANET
THE DEAD TOREADOR]
Manet commenced his first studies with Couture. After having travelled a
good deal at sea to obey his parents, his vocation took hold of him
irresistibly. About 1850 the young man entered the studio of the severe
author of the _Romains de la Décadence_. His stay was short. He
displeased the professor by his uncompromising energy. Couture said of
him angrily: "He will become the Daumier of 1860." It is known that
Daumier, lithographer, and painter of genius, was held in meagre esteem
by the academicians. Manet travelled in Germany after the _coup d'etat_,
copied Rembrandt in Munich, then went to Italy, copied Tintoretto in
Venice, and conceived there the idea of several religious pictures. Then
he became enthusiastic about the Spaniards, especially Velasquez and
Goya. The sincere expression of things seen took root from this moment
as the principal rule of art in the brain of this young Frenchman who
was loyal, ardent, and hostile to all subtleties. He painted some fine
works, like the _Buveur d'absinthe_ and the _Vieux musicien_. They show
the influence of Courbet, but already the blacks and the greys have an
original and superb quality; they announce a virtuoso of the first
order.
It was in 1861 that Manet first sent to the Salon the portraits of his
parents and the _Guitarero_, which was hailed by Gautier, and rewarded
by the jury, though it roused surprise and irritation. But after that he
was rejected, whether it was a question of the _Fifre_ or of the
_Déjeuner sur l'herbe._ This canvas, with an admirable feminine nude,
created a scandal, because an undressed woman figured in it amidst
clothed figures, a matter of frequent occurrence with the masters of the
Renaissance. The landscape is not painted in the open air, but in the
studio, and resembles a tapestry, but it shows already the most
brilliant evidence of Manet's talent in the study of the nude and the
still-life of the foreground, which is the work of a powerful master.
From the time of this canvas the artist's personality appeared in all
its maturity. He painted it before he was thirty, and it has the air of
an old master's work; it is based upon Hals and the Spaniards together.
The reputation of Manet became established after 1865. Furious critics
were opposed by enthusiastic admirers. Baudelaire upheld Manet, as he
had upheld Delacroix and Wagner, with his great clairvoyance,
sympathetic to all real originality. The _Olympia_ brought the
discussion to a head. This courtesan lying in bed undressed, with a
negress carrying a bouquet, and a black cat, made a tremendous stir. It
is a powerful work of strong colour, broad design and intense sentiment,
astounding in its _parti-pris_ of reducing the values to the greatest
simplicity. One can feel in it the artist's preoccupation with
rediscovering the rude frankness of Hals and Goya, and his aversion
against the prettiness and false nobility of the school. This famous
_Olympia_ which occasioned so much fury, appears to us to-day as a
transition work. It is neither a masterpiece, nor an emotional work, but
a technical experiment, very significant for the epoch during which it
appeared in French art, and this canvas, which is very inferior to
Manet's fine works, may well be considered as a date of evolution. He
was doubtful about exhibiting it, but Baudelaire decided him and wrote
to him on this occasion these typical remarks: "You complain about
attacks? But are you the first to endure them? Have you more genius than
Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by derision. And, in
order not to make you too proud, I must tell you, that they are models
each in his own way and in a very rich world, whilst you are only the
first in the decrepitude of your art."
[Illustration: MANET
OLYMPIA]
Thus it must be firmly established that from this moment Manet passed as
an innovator, years before Impressionism existed or was even thought of.
This is an important point: it will help to clear up the twofold origin
of the movement which followed. To his realism, to his return to
composition in the modern spirit, and to the simplifying of planes and
values, Manet owed these attacks, though at that time his colour was
still sombre and entirely influenced by Hals, Goya and Courbet. From
that time the artist became a chief. As his friends used to meet him at
an obscure Batignolles café, the café Guerbois (still existing), public
derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des
Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the _Angels at the Tomb of Christ_, a
souvenir of the Venetians; _Lola de Valence_, commented upon by
Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the _Fleurs du Mal_; the
_Episode d'un combat de taureaux_ (dissatisfied with this picture, he
cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The
_Acteur tragique_ (portrait of Rouvière in Hamlet) and the _Jésus
insulté_ followed, and then came the _Gitanos_, _L'Enfant à l'Epée_, and
the portrait of Mme. Manet. This series of works is admirable. It is
here where he reveals himself as a splendid colourist, whose design is
as vigorous as the technique is masterly. In these works one does not
think of looking for anything but the witchery of technical strength;
and the abundant wealth of his temperament is simply dazzling. Manet
reveals himself as the direct heir of the great Spaniards, more
interesting, more spontaneous, and freer than Courbet. The _Rouvière_ is
as fine a symphony in grey and black as the noblest portraits by
Bronzino, and there is probably no Goya more powerful than the _Toréador
tué_. Manet's altogether classic descent appears here undeniably. There
is no question yet of Impressionism, and yet Monet and Renoir are
already painting, Monet has exhibited at the _Salon des Refusés_, but
criticism sees and attacks nobody but Manet. This great individuality
who overwhelmed the Academy with its weak allegories, was the butt of
great insults and the object of great admiration. Banished from the
Salons, he collected fifty pictures in a room in the Avenue de l'Alma
and invited the public thither. In 1868 appeared the portrait of Emile
Zola, in 1860 the _Déjeuner_, works which are so powerful, that they
enforced admiration in spite of all hostility. In the Salon of 1870 was
shown the portrait of Eva Gonzalès, the charming pastellist and pupil of
Manet, and the impressive _Execution of Maximilian at Queretaro_. Manet
was at the apogee of his talent, when the Franco-German war broke out.
At the age of thirty-eight he had put forth a considerable amount of
work, tried himself in all styles, severed his individuality from the
slavish admiration of the old masters, and attained his own mastery. And
now he wanted to expand, and, in joining Monet, Renoir and Degas,
interpret in his own way the Impressionist theory.
[Illustration: MANET
THE WOMAN WITH THE PARROT]
The _Fight of the Kearsage and the Alabama_, a magnificent sea-piece,
bathed in sunlight, announced this transformation in his work, as did
also a study, a _Garden_, painted, I believe, in 1870, but exhibited
only after the crisis of the terrible year. At that time the Durand-Ruel
Gallery bought a considerable series by the innovator, and was imitated
by some select art-lovers. The _Musique aux Tuileries_ and the _Bal de
l'Opéra_ had, some years before, pointed towards the evolution of this
great artist in the direction of _plein-air_ painting. The _Bon Bock_,
in which the very soul of Hals is revived, and the grave _Liseur_, sold
immediately at Vienne, were the two last pledges given by the artist to
his old admirers; these two pictures had moreover a splendid success,
and the _Bon Bock_, popularised by an engraving, was hailed by the very
men who had most unjustly attacked the author of the portrait of Mme.
Morisot, a French masterpiece. But already Manet was attracted
irresistibly towards the study of light, and, faithful to his programme,
he prepared to face once again outbursts of anger and further sarcasms;
he was resolved once again to offer battle to the Salons. Followed by
all the Impressionists he tried to make them understand the necessity
of introducing the new ideas into this retrograde _Milieu_. But they
would not. Having already received a rebuff by the attacks directed for
some years against their works, they exhibited among themselves in some
private galleries: they declined to force the gate of the Salons, and
Manet remained alone. In 1875 he submitted, with his _Argenteuil_, the
most perfect epitome of his atmospheric researches. The jury admitted it
in spite of loud protests: they were afraid of Manet; they admired his
power of transformation, and he revolted the prejudiced, attracting them
at the same time by the charm of his force. But in 1876 the portrait of
_Desboutin_ and the _Linge_ (an exquisite picture,--one of the best
productions of open-air study) were rejected. Manet then recommenced the
experience of 1867, and opened his studio to the public. A register at
the door was soon covered with signatures protesting against the jury,
as well as with hostile jokes, and even anonymous insults! In 1877 the
defeated jury admitted the portrait of the famous singer Faure in the
part of Hamlet, and rejected _Nana_, a picture which was found
scandalising, but has charming freshness and an intensely modern
character. In 1878, 1879 and 1880 they accepted _la Serre_, the
surprising symphony in blue and white which shows Mr George Moore in
boating costume, the portrait of Antonin Proust, and the scene at the
_Père Lathuile_ restaurant, in which Manet's nervous and luminous
realism has so curious a resemblance to the art of the Goncourts. In
1881 the portrait of Rochefort and that of the lion-killer, Pertuiset,
procured the artist a medal at the Salon, and Antonin Proust, the friend
of Manet's childhood, who had become Minister of Fine Arts, honoured
himself in decorating him with the legion of honour. In 1882 appeared a
magnificent canvas, the _Bar des Folies-Bergère_, in which there is some
sparkling still-life painting of most attractive beauty. It was
accompanied by a lady's portrait, _Jeanne_. But on April 30, 1883, Manet
died, exhausted by his work and struggles, of locomotor ataxy, after
having vainly undergone the amputation of a foot to avoid gangrene.
[Illustration: MANET
THE BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE]
It will be seen that Manet fought through all his life: few artists'
lives have been nobler. His has been an example of untiring energy; he
employed it as much in working, as in making a stand against prejudices.
Rejected, accepted, rejected again, he delivered with enormous courage
and faith his attack upon a jury which represented routine. As he fought
in front of his easel, he still fought before the public, without ever
relaxing, without changing, alone, apart even from those whom he loved,
who had been shaped by his example. This great painter, one of those who
did most honour to the French soul, had the genius to create by himself
an Impressionism of his own which will always remain his own, after
having given evidence of gifts of the first order in the tradition
handed down by the masters of the real and the good. He cannot be
confused either with Monet, or with Pissarro and Renoir. His
comprehension of light is a special one, his technique is not in
accordance with the system of colour-spots; it observes the theory of
complementary colours and of the division of tones without departing
from a grand style, from a classic stateliness, from a superb sureness.
Manet has not been the inventor of Impressionism which co-existed with
his work since 1865, but he has rendered it immense services, by taking
upon himself all the outbursts of anger addressed to the innovators, by
making a breach in public opinion, through which his friends have passed
in behind him. Probably without him all these artists would have
remained unknown, or at least without influence, because they all were
bold characters in art, but timid or disdainful in life. Degas, Monet
and Renoir were fine natures with a horror of polemics, who wished to
hold aloof from the Salons, and were resigned from the outset to be
misunderstood. They were, so to say, electrified by the magnificent
example of Manet's fighting spirit, and Manet was generous enough to
take upon himself the reproaches levelled, not only against his work,
but against theirs. His twenty years of open war, sustained with an
abnegation worthy of all esteem, must be considered as one of the most
significant phenomena of the history of the artists of all ages.
This work of Manet, so much discussed and produced under such tormenting
conditions, owes its importance beyond all to its power and frankness.
Ten years of developing the first manner, tragically limited by the war
of 1870; thirteen years of developing the second evolution, parallel
with the efforts of the Impressionists. The period from 1860 to 1870 is
logically connected with Hals and Goya; from 1870 to 1883 the artist's
modernity is complicated by the study of light. His personality appears
there even more original, but one may well give the palm to those works
of Manet which are painted in his classic and low-toned manner. He had
all the pictorial gifts which make the glory of the masters: full, true,
broad composition, colouring of irresistible power, blacks and greys
which cannot be found elsewhere since Velasquez and Goya, and a profound
knowledge of values. He has tried his hand at everything: portraits,
landscapes, seascapes, scenes of modern life, still-life and nudes have
each in their turn served his ardent desire of creation. His was a much
finer comprehension of contemporary life than seems to be admitted by
Realism: one has only to compare him with Courbet, to see how far more
nervous and intelligent he was, without loss to the qualities of truth
and robustness. His pictures will always remain documents of the
greatest importance on the society, the manners and customs of the
second Empire. He did not possess the gift of psychology. His _Christ
aux Anges_ and _Jésus insulté_ are obviously only pieces of painting
without idealism. He was, like the great Dutch virtuosos, and like
certain Italians, more eye than soul. Yet his _Maximilian_, the drawings
to Poe's _Raven_, and certain sketches show that he might have realised
some curious, psychological works, had he not been so completely
absorbed by the immediate reality and by the desire for beautiful paint.
A beautiful painter--this is what he was before everything else, this is
his fairest fame, and it is almost inconceivable that the juries of the
Salons failed to understand him. They waxed indignant over his subjects
which offer only a restricted interest, and they did not see the
altogether classic quality of this technique without bitumen, without
glazing, without tricks; of this vibrating colour; of this rich paint;
of this passionate design so suitable for expressing movement and
gestures true to life; of this simple composition where the whole
picture is based upon two or three values with the straightforwardness
one admires in Rubens, Jordaens and Hals.
[Illustration: MANET
DÉJEUNER]
Manet will occupy an important position in the French School. He is the
most original painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, the
one who has really created a great movement. His work, the fecundity of
which is astonishing, is unequal. One has to remember that, besides the
incessant strife which he kept up--a strife which would have killed many
artists--he had to find strength for two grave crises in himself. He
joined one movement, then freed himself of it, then invented another and
recommenced to learn painting at a point where anybody else would have
continued in his previous manner. "Each time I paint," he said to
Mallarmé, "I throw myself into the water to learn swimming." It is not
surprising that such a man should have been unequal, and that one can
distinguish in his work between experiments, exaggerations due to
research, and efforts made to reject the prejudices of which we feel the
weight no longer. But it would be unjust to say that Manet has only had
the merit of opening up new roads; that has been said to belittle him,
after it had first been said that these roads led into absurdity. Works
like the _Toréador_, _Rouvière_, _Mme. Manet_, the _Déjeuner_, the
_Musique aux Tuileries_, the _Bon Bock_, _Argenteuil_, _Le Linge_, _En
Bateau_ and the _Bar_, will always remain admirable masterpieces which
will do credit to French painting, of which the spontaneous, living,
clear and bold art of Manet is a direct and very representative product.
