Leibl did for Germany what the pre-Raphaelites did for England. Men and women were represented with astonishing pains just as they sat and suffered themselves to be painted. He was determined to give the whole, pure truth, and he gave it; that, and nothing more and nothing less. He reproduced nature in her minutest traits and in her finest movements, bringing the imitative side of art to the highest perfection conceivable. In virtue of these qualities he was a born portrait painter; and although he never had “conception,” as Lenbach had, his portraits belong, with those of Lenbach,to the best German performances of the century. Only Holbein when he painted his “Gysze” had this remorseless manner of analysing the human countenance in every wrinkle. Leibl once more taught the German painters to go into detail, and led them constantly to hold nature as the only source of art; and that has been the beginning of every renaissance.
His works were pictorially the most complete expression of the aims of the Munich school in colour. As a representative of the efforts of the decade from 1870 he is as typical as Cornelius for the art of the thirties, Piloty for that of the fifties, and as Liebermann became later as a representative of the efforts of the eighties.
CHAPTER XXX
THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE
Courbetand Ribot for France, Holman Hunt and Madox Brown for England, Stevens for Belgium, Menzel, Lenbach, and Leibl for Germany, are the great names of modern Realism, the names of the men who subjected modern life to art, and subjected art to the nineteenth century.
One point, however, the question of colour, still remained unsolved: as the preceding generation took their form, so these painters took their colour, not from nature, but from the treasury of old art.
Courbet announced it as his programme to express the manners, ideas, and aspect of his age—in a word, to create living art. He described himself as the sincere lover ofla vérité vraie: “la véritable peinture doit appeler son spectateur par la force et par la grande vérité de son imitation.” But one may question how far his figures, and the environment of them, are true in colour? Where there is a delightful subtlety of fleetingnuancesin nature, an oppressive opaque heaviness is found in this modern Caravaggio of Franche-Comté. He certainly painted modern stone-breakers, but it was in the tone of saints of the Spanish school of the seventeenth century. His pictures of artisans have the odour of the museum. The home of his men and women is not the open field of Ornans, but that room in the Louvre where hang the pictures of Caravaggio.
Alfred Stevensmade a great stride by painting modernParisiennes. Whereas the costume picture had up to his time sought the truth of the old masters only in the matter of the skirts which the fashion of their age prescribed, Stevens was the first to dress his women in the garb of 1860, just as Terborg painted his in the costume of 1660 and not of 1460. But the very atmosphere in which theParisienneof the nineteenth century lived is no longer that in which the women of de Hoogh moved. The whole of life is brighter. The studios in which pictures are painted are brighter, and the rooms in which they are destined to hang. Van der Meer of Delft, the greatest painter of light amongst the Dutch, still worked behind little casements; and in dusky patrician dwellings, “where the very light of heaven breaks sad through painted window,” his pictures were ultimately hung. The old masters paid special attention to these conditions of illumination. The golden harmony of the Italian Renaissance came into being from the character of the old cathedrals furnished with glass windows of divers colours; the half-light ofthe Dutch corresponded to the dusky studios in which painters laboured, and the gloomy, brown-wainscoted rooms for which their pictures were destined. The nineteenth century committed the mistake even here of regarding what was done to meet a special case as something absolute. Rooms had long become bright when studios were artificially darkened, and artists still sought, by means of coloured windows and heavy curtains, to subdue the light, so as to be able to paint in tones dictated by the old masters. Stevens shed over a modern woman, aParisienne, sitting in a drawing-room in the Avenue de Jena, the light of Gerard Dow, without reflecting that this illumination, filtered through little lattice-windows, was quite correct in Holland during the seventeenth century, but no longer proper in the Paris of 1860, in a salon where the windows had great cross-bars and clear white panes which were not leaded. It is chiefly this that makes his pictures untrue, lending them an old Flemish heaviness, something earthy, savouring of the clay, and not in keeping with the fresh fragrance of the modernParisienne. Her modernity is seen through the yellowish glass which the old Flemish masters seemed to hold between Stevens and his model.
Considered as a separate personalityRibot, too, is a great artist; his works are masterpieces. Yet when young men spoke of him as the last representative of the school of cellar-windows there was an atom of truth in what they said. Like Courbet, he continued the art of galleries. The master of a style and yet the servant of a manner, he marks the summit of a tendency in which the great traditions of Frans Hals and Ribera were once more embodied. When he paints subjects resembling the themes of these old masters he is as great as they are, as genuine and as much a master of style; but as soon as he turns to other subjects the imitative mannerist is revealed. Even things as tender and unsubstantial as the flowers of the field seem as if they were made of wax. His disdain for what is light, fluent, and fickle, like air and water, is evident in his sea-pieces. His steamers plough their way through a greyish-black sea beneath a thickblack stormy sky, as though through grey deserts. Nature quivering in the air and bathed in light is not so heavy and compact, nor has it such plasticity of appearance. His women reading are thene plus ultraof painting; only it is astonishing that any human being can read in such a dark room.
