We saw dark-eyed, graceful manolas on balconies—this truly Spanish motive in art, as Spanish as is the Madonna Italian—over which are thrown gorgeous shawls, smiling, flirting; with languorous eyes and provocative fans, they sit ensconced as they sat in Goya's time and centuries before Goya, the Eternal Feminine of Spain. Zuloaga is her latest interpreter. Isn't Candida delicious in green, with black head-dress of lace—isn't she bewitching? Her stockings are green. The wall is a most miraculous adumbration of green. Across the room is another agent of disquiet in Nile green, Mercedes by name. Her aquiline nose, black eyes, and the flowers she wears at the side of her head bewilder; the sky, clouds, and landscape are all very lovely. This is a singularly limpid, loose, flowing picture. It has the paint quality sometimes missing in the bold, fat massing of the Zuloaga colour chords. The Montmartre Café concert singer is a sterling specimen of Zuloaga's portraiture. He is unconventional in his poses; he will jam a figure against the right side of the frame (as in the portrait of Marthe Morineau) or stand a young lady beside an ornamental iron gate in an open park (not a remarkable portrait, but one that pleases the ladies because of the textures). The head of the old actor capitally suggests the Spanish mummer. And the painter's cousin, Esperanza! What cousins he boasts! We recall The Three Cousins, with its laughing trio and the rich colour scheme. Our recollection, too, of The Piquant Retort, and its brown and scarlet harmonies; of the Promenade After the Bull-fight, which has the classical balance and spaced charm of Velasquez; and that startling Street of Love overbalances any picture except one in this exhibition, and that is The Bull-fighter's Family. The measuring eye of Zuloaga, his tremendous vitality, his sharp, superb transference to canvas of the life he has elected to represent and interpret are at first sight dazzling. The performance is so supreme—remember, not in a niggling, technical sense—a half-dozen men beat him at mere pyrotechnics and lacefioritura—that his limitations, very marked in his case, are overlooked. You have drunk a hearty Spanish wine; oil to the throat, confusion to the senses. You do not at first miss the soul; it is not included in the categories of Señor Zuloaga. Zuloaga, like his contemporary farther north, Anders Zorn, is a man as well as a painter; the conjunction is not too frequent. The grand manner is surely his. He has the modulatory sense, and Christian Brinton notes his sonorous acid effects. He paints beggars, dwarfs, work-girls, noblemen, bandits, dogs, horses, lovely women, gitanas, indolent Carmens; but real, not the pasteboard and foot-lights variety of Merimée and Bizet. Zuloaga's Spain is not a second-hand Italy, like that of so many Spanish painters. It is not all bric-a-brac and moonlight and chivalric tinpot helmets. It is the real Spain of to-day, the Spain that has at last awakened to the light of the twentieth century after sleeping so long, after sleeping, notwithstanding the desperate nudging it was given a century ago by the realist Goya. Now, Zuloaga is not only stepping on his country's toes, but he is recording the impressions he makes. He, too, is a realist, a realist with such magic in his brush that it would make us forgive him if he painted the odour of garlic.
Have you seen his Spanish Dancers? Not the dramatic Carmencita of Sargent, but the creature as she is, with her simian gestures, her insolence, her vulgarity, her teeth—and the shrill scarlet of the bare gum above the gleaming white, His street scenes are a transcript of the actual facts, and inextricably woven with the facts is a sense of the strange beauty of them all. His wine harvesters, venders of sacred images, or that fascinating canvas My Three Cousins—before these, also before the Promenade After the Bull-fight, you realise that by some miracle of nature the intensity of Goya and his sense of life, the charm of Velasquez and his sober dignity are recalled by the painting of a young Spanish artist who a decade ago was unknown. Nor is Zuloaga an eclectic. His force and individuality are too patent for us to entertain such a heresy. A glance at Jacques-Emile Blanche's portrait of the Spanish painter explains other things. There is the physique of a man who can work many hours a day before an easel; there are the penetrating eyes of an observer, spying eyes, slightly cruel; the head is an intellectual one, the general conformation of the face harmonious and handsome. The body is that of an athlete, but not of the bull-necked sort we see in Goya. The temperament suggested is impetuous, controlled by a strong will; it has been fined down by study and the enforced renunciations of poverty-haunted youth. Above all, there is race; race in the proud, resolute bearing, race in the large, firm, supple, and nervous hands. Indeed, the work of Zuloaga is all race. He is the most Spanish painter since Goya.
Zola, as reported by George Moore, said of Degas: "I cannot accept a man who shuts himself up all his life to draw a ballet girl as ranking co-equal in dignity and power with Flaubert, Daudet, and Goncourt." This remark gives us the cue for Zola's critical endowment; despite his asseverations his naturalism was only skin deep. He, too, was swayed by his literary notions concerning the importance of the subject. In painting the theme may count for little and yet a great picture result; in Zola's field there must be an appreciable subject, else no fiction. But what cant it is to talk about "dignity." Zola admits ingrained romanticism. He would not see, for instance, that the Degas ballet girls are on the same plane as the Ingres odalisques; that a still-life by Chardin outweighs a big canvas by David; and it must be admitted that the world is on the side of Zola. The heresy of the subject will never be stamped out, the painted anecdote will always win the eye of the easily satisfied majority.
It may be remembered that the great Spaniard began his apprenticeship to art by copying still-life, which he did in a superlative manner; his Bodegones, or kitchen pieces, testify to this. Chardin, who led as laborious an existence as Degas, shutting himself away from the world, studied surfaces with an intensity that Zola, the apostle of realism, would have misunderstood. Later the French painter devoted himself with equal success to genre and figure subjects; but for him there was no such category as still-life. Everything of substance, shape, weight, and colour is alive for the eye that observes, and, except Velasquez, Vermeer, and a few others, no man was endowed with the eye of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, an eye microscopic in intensity and that saw the beautiful in the homely.
Edmond Pilon has published a comprehensive little monograph in the series Les Maîtres de L'Art. M. Pilon is as sympathetic as he is just in his critical estimates of the man and his work. There is not much to relate of the quotidian life of the artist. His was not a romantic or a graceful figure among his contemporaries, the pastellist La Tour, Fragonard, and the rest, nor had his personality a jot of the mysterious melancholy of Watteau. His artistic ancestry was Dutch; in the footsteps of De Hooch, the younger Teniers, Vermeer, Terburg, Kalf, he trod, rather plodded, producing miracles of light, colour, finish. A long patience his career, he never indulged in brilliancy for the mere sake of brilliancy; nevertheless he was an amazing virtuoso of the brush. He was born in the Rue de Seine, Paris, November 2,1699. His father, Jean Chardin, a joiner, was a man of artistic instinct whose furniture and marquetrie were admired and in demand. The lad began his tuition under Cazes, but soon went to the atelier of Coypel. Later he worked under the eye of Carle Vanloo in the restoration of the large gallery at Fontainebleau. His painting of a barber-chirurgeon's sign drew upon him the notice of several artists of influence and he became a member of the Academy of St. Luc. When he exhibited for the first time in public, in the Place Dauphine, 1728, Watteau had been dead seven years; Coypel, Allegrain, Vanloo, Troy, and the imitators of the pompous art of Le Brun were the vogue. Colour had become a conventional abstraction; design, of the most artificial sort, the prime requisite for a sounding reputation. The unobtrusive art of Chardin, who went to nature not to books for his inspiration, was not appreciated. He was considered a belated Dutchman, though his superior knowledge of values ought to have proved him something else. Diderot, alone among the critics of his epoch, saluted him in company with the great Buffon as a man whom nature had taken into her confidence.
