In the Brooklyn Art Museum. Portrait of Mme. Maître From a painting by Fantin-LatourIn the Brooklyn Art Museum. Portrait of Mme. Maître From a painting by Fantin-Latour
In spite of the assiduous study of Dutch and Italian masters, Fantin's work is characteristically French in both its fantasy and its realism. Not only the grace of the forms and the elegance of the gestures, but the sentimentof the composition and the quality of the color, are undisguisedly Gallic. He is closer to Watteau than to any other painter but his firmer technic and more patient temperament give him an advantage over the feverish master of eighteenth-century idyls. His art throbs with a fuller life and in his airiest dreams his world is made of a more solid substance. For melancholy he offers serenity, for daintiness he offers delicacy.
His technique, especially in his later work, is quite individual in its character. He models with short swift strokes of the brush—not unlike the brush work in some of Manet's pictures. His pigment is rather dry and often almost crumbly in texture, but his values are so carefully considered that this delicately ruffled surface has the effect of casting a penumbra about the individual forms, of causing them to swim in a thickened but fluent atmosphere, instead of suggesting the rugosity of an ill-managed medium.
In his paintings of flowers he found the best possible expression for his subtle color sense. The letters written to him by Whistler in the sixties show how fervently these paintings were admired by the American master of harmony, and also how much good criticism came to him from his comrade whose enthusiasm for Japanese art already was fully awakened.
As a portraitist, Fantin was peculiarly fortunate. Hisexquisitely painted flower studies, his pearly-toned beautifully drawn nudes, his lithographs with their soft darks and tender manipulations of line, his ambitious imaginative compositions, are none of them so eloquent of his personality as his portraits with their absolute integrity, their fine divination, and their fluent technique. The portrait which we reproduce is of Madam Maître, was painted in 1882, and was acquired by the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1906. It represents a woman of middle years with a sincere and thoughtful face and a quiet bearing. The felicities of Fantin's brush are seen in the way in which the silk sleeve follows the curve of the round firm arm, and the soft lace of the bodice rests against the throat and is relieved almost without contrast of color against the white skin. The touches of pure pale blue in the fan and the delicate tints of the rose are manifestations of the artist's restrained and subtle management of color, but above all there is a perfectly unassuming yet uncompromising rendering of character. There is nothing in the plain refined features that cries out for recognition of a temperament astutely divined. They have the calm repose that indicates entire lack of self-consciousness, no quality is unduly insisted upon, there is neither sentimentality nor brutal realism in the handling, the sitter simply lives as naturally upon the canvas as we feel that she must have lived in the world.It is for such sweet and logical truth-telling, such mild and strict interpretation, that we must pay our debt of appreciation to Fantin, the painter of ideal realities and of actual ideals.
The accomplished Swedish critic, Georg Nordensvan, opens his monograph on Carl Larsson with the statement that the latter is unquestionably the most popular artist of the present day in his own country, and that he is equally popular as a man. It is not often that the personality of an artist seems so essentially connected with his work as in Larsson's case. His gay, pugnacious, independent, yet amiable temper of mind is so directly reflected in the character of his various production as to make a consideration of the two together an almost necessary prelude to any account of him. He has insisted upon expressing his individuality at whatever cost of traditional and conventional technique and he has at the same time unconsciously represented the frankest, most wholesome, and, on the whole, most characteristic side of the Swedish character. A rather daring and flippant humor enters into his paintings. One of his portraits of himself shows him standing, his happy reddish face aglow, against a yellowish-brownwall. He is dressed in a long, yellowish-brown smoking frock, and holds in his raised hand a pencil from which appears to spring a little feminine figure supposed to represent his genius. "This figure carries what looks like a quantity of small round cookies," says his critic, "possibly to symbolize the adequacy with which his genius provides for his nourishment."
Another shows him with his little girl sitting on his head, maintaining her equilibrium by planting stout feet on his shoulders. The painter wears a house-jacket, loose slippers and baggy trousers, his face beams with good-humor; the child is brimming with laughter; the little scene is instinctive with the spirit of intimate domesticity, and the drawing, free and easy, without apparent effort in the direction of elegant arrangement or expressiveness of line, is nevertheless singularly nervous and vigorous.