Ribot’s parallel in Germany isLenbach, who had less pictorial and greater intellectual power. As a painter of copies, particularly copies of the artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he formed and perfected a school for the understanding of the old masters, as none of his contemporaries had done. The copies which he made as a young man for Count Schack in Italy and Spain are probably the best translations by the brush that have ever been executed. He has reproduced Titian and Rubens, Velasquez and Giorgione, with equal magic; no other painter has entered into all the subtleties of their technique with such intelligence and keenness; and by the aid of these sleights of art, which he learnt as a copyist from classic masterpieces, he communicated to his own works that impress which qualifies them for the gallery and suggests the old masters with such refinement. His pictures mark the summit of ability reached in Germany in the pictorial style of the old artists.
But, at the same time, his weakness lies in this very eminence. The man who had passed through the high-school of the old masters with the greatest success was entered as a student for life, and never took the professorial chair himself. Helferich has called him the impersonated spirit of the galleries, the spirit which is centuries old.
This indicates the direction which must be taken by the further development of painting. A really new and independent art must finally emancipate itself from the Renaissance colouring, the tone of Church painting, and thechiaroscuroof pictures painted behind the variegated panes of lattice-windows. It must be evident that the methods of the old Spanish and old Dutch schools, excellent in themselves, were fully in keeping with strange scenes of martyrdomor quiet interiors with peasants and fat matrons, but that they could not possibly be employed in pictures of artisans beneath the free sky, nor in those of elegant interiors of our own days, nor of pale and delicateParisiennesattired in silks, beings of a new epoch. A different period necessitates different methods. It is not merely that the subjects of art change, but the way in which they are handled must bear the marks of the period. Nature should no longer be studied through the prism of old pictures, and the phrasebeau par la véritémust be exalted to a principle applying to colour also.
The pre-Raphaelites and Menzel were the first to become alive to the problem. They were never taken captive by the tones of the early masters, but placed themselves always in conscious opposition to the artists of older ages. The battle against “brown sauce” even formed an essential point in the programme of the Brotherhood. They protested against conventional colouring as violently as against the sweeping line taught by traditional rules of beauty.
But, as so often happens in the nineteenth century, though the English found the jewel, they did not understand how to cut it. The pre-Raphaelites had a quickening influence, in exciting a feeling for hue and tint, and rendering it keener by their own insistence on the elementary effects of colour. They sought to free themselves from brown sauce and to be just to local tones, through straightforward, independent observation. They painted the trees green, the earth grey, the sky blue, the sunbeams yellow, in sharply accentuated colours, as little blended as possible. But in most cases the result was not particularly pleasant; there was almost always a hard, motley colouring which produced a most unpleasant, glaring effect. Their audacity was somewhat barbaric. There was a want of warmth and softness, the atmospheredid not combine the whole by its mitigating and harmonising power. Even Madox Brown’s “Work” is an offensive chaos of crying colours. The bright clothes, the blue blouses, the red uniforms have a gaudy and unquiet effect. The problem was attacked, but the solution was harsh and crude.
OfMenzel’spictures the same is true, though not perhaps in the same degree. In pictorial conception he also has not quite reached the summit. His method of painting is sometimes sparkling and full of spirit, holding the mean, more or less, between the quiet and plain painting of Meissonier and the crisp, glittering style of Fortuny; he lets off a flickering, dazzling, rocket-like firework, but at bottom he has been cut from the block from which draughtsmen are made. Sometimes it is astonishing how his brush sweeps over costumes, ornaments, and buildings, but he does not think in colour; it is supplementary to the drawing, and not of earlier origin, nor even of equal birth. Much as he tried to paint smoke and steam in his “Iron Mill,” he had no understanding for atmospheric life; for this reason harsh and glaring tones almost invariably make a disturbing effect in his works. His “Piazza d’Erbe” as well as his “King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army” have a motley and restless effect in the picture, and only in photography or black and white do they acquire something of the simplicity which is to be desired in the originals. The best of his drawings may stand beside thesketches of Dürer without detriment; to place his pictures on the same level is impossible, because quietude and pure harmony are wanting in them.
So extremes meet. Courbet, Ribot, and Lenbach are greater connoisseurs of colour than Europe had seen previous to their appearance, but this they are at the expense of truth; they have identified themselves with the old masters, and not arrived at any personal conception of colour. Menzel and the pre-Raphaelites despised the old masters, but their conception of colour had something primitive, jarring, and undisciplined.