There remains, then, a great personality who knew how to dominate the
rather coarse conceptions of Realism, who influenced by his modernity
all contemporary illustration, who re-established a sound and strong
tradition in the face of the Academy, and who not only created a new
transition, but marked his place on the new road which he had opened. To
him Impressionism owes its existence; his tenacity enabled it to take
root and to vanquish the opposition of the School; his work has enriched
the world by some beautiful examples which demonstrate the union of the
two principles of Realism and of that technical Impressionism which was
to supply Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley with an object for their
efforts. For the sum total of all that is evoked by his name, Edouard
Manet certainly deserves the name of a man of genius--an incomplete
genius, though, since the thought with him was not on the level of his
technique, since he could never affect the emotions like a Leonardo or a
Rembrandt, but genius all the same through the magnificent power of his
gifts, the continuity of his style, and the importance of his part which
infused blood into a school dying of the anaemia of conventional art.
Whoever beholds a work of Manet's, even without knowing the conditions
of his life, will feel that there is something great, the lion's claw
which Delacroix had recognised as far back as 1861, and to which, it is
said, even the great Ingres had paid homage on the jury which examined
with disgust the _Guitarero_.
[Illustration: MANET
PORTRAIT OF MADAME M.L.]
To-day Manet is considered almost as a classic glory; and the progress
for which he had given the impulse, has been so rapid, that many are
astonished that he should ever have been considered audacious. Sight is
transformed, strife is extinguished, and a large, select public,
familiar with Monet and Renoir, judge Manet almost as a long defunct
initiator. One has to know his admirable life, one has to know well the
incredible inertia of the Salons where he appeared, to give him his full
due. And when, after the acceptance of Impressionism, the unavoidable
reaction will take place, Manet's qualities of solidity, truth and
science will appear such, that he will survive many of those to whom he
has opened the road and facilitated the success at the expense of his
own. It will be seen that Degas and he have, more than the others, and
with less apparent _éclat_, united the gifts which produce durable works
in the midst of the fluctuations of fashion and the caprices of taste
and views. Manet can, at the Louvre or any other gallery, hold his own
in the most crushing surroundings, prove his personal qualities, and
worthily represent a period which he loved.
An enormous amount has been written on him, from Zola's bold and
intelligent pamphlet in 1865, to the recent work by M. Théodore Duret.
Few men have provoked more comments. In an admirable picture, _Hommage à
Manet_, the delicate and perfect painter Fantin-Latour, a friend from
the first hour, has grouped around the artist some of his admirers,
Monet, Renoir, Duranty, Zola, Bazille, and Braquemond. The picture has
to-day a place of honour at the Luxembourg, where Manet is
insufficiently represented by _Olympia_, a study of a woman, and the
_Balcony_. A collection is much to be desired of his lithographs, his
etchings and his pastels, in which he has proved his diversified
mastery, and also of his portraits of famous contemporaries, Zola,
Rochefort, Desboutin, Proust, Mallarmé, Clemenceau, Guys, Faure,
Baudelaire, Moore, and others, an admirable series by a visionary who
possessed, in a period of unrest and artificiality, the quality of rude
sincerity, and the love of truth of a Primitive.
[Illustration: MANET
THE HOTHOUSE]
IV
EDGAR DEGAS: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
I have said how vain it is to class artistic temperaments under a title
imposed upon them generally by circumstances and dates, rather than by
their own free will. The study of Degas will furnish additional proof
for it. Classed with the Impressionists, this master participates in
their ideas in the sphere of composition, rather than in that of colour.
He belongs to them through his modernity and comprehension of character.
Only when we come to his quite recent landscapes (1896), can we link him
to Monet and Renoir as colourist, and he has been more their friend than
their colleague.
Degas is known by the select few, and almost ignored by the public. This
is due to several reasons. Degas has never wished to exhibit at the
Salons, except, I believe, once or twice at the beginning of his
career. He has only shown his works at those special exhibitions
arranged by the Impressionists in hired apartments (rue le Peletier, rue
Laffitte, Boulevard des Capucines), and at some art-dealers. The art of
Degas has never had occasion to shock the public by the exuberance of
its colour, because he restricted himself to grey and quiet harmonies.
Degas is a modest character, fond of silence and solitude, with a horror
of the crowd and of controversies, and almost disinclined to show his
works. He is a man of intelligence and ready wit, whose sallies are
dreaded; he is almost a misanthrope. His pictures have been gradually
sold to foreign countries and dispersed in rich galleries without having
been seen by the public. His character is, in short, absolutely opposed
to that of Manet, who, though he suffered from criticism, thought it his
duty to bid it defiance. Degas's influence has, however, been
considerable, though secretly so, and the young painters have been
slowly inspired by his example.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE BEGGAR WOMAN]
Degas is beyond all a draughtsman of the first order. His spirit is
quite classical. He commenced by making admirable copies of the Italian
Primitives, notably of Fra Angelico, and the whole first series of his
works speaks of that influence: portraits, heads of deep, mat, amber
colour, on a ground of black or grey tones, remarkable for a severity of
intense style, and for the rare gift of psychological expression. To
find the equal of these faces--after having stated their classic
descent--one would have to turn to the beautiful things by Ingres, and
certainly Degas is, with Ingres, the most learned, the most perfect
French draughtsman of the nineteenth century. An affirmation of this
nature is made to surprise those who judge Impressionism with
preconceived ideas. It is none the less true that, if a series of
Degas's first portraits were collected, the comparison would force
itself upon one's mind irrefutably. In face of the idealist painting of
Romanticism, Ingres represented quite clearly the cult of painting for
its own sake. His ideas were mediocre, and went scarcely beyond the
poor, conventional ideal of the Academy; but his genius was so great,
that it made him paint, together with his tedious allegories, some
incomparable portraits and nudes. He thought he was serving official
Classicism, which still boasts of his name, but in reality he dominated
it; and, whilst he was an imitator of Raphael, he was a powerful
Realist. The Impressionists admire him as such, and agree with him in
banishing from the art of painting all literary imagination, whether it
be the tedious mythology of the School, or the historical anecdote of
the Romanticists. Degas and Besnard admire Ingres as colossal
draughtsman, and, beyond all, as man who, in spite of the limitations of
his mind, preserved the clear vision of the mission of his art at a time
when art was used for the expression of literary conceptions. Who would
have believed it? Yet it is true, and Manet, too, held the same view of
Ingres, little as our present academicians may think it! It happens that
to-day Impressionism is more akin to Ingres than to Delacroix, just as
the young poets are more akin to Racine than to Hugo. They reject the
foreign elements, and search, before anything else, for the strict
national tradition. Degas follows Ingres and resembles him. He is also
reminiscent of the Primitives and of Holbein. There is, in his first
period, the somewhat dry and geometrical perfection, the somewhat heavy
colour which only serves to strengthen the correctness of the planes. At
the Exposition of 1900, there was a Degas which surprised everybody. It
was an _Interior of a cotton factory_ in an American town. This small
picture was curiously clear: it would be impossible to paint better and
with a more accomplished knowledge of the laws of painting. But it was
the work of a soulless, emotionless Realist; it was a coloured
photograph of unheard-of truth, the mathematical science of which left
the beholder cold. This work, which is very old (it dates back to about
1860), gave no idea of what Degas has grown into. It was the work of an
unemotional master of technique; only just the infinitely delicate value
of the greys and blacks revealed the future master of harmony. One
almost might have wished to find a fault in this aggravating perfection.
But Degas was not to remain there, and already, about that time, certain
portraits of his are elevated by an expression of ardent melancholy, by
warm, ivory-like, grave colouring which attracts one's eye. Before this
series one feels the firm will of a very logical, serious, classic
spirit who wants to know thoroughly the intimate resources of design,
before risking to choose from among them the elements which respond best
to his individual nature. If Degas was destined to invent, later on, so
personal a style of design that he could be accused of "drawing badly,"
this first period of his life is before us, to show the slow maturing of
his boldness and how carefully he first proved to himself his knowledge,
before venturing upon new things. In art the difficulty is, when one has
learnt everything, to forget,--that is, to appear to forget, so as to
create one's own style, and this apparent forgetting cloaks an
amalgamation of science with mind. And Degas is one of those patient and
reticent men who spend years in arriving at this; he has much in common
with Hokusai, the old man "mad with painting," who at the close of his
prodigious life invented arbitrary forms, after having given immortal
examples of his interpretation of the real.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE LESSON IN THE FOYER]
Degas is also clearly related to Corot, not only in the silvery
harmonies of his suave landscapes, but also, and particularly, in his
admirable faces whose inestimable power and moving sincerity we have
hardly commenced to understand. Degas passed slowly from classicism to
modernity. He never liked outbursts of colour; he is by no means an
Impressionist from this point of view. As a draughtsman of genius he
expresses all by the precision of the planes and values; a grey, a black
and some notes of colour suffice for him. This might establish a link
between him and Whistler, though he is much less mysterious and diffuse.
Whenever Degas plays with colour, it is with the same restraint of his
boldness; he never goes to excess in abandoning himself to its charm. He
is neither lyrical, nor voluptuous; his energy is cold; his wise spirit
affirms soberly the true character of a face or an object.
Since a long time this spirit has moved Degas to revel in the
observation of contemporary life. His nature has been that of a patient
psychologist, a minute analyst, and also of a bitter ironist. The man is
very little known. His friends say that he has an easily ruffled
delicacy, a sensibility open to poetry, but jealous of showing its
emotion. They say that Degas's satirical bitterness is the reverse side
of a soul wounded by the spectacle of modern morality. One feels this
sentiment in his work, where the sharp notation of truth is painful,
where the realism is opposed by colouring of a sober distinction, where
nothing, not even the portrait of a drab, could be vulgar. Degas has
devoted himself to the profound study of certain classes of women, in
the state of mind of a philosopher and physiologist, impartially
inclined towards life.
His work can be divided into several great series: the race-courses, the
ballet-dancers, and the women bathing count among the most important.
The race-courses have inspired Degas with numerous pictures. He shows in
them a surprising knowledge of the horse. He is one of the most perfect
painters of horses who have ever existed. He has caught the most curious
and truest actions with infallible sureness of sight. His racecourse
scenes are full of vitality and picturesqueness. Against clear skies,
and light backgrounds of lawn, indicated with quiet harmony, Degas
assembles original groups of horses which one can see moving,
hesitating, intensely alive; and nothing could be fresher, gayer and
more deliciously pictorial, than the green, red and yellow notes of the
jockey's costumes strewn like flowers over these atmospheric, luminous
landscapes, where colours do not clash, but are always gently
shimmering, dissolved in uniform clearness. The admirable drawing of
horses and men is so precise and seems so simple, that one can only
slowly understand the extent of the difficulty overcome, the truth of
these attitudes and the nervous delicacy of the execution.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE DANCING LESSON--PASTEL]
The dancers go much further still in the expression of Degas's
temperament. They have been studied at the _foyer_ of the Opera and at
the rehearsal, sometimes in groups, sometimes isolated. Some pictures
which will always count among the masterpieces of the nineteenth
century, represent the whole _corps de ballet_ performing on the stage
before a dark and empty house. By the feeble light of some lamps the
black coats of the stage managers mix themselves with the gauze skirts.
Here the draughtsman joins the great colourist: the petticoats of pink
or white tulle, the graceful legs covered with flesh-coloured silk, the
arms and the shoulders, and the hair crowned with flowers, offer
motives of exquisite colour and of a tone of living flowers. But the
psychologist does not lose his rights: not only does he amuse himself
with noting the special movements of the dancers, but he also notes the
anatomical defects. He shows with cruel frankness, with a strange love
of modern character, the strong legs, the thin shoulders, and the
provoking and vulgar heads of these frequently ugly girls of common
origin. With the irony of an entomologist piercing the coloured insect
he shows us the disenchanting reality in the sad shadow of the scenes,
of these butterflies who dazzle us on the stage. He unveils the reverse
side of a dream without, however, caricaturing; he raises even, under
the imperfection of the bodies, the animal grace of the organisms; he
has the severe beauty of the true. He gives to his groups of
ballet-dancers the charming line of garlands and restores to them a
harmony in the _ensemble_, so as to prove that he does not misjudge the
charm conferred upon them by rhythm, however defective they may be
individually. At other times he devotes himself to the study of their
practice. In bare rooms with curtainless windows, in the cold and sad
light of the boxes, he passionately draws the dancers learning their
steps, reaching high bars with the tips of their toes, forcing
themselves into quaint poses in order to make themselves more supple,
manoeuvring to the sound of a fiddle scratched by an old teacher--and he
leaves us stupefied at the knowledge, the observation, the talent
profusely spent on these little pictures. Furthermore there are humorous
scenes: ballet-dancers chatting in the dark with _habitués_ of the
Opera, others looking at the house through the small opening of the
curtain, others re-tying their shoe-laces, and they all are prodigious
drawings of movement anatomically as correct as they are unexpected.
Degas's old style of drawing undergoes modification: with the help of
slight deformations, accentuations of the modelling and subtle
falsifications of the proportions, managed with infinite tact and
knowledge, the artist brings forth in relief the important gesture,
subordinating to it all the others. He attempts _drawing by movement_ as
it is caught by our eyes in life, where they do not state the
proportions, but first of all the gesture which strikes them. In these
drawings by Degas all the lines follow the impulsion of the thought.