My Family From a painting by Carl LarssonMy Family From a painting by Carl Larsson
In still another portrait, he is sitting before his easel, his little girl on one knee, his canvas on the other with the easel serving only as a prop. His eyes are turned toward a mirror which is outside the picture and the reflection in which he is using as a model; the child's eyes are fixed on the canvas watching the growth of the design. These are "self-portraits" in more than the usual sense. It is the rarest thing in art to find a painter representing his own aspect with such complete lack ofself-consciousness. No characteristics seem especially to be emphasized, none betray exaggeration, there apparently is neither distortion nor idealization, nor is there any attempt to select a mood that shall preserve a favorable impression of the sitter. Nothing could, however, more favorably present a character to the critical scrutiny of strangers than this superb good faith. The least sentimental of us must recognize with frank delight the wholesome sweetness of the world these kindly faithful records open to us.
Larsson was born at Stockholm in 1853. From the age of thirteen he depended upon his own labors for support; retouching photographs at first. Later he entered the elementary school of the academy where he received honors. He drew from the antique and from the model and began to make drawings for illustration when he was about eighteen. The public knew him first through his drawings for the comic paper calledKasper, and he shortly became a much sought after illustrator for papers and books. The first book illustrated by him was a collection of stories by Richard Gustafsson, the editor ofKasper, the next was Anderson's "Tales." In the latter he succeeded Isidor Törnblom, who died in 1876 after having executed only a few drawings for the first part. He became bold and rapid in improvisation, and light and easy in execution—qualitiesthat he never lost. He was obliged to make of his academic studies a side issue, bread-winning taking necessarily the first place with him. No doubt it is to this necessity that he owes that prompt adaptation of his facility to various uses, that practical application of his freshly acquired knowledge which give to the simple compositions of his earlier period an especial spontaneity. He had no time to fix himself in ruts of practice. To draw from the Antinous one day and the next to press one's Greek outline into service for the representation of little dancing girls and happy babies is to effect that union between art and life which makes the first moving and the second beautiful; the union in which Daumier found the source of his prodigious strength. In his early years Larsson was anything but a realist. His fancy turned to unusual and vast subjects, and his natural impatience caused him to launch himself upon them with very inadequate preliminary study. The first canvas attempted by him during the study-time in Paris (time which he won at the Academy) was nearly ten feet high and represented a scene from the deluge with figures double life size. Naturally, he found himself unable to cope with the difficulties that promptly arose and was obliged to give it up. In 1877, when he was twenty-four years old, he painted a three-quarter length portrait of a woman standing, which was his best work ofthat period. The genre pictures which he sent home to Stockholm at about the same time awakened little enthusiasm and spread the impression that he had no future as a painter and would be obliged to content himself with illustration. As an illustrator he became thoroughly successful, turning out a large amount of work and gaining for himself in Stockholm the very inappropriate name of "the Swedish Doré." He made enough money in this branch of art to try painting again in Paris, but with almost no success until the Spring of 1883, when he exhibited at the Salon a couple of small water-colors, the subjects taken from the field and garden life of Grez, a little painting village that lies south of the Fontainebleau forest. These pictures won a medal and were bought in Gothenburg. Other similar subjects followed, all distinguished, Nordensvan affirms, by the same pleasing delicacy of handling, the same glow and splendor of sunlight, and the same glad color-harmony. He now was in a position to marry, and pictures of family life presently appeared in great numbers. These are altogether charming—spirited, vivid, original, and full of an indescribable freshness and heartiness. Sometimes he painted his young wife holding her baby, sometimes he painted his two boys parading as mimic soldiers; sometimes it was his little girl hiding under the great, handsome dining-table; or a young people's party inthe characteristic dining-room, all the furniture and decorations of which are reproduced with crisp naturalism.
Not the least charm of his paintings lies in the beauty of these handsome interiors in which detail has the precise definition found in the work of the old Dutch artists. While Larsson's technique lacks the exquisite finish of a Terborch or Vermeer of Delft he tells almost as many truths about a house and its occupants as they do. If we consider, for example, the charming composition which he calls "The Sluggard's Melancholy Breakfast" ("Sjusofverskans dystra frukost") we find worthy of note not only the pensive and rather cross little girl sitting alone at the table with her loaf of bread and cup of milk, but also the long tablecloth with its handsome conventional design, obviously a bit of artistic handicraft since it is signed and dated above the fringe at one end, the decoration on the wall, possibly the lower part of a painted window, with its significant motto "Arte et Probitate"; the graceful pattern of the chairs, the big pitcher full of flowers and fruits, the plain ample dishes, the polished floor of the passage-way at the end of which a door opens on the green fields with a child's figure half-seen standing on the threshold, the fine rich color harmony of greens and reds and blues and browns held together by a subtlety of tone that involves no loss of strength.