The note of truth was still missing in the mighty orchestra. By what possible means could it be supplied? How bring to perfection that great harmony which is ever the end and aim of all true artistic effort. It was not until the art of the Far East was unfolded before the eyes of Western painters that this disquieting problem reached its solution.
In the year in which Millet exhibited his “Winnower” and Courbet painted his “Stone-breakers” a man died in the Far East whose name was Hokusai. He was the last great representative of an art of painting more than a thousand years old—one which had no Raphael, Correggio, or Titian, though it was, nevertheless, art in the loftiest meaning of the word. Marco Polo, the great traveller of the Middle Ages, had told of a remarkable land “towards the sunrise,” the soil of which it was not permitted to him to tread. And the artistic views of the eighteenth century were revolutionised when the first Japanese porcelain and lacquer-work arrived at the Courts of Dresden and Paris. The aged Louis XIV himself began to find pleasure in idols,pagodas, and “stuffs printed with flowers.” In a short time these works formed an important part of superior collections, and led to the movement against the inflexible despotism of the pompous Lebrun style. For the Japanese gave Europe the unfettered principles of a freer intuition of beauty; they excited a preference for things which were unsymmetrical, capricious, full of movement, for everything by which the charming LouisXVstyle is to be distinguished from the tiresome academic art of LouisXIV. In the sixties of the nineteenth century Japan exerted, for the second time, a revolutionary influence on the development of European painting. If Japanese productions were in earlier days regarded as curiosities, for which place was to be found in cabinets of rarities, as trifles the artistic value of which was less prized than the dexterity of their construction, it was reserved for the present age to do justice to Japanese art as such.
As is well known, oil-painting exists neither in China nor Japan. Just as the Japanese choose the slightest material for building, so everything in their painting bears a trace of extreme lightness. Japanese pictures,kakemonos, are painted in water colour or Chinese ink upon framed silk or paper; but this paper has an advantage over the European article in its unsurpassed toughness, its remarkable softness and pliability, its surface which has either a dull, silky lustre, or may only be compared with the finest parchment. And the pictures themselves are kept rolled up, and only hung, as occasionoffers, in the Tokonama, the little closet near the reception-room, and according to very refined rules. Only a few are hung at a time, and only such as harmonise. When a visit is expected the taste of the guest determines the selection. Fresh and variously coloured flowers and branches, placed near them in vases, are obliged to harmonise in colour with the pictures.
As an instrument for painting use is only made of the pliant brush of hair, which executes everything with a free and fluent effect. Pen, crayon, or chalk, and all hard mediums which offer resistance, are consistently excluded. The subject-matter of these pictures is surprisingly rich, and assumes for their proper understanding some acquaintance with Japanese literature. An opulent folk-lore, in which cannibals and heroes like Tom Thumb live and move and have their being, just as in European fairy stories, stands at the disposal of the artist. Historical representations from the life of fabulous national heroes, ghosts, and apparitions half man and half bird, alternate with simple landscapes and scenes from daily life. And in all pictures, whether they are fanciful or plain renderings of fact, attention is riveted by the same keenness of observation, the same refinement of taste, in the highest sense of the word by pictorial charm. After the Japanese have been long recognised as the first decorative artists in the world, after the highest praise has been accorded to them in the industrial crafts taken jointly—in lacquer-work and bronze work, weaving, embroidery, and pottery—they are now likewise celebrated as the most spirited draughtsmen in existence.
The Japanese artist lives with nature and in her as no artist of any other country has ever done. Life in the open air creates a relation to nature suggestive of the doctrines of Rousseau; it makes earth, sky, and water as familiar to man as are the beings that move in them. Every house, even in the centre of towns, has a garden laid out with fine taste, and combining beautiful flowers, trees, and cascades, everything incidental to the soil. The form of trees, the shape and colour of flowers, the ripple of leaves, and the gleaming mail of insects are so imprinted in the memory of the painter that his fancy can summon them at pleasure without the need of fresh study. The most fleeting moment of the life of nature is held as firmly in his mind as the everlasting form of rocks and gigantic trees shadowing the temple groves of Nippon. Every one of these artists works with the unfettered falcon glance of the child of nature. His keen eye sees in the flight of birds turns and movements first revealed to us by instantaneous photography. This quickness of eye and this astonishing exercise of memory enable him to obtain the most striking effects with the slightest means. If a Japanese executes figures, race, station, age, business, personality are all seized with the keenest vision, and pregnantly rendered in their essential features. Robes and unclad forms, heads and limbs, animated and still nature, are all reproduced with the same reality. Yet little as the doctrine ever gained ground that to create works of art nature should be mastered upon a system, trivial realism was just as little at any time the vogue.
