Boecklin’s power of creating types in embodying these beings of his imagination is a thing unheard of in the whole history of art. He has represented his Centaurs and Satyrs, and Fauns and Sirens and Cupids, so vividly and impressively that they have become ideas as currently acceptable as if they were simple incomposite beings. He has seen the awfulness of the sea at momentswhen the secret beings of the deep emerge, and he allows a glimpse into the fabulous reality of their heretofore unexplored existence. For all beings which hover swarming in the atmosphere around have their dwelling in the trees or their haunts in rocky deserts, he has found new and convincing figures. Everything which was created in this field before his time—the works of Dürer, Mantegna, and Salvator Rosa not excepted—was an adroit sport with forms already established by the Greeks, and a transposition of Greek statues into a pictorial medium. With Boecklin, who instead of illustrating mythology himself creates it, a new power of inventing myths was introduced. His creations are not the distant issue of nature, but corporeal beings, full of ebullient energy, individualised through and through, and stout, lusty, and natural; and in creating them he has been even more consistent than the Greeks. In their work there is something inorganic in the combination of a horse’s body with the head of Zeus or Laocoön grafted upon it. But in the presence of Boecklin’s Centaurs heaving great boulders around them and biting and worrying each other’s manes, the spectator has really the feeling which prompts him to exclaim, “Every inch a steed!” In him the nature of the sea is expressed through his cold, slimy women with the dripping hair clinging to their heads far more powerfully than it was by the sea-gods of Greece. How merciless is the look in their cold, black, soulless eyes! They are as terrible as the destroying sea that yesterday in its bellowing fury engulfed a hundred human creatures despairing in the anguish of death, and to-day stretches still and joyous in its blue infinity and its callous oblivion of all the evils it has wrought.
And only a slight alteration in the truths of nature has sufficed him for the creation of such chimerical beings. As a landscape painter he stands with all his fibres rooted in the earth, although he seems quite alienated from this world of ours, and his fabulous creatures make the same convincing impression because they have been created with all the inner logical congruityof nature, and delineated under close relationship to actual fact with the same numerous details as the real animals of the earth. For his Tritons, Sirens, and Mermaids, with their awkward bodies covered with bristly hair and their prominent eyes, he may have made studies from seals and walruses. As they stretch themselves upon a rocky coast, fondling and playing with their young, they have the look of sea-cows in human form, though, like men, they have around them all manner of beasts of prey and domestic pets which they caress,—in one place a sea-serpent, in another a seal. His obese and short-winded Tritons, with shining red faces and flaxen hair dripping with moisture, are good-humoured old gentlemen with a quantity of warm blood in their veins, who love and laugh and drink new wine. His Fauns may be met with amongst the shepherds of the Campagna, swarthy strapping fellows dressed in goat-skins after the fashion of Pan—lads with glowing eyes and two rows of white teeth gleaming like ivory. It is chiefly the colour lavished upon them which turns them into children of an unearthly world, where other suns are shining and other stars.
In the matter of colour also the endeavours of Romanticists of the nineteenth century reach a climax in Boecklin. When Schwind and his comrades set themselves to represent the romantic world of fairyland an interdict was still laid upon colour, and it was lightly washed over the drawing, which counted as the thing of prime importance. But Boecklin was the first Romanticist in Germany to reveal the marvellous power in colour for rendering moods of feeling and its inner depth of musical sentiment. Even in those years when the brown tone of the galleries prevailed everywhere, colour was allowed in his pictures to have its own independent existence, apart from its office of being a merely subordinate characteristic of form. For him green was thoroughly green, blue was divinely blue, and red was jubilantly red. At the very time when Richard Wagner lured the colours of sound from music, with a glow and light such as no master had kindled before, Boecklin’s symphonies of colour streamed forth like a crashing orchestra. The whole scale, from the most sombre depth to the most chromatic light, was at his command. In his pictures of spring the colour laughs, rejoices, and exults. In “The Isle of the Dead” it seems as though a veil of crape were spread over the sea, the sky, and the trees. And since that time Boecklin has grown even greater. His splendid sea-green, his transparent blue sky, his sunset flush tinged with violet haze, his yellow-brown rocks, his gleaming red sea-mosses, and the white bodies of his girls are always arranged in new glowing, sensuous harmonies. Many of his pictures have such an ensnaring brilliancy that the eye is never weary of feasting upon their floating splendour.
A master who died in Rome some nineteen years ago might have been in the province of mural painting for German art what Puvis de Chavannes has become for French. In the earlier histories of art his name is not mentioned. Seldom alluded to in life, dead as a German painter ten years before his death, he was summoned from the grave by the enthusiasm of a friend who was a refined connoisseur four years after the earth had closed over him. Such wasHans von Marées’destiny as an artist.
Marées was born in Elberfeld in 1837. In beginning his studies he had first betaken himself to Berlin, and then went for eight years to Munich, where he paid his tribute to the historical tendency by a “Death of Schill.” But in 1864 he migrated to Rome, where he secluded himself with a few pupils, and passed his time in working and teaching. Only once did he receive an order. He was entrusted in 1873 with the execution of some mural paintings in the library of the Zoological Museum in Naples, and lamented afterwards that he had not received the commission in riper years. When he had sufficient confidence in himself to execute such tasks he had no similar opportunity, and thus he lost the capacity for the rapid completion of a work. He began to doubt his own powers, sent no more pictures to any exhibition, and when he died in the summer of 1887, at the age of fifty, his funeral was that of a man almost unknown. It was only when his best works were brought together at the annual exhibition of 1891 at Munich that he became known in wider circles, and these pictures, now preserved in the Castle of Schleissheim, will show to future years who Hans von Marées was, and what he aimed at.