His outdoor scenes are hardly less personal in their portraiture. There is the one called "Apple-Bloom" with a Larsson child in a pink sunbonnet clinging to the slim stem of a young apple-tree; in the distance some long low red buildings behind a board fence, in the foreground the pale green of spring grass; there is the one in which the larger part of the picture is filled with delicate field growth, thin sprays of pink, blue and white blossoms, and long slender leaves, at the top of the canvas a little thicket of trees with a small bright head peering between the branches; there is the one in which a baby lies on the greensward under the trees; each has an indescribable charm of individuality. Doubtless resembling a hundred other groves or meadows, these have an expression of their own distinguishing them from their kind. It is the genius of the close observer for discrimination between like things.
Whatever the subject, the treatment is always brilliant, frank and joyous. Larsson's brushwork is light and flowing; he has, indeed, a certain French vivacity of technique, but his motives and his personal point of view are so purely Scandinavian as to leave no other impression on the mind. Nor is he merely the painter of the Swedish type. He is the painter of intimate home life and character as found within his own walls. Hardly any other family in Sweden is known so well as his, andthe variety and enthusiasm of his mind lend spontaneity to these domestic pictures, so that one does not easily tire of the strong smiling creatures naturally and effectively presented to our vision.
In the field of mural decoration also he has shown marked originality. Under the encouragement of Mr. Pontus Furstenberg, one of the foremost patrons of art in Sweden, he tested himself on a series of paintings for a girl's school in Gothenburg. He accomplished his task in a manner entirely his own, taking for his subjects typical figures of women in Sweden at different periods of history—a Viking's widow; the holy Brigitta; a noble house mother of the time of the Vasas, etc.—but although his manner of painting was free and blithe it hardly satisfied the most severe critics on account of its lack of architectonic qualities and the absence in it of anything like monumental simplicity. He has continued, however, to go his own way in mural decoration and holds to the principle that the walls should look flat and that the harmony of color and line should be balanced and proportioned with regard to decorative and not to realistic effect. His subjects are apt to be fanciful and are executed in a semi-playful spirit not in the least familiar to an uninventive age, as where the spirit of the Renaissance is represented by a young woman seated high on a step-ladder, looking toward the sky,with Popes and Cardinals seated on the rungs below gazing in adoration, while underneath them all yawns the grave filled with skeletons, from which the Renaissance has risen.
A Painting by Carl LarssonA Painting by Carl Larsson
On the subject of home arts and handicrafts Larsson has emphatic ideas and urges on his compatriots the desirability of preserving their national types. "Take care of your true self while time is," he says, "again become a plain and worthy people. Be clumsy rather than elegant: dress yourselves in furs, skins, and woolens, make yourselves things that are in harmony with your heavy bodies, and make everything in bright strong colors; yes, in the so-called gaudy peasant colors which are needed contrasts to your deep green pine forests and cold white snow." He has made designs for haute-lisse weaving which were executed by the Handicraft Guild and which were practically open air painting translated into the Gobelin weave. In all that he does he is free from the trammels of convention; but his chief triumphs are in a field that is sadly neglected in modern art. As a painter of family life he is surpassed by none of his contemporaries.
Jan Steen was born in Leyden about 1626, which would make him nineteen years younger than Rembrandt. He is said to have studied first under Nicolas Knüpfer and then possibly under Adriaen van Ostade in Harlem, and finally under Jan van Goyen at the Hague. In 1648 he was enrolled in the Painter's Guild at Leyden, and the following year he married Margaretha van Goyen, the daughter of his latest master. His father was a well-to-do merchant and beer-brewer and Steen himself at one time ran a brewery, though apparently not with great success. He incontestably was familiar with the life of drinking places and houses in which rough merrymaking was the chief business. Many of his subjects are drawn from such sources and his brush brings them before us with their characteristic features sharply observed and emphasized. He has been accused of a moralizing tendency and it may at least be said that he permits us to draw our own moral from perverted and unpolished facts. In his least restrainedmoments he is a kind of Dutch Jordaens, less exuberant, less sturdy and florid and gesticulatory; but with the same zest for living, the same union of old and young in any festival that includes good meat and good drink with song and dance and horse-play. If we compare "Die Lustige Familie" at Amsterdam with that ebullient rendering of the same subject by Jordaens entitled "Zoo de ouden zongen: Zoo pypen de jongen" that hangs in the Antwerp Museum, we have no difficulty in perceiving the points of similarity. There even are likenesses in the color-schemes of the two painters, Jordaen's silvery yellows for once meeting their match; but we find in Steen's picture a more subtle discrimination in the characters and temperaments lying beneath the physical features of the gay company.
