Alfred Rollwas born in Paris, and the artisan of the Parisian streets is the chief hero of his pictures. Like Zola in his Rougon-Macquart series, he set before himself the aim of depicting the social life of the present age in a great sequence of pictures—the workmen’s strike, war, and toil. His pictures give one the impression that one is looking down from the window upon an agitated scene in the street. And his broad, plebeian workmanship is in keeping with his rough and democratic subjects. He made a beginning in 1875 with the colossal picture of the “Flood at Toulouse.” The roofs of little peasants’ houses rise out of the expanse of water. Upon one of them a group of country people have taken refuge, and are awaiting a boat whichis coming from the distance. A young mother summons her last remnant of strength to save her trembling child. Beside her an old woman is sitting, sunk in the stupor of indifference, while in front a bull is swimming, bellowing wildly in the water. The influence of Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” is indeed obvious; but how much more plainly and actually has the struggle for existence been represented here, than by the great Romanticist still hampered by Classicism. The devastating effect of the masses of water in all their elemental force could not have been more impressively rendered than has been done through this bull struggling for life with all its enormous strength.
In technique this picture belongs to the painter’s earlier phase. Even in the colouring of the naked figures it has still the dirty heaviness of the Bolognese. This bond which united him to the school of Courbet was broken when—probably under the influence of Zola’sGerminal—he painted “The Strike,” in 1880. The stern reality which goes through Zola’s accounts of the life of pit-men is likewise to be found in these ragged and starving figures, clotted with coal dust, assembling in savage desperation before the manufactory walls, prepared for a rising. The dull grey of a rainy November morning spreads above. In 1887 he painted war, war in the new age, in which one man is not pitted against another, but great masses of men, who kill without seeing one another, are made to manœuvre with scientific accuracy—war in which the balloon, distant signalling, and all the discoveries of science are turned to account. “Work” was the last picture of the series. There are men toiling in the hot, dusty air of Paris with sandstones of all sizes. Life-size, upon life-size figures, the drops of sweat were seen upon the apathetic faces, and the patches upon the blouses and breeches. Any one who only reckons as art what is fine and delicate will necessarily find these pictures brutal; but whoever delights in seeing art in close connection with the age, as it really is, cannot deny to AlfredRoll’s great epics of labour the value of artistic documents of the first rank.
He devoted himself to the more delicate problems of light, especially in certain idyllic summer scenes, in which he delighted in painting life-size bulls and cows upon the meadow, and beside them a girl, sometimes intended as a milkmaid and sometimes as a nymph. Of this type was the picture of 1888, A Woman returning from Milking, “Manda Lamétrie, Fermière.” With a full pail she is going home across the sunny meadow. Around there is a gentle play of light, a soft atmosphere transmitting faint reflections, lightly resting upon all forms, and mildly shed around them. A yet more subtle study of light in 1889 was named “The Woman with a Bull.” Pale sunbeams are rippling through the fluttering leaves, causing a delicious play of fine tones upon the nude body of the young woman and the shining hide of the bull.
On a strip of ground in the suburbs of Paris, where the town has come to an end and the country has not yet begun,Raffaelli, perhaps the most spirited of the Naturalists, has taken up his abode. He has painted theworkman, the vagabond, the restlessness of the man who does not know where he is going to eat and sleep; the small householder, who has all he wants; the ruined man, overtaken by misfortune, whose only remaining passion is the brandy-bottle,—he has painted them all amid the melancholy landscape around Paris, with its meagre region still in embryo, and its great straight roads losing themselves disconsolately in the horizon. Théophile Gautier has written somewhere that the geometricians are the ruination of landscapes. If he lived in these days he would find, on the contrary, that those monotonous roads running straight as a die give landscape a strange and melancholy grandeur. One thinks of the passage in Zola’sGerminal, where the two socialists, Étienne and Suwarin, walk in the evening silently along the edge of a canal, which, with the perpendicular stems of trees at its side, stretches for miles, as if measured with a pair of compasses, through a monotonous flat landscape. Only a few low houses standing apart break the straight line of the horizon; only here and there, in the distance, does there emerge a human being, whose diminished figure is scarcely perceptible above the ground. Raffaelli was the first to understand the virginal beauty of these localities, the dumb complaining language of poverty-stricken regions spreading languidly beneath a dreary sky. He is the painter of poor people and of wide horizons, the poet and historian of humanity living in the neighbourhood of great cities. There sits a house-owner, or the proprietor of a shop, in front of his own door; there a pedlar, or a man delivering parcels, hurries across the field; there a rag-picker’s dog strays hungry about a lonely farmyard. Sometimes the wide landscapes are relieved by the manufactories, water and gas-works which feed the huge crater of Paris. At other times the snow lies on the ground, the skeletons of trees stand along the high-road, and a driver shouts to his team; the heavy cart-horses covered with worsted cloths, shiver, and an impression of intense cold strikes through you to yourvery bones. Indeed, Raffaelli’s austerity was first subdued a little when he came to make a lengthy residence in England. Then he acquired a preference for the light-coloured atmosphere and the gracious verdure of nature in England. He began to take pleasure in tender spring landscapes, in place of rigid scenes of snow. The poor soil no longer seems so hard and inhospitable, but becomes attractive beneath the soft, peaceful, bluish atmosphere. Even the uncivilised beings, with famine in their eyes, who wandered about in his earliest pictures, become milder and more resigned. The grandfather, in his blouse and wooden shoes, leads his grandchild by the hand amid the first shyly budding verdure. Old men sit quietly in the grounds of the alms-house, with the sun shining upon them. People no longer stand in the mist of November evenings with their teeth chattering from the frost, but breathe with delight the soft air of bright spring mornings.
Raffaelli, for fifteen years the master of this narrowly circumscribed region, has recorded his impressions of it in an entirely personal manner, in a style which in one of hisbrochureshe has himself designated “caractérisme.” And by comparing the costumed models in the pictures of the previous generation with the figures of Raffaelli, the happiness of this phrase is at once understood. In fact, Raffaelli is a great master of characterisation, and perhaps nowhere more trenchant than in the illustrations which he drew for theRevue Illustrée. Spirited caricatures of theatrical representations alternate with the grotesque figures of the Salvation Army. Yet he feels most in his element when he dives into the horrors of Paris by night. The types which he has created live; they meetyou at every step, wander about the boulevards in the cafés and outside the barriers, and they haunt you with their looks of misery, vice, and menace.