The love of nature is born in the Japanese, but the photographic imitation, the servile reproduction of reality, is never his ultimate aim. Geoffroy has noted with much subtlety the resemblance which exists between Japanese poets and painters in this respect. Their poets never describe, but only endeavour to express a spiritual feeling, to hold a memory fast—the blitheness of smiling pleasure, the mournfulness of vanished joy. They sing of the mist passing over the mountain summits, the fishing boats, the reeds by the seashore, the plash of waves, the flying streaks of cloud, the sunset streaming purple over the weary world. The same economy of means, the same sureness in the choice of characteristic features, and a similar rapidity in striking the keynote are peculiar to the painters. They, too, express themselves by the scantiest means, shrink from saying too much, and aim only at a rapid and right expression of total effect, leaving to the imagination the task of supplementing and amplifying what is given. The heaviness of matter is overcome, the absurd pretence of reality not attempted. Like the French of the eighteenth century, the Japanese possess the sportive grace, theespritof the brush hovering over objects, extracting merely their bloom and essence, and using them as the basis for free and independent caprices of beauty. They have the remarkable faculty of being synthetic and discarding every ponderous and disturbing element, without losing the local accent in a landscape or a figure. They fasten upon the most vivid impression of things, but in great, comprehensive lines, subordinating every peculiarity to the light which shines upon them and the shadow in which they are muffled. Their handwriting is at once broad and precise, graceful and bizarre. What a nonchalant, fragile, piquant, or coquettish effect have their feminine figures! And but a few firm strokes sufficed to create the impression. A dexterous sweep of the brush was all that was necessary for the modelling, all that was wanted to summon the idea of the velvet softness of the flesh and the firmness of the bosom. Or surging waves have been painted, or foaming cataracts. But with what consummate mastery, with what peculiar knowledge, the swirl and eddying of the waters have been represented. And how slight are the means which have been employed! Everything has the freshness of life, and the sheer, intangible movement of objects has been caught by a simple and decisive line. A few dashes of Chinese ink are made, and the forcible strokes unite without effort in forming a mountain path or a hillside stream foaming over rocks and trees. Or the prow of a vessel is represented. Nothing is to be seen of the water, and yet it is as if the waves wererocking the ship. The billow swells, rises, and sinks, suggesting the wide sea, the rhythm in the universe. The lines in which the motives are executed render only what is essential. But combined with this striving after simplified form there is a sense of space which of itself, as it were, controls everything, producing the poetic illusion of distance.
The Japanese are masters of the art of enlarging a narrow picture frame to a great expanse, and indicating by a few strokes the distance between foreground and horizon. There is often nothing, or next to nothing, in the wide space, but proximity and distance are so correctly related that all the geological structure is clear, whilst light air is pervasive, giving the eye a vision of boundless perspective. The spur of a headland, the bank of a river, or a cleft between two mountains enables the eye to measure far landscapes. In the presence of their works one dreams, one has the presentiment of infinite distances. They divest objects of their earthiness by bold simplifications, and transform reality into dreamland. It is the spirit of things, their smile, and their intangible perfume which live in these veiled masterpieces which are yet so precise.
The bold irregularity of Japanese works, which know nothing of the stiffness of symmetrical composition, contributes much to this impression. Their pictures are never “composed” in our sense of the word, but rather resemblethe instantaneous pictures of photographers. A bird is seen to dart past, only half visible, a cluster of trees is a chance slice from the forest, as it is seen out of the window of a railway train whizzing past. Or it is merely the bough of a tree with a bird upon it that stretches into the picture, which is otherwise filled with a fragment of blue sky. Without appearing to concern themselves about it, they compose little poems of grace and freshness, with a frog, a butterfly, and a blossoming apple-branch sprouting out of a vase. They play with beetles, grasshoppers, tortoises, crabs, and fish as did the artists of the Renaissance with Cupids and angels.