Oftentimes Steen indulges in a gay and harmless badinage as different as possible from the bold and keen irony of his wilder themes. In "Die Katzentanz Stunde" of the Rijks museum at Amsterdam the laughing children putting the wretched little cat through a course of unwelcome instruction, the excited pose of the dog, the concentration of the girl upon her dance-music, are rendered with joyous freedom and animation, and suggest a childlike mood. The lovelyMenagerieof the Hague is conceived in a still milder and gentler temper, the demure child among her pets, feeding her lamb, withher doves flying about her head and the faithful little Steen dog in the background, is an idyllic figure. Indeed the entire composition has a tenderness and almost a religious depth of sentiment that make it unique among the painter's achievements. Another charming composition in which homely pleasures enjoyed with moderation and in a mood of simple merriment are delicately depicted is "Der Wirtshausgarten" in Berlin, in which the young people and their elders together with the happy dog are having a quiet meal under a green arbor. Family pets play an important part in all these scenes of domestic life; apparently Jan Steen even more than other Dutch painters was interested in the idiosyncrasies of the animals about him and was amused by incidents including them. His pictures gain by this a certain suggestion of kindliness and community of good feeling that is refreshing in the midst of the frequent vulgarity of theme and sentiment. Reminiscences of the exquisite feeling shown in "Die Menagerie" continually occur in such incidents as a girl feeding her parrot, the play of children with the friendly dogs and cats of the noisy inn, and especially in the importance given to the expressions and attitudes of the dumb creatures. The dog is nearly always in the foreground, invariably characterized with the utmost vivacity and clearness, and usually playing his cheerful part in whatever of lively occupation hismasters are engaged in. In "Die Lustige Familie" he joins his voice to the family concert with an expression of canine agony.
Frequently the subjects are obviously drawn from the life of his own family circle and the portraits of his children in these canvases are always sympathetic and delightful, giving a peculiarly intimate character to the artist's works in this kind. In "Das Nikolausfest" at Amsterdam the little girl in the foreground—apparently the little Elisabeth born in 1662, who figures in so many of the later paintings—is a particularly engaging figure.
These simpler "feasts" and family gatherings in which gay laughter reigns in place of brawling, constitute a delightful phase of Steen's art, yet curiously they are seldom as beautiful in their esthetic qualities as the tavern scenes and incidents of low and vicious life. The picture in the Louvre, however, "Das Familien Mahl," contradicts this generalization in the sheer loveliness of color, in the light that streams through the window hung with vines, and in the delicately discriminated textures of the gowns and furnishings. In this picture the figure of the woman nursing her child in the background has an amplitude of line and graciousness of pose that places it on a plane with Millet's renderings of similar subjects, while the painting in itself is of a quality never achieved by the poetic Frenchman.
Occasionally we find compositions by Steen in which only two or three figures are introduced, although as a rule he crowds every inch of his canvas with human beings and still-life. A very beautiful example of these compositions is seen in "Die Musikstunde" of the National Gallery, London. The daintiness and innocence of the young girl's profile, the refinement of the man's face, and the enchanting tones of the yellow bodice and blue skirt make of this picture a worthy sequel to "Die Menagerie."