“An artist rarely confines himself to what he has the power of doing,” said Goethe once to Eckermann; “most artists want to do more than they can, and are only too ready to go beyond the limits which nature has set to their talent.” Setting out from this tenet, there would be little cause for rescuing Marées from oblivion. Some portraits and a few drawings are his only performances which satisfy the demands of the studio—the portraits being large in conception and fine in taste, the drawings sketched with a swifter and surer hand. His large works have neither in drawing nor colour any one of those advantages which are expected in a good picture; they are sometimes incomplete, sometimes tortured, and sometimes positively childish. “He is ambitious, but he achieves nothing,” was the verdict passed upon him in Rome. Upon principle Marées was an opponent of all painting from the model. He scoffed at those who would only reproduce existing fact, and thus, in a certain sense, reduplicate nature, according to Goethe’s saying: “If I paint my mistress’s pug true to nature, I have two pugs, but never a work of art.” For this reason he never used models for the purpose of detailed pictorial studies; and just as little was he at pains to fix situations in his mind by pencil sketches to serve as notes; for, according to his view, the direct use of motives, as they are called, is only a hindrance to free artistic creation. And, of course, creation of this kind is only possible to a man who can always command a rich store of vivid memories of what he has seen and studied and profoundly grasped in earlier days. This treasury of artistic forms was not large enough in Marées. If one buries oneself in Marées’ works—and there are some of them in which the trace of great genius has altogether vanished beneath the unsteady hand of a restless brooder—it seems as if there thrilled within them the cry of a human heart. Sometimes through his method of painting them over and over againhe produced spectral beings with grimacing faces. Their bodies have been so painted and repainted that whole layers of colour lie upon separate parts, and ruin the impression in a ghastly fashion. Only too often his high purpose was wrecked by the inadequacy of his technical ability; and his poetic dream of beauty almost always evaporated because his hand was too weak to give it shape.
If his pictures, in spite of all this, made a great effect in the Munich exhibition, it was because they formulated a principle. It was felt that notes had been touched of which the echo would be long in dying. When Marées appeared there was no “grand painting” for painting’s sake in Germany, but mural decoration after the fashion of the historical picture—works in which the aim of decorative art was completely misunderstood, since they merely gave a rendering of arid and instructive stories, where they should have simply aimed at expressing “a mood.” Like his contemporary Puvis de Chavannes in France, Marées restored to this “grand painting” the principle of its life, its joyous impulse, and did so not by painting anecdote, but because he aimed at nothing but pictorial decorative effect. A sumptuous festal impression might be gained from his pictures; it was as though beautiful and subdued music filled the air; they made the appeal of quiet hymns to the beauty of nature, and were, at the same time, grave and monumental in effect.
In one, St. Martin rides through a desolate wintry landscape upon a slow-trotting nag, and holds his outspread mantle towards the half-naked beggar, shivering with the cold. In another, St. Hubert has alighted from his horse, and kneels in adoration before the cross which he sees between the antlers of the stag. In another, St. George, upon a powerful rearing horse, thrusts his lance through the body of the dragon with solemn and earnest mien. But as a rule even the relationship with antique, mythological, and mediæval legendary ideas is wanting in his art. Landscapes which seem to have been studied in another world he peoples with beings who pass their lives lost in contemplation of the divine. Women and children, men and grey-beards live, and love, and labour as though in an age that knows nothing of the stroke of the clock, and which might be yesterday or a hundred thousand years ago. They repose upon the luxuriant sward shadowed by apple-trees laden with fruit, abandoning themselves to a thousand reveries and meditations. They do not pose, and they aim at being nothing except children of nature, nature in her innocence and simplicity. Nude women stand motionless under the trees, or youths are seen reflected in the pools. The motive of gathering oranges is several times repeated: a youth snatches at the fruit, an old man bends to pick up those which have dropped, and a child searches for those which have rolled away in the grass. Sometimes the steed, the Homeric comrade of man, is introduced: the nude youth rides his steed in the training-school, or the commander of an army gallops upon his splendid warhorse. Everything that Marées painted belongs to the golden age. And when it was borne in mind that these pictures had been produced twenty years back or more, they came to have the significance of works that opened out a new path; there was poetry in the placeof didactic formula; in the place of historical anecdote the joy of plastic beauty; in the place of theatrical vehemence an absence of gesticulation and a perfect simplicity of line. At a time when others rendered dramas and historical episodes by colours and gestures, Marées composed idylls. He came as a man of great and austere talent, Virgilian in his sense of infinite repose on the breast of nature, monastic in his abnegation of petty superficial allurements, despite special attempts which he made at chromatic effect. Something dreamy and architectonic, lofty and yet familiar, intimate in feeling and yet monumental holds sway in his works. Intimacy of effect he achieved by the stress he laid upon landscape; monumental dignity by his grandiose and earnest art, and his calm and sense of style in line. All abrupt turns and movements were avoided in his work. And he displayed a refinement entirely peculiar to himself through the manner in which he brought into accord the leading lines of landscape and the leading lines in his figures. A feeling for style, in the sense in which it was understood by the old painters, is everywhere dominant in his work, and a handling of line and composition in the grand manner which placed him upon a level with the masters of art. A new and simple beauty was revealed. And if it is true that it is only in the field of plastic art that he has had, up to the present, any pupil of importance—and he had one in Adolf Hildebrandt—it is, nevertheless, beyond question that the monumental painting of the future is alone capable of being developed upon the ground prepared by Marées.
In this more than anything, it seems to me, lies the significance of all these masters. We must not lay too much stress upon the fact that they dealt with ideal and universal themes; a healthy art cannot be nourished on bloodlessideals, but only on the living essence of its own epoch. We must bear in mind, however, that a sound artistic principle has been formulated. A glance at the productions of classic art shows us that the old masters carefully considered the relation of a picture to its environment. Take, for instance, the Ravenna mosaics or Giotto’s frescoes. They must needs resound in solemn harmony the whole church through; looked at from any point of view they must make their presence felt right away in the farthest distance: so both Giotto and the mosaic artists worked only in broad expressive lines, their forcible colour-schemes were fitted together in accordance with strict decorative laws. All naturalistic effects are avoided, all petty detail is left out in the flow of the drapery as well as in the structure of the landscape. Then the clear outlines tell out. The pictures must, when viewed from a distance, simultaneously, in all their lines, carry on the lines of the building.
Later on, in the Netherlands, there arose another style of painting. In abrupt contrast to the monumental works of the Italian school we have Jan van Eyck’s tiny little pictures painted with a fine point, stroke by stroke, with the most minute exactitude. Every hair in the head, every vein in the hands, every ornament in the costume is drawn true to life. Jan van Eyck knew what he was about with this fine-point style of art, for his pictures did not lay claimto any effect from a distance; they were meant to be looked at, like miniatures in the prayer-books, from the closest point of view possible. They were little domestic altar-pieces: when anyone wanted to look at them, he drew the curtain aside and knelt or stood just in front of them. The style of painting of the later Dutch cabinet pictures is accounted for in the same way. These paintings were generally placed on an easel, as if to give the spectator a gentle hint, “If you wish to fully appreciate the beauties of this little picture, please stand right in front.” Even when the pictures were meant to adorn the walls, the minute and dainty style of a Don or a Mieris was appropriate, for the narrowness of the old Dutch rooms precluded all possibility of the spectator’s being able to stand far away from the picture.