What one sees first, is the movement transmitted to the members by the
will. The active part of the body is more carefully studied than the
rest, which is indicated by bold foreshortenings, placed in the second
plane, and apparently only serves to throw into relief the raised arm or
leg. This is no longer merely _exact_, it is _true_; it is a superior
degree of truth.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE DANCERS]
These pictures of dancers are psychologic documents of great value. The
physical and moral atmosphere of these surroundings is called forth by a
master. Such and such a figure or attitude tells us more about Parisian
life than a whole novel, and Degas has been lavish of his intellect and
his philosophy of bitter scepticism. But they are also marvellous
pictorial studies which, in spite of the special, anecdotal subjects,
rise to the level of grand painting through sheer power of
draughtsmanship and charm of tone. Degas has the special quality of
giving the precise sensation of the third dimension. The atmosphere
circulates round his figures; you walk round them; you see them in their
real plane, and they present themselves in a thousand unexpected
arrangements. Degas is undoubtedly the one man of his age who has most
contributed towards infusing new life into the representation of human
figures: in this respect his pictures resemble no one else's. The same
qualities will be found in his series of women bathing. These interiors,
where the actions of the bathers are caught amidst the stuffs, flowered
cushions, linen, sponges and tubs, are sharp visions of modernity. Degas
observes here, with the tenacious perfection of his talent, the
slightest shiver of the flesh refreshed by cold water. His masterly
drawing follows the most delicate inflexion of the muscles and suggests
the nervous system under the skin. He observes with extraordinary
subtlety the awkwardness of the nude being at a time when nudity is no
longer accustomed to show itself, and this true nudity is in strong
contrast to that of the academicians. One might say of Degas that he has
the disease of truth, if the necessity of truth were not health itself!
These bodies are still marked with the impressions of the garments; the
movements remain those of a clothed being which is only nude as an
exception. The painter notices beauty, but he looks for it particularly
in the profound characterisation of the types which he studies, and his
pastels have the massiveness and the sombre style of bronze. He has also
painted café-scenes, prostitutes and supers, with a mocking and sad
energy; he has even amused himself with painting washerwomen, to
translate the movements of the women of the people. And his colour with
its pearly whites, subdued blues and delicate greys, always elevates
everything he does, and confers upon him a distinctive style.
Finally, about 1896, Degas has revealed himself as a dreamy landscapist.
His recent landscapes are symphonies in colours of strange harmony and
hallucinations of rare tones, resembling music rather than painting. It
is perhaps in these pictures that he has revealed certain dreams
hitherto jealously hidden.
And now I must speak of his technique. It is very singular and varied,
and one of the most complicated in existence. In his first works, which
are apparently as simple as Corot's, he does not employ the process of
colour-spots. But many of the works in his second manner are a
combination of drawing, painting and pastel. He has invented a kind of
engraving mixed with wash-drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of
special pattern. Here one can find again his meticulous spirit. He has
many of the qualities of the scientist; he is as much chemist as
painter. It has been said of him, that he was a great artist of the
decadence. This is materially inexact, since his qualities of
draughtsmanship are those of a superb Classicist, and his colouring of
very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail,
his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the signs of an
extremely alert intellect who regards life prosaically and with a
lassitude and disenchantment which are only consoled by the passion for
truth. Certain water-colours of his heightened by pastel, and certain
landscapes, are somewhat disconcerting through the preciousness of his
method; others are surprisingly spontaneous. All his work has an
undercurrent of thought. In short, this Realist is almost a mystic. He
has observed a limited section of humanity, but what he has seen has not
been seen so profoundly by anybody else.
[Illustration: DEGAS
HORSES IN THE MEADOWS]
Degas has exercised an occult, but very serious, influence. He has lived
alone, without pupils and almost without friends; the only pupils one
might speak of are the caricaturist Forain, who has painted many small
pictures inspired by him, and the excellent American lady-artist Miss
Mary Cassatt. But all modern draughtsmen have been taught a lesson by
his painting: Renouard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen have been
impressed by it, and the young generation considers Degas as a master.
And that is also the unexpressed idea of the academicians, and
especially of those who have sufficient talent to be able to appreciate
all the science and power of such an art. The writer of this book
happened one day to mention Degas's name before a member of the
Institute. "What!" exclaimed he, "you know him? Why didn't you speak to
me about him?" And when he received the reply, that I did not consider
Degas to be an agreeable topic for him, the illustrious official
answered vivaciously, "But do you think I am a fool, and that I do not
know that Degas is one of the greatest draughtsmen who have ever
lived?"--"Why, then, my dear sir, has he never been received at the
Salons, and not even been decorated at the age of sixty-five?"--"Ah,"
replied the Academician a little angrily, "that is another matter!"
Degas despises glory. It is believed that he has by him a number of
canvases which will have to be burnt after his death in accordance with
his will. He is a man who has loved his art like a mistress, with
jealous passion, and has sacrificed to it all that other
artists--enthusiasts even--are accustomed to reserve for their personal
interest. Degas, the incomparable pastellist, the faultless draughtsman,
the bitter, satirical, pessimistic genius, is an isolated phenomenon in
his period, a grand creator, unattached to his time. The painters and
the select few among art-lovers know what considerable force there is in
him. Though almost latent as yet, it will reveal itself brilliantly,
when an opportunity arises for bringing together the vast quantity of
his work. As is the case with Manet, though in a different sense, his
powerful classic qualities will become most prominent in this ordeal,
and this classicism has never abandoned him in his audacities. To Degas
is due a new method of observation in drawing. He will have been the
first to study the relation between the moving lines of a living being
and the immovable lines of the scene which serves as its setting; the
first, also, to define drawing, not as a graphic science, but as the
valuation of the third dimension, and thus to apply to painting the
principles hitherto reserved for sculpture. Finally, he will be counted
among the great analysts. His vision, tenacious, intense, and sombre,
stimulates thought: across what appears to be the most immediate and
even the most vulgar reality it reaches a grand, artistic style; it
states profoundly the facts of life, it condenses a little the human
soul: and this will suffice to secure for Degas an important place in
his epoch, a little apart from Impressionism. Without noise, and through
the sheer charm of his originality, he has contributed his share towards
undermining the false doctrines of academic art before the painters, as
Manet has undermined them before the public.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
AN INTERIOR, AFTER DINNER]
V
CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant
technical expression, and touch upon the principal points referred to in
the second chapter of this book.
Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and
Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road
to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study
of the laws of light. His work is a magnificent verification of the
optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul. It is born
spontaneously from the artist's vision, and happens to be a rigorous
demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared
to know. Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to
join hands with the scientist. His work supplies not only the very
basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed
it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws. It
will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds
met by the artists hitherto, and it will also serve to endow decorative
art and mural painting with a process, the applications of which are
manyfold and splendid.
I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet's
painting more clearly even than from Manet's. Suppression of local
colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and
division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed
colours--these are the essential principles of _chromatism_ (for this
word should be used instead of the very vague term "Impressionism").
Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape
painting.
There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an
excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.
One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined
jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself
be sufficient to save from oblivion the man who has painted it. But the
study of light upon the figure has been the special preoccupation of
Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and, after the Impressionists, of the great
lyricist, Albert Besnard, who has concentrated the Impressionist
qualities by placing them at the service of a very personal conception
of symbolistic art. Monet commenced with trying to find his way by
painting figures, then landscapes and principally sea pictures and boats
in harbours, with a somewhat sombre robustness and very broad and solid
draughtsmanship. His first luminous studies date back to about 1885.
Obedient to the same ideas as Degas he had to avoid the Salons and only
show his pictures gradually in private galleries. For years he remained
unknown. It is only giving M. Durand-Ruel his due, to state that he was
one of the first to anticipate the Impressionist school and to buy the
first works of these painters, who were treated as madmen and
charlatans. He has become great with them, and has made his fortune and
theirs through having had confidence in them, and no fortune has been
better deserved. Thirty years ago nobody would have bought pictures by
Degas or Monet, which are sold to-day for a thousand pounds. This detail
is only mentioned to show the evolution of Impressionism as regards
public opinion.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR]
So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis of the laws of light
that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show
clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series
of pictures painted from nature at all hours of the day. This is the
principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might
be called "Investigation of the variations of sunlight." The most famous
of these series are the _Hay-ricks_, the _Poplars_, the _Cliffs of
Etretat_, the _Golfe Juan_, the _Coins de Rivière_, the _Cathedrals_,
the _Water-lilies_, and finally the _Thames_ series which Monet is at
present engaged upon. They are like great poems, and the splendour of
the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the
symphonic _parti-pris_ of the colours, make their realism, the minute
contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.
Monet paints these series from nature. He is said to take with him in a
carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to
hour, taking them up again the next day. He notes, for example, from
nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick;
at ten o'clock he passes on to another canvas and recommences the study
until eleven o'clock. Thus he follows step by step the modifications of
the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of
the whole series. He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times
over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different. He exhibits them
together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history
of light playing upon one and the same object. It is a dazzling display
of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation. Light is certainly
the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is
thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see
the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the
arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with
infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric
vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights
where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange,
predominate, and it is the proportional quantity of the spots that
differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights,
just as it actually happens in optic science. There are some midday
scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette--tree, hay-rick,
or rock--is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust
of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as
he would in actual sunlight. Sometimes even there are no more shadows at
all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create
contrasts of colours. Everything is light, and the painter seems easily
to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a
gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE]
Generally he finds a very simple _motif_ sufficient; a hay-rick, some
slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also
proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater
complexity. Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst
tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction
of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a
cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river,
or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun. All
this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or
fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in
the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped
with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain
distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented
with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has
dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the
secret order which has presided over this accumulation of spots which
seem projected in a furious shower. It is a veritable orchestral piece,
where every colour is an instrument with a distinct part, and where the
hours with their different tints represent the successive themes. Monet
is the equal of the greatest landscape painters as regards the
comprehension of the true character of every soil he has studied, which
is the supreme quality of his art. Though absorbed beyond all by study
of the sunlight, he has thought it useless to go to Morocco or Algeria.
He has found Brittany, Holland, the _Ile de France_, the _Cote d'Azur_
and England sufficient sources of inspiration for his symphonies, which
cover from end to end the scale of perceptible colours. He has
expressed, for instance, the mild and vaporous softness of the
Mediterranean, the luxuriant vegetation of the gardens of Cannes and
Antibes, with a truthfulness and knowledge of the psychology of land and
water which can only be properly appreciated by those who live in this
enchanted region. This has not prevented him from understanding better
than anybody the wildness, the grand austereness of the rocks of
_Belle-Isle en mer_, to express it in pictures in which one really feels
the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking
against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of
_Water-lilies_ expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet
basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has
painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of
bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at
twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, tulip-fields in Holland,
bouquets, effects of snow and hoar frost of exquisite softness, and
sailing boats passing in the sun. He has painted some views of the banks
of the Seine which are quite wonderful in their power of conjuring up
these scenes, and over all this has roved his splendid vision of a
great, amorous and radiant colourist. The _Cathedrals_ are even more of
a _tour de force_ of his talent. They consist of seventeen studies of
Rouen Cathedral, the towers of which fill the whole of the picture,
leaving barely a little space, a little corner of the square, at the
foot of the enormous stone-shafts which mount to the very top of the
picture. Here he has no proper means to express the play of the
reflections, no changeful waters or foliage: the grey stone, worn by
time and blackened by centuries, is for seventeen times the monochrome,
the thankless theme upon which the painter is about to exercise his
vision. But Monet finds means of making the most dazzling atmospheric
harmonies sparkle upon this stone. Pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at
midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun,
standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist,
the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with
its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without
minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the
composite, bold and rich tone of Oriental carpets.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
POPLARS ON THE EPTE IN AUTUMN]
Monet excels also in suggesting the _drawing of light_, if I may venture
to use this expression. He makes us understand the movement of the
vibrations of heat, the movement of the luminous waves; he also
understands how to paint the sensation of strong wind. "Before one of
Manet's pictures," said Mme. Morisot, "I always know which way to
incline my umbrella." Monet is also an incomparable painter of water.
Pond, river, or sea--he knows how to differentiate their colouring,
their consistency, and their currents, and he transfixes a moment of
their fleeting life. He is intuitive to an exceptional degree in the
intimate composition of matter, water, earth, stone or air, and this
intuition serves him in place of intellectuality in his art. He is a
painter _par excellence_, a man born for painting, and this power of
penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a
kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate
truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is
the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist,
Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.
His work is immense. He produces with astonishing rapidity, and he has
yet another characteristic of the great painters: that of having put his
hand to every kind of subject. His recent studies of the Thames are, at
the decline of his energetic maturity, as beautiful and as spontaneous
as the _Hay-ricks_ of seventeen years back. They are thrillingly
truthful visions of fairy mists, where showers of silver and gold
sparkle through rosy vapours; and at the same time Monet combines in
this series the dream-landscapes of Turner with Monticelli's
accumulation of precious stones. Thus interpreted by this intense
faculty of synthesis, nature, simplified in detail and contemplated in
its grand lines, becomes truly a living dream.