And in everything, as regards colour too, the Japanese have a strain of refinement peculiar to themselves. It is as though they were controlled by the finest tact, as by aforce majeure, even in their intuition of colour. That great harmony of which Théodore Rousseau spoke, and to which it was the aim of his life to attain, is reached by the Japanese artist almost instinctively. The most vivid effects of red and green trees, yellow roads, and blue sky are represented; the most refined effects of light are rendered—illuminated bridges, dark firmaments, the white sickle of the moon, glittering stars, the bright and rosy blossoms of spring, the dazzling snow as it falls upon trim gardens; and there are discords nowhere. How heavy and motley our colouring is compared with these delicious chords, set beside each other so boldly, and invariably so harmonious. Is it that our eyes are by nature less delicate? or is everything in the Japanese only the result of a more rational training? We have not the same intense force of perception, this instinctive and sensuous gift of colour. Their colouring is a delight to the eyes, a magic potion. Offence is nowhere given by a glaring or an entirely crude tone; everything is finely calculated, delicately indicated, and has that melting softness so enchantingin Japanese enamel. The simplest chords of colour are often the most effective; nothing can be more charming than the delicate duet of grey and gold. And the cheapest wood-cut has often all these refinements in common with the most costlykakemono. Even here, where they turn to lowly things, their art is never vulgar, but maintains itself at such an aristocratic height that we barbarians of the West, blessed with oleographs and Academies of Art, can only look up with envy to this nation of connoisseurs.
The oldest of these Japanese artists working in wood-cut engraving was Matahei, who lived in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and executed scenes from the theatres and Japanese family and street life. Icho and Moronobu followed at the close of the seventeenth century, the one being a spirited caricaturist, the other a genuinebaroqueartist of noble and classic reserve. Through the masters of the eighteenth century, as through Eisen, Fragonard, and Boucher, this reproductive art took fresh development. The soft girls of Soukénobu with their delicate round faces, the graceful beauties of Harunobu arrayed in costly toilettes, the tall feminine forms of the marvellous Outamaro in all their provocative charm, the vivid scenes from popular life of the great colourist Shunsho, are works pervaded with a delicate perfume of which Edmond de Goncourt alone could render any impression in words.
Outamaro, the poet of women, was, in a special sense, the Watteau of aristocratic life in Japan. He knew the life of the Japanese woman as no other has ever done—her domestic occupations, her walks and her charminggraces, her vanities and her love affairs. He knew also the scenes of nature which she contemplated, the streets through which she passed, and the banks along which she sauntered with an undulating step. His women are slender beings, isolated like idols, and standing motionless in poses hieratically august; æsthetic souls, who swoon and grow pale under the sway of disquieting visions; fading flowers, forms roaming wearily by the verge of a lonely sea or a sluggish stream, or flitting timidly, like bats, through the soft brilliancy of lights amid a festival by night. And in killing what is fleshly and physical he renders the faces visionary and dreamy, renders the hands and the gestures finer, and at the same time subdues and mitigates the colours and the splendour of the clothes, taking pleasure in dying chords, in deep black and tender white, in fine, pallidnuancesof rose-colour and lilac. Every one of his pupils became a fresh chronicler of aristocratic life. Toyohami painted night festivals; Toyoshiru, animated crowds; Toyokumi, scenes of the theatre; Kunisada, women upon their walks; Kunioshi, melodramatic representations full of pomp, with marvellous fantastic landscapes.
The nineteenth century brought the widest popularisation of art, corresponding more or less to the “resort to popular national life,” as the beginning of moderngenrepainting and of the modern art of illustration was called in Germany. The refined son of Nippon shrugs his shoulders over these last creations of Japanese reproduction in colours; he prefers those earlier charming masters of grace, and misses the aristocraticcachetin thenew men, with as much justification as the refined European collector has when he does not care to place the plates of Granville or Doré in a portfolio with those of Eisen or Fragonard. Nevertheless amongst the draughtsmen who followed the popular tendency there was at any rate one great genius, one of the most important artists of his country, who became more familiar to Europe than any of his other compatriots: this wasHokusai.
All the qualities of Japanese art are united in him as in a focus. His work is the encyclopædia of a whole nation, and in his technical qualities he stands by the side of the greatest men in Europe. He is the most attentive observer, a painter of manners as no other has ever been; he takes strict measure of everything, analysing the slightest movements. He draws the solid things of earth, the immovable rocks, the everlasting primæval mountains, and yet follows the changing phenomena of light and shade upon its surface. He has, in the highest degree, that peculiarly Japanese quality of giving tangible expression to the movements of things and living creatures. His men and women gesticulate, his animals run, his birds fly, his reptiles crawl, his fish swim; the leaves on the trees, the water of the rivers, and the sea and the clouds of the sky move gently. He is a magnificent landscape painter, celebrating all the seasons, from blossoming spring to ice-bound winter. In his designs he maps out orchards, fields, and woods, follows the winding course of rivers, summons a fine mist from the sea, sends the waves surging forward, and the billows racing up against the rocks and losing themselves as murmuring rivulets in the sand. But he is also a philosopher and a poet of wide flight, who makes the boldest journeys into the land of dreams. Hisimagination rises above the work-a-day world, rides upon the chimera, bodies forth a new life, creates monsters, and tells visions of terrible poetry. The deep feeling of the primitive masters revives in him, and he appears as a strange mystic, when he paints his blithe ethereal goddesses, or that old Buddhist who, when banished, came every day across the sea, as the legend tells, to behold once more Fuji, the sacred mountain.