Giuseppe de Nittis, an Italian turned a Parisian, a bold, searching, nervously excitable spirit, was the firstgentilhommeof Impressionism, the first who made a transition from the rugged painting of the proletariat to coquettish pictures from the fashionable quarters of the city, and reconciled even the wider public to the principles of Impressionism by the delicate flavouring of his works.
“It was a cold November morning. Cold it was certainly, but in compensation the morning vapour was as fine as snow turned into mist. Yonder in the crowded, populous, sooty quarters of the city, in Paris busy with trade and industry, this early vapour which settles in the broad streets is not to be found; the hurry of awakening life, and the confused movement of country carts, omnibuses, and heavy, rattling freight-waggons, have scattered, divided, and dispersed it too quickly. Every passer-by bears it away on his shabby overcoat, on his threadbare comforter, or disperses it with his baggy gloves. It dribbles down the shivering blouses and the waterproofs of toiling poverty, it dissolves before the hot breath of the many who have passed a sleepless or dissipated night, it is absorbed by the hungry, it penetrates into shops which have just been opened, into gloomy backyards, and it floats up the staircases, dripping on the walls and banisters, right up to the frozen attics. And that is the reason why so little of it remains outside. But in the spacious and stately quarter of Paris, upon the broad boulevards planted with trees and the empty quays the mist lay undisturbed, section over section, like an undulating mass of transparent wool in which one felt isolated, hidden, almost imbedded in splendour, for the sun rising lazily on the distant horizon already shed a mild purple glow, and in this light the mist level with the tops of the houses shone like a piece of muslin spread over scarlet.”
This opening passage in Daudet’sLe Nababmost readily gives the mood awakened by Giuseppe do Nittis’ Parisian landscapes. De Nittis was born in 1846 at Barletta, near Naples, in poor circumstances. In 1868, when he was two-and-twenty years of age, he came to Paris, where Gérôme and Meissonier interested themselves in him. Intercourse with Manet led him to his range of subject. He became the painter of Parisian street-life as it is to be seen in the neighbourhood of the quays, the painter of mist, smoke, and air. The Salons of 1875 and 1876 contained his first pictures, the “Place des Pyramides” and the view of the Pont Royal, fine studies of mist with a tremulous grey atmosphere, out of which graceful little figures raise their faint, vanishing outlines. From that time he has stood at the centre of artistic life in Paris. He observed everything, saw everything, painted everything—a strip of the boulevards, the Place du Carrousel, the Bois de Boulogne, the races, the Champs Elysées, in the daytime with the budding chestnuts, the flower-beds blooming in all colours, the playing fountains, the women of grace and beauty, and the light carriages which crowd between the Arc de Triomphe, the Obelisk, and the Gardens of the Tuileries, and in the evening when chains of white and coloured lights flash among the dark trees. De Nittis has interpreted all atmospheric phases. He seized the intangible, the vibration of vapour, the dust of summer, and the rains of December days. He breathed the atmosphere, as it were, with his eyes, and felt with accuracy its greater or its diminished density. The great public he gained by his exquisite sense of feminine elegance. Of marvellous charm are the figures which give animation to the Place des Pyramides, the Place du Carrousel, the Quai du Pont Neuf—women in the most coquettish toilettes, men chatting together as they lean against a newspaper kiosk, flower-girls offering bouquets, loiterers carelessly turning over the books exposed for sale upon a stall,bonneswith short petticoats and broad ribbons, smart-looking boys with hoops, and little girls with the air of great ladies. SinceGabriel de Saint Aubin, Paris has had no more faithful observer. “De Nittis,” said Claretie in 1876, “paints modern French life for us as that brilliant Italian, the Abbé Galliani, spoke the French language—that is to say, better than we do it ourselves.”
The summit of his ability was reached in his last pictures from England. One knows the London fogs of November, which hover over the town as black as night, so that the gas has to be lit at noon, fogs which are suffocating and shroud the nearest houses in a veil of crape. Scenes like this were made for de Nittis’ brush. He roamed about in the smoke of the city, observed the fashion of the season, the confusion of cabs and drays upon London Bridge, the surge and hurry of the human stream in Cannon Street, the vast panorama of the port of London veiled with smoke and fog, the fashionable West End with its magnificent clubs, the green, quiet squares and great, plainly built mansions; he studied the dense smoky atmosphere of fog compressed into floating phantom shapes, the remarkable effects of light seen when a fresh breeze suddenly drives the black clouds away. And again his eye adapted itself at once to the novel environment. It was not merely the blithe splendour of Paris that found an incomparable painter in Giuseppe de Nittis, but London also with its thick atmosphere and that mixture of damp, tawny fog and grey smoke. Piccadilly, the National Gallery, the railway bridge at Charing Cross, the Green Park, the Bank, and Trafalgar Square are varied samples of these English studies, which showed British painters themselves that not one of them had understood the foggy atmosphere of London as this tourist who was merely travelling through the town. “Westminster” and “Cannon Street,” a pair of dreary, sombre symphonies in ash-grey, perhaps display the highest of what De Nittis has achieved in the painting of air.
Born in Hamburg, though a naturalised Frenchman,Ferdinand Heilbuthtook up again thecultof theParisiennein the wake of Stevens, and as he turned the acquisitions of Impressionism to account in an exceedingly pleasingmanner he seems, in comparison with Stevens, lighter and more vaporous and gracious. He painted water-scenes, scenes on the greensward or in the entrance squares of châteaux, placing in these landscapes girls in fashionable summer toilette. He was particularly fond of representing them in a white hat, a white or pearl-grey dress with a black belt and long black gloves, in front of a bright grey stream, seated upon a fallen trunk, with a parasol resting against it. The bloom of the atmosphere is harmonised in the very finest chords with the virginal white of their dresses and the fresh verdure of the landscapes. His pictures are little Watteaus of the nineteenth century, as discreet in effect as they are piquant.
After Heilbuth’s deathAlbert Aublet, who in earlier days depicted sanguinary historical pieces, became the popular painter of girls, whose beauties are gracefully interpreted in his pictures. When he paints the composer Massenet, sitting at the piano surrounded by flowers and beautiful women,—when he represents the doings of the fashionable world on the shore at a popular watering-place, or young ladies plucking roses, or wandering meditatively in bright dresses amid green shrubs and yellow flowers, or going into the sea in white bathing-gowns, there may be nothing profound or particularly artistic in it all, but it is none the less charming, attractive, bright, joyous, and fresh.