Since the _Hay-ricks_ one can say that the work of Claude Monet is
glorious. It has been made sacred to the admiring love of the
connoisseurs on the day when Monet joined Rodin in an exhibition which
is famous in the annals of modern art. Yet no official distinction has
intervened to recognise one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth
century. The influence of Monet has been enormous all over Europe and
America. The _process of colour spots_[1] (let us adhere to this
rudimentary name which has become current) has been adopted by a whole
crowd of painters. I shall have to say a few words about it at the end
of this book. But it is befitting to terminate this all too short study
by explaining that the most lyrical of the Impressionists has also been
the theorist _par excellence_. His work connects easel painting with
mural painting. No Minister of Fine Arts has been found, who would
surmount the systematic opposition of the official painters, and give
Manet a commission for grand mural compositions, for which his method is
admirably suited. It has taken long years before such works were
entrusted to Besnard, who, with Puvis de Chavannes, has given Paris
her most beautiful modern decorations, but Besnard's work is the direct
outcome of Claude Monet's harmonies. The principle of the division of
tones and of the study of complementary colours has been full of
revelations, and one of the most fruitful theories. It has probably been
the principle which will designate most clearly the originality of the
painting of the future. To have invented it, is enough to secure
permanent glory for a man. And without wishing to put again the question
of the antagonism of realism and idealism, one may well say that a
painter who invents a method and shows such power, is highly
intellectual and gifted with a pictorial intelligence. Whatever the
subjects he treats, he creates an aesthetic emotion equivalent, if not
similar, to those engendered by the most complex symbolism. In his
ardent love of nature Monet has found his greatness; he suggests the
secrets by stating the evident facts. That is the law common to all the
arts.
[Footnote 1: _Procédé de la tache._]
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL]
VI
AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK
The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of
forty years. It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist
art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general
destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art
movement. It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy
magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the
technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite. Like
Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has
treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes
and still-life, all with equal beauty.
His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.
His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses
the same technique as Boucher: fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy,
laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the principal
values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those
of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the
opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious attitudes and an
effort towards decorative convention. Nevertheless, his _Bathers_, of
which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern
and personal. Renoir's nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas,
whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in
the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally
looked for in the features of the clothed being. Nor is Renoir's nude
that of the academicians, that poetised nude arranged according to a
pseudo-Greek ideal, which has nothing in common with contemporary women.
What Renoir sees in the nude is less the line, than the brilliancy of
the epidermis, the luminous, nacreous substance of the flesh: it is the
"ideal clay"; and in this he shows the vision of a poet; he transfigures
reality, but in a very different sense from that of the School.
Renoir's woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless,
wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub. He sets her in backgrounds of
foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents. She is a luxuriant, firm,
healthy and naïve woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes
wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and
her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti,
born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where
entire ingenuousness is a guarantee against all indecency. One cannot
but be astonished at this mixture of "Japanism," savagism and eighteenth
century taste, which constitutes inimitably the nude of Renoir.
[Illustration: RENOIR
DÉJEUNER]
[Illustration: RENOIR
IN THE BOX]
M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist
methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits.
Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet.
These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the
objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are
frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in
the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of
depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as
interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the
interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the
essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He
knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time;
how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate,
behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches
which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is
now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the _Déjeûner des
Canotiers_, the _Bal au Moulin de la Galette_, the _Box_, the _Terrace_,
the _First Step_, the _Sleeping Woman with a Cat_, and his most
beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied
with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent
of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the _Woman with the broken neck_ is related
to Manet; the portrait of _Sisley_ invents pointillism fifteen years
before the pointillists; _La Pensée_, this masterpiece, evokes
Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the
_Jeune Fille au panier_ is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the
delightful _Jeune Fille à la promenade_ is connected with Fragonard; the
_Box_, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole
worldliness of 1875. The portrait of _Jeanne Samary_ is an evocation of
the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white
satin and golden hair.
[Illustration: RENOIR
YOUNG GIRL PROMENADING]
Renoir's realism bears in spite of all, the imprint of the lyric spirit
and of sweetness. It has neither the nervous veracity of Manet, nor the
bitterness of Degas, who both love their epoch and find it interesting
without idealising it and who have the vision of psychologist novelists.
Before everything else he is a painter. What he sees in the _Bal au
Moulin de la Galette_, are not the stigmata of vice and impudence, the
ridiculous and the sad sides of the doubtful types of this low resort.
He sees the gaiety of Sundays, the flashes of the sun, the oddity of a
crowd carried away by the rhythm of the valses, the laughter, the
clinking of glasses, the vibrating and hot atmosphere; and he applies
to this spectacle of joyous vulgarity his gifts as a sumptuous
colourist, the arabesque of the lines, the gracefulness of his bathers,
and the happy eurythmy of his soul. The straw hats are changed into
gold, the blue jackets are sapphires, and out of a still exact realism
is born a poem of light. The _Déjeûner des Canotiers_ is a subject which
has been painted a hundred times, either for the purpose of studying
popular types, or of painting white table-cloths amidst sunny foliage.
Yet Renoir is the only painter who has raised this small subject to the
proportions and the style of a large canvas, through the pictorial charm
and the masterly richness of the arrangement. The _Box_, conceived in a
low harmony, in a golden twilight, is a work worthy of Reynolds. The
pale and attentive face of the lady makes one think of the great English
master's best works; the necklace, the flesh, the flounce of lace and
the hands are marvels of skill and of taste, which the greatest modern
virtuosos, Sargent and Besnard, have not surpassed, and, as far as the
man in the background is concerned, his white waistcoat, his
dress-coat, his gloved hand would suffice to secure the fame of a
painter. The _Sleeping Woman_, the _First Step_, the _Terrace_, and the
decorative _Dance_ panels reveal Renoir as an _intimiste_ and as an
admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of
grasping nature and of ingenuity--strangers to all decadent
complexity--have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have
expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with
over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of
dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with
inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.
[Illustration: RENOIR
WOMAN'S BUST]
His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It
seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the
palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches
for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical
dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to
take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and
conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in assembling those tones
which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed
strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded
colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he
can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One
feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian
shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one
refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional
virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It
is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the
most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his
generation. The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques
according to their own character: the gladioles and roses in pasty
paint, the poor flowers of the field are defined by a cross-hatching of
little touches. Influenced by the purple shadow of the large
flower-decked hats, the heads of young girls are painted on coarse
canvas, sketched in broad strokes, with the hair in one colour only.
Some little study appears like wool, some other has the air of agate,
or is marbled and veined according to his inexplicable whim. We have
here an incessant confusion of methods, a complete emancipation of the
virtuoso who listens only to his fancy. Now and then the harmonies are
false and the drawing incorrect, but these weaknesses do at least no
harm to the values, the character and the general movement of the work,
which are rather accentuated by them.
[Illustration: RENOIR
YOUNG WOMAN IN EMPIRE COSTUME]
Surely, it would be false to exclude ideologist painting which has
produced wonders, and not less iniquitous to reproach Impressionism with
not having taken any interest in it! One has to avoid the kind of
criticism which consists in reproaching one movement with not having had
the qualities of the others whilst maintaining its own, and we have
abandoned the idea of Beauty divided into a certain number of clauses
and programmes, towards the sum total of which the efforts of the
eclectic candidates are directed. M. Renoir is probably the most
representative figure of a movement where he seems to have united all
the qualities of his friends. To criticise him means to criticise
Impressionism itself. Having spent half of its strength in proving to
its adversaries that they were wrong, and the other half in inventing
technical methods, it is not surprising to find that Impressionism has
been wanting in intellectual depth and has left to its successors the
care of realising works of great thought. But it has brought us a sunny
smile, a breath of pure air. It is so fascinating, that one cannot but
love its very mistakes which make it more human and more accessible.
Renoir is the most lyrical, the most musical, the most subtle of the
masters of this art. Some of his landscapes are as beautiful as those of
Claude Monet. His nudes are as masterly in painting as Manet's, and more
supple. Not having attained the scientific drawing which one finds in
Degas's, they have a grace and a brilliancy which Degas's nudes have
never known. If his rare portraits of men are inferior to those of his
rivals, his women's portraits have a frequently superior distinction.
His great modern compositions are equal to the most beautiful works by
Manet and Degas. His inequalities are also more striking than theirs.
Being a fantastic, nervous improvisator he is more exposed to radical
mistakes. But he is a profoundly sincere and conscientious artist.
[Illustration: RENOIR
ON THE TERRACE]
The race speaks in him. It is inexplicable that he should not have met
with startling success, since he is voluptuous, bright, happy and
learned without heaviness. One has to attribute his relative isolation
to the violence of the controversies, and particularly to the dignity of
a poet gently disdainful of public opinion and paying attention solely
to painting, his great and only love. Manet has been a fighter whose
works have created scandal. Renoir has neither shown, nor hidden
himself: he has painted according to his dream, spreading his works,
without mixing up his name or his personality with the tumult that raged
around his friends. And now, for that very reason, his work appears
fresher and younger, more primitive and candid, more intoxicated with
flowers, flesh and sunlight.
VII
THE SECONDARY PAINTERS OF IMPRESSIONISM--CAMILLE PISSARRO, ALFRED
SISLEY, PAUL CÉZANNE, BERTHE MORISOT, MISS MARY CASSATT, EVA GONZALÈS,
GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE, BAZILLE, ALBERT LEBOURG, EUGÈNE BOUDIN.
Manet, Degas, Monet and Renoir will present themselves as a glorious
quartet of masters, in the history of painting. We must now speak of
some personalities who have grown up by their side and who, without
being great, offer nevertheless a rich and beautiful series of works.
Of these personalities the most considerable is certainly that of M.
Camille Pissarro. He painted according to some wise and somewhat timid
formulas, when Manet's example won him over to Impressionism to which he
has remained faithful. M. Pissarro has been enormously productive. His
work is composed of landscapes, rustic scenes, and studies of streets
and markets. His first landscapes are in the manner of Corot, but bathed
in blond colour: vast cornfields, sunny woods, skies with big, flocking
clouds, effects of soft light--these are the motifs of some charming
canvases which have a solid, classic quality. Later the artist adopted
the method of the dissociation of tones, from which he obtained some
happy effects. His harvest and market scenes are luminous and alive. The
figures in these recall those of Millet. They bear witness to high
qualities of sincere observation, and are the work of a man profoundly
enamoured of rustic life. M. Pissarro excels in grouping the figures, in
correctly catching their attitudes and in rendering the medley of a
crowd in the sun. Certain fans in particular will always remain
delightful caprices of fresh colour, but it would be vain to look in
this attractive, animated and clear painting for the psychologic gifts,
the profound feeling for grand silhouettes, and the intuition of the
worn and gloomy soul of the men of the soil, which have made Millet's
noble glory. At the time when, about 1885, the neo-Impressionists whom
we shall study later on invented the Pointillist method, M. Pissarro
tried it and applied it judiciously, with the patient, serious and
slightly anxious talent, by which he is distinguished. Recently, in a
series of pictures representing views of Paris (the boulevards and the
Avenue de l'Opéra) M. Pissarro has shewn rare vision and skill and has
perhaps signed his most beautiful and personal paintings. The
perspective, the lighting, the tones of the houses and of the crowds,
the reflections of rain or sunshine are intensely true; they make one
feel the atmosphere, the charm and the soul of Paris. One can say of
Pissarro that he lacks none of the gifts of his profession. He is a
learned, fruitful and upright artist. But he has lacked originality; he
always recalls those whom he admires and whose ideas he applies boldly
and tastefully. It is probable that his conscientious nature has
contributed not little towards keeping him in the second rank.
Incapable, certainly, of voluntarily imitating, this excellent and
diligent painter has not had the sparks of genius of his friends, but
all that can be given to a man through conscientious study, striving
after truth and love of art, has been acquired by M. Pissarro. The rest
depended on destiny only. There is no character more worthy of respect
and no effort more meritorious than his, and there can be no better
proof of his disinterestedness and his modesty, than the fact that,
although he has thirty years of work behind him, an honoured name and
white hair, M. Pissarro did not hesitate to adopt, quite frankly, the
technique of the young Pointillist painters, his juniors, because it
appeared to him better than his own. He is, if not a great painter, at
least one of the most interesting rustic landscape painters of our
epoch. His visions of the country are quite his own, and are a
harmonious mixture of Classicism and Impressionism which will secure one
of the most honourable places to his work.
[Illustration: PISSARRO
RUE DE L'EPICERIE, ROUEN]
[Illustration: PISSARRO
BOULEVARDE MONTMARTRE]
[Illustration: PISSARRO
THE BOILDIEAUX BRIDGE AT ROUEN]
[Illustration: PISSARO
THE AVENUE DE L'OPÉRA]
There has, perhaps, been more original individuality in the landscape
painter Alfred Sisley. He possessed in the highest degree the feeling
for light, and if he did not have the power, the masterly passion of
Claude Monet, he will at least deserve to be frequently placed by his
side as regards the expression of certain combinations of light. He did
not have the decorative feeling which makes Monet's landscapes so
imposing; one does not see in his work that surprising lyrical
interpretation which knows how to express the drama of the raging waves,
the heavy slumber of enormous masses of rock, the intense torpor of the
sun on the sea. But in all that concerns the mild aspects of the _Ile de
France_, the sweet and fresh landscapes, Sisley is not unworthy of being
compared with Monet. He equals him in numerous pictures; he has a
similar delicacy of perception, a similar fervour of execution. He is
the painter of great, blue rivers curving towards the horizon; of
blossoming orchards; of bright hills with red-roofed hamlets scattered
about; he is, beyond all, the painter of French skies which he presents
with admirable vivacity and facility. He has the feeling for the
transparency of atmosphere, and if his technique allies him directly
with Impressionism, one can well feel, that he painted spontaneously and
that this technique happened to be adapted to his nature, without his
having attempted to appropriate it for the sake of novelty. Sisley has
painted a notable series of pictures in the quaint village of Moret on
the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he died at a ripe
age, and these canvases will figure among the most charming landscapes
of our epoch. Sisley was a veteran of Impressionism. At the Exhibition
of 1900, in the two rooms reserved for the works of this school, there
were to be seen a dozen of Sisley's canvases. By the side of the finest
Renoirs, Monets and Manets they kept their charm and their brilliancy
with a singular flavour, and this was for many critics a revelation as
to the real place of this artist, whom they had hitherto considered as a
pretty colourist of only relative importance.
