Asian Elephant crushing Tiger From a bronze by BaryeAsian Elephant crushing Tiger From a bronze by Barye
Since Barye's death and the great increase in the prices of his work, many devices have been used to sell objects bearing his name, but not properly his work. For example, he produced for the city of Marseilles some objects in stone (designed for the columns of the gateway), which were never done in bronze; since his death these have been reduced in size and produced in bronze as his work. Works of the younger Barye signed by the great name are also confused with those of the father. Further still, to the confusion of inexperienced collectors, the bronzes of Méne, Fratin, and Cain, all artists of importance, but hardly increasing fame, have had the signatures erased and that of Barye substituted. It is therefore inadvisable to attempt at this date the collection of Barye's bronzes without special knowledge or advice. The great collections of early and fine proofs have been made. At the sale of his effects after his death the models with the right of reproduction were sold, and in many instances these modern proofs are on the market bearing the name of Barye, with no indication of their modernity. Some of these are so cleverly done that great knowledge is required to detect them, and if they were sold for a moderate price, would be desirable possessions. Certain dealers frankly sell a modern reproduction as modern and at anappropriate price, but I know of one only, M. Barbédienne, who puts a plaque with his initials on each piece produced by him.
During Barye's lifetime he had, however, in his employ, a man named Henri, who possessed his confidence to a full degree. A few pieces are found with the initial of this man, showing that they were done under his supervision and not that of Barye, but whether before or after the death of the latter is not yet determined.
Some fifteen years ago, on the occasion of an exhibition in Paris of Miss Cassatt's work a French critic suggested that she was then, perhaps, with the exception of Whistler, "the only artist of an elevated, personal and distinguished talent actually possessed by America." The suggestion no doubt was a rash one, since, as much personal and distinguished work by American artists never leaves this country, the data for comparison must be lacking to a French critic; but it is certainly true that, like Whistler, Miss Cassatt early struck an individual note, looked at life with her own eyes, and respected her intellectual instrument sufficiently to master it to the extent, at least, of creating a style for herself. Born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she studied first at the Philadelphia Academy, and later traveled through Spain, Italy, and Holland in search of artistic knowledge and direction. In France she came to know the group of painters including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Degas, and especially influenced by the work of Degas, she turned to him forthe counsel she needed, receiving it in generous measure. It was a fortunate choice, the most fortunate possible, if she wished to combine in her art the detached observation characteristic in general of the Impressionist school with a passionate pursuit of all the subtlety, eloquence and precision possible to pure line. The fruit of his influence is to be found in the technical excellence of her representations of life, the firmness and candor of her drawing, her competent management of planes and surfaces, and the audacity with which she attacks difficult problems of color and tone. The extreme gravity of her method is the natural result of working under a master whose intensity and austerity in the pursuit of artistic truth are perhaps unequaled in the history of modern art.
Her choice of subject is not, however, the inspiration of any mind other than her own. She has taken for the special field in which to exercise her vigorous talent that provided by the various phases of the maternal relation. Her wholesome young mothers with their animated children, comely and strong, unite the charm of great expressiveness with that of profoundly scientific execution. The attentive student of art is well aware how easily the former quality unsupported by the latter may degenerate into the cloying exhibition of sentiment, and is equally aware of the sterility of the latter practised for itself alone.With expressiveness for her goal and the means of rendering technical problems for her preoccupation, Miss Cassatt has arrived at hard-earned triumphs of accomplishment. One has only to turn from one of her recently exhibited pictures to another painted ten or twelve years ago to appreciate the length of the way she has come. The earlier painting, an oil color, is of a woman in a striped purple, white, and green gown, holding a half-naked child, who is engaged in bathing its own feet, with the absorbed expression on its face common to children occupied with such responsible tasks. The bricky flesh tints of the faces and hands, and the greenish half-tones of the square little body are too highly emphasized, but a keen perception of facts of surface and construction is obvious in the well-defined planes of the child's anatomy, in the foreshortened, thin little arm pressing firmly on the woman's knee and in the stout little legs, hard and round and simply modeled. There is plenty of truth in the picture, but in spite of an almost effective effort toward harmony of color, it lacks what the critics call "totality of effect." The annotation of the various phenomena is too explicit, the values are not finely related, and there is little suggestion of atmosphere.