In 1728 he was received at the Academy as painter of fruit and flowers. He married his first wife, Marguerite Saintan, in 1731, and his son, J.B. Chardin, was born the same year. In 1735 he lost his wife and infant daughter, and the double blow drove him into retirement, but he exposed his pictures from time to time. He was made counsellor of the Academy in 1743, and in 1744 married the second time, a widow, Françoise Marguerite Pouget by name. This was a happy marriage; Madame Chardin, a sensible, good-tempered bourgeoise, regulated the household accounts, and brought order and peace into the life of the lonely artist. Hereafter he painted without interruptions. He received from the king a pension of five hundred francs, his son obtained the prix de Rome for a meritorious canvas, and if he had had his father's stable temperament he would have ended an admirable artist. But he was reckless, and died at Venice in a mysterious manner, drowned in a canal, whether by murder or suicide no one knew. Chardin never recovered his spirits after this shock. The king offered him lodging in the gallery of the Louvre (Logement No. 12). This was accepted, as much as he disliked leaving his comfortable little house in the Rue Princesse. As he aged he suffered from various ailments and his eyes began to give him trouble; then it was he took up pastels. December 6, 1779, he died, his wife surviving him until 1791.
He was a man of short stature, broad-shouldered and muscular. Liked by his friends and colleagues for his frankness, there was a salt savour in his forthright speech—he never learned to play the courtier. His manners were not polished, a certain rusticity clung to him always, but his honesty was appreciated and he held positions of trust. Affectionate, slow—with the Dutch slowness praised by Rodin—and tenacious, he set out to conquer a small corner in the kingdom of art, and to-day he is first among the Little Masters. This too convenient appellation must not class him with such myopic miniaturists as Meissonier. There are breadth of style, rich humanity, largeness of feeling, apart from his remarkable technique, that place him in the company of famous portrait painters. He does not possess what are called "general ideas"; he sounds no tragic chords; he has no spoor of poetry, but he sees the exterior world steadily; he is never obvious, and he is a sympathetic interpreter in the domestic domain and of character. His palette is as aristocratic as that of Velasquez: the music he makes, like that of the string quartet, borders on perfection.
At his début he so undervalued his work that Vanloo, after reproaching the youth for his modesty, paid him double for a picture. Another time he gave a still-life to a friend in exchange for a waistcoat whose flowery pattern appealed to him. His pictures did not fetch fair prices during his lifetime; after more than half a century of hard work he left little for his widow. Nor in the years immediately subsequent to that of his death did values advance much. The engraver Wille bought a still-life for thirty-six livres, a picture that to-day would sell for thousands of dollars. At the beginning of the last century, in 1810, when David was ruler of the arts in Paris, the two masterpieces in pastel, now in the Louvre, the portraits of Chardin aux besicles, and the portrait of Marguerite Pouget, his second spouse, could have been bought for twenty-four francs. In 1867 at the Laperlier sale the Pourvoyeuse was sold for four thousand and fifty francs to the Louvre, and forty years later the Louvre gave three hundred and fifty thousand francs to Madame Emile Trépard for Le Jeune Homme au Violon and l'Enfant au Toton. Diderot truly prophesied that the hour of reparation would come.
He is a master of discreet tonalities and a draughtsman of the first order. His lighting, more diffused than Rembrandt's, is the chief actor in his scene. With it he accomplishes magical effects, with it he makes beautiful copper caldrons, humble vegetables, leeks, carrots, potatoes, onions, shining rounds of beef, hares, and fish become eloquent witnesses to the fact that there is nothing dead or ugly in nature if the vision that interprets is artistic. It is said that no one ever saw Chardin at work in his atelier, but his method, hisfacturehas been ferreted out though never excelled. He employs the division of tones, hiscouchesare fat and his colour is laid on lusciously. His colour is never hot; coolness of tone is his chief allurement. Greuze, passing one of his canvases at an exhibition, a long time regarded it and went away, heaving a sigh of envy. The frivolous "Frago," who studied with Chardin for a brief period, even though he left him for Boucher, admired his former master without understanding him. Decamps later exclaimed in the Louvre: "The whites of Chardin! I don't know how to recapture them." He might have added the silvery grays. M. Pilon remarks that as in the case of Vermeer the secret of Chardin tones has never been surprised. The French painter knew the art of modulation, while his transitions are bold; he enveloped his objects in atmosphere and gave his shadows a due share of luminosity. He placed his colours so that at times his work resembles mosaic or tapestry. He knew a century before the modern impressionists the knack of juxtaposition, of opposition, of tonal division; his science was profound. He must have studied Watteau and the Dutchmen closely. Diderot was amazed to find that his surpassing whites were neither black nor white, but a neuter—but by a subtle transposition of tones looked white. Chardin worked from an accumulation of notes, but there are few sketches of his in existence, asanguineor two. The paucity of the Velasquez sketches has piqued criticism. Like Velasquez, Chardin was of a reflective temperament, a slow workman and a patient corrector.
The intimate charm of the Chardin interiors is not equalled even in the Vermeer canvases. At the Louvre, which contains at least thirty of the masterpieces, consider the sweetness of Le Benedicite, or the three pastels, and then turn to the fruits, flowers, kitchen utensils, game, or to La Raie Ouverte, that magnificent portrait of a skatefish, with its cat slyly stealing over opened oysters, the table-cloth of such vraisemblance that the knife balanced on the edge seems to lie in a crease. What bulk, what destiny, whatchatoyanttones! Here are qualities of paint and vision pictorial, vision that has never been approached; paint without rhetoric, paint sincere, and the expression in terms of beautiful paint of natural truths. In Chardin's case—by him the relativity of mundane things was accepted with philosophic phlegm—an onion was more important than an angel, a copper stew-pan as thrilling as an epic. And then the humanity of his youth holding a fiddle and bow, the exquisite textures of skin and hair, and the glance of the eyes. You believe the story told of his advice to his confrère: "Paint with sentiment." But he mixed his sentiment with lovely colours, he is one of the chief glories of France as a colourist.
Some Frenchman has called the theatre a book reversed. It is a happy epigram. By a similar analogy the engraving or mezzotint might be described as a reversed picture. And with still more propriety black and white reproductions may be compared to the pianoforte in the hands of a skilful artist. The pianoforte can interpret in cooler tones orchestral scores. It gives in its all-formal severity the line; the colour is only suggested. But such is the tendency of modern music toward painting that the success of a pianoforte virtuoso to-day depends upon his ability to arouse within his listeners' imagination the idea of colour—in reality, the emotional element. The engraver evokes colour by his cunning interplay of line and cross hatching; the mezzotinter by his disposition of dark masses and white spaces. Indeed, the mezzotint by reason of its warm, more sympathetic, and ductile medium has always seemed more colourful in his plates than the most laboriously executed steel engravings. In this sense the scraper beats the burin, while the etcher, especially if he be a painter, attains a more personal vision than either one of these processes. "The stone was made for the mystics," say the Pennells. The revival of lithography by contemporary artists of fame is very welcome.
Above all, the appeal of engraving, mezzotint, and etching is to the refined. It is an art of a peculiarly intimate character. Just as some prefer the exquisite tonal purity and finished performances of the Kneisel String Quartet to the blare and thunder of the Philharmonic Society; just as some enjoy in silence beautiful prose more than our crude drama, so the lovers of black and white may feel themselves a distinctive class. They have at their elbow disposed in portfolios or spaced on walls the eloquent portraiture, the world's masterpieces, marine views, and landscapes. There is no better way to study painting historically than in the cabinet of an engraving collector. Furthermore, divested of bad or mediocre paint—many famous pictures by famous names are mere cartoons, the paint peeled or peeling off—the student and amateur penetrates to the very marrow of the painter's conception, to the very skeleton of his technical methods.
"Battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars" is a line from Wordsworth that Thomas de Quincey approvingly quotes in regard to his opium-induced "architectural dreams," and, aptly enough, immediately after a page devoted to Piranesi, the etcher, architect, and visionary. You may find this page in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, that book of terror, beauty, mystification, and fudge (De Quincey deluded himself quite as much as his readers in this autobiography, which, like the confessions of most distinguished men, must not be taken too literally): "Many years ago," he wrote, "when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, which record the scenery of his own soul during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (described only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase, and upon it, groping his way upward, was Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little farther and you perceive it to come to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onward to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi? You suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eyes, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi on his aspiring labours, and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall."
This plate was evidently one of the Carceri set—sixteen in all—which the etcher improvised after some severe cerebral malady. What would we not give to have heard the poet of Kubla Khan describing the fantastic visions of the Venetian artist to the English opium eater! The eloquence of the prose passage we have transcribed has in it some faint echoes of Coleridge's golden rumble. That these two men appreciated the Italian is something; perhaps they saw chiefly in his work its fantastic side. There was no saner craftsman than Piranesi apart from certain of his plates; no more solid construction in a print can be shown than his various interpretations of the classic ruins of Rome, the temples at Pæstum. He was a great engraver and etcher whose passion was the antique. He deliberately withdrew from all commerce with the ideas and art of his own times. He loved architecture for architecture's sake; not as a decoration, not as a background for humanity, but as something personal. It was for him what the human face was for Rembrandt and Velasquez. That he was called the Rembrandt of Architecture is but another testimony to the impression he made upon his contemporaries, though the title is an unhappy one. Piranesi even in his own little fenced-off coign of art is not comparable to the etcher of the Hundred Guilder print, nor are there close analogies in their respective handling of darks and lights.
It might be nearer the mark to call Piranesi—though all such comparisons are thorns in the critical flesh—the Salvator Rosa of architecture, for there is much of Salvator's unbridled violence, fantasy, and genius for deforming the actual that is to be encountered in some of Piranesi's works. His was not a classic temperament. The serene, airy, sun-bathed palaces and temples which Claude introduced into his foregrounds are seldom encountered in Piranesi. A dark Gothic imagination his, Gothic and often cruel. In his etching of public buildings at Rome or elsewhere, while he is not always faultless in drawing or scrupulous in observation, such was the sincerity and passion of the man that he has left us the noblest transcriptions of these stately edifices and monuments. It is in the rhythmic expression of his personal moods that his sinister romantic imaginings are revealed, and with a detail and fulness that are positively overwhelming.
It should not be forgotten that in the eighteenth and in the early part of the nineteenth centuries Piranesi achieved widespread popularity. He was admired outside of Italy, in England, in France, and Germany. A generation that in England read Vathek and Mrs. Radcliffe, supped on the horrors of Melmoth and Frankenstein, knew E.T.W. Hoffmann and the German romantic literature, could be relied on to take up Piranesi, and for his lesser artistic side. Poe knew his work and Baudelaire; we see that for De Quincey he was a kindred spirit. The English mezzotinter John Martin must have studied him closely, also Gustave Doré.
The Carceri (1750) of Piranesi are indoor compositions, enclosed spaces in which wander aimlessly or deliriously the wraiths of damned men, not a whit less wretched nor awful than Dante's immemorial mob. Piranesi shows us cavernous abodes where appalling engines of torture fill the foreground, while above, at vertiginous heights, we barely discern perilous passageways, haunted windows peering out upon the high heavens, stone-fretted ceilings that are lost in a magic mist. By a sort of diabolic modulation the artist conducts our eye from these dizzy angles and granitic convolutions down tortuous and tumultuous staircases that seemingly wind about the axis of eternity. To traverse them would demand an eternity and the nerves of a madman. Lower barbaric devices reveal this artist's temperament. He is said to have executed the prison set "during the delirium of fever." This is of the same calibre as the clotted nonsense about Poe composing when intoxicated or Liszt playing after champagne. It is a credible anecdote for Philistines who do not realise that even the maddest caprice, whether in black and white, marble, music, or verse, must be executed in silence and cold blood. Piranesi simply gave wing to his fancy, recalling the more vivid of his nightmares—as did Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, and the rest of the drug-steeped choir. We recall one plate of Piranesi's in which a miserable devil climbs a staircase suspended over an abyss; as he mounts each step the lower one crumbles into the depths below.
The agony of the man (do you recall The Torture by Hope of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam?) is shown in his tense, crouching attitude, his hands clawing the masonry above him. Nature is become a monstrous fever, existence a shivering dread. You overhear the crash of stone into the infernal cellarage—where awaits the hunted wretch perhaps a worse fate than on the pinnacles above. It is a companion piece to Martin's Sadak searching for the Waters of Oblivion. Another plate depicts with ingenuity terraces superimposed upon terraces, archways spaced like massive music, narrow footways across which race ape-like men, half naked, eagerly preparing some terrible punishments for criminals handcuffed and guarded. They are to walk a sharp-spiked bridge. Gigantic chains swing across stony precipices, a lamp depends from a roof whose outlines are merged in the gray dusk of dreams. There is cruelty, horror, and a sense of the wickedly magnificent in the ensemble. What crimes were committed to merit such atrocious punishment? The boldness and clearness of it all! With perspicacity George Saintsbury wrote of Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony: "It is the best example of dream literature that I know—most writers who have tried this style have erred, inasmuch as they have endeavoured to throw a portion of the mystery with which the waking mind invests dreams over the dream itself. Any one's experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong. The events of dreams, as they happen, are quite plain and matter of fact, and it is only in the intervals that any suspicion occurs to the dreamer."
Certainly Piranesi remembered his dreams. He is a realist in his delineation of details, though the sweep and breadth of an ideal design are never absent. He portrays ladders that scale bulky joists, poles of incredible thickness, cyclopean block and tackling. They are of wood, not metal nor marble, for the art of Piranesi is full of discriminations. Finally, you weary. The eye gorged by all the mystic engines, hieroglyphs of pain from some impossible inquisition—though not once do we see a monkish figure—all these anonymous monkey men scurrying on what errand Piranesi alone knows; these towering arches, their foundations resting on the crest of hell (you feel the tremendous impact of the architectural mass upon the earth—no mean feat to represent or rather to evoke the sense of weight, of pressure on a flat surface); the muffled atmosphere in these prisons from which no living prisoner emerges; of them all you weary, for the normal brain can only stand a certain dose of the delirious and the melancholy. This aspect, then, of Piranesi's art, black magic in all its potency, need no longer detain us. His Temples of Pæstum sound a less morbid key than his Carceri, and as etchings quite outrank them.
Giambattista Piranesi was born at Venice in 1720. Bryan says that about 1738 his father sent him to Rome, where he studied under Valeriani, through whom he acquired the style of Valeriani's master, Marco Ricci of Belluno. With Vasi, a Sicilian engraver, he learned that art. Ricci and Pannini were much in vogue, following the example of Claude in his employment of ruins as a picturesque element in a composition. But Piranesi excelled both Ricci and Pannini. He was an architect, too, helping to restore churches, and this accounts for the proud title, Architect of Venice, which may be seen on some of his plates. He lived for a time in Venice, but Rome drew him to her with an imperious call. And, notwithstanding the opposition of his father, to Rome he went, and for forty years devoted himself to his master passion, the pictorial record of the beloved city, the ancient portions of which were fast vanishing owing to time and the greed of their owners. This was Piranesi's self-imposed mission, begun as an exalted youth, finished as an irritable old man. Among his architectural restorations, made at the request of Clement XIII, were the two churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Il Priorato. Lanciani says that Il Priorato is "a mass of monstrosities inside and out." It is his etching, not his labour as an architect, that will make Piranesi immortal. He seems to have felt this, for he wrote that he had "executed a work which will descend to posterity and will last so long as there will be men desirous of knowing all that has survived the ruins of the most famous city of the universe."