[Illustration: SISLEY
SNOW EFFECT]
[Illustration: SISLEY
BOUGIVAL, AT THE WATER'S EDGE]
[Illustration: SISLEY
BRIDGE AT MORET]
Paul Cézanne, unknown to the public, is appreciated by a small group of
art lovers. He is an artist who lives in Provence, away from the world;
he is supposed to have served as model for the Impressionist painter
Claude Lantier, described by Zola in his celebrated novel "L'Oeuvre."
Cézanne has painted landscapes, rustic scenes and still-life pictures.
His figures are clumsy and brutal and inharmonious in colour, but his
landscapes have the merit of a robust simplicity of vision. These
pictures are almost primitive, and they are loved by the young
Impressionists because of their exclusion of all "cleverness." A charm
of rude simplicity and sincerity can be found in these works in which
Cézanne employs only just the means which are indispensable for his end.
His still-life pictures are particularly interesting owing to the
spotless brilliancy of their colours, the straightforwardness of the
tones, and the originality of certain shades analogous to those of old
faience. Cézanne is a conscientious painter without skill, intensely
absorbed in rendering what he sees, and his strong and tenacious
attention has sometimes succeeded in finding beauty. He reminds more of
an ancient Gothic craftsman, than of a modern artist, and he is full of
repose as a contrast to the dazzling virtuosity of so many painters.
[Illustration: CÉZANNE
DESSERT]
Berthe Morisot will remain the most fascinating figure of
Impressionism,--the one who has stated most precisely the femineity of
this luminous and iridescent art. Having married Eugène Manet, the
brother of the great painter, she exhibited at various private
galleries, where the works of the first Impressionists were to be
seen, and became as famous for her talent as for her beauty. When Manet
died, she took charge of his memory and of his work, and she helped with
all her energetic intelligence to procure them their just and final
estimation. Mme. Eugène Manet has certainly been one of the most
beautiful types of French women of the end of the nineteenth century.
When she died prematurely at the age of fifty (in 1895), she left a
considerable amount of work: gardens, young girls, water-colours of
refined taste, of surprising energy, and of a colouring as
distinguished, as it is unexpected. As great grand-daughter of
Fragonard, Berthe Morisot (since we ought to leave her the name with
which her respect for Manet's great name made her always sign her works)
seemed to have inherited from her famous ancestor his French
gracefulness, his spirited elegance, and all his other great qualities.
She has also felt the influence of Corot, of Manet and of Renoir. All
her work is bathed in brightness, in azure, in sunlight; it is a woman's
work, but it has a strength, a freedom of touch and an originality,
which one would hardly have expected. Her water-colours, particularly,
belong to a superior art: some notes of colour suffice to indicate sky,
sea, or a forest background, and everything shows a sure and masterly
fancy, for which our time can offer no analogy. A series of Berthe
Morisot's works looks like a veritable bouquet whose brilliancy is due
less to the colour-schemes which are comparatively soft, grey and blue,
than to the absolute correctness of the values. A hundred canvases, and
perhaps three hundred water-colours attest this talent of the first
rank. Normandy coast scenes with pearly skies and turquoise horizons,
sparkling Nice gardens, fruit-laden orchards, girls in white dresses
with big flower-decked hats, young women in ball-dress, and flowers are
the favourite themes of this artist who was the friend of Renoir, of
Degas and of Mallarmé.
[Illustration: BERTHE MORISOT
MELANCHOLY]
[Illustration: BERTHE MORISOT
YOUNG WOMAN SEATED]
Miss Mary Cassatt will deserve a place by her side. American by birth,
she became French through her assiduous participation in the exhibitions
of the Impressionists. She is one of the very few painters whom Degas
has advised, with Forain and M. Ernest Rouart. (This latter, a painter
himself, a son of the painter and wealthy collector Henri Rouart, has
married Mme. Manet's daughter who is also an artist.) Miss Cassatt has
made a speciality of studying children, and she is, perhaps, the artist
of this period who has understood and expressed them with the greatest
originality. She is a pastellist of note, and some of her pastels are as
good as Manet's and Degas's, so far as broad execution and brilliancy
and delicacy of tones are concerned. Ten years ago Miss Cassatt
exhibited a series of ten etchings in colour, representing scenes of
mothers and children at their toilet. At that time this _genre_ was
almost abandoned, and Miss Cassatt caused astonishment by her boldness
which faced the most serious difficulties. One can relish in this
artist's pictures, besides the great qualities of solid draughtsmanship,
correct values, and skilful interpretation of flesh and stuffs, a
profound sentiment of infantile life, childish gestures, clear and
unconscious looks, and the loving expression of the mothers. Miss
Cassatt is the painter and psychologist of babies and young mothers whom
she likes to depict in the freshness of an orchard, or against
backgrounds of the flowered hangings of dressing-rooms, amidst bright
linen, tubs, and china, in smiling intimacy. To these two remarkable
women another has to be added, Eva Gonzalès, the favourite pupil of
Manet who has painted a fine portrait of her. Eva Gonzalès became the
wife of the excellent engraver Henri Guérard, and died prematurely, not,
however, before one was able to admire her talent as an exquisitely
delicate pastellist. Having first been a pupil of Chaplin, she soon came
to forget the tricks of technique in order to acquire under Manet's
guidance the qualities of clearness and the strength of the great
painter of _Argenteuil_; and she would certainly have taken one of the
first places in modern art, had not her career been cut short by death.
A small pastel at the Luxembourg Gallery proves her convincing qualities
as a colourist.
[Illustration: MARY CASSATT
GETTING UP BABY]
[Illustration: MARY CASSATT
WOMEN AND CHILD]
Gustave Caillebotte was a friend of the Impressionists from the very
first hour. He was rich, fond of art, and himself a painter of great
merit who modestly kept hidden behind his comrades. His picture _Les
raboteurs de parquets_ made him formerly the butt of derision. To-day
his work, at the Luxembourg Gallery seems hardly a fit pretext for so
much controversy, but at that time much was considered as madness,
that to our eyes appears quite natural. This picture is a study of
oblique perspective and its curious _ensemble_ of rising lines sufficed
to provoke astonishment. The work is, moreover, grey and discreet in
colour and has some qualities of fine light, but is on the whole not
very interesting. Recently an exhibition of works by Caillebotte has
made it apparent that this amateur was a misjudged painter. The
still-life pictures in this exhibition were specially remarkable. But
the name of Caillebotte was destined to reach the public only in
connection with controversies and scandal. When he died, he left to the
State a magnificent collection of objets-d'art and of old pictures, and
also a collection of Impressionist works, stipulating that these two
bequests should be inseparable. He wished by this means to impose the
works of his friends upon the museums, and thus avenge their unjust
neglect. The State accepted the two legacies, since the Louvre
absolutely wanted to benefit by the ancient portion, in spite of the
efforts of the Academicians who revolted against the acceptance of the
modern part. On this occasion one could see how far the official
artists were carried by their hatred of the Impressionists. A group of
Academicians, professors at the _Ecole des Beaux-Arts_, threatened the
minister that they would resign _en masse_. "We cannot," they wrote to
the papers, "continue to teach an art of which we believe we know the
laws, from the moment the State admits into the museums, where our
pupils can see them, works which are the very negation of all we teach."
A heated discussion followed in the press, and the minister boldly
declared that Impressionism, good or bad, had attracted the attention of
the public, and that it was the duty of the State to receive impartially
the work of all the art movements; the public would know how to judge
and choose; the Government's duty was not to influence them by showing
them only one style of painting, but to remain in historic neutrality.
Thanks to this clever reply, the Academicians, among whom M. Gérôme was
the most rabid, resigned themselves to keeping their posts. A similar
incident, less publicly violent, but equally strange, occurred on the
occasion of the admission to the Luxembourg Gallery of the portrait of
M. Whistler's mother, a masterpiece of which the gallery is proud
to-day, and for which a group of writers and art lovers had succeeded in
opening the way. It is difficult to imagine the degree of irritation and
obstruction of the official painters against all the ideas of the new
painting, and if it had only depended upon them, there can be no doubt
that Manet and his friends would have died in total obscurity, not only
banished from the Salons and museums, but also treated as madmen and
robbed of the possibility of living by their work.
The Caillebotte collection was installed under conditions which the
ill-will of the administrators made at least as deplorable as possible.
The works were crowded into a small, badly lighted room, where it is
absolutely impossible to see them from the distance required by the
method of the division of tones, and the meanness of the opposition was
such that, the pictures having been bequeathed without frames, the
keeper was obliged to have recourse to the reserves of the Louvre,
because he was refused the necessary credit for purchasing them. The
collection is however beautiful and interesting. It does not represent
Impressionism in all its brilliancy, since the works by which it is
composed had been bought by Caillebotte at a time, when his friends were
still far from having arrived at the full blossoming of their qualities.
But some very fine things can at least be found there. Renoir is
marvellously represented by the _Moulin de la Galette_, which is one of
his masterpieces. Degas figures with seven beautiful pastels, Monet with
some landscapes grand in style; Sisley and Pissarro appear scarcely to
their advantage, and finally it is to be regretted, that Manet is only
represented by a study in black in his first manner, the _Balcony_,
which does not count among his best pictures, and the famous _Olympia_
whose importance is more historical than intrinsic. The gallery has
separately acquired a _Young Girl in Ball Dress_ by Berthe Morisot,
which is a delicate marvel of grace and freshness. And in the place of
honour of the gallery is to be seen Fantin-Latour's great picture
_Hommage à Manet_, in which the painter, seated before his easel, is
surrounded by his friends; and this canvas may well be considered the
emblem of the slow triumph of Impressionism, and of the amends for a
great injustice.
It is in this picture that the young painter Bazille is represented, a
friend and pupil of Manet's, who was killed during the war of 1870, and
who should not be forgotten here. He has left a few canvases marked by
great talent, and would no doubt have counted among the most original
contemporary artists. We shall terminate this all too short enumeration
with two remarkable landscapists; the one is Albert Lebourg who paints
in suave and poetic colour schemes, with blues and greens of particular
tenderness, a painter who will take his place in the history of
Impressionism. The other is Eugène Boudin. He has not adopted Claude
Monet's technique; but I have already said that the vague and inexact
term "Impressionism" must be understood to comprise a group of painters
showing originality in the study of light and getting away from the
academic spirit. As to this, Eugène Boudin deserves to be placed in the
first rank. His canvases will be the pride of the best arranged
galleries. He is an admirable seascape painter. He has known how to
render with unfailing mastery, the grey waters of the Channel, the
stormy skies, the heavy clouds, the effects of sunlight feebly piercing
the prevailing grey. His numerous pictures painted at the port of Havre
are profoundly expressive. Nobody has excelled him in drawing
sailing-boats, in giving the exact feeling of the keels plunged into the
water, in grouping the masts, in rendering the activity of a port, in
indicating the value of a sail against the sky, the fluidity of calm
water, the melancholy of the distance, the shiver of short waves rippled
by the breeze. Boudin is a learned colourist of grey tones. His
Impressionism consists in the exclusion of useless details, his
comprehension of reflections, his feeling for values, the boldness of
his composition and his faculty of directly perceiving nature and the
transparency of atmosphere: he reminds sometimes of Constable and of
Corot. Boudin's production has been enormous, and nothing that he has
done is indifferent. He is one of those artists who have not a brilliant
career, but who will last, and whose name, faithfully retained by the
elect, is sure of immortality. He may be considered an isolated
artist, on the border line between Classicism and Impressionism, and
this is unquestionably the cause of the comparative obscurity of his
fame. The same might be said of the ingenuous and fine landscapist
Hervier, who has left such interesting canvases; and of the Lyons
water-colour painter Ravier who, almost absolutely unknown, came very
close to Monticelli and showed admirable gifts. It must, however, be
recognised that Boudin is nearer to Impressionism than to any other
grouping of artists, and he must be considered as a small master of pure
French lineage. Finally, if a question of nationality prevents me from
enlarging upon the subject of the rank of precursor which must be
accorded to the great Dutch landscapist Jongkind, I must at least
mention his name. His water-colour sketches have been veritable
revelations for several Impressionists. Eugène Boudin and Berthe Morisot
have derived special benefit from them, and they are valuable lessons
for many young painters of the present day.
[Illustration: JONGKIND
IN HOLLAND]
[Illustration: JONGKIND
VIEW OF THE HAGUE]
We do not pretend to have mentioned in this chapter all the painters
directly connected with the first Impressionist movement. We have
confined ourselves to enumerating the most important only, and each of
them would deserve a complete essay. But our object will have been
achieved, if we have inspired art-lovers with just esteem for this brave
phalanx of artists who have proved better than any aesthetic
commentaries the vitality, the originality, and the logic of Manet's
theories, the great importance of the notions introduced by him into
painting, and who have, on the other hand, clearly demonstrated the
uselessness of official teaching. Far from the traditions and methods of
the School, the best of their knowledge and of their talent is due to
their profound and sincere contemplation of nature and to their freedom
of spirit. And for that reason they will have a permanent place in the
evolution of their art.