Hokusai was born in 1760, amid flowery gardens in a quiet corner of Yeddo, fourteen years after Goya and twelve years after David. His father was purveyor of metallic mirrors to the Court. Hokusai took lessons from an illustrator, but does not seem to have been much known until his fortieth or fiftieth year. In 1810 he first founded an industrial school of art, which attracted numbers of young people. To provide them with a compendium of instruction in drawing he published in 1810 the first volume of hisMangwa. From that time he was recognised as the head of a school. When his fame began to spread he changed his residence almost every month to protect himself from troublesome visitors. And just as often did he alter his name. Even that under which he became famous in Europe is only a pseudonym, like “Gavarni”: amongst variousnoms de guerreit was that which he bore the longest and by which he was definitely recognised.
As a painter he was only active in his youth. The achievement of his life is not his pictures, but a magnificent series of illustrated books, a life’s work richer than that of any of his compatriots. Like Titian and Corot, fate had predestined him to reach a very great age without ever growing old.
“From my sixth year,” he writes in the preface to one of his books, “I had a perfect mania for drawing every object that I saw. When I had reached my fiftieth year I published a vast quantity of drawings; but I am unsatisfied with all that I have produced before my seventieth year. At seventy-three I had some understanding of the form and real nature of birds, fish, and plants. At eighty I hope to have made further progress, and at ninety tohave discovered the ultimate foundation of things. In my hundredth year I shall rise to yet higher spheres unknown, and in my hundred and tenth, every stroke, every point, and in short everything that comes from my hand will be alive.” Hokusai certainly did not reach so great an age as that. He died at eighty-nine, on 13th April 1849, and is buried in the temple at Yeddo. During the period between 1815 and 1845 he published about eighty great works, altogether over five hundred volumes.
“I rose from my seat at the window, where I had idled the whole day long ... softly, softly.... Then I was up and away.... I saw the countless green leaves tremble in the densely embowered tops of the trees; I watched the flaky clouds in the blue sky, collecting fantastically into shapes torn and multiform.... I sauntered here and there carelessly, without aim or volition.... Now I crossed the Bridge of Apes and listened as the echo repeated the cry of the wild cranes.... Now I was in the cherry-grove of Owari.... Through the mists shifting along the coast of Miho I descried the famous pines of Suminoye.... Now I stood trembling upon the Bridge of Kameji and looked down in astonishment at the gigantic Fuki plants.... Then the roar of the dizzy waterfall of Ono resounded in my ear. A shudder ran through me.... It was only a dream which I dreamed, lying in bed near my window with this book of pictures by the master as a cushion beneath my head.”
In these words a learned Japanese has indicated the great range of subject, the unspeakably rich material of the works of the master. By preference he leads us to the work-places of artisans, to woodcarvers, smiths, workers in metal, dyers, weavers, and embroiderers. Then come the pleasures of the nobility, who are displayed in their refinement, reserve, and dignity; the country-folk at their daily avocations, or making merry upon holidays; the fantastic shapes of fabulous animals and demons, who figure in the life of Japanese national heroes, mighty with the sword;apparitions, drunken men, wrestlers, street figures of every conceivable description, mythical reptiles, snow-clad mountain tops, waving rice-fields lashed by the wind, woodland glens, strange gateways of rock, far views over waters with cliffs clothed with pine.
The most celebrated of those works which contain landscapes exclusively are the views, published in three volumes in 1834-36, of the mountain of Fuji, the great volcano rising close by Yeddo, and from old time playing a part in the works of Japanese landscape painters. In Hokusai’s book the cone of the mountain is sometimes seen rising clear in a cloudless sky, whilst it is sometimes shrouded by clouds of various shapes. Its beautiful outline glimmers through the meshes of a net, through the spindrift of snow falling in great flakes, or through a curtain of rain splashing vertically down. It rises from misty valleys coloured by the rays of the evening sun, or is reflected—itself out of sight—in the smooth surface of a lake, upon the reedy shores of which the wild geese cackle, or it stands in ghostly outlines against the night sky flooded with silver moonlight. Summer breezes and winter storms drive over it, rattling showers of hail, lashed by the wind, or light falls of snow descend round it. In spring the blossoms of peach and plum-trees flutter to the earth, like swarms of white and rosy butterflies. Only famished wolves or dragons, which popular superstition has located in the mountain of Fuji, occasionally animate the grandiose solitude of the landscape.