Jean Béraud, another interpreter of Parisian elegance, has found material for numerous pictures in the blaze of the theatres, the naked shoulders ofballet-girls, the dress-coats of old gentlemen, the evening humour of the boulevards, the mysteries of the Café Anglais, the bustle of Monte Carlo, and the footlights of the Café-Concert. But absolute painter he is not. One would prefer to have a less oily heaviness in his works, a bolder and freer execution more in keeping with the lightness of the subject, and for this one would willingly surrender the touches ofgenrewhich Béraud cannot let alone even in these days. But his illustrations are exceedingly spirited.
It would be impossible to classify painters according to further specialties. In fact, it is as little possible to bring individuals into categories as it was at the time of the Renaissance, when the painter busied himself at the same time with sculpture, architecture, and the artistic crafts. Great artists do not wall themselves up in a narrow space to be studied. Liberated from the studio and restored to nature, they endeavour, as in the best periods of art, to encompass life as widely as possible. A mere enumeration, such as chance offers, and such as will preserve a sense for the individuality of every man’s talent without attempting comparisons, seems therefore a better method to pursue than a systematic grouping which could only be attained artificially and by ambiguities.
The lateUlysse Butinsettled down on the shore of the Channel and painted the life of the fishermen of Villerville, a little spot upon the coast near Honfleur. Sturdy, large-boned fellows drag their nets across the strand, carry heavy anchors ashore, or lie smoking upon the dunes. The rays of the evening sun play upon their clothes; the night falls, and a profound silence rests upon the landscape.
By preferenceÉdouard Dantanhas painted the interiors of sculptors’ studios—men turning pots, casting plaster, or working on marble, with grey blouses, contrasting delicately with the light grey walls of workrooms which are themselves flooded with bright and tender light. Very charming was “A Plaster Cast from Nature,” painted in 1887: in the centre was a nudefemale figure most naturally posed, whilst a fine, even atmosphere, which lay softly upon the girl’s form, streaming gently over it, was shed around.
Having cultivated in the beginning the province of feminine nudity with little success, in such pictures as “The Bacchante” of the Luxembourg, “The Woman with the Mask,” and “Rolla,”Henri Gervex, the spoilt child of contemporary French painting, turned to the lecture-rooms of the universities, and by his picture of Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière gave the impulse to the many hospital pictures, surgical operations, and so forth which have since inundated the Salon. With the upper part of her body laid bare and her lips half opened, the patient lies under the influence of narcotics, whilst Péan’s assistant is counting her pulse. His audience have gathered round. The light falls clear and peacefully into the room. Everything is rendered simply, without diffidence, and with confidence and quietude.
Duez, when he had had his first success in 1879 with a large religious picture—the triptych of Saint Cuthbert in the Luxembourg—appeared with animal pictures, landscapes, portraits, or fashionable representations of life in the streets and cafés. In the hands of such mild and complacent spirits asFriantandGoeneutte, Naturalism fell into a mincing, lachrymose condition; but in a series of quiet, unpretentious picturesDagnan-Bouveretwas more successful in meeting the growing inclination of recent years for contemplative repose, just as in the province of literature Ohnet, Malot, and Claretie, with their spirit of compromise, came after those stern naturalists Flaubert and Zola. According to the drawing of Paul Renouard, Dagnan-Bouveret is a little, black-haired man with a dark complexion and deep-set eyes, a short blunt nose, and a black pointed beard. There is nothing in him which betrays spirit, caprice, and audacity, but everything which is an indication of patience and endurance; and, as a matter of fact, such are the qualities by which he has gained his high position. He is a man of poetictalent, though rather tame, and stands to Bastien-Lepage and Roll as Breton to Millet. One often fancies that it is possible to observe in him that GermanGemüth, that genial temper, for the satisfaction of which Frau Marlitt provided in fiction. A pupil of Gérôme, he made his first great success in the Salon of 1879 with the picture “A Wedding at the Photographer’s.” This was succeeded in 1882 by “The Nuptial Benediction”; in 1883 by “The Vaccination”; in 1884 by “The Horse-pond” of the Musée Luxembourg; in 1885 by a “Blessed Virgin,” a homely, thoughtful, and delicately coloured picture which gained him many admirers in Germany; and in 1886 by “The Consecrated Bread,” in which he was one of the first to take up the study of light in interiors. In a Catholic church there are sitting devout women—most of them old, but also one who is young—and children, while an acolyte is handing them consecrated bread. This simple scene in the damp village church, filled with a tender gloom, is rendered with a winning homely plainness, and with that touch of compassionate sentimentality which is the peculiar note of Dagnan-Bouveret. The “Bretonnes au Pardon” of 1889 thoroughly displayed this definitive Dagnan: a soft, peaceful picture, full of simple and cordial poetry. In the grass behind the church, the plain spire of which rises at the end of a wall, women are sitting, both young and old, in black dresses and white caps. One of them is reading a prayer from a devotional book. The rest are listening. Two men stand at the side. Everything is at peace; the scheme of colour is soft and quiet, while in the execution there is something recalling Holbein, and the effect is idyllically moving like the chime of a village bell when the sun is going down.
The zeal with which painters took up the study of contemporary life, so long neglected, did not, however,prevent the quality of French landscape painting from being exceedingly high. New parts of the world were no longer to be conquered. For fifteen years none of the nobler, nor of the less noble, landscapes of France had been neglected, nor any strip of field; there were no flowers that were not plucked, whether they were cultivated in forcing-houses or had sprung pallid in a dark garden of old Paris. It was only the joy in brightness and the newly discovered beauty of sunshine that brought with them any change of material. Following the Impressionists, the landscape painters deserted their forests. Those “woodland depths,” such as Diaz and Rousseau painted, seldom appear in the works of the most modern artists. In the severest opposition to such once popular scenes there lies the plain, the wide expanse stretching forth like a carpet in bright, shining tones under the play of tremulous sunbeams, and scarcely do a few trees break the quiet line of the distant horizon. At first the poorest and most humble corners were preferred. The painting of the poor brought even the most forlorn regions into fashion. Later, in landscape also, a bent towards the most tender lyricism corresponded with that inclination to idyllic sentiment which was on the increase in figure painting. These painters have a peculiar joy in the fresh mood of morning, when a light vapour hovers over the meadows and the waters, before it is dissolved into shining dew. They love the bloom of fruit-trees and the first smile of spring, or revel in the gradations of the dusk, rich as they are in shades of tint, mistily wan and grey, pale lilac, delicate green, and milky blue. The perspective is broad and fine; objects are entirely absorbed by the harmony of colour, and the older and coarser treatment offree light heightened to the most refined play by the most delicate shades of hue. And these colourists deriving from Corot, with their soft grey enveloping all, are opposed by others who strike novel and higher chords upon the keyboard of Manet—landscape painters whom such simple and intimate things do not satisfy, but who search after unexpected, fleeting, and extraordinary impressions, analysing fantastically combined effects of light.