In the later picture this crudity is replaced by a beautiful fluent handling and the mastery of tone. The subject is again a woman and child, the latter just out of itsbath, its flesh bright and glowing, its limbs instinct with life and ready to spring with uncontrollable vivacity. The modeling of the figures is as elusive as it is sure, and in the warm, golden air by which they seem to be enveloped, the well-understood forms lose all suggestion of the hardness and dryness conspicuous in the early work. Another recent painting of a kindred subject,Le lever de bébé, shows the same synthesis of detail, the same warmth and richness of tone, the same free and learned use of line. Obviously, Miss Cassatt has come into the full possession of her art and is no longer constrained by the struggle, sharp and hard as it must have been, with her exacting method—a method that has not at any time permitted the sacrifice of truth to charm. Since art is both truth and charm, record and poetry, there is a great satisfaction in watching the flowering of a positive talent, after the inevitable stages of literalism are passed, into the beauty of intelligent generalization. In all the later work there is the important element of ease, a certain graciousness of style, that enhances to a very great degree the beauty of the serious, dignified canvases. And from the beginning these have shown the admirable qualities of serenity and poise. There is no superficiality or pettiness about these homely women with their deep chests and calm faces, peacefully occupying themselves with their sound, agreeable children. The air of health, offresh and normal vigor, is the characteristic of the chosen type, and lends a suggestion of the Hellenic spirit to the modern physiognomies.
Child Resting From an etching by Mary CassattChild Resting From an etching by Mary Cassatt
If, however, in her technique and in the feeling of quietness she conveys, Miss Cassatt recalls the classic tradition, she is intensely modern in her choice of natural, unhackneyed gesture, and faces in which individuality is strongly marked and from which conventional beauty is absent. Occasionally, as in the picture shown at Philadelphia in 1904, and in the fine painting owned by Sir William C. Van Horne, we have a face charming in itself and modeled in a way to bring out its refinement, but in the greater number of instances the rather heavy and imperfect features of our average humanity are reproduced without compromise, with even a certain sense of triumph in the beautiful statement of sufficiently ugly facts and freedom from a fixed ideal.
Nothing, for example, could be less in the line of academic beauty than the quiet bonneted woman in the opera-box shown at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1907. She has her opera-glass to her eyes and her pleasant refined profile is cut sharply against the light balustrade of the balcony. Other figures in adjoining boxes are mere patches of color and of light and shade, telling, nevertheless, as personalities so acutely are the individual values perceived and discriminated. The color is personal andinteresting, the difficult perspective of the curving line of boxes is mastered with amazing skill; the fidelity of the drawing to the forms and aspects of things seen gives expression to even the inanimate objects recorded—and to painters who have tried it we recommend the subtlety of that simply modeled cheek! The whole produces the impression of solid reality and quick life and we get from it the kind of pleasure communicated not by the imitation but by the evocation of living truth. We note things that have significance for us for the first time—the fineness of the hair under the dark bonnet, the pressure of the body's weight on the arm supported by the railing, the relaxation of the arm holding the fan, and very clever painting by artists of less passionate sincerity takes on a meretricious look in contrast with this closeness of interpretation.
This, perhaps, is the chief distinction of Miss Cassatt's art—closeness of interpretation united to the Impressionist's care for the transitory aspect of things. She follows the track of an outline as sensitively if not as obviously as Ingres, and she exacts from line as much as it is capable of giving without interference with the expressiveness of the whole mass. She takes account of details with an unerring sense for their appropriateness. She selects without forcing the note of exclusion, and she thus becomes an artist of sufficiently general appeal to be understoodat once. She is not merely intelligent, but intelligible; her art has no cryptic side. It is only the initiated frequenter of galleries who will pause to reflect how tremendously it costs to be so clear and plain.
In her etchings and drawings Miss Cassatt early arrived at freedom of handling. The more responsive medium gave her an opportunity to produce delightful studies of domestic life while she was still far from having attained an easy control of pigment and brush. Her dry-points, pulled under her own direction and enriched with flat tints of color, are interesting and expressive, rich in line and large and full in modeling. The color was not, however, wholly an improving experiment. Under the friendly influence of time it may become an element of beauty, since in no case is it either commonplace or crude, but in its newness it lacks something of both delicacy and depth. The later etchings without color are more nearly completely satisfying. The three charming interpretations of children recently sent over to this country are full of freshness and life, and are admirable examples of the brilliant use of pure line. The attitude of the child in the etching reproduced here is, indeed, quite an extraordinary feat of richness of expression with economy of means. The heavy little head sagging against the tense arm, the small, childish neck and thin shoulder are insisted upon just sufficiently to render the mood of lightweariness, and the little face, full of individuality, is tenderly observed and modeled with feeling. The psychological bent of the artist, her interest in the portrayal of mental and moral qualities, is nowhere more clearly revealed than in her drawings of children. She has never been content to reproduce merely the physical plasticity and delicacy of infancy, but has shown in her joyous babies and dreamy little girls at least the potentiality of strong wills and clear minds. Great diversity of character and temperament are displayed in the expressive curves of the plump young faces, and the eyes, in particular, questioning, exultant, wondering, reflective or merry, betray a penetrating and subtle insight into the dawning personality under observation.