“Never,” says Gonse, “has a more dexterous hand rested upon paper. It is impossible to study his plates without an excited feeling of pleasure, for they are absolute perfection, the highest that Japanese art has produced in freshness, brilliancy, life, and originality. Hokusai’s capacity of giving the impression of relief and colour with a stroke of the brush has nothing like it except in Rembrandt, Callot, and Goya. Men, animals, landscapes, and everything in his drawings are reduced to their simplest expression. Groups are seen in motion, priests in procession, soldiers on the march, and often a single stroke is sufficient to render an individual or create the impression of life and movement. Every plate is a masterpiece of coloured woodcut engraving, of singular flavour in colour, delightful in its gravely harmonised chord of golden yellow, faded green, and fiery red, to which are sometimes added golden, silvern, and other metallic tones.”
After the beginning of the sixties Paris came under the captivating influence of Japan. And there is no doubt that as the English influenced the landscape painters of Fontainebleau, the Venetians Delacroix, and the Neapolitan masters Courbet and Ribot, the newest phase of French art, which took its departure from Manet, was inaugurated by the enthusiasm for things Japanese. From the moment when the peculiar isolation of Japan was ended by the breaking up of the Japanese feudal state, Paris was flooded by splendid works of Japanese art. A painter discovered amongst the mass of articles newly arrived albums, colour prints, and pictures. Their drawing, colouring, and composition deviated from everything hitherto accounted as art, and yet the æstheticcharacter of these works was too artistic to permit of any one smiling over them as curiosities. Whether the discoverer was Alfred Stevens or Diaz, Fortuny, James Tissot, or Alphonse Legros, the enthusiasm for the Japanese swept over the studios like a storm. The artistic world never wearied of admiring the capricious ability of these compositions, the astonishing power of drawing, the fineness in tone, the originality of pictorial effect, nor of wondering at the refined simplicity of the means by which these results were achieved. Japanese art made itself felt by its fresh and tender charm, its creative opulence, its lightness and delicacy of observation; it arrested attention because directness, unfailing tact, and inherent distinction were of the essence of its conception; and it was recognised as the production of a nation of artists combining the subtilised taste of an originally refined civilisation with the freshness of feeling peculiar to primitive people. Colour prints, now to be had for a few francs at every bazaar, were bought at the highest figures. Every new consignment was awaited with feverish impatience. Old ivory, enamel, porcelain and embellished pottery, bronzes and wood and lacquer-work, ornamented stuffs, embroidered silks, albums, books of wood-cuts, and knick-knacks were scarcely unpacked in the shop before they found their way into the studios of artists and the libraries of scholars. In a short time great collections of the artistic productions of Japan passed into the hands of the painters Manet, James Tissot, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Degas, Carolus Duran, and Monet; of the engravers Bracquemond and Jules Jacquemart; of the authors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Champfleury, Philippe Burty, and Zola; and of the manufacturers Barbedienne and Christofle.
The International Exhibition of 1867 brought Japan still more into fashion, and from this year must be dated the peculiar influence of the West upon the East and the East upon the West. The Japanese came over to study at the European polytechnic institutes, universities, and military academies. On the other hand, we became thepupils of the Japanese in art. Even during the course of the Exhibition a group of artists and critics founded a Japanese society of the “Jinglar,” which met every week in Sèvres at the house of Solon, the director of the manufactory. They used a Japanese dinner-service, designed by Bracquemond, and everything except the napkins, cigars, and ash-trays was Japanese. One of the members, Dr. Zacharias Astruc, published inL’Étendarda series of articles upon “The Empire of the Rising Sun,” which made a great sensation. Soon afterwards the Parisian theatres brought out Japanese ballets and fairy plays. Ernest d’Hervilly wrote his Japanese pieceLa Belle Saïnara, which Lemère printed for him in Japanese fashion and paged from right to left, giving it a yellow cover designed by Bracquemond. A Japanese ballet was performed at the opera, and a Japanese turn was given to the toilettes of women.
For painters Japanese art was a revelation. Here was uttered the word that hovered on so many lips, and that no one had dared to pronounce. With what a fleeting touch, and yet with what precision, with what incomparable sureness, lightness, and grace, was everything carried out. How intuitive and spontaneous, how imaginative and how full of suggestion, how effortless and how rich in surprises, was this strange art. How happily was industry united with caprice, and nonchalance with endeavour at the highest finish. How suggestive was this disregard for symmetry, this piquant method of introducing a flower, an insect, a frog, or a bird here and there, merely as a pictorial spot in the picture. How the Japanese understood the art of expressing much with few means, where the Europeans toiled with a great expenditure of means to express little.