A group of New-Impressionists, who might be called prismatic painters, stand in this respect at the extreme left. Starting from the conviction that the traditional mixing of colours upon the palette results after all only in palette tones, and can never fully express the intensity and pulsating vividness of tone-values, they founded the theory of the resolution of tones,—in other words, they break up all compound colours into their primary hues, set these directly upon the canvas, and leave it to the eye of the spectator to undertake the mixture for itself. In particularGeorge Seuratwas an energetic disseminator of this painting in points which excited new discussions amongst artists and new polemics in the newspapers. His pictures were entirely composed of flaming, glowing, and shining patches. Close to these pictures nothing was to be seen but a confusion of blotches, but at the proper distance they took shape as wild sea-studies in the brilliant hues of noon, with rocks and stones standing out in relief, orgies of blue, red, and violet. Such was Seurat’s manner of seeing nature. That such a course brings with it a good deal of monotony, that it will hardly ever be possible to quicken art to this extent with science, is incontestable. But it is just as certain that Seurat was a painter of distinction who shows in many of his pictures a fine sense for delicate, pale atmosphere. Many of his landscapes, which at close quarters look like mosaics of small, smooth, variously coloured stones, acquire a vibrating light, such asMonet himself did not attain, when looked at from a proper distance.Signac,Anquetin,Angrand,Lucien Pissarro,Coss,Luèc,Rysselberghe, andValtatare the names of the other representatives of this scientific painting, and their method has not seldom enabled them to give expression in an overpowering manner to the quiet of water and sky, the green of the meadows, and the softness of tender light shifting over the sea.
When these “spotted” pictures hang in a room where they are fewer in number than ordinary paintings they are difficult to understand. Only the disadvantages of such a method of painting are noticed; the disagreeable spottiness of the little points of colour ranged unpleasantly side by side, and putting one in mind of a piece of embroidery work, does not exactly appeal to the artist who looks for beautiful lines andbelle pâtein a picture. Nevertheless, the method would scarcely have found so many exponents did it not afford an opportunity to get certain effects which are scarcely obtainable in any other way. As a matter of fact, one finds in these pictures a sense oflife, such shimmering, glimmering effects, such tremulous, vibrating light, as could not be arrived at without this disintegration of colour into separate points. Moreover, they have at a distance a decorative effect that leaves other pictures far behind.
The importance of Neo-Impressionism, therefore, depends on two particulars. First, in the analysis of light it has carried the principles of Impressionism to their furthest limit; secondly, in the matter of decorative effect it has laid aside one great fault of Impressionism, and has given us pictures which, seen from a distance, take on a definite form instead of a blur of indistinct tones.
Amongst the younger painters exhibiting in the Salon,Pointelin—without any trace of imitation—perhaps comes nearest to the tender poetry of Corot, and has with most subtlety interpreted the delicate charm of cold moods of morning, the deep feeling of still solitude in a wide expanse.Jan Monchablonviews the meadow and the grass, the blades and variegated flowers of the field, with the eyes of a primitive artist. Wide stretches of rolling ground upon radiant spring days are usually to be seen in his pictures. The sun shines, the grass sparkles, and the horizon spreads boundless around. In the background cows are grazing, or there move small figures bathed in air, whilst a dreamy rivulet murmurs in the foreground. The bright, soft light ofProvence is the delight ofMontenard, and he depicts with delicacy this landscape with its bright, rosy hills, its azure sky, and its pale underwood. Light, as he sees it, has neither motes nor shadows; its vibration is so intense and fine that it fills the air with liquid gold, and absorbs the tints of objects, wrapping them in a soft and mystic golden veil.
Dauphin, who is nearly allied with him, always remains a colourist. His painting is more animated, provocative, and blooming, especially in those sea-pieces with their bright harbours, glittering waves, and rocking ships with their sails shimmering and coquetting in the sunshine. The name ofRosset-Grangetrecalls festal evenings, houses all aglow with lights and fireworks, or red lanterns shedding forth their gleam into the dark blue firmament, and reflected with a thousand fine tints in the sea.
The melancholy art ofÉmile Barau, a thoroughly rustic painter, who renders picturesque corners of little villages with an extremely personal accent, stands in contrast with the blithe painting of the devotees of light; it is not the splendour of colour that attracts him, but the dun hues of dying nature. He has come to a halt immediately in front of Paris, in the square before the church of Creile. He knows the loneliness of village streets when the people are at work in the fields, and the houses give a feeling that their inhabitants are not far off and may return at any moment. His pictures are harmonies in grey. The leading elements in his works are the pale light lying upon colourless autumn sward, the mournful outlines of leafless trees stretching their naked boughs into the air as though complaining, small still ponds where ducks are paddling, the scanty green of meagre gardens, the muddy waters of old canals, reddish-grey roofs and narrow little streets amid moss-covered hills, tall poplars and willows by the side of swampy ditches, and in the background the old village steeple, which is scarcely ever absent.Damoye, likewise, is fond of twilight, and autumn and winter evenings. He is the poet of the great plains and dunes and the sombre heaven, where isolated sunbeams break shyly from behind white clouds. A fine sea-painter,Boudin, studies in Etretat, Trouville, Saint Valery, Crotoy, and Berck the dunes and the misty sky, spreading in cold northern grey across the silent sea.Dumoulinpaints night landscapes with deep blue shadows and bright blue lights, whileAlbertLebourghas a passion for the grey of rain and the glittering snow which gleams in the light, blue in one place, violet and rosy in another.Victor BinetandRéné Billottehave devoted themselves to the study of that poor region, still in embryo, which lies around Paris, a region where a delicate observer finds so much that is pictorial and so much hidden poetry. Binet is so delicate that everything grows nobler beneath his brush. He specially loves to paint the poetry of twilight, which softens forms and tinges the trees with a greyish-green, the quiet, monotonous plains where tiny footpaths lose themselves in mysterious horizons, the expiring light of the autumn sun playing with the fallen yellow leaves upon dusty highways. Réné Billotte’s life is exceedingly many-sided. In the forenoon he is an important ministerial official, in the evening the polished man of society in dress-clothes and white tie whom Carolus Duran painted. Of an afternoon, in the hours of dusk and moonrise, he roams as a landscape painter in the suburbs of Paris; he is an exceedingly accomplished man of the world, who only speaks in a low tone, and what he specially loves in nature, too, is the hour when moonlight lies gently and delicately over all forms. The scenes he usually chooses are a quarry with light mist settling over it, a light-coloured cornfield in a bluish dusk, a meadow bathed in pale light, or a strip of the seashore where the delicate air is impregnated with moisture.