If by chance one of these Dutch artists, Weenix for instance, had to do work for a Flemish palace, he changed his style forthwith. He recognised the fact that a picture, to be effective in a large state-room, must differ not only in size, but in composition and style of painting from one that is meant for a small parlour. It is undoubtedly this lack of appreciation of the fact that a picture must be suitable to its surroundings that has robbed the nineteenth century of any claim to style. What abominable daubs mural painters have foisted upon us in our public buildings! The literary trend of the time drew away people’s attention from the beauty of form and colour, and centred it upon the didactic value of the works. Instead of starting from the idea that a picture should “adorn,” they covered the walls with historical genre painting, never troubling themselves about decorative effect, and offered the beholder instructive stories in picture cards. As to art in the home, well, we can all of us remember the time when small photographs and etchings, instead of being kept in an album or a portfolio, were put on the wall, where they looked like mere spots of dead black and white. It was the same sort of thing in galleries and exhibitions, confusion worse confounded. On one and the same wall you got the most heterogeneous collection, cabinet pictures by Brouwer or Ostade next to an enormous altar-piece by Rubens, a gigantic Delacroix flanked by neat little Meissoniers. In this way the power of appreciating the significance of a work of art as part of thedecoration of a room was totally lost. Surely it is not to be wondered at that a picture seen close to in an exhibition, bought, taken home, hung on the wall and looked at from a distance, turns out a meaningless chaos of dirty-brown.
In the province of mural painting the tendency towards an improvement set in earliest. In England, France, and Germany, almost simultaneously efforts began to be made with the object of restoring to mural painting once more its decorative element. In England Burne-Jones was the first to pay attention to harmony of style between picture and building. Before his time English churches were provided with stained-glass windows in a spurious sort of Cinquecento style that was absolutely unsuited to the building, but Burne-Jones satisfied the most exacting demands of the English Neo-Gothic architecture. All his subjects are brought into style with the slender pillars, the curves of the landscape as well as of the figures harmonise with the pointed arches of the building. Everything, colour as well as line, is so simplified that the pictures retain the clearness of their composition when seen from the farthest possible standpoint. In France, Puvis de Chavannes travelled by another road to the same goal. The decoration of the Pantheon was placed in his hands. Before him many artists had done work there, but the policy of all of them had been to adopt the old style of oil-painting to mural decoration, and so they adorned the Pantheon as well, though it was called a Grecian temple, with oil-paintings founded on Raphael or Caravaggio, mural pictures that would have been far better suited to a church of the Cinquecento or thebaroqueperiod. Puvis was the first to realise that in the decoration of a building the artist must be strictly controlled by the style of the architecture; so in his frescoes he avoided all projections, allroundness, all wavy lines, bends, and curves, and dealt exclusively with groups of vertical and horizontal lines, that followed the characteristic lines of pillar and architrave. Similarly in the colours as well as the lines he excluded all detail that would distract the attention, all confusion of colours that would disturb the eye, and thereby gave his works the stately and dominant effect that they produce. Had Fate been kind, poor Hans von Marées might have won the same significance for Germany as Puvis did for France. Though individually his works are faulty, they are all informed with a marvellous feeling for style; one observes how beautifully the lines of the landscape are made to harmonise with the lines of the figures, and with what a finely decorative quality the colours are combined.
In a similar manner we must bring our minds to bear upon the problem of the framed picture in connection with the decoration of a room. Our rooms are not only lighter but more spacious than the old-fashioned Dutch parlours, with their leaded panes; so it was merely a hereditary taint in our painters that made them cling so long to the ancestral style of painting, in spite of the altered conditions of the lighting and size of modern rooms. Impressionism did at any rate bring colour more into harmony with the improved lighting of our rooms; yet in every art the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. The Impressionists discovered atmosphere, and so they denied the existence of lines, and the outlines vanished into thin air; they discovered light, and therefore they likewise denied the existence of colours. Then by means of light the colours were analysed, and patches of colour were decomposed into a heterogeneous conglomeration of luminous points. The Impressionists simply revelled inthe most delicate nuances of vague tones of indefinite colour, and as they eliminated from their work all significant lines and all strong and frank colours, they spoilt to a great extent the decorative effect of their pictures when viewed at a distance: their paintings from that standpoint are often nothing more than a daub of violet and yellow, without form and void.
Thus towards the close of the nineteenth century there came under discussion a new problem again in the matter of picture painting. The question arose as to how decorative qualities might be arrived at in painting pure and simple. The way seems to be pointed out in the works of Moreau and Boecklin; the way in which they placed side by side beautiful strong colours in broad masses, and invariably so as to avoid all discord, and combined the most conflicting tones into a harmonious whole in a manner which words fail one to describe. It was delightful, after having looked so long at nothing but the subtle, delicate nuances of the Impressionists, to turn again to these full-toned colours ringing out their deep and mighty harmonies.
It is scarcely to be wondered at that the younger generation of the present day refused to be bound by the principles of art laid down by their predecessors, notwithstanding the fact that Moreau, as well as Boecklin, was indebted to the Quattrocento for the mosaic-like brilliancy of his colours. Impressionism has discovered a whole range of new colour values by careful and intelligent study of the influence of light upon colour, and where formerly we saw ten we now find a hundred. Red, green, blue have lost their meaning in the category of complex and infinitely differentiated tones. So, as we advance from a realistic transcript of impressions taken direct from natureto free, symphonic compositions of the colours to which Impressionism has opened our eyes, we shall evolve harmonies richer than were ever imagined before, more melting than we ever dreamed of. This is the goal to which the efforts of the younger generation are primarily tending. Building upon the foundations laid by the Impressionists, they seek to ensure for their pictures both clearness and harmony, by simplification of form, by beauty of technique, and by subordination of colour to the decorative scheme. Their confession of faith is comprised in the words of Paterson: “A picture must be something more than garbled Nature: it must please the educated eye; and only so far as nature gives the painter his material can he or dare he follow her.”
BOOK V
A SURVEY OF EUROPEAN ART AT THE PRESENT TIME
INTRODUCTION
Bywhat means was the further development of painting in Europe brought about under the influence of the principles of the two schools, the Impressionists and the Decorative-Stylists? The following may supply the answer.