Another composition of two figures is "Das Trinkerpaar" in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. A woman is drinking from a glass, and a man standing at one side holds a jug and looks at her with an expression of concern. The painting of the woman's right hand which she holds to her breast is delightful and so is the clear half-tone of her face. An attractive one-figure composition, also in the Rijks Museum, is "Die Scheuermagd," a scullery maid scouring a metal pitcher on the top of a cask. The discriminations of texture in this picture, the wood and metal surfaces, the cotton of the woman's blouse, the rather coarse skin of her bared arms and the more delicate texture of her full throat, are especially noteworthy. Several compositions in which two or three figures are grouped are variations of one theme, an invalid visited by her physician. In several instancesthe title, the rather lackadaisical expression of the lady, and the significant glances of her companions, indicate that love-sickness is the malady. The color in these pictures is usually beautiful and the types are cleverly differentiated, the entire story becoming apparent to the spectator by particularities of gesture and feature, neither exaggerated nor emphasized unduly, but acutely observed and rendered at their precise value in the expressiveness of the whole. A very fine example of these "Doktorbilder" is in the collection of the New York Historical Society. The doctor is bleeding his patient, and there are several people in the room. The rich costumes are distinguished by the indescribable blond yellows and silvery blues that make Steen's color harmonies at their best singularly delicate and blithe.
Among the compositions in which many figures in a complicated environment tax the artist's technical skill to the utmost, are several representations of the bean feast, that saturnalia of Germany, upon which abundant eating and drinking are in order. One of the most beautiful of these pictures is in the Cassel Gallery. Steen himself, portly and flushed, sits at the table, grimacing good-naturedly at the racket assailing his ears. His handsome wife is in the foreground, her large free gesture and unrestrained pose bringing out the opulent beauty of her form draped in shining silken stuffs. Her face,turned toward the little urchin who has found the bean in the cake and thus won the right to wear a paper crown as king of the revels, is dimpled with smiles. The two children are babyish in figure and expression and the little dog is more serious than is his wont upon these occasions. A couple of men are making a din with bits of brass and iron, and the place is in complete disorder with eggshells and kitchen utensils scattered about on the floor, yet the aspect of the scene is curiously removed from vulgarity. Both beauty and character have been ideals of the artist. He has not only grasped the loveliness of external things but he has delved rather deeply into the individualities of these roistering Hollanders. You do not feel as you do with Jordaens that excess of flesh and the joys of the palate are all the world holds for the revelers. The world holds, for one thing, appreciation of rich accessories. The columned bedstead, the handsome rugs, the carved furniture, the glint of gold in the ornate picture frame, especially the sheen of the silk skirts, the soft thick velvet and fur of the sacques and bodices, these, while they are not uncommon in the Dutch interiors of the period combine to produce an impression of esthetic well-being that tempers the unctuous physical satisfactions of a merry-making class. With Jordaens it is the satyr in man that sets the standard of enjoyment, except in his religious pictures which oftenare filled with genuine and noble emotion, and in which he rises superior to Steen where the latter works in the same kind. Nothing could be more commonplace or characterless in color and form than Steen's rendering of the dinner at Emmaus. Occasionally, however, he is equally without inspiration in his lustiest subjects. In the "Fröhliche Heimkehr" at Amsterdam, a merry enough scene of people returning from a boatride in high spirits, there is neither charm of color (save in the yellow jacket of a girl who leans over the side of the boat) nor subtlety of characterization.
Fully to appreciate Steen, we should know his pictures in the Louvre and at Amsterdam. They cover a wide range and comprise a considerable number of masterpieces. The life he depicts in them is not of a very high order, but he has seen the possibilities for pictorial representation in his surroundings as almost no other painter of his time. His people are alive and their living is active and fervent. What they do they do with zest. There is energy in the painter's line and vitality in his color. Nothing is dull or tame in his family drama. All has a touch of moving beauty. In the "Schlechte Gesellschaft" of the Louvre or the more vulgar "Nach dem Gelage" of the Rijks Museum—least rewarding of pictures for the moralist—how rich in beauties of color and line is the composition, how tender in modeling arethe forms, how bewitching to the eye the fine enamel of the surface!
In the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, is one characteristic example: "The old rat comes to the trap at last," which badly needs cleaning, and one new purchase attributed to Steen in the lists of his work but hardly typical or even characteristic. The subject is a kitchen scene. In it we have neither Steen's charm of color nor his perfection of finish. Yet the turn of the woman's head, the unaffected merriment of her expression and that of the youth, and the type to which her face belongs sufficiently recall such examples of the artist's work as "Das Galante Anerbieten" at Brussels with which indeed it has more in common than with any other of Jan Steen's pictures known to me.
Steen's own portrait, painted by himself and hanging now in the Amsterdam Museum, shows a face upon which neither wild living nor ardent toil has left unhappy marks. His serious eyes look frankly out from under arched brows. His mouth is firm though smiling slightly. The high, bold nose and strong chin, the well-shaped head and thoughtful brow indicate a character more decided and more praiseworthy than the legends adrift concerning his life would lead us to expect in him.