From the Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia. On the Balcony From a painting by Mary CassattFrom the Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia. On the Balcony From a painting by Mary Cassatt
One of her earliest works recently has been added to the Wilstach collection in Philadelphia. It shows a man and two women on a balcony. The straight line of the balcony railing stretches across the foreground without any modification of its rigid linear effect. The man's figure is in shadow, barely perceptible as to detail, yet indicated without uncertainty of drawing or vagueness of any kind, a solid figure the "tactile values" of which are clearly recognized. One of the women is bending over the railing in a half-shadow while the other lifts her face toward the man in an attitude that makes exacting requirements of the artist's knowledge of foreshortening.The whole is duskily brilliant in color, full of the sense of form, simple, dignified, sturdy, opulent. It shows that Miss Cassatt held at the beginning of her career as now, valuable ideals of competency and lucidity in the interpretation of life.
Woman with a Fan From a painting by Mary CassattWoman with a Fan From a painting by Mary Cassatt
Max Klinger is one of the most interesting and representative figures in the art of Germany to-day. Essentially German in manner of thought and feeling, he has brought into the stiff formality of early nineteenth century German painting and sculpture a plasticity of mind and an elevation of purpose and idea that suggest (as most that is excellent in Germany does suggest) the influence of Goethe. In his restless interrogation of all the forms of representative art, his work in the mass shows a curious mingling of fantasy, imagination, brusque realism, antique austerity, and modern science. The enhancing of the sense of life is, however, always the first thought with him, and lies at the root of his method of introducing color into sculpture, not by the means of a deadening pigment but by the use of marbles of deep tints and positive hues, and of translucent stones. As an artist, his chief distinction is this unremitting intention to convey in one way or another the sense of the vitalizing principle in animate objects. We may say of him that hisdrawing is sometimes poor, that his imagination may be clumsy and infelicitous, that his treatment of a subject is frequently coarse and even crude, but we cannot deny that out of his etchings and paintings, and out of his great strange sculptured figures looks the spirit of life, more often defiant than noble, more often capricious than beautiful, but not to be mistaken, and the rarest phenomenon in the art product of his native country. He unites, too, a profound respect for the art of antiquity with a stout modern sentiment, a union that gives to his better work both dignity and force. What he seems to lack is the one impalpable, delicate, elusive quality that makes for our enjoyment of so many imperfect productions, and the lack of which does so much to blind us to excellence in other directions—the quality of charm, which in the main depends upon the possession by the artist of taste.
Beethoven From a statue in colored marble by Max KlingerBeethoven From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger
Max Klinger was born in Leipzig on the eighteenth of February, 1857. His father was a man of artistic predilections, and in easy circumstances, so that the choice of a bread-winning profession for the son was not of first importance. As Klinger's talent showed itself at a very early age, it was promptly decided that he should be an artist. He left school at the age of sixteen, and went to Karlsruhe, where Gussow was beginning to gather about him a large number of pupils. In 1875 he followed Gussowto Berlin, where he came also under the influence of Menzel. Gussow's teaching was all in the line of individualism and naturalism. He led his pupils straight to nature for their model, and encouraged them to paint only what they themselves saw and felt. For this grounding in the representation of plain facts Klinger has been grateful in his maturer years, and looks back to his first master with admiration and respect as having early armed him against his tendency toward fantasy and idealism. His early style in the innumerable drawings of his youth is thin and weak, without a sign of the bold originality characterizing his recent work, and he obviously needed all the support he could get from frank and sustained observation of nature. His first oil-painting, exhibited in Berlin in 1878, showed the result of Gussow's influence in its solidity and practical directness of appeal, but a number of etchings, executed that year and the next—forerunners of the important later series—indicate the natural bent of the young artist's mind toward symbolic forms and unhackneyed subjects.
About the art of drawing as distinguished from that of painting he has his own opinions, expressed with emphasis in an essay calledMalerei und Zeichnung. Drawing, etching, lithography and wood-engraving he considers preeminently adapted to convey purely imaginative thoughts such as would lose a part of their evanescentsuggestiveness by translation into the more definite medium of oil-color, and he holdsGriffelkunst, or the art of the point in as high estimation as any other art for the interpretation of ideas appropriate to it, an opinion not now as unusual as when he first announced it to his countrymen. For about five years after the close of his student period, he occupied himself chiefly with etchings, turning out between 1879 and 1883 no fewer than nine of the elaborate "cycles" which are so expressive of his method of thought, and of the best qualities of his workmanship. In these cycles he delights in following a development not unlike that of a musical theme, beginning with a prelude and carrying the idea through manifold variations to its final expression. His curious history of the finding of a glove which passes through different symbolic forms of individuality in the dreams of a lover, is a fair example of his eccentric and somewhat lumbering humor in the use of a symbol in his earlier years. His etchings for Ovid'sMetamorphosesshow the same violent grasp of the lighter side of his subject, but in his landscape etchings of 1881 we have ample opportunity to see what he could do with a conventionally charming subject treated with conventional sentiment and without symbolic intention. The moonlight scene which he callsMondnacht, has all the subtle exquisite feeling for harmony and tone to be gained from a Whistler nocturne.The dim light on the buildings, the soft sweep of the clouds across the dark sky, the impalpable rendering, the grave and deep beauty of the scene combine to express the essence of night and its mystery. The oil-paintingAbend, of 1882, also bears eloquent testimony to Klinger's power to evoke purely pictorial images of great loveliness.