“Realism” having led painting from the past to the present, and “Impressionism” having broken the jurisdiction of the galleries by establishing an independent conception of colour for a new class of subjects, the flood of modern life, which had been artificially dammed, began to pour into art in all its volume. A whole series of new problems emerged, and a vigorous band of modern spirits were ready to lay hold upon them and give them artistic shape, each according to his nature, his ability, and his individual knowledge and power. After nineteenth-century painting had found its proper field of activity they were no longer under the necessity of seeking remote subjects. The fresh conquest of a personal impression of nature took the place of that retrospective taste which employed the ready-made language of form and colour belonging to the old masters, as a vocabulary for the preparation of fresh works of art. Nature herself had become a gallery of splendid pictures. Artists were dazzled as if by a new light, overcome as though by a revelation of tones and strains from which the painter was to compose his symphonies. They learnt how to find what was pictorial and poetic in the narrowest family circle and amongst the beds of the simplest vegetable garden; and for the first time they felt more wonder in the presence of reality, the joy of gradual discovery and of a leisurely conquest of the world.
Of course,plein-airpainting was at first the chief object of their endeavours. Having painted so long only in brown tones, the radiant magic world of free and flowing light was something so ravishingly novel that for several years all their efforts were exclusively directed to possessing themselves once more of the sun, and substituting the clear daylight for the clare-obscure which had reigned alone, void of atmosphere. In this sunny brightness, flooded with light and air, they found a crowd of problems, and turned to the perpetual discovery of new chords of colour. Sunbeams sparkling as they rippled through the leaves, and greyish-green meadows flecked with dust and basking under light, were the first and most simple themes.
The complete programme, however, did not consist of painting in bright hues, but, generally speaking, in seizing truth of colour and altogether renouncing artificial harmony in a generally accepted tone. Thus, after thepainting of daylight and sunlight was learnt, a further claim had still to be asserted: the ideal of truth in painting had to be made the keynote in every other task. For in the sun, light is no doubt white, but in the recesses of the forest, in the moonshine, or in a dim place, it shines and is at the same time charged with colour. Night, or mist, with its hovering and pervasive secrets, is quite as rich in beauties as the radiant world of glistening sunshine. After seeing the summer sun on wood and water, it was a relief for the eye to behold the subdued, soft, and quiet light of a room. Upon the older and rougher painting of free light there followed a preference for dusk, which has a softness more picturesque, a more tender harmony of colours, and more geniality than the broad light of day. Artists studied clare-obscure, and sought for an enhancement of colour in it; they looked into the veil of night, and addressed themselves to a painting of darkness such as could only have proceeded from theplein-airschool. For this darkness of theirs is likewise full of atmosphere, a darkness in which there is life and breath and palpitation. In earlier days, when a night was painted, everything was thick and opaque, covered with black verging into yellow; to this latter error artists were seduced by the crusts of varnish upon old pictures. Now they learnt to interpret the mysterious life of the night, and to render the bluish-grey atmosphere of twilight. Or if figures were to be painted in a room, artists rendered the circulation of the air amid groups of people, which Correggio called “the ambient” and Velasquez “respiration.” And there came also the study of artificial illumination—of the delicate coloured charm of many-coloured lanterns, of the flaring gas or lamp-light which streams through the glass windows of shops, flaring and radiating through the night and reflected in a blazing glow upon the faces of men and women. Under these purely pictorial points of view the gradual widening of the range of subject was completed.
So long as the acquisition of sunlight was the point in question, representations from the life of artisans in town and country stood at the centre itself of artistic efforts, because the conception and technical methods of the new art could be tested upon them with peculiar success. And through these pictures painting came into closer sympathy with the heart-beat of the age. At an epoch when the labouring man as such, and the political and social movement in civilisation, had become matters of absorbing interest, the picture of artisans necessarily claimed an important place in art; and one of the best sides of the moral value of modern painting lies in its no longer holding itself in indifference aloof from these themes. When the century began, Hector and Agamemnon alone were qualified for artistic treatment, but in the natural course of development the disinherited, the weary and heavy-laden likewise acquired rights of citizenship. In the passage where Vasari speaks of the Madonnas of Cimabue, comparing them with the older Byzantine Virgins, he says finely that the Florentine master brought more “goodness of heart” into painting. And perhaps the historians of the future will say the same about the art of the present.
The predilection for the disinherited was in the beginning to such an extentidentified with the plain, straightforward painting of the proletariat that Naturalism could not be conceived at all except in so far as it dealt with poverty: in making its first great successes it had sought after the miserable and the outcast, and serious critics recognised its chief importance in the discovery of the fourth estate. Of course, the painting of paupers, as a sole field of activity for the new art, would have been an exceedingly one-sided acquisition. It is not merely the working-man who should be painted, because the age must strive to compass in a large and full spirit the purport of its own complicated conditions of life. So there began, in general, the representation, so long needed, of the man of to-day and of society agitated, as it is, by the stream of existence. As Zola wrote in the very beginning of the movement: “Naturalism does not depend upon the choice of subject. The whole of society is its domain, from the drawing-room to the drinking-booth. It is only idiots who would make Naturalism the rhetoric of the gutter. We claim for ourselves the whole world.” Everything is to be painted,—forges, railway-stations, machine-rooms, the workrooms of manual labourers, the glowing ovens of smelting-works, official fêtes, drawing-rooms, scenes of domestic life,cafés, storehouses and markets, the races and the Exchange, the clubs and the watering-places, the expensive restaurants and the dismal eating-houses for the people, thecabinets particuliersandchic des premières, the return from the Bois and the promenades on the seashore, the banks and the gambling-halls, casinos, boudoirs, studios, and sleeping-cars, overcoats, eyeglasses and red dress-coats, balls,soirées, sport, Monte Carlo and Trouville, the lecture-rooms of universities and the fascination of the crowded streets in the evening, the whole of humanity in all classes of society and following every occupation, at home and in the hospitals, at the theatre, upon the squares, in poverty-stricken slums and upon the broad boulevards lit with electric light. Thus the new art flung aside the blouse, and soon displayed itself in the most various costumes, down to the frock-coat and the smoking-jacket. The rude and remorseless traits which it had at first, and which found expression in numbers of peasant, artisan, and hospital pictures, were subdued and softened until they even became idyllic. Moreover, the scale of painting over life-size, favoured in the early years of the movement, could be abandoned, since it arose essentially from competition with the works of the historical school. So long as those huge pictures covered the walls at exhibitions, artists who obeyed a new tendency were forced from the beginning—if they wished to prevail—to produce pictures of the same size. But since historical painting was finally dead and buried, there was no need to set up such a standard any longer, and a transition could be made to a smaller scale, better fitted for works of an intimate character. The dazzling tones in which the Impressionists revelled were replaced by those which were dim and soft, energy and force by subdued and tender treatment, largeness of size by a scale which was small and intimate.