It would certainly have been an exceedingly false move if a direct imitation of the Japanese had been thought of. Japanese art is the product of a sensuous people, and European art that of intellectual nations. The latter is greater and more serious; it is nobler, and it reaches heights of expression not attained by the grotesque and terrible distortions and the morbidly droll or melancholy outbursts of sentiment known to the Japanese. Our imagination is alien to that of these children of the sensuous world, who quake and tremble for joy, horrify themselves with their masks, and pass from convulsive laughter to sheer terror, and from the shudder of hallucination to ecstatic bliss. Had Japanese art been coarsely transposed by imitators it would have led to caricature.
But if its poetics were little suitable for Europe in the specialised case, they nevertheless contained general laws better fitted for modern art than those which had been hitherto borrowed from Greece. All arts, music as well as poetry, were then striving for the dissolution of simple, tyrannical rhythms. The recurrence of unyielding measures beaten out with unwavering repetition no longer corresponded with the complicated, neurotic emotions of the new age. In painting, likewise, exertions were being made to burst the old shell, and a style was sought after for the treatment of modern life which had been violentlyhandled in the effort to force it to fit the Procrustean bed of traditional rules. Then came the Japanese with their astonishing, rapid, and pictorial sketches, and revealed a new method for the interpretation of nature. At a time when the symmetrical balance of lines, borrowed from the works of the Renaissance masters, became wearisome in its monotony, they taught a much freer architecture of form, and one which was broken by charming caprices. Where there had been rhythm, tension, clarity, largeness, and quietude in the old European painting, there was in them a nervous freedom, an artful carelessness, and life and charm. Art was concealed beneath the fancy shown in their facile construction, which seemed to have been improvised by nature herself. An artistic method of deviating from geometrical arrangement, freedom of distribution, unforced and unsymmetrical structure, in the place of balance and construction according to rules, were learnt from the Japanese in the matter of composition.
At the same time, they threw light upon what had been flat and trivial in Courbet’s realism. These spirited narrators never told a story for the sake of telling it; they never painted to give a prosaic copy of some particle of reality. They liberated European painting from the heaviness of matter, and rendered it tender and delicate. They taught that art of not saying everything, which says so much, the method of compendious drawing, the secret of expanding distance by a special treatment of lines, the touch thrown rapidly in, the unforeseen, the surprise, the fleeting hint, the way of increasing effect by theincompletion of motive, the suggestion of the whole by a part. Artists learnt from them another manner of drawing and modelling, a manner of giving the impression of the object without the need for the whole of it being executed, so that one knows that it is there only through one’s knowledge. They brought in the taste for pithy sketches dealing only with essentials, the consciousness of the endless catalogue of what may be contained—in life, reality, and fancy—by one fluent outline. They introduced the preference for perspective bird’s-eye views, the disposition to throw groups, dense masses, and crowds more into the distance, and render them more animated and vivid by a relief of the foreground, which (though confirmed by photography) is apparently improbable.
The influence of Japan on colouring is just as visible as upon composition and drawing. It had been clearly shown in Courbet’s pictures of artisans that the rules of the Bolognese school, with their brown sauce and their red shadows, could not possibly be applied to objects in the open air. It was therefore necessary to discover a new principle of colour for modern subjects, a principle by which oil-painting would be divested of its oil, and light and air would come to their rights. It was seen from the works of the painters of Nippon that it was not absolutely necessary to paint brown to be a painter. They taught a new method of seeing things, opened the eyes to the changing play of the phenomena of light, the fugitive nature and constant mutability of which had up to this time seemed to mock at every rendering. The softness of their bright harmonies was studied and artistically transposed.
These are the points in which Japanese art has had a revolutionary effect upon the development of European. Each one of those who at that time belonged to the Society of the Jinglar has had more or less experience of its influence. Alfred Stevens owes to it certain delicacies of colouring; Whistler, his exquisite refinement of tone and his capriciously artistic method in the treatment of landscape; Degas, his fantastic and free grouping, his unrivalled audacities of composition. Manet especially became now the artist to whom history does honour, and Louis Gonse tells a story with a very characteristic touch of the first exhibition of theMaîtres impressionistes. He went there, coming from the official Salon in the company of a Japanese, and, while the French public declared the fresh brightness of the pictures to be untrue and barbaric, the son of sacred Nippon, accustomed from youth to see nature in light, airy tones without a yellow coating of varnish, said: “Over there I was in an exhibition of oil-pictures, here I feel as if I were entering a flowery garden. What strikes me is the animation of these figures, and the feeling is one I have never had elsewhere in your picture exhibitions.”