In 1882, after about a year of study in Munich, he painted the important frescoes for the Steglitz Villa, in which the influence of Boecklin played freely. It was in Paris, however, where he studied between 1883 and 1885, that Klinger received his strongest and most definite impulse toward painting. HisJudgment of Parisrevealed the fact that the young painter had come into possession of himself, and could be depended upon for qualities demanding constraint and a measure of severity. In choosing a legend of antiquity for the subject of his picture, he may have felt a psychological obligation to obey the greater influences of the antique tradition. At all events he rather suddenly developed a style of great maturity and firmness. From Paris he went back to Berlin, but in 1889 he started for Rome, where he spent four profitable years. The fruit of this Roman period has continued to ripen up to the present time, although since 1893 Klinger has made his home in Leipzig, hiswanderjahreapparently over and done with. He notonly painted in Rome aPietà, aCrucifixion, and a number of pictures in which problems of open-air painting are attacked, but he conceived there the powerful series of etchings on the subject of death, and there he made his first attempts in colored sculpture. From his earliest years, the image of death had often solicited him, and some of his interpretations are filled with dignity and pathos. In the slender, rigid figure on a white draped bed, from the etching cycle entitledEine Liebe, there is the suggestion of a classic tomb, severe and impressive in outline, while nothing could be more poignant than the emotional appeal of theMutter und Kindin the second death series. To turn from these to the two religious paintings executed in Rome, is to realize that eccentric as Klinger often is, both in choice of subject and treatment, his attitude toward the mysteries and problems of man's existence is that of a serious thinker with a strong artistic talent, but a still stronger intelligence. It is not, however, until we reach the period which he devotes to sculpture, that we find in his art the quality of nobility, a certain breadth, which in spite of innovations in execution and almost trivial symbolic detail, impresses upon his conceptions the classic mark.
He began his studies for his great polychromatic statue of Beethoven as early as 1886, fifteen years before its completion. In 1892 it was reported in Rome that he hadturned to sculpture as a new field in which to prove himself a master, and his first exhibited figure placed him above the rank of the amateur. He threw himself into his new work with his usual energy, making himself familiar with the technicalities of marble cutting in order to follow the execution with intelligence at every stage. He sought for his material with unwearying zest, taking long journeys into Italy, Greece and the Pyrenees to procure marble with the soft, worn, rich quality produced by exposure to the weather; with this he combined onyx and brilliant stones, bronze, ivory and gold, always with the intention of creating an impression of life in addition to producing a decorative result. His strong decorative instinct comes to his aid, however, in avoiding the incoherence that would seem inevitable from the mixture of so many and such diverse materials, and the equally strong intellectual motive always obvious in his work also tends to hold it together in a more or less dignified unity. TheCassandra, his second colored statue, finished in Leipzig in 1895, and now in possession of the Leipzig Museum, is especially free from eccentricity and caprice. The beautiful Greek head, with its deep-set eyes and delicate mouth, is expressive of intense but normal feeling. The flesh is represented by warm-toned marble, the hair is brownish-red, the garment is of alabaster, yellowish-red with violet tones, and the figure stands on a pedestal ofPyranean marble. In color effect, however, theBeethovenis the most striking. InLes Maîtres Contemporains, M. Paul Mongré thus describes it:
"The pedestal, half rock, half cloud, which supports the throne of the Olympian master, is of Pyranean marble of a dark violet-brown; the eagle is of black marble, veined with white, its eyes are of amber. The nude bust of Beethoven is of white Syrian marble, with light yellowish reflections, the drapery, hanging in supple folds, is of Tyrolean onyx with yellow-brown streaks in it. The throne of bronze is of a dull brown tone, except in the curved arms, which are brilliantly gilded. Five angel heads in ivory are placed like a crown on the inside of the back of the throne; their wings are studded with multi-colored gems and with antique fluorspar; the back of the throne is laid with blue Hungarian opals." All these different elements, the French critic maintains, are held together in reciprocal cohesion, and are kept subordinated to the bold conception of Beethoven as the Jupiter of music—"the godlike power accumulated and concentrated, on the point of breaking forth in lightnings; the eagle in waiting, ready to take flight, as the visible thought of Jupiter, before whom will spring up a whole world, or the musical image of a world: that is what is manifested by this close alliance of idea and form."