In the black-and-white portrait of the etcher by F. Polonzani, we see a full-cheeked man with a well-developed forehead, the features of the classic Roman order, the general expression not far removed from a sort of sullen self-satisfaction. But the eyes redeem. They are full, lustrous, penetrating, and introspective. The portrait etched by the son of Piranesi, after a statue, discovers him posed in a toga, the general effect being classic and consular. His life, like that of all good workmen in art, was hardly an eventful one. He married precipitately and his wife bore him two sons (Francesco, the etcher, born at Rome, 1748—Bryan gives the date as 1756—died at Paris, 1810) and a daughter (Laura, born at Rome, 1750—date of death unknown). These children were a consolation to him. Both were engravers. Francesco frequently assisted his father in his work, and Bryan says that Laura's work resembled her father's. She went to Paris with her brother and probably died there. She left some views of Rome. Francesco, with his brother Pietro, attempted to found an academy in Paris and later a terra cotta manufactory.
The elder Piranesi was of a quarrelsome disposition. He wrangled with an English patron, Viscount Charlemont, and, like Beethoven, destroyed title-pages when he became displeased with the subject of his dedications. He was decorated with the Order of Christ and was proud of his membership in the London Society of Antiquaries. It is said that the original copper plates of his works were captured by a British man-of-war during the Napoleonic conflict. This probably accounts for the dissemination of so many revamped and coarsely executed versions of his compositions. His besetting fault was a tendency toward an Egyptian blackness in his composition. Fond of strong contrasts as was John Martin, he is, at times, as great a sinner in the handling of his blacks. An experimenter of audacity, Piranesi's mastery of the technique of etching has seldom been equalled, and even in his inferior work the skilful printing atones for many defects. The remarkable richness and depth of tone, brought about by continuous and innumerable bitings, and other secret processes known only to himself, make his plates warm and brilliant. Nobility of form, grandeur of mass, a light and shade that is positively dramatic in its dispersion over wall and tower, are the characteristic marks of this unique etcher. He could not resist the temptation of dotting with figures the huge spaces of his ruins. They dance or recline or indulge in uncouth gestures. His shadows are luminous—you may gaze into them; his high lights caught on some projection or salient cornice or silvering the August porticoes of a vanished past, all these demonstrate his feeling for the dramatic. And dramatic is the impression evoked as you study the majestic temples that were Pæstum, the bare, ruined arches and pillars that were Rome. It is Pæstum that is the more vivid. It tallies, too, with the Piranesi plates; while Rome has visibly changed since his day. His original designs for chimneys, Diverse Maniere d'Adornare i Camini, are pronounced by several critics as "foolish and vulgar." He left nearly two thousand etchings, and died at Rome November 9, 1778. His son erected a mediocre statue by Angolin for his tomb in Il Priorato. A manuscript life of Piranesi, which was in London about 1830, is now lost. Bryan's dictionary gives a partial list of his works "as published both by himself in Rome and by his sons in Paris. The plates passed from his sons first to Firmin-Didot, and ultimately into the hands of the Papal Government."
De Quincey's quotation of Wordsworth is apposite in describing Piranesi's creations: "Battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars"; from sheer brutal masonry, gray, aged, and moss-encrusted, he invented a precise pattern and one both passionate and magical.
Until the recent appearance of the Baudelaire letters (1841-66) all that we knew of Meryon's personality and art was to be found in the monograph by Philippe Burty and Béraldi's Les Graveurs du XIX Siècle. Hamerton had written of the French etcher in 1875 (Etching and Etchers), and various anecdotes about his eccentric behaviour were public property. Frederick Wedmore, in his Etching in England, did not hesitate to group Meryon's name with Rembrandt's and Jacquemart's (one feels like employing the Whistlerian formula and asking: Why drag in Jacquemart?); and to-day, after years of critical indifference, the unhappy copper-scratcher has come into his own. You may find him mentioned in such company as Dürer, Rembrandt, and Whistler. The man who first acclaimed him as worthy of associating with Rembrandt was the critic Charles Baudelaire; and we are indebted to him for new material dealing with the troubled life of Charles Meryon.
On January 8, 1860, Baudelaire wrote to his friend and publisher, Poulet-Malassis, that what he intends to say is worth the bother of writing. Meryon had called, first sending a card upon which he scrawled: "You live in a hotel the name of which doubtless attracted you because of your tastes." Puzzled by this cryptic introduction, the poet then noted that the address read: Charles Baudelaire, Hôtel de Thébes. He did not stop at a hotel bearing that name, but, fancying him a Theban, Meryon took the matter for granted. This letter was forwarded. Meryon appeared. His first question would have startled any but Baudelaire, who prided himself on startling others. The etcher, looking as desperate and forlorn as in the Bracquemond etched portrait (1853), demanded news of a certain Edgar Poe. Baudelaire responded sadly that he had not known Poe personally. Then he was eagerly asked if he believed in the reality of this Poe. Charles began to suspect the sanity of his visitor. "Because," added Meryon, "there is a society of littérateurs, very clever, very powerful, and knowing all the ropes." His reasons for suspecting a cabal formed against him under the guise of Poe's name were these: The Murders in the Rue Morgue. "I made a design of the Morgue—an orang-outang. I have been often compared to a monkey. This orang-outang assassinated two women, a mother and daughter. Et moi aussi, j'ai assassiné moralement deux femmes, la mère et sa fille. I have always taken this story as an allusion to my misfortunes. You, M. Baudelaire, would do me a great favour if you could find the date when Edgar Poe, supposing he was not assisted by any one, wrote his tale. I wish to see if this date coincides with my adventures." After that Baudelaire knew his man.
Meryon spoke with admiration of Michelet's Jeanne d'Arc, though he swore the book was not written by Michelet. (Not such a wild shot, though not correct in this particular instance, for the world has since discovered that several books posthumously attributed to Michelet were written by his widow.) The etcher was interested in the cabalistic arts. On one of his large plates he drew some eagles, and when Baudelaire objected that these birds did not frequent Parisian skies he mysteriously whispered "those folks at the Tuileries" often launched as a rite the sacred eagles to study the omens and presages. He was firmly convinced of this. After the termination of the trying visit Baudelaire, with acrid irony, asks himself why he, with his nerves usually unstrung, did not go quite mad, and he concludes, "Seriously I addressed to Heaven the grateful prayers of a pharisee."