The best substitutes for the judgments of posterity are the judgments of foreigners. A group of pictures by the artists of one country, taken to another country for exhibition and criticism, is subjected to something the same test as the pictures of one generation coming under the scrutiny of another generation.
When a collection of pictures by modern German artists was exhibited in America in 1909, the American people were prompt in their recognition of a certain quality which they termed national. The critics—many of them—saw this quality from the adverse side and were far from complimentary to the Germans in their comparisons between American art and German art, but a general impression was given of a vitality sufficiently marked to make itself felt by the least initiated observer. A number of the pictures by the older men had little enough of this vitality, but where it existed it was so decided as to leaven the mass. And there was almost none of the sentimentality characterizing the Teutonic ideal as ithad manifested itself in the pictures formerly brought to this country.
Compared, then, with the paintings of American artists and with those of the Frenchmen, whose work we have known so much better than that of any other country, compared also with the work of the modern Spaniards, whose paintings were on exhibition the same winter at the Hispanic Museum, we find the special character of the German painting to exist in a resolute individualism, a determination to express the inner life of the artist, his temperament and predilections and his mood at whatever cost of technical facility. Expressiveness, getting the idea into circulation, getting something said, this appears to be the common goal of the German painter of the present day.
In such case, of course, the idea is of particular importance. If it is to take precedence over purely esthetic qualities it is reasonable to expect it to be an idea of no little importance. Let us examine some of the painters represented in the exhibition arranged for America, and see whether in most cases the idea is emotional as with the artists of China and Japan, and therefore peculiarly appropriate to translation by rhythms of line and harmonies of color, or intellectual, and therefore demanding a complex and difficult expression and the solution of technical problems that do not come into the question atall when nothing else is required than to evoke an especial mood or temper of soul.
The oldest of the painters represented was Adolf von Menzel, who was born in 1815 and died in his ninetieth year. As he began work at an early age his accomplishment practically covers the period of the nineteenth century. He has been designated by one of his German critics as three Menzels in one: the first, the historian of the Freiderician period; the second, the historian of his own time, recording the court life in which he played his part; the third, the acute observer of the life of the streets and workrooms and a commentator on the amusing details of the passing show.
A number of his sketches were shown at the exhibition, a couple of landscapes, a ballroom scene and a theater subject, beside a little mediaeval subject in gouache. These displayed his dexterity of hand which was truly astounding, and also his memory, as the "Théâtre Gymnase" was painted fully a year after he left Paris. The ballroom supper was painted in an ironic mood and the gluttony of his fellow humans, their unattractive personalities, their curious aspect of the educated animal, appear with an intense and pitiless fidelity to the fact which is of the essence of intellectual realism, but which could equally have been achieved through the medium of words. In spite of a cultivated color sense and a fine controlover his instrument he was from first to last essentially an illustrator. It was difficult for him to omit any detail that would add to the piquancy or fulness of his story, however much the omission might have done for his general effect. He said himself, "There should be no unessentials for the artist," and he advised his pupils to finish as much as possible and not to sketch at all. This passion for completeness rarely accompanies a strong feeling for the romantic aspects of nature or for atmospheric subtleties. Neither does the painter who observes human nature closely and represents it with a detailed commentary upon its characteristics usually convey the impression of any subjective emotion.
Menzel is no exception to this rule. In his work he appears as emotionless as a machine, but his accomplishment is not mechanical. It is, on the contrary, the record of a busy, highly individualized, accurate mind. A Berlin man, he had the alertness, the clear-cut effectiveness, the energy, and the coldness typical of a cosmopolitan product. If we compare his "Ball Supper" in which the glare of lights, the elaboration of costume, the rapacity and shallow glittering superficiality of a Court festivity are presented almost as though in hackneyed phrases, so devoid is the picture of any meaning beyond the obvious, with the "Steel Foundry" in which the unsentimental acceptance of labor as a necessary factor in civilizationis conspicuous, it is clear that his mind was free from dreams and visions whichever side of society he looked upon. In this respect his influence is salutary. It is like a cool and wholesome breeze blowing away all miasmic vapors, and there is a positively exhilarating quality in his firm assumption of the power of the human being over his material. His workmen are men of strong muscle and prompt brain. In the "Steel Foundry" we see their efficient handling of the great bars of metal with admiration as we should in life, and we note what in modern times is not always present for notation, the intelligence and interest in their faces. In one corner of the room, behind a screen or partition, a little group is devouring luncheon. Here we strike once more the note of the ballroom supper in the munching eagerness of the eaters, but seen in juxtaposition with the physical force and effort of the workers it ceases to be revolting, and seems to symbolize the lusty joy of living with a sympathetic zest of realization.