To be at once refined and true is the goal which portrait painting in recent years has also specially set itself to reach. In the years ofchicit started with the endeavour to win from every personality its beauties, to paint men and women “to advantage”; but later, when the Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage stood at its zenith, it strove at all costs to seize the actual human being, to catch, as it were, the work-a-day character of the personality as it is in involuntary moments when people believe themselves to be unobserved and give up posing. The place of those pompous arrangements of the painters of material was taken by a soul, and temperament interpreted by an intelligence. And corresponding with the universal principle of conceiving man and nature as an indivisible whole, it became imperative in portrait painting no longer to place persons before an arbitrary background, but in their real surroundings—topaint the man of science in his laboratory, the painter in his studio, the author at his work-table—and to observe with accuracy the atmospheric influences of this environment.
The ready master-worker of this plain and sincere naturalism in portrait painting was peculiarlyFantin-Latour, who ought not merely to be judged by his latest paintings, which have something petrified, rigid, gloomy, and professorial. In his younger days he was a solid and powerful artist, one of the soundest and simplest of whom France could boast. His pictures were dark in tone and harmonious, and had a puritanic charm. The portrait of Manet, and that of the engraver Edwin Edwards and his wife, in particular, will always preserve their historical value.
Later, when the whole bias of art tended away from the poorer classes, and once more approached this fashionable world, portrait painting also showed a tendency to become exquisite and over-refined, and to exhibit a preference for symphonic arrangements of colour and subtilised effects of light. White, light yellow, and light blue silks were harmonised upon very delicate scales with pearly-grey backgrounds. Ladies in mantles of light grey fur and rosy dresses stand amid dark-green shrubs, in which rose-coloured lanterns are burning, or they sit in a ball-dress near a lamp which produces manifold and tender transformations of light upon the white of the silk.
The work ofJacques Émile Blanche, the son of the celebrated mad-doctor, is peculiarly characteristic of these tendencies of French portrait painting. It is well known that English fashion was at this time regarded in Paris as the height of elegance, while Anglicisms were entering more and more into the French language; and this tendency of taste gave Blanche the occasion for most æsthetic pictures. The English Miss, in her attractive mixture of affectation and naïveté, in all her slim and long-footed grace, has found a delicate interpreter in him. Tall ladies clad in white, bitten with the Anglomania, drink tea most æsthetically, and sit there bored, or are grouped round the piano;gommeux, neat, straight,chic, from their tall hats to their patent-leather boots, look wearily about the world, with an eyeglass fixed, a yellow rose in their buttonhole, and a thick stick in the gloved hand. Amongst his portraits of well-known personalities, much notice was attracted by that of his father in 1890—a modern Bertin the Elder, and in 1891 by that of Maurice Barrès, a portrait in which he has analysed the author ofLe Jardin de Bérénicein a very simple and convincing fashion.
The brilliant ItalianBoldinibrought to this Englishchicthe manual volubility of a Southerner: sometimes he was microscopicà laMeissonier, sometimes a juggler of the brushà laFortuny, and sometimes he gave the most seductive mannerism and the most diverting elegance to his portraits of ladies. Born in 1845, the son of a painter of saints, Boldini had begun as a Romanticist with pictures for Scott’sIvanhoe. From Ferrara he went to Florence, where he remained six years. At the end of the sixties he emerged in London, and, after he had painted Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster there, he soon became a popular portrait painter. But since 1872 his home has been Paris, where the fine Anglo-Saxon aroma, the “æsthetic” originality of his pictures, soon became an object of universal admiration. In his portraits of women Boldini always renders what is most novel. It is as if he knew in advance the new fashion which the coming season would bring. His trenchantly cut figures of ladies in white dresses and with black gloves have a defiant and insolent effect, and yet one which is captivating through their ultra-modernchic. The portraits of Carolus Duran have nothing of that charm which makes such an appeal to the nerves, nothing of that discomposing indefinable quality which lies in the expression and gestures of a fashionable woman, whose eccentricity reveals every day freshnuancesof beauty. He had not the faculty of seizing movement, the most difficult element in the world. But Boldini’s pictures seem like bold and sudden sketches which clinch the conception with spirit and swiftness in liberal, pointed crayon strokes controlled by keen observation. There is no ornament, no bracelet, no pillars and drapery. One hears the silken bodice rustle over the tightly laced corset, sees the mobile foot, and the long train swept to the side with a bold movement. Sometimes his creations are full and luxuriant, nude even in their clothes, excited and full of movement; sometimes they are bodiless, as if compact of the air, pallid and half-dead with the strain of nights of festivity, “living with hardly any blood in their veins, in which the pulse beats almost entirely out of complaisance.”
His pictures of children are just as subtle: there is an elasticity in these little girls with their widely opened velvet eyes, their rosy young lips, and their poses calculated with so much coquetry. Boldini has an indescribable method of seizing a motion of the head, a mien, or a passing flash of the eyes, of arranging the hair, of indicating coquettish lace underclothing beneath bright silk dresses, or of showing the grace and fineness of the slender leg of a girl, encased in a black silk stocking, and dangling in delicate lines from a light grey sofa. There is Frenchesprit, something piquant and with a double meaning in his art, which borders on the indecorous and is yet charming. These portraits of ladies, however, form but a small portion of his work. He paints in oils, in water-colour,and pastel, and is equally marvellous in handling the portraits of men, the street picture and the landscape. His portrait of the painter John Lewis Brown, crossing the street with his wife and daughter, looked as though it had been painted in one jet. In his little pictures of horses there is an astonishing animation and nervous energy. M. Faure, the singer, possesses some smallrococopictures from his brush, scenes in the Garden of the Tuileries, which might have come from Fortuny. His pictures from the street life of Paris—the Place Pigalle, the Place Clichy—recall De Nittis, and some illustrations—scenes from the great Paris races—might have been drawn by Caran D’Ache.