In March the same year he assures the same correspondent that decidedly Meryon does not know how to conduct himself. He knows nothing of life, neither does he know how to sell his plates or find an editor. His work is very easy to sell. Baudelaire was hardly a practical business man, but, like Poe, he had sense enough to follow his market. He instantly recognised the commercial value of Meryon's Paris set, but knew the etcher was a hopeless character. He wrote to Poulet-Malassis concerning a proposed purchase of Meryon's work by the publisher. It never came to anything. The etcher was very suspicious as to paper and printing. He grew violent when the poet asked him to illustrate some little poems and sonnets. Had he, Meryon, not written poems himself? Had not the mighty Victor Hugo addressed flattering words to him? Baudelaire, without losing interest, then thought of Daumier as an illustrator for a new edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. It must not be supposed, however, that Meryon was ungrateful. He was deeply affected by the praise accorded him in Baudelaire's Salon of 1859. He wrote in February, 1860, sending his Views of Paris to the critic as a feeble acknowledgment of the pleasure he had enjoyed when reading the brilliant interpretative criticism. He said that he had created an epoch in etching—which was the literal truth—and he had saved a rapidly vanishing Paris for the pious curiosity of future generations. He speaks of his "naïve heart" and hoped that Baudelaire in turn would dream as he did over the plates. This letter was signed simply "Meryon, 20 Rue Duperré." The acute accent placed over the "e" in his name by the French poet and by biographers, critics, and editors since was never used by the etcher. It took years before Baudelaire could persuade the Parisians that Poe did not spell his name "Edgard Poë." And we remember the fate of Liszt and Whistler, who were until recently known in Paris as "Litz" and "Whistler." With the aid of Champfleury and Banville, Baudelaire tried to bring Meryon's art to the cognisance of the Minister of Beaux-Arts, but to no avail. Why?
There was a reason. Bohemian as was the artist during the last decade of his life, he did not always haunt low cafés and drink absinthe. His beginnings were as romantic as a page of Balzac. He was born a gentlemanà la main gauche. His father was the doctor and private secretary of Lady Stanhope. Charles Lewis Meryon was an English physician, who, falling in love with a ballet dancer at the Opéra, Pierre Narcisse Chaspoux, persuaded her that it would be less selfish on her part if she would not bind him to her legally. November 23,1821, a sickly, nervous, and wizened son was born to the pair and baptised with his father's name, who, being an alien, generously conceded that much. There his interest ceased. On the mother fell the burden of the boy's education. At five he was sent to school at Passy and later went to the south of France. In 1837 he entered the Brest naval school, and 1839 saw him going on his maiden voyage. This first trip was marred by the black sorrow that fell upon him when informed of his illegitimate birth. "I was mad from the time I was told of my birth," he wrote, and until madness supervened he suffered from a "wounded imagination." He was morbid, shy, and irritable, and his energy—the explosive energy of this frail youth was amazing; because he had been refused the use of a ship boat he wasted three months digging out a canoe from a log of wood. Like Paul Gauguin, he saw many countries, and his eyes were trained to form, though not colour—he suffered from Daltonism—for when he began to paint he discovered he was totally colour-blind. The visible world for him existed as a contrapuntal net-work of lines, silhouettes, contours, or heavy dark masses. When a sailor he sketched. Meryon tells of the drawing of a little fungus he found in Akaroa. "Distorted in form and pinched and puny from its birth, I could not but pity it; it seemed to me so entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not deny it a place in mysouvenirs de voyage, and so I drew it carefully." This bit of fungus was to him a symbol of his own gnarled existence.
Tiring of ship life, he finally decided to study art. He had seen New Zealand, Australia, Italy, New Caledonia, and if his splendid plate—No. 22 in M. Burty's list—is evidence, he must have visited San Francisco. Baudelaire, in L'Art Romantique, speaks of this perspective of San Francisco as being Meryon's most masterly design. In 1846 he quit seafaring. He was in mediocre health, and though from a cadet he had attained the rank of lieutenant it was doubtful if he would ever rise higher. His mother had left him four thousand dollars, so he went over to the Latin Quarter and began to study painting. That he was unfitted for, and meeting Eugène Bléry he became interested in etching. A Dutch seventeenth-century etcher and draughtsman, Reiner Zeeman by name, attracted him. He copied, too, Ducereau and Nicolle. "An etching by the latter of a riverside view through the arch of a bridge is like a link between Meryon and Piranesi," says D.S. MacColl. Meryon also studied under the tuition of a painter named Phelippes. He went to Belgium in 1856 on the invitation of the Duc d'Aremberg, and in 1858 he was sent to Charenton suffering from melancholy and delusions. He left in a year and returned to Paris and work; but, as Baudelaire wrote, a cruel demon had touched the brain of the artist. A mystic delirium set in. He ceased to etch, and evidently suffered from the persecution madness. In every corner he believed conspiracies were hatching. He often disappeared, often changed his abode. Sometimes he would appear dressed gorgeously at a boulevard café in company with brilliant birds of prey; then he would be seen slinking through mean streets in meaner rags. There are episodes in his life that recall the career of another man of genius, Gerard de Nerval, poet, noctambulist, suicide. It is known that Meryon destroyed his finest plates, but not in a mad fit. Baudelaire says that the artist, who was a perfectionist, did not wish to see his work suffer from rebiting, so he quite sensibly sawed up the plates into tiny strips. That he was suspicious of his fellow-etchers is illustrated in the story told by Sir Seymour Haden, who bought several of his etchings from him at a fair price. Two miles away from the atelier the Englishman was overtaken by Meryon. He asked for the proofs he had sold, "as they were of a nature to compromise him"; besides, from what he knew of Haden's etchings he was determined that his proofs should not go to England. Sir Seymour at once returned the etchings. Now, whether Meryon's words were meant as a compliment or the reverse is doubtful. He was half crazy, but he may have seen through a hole in the millstone.
Frederick Keppel once met in Paris an old printer named Beillet who did work for Meryon. He could not always pay for the printing of his celebrated Abside de Notre Dame, a masterpiece, as he hadn't the necessary ten cents. "I never got my money!" exclaimed the thrifty printer. Enormous endurance, enormous vanity, diseased pride, outraged human sentiment, hatred of the Second Empire because of the particular clause in the old Napoleonic code relating to the research of paternity; an irregular life, possibly drugs, certainly alcoholism, repeated rejections by the academic authorities, critics, and dealers of his work—these and a feeble constitution sent the unfortunate back to Charenton, where he died February 14, 1868. Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, had only preceded him to a lunatic's grave six months earlier. Inasmuch as there is a certain family likeness among men of genius with disordered minds and instincts, several comparisons might be made between Meryon and Baudelaire. Both were great artists and both were born with flawed, neurotic systems. Dissipation and misery followed as a matter of course.
Charles Meryon was, nevertheless, a sane and a magnificent etcher. He executed about a hundred plates, according to Burty. He did not avoid portraiture, and to live he sometimes manufactured pot-boilers for the trade. To his supreme vision was joined a miraculous surety of touch. Baudelaire was right—those plates, the Paris set, so dramatic and truthful in particulars, could have been sold if Meryon, with his wolfish visage, his fierce, haggard eyes, his gruff manner, had not offered them in person. He looked like a vagabond very often and too often acted like a brigand. The Salon juries were prejudiced against his work because of his legend. Verlaine over again! The etchings were classic when they were born. We wonder they did not appeal immediately. To-day, if you are lucky enough to come across one, you are asked a staggering price. They sold for a song—when they did sell—during the lifetime of the artist. Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann destroyed picturesque Paris to the consternation of Meryon, who to the eye of an archæologist united the soul of an artist. He loved old Paris. We can evoke it to-day, thanks to these etchings, just as the Paris of 1848 is forever etched in the pages of Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale.
But there is hallucination in these etchings, beginning with Le Stryge, and its demoniac leer, "insatiable vampire, l'eternelle luxure." That gallery of Notre Dame, with Wotan's ravens flying through the slim pillars from a dream city bathed in sinister light, is not the only striking conception of the poet-etcher. The grip of reality is shown in such plates as Tourelle, Rue de la Tisseranderie, and La Pompe, Notre Dame. Here are hallucinations translated into the actual terms of art, suggesting, nevertheless, a solidity, a sharpness of definition, withal a sense of fluctuating sky, air, clouds that make you realise thejustesseof Berenson's phrase—tactile values. With Meryon the tactile perception was a sixth sense. Clairvoyant of images, he could transcribe the actual with an almost cruel precision. Telescopic eyes his, as MacColl has it, and an imagination that perceived the spectre lurking behind the door, the horror of enclosed spaces, and the mystic fear of shadows—a Poe imagination, romantic, with madness as an accomplice in the horrible game of his life. One is tempted to add that the romantic imagination is always slightly mad. It runs to seed in darkness and despair. The fugitive verse of Meryon is bitter, ironical, defiant; a whiff from an underground prison, where seems to sit in tortured solitude some wretch abandoned by humanity, a stranger even at the gates of hell.