Cassandra From a statue in colored marble by Max KlingerCassandra From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger
This monument to Beethoven is a performance designedto express not merely the artistic interest of the subject for Klinger, but the abounding enthusiasm of the latter for the great musician's genius. Immediately after leaving Rome, Klinger also brought to completion a series of etchings calledBrahms-phantasie, and intended to illustrate the emotions aroused by the compositions of Brahms. In 1901 he made a portrait bust of Liszt, and his drawings for theMetamorphoseswere dedicated to Schumann. In the autumn of 1906 his Brahms memorial was placed in the new Music Hall in Hamburg. This memorial monument has the form of a powerful Hermes with the head of Brahms. The Muse of tone is apparently whispering secrets of art into the ears of the master. His debt, therefore, to the masters of music may be considered as fully and promptly paid, and the impression of hero-worship conveyed by these ardent tributes is a reminder that the artist is young in temperament, Teutonic in origin, and untouched by the modern spirit of indifference to persons. Unlike many German artists of the present day, he did not find in Paris the atmosphere that suited him. In spite of his years there and in Rome, he has remained undisturbed by any anti-German influence. His compatriots speak with pride of the intensely national character of his mind, and have early recognized his importance, as perhaps could hardly have failed to be the case with powers so far from humble, and a method so far frompatient. France also has paid him more than one tribute of appreciation, and the general feeling toward him seems now to be that expressed by one of his German admirers in America: "Why criticize him? He is so overwhelming, so overpowering intellectually that the best we can do is to try to understand him."
An exhibition of the paintings of Alfred Stevens was held in April and May, 1907, at the city of Brussels, and later in May and in June at the city of Antwerp. The collection comprised examples from the museums at Brussels, Antwerp, Paris and Marseilles, and from the galleries of many private owners. It was representative in the fullest sense of the word, showing the literal tendencies of the artist's youth in such pictures asLes Chasseurs de Vincennes(1855) tightly painted, conscientiously modeled, with only the deep, resonant red of a woman's cape to indicate the magnificent color-sense soon to be revealed; orLe Convalescent, in which the two sympathetic women hovering over the languid young man in a Paris drawing-room are photographically true to the life of the time, without, however, conveying its spiritual or intellectual expression; showing also the rich and grave middle period in which beauty of face and form and the charm of elegant accessories are rendered with singular intensity and perfect sincerity; asinLes Visiteuses,Désespérée, etc.; and, finally, showing the psychological synthesis of the later years, which reveals itself in such works asUn Sphinx Parisien, baffling in its fixed introspective gaze, and executed with an impeccable technique.
Many of the early pictures have a joyousness of frank workmanship, a directness of attack and a simplicity of arrangement that appeal to the world at large more freely than the subtler blonde harmonies of the later years. TheProfil de Femme(1855) in which M. Lambotte discerns the influence of Rembrandt, is more suggestive to the present writer of familiarity with Courbet's bold, heavy impasto and sharp transitions from light to shadow. TheRéverieof the preceding year has also its suggestions of Courbet, in spite of the delicately painted flowers in the Japanese vase; but in the pictures of the next few years, the robust freshness of the painter's Flemish vision finds expression in color-schemes that resemble nothing so much as the gardens of Belgium in springtime, filled with hardy blossoms and tended by skillful hands;La Consolationof 1857, for example, in which the two black-robed women form the heavy note of dead color against which are relieved the pink and white of their companion's gown, the pale yellow of the wall, the blue of the floor and the low, softly brilliant tones of the beautiful tapestry curtain.Another painting of about the same time has almost the charm of Fantin-Latour's early renderings of serious women bending over their books or their sewing. InLa Liseusethe girl's face is absorbed and thoughtful, the color harmony is quiet, the white dress, the dull red of the chair, the blue and yellow and green wools on the table, forming a pattern of closely related tones as various in its unity as the motley border of an old-fashioned dooryard. In other examples we have reminiscences of that time of excitement and esthetic riot when the silks and porcelains and enamels of the Far East came into the Paris of artists and artisans and formed at once a part of the baggage of the Parisian atelier.L'Inde à Parisis a particularly delightful reflection of this period of "Chinoiseries." It depicts a young woman in a black gown of the type that Millais loved, leaning forward with both hands on a table covered with an Indian drapery. On the table stands the miniature figure of an elephant. The background is of the strong green so often used by Manet and the varied pattern of the table cover gives opportunity for assembling a number of rich and vivid yet quiet hues in an intricate and interesting color composition.
La Parisienne Japonaiseis a subject of the kind that enlisted Whistler's interest during the sixties—a handsome girl in a blue silk kimono embroidered with whiteand yellow flowers, and a green sash, looks into a mirror that reflects a yellow background and a vase of flowers. The colors are said to have faded and changed, to the complete demoralization of the color-scheme, but it is still a picture of winning charm, less reserved and dignified than Whistler'sLange Leizenof 1864, but with passages of subtle color and a just relation of values that have survived the encroachments of time.