That was more or less the course of evolution run through in all European countries in a similar way between the years 1875 and 1885. Just in the sameway from this time onwards the Decorative-Stylists’ tendency set in universally. Hitherto everything was focused on the “picture as such.” Tasteless novelty or methodless imitation held sway over the applied arts. The endeavours of the next decade aimed at freeing the picture from its isolation and making the room itself a harmonious work of art. A long line of eminent artists took in hand the hitherto neglected subject of art in decoration; and as thereby new blood was infused into the applied arts, so on the other hand pictorial art in one way renounced its freedom to fit itself into its new frame. Colour, which formerly was determined principally by the lighting, now became subordinate to a decorative scheme. Truth is no longer the end and aim of art, but fitness, harmony of form and colour values. It is, however, obviously impossible to give verse and chapter to the history of this development, just as it would be impossible to fix a boundary line between the two roads, the Impressionistic on the one hand and the Decorative on the other. We will wander free from one country to another, and try to assign to each its proper place in the general chart of modern painting.
CHAPTER XXXIV
FRANCE
Paris,which for a hundred years had given the signal for all novel tactics in European art, still remained at the head of the movement; the artistic temperament of the French people themselves, and the superlatively excellent training which the painter enjoys in Paris, enable him at once to follow every change of taste with confidence and ease. In 1883 Manet died, on the varnishing day of the Salon, and in the preface which Zola wrote to the catalogue of the exhibition held after the death of the master he was well able to say: “His influence is an accomplished fact, undeniable, and making itself more deeply felt with every fresh Salon. Look back for twenty years, recall those black Salons, in which even studies from the nude seemed as dark as if they had been covered with mouldering dust. In huge frames history and mythology were smothered in layers of bitumen; never was there an excursion into the province of the real world, into life and into perfect light; scarcely here or there a tiny landscape, where a patch of blue sky ventured bashfully to shine down. But little by little the Salons were seen to brighten, and the Romans and Greeks of mahogany to vanish in company with the nymphs of porcelain, whilst the stream of modern representations taken from ordinary life increased year by year, and flooded the walls, bathing them with vivid tones in the fullest sunlight. It was not merely a new period; it was a new painting bent upon reaching the perfect light, respecting the law of colour values, setting every figure in full light and in its proper place, instead of adapting it in an ideal fashion according to established tradition.”
When the way had been paved for this change, when the new principles had been transferred from the chamber of experiments to full publicity, from theSalon des Refusésto the Salon which was official, it was chieflyBastien-Lepagewho gained the first adherents to them amongst the public. But because he does not belong to the pioneers of art, and merely adapted for the great public elements that had been won by Manet, the immoderate praise which was accorded him in earlier days has been recently brought within more legitimate limits. It has been urged, by way of restriction, that he stands in relation to Manet as Breton to Millet, and that, admitting all differences, he has nevertheless a certain resemblance to his teacher, Cabanel. As the latter rendered Classicism elegant, Bastien-Lepage, it has been said, softened the ruggedness of Naturalism, cut and polished the nails of hispeasants, and made their rusticity a pretty thing, qualifying it for the drawing-room. Degas was in the habit of calling him the Bouguereau of Naturalism. As a matter of fact, Naturalism was bound to make certain concessions if it were ever to prevail, and such critics forget that it was just these amiable concessions which helped the principles of Manet to prevail more swiftly than would have been otherwise possible. All the forms and ideas of the Impressionists, with which no one, outside the circle of artists, had been able to reconcile himself, were to be found in Bastien-Lepage, purified, mitigated, and set in a golden style. He followed theeclaireurs, as the leader of the main body of the army which has gained the decisive battle, and in this way he has fulfilled an important mission in the history of art.
Bastien-Lepage was born in ancient Damvillers—once a small stronghold of Lorraine—in a pleasant, roomy house that told a tale of even prosperity rather than of wealth. As a boy he played amongst the venerable moats which had been converted into orchards. Thus in his youth he received the freshest impressions, being brought up in the heart of nature. His father drew a good deal himself, and kept his son at work with the pencil, without any æsthetic theories, without any vague ideal, and without ever uttering the word “academy” or “museum.” Having left school in Verdun, Bastien-Lepage went to Paris to become an official in the post-office. Of an afternoon, however, he drew and painted with Cabanel. But he was Cabanel’s pupil much as Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits. “My handicraft,” as he said afterwards, “I learnt at the Academy, but not my art. You want to paint what exists, and you are invited to represent the unknown ideal, and to dish up the pictures of the old masters. In old days I scrawled drawings of gods and goddesses, Greeks and Romans, beings I didn’t know, and didn’t understand, and regarded with supreme indifference. To keep up my courage, I repeated to myself that this was possibly ‘grand art,’ and I ask myself sometimes whether anything academical still remains in my composition. I do not say that one should only paint everyday life; but I do assert thatwhen one paints the past it should, at any rate, be made to look like something human, and correspond with what one sees around one. It would be so easy to teach the mere craft of painting at the academies, without incessantly talking about Michael Angelo, and Raphael, and Murillo, and Domenichino. Then one would go home afterwards to Brittany, Gascony, Lorraine, or Normandy, and paint what lies around; and any morning, after reading, if one had a fancy to represent the Prodigal Son, or Priam at the feet of Achilles, or anything of the kind, one would paint such scenes in one’s own fashion, without reminiscences of the galleries—paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place yesterday evening. It is only in that way that art can be living and beautiful.”
The outbreak of the war fortunately prevented him from remaining long at the Academy. He entered a company of Franc-Tireurs, took part in the defence of Paris, and returned ill to Damvillers. Here he came to know himself and his peculiar talent. At once a poet and a realist, he looked at nature with that simple frankness which those alone possess who have learnt from youth upwards to see with their own eyes instead of trusting to other people’s. His friends called him “primitive,” and there was some truth in what they said, for Bastien-Lepage came to art free from all trace of mannerism; he knew nothing of academical rules, and merely relied upon his eyes, which were always open and trustworthy.