VIII
THE MODERN ILLUSTRATORS CONNECTED WITH IMPRESSIONISM: RAFFAËLLI,
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, FORAIN, CHÉRET, ETC.
Not the least important result of Impressionism has been the veritable
revolution effected by it in the art of illustration. It was only
natural that its principles should have led to it. The substitution of
the beauty of character for the beauty of proportion was bound to move
the artists to regard illustration in a new light; and as pictorial
Impressionism was born of the same movement of ideas which created the
naturalist novel and the impressionist literature of Flaubert, Zola and
the Goncourts, and moreover as these men were united by close relations
and a common defence, Edouard Manet's modern ideas soon took up the
commentary of the books dealing with modern life and the description of
actual spectacles.
The Impressionists themselves have not contributed towards illustration.
Their work has consisted in raising to the style of grand painting
subjects, that seemed at the best only worthy of the proportion of
vignettes, in opposition to the subjects qualified as "noble" by the
School. The series of works by Manet and Degas may be considered as
admirable illustrations to the novels by Zola and the Goncourts. It is a
parallel research in modern psychologic truth. But this research has
remained confined to pictures. It may be presumed that, had they wished
to do so, Manet and Degas could have admirably illustrated certain
contemporary novels, and Renoir could have produced a masterpiece in
commenting, say, upon Verlaine's _Fêtes Galantes_. The only things that
can be mentioned here are a few drawings composed by Manet for Edgar A.
Poe's _The Raven_ and Mallarmé's _L'Après-Midi d'un Faune_, in addition
to a few music covers without any great interest.
But if the Impressionists themselves have neglected actively to assist
the interesting school of modern illustration, a whole legion of
draughtsmen have immediately been inspired by their principles. One of
their most original characteristics was the realistic representation of
the scenes, the _mise en cadre_, and it afforded these draughtsmen an
opportunity for revolutionising book illustration. There had already
been some excellent artists who occupied themselves with vignette
drawings, like Tony Johannot and Célestin Nanteuil, whose pretty and
smart frontispieces are to be found in the old editions of Balzac. The
genius of Honoré Daumier and the high fancy of Gavarni and of Grévin had
already announced a serious protest of modern sentiment against academic
taste, in returning on many points to the free tradition of Eisen, of
the two Moreaus and of Debucourt. Since 1845 the draughtsman Constantin
Guys, Baudelaire's friend, gave evidence, in his most animated
water-colour drawings, of a curious vision of nervous elegance and of
expressive skill quite in accord with the ideas of the day.
Impressionism, and also the revelation of the Japanese colour prints,
gave an incredible vigour to these intuitive glimpses. Certain
characteristics will date from the days of Impressionism. It is due to
Impressionism that artists have ventured to show in illustration, for
instance, figures in the foreground cut through by the margin, rising
perspectives, figures in the background that seem to stand on a higher
plane than the others, people seen from a second story; in a word, all
that life presents to our eyes, without the annoying consideration for
"style" and for arrangement, which the academic spirit obstinately
insisted to apply to the illustration of modern life. Degas in
particular has given many examples of this novelty in composition. One
of his pastels has remained typical, owing to the scandal caused by it:
he represents a dance-scene at the Opera, seen from the orchestra. The
neck of a double bass rises in the middle of the picture and cuts into
it, a large black silhouette, behind which sparkle the gauze-dresses and
the lights. That can be observed any evening, and yet it would be
difficult to recapitulate all the railleries and all the anger caused by
so natural an audacity. Modern illustration was to be the pretext of a
good many more outbursts!
We must now consider four artists of great importance who are remarkable
painters and have greatly raised the art of illustration. This title
illustrator, despised by the official painters, should be given them as
the one which has secured them the best claim to fame. They have
restored to this title all its merit and all its brilliancy and have
introduced into illustration the most serious qualities of painting. Of
these four men the first in date is M.J.F. Raffaëlli, who introduced
himself about 1875 with some remarkable and intensely picturesque
illustrations in colours in various magazines. He gave an admirable
series of _Parisian Types_, in album form, and a series of etchings to
accompany the text of M. Huysmans, describing the curious river "la
Bièvre" which penetrates Paris in a thousand curves, sometimes
subterranean, sometimes above ground, and serves the tanners for washing
the leather. This series is a model of modern illustration. But, apart
from the book, the entire pictorial work of M. Raffaëlli is a humorous
and psychological illustration of the present time. He has painted with
unique truth and spirit the working men's types and the small
_bourgeois_, the poor, the hospital patients and the roamers of the
outskirts of Paris. He has succeeded in being the poet of the sickly and
dirty landscapes by which the capitals are surrounded; he has rendered
their anaemic charm, the confused perspectives of houses, fences, walls
and little gardens, and their smoke, under the melancholy of rainy
skies. With an irony free from bitterness he has noted the clumsy
gestures of the labourer in his Sunday garb and the grotesque
silhouettes of the small townsmen, and has compiled a gallery of very
real sociologic interest. M. Raffaëlli has also exhibited Parisian
landscapes in which appear great qualities of light. He excels in
rendering the mornings in the spring, with their pearly skies, their
pale lights, their transparency and their slight shadows, and finally he
has proved his mastery by some large portraits, fresh harmonies,
generally devoted to the study of different qualities of white. If the
name "Impressionist" meant, as has been wrongly believed, an artist who
confines himself to giving the impression of what he sees, then M.
Raffaëlli would be the real Impressionist. He suggests more than he
paints. He employs a curious technique: he often leaves a sky completely
bare, throwing on to the white of the canvas a few colour notes which
suffice to give the illusion. He has a decided preference for white and
black, and paints very slightly in small touches. His very correct
feeling for values makes him an excellent painter; but what interests
him beyond all, is psychologic expression. He notes it with so hasty a
pencil, that one might almost say that he writes with colour. He is also
an etcher of great merit, and an original sculptor. He has invented
small bas-reliefs in bronze which can be attached to the wall, like
sketches or nick-nacks; and he has applied his talent even to renewing
the material for painting. He is an ingenious artist and a prolific
producer, a roguish, but sympathetic, observer of the life of the small
people, which has not prevented him from painting very seriously when he
wanted to, as is witnessed among other works by his very fine portrait
of M. Clemenceau speaking at a public meeting, in the presence of a
vociferous audience from which rise some hundred of heads whose
expressions are noted with really splendid energy and fervour.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died recently, insane, leaves a great
work behind him. He had a kind of cruel genius. Descended from one of
the greatest families of France, badly treated by nature who made him a
kind of ailing dwarf, he seemed to take a bitter pleasure in the study
of modern vice. He painted scenes at café-concerts and the rooms of
wantons with intense truth. Nobody has revealed better than he the
lowness and suffering of the creatures "of pleasure," as they have been
dubbed by the heartrending irony of life. Lautrec has shown the
artificiality of the painted faces; the vulgarity of the types of the
prostitutes of low origin; the infamous gestures, the disorder, the
slovenliness of the dwellings of these women; all the shady side of
their existence. It has been said that he loved ugliness. As a matter of
fact, he did not exaggerate, he raised a powerful accusation against
everything he saw. But his terrible clairvoyance passed for caricature.
This sad psychologist was a great painter; he pleased himself with
dressing in rose-coloured costumes the coarsest and most vulgar
creatures he painted, such as one can find at the cabarets and concerts,
and he enjoyed the contrast of fresh tones with the faces marked by vice
and poverty; Lautrec's two great influences have been the Japanese and
Degas. Of the former he retained the love for decorative arabesques and
the unconventional grouping; of the other the learned draughtsmanship,
expressive in its broad simplification, and one might say that the pupil
has often been worthy of the masters. One can only regret that Lautrec
should have confined his vision and his high faculties to the study of a
small and very Parisian world; but, seeing his works, one cannot deny
the science, the spirit and the grand bearing of his art. He has also
signed some fine posters, notably a _Bruant_ which is a masterpiece of
its kind.
Degas's deep influence can be found again in J.L. Forain, who has made
himself known by an immense series of drawings for the illustrated
papers, drawings as remarkable in themselves as they are, through their
legends, bitterly sarcastic in spirit. These drawings form a synthesis
of the defects of the _bourgeoisie_, which is at the same time amusing
and grave. They also concern, though less happily, the political world,
in which the artist, a little intoxicated with his success, has thought
himself able to exercise an influence by scoffing at the parliamentary
régime. Forain's drawing has a nervous character which does, however,
not weaken its science: every stroke reveals something and has an
astonishing power. In his less known painting can be traced still more
clearly the style and influence of his master Degas. They are generally
incidents behind the scenes and at night restaurants, where caricatured
types are painted with great force. But they are insistently
exaggerated, they have not the restraint, the ironical and discreet
plausibility, which give so much flavour, so much value to Degas's
studies. Nevertheless, Forain's pictures are very significant and are of
real interest. He is decidedly the most interesting newspaper
illustrator of his whole generation, the one whose ephemeral art most
closely approaches grand painting, and one of those who have most
contributed towards the transformation of illustration for the
contemporary press.
Jules Chéret has made for himself an important and splendid position in
contemporary art. He commenced as a lithographic workman and lived for a
long time in London. About 1870 Chéret designed his first posters in
black, white and red; these were at the time the only colours used. By
and by he perfected this art and found the means of adding other tones
and of drawing them on the lithographic stone. He returned to France,
started a small studio, and gradually carried poster art to the
admirable point at which it has arrived. At the same time Chéret drew
and painted and composed himself his models. About 1885 his name became
famous, and it has not ceased growing since. Some writers, notably the
eminent critic Roger Marx and the novelist Huysmans, hailed in Chéret an
original artist as well as a learned technician. He then exhibited
decorative pictures, pastels and drawings, which placed him in the first
rank. Chéret is universally known. The type of the Parisian woman
created by him, and the multi-coloured harmony of his works will not be
forgotten. His will be the honour of having invented the artistic
poster, this feast for the eyes, this fascinating art of the street,
which formerly languished in a tedious and dull display of commercial
advertisements. He has been the promoter of an immense movement; he has
been imitated, copied, parodied, but he will always remain inimitable.
He has succeeded in realising on paper by means of lithography, the
pastels and gouache drawings in which his admirable colourist's fancy
mixed the most difficult shades. In Chéret can be found all the
principles of Impressionism: opposing lights, coloured shadows,
complementary reflections, all employed with masterly sureness and
delightful charm. It is decorative Impressionism, conceived in a
superior way; and this simple poster-man, despised by the painters, has
proved himself equal to most. He has transformed the street, in the open
light, into a veritable Salon, where his works have become famous. When
this too modest artist decided to show his pictures and drawings, they
were a revelation. The most remarkable pastellists of the period were
astonished and admired his skill, his profound knowledge of technique,
his continual _tours-de-force_ which he disguised under a shimmering
gracefulness. The State had the good sense to entrust him with some
large mural decorations, in which he unfolded the scale of his sparkling
colours, and affirmed his spirit, his fancy and his dreamy art. Chéret's
harmonies remain secrets; he uses them for the representation of
characters from the Italian comedy, thrown with fiendish _verve_ upon a
background of a sky, fiery with the Bengal lights of a fairy-like
carnival, and he strangely intermingles the reality of the movements
with the most arbitrary fancy. Chéret has also succeeded in proving his
artistic descent by a beautiful series of drawings in sanguine: he
descends from Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard; he is a Frenchman of pure
blood; and when one has done admiring the grace and the happy animation
of his imagination, one can only be surprised to see on what serious and
sure a technique are based these decorations which appear improvised.
Chéret's art is the smile of Impressionism and the best demonstration
of the decorative logic of this art.
These are the four artists of great merit who have created the
transition between Impressionist painting and illustration. It would be
fit to put aside Toulouse-Lautrec, who was much younger, but his work is
too directly connected with that of Degas for one to take into account
the difference of age. He produced between 1887 and 1900 works which
might well have been ante-dated by fifteen years. We shall study in the
next chapter his Neo-Impressionist comrades, and we shall now speak of
some illustrators more advanced in years than he. The oldest in date is
the engraver Henri Guérard, who died three years ago. He had married Eva
Gonzalès and was a friend of Manet's, many of whose works have been
engraved by him. He was an artist of decided and original talent, who
also occupied himself successfully with pyrogravure, and who was happily
inspired by the Japanese colour-prints. His etchings deserve a place of
honour in the folios of expert collectors; they are strong and broad. As
to the engraver Félix Buhot, he was a rather delicate colourist in
black and white; his Paris scenes will always be considered charming
works. In spite of his Spanish origin, the painter, _aquarelliste_, and
draughtsman Daniel Vierge, should be added to the list of the men
connected with Impressionism. His illustrations are those of a great
artist--admirable in colour, movement and observation; all the great
principles of Impressionism are embodied in them. But there are four
more illustrators of the first rank: Steinlen, Louis Legrand, Paul
Renouard and Auguste Lepère.