From a very early period Stevens adopted the camel's-hair shawl with its multi-colored border as the model for his palette and the chief decoration of his picture. It is easier, says one of his French critics, to enumerate the paintings in which such a shawl does not appear than those in which it does. It slips from the shoulders of theDésespéréeand forms a wonderful contrast to the smooth fair neck and arm relieved against it; it is the magnificent background of the voluminous gauzy robe inUne Douloureuse Certitude; it falls over the chair in which the young mother sits nursing her baby inTous les Bonheurs; it hangs in the corners of studios, it is gracefully worn by fashionable visitors in fashionable drawing-rooms; its foundation color is cream or red or a deep and tender yellow as soft as that of a tea-rose; it determines the harmony of the colored silks and bric-à-brac which are in its vicinity, it rules its surroundings with a truly oriental splendor, and it gives to the work in which it plays soprominent a part an individuality supplementary to the artist's own. It is as important as the rugs in the pictures of Vermeer of Delft or Gerard Terborch.
L'Atelier From a painting by Alfred StevensL'Atelier From a painting by Alfred Stevens
The silks and muslins of gowns and scarves are also important accessories in these pictures which have a modernity not unlike that of the pictures of Velasquez, in which the ugliness of contemporary fashions turns to beauty under the learned rendering of textures and surfaces. Bibelots and furnishings, wall-hangings, pictures, rugs, polished floors, glass and silver and china and jewels are all likewise pressed into the service of an art that used what lay nearest to it, not for the purposes of realism but for the enchantment of the vision. M. Lambotte has pointed out that Stevens introduced mirrors, crystals and porcelains into his canvasses with the same intention as that of the landscape-painter who makes choice of a subject with a river, lake or pond, knowing that clear reflections and smooth surface aid in giving the effect of distance and intervening atmosphere. The same writer has told us that so far from reproducing the ordinary costumes of his period Stevens took pains to seek exclusive and elegant examples,chefs d'œuvresof the dressmaker's art, and that such were put at his service by the great ladies of the second empire. The beautiful muslin over-dress of theDame en Roseis perhaps the one that most taxed his flexible brush.It is diaphanous in texture, elaborately cut and trimmed with delicate laces and embroideries, and the rose of the under-robe, the snowy white of the muslin, the silver ornaments and the pale blonde hair of the wearer make the lightest and daintiest of harmonies accentuated by the black of the lacquer cabinet with its brilliant polychromatic insets.
Unlike Whistler, Stevens never abandoned the rich and complicated color arrangements of his youth for an austere and restricted palette. He nevertheless was at his best when his picture was dominated by a single color, as in the wonderfulFédoraof 1882 orLa Tricoteuse. In the former the warmly tinted hair and deep yellow fan are the vibrant notes, the creamy dress, the white flowers, the silver bracelet, and the white butterfly making anensemblelike a golden wheatfield swept by pale lights. The piquant note of contrast is given by the blue insolent eyes and the hardly deeper blue blossoms of the love-in-a-mist held in the languid hands.
InLa Tricoteusethe composition of colors is much the same—a creamy white dress with gray shadows, reddish yellow hair, and a bit of blue knitting with the addition of a sharp line of red made by the signature. There is no austerity in these vaporous glowing arrangements of a single color. They are as near to the portraiture of full sunlight as pigment has been able to approachand if it can be said that Whistler has "painted the soul of color," it certainly can be said that Stevens here has painted its embodied life. For the most part we have, however, to think of Alfred Stevens as a portraitist of the ponderable world; a Flemish lover of brilliant appearances, a scrupulous translator of the language of visible things into the idiom of art. In the picture entitledL'Atelier, which we reproduce, is a more or less significant instance of his artistic veracity. On the crowded wall, forming the background against which is seen the model's charming profile, is a picture which obviously is a copy of the painting ofLa Fuite en Egypteby Breughel. Two versions of the same subject, one, the original by Breughel the elder, the other, a copy by his son, now hang in the Brussels Museum, alike in composition but differing in tone, the son's copy having apparently been left in an unfinished condition with the brown underpainting visible throughout. That this, and not the elder Breughel's, is the original of the picture in Steven'sL'Atelieris clear at the first glance, the warm tonality having been accurately reproduced and even the drawing of the tree branches, which differs much in the two museum pictures having conformed precisely to that in the copy by the younger Breughel. It is by this accuracy of touch, this respect for differences of texture and material, this recognition of the part played in theensemble by insignificant detail, this artistic conscience, in a word, that Stevens demonstrates his descent from the great line of Flemish painters and makes good their tradition in modern life. Many of his sayings are expressive of his personal attitude toward art. For example:
"It is first of all necessary to be a painter. No one is wholly an artist who is not a perfect workman."