Looking back as far as he could, he was able to remember nothing except gleaners bowed over the stubble-fields, vintagers scattered amid the furrows of the vineyards, mowers whose robust figures rose brightly from the green meadows, shepherdesses seeking shelter beneath talltrees from the blazing rays of the midday sun, shepherds shivering in their ragged cloaks in winter, pedlars hurrying with great strides across the plain raked by a storm, laundresses laughing as they stood at their tubs beneath the blossoming apple-trees. He was impressionable to everything: the dangerous-looking tramp who hung about one day near his father’s house; the wood-cutter groaning beneath the weight of his burden; the passer-by trampling the fresh grass of the meadows and leaving his trace behind him; the little sickly girl minding her lean cow upon a wretched field; the fire which broke out in the night and set the whole village in commotion. That was what he wanted to paint, and that is what he has painted. The life of the peasants of Lorraine is the theme of all his pictures, the landscape of Lorraine is their setting. He painted what he loved, and he loved what he painted.
It was in Damvillers that he felt at home as an artist. He had his studio in the second storey of his father’s house, though he usually painted in the open air, either in the field or the orchard, whilst his grandfather, an old man of eighty, was near him clipping the trees, watering the flowers, and weeding the grass. His mother, a genuine peasant, was always busy with the thousand cares of housekeeping. Of an evening the whole family sat together round the lamp, his mother sewing, his father reading the paper, his grandfather with the great cat on his lap, and Jules working. It was at this time that he produced those familiar domestic scenes, thrown off with a few strokes, which were to be seen at the exhibition of the works which he left behind him. He knew no greater pleasure than that of drawing again and again the portraits of his father and mother, the old lamp, or the velvet cap of his grandfather. At ten o’clock sharp his father gave the signal for going to bed.
In Paris, indeed, other demands were made. In 1872 he painted, with the object of being represented in the Salon, that remarkable picture “In the Spring,” the only one of his works which is slightly hampered by conventionality in conception. The pupilof Cabanel is making an effort at truth, and has not yet the courage to be true altogether. Here, as in the “Spring Song” which followed, there is a mixture of borrowed sentiment, work in the old style and fresh Naturalism. The landscape is painted from nature, and the peasant woman is real, but the Cupids are taken from the old masters.
The next years were devoted to competitive labours. To please his father and mother Bastien-Lepage twice contested thePrix de Rome. In 1873 he painted as a prize exercise a “Priam before Achilles,” and in 1875 an “Annunciation of the Angel to the Shepherds,” that now famous picture which received the medal at the World Exhibition of 1878. And he who afterwards revelled in the clearestplein-airpainting here celebrates the secret wonders of the night, though the influences of Impressionism are here already visible. In his picture the night is as dark as in Rembrandt’s visions; yet the colours are not harmonised in gold-brown, but in a cool grey silver tone. And how simple the effect of the heavenly appearance upon the shepherds lying round the fire of coals! The place of the curly ideal heads of the old sacred painting has been taken by those of bristly, unwashed men who, nurtured amid the wind and the weather, know nothing of those arts of toilette so much in favour with the imitators of Raphael, and who receive the miracle with the simplicity of elemental natures. Fear and abashed astonishment at the angelic appearance are reflected in their faces, and the plain and homely gestures of their hands are in correspondence with their inward excitement. Even the angel turning towards the shepherds was conceived in an entirely human and simple way. In spite of this, or just because of it, Bastien failed with his “Annunciation to the Shepherds,” as he had done previously with his “Priam.” Once the prize was taken by Léon Comerre, a pupil of Cabanel, and on the other occasion by Josef Wencker, the pupil of Gérôme. It was written in the stars that Bastien-Lepage was not to go to Rome, and it didhim as little harm as it had done to Watteau a hundred and sixty years before. In Italy Bastien-Lepage would only have been spoilt for art. The model for him was not one of the old Classic painters, but nature as she is in Damvillers,—Nature, the great mother. When the works sent in for the competition were exhibited a sensation was made when one day a branch of laurel was laid on the frame of Bastien-Lepage’s “Annunciation to the Shepherds” by Sarah Bernhardt. And Sarah Bernhardt’s portrait became the most celebrated of the small likenesses which soon laid the foundation of the painter’s fame.
The portrait of his grandfather, that marvellous work of a young man of five-and-twenty, is the first picture in which he was completely himself. The old man sits in a corner of the garden, just as usual, in a brown cap, his spectacles upon his nose, his arms crossed upon his lap, with a horn snuff-box and a check handkerchief lying upon his knees. How perfectly easy and natural is the pose, how thoughtful the physiognomy, what a personal note there is in the dress! Nor are there in that garden, bathed in light, any of those black shadows which only fall in the studio. Everything bore witness to a simplicity and sincerity which justified the greatest hopes. After that first work the world knew that Bastien-Lepage was a preeminent portrait painter, and he did not betray the promise of his youth. His succeeding pictures showed that he had not merely rusticity and nature to rely upon, but that he was acharmeurin the best sense of the word.
This ingenuous artist, who knew nothing of the history of painting, and felt more at home in the open air than in museums, was not ignorant, at any rate, of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and had chosen for his likenesses a scale as small as that which Clouet and his school preferred. The representation here reaches a depth of characterisation which recalls Jan van Eyck’s little pearls of portrait painting. In these works also he mostly confined himself to bright lights. Portraits of this type are those of his brother, of MadameDrouet, the aged friend of Victor Hugo, with her weary, gentle, benevolent face—a masterpiece of intimate feeling and refinement; of his friend and biographer André Theuriet, of Andrieux the prefect of the police, and, above all, the famous and signal work of inexorable truth and marvellous delicacy, Sarah Bernhardt in profile, with her tangled chestnut hair, sitting upon a white fur, arrayed in a white China-silk dress with yellowish lights in it, and carefully examining a Japanese bronze. The bizarre grace of the tragic actress, her slender figure, fashioned, as it were, for Donatello, the nervous intensity with which she sits there, her weird Chinese method of wearing the hair, and the profile of which she is so proud, have been rendered in none of her many likenesses with such an irresistible force of attraction as in this little masterpiece. In some of his other portraits Bastien-Lepage has not disdained the charm of obscure light; he has not done so, for example, in the little portrait of Albert Wolff, the art-critic, as he sits at his writing-desk amongst his artistic treasures, with a cigarette in his hand. OnlyClouet and Holbein painted miniature portraits of such refinement. Amongst moderns, probably Ingres alone has reached such a depth of characterisation upon the smallest scale, and in general he is the most closely allied to Bastien-Lepage as a portrait painter in profound study of physiognomy, and in the broad and, one might say, chased technique of his little drawings. Comparison with Gaillard would be greatly to the disadvantage of this great engraver, for Bastien-Lepage is at once more seductive and many-sided. It is curious how seldom his portraits have that family likeness which is elsewhere to be found amongst almost all portrait painters. In his effort at penetrative characterisation he alters, on every occasion, his entire method of painting according to the personality, so that it leaves at one time an effect that is bizarre, coquettish, and full of intellectual power and spirit, at another one which is plain and large, at another one which is bashful, sparing, andbourgeois.