Sir Seymour Haden has told us that Meryon's method was to make a number of sketches, two or three inches square, of parts of his picture, which he put together and arranged into a harmonious whole. Herkomer says that he "used the burin in finishing his bitten work with marvellous skill. No better combination can be found of the harmonious combination of the two." Burty declared that "Meryon preserves the characteristic detail of architecture… Without modifying the aspect of the monument he causes it to express its hidden meaning, and gives it a broader significance by associating it with his own thought." His employment of a dull green paper at times showed his intimate feeling for tonalities. He is, more so than Piranesi, the Rembrandt of architecture. Hamerton admits that the French etcher was "one of the greatest and most original artists who have appeared in Europe," and berates the public of the '60s for not discovering this. Then this writer, copying in an astonishingly wretched manner several of Meryon's etchings, analysing their defects as he proceeds, asserts that there is false tonality in Le Stryge. "The intense black in the street under the tower of St. Jacques destroys the impression of atmosphere, though at a considerable distance it is as dark as the nearest raven's wing, which cannot relieve itself against it. This may have been done in order to obtain a certain arrangement of black and white patches," etc. This was done for the sheer purpose of oppositional effects. Did Hamerton see a fine plate? The shadow is heavy; the street is in demi, not total, obscurity; the values of the flying ravens and the shadow are clearly enunciated. The passage is powerful, even sensational, and in the Romantic, Hugoesque key. Hamerton is wrong. Meryon seldom erred. His was a temperament of steel and fire.
The sitting-room was long and narrow. A haircloth sofa of uncompromising rectitude was pushed so close to the wall that the imprints of at least two generations of heads might be discerned upon the flowered wall-paper—flowers and grapes of monstrous size from some country akin to that visited by the Israelitish spies as related in the Good Book. A mahogany sideboard stood at the upper end of the room; in one window hung a cage which contained a feeble canary. As you entered your eyes fell upon an ornamental wax fruit piece under a conical glass. A stuffed bird, a robin redbreast, perched on a frosted tree in the midst of these pale tropical offerings, glared at you with beady eyes. Antimacassars and other things of horror were in the room. Also a centre table upon which might have been found Cowper's poems, the Bible, Beecher's sermons, and an illustrated book about the Holy Land by some hardworking reverend. It was Aunt Jane's living-room; in it she had rocked and knitted for more than half a century. There were a few pictures on the wall, a crayon of her brother, a bank president with a shaved upper lip, a high, pious forehead, and in his eyes a stern expression of percentage. Over the dull white marble mantelpiece hung a huge mezzotint, of violent contrast in black and white, a picture whose subject had without doubt given it the place of honour in this old-fashioned, tasteless, homely, comfortable room. It bore for a title The Fall of Nineveh, and it was designed and mezzotinted by John Martin.
Let us look at this picture. It depicts the downfall of the great city upon which the wrath of God is visited. There are ghastly gleams of lightning above the doomed vicinity. A fierce tempest is in progress as the invading hosts break down the great waterways and enter dry-shod into the vast and immemorial temples and palaces. The tragedy, the human quality of the design, is summed up by the agitated groups in the foreground; the king, surrounded by his harem, makes a gesture of despair; the women, with loose-flowing draperies, surround him like frightened swans. A high priest raises his hand to the stormy heavens, upon which he is evidently invoking as stormy maledictions. A warrior swings his blade; to his neck clings a fair helpless one, half nude. There are other groups. Men in armour rush to meet the foe in futile agitation. On temple tops, on marble terraces and balconies, on the efflorescent capitals of vast columns that pierce the sky, swarms affrighted humanity. The impression is grandiose and terrific. Exotic architecture, ebon night, an event that has echoed down the dusty corridors of legend or history—these and a hundred other details are enclosed within the frame of this composition. Another picture which hangs hard by, the Destruction of Jerusalem, after Kaulbach, is colourless in comparison. The Englishman had greater imagination than the German, though he lacked the latter's anatomical science. To-day in the Pinakothek, Munich, Kaulbach holds a place of honour. You may search in vain at the London National Gallery for the paintings of a man who once was on the crest of popularity in England, whose Biblical subjects attracted multitudes, whose mezzotints and engravings were sold wherever the English Bible was read. John Martin, painter, mezzotinter, man of gorgeous imagination, second to De Quincey or the author of Vathek, is to-day more forgotten than Beckford himself.
Heinrich Heine in his essay, The Romantic School, said that "the history of literature is a great morgue, wherein each seeks the dead who are near or dear to him." Into what morgue fell John Martin before his death? How account for the violent changes in popular taste? Martin suffered from too great early success. The star of Turner was in the ascendant. John Ruskin denied merit to the mezzotinter, and so it is to-day that if you go to our print-shops you will seldom find one of his big or little plates. He has gone out of fashion—fatal phrase!—and only in the cabinets of old collectors can you get a peep at his archaic and astounding productions. William Blake is in vogue; perhaps Martin—? And then those who have garnered his plates will reap a harvest.
Facts concerning him or his work are slight. Bryan's dictionary accords him a few paragraphs. When at the British Museum, a few years ago, I asked Mr. Sidney Colvin about the Martins in his print-room. There are not many, not so many as in a certain private collection here. But Mr. Colvin told me of the article written by Cosmo Monkhouse in the Dictionary of National Biography, and from it we are enabled to present a few items about the man's career. He was born at Hayden Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, July 19, 1789. His father, Fenwick Martin, a fencing-master, held classes at the Chancellor's Head, Newcastle. His brothers, Jonathan (1782-1838) and William (1772-1851), have some claim on our notice, for the first was an insane prophet and incendiary, having set fire to York Minster in 1829; William was a natural philosopher and poet who published many works to prove the theory of perpetual motion. "After having convinced himself by means of thirty-six experiments of the impossibility of demonstrating it scientifically, it was revealed to him in a dream that God had chosen him to discover the great cause of all things, and this he made the subject of many works" (Jasnot, Vérités positives, 1854). Verily, as Lombroso hath it, "A hundred fanatics are found for a theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric problem."
The Martin stock was, without doubt, neurasthenic. John was apprenticed when fourteen to Wilson, a Newcastle coach painter, but ran away after a dispute over wages. He met Bonifacio Musso, an Italian china painter, and in 1806 went with him to London. There he supported himself painting china and glass while he studied perspective and architecture. At nineteen he married and in 1812 lived in High Street, Marylebone, and from there sent to the Academy his first picture, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (from Tales of the Genii). The figure of Sadak was so small that the framers disputed as to the top of the picture. It sold to Mr. Manning for fifty guineas. Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy, encouraged Martin, and next year he painted Adam's First Sight of Eve, which he sold for seventy guineas. In 1814 his Clytis was shown in an ante-room of the exhibition, and he bitterly complained of his treatment. Joshua, in 1816, was as indifferently hung, and he never forgave the Academy the insult, though he did not withdraw from its annual functions. In 1817 he was appointed historical painter to Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. He etched about this time Character of Trees (seven plates) and the Bard at the Academy. In 1818 he removed to Allsop Terrace, New (Marylebone road). In 1819 came The Fall of Babylon, Macbeth (1820), Belshazzar's Feast (1821), which, "excluded" from the Academy, yet won the £200 prize. A poem by T.S. Hughes started Martin on this picture. It was a national success and was exhibited in the Strand behind a glass transparency. It went the round of the provinces and large cities and attracted thousands. Martin joined the Society of British Artists at its foundation and exhibited with them from 1824 to 1831, and also in 1837 and 1838, after which he sent his important pictures to the Royal Academy.