"When your right hand becomes too facile—more facile than the thought that guides it, use the left hand."
"Do not put into a picture too many things which attract attention. When every one speaks at once no one is heard."
Concerning technique, he says to his pupils: "Paint quantities of flowers. It is excellent practice. Use the palette knife to unite and smooth the color, efface with the knife the traces of the brush. When one paints with a brush the touches seen through a magnifying glass are streaked with light and shade because of the hairs of the brush. The use of the palette knife renders these strokes as smooth as marble, the shadows have disappeared. The material brought together renders the tone more beautiful. Marble has never an ugly tone."
"One may use impasto, but not everywhere. Your brush should be handled with reference to the character of what you are copying ... do not forget that anapple is smooth. I should like to see you model a billiard ball. Train yourself to have a true eye."
These are precepts that might be given by any good painter, but few of the moderns could more justly claim to have practiced all that they preached.
As a creative artist Stevens had his limitations. His lineal arrangements are seldom entirely fortunate and his compositions, despite the skill with which the given space is filled, lack except in rare instances the serenity of less crowded canvasses. He invariably strove to gain atmosphere by his choice and treatment of accessories but he rarely used the delicate device of elimination. Nevertheless he was a great painter and a great Belgian, untrammeled by foreign influences. He not only drank from his own glass but he drank from it the rich old wines of his native country.
In the Print Room of the New York Public Library are a large number of etchings by Jacques Callot, which are a mine of wealth to the painter-etcher of to-day, curious of the methods of his predecessors. Looking at the portrait of Callot in which he appears at the height of his brief career with well formed, gracious features, ardent eyes, a bearing marked by serenity and distinction, an expression both grave and genial, the observer inevitably must ask: "Is this the creator of that grotesque manner of drawing which for nearly three centuries has borne his name, the artist of theBalli, theGobbi, theBeggars?" In this dignified, imaginative countenance we have no hint of Callot's tremendous curiosity regarding the most fantastic side of the fantastic times in which he lived. We see him in the rôle least emphasized by his admirers, although that to which the greater number of his working years were dedicated: the rôle, that is, of moralist, philosopher and historian, one deeply impressed by the sufferings and cruelties of which he became a sorrowful critic.
There surely never was an artist whose life and environment were more faithfully illustrated by his art. To know one is to know the other, at least as they appear from the outside, for with Callot, as with the less veracious and ingenuous Watteau, it is the external aspect of things that we get and from which we must form our inferences. Only in his selection of his subjects do we find the preoccupation of his mind; in his rendering he is detached and impersonal, helping us out at times in our knowledge of his mental attitude with such quaint rhymes as those accompanyingLes Grandes Misères de la Guerre, but chiefly confining his hand to the representation of forms, relations and distances, with as little concern as possible for the expression of his own temperament, or for psychological portraiture of any sort.
In the little history, more or less authenticated, of his eventful youth is the key to his charm as an artist, a charm the essence of which is freedom, an easy, informal way of looking at the visible world, a light abandon in the method of reproducing it, an independence of the tool or medium, resulting in art which, despite its minuteness of detail, seems to "happen" as Whistler has said all true art must. The beginning was distinctly picturesque, befitting a nature to which the world at first unfolded itself as a great Gothic picturebook filled with strange, eccentric and misshapen figures.
One spring day in 1604, a band of Bohemians, such as are described in Gautier'sLe Capitaine Fracasse, might have been seen journeying through the smiling country of Lorraine on their way to Florence to be present there at the great Fair of the Madonna. No gipsy caravan of to-day would so much as suggest that bizarre and irresponsible company of men, women, and children, clad in motley rags, some in carts, some trudging on foot, some mounted on asses or horses rivaling Rosinante in bony ugliness, the men armed with lance, cutlass and rifle, a cask of wine strapped to the back of one, a lamb in the arms of another. A couple of the swarming children were decked out with cooking utensils, an iron pot for a hat, a turnspit for a cane, a gridiron hanging in front apron wise. Chickens, ducks, and other barnyard plunder testified to the marauding course of the troop whose advent at an inn was the signal for terrified flight on the part of the inmates. The camp by night, if no shelter were at hand, was in the forest, where the travelers tied their awnings to the branches of trees, built their fires, dressed their stolen meats, and lived so far as they could accomplish it on the fat of the land—for the most part of their way a rich and lovely land of vine-clad hills and opulent verdure.
The period was lavish in curious gay figures to set against the peaceful background of the landscape.Strolling players of the open-air theaters, jugglers, fortune-tellers, acrobats, Pierrots, and dancers amused the pleasure-loving people. The band of Bohemians just described was but one of many. Its peculiarity consisted in the presence among its members of a singularly fair and spirited child, about twelve years of age, whose alert face and gentle manner indicated an origin unmistakably above that of his companions. This was little Jacques Callot, son of Renée Brunehault and Jean Callot, and grandson of the grandniece of the Maid of Orleans, whose self-reliant temper seems to have found its way to this remote descendant.