As a painter of peasant life he made his first appearance in 1878.
In the Salon of this year a sensation was made by a work of such truth and poetry as had not been seen since Millet; this was the “Hay Harvest.” It is noon. The June sun throws its sultry beams over the mown meadows. The ground rises slowly to a boundless horizon, where a tree emerges here and there, standing motionless against the brilliant sky. The grey and the green of these great plains—it is as if the weariness of many toilsome miles rose out of them—weighed heavily upon one, and created a sense of forsaken loneliness. Only two beings, a pair of day-labourers, break the wide level scorched by a quivering, continuous blaze of light. They have had their midday meal, and their basket is lying near them upon the ground. The man has now lain down to sleep upon a heap of hay, with his hat tilted over his eyes. But the woman sits dreaming, tired with the long hours of work, dazzled with the glare of the sun, and overpowered by the odour of the hay and the sultriness of noon. She does not know the drift of her thoughts; nature is working upon her, and she has feelings which she scarcely understands herself. She is sunburnt and ugly, and her head is square and heavy, and yet there lies a world ofsublime and mystical poetry in her dull, dreamy eyes gazing into a mysterious horizon. By this picture and “The Potato Harvest,” which succeeded it in 1879, Bastien-Lepage, the splendid, placed himself in the first line of modern French painters. This time he renders the sentiment of October. The sandy fields, impregnated with dust, rest in a white, subdued light of noon; pale brown are the potato stalks, pale brown the blades of grass, and the roads are bright with dust; and through this landscape, with its wide horizon, where the tree-tops, half despoiled already, shiver in the wind, there blowsle grand air, a breeze strong as only Millet in his water-colours had the secret of painting. With Millet he shares likewise the breath of tender melancholy which broods so sadly over his pictures. “The Girl with the Cow,” the little Fauvette, that child of social misery—misery that lies sorrowful and despairing in the gaze of her eyes—is perhaps the most touching example of his brooding devotion to truth. Her brown dress is torn and dirty, while a grey kerchief borders her famished, sickly face. A waste, disconsolate landscape, with a frozen tree and witheredthistles, stretches round like a boundless Nirvana. Above there is a whitish, clear, tremulous sky, making everything paler, more arid and wearily bright; there is no gleam of rich luxuriant tints, but only dry, stinted colours; and not a sound is there in the air, not a scythe driving through the grass, not a cart clattering over the road. There is something overwhelming in this union between man and nature. One thinks of the famous words of Taine: “Man is as little to be divided from the earth as an animal or a plant. Body and soul are influenced in the same way by the environment of nature, and from this influence the destinies of men arise.” As an insect draws its entire nature, even its form and colour, from the plant on which it lives, so is the child the natural product of the earth upon which it stands, and all the impulses of its spirit are reflected in the landscape.
In 1879 Bastien-Lepage went a step further. In that year appeared “Joan of Arc,” his masterpiece in point of spiritual expression. Here he has realised the method of treating historical pictures which floated before him as an idea at the Academy, and has, at the same time, solved a problem which beset him from his youth—the penetration of mysticism and the world of dreams into the reality of life. “The Annunciation to the Shepherds,” “In Spring,” and “The Spring Song” were merely stages on a course of which he reached the destination in “Joan of Arc.” His ideal was “to paint historical themes without reminiscences of the galleries—paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place yesterday evening.”
The scene of the picture is a garden of Damvillers painted exactly from nature, with its grey soil, its apple and pear-trees clothed with small leaves, its vegetable beds, and its flowers growing wild. Joan herself is a pious, careworn, dreamy country girl. Every Sunday she has been to church, lost herself in long mystic reveries before the old sacred pictures, heard the misery of France spoken of; and the painted statues of the parish church and its tutelary saints pursue her thoughts. And just to-day, as she sat winding yarn in the shadow of the apple-trees, murmuring aprayer, she heard of a sudden the heavenly voices speaking. The spirits of St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catharine, before whose statues she has prayed so often, have freed themselves from the wooden images and float as light phantoms, as pallid shapes of mist, which will as suddenly vanish into air before the eyes of the dreaming girl. Joan rises trembling, throwing her stool over, and steps forward. She stands in motionless ecstasy stretching out her left arm, and gazing into vacancy with her pupils morbidly dilated. Of all human phases of expression which painting can approach, such mystical delirium is perhaps the hardest to render; and probably it was only by the aid of hypnotism, to which the attention of the painter was directed just then by the experiments of Charcot, that Bastien-Lepage was enabled to produce in his model that look of religious rapture, oblivious to the whole world, which is expressed in the vague glance of her eyes, blue as the sea.
“Joan of Arc” was succeeded by “The Beggar,” that life-size figure of the haggard old tramp who, with a thick stick under his arm—of which he would make use upon any suitable occasion—picks up what he can in the villages, saying a paternoster before the doors while he begs. This time he has been ringing at the porch of an ordinary middle-class dwelling, and he is sulkilythrusting into the wallet slung round his shoulders a great hunch of bread which a little girl has just given to him. There is a mixture of spite and contempt in his eyes as he shuffles off in his heavy wooden shoes. And behind the doorpost the little girl, who, in her pretty blue frock, has such a trim air of wearing her Sunday best, looks rather alarmed and glances timidly at the mysterious old man.
“Un brave Homme,” or “Le Père Jacques,” as the master afterwards called the picture, was to some extent a pendant to “The Beggar.” He comes out of the wood wheezing, with a pointed cap upon his head and a heavy bundle of wood upon his shoulders, whilst at his side his little grandchild is plucking the last flowers. It is November; the leaves have turned yellow and cover the ground. Père Jacques is providing against the Winter. And the Winter is drawing near—death.