In all of Menzel's work we have this sense of physical and mental competency. It shows nothing of the abnormal or decadent, and it must also be admitted that only in a few instances does it show anything of esthetic beauty. He was able to paint crowds of people and he managed to get a remarkable unity of effect in spite of his devotion to detail, but his masses of light and shade are notheld in that noble harmonious relation achieved by the peasant Millet who was Menzel's contemporary, his lines have no rhythmic flow, his color, though often charming, is seldom held together in a unified tone. Some one has called him "the conscience of German painting," but he is more than that. He is both conscience and brain. It is always possible to obtain an intellectual satisfaction from his point of view. What is lacking is emotion.
We feel this lack in other Berlin masters. Professor Max Liebermann is one of the most distinguished of the modern group, and his large, cool, definite art is innocent of the moving quality. He was represented in the exhibition by a portrait of Dr. Bode, a vigorous little composition called "The Polo-players," the "Flax Barn at Laren," and "The Lace Maker." The last two were especially typical of his steady detachment from his subject. The old lace maker, bending over her bobbins, suggests only absorption in her task. There is no ennobling of her form, no idealizing of her features, no enveloping of her occupation with sentiment, nothing but the direct statement of her personality which is neither subtle nor complex and the description of what she is doing. But she is intensely real, more real, even, than Menzel's closely observed individuals. Liebermann, born in 1847, was the leader of the new tendency characterizing the Germany of the seventies, the tendency toward constantreference to nature as opposed to the old-fashioned conventionalism and Academic methods. There could have been no safer leader for a band of rebels since he was the sanest of thinkers and worked out a style in which the classic qualities of nobility in the disposition of lines and spaces and remarkable purity of form played a prominent part.
Courtesy of Berlin Photographic Company. Peasant Women of Dachauer From a painting by LeiblCourtesy of Berlin Photographic Company. Peasant Women of Dachauer From a painting by Leibl
Observing his "Flax Barn," in comparison with the work of his compatriots, its fine freedom from triviality of detail was apparent, and the beauty of its cool light, spread over large spaces and diffused throughout the interior of the low shed, made itself felt. One noted also, as elements of the picture's peculiarly dignified appeal, the severe arrangement of the figures with the long row of workers under the windows, the long threads of flax passing over their heads to the women in the foreground, and the almost straight line formed in turn by these women. The composition, quite geometrical in its precision, gave a sense of deep repose in spite of the vitality of the individual figures and the impression they made of being able to turn and move at will, an impression nearly always missed by Leibl, Liebermann's great forerunner in the painting of humble life. We get much the same austere effect from the almshouse pictures of old men and women on benches in the open square, always arranged in a geometrical design, and always calm in gesture and mildin type, which appear from time to time in the foreign exhibitions of Liebermann's work.
Liebermann has done for the Germans something of what Millet did for the French. He has built his art upon the daily life of the poor, but while, like Millet, he has introduced a monumental element into his work, it is clearer, more closely reasoned, more firmly knit than Millet's art, and at the same time less emotional. Liebermann's hospitality to purely technical ideas, his interest in problems of light and air, his diligent analysis of motion, his ability to translate a scene from the life of the laboring class without sentimentality, without prettiness or eloquence or any of the attributes that catch the multitude, give to his art a touch of coldness that is not without its charm for those who care for a highly developed orderly product of the mind.