Already determined to be an artist, he had left home with almost no money in his pocket and without the consent of his parents, set upon finding his way to Rome, where one of his playfellows—the Israel Henriet, "son ami," whose name is seen upon so many of the later Callot prints—was studying.
Falling in with the gipsies, he traveled with them for six or eight weeks, receiving impressions of a flexible, wanton, vagabond life that were never entirely to lose their influence upon his talent, although his most temperate and scholarly biographer, M. Meaume, finds little of Bohemianism in his subsequent manner of living. Félibien records that according to Callot's own account, when he found himself in such wicked company, "helifted his heart to God and prayed for grace not to join in the disgusting debauchery that went on under his eyes." He added also that he always asked God to guide him and to give him grace to be a good man, beseeching Him that he might excel in whatever profession he should embrace, and that he "might live to be forty-three years old." Strangely enough this most explicit prayer was granted to the letter, and was a prophecy in outline of his future.
Arriving in Florence with his friends the Bohemians, fortune seemed about to be gracious to him. His delicate face with its indefinable suggestions of good breeding attracted the attention of an officer of the Duke, who took the first step toward fulfilling his ambition by placing him with the painter and engraver, Canta Gallina, who taught him design and gave him lessons in the use of the burin. His taste was already for oddly formed or grotesque figures, and to counteract this tendency Gallina had him copy the most beautiful works of the great masters.
Possibly this conventional beginning palled upon his boyish spirit, or he may merely have been impatient to reach Israel and behold with his own eyes the golden city described in his friend's letters. At all events, he shortly informed his master that he must leave him and push on to Rome. Gallina was not lacking in sympathy,for he gave his pupil a mule and a purse and plenty of good advice, and started him on his journey.
Stopping at Siena, Callot gained his first notion of the style, later to become so indisputably his own, from Duccio's mosaics, the pure unshadowed outline of which he bore in mind when he dismissed shading and cross-hatching from the marvelously expressive little figures that throng his prints. He had hardly entered Rome, however, when some merchants from the town of Nancy, his birthplace, recognized him and bore him, protesting, back to his home.
Once more he ran away, this time taking the route to Italy through Savoy and leading adventurous days. In Turin he was met by his elder brother and again ignominiously returned to his parents. But his persistence was not to go unrewarded. The third time that he undertook to seek the light burning for him in the city of art, he went with his father's blessing, in the suite of the ambassador dispatched to the Pope by the new duke, Henry II.
It is said that a portrait of Charles the Bold, engraved by Jacques from a painting, was what finally turned the scale in favor of his studying seriously with the purpose of making art his profession. He had gained smatterings of knowledge, so far as the use of his tools went, from Dumange Crocq, an engraver and Master of theMint to the Duke of Lorraine, and from his friend Israel's father, chief painter to Charles III. He had the habit also of sketching on the spot whatever happened to attract his attention.
In truth he had lost but little time. At the age of seventeen he was at work, and very hard at work, in Rome under Tempesta. Money failing him, he became apprenticed to Philippe Thomassin, a French engraver, who turned out large numbers of rubbishy prints upon which his apprentices were employed at so much a day. Some three years spent in this fashion taught Callot less art than skill in the manipulation of his instruments. Much of his early work is buried in the mass of Thomassin's production, and such of it as can be identified is poor and trivial. His precocity was not the indication of rapid progress. His drawing was feeble and was almost entirely confined to copying until 1616, when, at the age of twenty-four, he began regularly to engrave his own designs, and to show the individuality of treatment and the abundant fancy that promptly won for him the respect of his contemporaries.
While he was in Thomassin's studio, it is reported that his bright charm of face and manner gained him the liking of Thomassin's young wife—much nearer in age to Callot than to her husband—and the jealousy of his master. He presently left the studio and Romeas well, never to return to either. It is the one misadventure suggestive of erratic tendencies admitted to Callot's story by M. Meaume, although other biographers have thrown over his life in Italy a sufficiently lurid light, hinting at revelries and vagaries and lawless impulses unrestrained. If, indeed, the brilliant frivolity of Italian society at that time tempted him during his early manhood, it could only have been for a brief space of years. After he was thirty all unquestionably was labor and quietness.
From Rome he went to Florence, taking with him some of the plates he recently had engraved. These at once found favor in the eyes of Cosimo II, of the Medici then ruling over Tuscany, and Callot was attached to his person and given a pension and quarters in what was called, "the artist's gallery." At the same time he began to study under the then famous Jules Parigi, and renewed his acquaintance with his old friend Canta Gallina, meeting in their studios the most eminent artists of the day—the bright day not yet entirely faded of the later Renaissance.