Steinlen has been enormously productive: he is specially remarkable for
his illustrations. Those which he has designed for Aristide Bruant's
volume of songs, _Dans la rue_, are masterpieces of their kind. They
contain treasures of bitter observation, quaintness and knowledge. The
soul of the lower classes is shown in them with intense truth, bitter
revolt and comprehensive philosophy. Steinlen has also designed some
beautiful posters, pleasing pastels, lithographs of incontestable
technical merit, and beautifully eloquent political drawings. It cannot
be said that he is an Impressionist in the strict sense of the word; he
applied his colour in flat tints, more like an engraver than a painter;
but in him too can be felt the stamp of Degas, and he is one of those
who best demonstrate that, without Impressionism, they could not have
been what they are.
The same may be said of Louis Legrand, a pupil of Félicien Rops, an
admirably skilful etcher, a draughtsman of keen vision, and a painter of
curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the artists of
to-day. Louis Legrand also shows to what extent the example of Manet and
Degas has revolutionised the art of illustration, in freeing the
painters from obsolete laws, and guiding them towards truth and frank
psychological study. Legrand is full of them, without resembling them.
We must not forget that, besides the technical innovation (division of
tones, study of complementary colours), Impressionism has brought us
novelty of composition, realism of character and great liberty in the
choice of subjects. From this point of view Rops himself, in spite of
his symbolist tendencies, could not be classed with any other group, if
it were not that any kind of classification in art is useless and
inaccurate. However that may be, Louis Legrand has signed some volumes
resplendent with the most seductive qualities.
Paul Renouard has devoted himself to newspaper illustration, but with
what surprising prodigality of spirit and knowledge! The readers of the
"Graphic" will know. This masterly virtuoso of the pencil might give
drawing-lessons to many members of the Institute! The feeling for the
life of crowds, psychology of types, spirited and rapid notation,
astonishing ease in overcoming difficulties--these are his undeniable
gifts. And again we must recognise in Renouard the example of Degas and
Manet. His exceptional fecundity only helps to give more authority to
his pencil. Renouard's drawings at the Exhibition of 1900 were, perhaps,
more beautiful than the rest of his work. There was notably a series of
studies made from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, an
accumulation of wonders of perspectives framing scenes of such animation
and caprice as to take away one's breath.
Finally, Auguste Lepère appears as the Debucourt of our time. As
painter, pastellist and wood-engraver he has produced since 1870, and
has won for himself the first place among French engravers. It would be
difficult to recount the volumes, albums and covers on which the fancy
of his burin has played; but it is particularly in wood-engraving that
he stands without rival. Not only has he produced masterpieces of it,
but he has passionately devoted himself to raising this admirable art,
the glory of the beautiful books of olden days, and to give back to it
the lustre which had been eclipsed by mechanical processes. Lepère has
started some publications for this purpose; he has had pupils of great
merit, and he must be considered the master of the whole generation of
modern wood-engravers, just as Chéret is the undisputed master of the
poster. Lepère's ruling quality is strength. He seems to have
rediscovered the mediaeval limners' secrets of cutting the wood, giving
the necessary richness to the ink, creating a whole scale of half-tones,
and specially of adapting the design to typographic printing, and making
of it, so to say, an ornament and a decorative extension for the type.
Lepère is a wood-engraver with whom none of his contemporaries can be
compared; as regards his imagination, it is that of an altogether
curious artist. He excels in composing and expressing the life, the
animation, the soul of the streets and the picturesque side of the
populace. Herein he is much inspired by Manet and, if we go back to the
real tradition, by Guys, Debucourt, the younger Moreau and by Gabriel de
Saint-Aubin. He is decidedly a Realist of French lineage, who owes
nothing to the Academy and its formulas.
It would be evidently unreasonable to attach to Impressionism all that
is ante-academical, and between the two extremes there is room for a
crowd of interesting artists. We shall not succumb to the prejudice of
the School by declaring, in our turn, that there is no salvation outside
Impressionism, and we have been careful to state repeatedly that, if
Impressionism has a certain number of principles as kernel, its
applications and its influence have a radiation which it is difficult to
limit. What can be absolutely demonstrated is, that this movement has
had the greatest influence on modern illustration, sometimes through its
colouring, sometimes simply through the great freedom of its ideas. Some
have found in it a direct lesson, others an example to be followed.
Some have met in it technical methods which pleased them, others have
only taken some suggestions from it. That is the case, for instance,
with Legrand, with Steinlen, and with Renouard; and it is also the case
with the lithographer Odilon Redon, who applies the values of Manet and,
in his strange pastels, the harmonies of Degas and Renoir, placing them
at the service of dreams and hallucinations and of a symbolism which is
absolutely removed from the realism of these painters. It is, finally,
the case with the water-colour painter Henri Rivière, who is misjudged
as to his merit, and who is one of the most perfect of those who have
applied Impressionist ideas to decorative engraving. He has realised
images in colours destined to decorate inexpensively the rooms of the
people and recalling the grand aspects of landscapes with a broad
simplification which is derived, curiously enough, from Puvis de
Chavannes's large decorative landscapes and from the small and precise
colour prints of Japan. Rivière, who is a skilful and personal poetic
landscapist, is not exactly an Impressionist, in so far as he does not
divide the tones, but rather blends them in subtle mixtures in the
manner of the Japanese. Yet, seeing his work, one cannot help thinking
of all the surprise and freedom introduced into modern art by
Impressionism.
Everybody, even the ignorant, can perceive, on looking through an
illustrated paper or a modern volume, that thirty years ago this manner
of placing the figures, of noting familiar gestures, and of seizing
fugitive life with spirit and clearness was unknown. This mass of
engravings and of sketches resembles in no way what had been seen
formerly. They no longer have the solemn air of classic composition, by
which the drawings had been affected. A current of bold spontaneity has
passed through here. In modern English illustration, it can be stated
indisputably that nothing would be such as it can now be seen, if
Morris, Rossetti and Crane had not imposed their vision, and yet many
talented Englishmen resemble these initiators only very remotely. It is
exactly in this sense that we shall have credited Impressionism with the
talents who have drawn their inspiration less from its principles, than
from its vigorous protest against mechanical formulas, and who have
been able to find the energy, necessary for their success, in the
example it set by fighting during twenty years against the ideas of
routine which seemed indestructible. Even with the painters who are far
removed from the vision and the colouring of Manet and Degas, of Monet
and Renoir, one can find a very precise tendency: that of returning to
the subjects and the style of the real national tradition; and herein
lies one of the most serious benefits bestowed by Impressionism upon an
art which had stopped at the notion of a canonical beauty, until it had
almost become sterile in its timidity.
IX
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM--GAUGUIN, DENIS, THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE--THE THEORY OF
POINTILLISM--SEURAT, SIGNAC AND THE THEORIES OF SCIENTIFIC
CHROMATISM--FAULTS AND QUALITIES OF THE IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT, WHAT WE
OWE TO IT, ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL--SOME WORDS ON
ITS INFLUENCE ABROAD
The beginnings of the movement designated under the name of
Neo-Impressionism can be traced back to about 1880. The movement is a
direct offshoot of the first Impressionism, originated by a group of
young painters who admired it and thought of pushing further still its
chromatic principles. The flourishing of Impressionism coincided, as a
matter of fact, with certain scientific labours concerning optics.
Helmholtz had just published his works on the perception of colours and
sounds by means of waves. Chevreul had continued on this path by
establishing his beautiful theories on the analysis of the solar
spectrum. M. Charles Henry, an original and remarkable spirit, occupied
himself in his turn with these delicate problems by applying them
directly to aesthetics, which Helmholtz and Chevreul had not thought of
doing. M. Charles Henry had the idea of creating relations between this
branch of science and the laws of painting. As a friend of several young
painters he had a real influence over them, showing them that the new
vision due to the instinct of Monet and of Manet might perhaps be
scientifically verified, and might establish fixed principles in a
sphere where hitherto the laws of colouring had been the effects of
individual conception. At that moment the criticism which resulted from
Taine's theories tried to effect a _rapprochement_ of the artistic and
scientific domains in criticism and in the psychologic novel. The
painters, too, gave way to this longing for precision which seems to
have been the great preoccupation of intellects from 1880 to about 1889.
Their researches had a special bearing on the theory of complementary
colours and on the means of establishing some laws concerning the
reaction of tones in such manner as to draw up a kind of tabula. Georges
Seurat and Paul Signac were the promoters of this research. Seurat died
very young, and one cannot but regret this death of an artist who would
have been very interesting and capable of beautiful works. Those which
he has left us bear witness to a spirit very receptive to theories, and
leaving nothing to chance. The silhouettes are reduced to almost
rigorously geometrical principles, the tones are decomposed
systematically. These canvases are more reasoned examples than works of
intuition and spontaneous vision. They show Seurat's curious desire to
give a scientific and classic basis to Impressionism. The same idea
rules in all the work of Paul Signac, who has painted some portraits and
numerous landscapes. To these two painters is due the method of
_Pointillism_, _i.e._ the division of tones, not only by touches, as in
Monet's pictures, but by very small touches of equal size, causing the
spheric shape to act equally upon the retina. The accumulation of these
luminous points is carried out over the entire surface of the canvas
without thick daubs of paint, and with regularity, whilst with Manet the
paint is more or less dense. The theory of complementary colours is
systematically applied. On a sketch, made from nature, the painter notes
the principal relations of tones, then systematises them on his picture
and connects them by different shades which should be their logical
result. Neo-Impressionism believes in obtaining thus a greater exactness
than that which results from the individual temperament of the painter
who simply relies on his own perception. And it is true, in theory, that
such a conception is more exact. But it reduces the picture to a kind of
theorem, which excludes all that constitutes the value and charm of an
art, that is to say: caprice, fancy, and the spontaneity of personal
inspiration. The works of Seurat, Signac, and of the few men who have
strictly followed the rules of Pointillism are lacking in life, in
surprise, and make a somewhat tiring impression upon one's eyes. The
uniformity of the points does not succeed in giving an impression of
cohesion, and even less a suggestion of different textures, even if the
values are correct. Manet seems to have attained perfection in using the
method which consists in directing the touches in accordance with each
of the planes, and this is evidently the most natural method. Scientific
Chromatism constitutes an _ensemble_ of propositions, of which art will
be able to make use, though indirectly, as information useful for a
better understanding of the laws of light in presence of nature. What
Pointillism has been able to give us, is a method which would be very
appreciable for decorative paintings seen from a great distance--friezes
or ceilings in spacious buildings. It would in this case return to the
principle of mosaic, which is the principle _par excellence_ of mural
art.
The Pointillists have to-day almost abandoned this transitional theory
which, in spite of the undeniable talent of its adepts, has only
produced indifferent results as regards easel pictures. Besides Seurat
and Signac, mention should be made of Maurice Denis, Henri-Edmond Cross,
Angrand, and Théo Van Rysselberghe. But this last-named and Maurice
Denis have arrived at great talent by very different merits. M. Maurice
Denis has abandoned Pointillism a few years ago, in favour of returning
to a very strange conception which dates back to the Primitives, and
even to Giotto. He simplifies his drawing archaically, suppresses all
but the indispensable detail, and draws inspiration from Gothic stained
glass and carvings, in order to create decorative figures with clearly
marked outlines which are filled with broad, flat tints. He generally
treats mystic subjects, for which this special manner is suitable. One
cannot love the _parti pris_ of these works, but one cannot deny M.
Denis a great charm of naivete, an intense feeling for decorative
arrangements and colouring of a certain originality. He is almost a
French pre-Raphaelite, and his profound catholic faith inspires him
nobly.
[Illustration: THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE
PORTRAITS OF MADAME VAN RYSSELBERGHE AND HER DAUGHTER]
M. Théo Van Rysselberghe continues to employ the Pointillist method. But
he is so strongly gifted, that one might almost say he succeeds in
revealing himself as a painter of great merit in spite of this dry and
charmless method. All his works are supported by broad and learned
drawing and his colour is naturally brilliant. M. Van Rysselberghe, a
prolific and varied worker, has painted nudes, large portraits,
landscapes with figures, seascapes, interiors and still-life, and in all
this he evinces faculties of the first order. He is a lover of light and
understands how to make it vibrate over flesh and fabrics. He is an
artist who has the sense of style. He has signed a certain number of
portraits, whose beautiful carriage and serious psychology would suffice
to make him be considered as the most significant of the
Neo-Impressionists. It is really in him that one has to see the young
and worthy heir of Monet, of Sisley, and of Degas, and that is why we
have insisted on adding here to the works of these masters the
reproduction of one of his. M. Van Rysselberghe is also a very delicate
etcher who has signed some fine works in this method, and his seascapes,
whether they revel in the pale greys of the German Ocean or in the warm
sapphire and gold harmonies of the Mediterranean, count among the finest
of the time; they are windows opened upon joyous brightness.
To these painters who have never taken part at the Salons, and are only
to be seen at the exhibitions of the _Indépendants_ (except M. Denis),
must be added M. Pierre Bonnard, who has given proof to his charm and
fervour in numerous small canvases of Japanese taste; and M. Edouard
Vuillard, who is a painter of intimate scenes of rare delicacy. This
artist, who stands apart and produces very little, has signed some
interiors of melancholic distinction and of a colouring which revels in
low tones. He has the precision and skill of a master. There is in him,
one might say, a reflection of Chardin's soul. Unfortunately his works
are confined to a few collections and have not become known to the
public. To the same group belong M. Ranson, who has devoted himself to
purely decorative art, tapestry, wall papers and embroideries; M.
Georges de Feure, a strange, symbolist water-colour painter, who has
become one of the best designers of the New Art in France; M. Félix
Vallotton, painter and lithographer, who is somewhat heavy, but gifted
with serious qualities. It is true that M. de Feure is Dutch, M.