Bastien-Lepage’s health had never been good, nor was Parisian life calculated to make it better. Slender and delicate, blond with blue eyes and a sharply chiselled profile—tout petit, tout blond, les cheveux à la bretonne, le nez retroussé et une barbe d’adolescent, as Marie Baskirtscheff describes him—he was just the type whichParisiennesadore. His studio was besieged; there was no entertainment to which he was not invited, no committee, no meeting to hold judgment over pictures at which he was not present. Amateurs fought for his works and asked for his advice when they made purchases. Pupils flocked to him in numbers. He was intoxicated with the Parisian world, enchanted with its modern elegance; he loved the vibration of life, and rejoiced in masked balls like a child. Consumptive people are invariably sensuous, drinking in the pleasures of life with more swift and hasty draughts. He then left Paris and plunged into the whirlpool of other great cities. From Switzerland, Venice, and London he cameback with pictures and landscapes. In London, indeed, he painted that beautiful picture “The Flower-Girl,” the pale, delicate child upon whose faded countenance the tragedy of life has so early left its traces. Through the whole summer of 1882 he worked incessantly in Damvillers. Once more he painted his native place in a landscape of the utmost refinement. Here, as in his portraits, everything has been rendered with a positive trenchancy, with a severe, scientific effort after truth, in which there lies what is almost a touch of aridness. And yet an indescribable magic is thrown over the fragrant green of the meadows, the young, quivering trees, and the still pond which lies rippling in the cloudless summer day.
In 1883 there appeared in the Salon that wonderful picture “Love in the Village.” The girl has hung up her washing on the paling, and the neighbour’s son has run down with a flower in his hand; she has taken the flower, and in confusion they have suddenly turned their backs upon each other, and stand there without saying a word. They love each other, and wish to marry, but how hard is the first confession. Note how the lad is turning his fingers about in his embarrassment; note the confusion of the girl, which may be seen, although she is looking towards the background of the picture; note the spring landscape, which is as fair as the figures it surrounds.
It is a tender dreamer who gives himself expression here—and love came to him also.
Enthusiastically adored by the women in his school of painting, he had found a dear friend inMarie Baskirtscheff, the distinguished young Russian girl who had become his pupil just as his fame began to rise. It is charming to see the enthusiasm with which Marie speaks of him in her diary. “Je peins sur la propre palette du vrai Bastien, avec des couleurs à lui, son pinceau, son atelier, et son frère pour modèle.” And how the others envy her because of it! “La petite Suédoise voulait toucher à sa palette.” With Marie he sketched his plans for the future, and in the midst of this restless activity he was summoned hence together with her, for she also died young, at the age of twenty-four, just as her pictures began to create a sensation. A touching idyll in her diary tells how the girl learnt, when she was dying of consumption, that young Bastien had also fallen ill, and been given up as hopeless. So long as Marie could go out of doors she went with her mother and her aunt to visit her sick friend; and when she was no longer allowed to leave the house he had himself carried up the steps to her drawing-room by his brother, and there they both sat beside each other in armchairs, and saw the end draw near, merciless and inevitable, the end of their young lives, their talents, their ambition, and their hopes. “At last! Here it is then, the end of all my sufferings! So many efforts, so many wishes, so many plans, so many —— ——, and then to die at four-and-twenty upon the threshold of them all!”
Her last picture was one of six schoolboys, sons of the people, who are standing at a street corner chattering; and it makes a curiously virile impression, when one considers that it was painted by a blond young girl, who slept under dull blue silken bed-curtains, dressed almost entirely in white, was rubbed with perfumes after a walk in hard weather, and wore on her shoulders furs which cost two thousand francs. It hangs in the Luxembourg, and for a long time a lady dressed in mourning used to come there every week and cry before the picture painted by the daughter whom she had lost so early. Marie died on 31st October 1884, and Bastien barely a month afterwards. “The Funeral of a Young Girl,” in which he wished to immortalise the funeral of Marie, was his last sketch,his farewell to the world, to the living, alluring, ever splendid nature which he loved so much, grasped and comprehended so intimately, and to the hopes which built up their deceptive castles in the air before his dying gaze. He died before he reached Raphael’s age, for he was barely thirty-six. The final collapse came on 10th December 1884, upon a sad, rainy evening, after he had lain several months upon a bed of sickness. His frame was emaciated, and as light as that of a child; his face was shrivelled—the eyes alone had their old brilliancy.
On 14th December his body was brought up to the Eastern railway station. The coffin was covered with roses, white elder blossoms, and immortelles. And now he lies buried in Lorraine, in the little churchyard of Damvillers, where his father and grandfather rest beneath an old apple-tree. Red apple-blossoms he too loved so dearly. His importance Marie Baskirtscheff has summarised simply and gracefully in the words: “C’est un artiste puissant, originel, c’est un poète, c’est un philosophe; les autres ne sont que des fabricants de n’importe quoi à côté de lui.... On ne peut plusrien regarder quand on voit sa peinture, parce que c’est beau comme la nature, comme la vie....”
This tender poetic trait which runs through his works is what principally distinguishes him fromL’hermitte, the most sterling representative of the picture of peasant life at the present time. L’hermitte, also, like most of these painters of peasants, was himself the son of a peasant. He came from Mont-Saint-Père, near Château-Thierry, a quiet old town, where from the great “Hill of Calvary” one sees a dilapidated Gothic church and the moss-grown roofs of thatched houses. His grandfather was a vine-grower and his father a schoolmaster. He worked in the field himself, and, like Millet, he painted afterwards the things which he had done himself in youth. His principal works were pictures of reapers in the field, peasant women in church, young wives nursing their children, rustics at work, here and there masterly water-colours, pastels and charcoal drawings, in 1888 the pretty illustrations to André Theuriet’sVie Rustique, the decoration of a hall at the Sorbonne with representations of rustic life, in his later period occasionally pictures from other circles of life, such as “The Fish-market of St. Malo,” “The Lecture in the Sorbonne,” “The Musical Soirée,” and finally, as a concession to the religious tendency of recent years, a “Christ visiting the House of a Peasant.” He has his studio in the Rue Vaquelin in Paris, though he spends most of his time in the village where he was born, and where he now lives quietly and simply with the peasants. Most of his works, which are to be ranked throughout amongst the most robust productions of modern Naturalism, are painted in the great glass studio which he built in the garden of his father’s house. Whilst Bastien-Lepage, through a certain softness of temperament, was moved to paint the weak rather than the strong, and less often men in the prime of life than patriarchs, women, and children, L’hermitte displays the peasant in all his rusticity. He knows the country and thelabours of the field which make the hands horny and the face brown, and he has rendered them in a strictly objective manner, in a great sculptural style. Bastien-Lepage is inclined to refinement and poetic tenderness; in L’hermitte everything is clear, precise, and sober as pale, bright daylight.