In 1833 The Fall of Nineveh went to Brussels, where it was bought by the Government. Martin was elected member of the Belgian Academy and the Order of Leopold was conferred on him. His old quarrels with the Academy broke out in 1836, and he testified before a committee as to favouritism. Then followed The Death of Moses, The Deluge, The Eve of the Deluge, The Assuaging of the Waters, Pandemonium. He painted landscapes and water-colours, scenes on the Thames, Brent, Wandle, Wey, Stillingbourne, and the hills and eminences about London. About this time he began scheming for a method of supplying London with water and one that would improve the docks and sewers. He engraved many of his own works, Belshazzar, Joshua, Nineveh, Fall of Babylon. The first two named, with The Deluge, were presented by the French Academy to Louis Philippe, for which courtesy a medal was struck off in Martin's honour. The Ascent of Elijah, Christ Tempted in the Wilderness, and Martin's illustrations (with Westall's) to Milton's Paradise Lost were all completed at this period. For the latter Martin received £2,000. He removed to Lindsey House, Chelsea, in 1848 or 1849, and was living there in 1852, when he sent to the Academy his last contribution, Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. November 12, 1853, while engaged upon his last large canvases, The Last Judgment, The Great Day of Wrath, and The Plains of Heaven, he was paralysed on his right side. He was removed to the Isle of Man, and obstinately refusing proper nourishment, died at Douglas February 17, 1854. After his death three pictures, scenes from the Apocalypse, were exhibited at the Hall of Commerce. His portrait by Wangemann appeared in theMagazine of Fine Arts. A second son, Leopold Charles, writer, and godson of Leopold, King of Belgium, was an authority on costumes and numismatics (1817-89). His wife was a sister of Sir John Tenniel ofPunch.
John Martin was slightly cracked; at least he was so considered by his contemporaries. He was easily affronted, yet he was a very generous man. He bought Etty's picture, The Combat, in 1825 for two or three hundred guineas. There are at the South Kensington Museum three Martins, watercolours, and one oil; at Newcastle, an oil. At the time of his decease his principal works were in the collections of Lord de Tabley, Dukes of Buckingham and Sutherland, Messrs. Hope and Scarisbruck, Earl Grey and Prince Albert. The Leyland family of Nantchvyd, North Wales, owns the Joshua and several typical works of Martin. Wilkie, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, describes Belshazzar's Feast as a "phenomenon." Bulwer declared that Martin was "more original and self-dependent than Raphael or Michael Angelo." In the Last Essays of Elia there is one by Charles Lamb entitled Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art. The name of Martin is not mentioned, but several of his works are unmistakably described. "His towered architecture [Lamb is writing of Belshazzar's Feast] are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams or transcripts of some elder workmanship—Assyrian ruins old—restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled." "Literary" art critic as he was, Lamb put his finger on Martin's weakest spot—his figure painting. The entire essay should be read, for it contains a study of the Joshua in which this most delicious of English prose writers speaks of the "wise falsifications" of the great masters. Before his death the critics, tiring of him sooner than the public, called Martin tricky, meretricious, mechanical. To be sure, his drawing is faulty, his colour hot and smoky; nevertheless, he was not a charlatan. As David Wilkie wrote: "Weak in all these points in which he can be compared to other artists," he had the compensating quality of an imposing, if at times operatic, imagination. Monkhouse justly says that in Martin's illustrations to Milton the smallness of scale and absence of colour enable us to appreciate the grandeur of his conceptions with a minimum of his defects.
In sooth he lacked variety. His pictures are sooty and apocalyptic. We have seen the Mountain Landscape, at South Kensington, The Destruction of Herculaneum, at Manchester, another at Newcastle whose subject escapes us, and we confess that we prefer the mezzotints of Martin, particularly those engraved by Le Keux—whose fine line and keen sense of balance corrected the incoherence of Martin's too blackened shadows and harsh explosions of whites. One looks in vain for the velvety tone of Earlom, or the vivid freshness of Valentine Green, in Martin. He was not a colourist; his mastery consisted in transferring to his huge cartoons a sense of the awful, of the catastrophic. He excelled in the delineation of massive architecture, and if Piranesi was his superior in exactitude, he equalled the Italian in majesty and fantasy of design. No such cataclysmic pictures were ever before painted, nor since, though Gustave Doré, who without doubt made a study of Martin, has incorporated in his Biblical illustrations many of Martin's overwhelming ideas—the Deluge, for example. James Ensor, the Belgian illustrator, is an artist of fecund fancy who, alone among the new men, has betrayed a feeling for the strange architecture, dream architecture, we encounter in Martin. Coleridge in Kubla Khan, De Quincey in opium reveries, Poe and Baudelaire are among the writers who seem nearest to the English mezzotinter. William Beckford's Vathek, that most Oriental of tales, first written in French by a millionaire of genius, should have inspired Martin. Perhaps its mad fantasy did, for all we know—there is no authentic compilation of his compositions. Heine has spoken of Martin, as has Théophile Gautier; and his name, by some kink of destiny, is best known to the present generation because of Macaulay's mention of it in an essay.
The Vale of Tempe is one of Martin's larger plates seldom seen in the collector's catalogue. We have viewed it and other rare prints in the choice collection referred to already. Satan holding council, after Milton, is a striking conception. The Prince of Eblis sits on a vast globe of ebony. About him are tier upon tier of faces, the faces of devils. Infernal chandeliers depend from remote ceilings. Light gashes the globe and the face and figure of Satan; both are of supernal beauty. Could this mezzotint, so small in size, so vast in its shadowy suggestiveness, have stirred Baudelaire to lines that shine with a metallic poisonous lustre?
And there is that tiny mezzotint in which we find ourselves at the base of a rude little hill. The shock of the quaking earth, the silent passing of the sheeted dead and the rush of the affrighted multitudes tell us that a cosmic tragedy is at hand. In a flare of lightning we see silhouetted against an angry sky three crosses at the top of a sad little hill. It is a crucifixion infinitely more real, more intense than Doré's. Another scene—also engraved by Le Keux: On a stony platform, vast and crowded, the people kneel in sackcloth and ashes; the heavens thunder over the weeping millions of Nineveh, and the Lord of Hosts will not be appeased. Stretching to the clouds are black basaltic battlements, and above rear white-terraced palaces as swans that strain their throats to the sky. The mighty East is in penitence. Or, Elijah is rapt to heaven in a fiery whirlwind; or God creates light. This latter is one of the most extraordinary conceptions of a great visionary and worthy of William Blake. Or Sadak searching for the waters of oblivion. Alas, poor humanity! is here the allegory. A man, a midget amid the terrifying altitudes of barren stone, lifts himself painfully over a ledge of rock. Above him are vertiginous heights; below him, deadly precipices. Nothing helps him but himself—a page torn from Max Stirner is this parable. Light streams upon the struggling egoist as he toils to the summit of consciousness. Among the designs of nineteenth-century artists we can recall none so touching, so powerful, so modern as this picture. Martin was not equally successful in portraying celestial episodes, though his paradises are enormous panoramas replete with architectural beauties. His figures, as exemplified in Miltonic illustrations, are more conventional than Fuseli's and never naively original as are Blake's. Indeed, of Blake's mystic poetry and divination Martin betrays no trace. He is not so much the seer as the inventor of infernal harmonies. Satan reviewing his army of devils is truly magnificent in its depiction of the serried host armed for battle; behind glistens burning Tophet in all its smoky splendour. Satan in shining armour must be a thousand feet high; he is sadly out of scale. So, too, in the quarrel of Michael and Satan over the sleeping Adam and Eve. Blake is here recalled in the rhythms of the monstrous figures. Bathos is in the design of Lucifer swimming in deepest hell upon waves of fire and filth; yet the lugubrious arches of the caverns in the perspective reveal Blake's fantasy, so quick to respond to external stimuli. Martin saw the earth as in an apocalyptic swoon, its forms distorted, its meanings inverted; a mad world, the world of an older theogony. But if there was little human in his visions, he is enormously impersonal; if he assailed heaven's gates on wings of melting wax, or dived deep into the pool of iniquity, he none the less caught glimpses in his breathless flights of strange countries across whose sill no human being ever passes. There is genuine hallucination. He must have seen his ghosts so often that in the end they petrified him, as did the Statue Don Giovanni. Martin was a species of reversed Turner. He spied the good that was in evil, the beauty in bituminous blacks. He is the painter of black music, the deifier of Beelzebub, and also one who caught the surge and thunder of the Old Testament, its majesty and its savagery. As an illustrator of sacred history, the world may one day return to John Martin.