Most of the Berlin men who are in any degree notable share somewhat in this attribute. Arthur Kampf, although he has less than Liebermann of cool detachment, has both elegance and gravity. He could hardly have had a better representation by any one or two canvases than by the "Charity" and the "Two Sisters" of the American exhibition. In the first he depicts a street scene with its contrasts of poverty and wealth. A man and woman in evening dress, returning from their evening's pleasure, are besought by poor people clustering around a soupstall and drop coin into the insistent hands. The smoking caldron of soup in the center and the circle of sharply differentiated faces form an admirable composition, the apparently accidental lines of which play into a dignified linear scheme. The "Two Sisters" reveals the influence of Velasquez in its flat modeling and subtle characterization, and in its atmospheric grays enlivened with geranium reds. Both of these pictures indicate a modern temper of mind in the fluency of their technique and the realism of their treatment together with the attention paid to the tonal quality and to the character of the space composition. Kampf, however, although a young man—he was born in 1864—has passed through many phases of development which are recorded in his many-sided art. His subjects range from the historical themes of his wall decorations at Magdeburg and Aachen through portraiture in which he grasps characters essentially diverse and suggests with unerring instinct the dominant quality, scenes of labor as in his "Bridge-Building," scenes of brutality and excitement as in his "Bull-fight," scenes from the drama of the Biblical story, scenes of domestic life as in his delicately humorous picture of the absorbed reader eating his breakfast with the morning paper propped up in front of him, and scenes of peaceful holiday-making among the poor as in his idyllic "Sunday Afternoon" which shows a peasant boy playing hisharmonicum under the trees, with his old father and mother sitting by in placid enjoyment. Various as these pictures are and closely as the manner has in each case been adapted to the special subject, we nowhere miss the note of individuality, although in such a portrait as that of the Kaiser, which was shown in America, it unquestionably is subdued. Neither do we miss the note of locality. Born at Aachen, Kampf is a true Rheinlander and one of his German critics notes that we must look to this fact for the explanation of his special qualities, declaring that without the Rheinlander's cheerfulness and energetic temperament, and without the background of the ancient Rhenish culture, he would be inconceivable. On the other hand his turning to drama and romance for his inspiration speaks of his Duesseldorfian training and his realism of representation allies him to Menzel. At forty-two he was made president of the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin, and it is probable that the wholesome Rhenish energy of which his critic speaks will save him from sinking into the formalism of the academic tradition.
In his art, however, as in that of his compatriots, it is apparent that the world of ideas is the world in which he lives, and he works to express his mind rather than his soul, his thoughts rather than his emotions, if we followthe indefinite and arbitrary division between thought and feeling that does service as a symbol of a meaning difficult to express clearly.
There were other interesting painters represented in the Berlin group at the American Exhibition, Otto Engel, Fritz Berger, Hans Hartig—and of all it is more or less true that the idea in their work is more important than the feeling. It is true also that the tradition of the peasant Leibl, a great painter, but invariably cold, rests upon most of them. His wonderful manipulation of pigment is equaled by none of them, but his accurate, detached observation, his balanced rendering, the firmness of his method, have entered more or less into their scheme of art. And it is to be noted that his ideas and theirs are ideas appropriate to the painter's medium. Menzel's literary bent is not shared by them, his predilection for a story to illustrate almost never appears among the younger Berlin painters, and he cannot in any real sense be considered their prototype.
When we turn to the older members of the modern Munich school we find the influence of Boecklin dominant. Arnold Boecklin, a Swiss by birth, and possessed of the Swiss ingenuity of mind, has been the subject of endless discussion among the Germans of the present day. He exhausted his very great talent in painting a symbolic world, and by his appreciation of the value ofcoherence he made his paintings impressive. They are each a perfectly coherent arrangement of parts, making a whole which has the appearance of simplicity, however numerous the elements composing it may be. By a combined generalization and intensity he turned the actual world which he studied closely enough, into his own unreality. Thus, in his Italian landscapes, he reveals the architectonic structure of his scene stripped of all incidental ornament, the upright and horizontal lines left severe and uncompromised, and the blue of the heavens and the sea, and the dark green of the cypresses, pushed to an almost incredible depth. Everything is more significant than in nature, yet nature has provided the elements of significance. It is in his ability to see things whole and to co-ordinate the selected details that Boecklin is most an artist. This largeness of generalization gives him power over the imagination, and is, perhaps the only, certainly the chief source of his power. His color by its very intensity overdoes the intended effect. The imagination instead of being stimulated is sated, and his obvious symbolism fails to pique the curiosity. Moreover, his handling of paint lacks sensitiveness. He has something of the disregard shown by the English painter Watts for the beauty inherent in his material which might as well be clay or textile as pigment in his hands. But his appreciation of the effect upon the mind of noble arrangementsof space and mass raises him to a much higher place as an artist than he can be said to occupy as a painter.