There is no need to treat illustration in greater detail, because, naturally, it could no longer play the initiative part which fell to it in earlier days, now that the whole of life had been drawn within the compass of pictorial representation. Besides, in an epoch like our own, which is determined to know and see and feel everything, illustration has been so extended that it would be quite impossible even to select the most important work. Entirely apart from the many painters who occasionally illustrated novels or other books, such as Bastien-Lepage, Gervex, Dantan, Détaille, Dagnan-Bouveret, Ribot, Benjamin Constant, Jean Paul Laurens, and others, there are a number of professional draughtsmen in Paris, most of whom are really distinguished artists.
In particular,Chéret, one of the most original artists of our time—Chéret, the great king of posters, the monarch of a fabulously charming world, in which everything gleams in blue and red and orange, cannot be passed over in a history of painting. The flowers which he carelessly strews on all sides with his spendthrift hand are not destined for preservation in an historical herbarium; his works are transient flashes of spirit, brilliantly shining, ephemera, but a bold and subtle Parisian art is concealed amid this improvisation. Settled for many years in London, Jules Chéret had there already drawn admirable placards, which are now much sought after by collectors.
In 1866 he introduced this novel branch of industry into France, and gave it—thanks to the invention of machines which admit of the employment of the largest lithographic stones—an artistic development which could not have been anticipated. He has created many thousands of posters. The book-trade, the great shops, and almost all branches of industry owe their success to him. His theatrical posters alone are amongst the most graceful products of modern art: La Fête des Mitrons, La Salle de Frascati, Les Mongolis, Le Chat Botté, L’Athénée Comique, Fantaisies Music-Hall, La Fée Cocotte, Les Tsiganes, Les Folies-Bergères en Voyage, Spectacle Concert de l’Horloge, Skating Rink, Les Pillules du Diable, La Chatte Blanche, Le Petit Faust, La Vie Parisienne, Le Droit du Seigneur, Cendrillon, Orphée aux Enfers, Éden Théâtre, etc. These are mere posters, destined to hang for a few days at the street corners, and yet in graceful ease, sparkling life, and coquettish bloom of colour they surpass many oil paintings which flaunt upon the walls of the Musée Luxembourg.
Amongst the illustratorsWilletteis perhaps the most charming, the most brilliant in grace, fancy, and spirit. A drawing by him is something living, light, and fresh. Only amongst the Japanese, or the great draughtsmen of therococoperiod, does one find plates of a charm similar to Willette’s tender poems of the “Chevalier Printemps” or the “Baiser de la Rose.” At the same time there is something curiously innocent, something primitive, naïve, something like the song of a bird, in his charming art. No one can laugh with such youthful freshness. No one has such a childlike fancy. Willette possesses the curious gift of looking at the world like a boy of sixteen with eyes that are not jaded for all the beauty of things, with the eyes of a schoolboy in love for the first time. He has drawn angels for Gothic windows, battles, and everything imaginable; nevertheless, woman is supreme over his whole work, ruined and pure as an angel, cursed and adored, and yet always enchanting. She is Manon Lescaut, with her soft eyes and angelically pure sins. She has something of the lovely piquancy of the woman of Brantôme, when she disdainfully laughs out of countenance poor Pierrot, who sings his serenades to her plaintively in the moonlight. One might say thatWillette is himself his Pierrot, dazzled with the young bosoms and rosy lips: at one time graceful and laughing, wild as a young fellow who has just escaped from school; at another earnest and angry, like an archangel driving away the sinful; to-day fiery, and to-morrow melancholy; now in love, teasing, blithe, and tender, now gloomy and in mortal trouble. He laughs amid tears and weeps amid laughter, singing theDies Iræafter a couplet of Offenbach; himself wears a black-and-white garment, and is, at the same time, mystic and sensuous. His plates are as exhilarating as sparkling champagne, and breathe the soft, plaintive spirit of old ballads.
Beside this amiable PierrotForainis like the modern Satyr, the true outcome of the Goncourts and Gavarni, the product of the most modern decadence. All the vice and grace of Paris, all the luxury of the world, and all thechicof thedemi-mondehe has drawn with spirit, with bold stenographical execution, and the elegance of a sure-handed expert. Every stroke is made with trenchant energy and ultimate grace. Adultery, gambling,chambres séparées, carriages, horses, villas in the Bois de Boulogne; and then the reverse side—degradation, theft, hunger, the filth of the streets, pistols, suicide,—such are the principal stages of the modern epic which Forain composed; and over all theParisienne, the dancing-girl, floats with smiling grace like a breath of beauty. His chief field of study is the promenade of the Folies-Bergères—the delicate profiles of anæmic girls singing, the heavy masses of flesh of gluttonisinggourmets, the impudent laughter and lifeless eyes of prostitutes, the thin waists, lean arms, and demon hips of fading bodies laced in silk. Little dancing-girls and fatroués, snobs with short, wide overcoats, huge collars, and long, pointed shoes—they all move, live, and exhale the odour of their own peculiar atmosphere. There is spirit in the line of an overcoat which Forain draws, in the furniture of a room, in the hang of a fur or a silk dress. He is the master of the light, fleeting seizure of the definitive line. Every one of his plates is like a spiritedcauserie, which is to be understood through nods and winks.
The name ofPaul Renouardis inseparable from the opera. Degas had already painted the opera and the ballet-dancers with wonderful reality, fine irony, or in the weird humour of a dance of death. But Renouard did not imitate Degas. As a pupil of Pils he was one of the many who, in 1871, were occupied with the decoration of the staircase of the new opera house, and through this opportunity he obtained his first glance into this capricious and mysterious world made up of contrasts,—a world which henceforward became his domain. All his ballet-dancers are accurately drawn at their rehearsals, but the charm of their smile, of their figures, their silk tights, their gracious movements, has something which almost goes beyond nature. Renouard is a realist with very great taste. Girls practising at standing on the tips of their toes, dancing, curtseying, and throwing kisses to the audience are broadly and surely drawn with a few strokes. The opera is for him a universe in a nutshell—arésuméof Paris, where all the oddities, all the wildness, and all the sadness of modern life are to be found.