Anders Zorn—what's in a name? Possibly the learned and amiable father of Tristram Shandy or that formidable pedant Professor Slawkenbergius might find much to arouse his interest in the patronymic of the great Swedish painter and etcher. What Zorn means in his native tongue we do not profess to know; but in German it signifies anger, wrath, rage. Now, the Zorn in life is not an enraged person—unless some lady sitter asks him to paint her as she is not. He is, as all will testify who have met him, a man of rare personal charm and sprightly humour. He, it may be added, calls yellow yellow, and he never paints a policeman like a poet. In a word, a man of robust, normal vision, a realist and an artist. False realism with its hectic, Zola-like romanticism is distasteful to Zorn. He is near Degas among the Frenchmen and Zuloaga among the new Spaniards; near them in a certain forthright quality of depicting life, though unlike them in technical and individual methods.
Yes, Zorn, that crisp, bold, short name, which begins with a letter that abruptly cuts both eye and ear, quite fits the painter's personality, fits his art. He is often ironic. Some fanciful theorist has said that the letters Z and K are important factors in the career of the men who possess them in their names. Camille Saint-Saëns has spoken of Franz Liszt and his lucky letter. It is a very pretty idea, especially when one stakes on zero at Monte Carlo; but no doubt Anders Zorn would be the first to laugh the idea out of doors.
We recall an exhibition a few years ago at Venice in the art gallery of the Giardino Reale. Zorn had a place of honour among the boiling and bubbling Secessionists; indeed, his work filled a large room. And what work! Such a giant's revel of energy. Such landscapes, riotous, sinister, and lovely. Such women! Here we pause for breath. Zorn's conception of womanhood has given offence to many idealists, who do not realise that once upon a time our forebears were furry and indulged in arboreal habits. Zorn can paint a lady; he has signed many gentle and aristocratic canvases.
But Zorn is also too sincere not to paint what he sees. Some of his models are of the earth, earthy; others step toward you with the candid majesty of a Brunhilda, naked, unashamed, and regal. They are all vital. We recall, too, the expressions, shocked, amazed, even dazed, of some American art students who, fresh from their golden Venetian dreams, faced the uncompromising pictures of a man who had faced the everyday life of his day. For these belated visionaries, whose ideal in art is to painfully imitate Giorgione, Titian, or Tiepolo, this modern, with his rude assault upon the nerves, must seem a very iconoclast. Yet Zorn only attempts to reproduce the life encircling him. He is a child of his age. He, too, has a perception of beauty, but it is the beauty that may be found by the artist with an ardent, unspoiled gaze, the curious, disquieting beauty of our time. Whistler saw it in old Venetian doorways as well as down Chelsea way or at Rotherhithe. Zorn sees it in some corner of a wood, in some sudden flex of muscle or intimate firelit interior. And he loves to depict the glistening curves of his big model as she stands in the sunlight, a solid reproach to physical and moral anæmia. A pagan, by Apollo!
As an etcher the delicacy of his sheathed lion's paw is the principal quality that meets the eye, notwithstanding the broad execution. Etching is essentially an impressionistic art. Zorn is an impressionist among etchers. He seems to attack his plate not with the finesse of a meticulous fencing-master but like a Viking, with a broad Berserker blade. He hews, he hacks, he gashes. There is blood in his veins, and he does not spare the ink. But examine closely these little prints—some of them miracles of printing—and you may discern their delicate sureness, subtlety, and economy of gesture. Fitzroy Carrington quotes the Parisian critic Henri Marcel, who among other things wrote of the Zorn etchings: "Let us only say that these etchings—paradoxical in their coarseness of means and fineness of effect—manifest the master at his best."
Coarseness of means and fineness of effect—the phrase is a happy one. Coarse is sometimes the needle-work of Zorn, but the end justifies the means. He is often cruel, more cruel than Sargent. His portraits prove it. He has etched all his friends, some of whom must have felt honoured and amused—or else offended. The late Paul Verlaine, for example, would not have been pleased with the story of his life as etched by the Swede. It is as biting a commentary—one is tempted to say as acid—as a page from Strindberg. Yes, without a touch of Strindberg's mad fantasy, Zorn is kin to him in his ironic, witty way of saying things about his friends and in front of their faces. Consider that large plate of Renan. Has any one so told the truth concerning the ex-seminarian, casuist, and marvellous prose writer of France? The large, loosely modelled head with its fleshy curves, its super-subtle mouth of orator, the gaze veiled, the bland, pontifical expression, the expression of the man who spoke of "the mania of certitude"—here is Ernest Renan, voluptuous disdainer of democracies, and planner of a phalanstery of superior men years before Nietzsche's superman appeared. Zorn in no unkindly spirit shows us the thinker; also the author of L'Abbesse de Jouarre. It is something, is it not, to evoke with needle, acid, paper, and ink the dualism of such a brain and temperament as was Renan's?
He is not flattering to himself, Zorn. The Henry G. Marquand, two impressions, leaves one rather sad. An Irish girl, Annie, is superb in its suggestion of form and colour. Saint-Gaudens and his model is excellent; we prefer the portrait. The Evening Girl Bathing is rare in treatment—simple, restrained, vital. She has turned her back, and we are grateful, for it is a beautiful back. The landscape is as evanescent as Whistler, the printing is in a delicate key. The Berlin Gallery contains a Zorn, a portrait striking in its reality. It represents Miss Maja von Heyne wearing a collar of skins. She could represent the Maja of Ibsen's epilogue, When We Dreamers Awake; Maja, the companion of the bear hunter, Ulfheim. As etched, we miss the massiveness, the rich, vivid colour, yet it is a plate of distinction.
Among his portraits are the Hon. Daniel S. Lamont, Senator "Billy" Mason, the Hon. John Hay, Mr. and Mrs. Atherton Curtis, and several big-wigs of several nations. An oil-painting is an impressionistic affair, showing some overblown girls dressing after their bath. The sun flecks their shoulders, but otherwise seems rather inclined to retire modestly. Evidently not the midnight sun.
We have barely indicated the beauties in which the virile spirit of Anders Zorn comes out at you from the wall—a healthy, large-hearted, girted Swede is this man with the Z.