Vallotton Swiss, and M. Van Rysselberghe Belgian; but they have settled
down in France, and are sufficiently closely allied to the
Neo-Impressionist movement so that the question of nationality need not
prevent us from mentioning them here. Finally it is impossible not to
say a few words about two pupils of Gustave Moreau's, who have both
become noteworthy followers of Impressionism of very personal
individuality. M. Eugène Martel bids fair to be one of the best painters
of interiors of his generation. He has the feeling of mystical life and
paints the peasantry with astonishing psychologic power. His vigorous
colouring links him to Monticelli, and his drawing to Degas. As to M.
Simon Bussy who, following Alphonse Legros's example, is about to make
an enviable position for himself in England, he is an artist of pure
blood. His landscapes and his figures have the distinction and rare tone
of M. Whistler, besides the characteristic acuteness of Degas. His
harmonies are subtle, his vision novel, and he will certainly develop
into an important painter. Together with Henri le Sidaner and Jacques
Blanche, Simon Bussy is decidedly the most personal of that young
generation of "Intimists" who seem to have retained the best principles
of the Impressionist masters to employ them for the expression of a
psychologic ideal which is very different from Realism.
Outside this group there are still a few isolated painters who are
difficult to classify. The very young artists Laprade and Charles Guérin
have shown for the last three years, at the exhibition of the
_Indépendants_, some works which are the worthy result of Manet's and
Renoir's influence. They, too, justify great expectations. The
landscapists Paul Vogler and Maxime Maufra, more advanced in years, have
made themselves known by some solid series of vigorously presented
landscapes. To them must be added M. Henry Moret, M. Albert André and M.
Georges d'Espagnet, who equally deserve the success which has commenced
to be their share. But there are some older ones. It is only his due,
that place should be given to a painter who committed suicide after an
unhappy life, and who evinced splendid gifts. Vincent Van Gogh, a
Dutchman, who, however, had always worked in France, has left to the
world some violent and strange works, in which Impressionism appears to
have reached the limits of its audacity. Their value lies in their naïve
frankness and in the undauntable determination which tried to fix
without trickery the sincerest feelings. Amidst many faulty and clumsy
works, Van Gogh has also left some really beautiful canvases. There is a
deep affinity between him and Cézanne. A very real affinity exists, too,
between Paul Gauguin, who was a friend and to a certain extent the
master of Van Gogh, and Cézanne and Renoir. Paul Gauguin's robust talent
found its first motives in Breton landscapes, in which the method of
colour-spots can be found employed with delicacy and placed at the
service of a rather heavy, but very interesting harmony. Then the artist
spent a long time in Tahiti, whence he returned with a completely
transformed manner. He has brought back from these regions some
landscapes with figures treated in intentionally clumsy and almost wild
fashion. The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad,
flat tints on canvas which has the texture almost of tapestry. Many of
these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multi-coloured, crude
and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental
qualities, the beautiful values, the ornamental taste, and the
impression of primitive animalism. On the whole, Paul Gauguin has a
beautiful, artistic temperament which, in its aversion to virtuosoship,
has perhaps not sufficiently understood that the fear of formulas, if
exaggerated, may lead to other formulas, to a false ignorance which is
as dangerous as false knowledge. Gauguin's symbolical intentions, like
those of his pupil Emile Bernard, are sincere, but are badly served by
minds which do not agree with their technical qualities, and both
Gauguin and Emile Bernard are most happily inspired when they are
painters pure and simple.
Next to Gauguin, among the seniors of the present generation and the
successors of Impressionism, should be placed the landscapist Armand
Guillaumin who, without possessing Sisley's delicate qualities, has
painted some canvases worthy of notice; and we must, finally, terminate
this far too summary enumeration by referring to one of the most gifted
painters of the French School of the day, M. Louis Anquetin. His is a
most varied talent whose power is unquestionable. He made his _début_
among the Neo-Impressionists and revealed the influence upon him of the
Japanese and of Degas. It may be seen that these two influences
predominate in the whole group. Then M. Anquetin became fascinated by
the breadth and superb freedom of Manet's works, and signed a series of
portraits and sketches, some of which are not far below so great a
master's. They are works which will surprise the critics, when our
contemporary painting will be examined with calm impartiality. After
these works, M. Anquetin gave way to his impetuous nature which led him
to decorative painting, and he became influenced by Rubens, Jordaens,
and the Fontainebleau School. He painted theatre curtains and
mythological scenes, in which he gave free rein to his sensual
imagination. In spite of some admirable qualities, it seems as though
the artist had strayed from his true path in painting these brilliant,
but somewhat declamatory works, and he has since returned to a more
modern and more direct painting. In all his changed conditions Anquetin
has shown a considerable talent, pleasing in its fine vigour,
impetuosity, brilliancy and sincerity. His inequality is perhaps the
cause of his relative want of success; it has put the public off, but
nevertheless in certain of this brave and serious painter's canvases can
be seen the happy influence of Manet.
It seems to us only right to sum up our impartial opinion of
Neo-Impressionism by saying that it has lacked cohesion, that
Pointillism in particular has led painting into an aimless path. It has
been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical
researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day,
after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate
attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the
"Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious
painter, Besnard, imposes upon the Salons, where the elect draw
inspiration from him. We can here only indicate with a few words the
considerable part played by Besnard: his clever work has proved that the
scientific colour principles of Impressionism may be applied, not to
realism, but to the highest thoughts, to ideologic painting most nobly
inspired by the modern intellectual preoccupations. He is the
transition between Impressionism and the art of to-morrow. Of pure
French lineage by his portraits and his nudes, which descend directly
from Largillière and Ingres, he might have restricted himself to being
placed among the most learned Impressionists. His studies of reflections
and of complementary colours speak for this. But he has passed this
phase and has, with his decorations, returned to the psychical domain of
his strangely beautiful art. The "Intimists," C. Cottet, Simon, Blanche,
Ménard, Bussy, Lobre, Le Sidaner, Wéry, Prinet, and Ernest Laurent, have
proved that they have profited by Impressionism, but have proceeded in
quite a different direction in trying to translate their real
perceptions. Some isolated artists, like the decorative painter Henri
Martin, who has enormous talent, have applied the Impressionist
technique to the expression of grand allegories, rather in the manner of
Puvis de Chavannes. The effort at getting away from mere cleverness and
escaping a too exclusive preoccupation with technique, and at the same
time acquiring serious knowledge, betrays itself in the whole position
of the young French School; and this will furnish us with a perfectly
natural conclusion, of which the following are the principal points:--
What we shall have to thank Impressionism for, will be moral and
material advantages of considerable importance. Morally it has rendered
an immense service to all art, because it has boldly attacked routine
and proved by the whole of its work that a combination of independent
producers could renew the aesthetic code of a country, without owing
anything to official encouragement. It has succeeded where important but
isolated creators have succumbed, because it has had the good fortune of
uniting a group of gifted men, four of whom will count among the
greatest French artists since the origin of national art. It has had the
qualities which overcome the hardest resistance: fecundity, courage and
sure originality. It has known how to find its strength by referring to
the true traditions of the national genius, which have happily
enlightened it and saved it from fundamental errors. It has, last, but
not least, inflicted an irremediable blow on academic convention and has
wrested from it the prestige of teaching which ruled tyrannically for
centuries past over the young artists. It has laid a violent hand upon a
tenacious and dangerous prejudice, upon a series of conventional notions
which were transmitted without consideration for the evolution of modern
life and intelligence. It has dared freely to protest against a
degenerated ideal which vainly parodied the old masters, pretending to
honour them. It has removed from the artistic soul of France a whole
order of pseudo-classic elements which worked against its blossoming,
and the School will never recover from this bold contradiction which has
rallied to it all the youthful. The moral principle of Impressionism has
been absolutely logical and sane, and that is why nothing has been able
to prevent its triumph.
Technically Impressionism has brought a complete renewal of pictorial
vision, substituting the beauty of character for the beauty of
proportions and finding adequate expression for the ideas and feelings
of its time, which constitutes the secret of all beautiful works. It has
taken up again a tradition and added to it a contemporary page. It will
have to be thanked for an important series of observations as regards
the analysis of light, and for an absolutely original conception of
drawing. Some years have been wasted by painters of little worth in
imitating it, and the Salons, formerly encumbered with academic
_pastiches_, have been encumbered with Impressionist _pastiches_. It
would be unfair to blame the Impressionists for it. They have shown by
their very career that they hated teaching and would never pretend to
teach. Impressionism is based upon irrefutable optic laws, but it is
neither a style, nor a method, likely ever to become a formula in its
turn. One may call upon this art for examples, but not for receipts. On
the contrary, its best teaching has been to encourage artists to become
absolutely independent and to search ardently for their own
individuality. It marks the decline of the School, and will not create a
new one which would soon become as fastidious as the other. It will only
appear, to those who will thoroughly understand it, as a precious
repertory of notes, and the young generation honours it intelligently by
not imitating it with servility.
Not that it is without its faults! It has been said, to belittle it,
that it only had the value of an interesting attempt, having only been
able to indicate some excellent intentions, without creating anything
perfect. This is inexact. It is absolutely evident, that Manet, Monet,
Renoir and Degas have signed some masterpieces which did not lose by
comparison with those in the Louvre, and the same might even be said of
their less illustrious friends. But it is also evident that the time
spent on research as well as on agitation and enervating controversies
pursued during twenty-five years, has been taken from men who could
otherwise have done better still. There has been a disparity between
Realism and the technique of Impressionism. Its realistic origin has
sometimes made it vulgar. It has often treated indifferent subjects in a
grand style, and it has too easily beheld life from the anecdotal side.
It has lacked psychologic synthesis (if we except Degas). It has too
willingly denied all that exists hidden under the apparent reality of
the universe and has affected to separate painting from the ideologic
faculties which rule over all art. Hatred of academic allegory,
defiance of symbolism, abstraction and romantic scenes, has led it to
refuse to occupy itself with a whole order of ideas, and it has had the
tendency of making the painter beyond all a workman. It was necessary at
the moment of its arrival, but it is no longer necessary now, and the
painters understand this themselves. Finally it has too often been
superficial even in obtaining effects; it has given way to the wish to
surprise the eyes, of playing with tones merely for love of cleverness.
It often causes one regret to see symphonies of magnificent colour
wasted here in pictures of boating men; and there, in pictures of café
corners; and we have arrived at a degree of complex intellectuality
which is no longer satisfied with these rudimentary themes. It has
indulged in useless exaggerations, faults of composition and of harmony,
and all this cannot be denied.
But it still remains fascinating and splendid for its gifts which will
always rouse enthusiasm: freedom, impetuousness, youth, brilliancy,
fervour, the joy of painting and the passion for beautiful light. It is,
on the whole, the greatest pictorial movement that France has beheld
since Delacroix, and it brings to a finish gloriously the nineteenth
century, inaugurating the present. It has accomplished the great deed of
having brought us again into the presence of our true national lineage,
far more so than Romanticism, which was mixed with foreign elements. We
have here painting of a kind which could only have been conceived in
France, and we have to go right back to Watteau in order to receive
again the same impression. Impressionism has brought us an almost
unhoped-for renaissance, and this constitutes its most undeniable claim
upon the gratitude of the race.
It has exercised a very appreciable influence upon foreign painting.
Among the principal painters attracted by its ideas and research, we
must mention, in Germany, Max Liebermann and Kuehl; in Norway, Thaulow;
in Denmark, Kroyer; in Belgium, Théo Van Rysselberghe, Emile Claus,
Verheyden, Heymans, Verstraete, and Baertson; in Italy, Boldini,
Segantini, and Michetti; in Spain, Zuloaga, Sorolla y Bastida, Dario de
Regoyos and Rusiñol; in America, Alexander, Harrison, Sargent; and in
England, the painters of the Glasgow School, Lavery, Guthrie and the
late John Lewis Brown. All these men come within the active extension of
the French movement, and one may say that the honour of having first
recognised the truly national movement of this art must be given to
those foreign countries which have enriched their collections and
museums with works that were despised in the land which had witnessed
their birth. At the present moment the effects of this new vision are
felt all over the world, down to the very bosom of the academies; and at
the Salons, from which the Impressionists are still excluded, can be
witnessed an invasion of pictures inspired by them, which the most
retrograde juries dare not reject. In whatever measure the recent
painters accept Impressionism, they remain preoccupied with it, and even
those who love it not are forced to take it into account.
The Impressionist movement can therefore now be considered, apart from
all controversies, without vain attacks or exaggerated praise, as an
artistic manifestation which has entered the domain of history, and it
can be studied with the impartial application of the methods of
critical analysis which is usually employed in the study of the former
art movements. We shall not pretend to have given in these pages a
complete and faultless history; but we shall consider ourselves well
rewarded for this work, which is intended to reach the great public, if
we have roused their curiosity and sympathy with a group of artists whom
we consider admirable; and if we have rectified, in the eyes of the
readers of a foreign nation, the errors, the slanders, the undeserved
reproaches, with which Frenchmen have been pleased to overwhelm sincere
creators who thought with faith and love of the pure tradition of the
national genius, and who have for that reason been vilified as much as
if they had in an access of anarchical folly risen against the very
common sense, taste, reason and clearness, which will remain the eternal
merits of their soil. This small, imperfect volume will perhaps find its
best excuse in its intention of repairing an old injustice and of
affirming a useful and permanent truth: that of the authenticity of the
classicism of Impressionism, in the face of the false classicism of the
academic world which official honours have made the guardian of a French
heritage, whose soul it denied and whose spirit it deceived with its
narrow and cold formulas.
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