Mention must also be made ofDaniel Vierge, torn prematurely from his art by a cruel disease, but not before he had been able to complete his masterpiece, the edition of Don Pablo de Segovia.Henri de Toulouse-Lautrectoo must be named, the grim historian of absinthe dens, music halls and dancing saloons; and we must give a passing glance toLéandreandSteinlen, in whose drawings also the whole of Parisian life breathes and pulsates, with all the glitter of over-civilisation, with all its ultra-refinement of pleasure. But a detailed appreciation of these draughtsmen is obviously out of place in a history of painting.
If we turn back to those who have done good work in the province of painting pure and simple, we must tarry for a while with that refined painter of elegiaclandscape,Charles Cazin. He awaits us as the evening gathers, and tells with a vibrating voice of things which induce a mood of gentle melancholy. He has his own hour, his own world, his own men and women. His hour is that secret and mystic time when the sun has gone down and the moon is rising, when soft shadows repose upon the earth and bring forgetfulness. The land he enters is a damp, misty land with dunes and pale foliage, one that lies beneath a heavy sky and is seldom irradiated by a beam of hope, a land of Lethe and oblivion of self, a land created to yield to the tender colour of infinite weariness. The motives of his landscapes are always exceedingly simple, though they have a simplicity which is perhaps forced, instead of being entirely naïve. He represents, it may be, the entrance into a village with a few cottages, a few thin poplars, and reddish tiled roofs, bathed in the pale shadows of evening. Upon the broad street lined with irregular houses, in a provincial town, the rain comes splashing down. Or it is night, and in the sky there are black clouds, with the moon softly peering between them. Lamps are gleaming in the windows of the houses, and an old post-chaise rolling heavily over the slippery pavement. Or dun-green shadows repose upon a solitary green field with a windmill and a sluggish stream. The earth is wrapt in mysterious silence, and there is movement only in the sky, where a flash of lightning quivers—not one that blazes into intensely vivid light, but rather a silvery white electric spark lambent in the dark firmament. Corot alone has painted such things, but where he is joyous Cazin is elegiac. The little solitary houses are of a ghostly grey. The trees sway towards each other as if in tremulous fear. And the mist hangs damp in the brown boughs. Faint evening shadows flit around. A Northern malaria seems to prevail. At times a sea-bird utters a wailing complaint. One thinks of Russian novels, Nihilism, and Raskolnikoff, though I know not through what association of ideas. One is disposed to sit by the wayside and dream, as Verlaine sings:—
“La lune blancheLuit dans les bois;De chaque branchePart une voix.L’étang reflète,Profond miroir,La silhouetteDu saule noirOù le vent pleure:Rêvons c’est l’heure.Un vaste et tendreApaisementSemble descendreDu firmamentQue l’astre irise:C’est l’heure exquise.”
“La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois;
De chaque branche
Part une voix.
L’étang reflète,
Profond miroir,
La silhouette
Du saule noir
Où le vent pleure:
Rêvons c’est l’heure.
Un vaste et tendre
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
Que l’astre irise:
C’est l’heure exquise.”
Sometimes the humour of the landscape is associated with the memory of kindred feelings which passages in the Bible or in old legends have awakened in him. In such cases he creates the biblical or mythological pictures which have principally occupied him in recent years. Grey-green dusk rests upon the earth; the shadows of evening drive away the last rays of the sun. A mother with her child is sitting upon a bundle of straw in front of a thatched cottage with a ladder leaning against its roof, and a poverty-stricken yard bordered by an old paling, while a man in a brown mantle stands beside her, leaning upon a stick: this picture is “The Birth of Christ.” Two solitary people, a man and a woman, are walking through a soft, undulating country. The sun is sinking. No house will give the weary wanderers shelter in the night, but the shade of evening, which is gradually descending, envelops them with its melancholy peace: this is “The Flight into Egypt.” An arid waste of sand, with a meagre bush rising here and there, and the parching summer sun brooding sultry overhead, forms the landscape of the picture “Hagar and Ishmael.” Or the fortifications of a mediæval town are represented. Night is drawing on, watch-fires are burning, brawny figures stand at the anvil fashioning weapons, and the sentinels pace gravely along the moat. The besieged town is Bethulia, and the woman who issues with a wild glance from the town gateway is Judith, going forth followed by her handmaid to slay Holofernes. Through such works Cazin has become the creator of the landscape of religious sentiment, which has since occupied so much space in French and German painting. The costume belongs to no time in particular, though it is almost more appropriate to the present than to bygone ages; but something so biblical, so patriarchal, such a remote and mystical poetry is expressed in the great lines of the landscape that the figures seem like visions from a far-off past.
The continuation of this movement is marked by that charming artist who delighted in mystery,Eugène Carrière, “the modern painter of Madonnas,”as he has been called by Edmond de Goncourt. Probably no one before him has painted the unconscious spiritual life of children with the same tender, absorbed feeling: little hands grasping at something, stammering lips of little ones who would kiss their mother, dreamy eyes gazing into infinity. But although young children at the beginning of life, whose eyes open wide as they turn towards the future, look out of his pictures, a profound sadness rests over them. His figures move gravely and silently in a soft, mysterious dusk, as though divided from the world of realities by a veil of gauze. All forms seem to melt, and fading flowers shed a sleepy fragrance around; it is as though there were bats flitting invisible through the air. Even as a portrait painter he is still a poet dreaming in eternal haze and a twilight of mystery. In his portraits, Alphonse Daudet, Geffroy, Dolent, and Edmond de Goncourt looked as though they had been resolved into vapour, although the delineation of character was of astonishing power, and marked firmly with a penetrative insight into spiritual life such as was shared by Ribot alone.
At the very opposite pole of art standsPaul Albert Besnard: amongst the worshippers of light he is, perhaps, the most subtle and forcible poet, a luminist who cannot find tones high enough when he would play upon the fibres of the spirit. Having issued from the École des Beaux-Arts, and gained thePrix de Romewith a work which attracted much notice, he had long moved upon strictly official lines; and he only broke from his academical strait-waistcoat about a dozen years ago, to become the refined artist to whom the younger generation do honour in these days, a seeker whose works vary widely in point of merit, though they always strike one afresh from the bold confidence with which he attacks and solves the most difficult problems of light. In Puvis de Chavannes, Cazin, and Carrière a reaction towards sombre effect and pale, vaporous beauty of tone followed the brightness of Manet; but Besnard, pushing forward upon Manet’s course, revels in the most subtle effects of illumination—effects not ventured upon even by the boldest Impressionists—endeavours to arrest the most unexpected and unforeseen phases of light, and the most hazardous combinations of colour. The ruddy glow of the fire glances upon faded flowers. Chandeliers and tapers outshine the soft radiance of the lamp; artificial light struggles with the sudden burst of daylight; and lanterns, standing out against the night sky like golden lights with a purple border, send their glistening rays into the blue gloom. It is only in the field of literature that a parallel may be found in Jens Pieter Jacobsen, who in his novels occasionally describes with a similar finesse of perception the reflection of fire upon gold and silver, upon silk and satin, upon red and yellow and blue, or enumerates the hundred tints in which the September sun pours into a room.
The portrait group of his children is a harmony in red. A boy and two girls are standing, with the most delightful absence of all constraint, in a country room, which looks out upon a mountainous landscape. The wallof the background is red, and red the costume of the little ones, yet all these conflictingnuancesof red tones are brought into harmonious unity with inherent taste. Rubens would have rejoiced over a second landscape exhibited in the same year. A nude woman is seated upon a divan drinking tea, with her feet tucked under her and her back to the spectator. Upon her back are cast the warm and the more subdued reflections of a fire which lies out of sight and of the daylight quivering in yellowish stripes, like a glowing aureole upon her soft skin.
In a third picture, called “Vision de Femme,” a young woman with the upper part of her form unclothed appears upon a terrace, surrounded by red blooming flowers and the glowing yellow light of the moon. Under this symbol Besnard imagined Lutetia, the eternally young, hovering over the rhododendrons of the Champs Elysées and looking down upon the blaze of lights in the Café des Ambassadeurs. In 1889 he produced “The Siren,” a symphony in red. Apetite femmeof Montmartre stands wearily in a half-antique morning toilette before a billowing lake, which glows beneath the rays of the setting sun in fiery red and dull mallow colour. In his “Autumn” of 1890 he made the same experiment in green. The moon casts its silvery light upon the changeful greenish mirror of a lake, and at the same time plays in a thousand reflections upon the green silk dress of a lady sitting upon the shore; while, in a picture of 1891, a young lady in an elegantnégligéis seated at the piano, with her husband beside her turning over the music.The light of the candles is shed over hands, faces, and clothes. Another picture, called “Clouds of Evening,” represented a woman with delicate profile amid a violet landscape over which the clouds were lightly hovering, touched with orange-red by the setting sun. The double portrait, executed in 1892, of the “Mlles. D——,” one of whom is leisurely placing a scarf over her shoulders with a movement almost recalling Leighton, while the other stoops to pick a blossom from a rhododendron bush, is exceedingly soft in its green, red, and blue harmony.
The French Government recognised the eminent decorative talent displayed in these pictures, and gave Besnard the opportunity of achieving further triumphs as a mural painter. Here, too, he is modern to his fingertips, knowing nothing of stately gestures, nothing of old-world naïveté; but merely through his appetising and sparkling play of colour he has the art of converting great blank spaces into a marvellous storied realm.
In 1890 he had to represent “Astronomy” as a ceiling-piece for the Salon des Sciences in the Hôtel de Ville. Ten years before there would have been no artist who would not have executed this task by the introduction of nude figures provided with instructive attributes. One would have held a globe, the second a pair of compasses, and the third a telescope in one hand, and in the other branches of laurel wherewith to crown Galileo, Columbus, or Kepler. Besnard made a clean sweep of all this. He did not forget that a ceiling is a kind of sky, and accordingly he painted the planets themselves, the stars which run their course through the firmament of blue. The figures of the constellations are arranged in a gracious interplay of light bodies floating softly past. Amongst the pictures of the École de Pharmacie a like effect is produced by Besnard’s great composition “Evening,” a work treated with august simplicity. The atmosphere is of a grey-bluish white: stars are glittering here and there, and two very ancient beings, a man and a woman, sit upon the threshold of their house, grave, weather-beaten forms of quiet grandeur, executed with expressive lines. The old man casts a searching glance at the stars, as if yearning after immortality, while the woman leans weary and yet contented upon his shoulder. In the room behind a kettle hangs bubbling over the fire, and a young woman with a child upon her arm steps through the door: man and the starry world, the finite and the infinite, presented under plain symbols.
Such are, more or less, the representative minds of contemporary France, the centres from which other minds issue like rays.Alfred Agachedevotes himself with great dexterity to an allegorical style after the fashion of Barroccio. Inspired by the pre-Raphaelites,Aman-Jeanhas found the model for his allegorical compositions in Botticelli, and is a neurasthenic in colour, which is exceptionally striking, in his delicate portraits of women.Maurice Denis, who drew the illustrations to Verlaine’sSagessein a style full of archaic bloom, as a painter takes delight in the intoxicating fragrance of incense, the gliding steps and slow, quiet movements of nuns, in men and womenkneeling before the altar in prayer, and priests crossing themselves before the golden statue of the Virgin. The SpaniardGandara, who lives in Paris, displays in his grey and melting portraits much feeling for the decorative swing of lines. That spirited “pointillist”Henri Martinseems for the present to have reached a climax in his “Cain and Abel,” one of the most powerful creations of the younger generation in France.Louis Picard’swork has a tincture of literature, and he delights in Edgar Allan Poe, mysticism and psychology.Ary Renan, the son of Ernest Renan and the grandson of Ary Scheffer, has given the soft subdued tones of Puvis de Chavannes a tender Anglo-Saxon fragrance in the manner of Walter Crane. And that spirited artist in lithograph,Odilon Redon, has visions of distorted faces, flowers that no mortal eye has seen, and huge white sea-birds screaming as they fly across a black world. Forebodings like those we read of in the verse of Poe take shape in his works, ghosts roam in the broad daylight, and the sea-green eyes of Medusa-heads dripping with blood shine in the darkness of night with a mesmeric effect.Carlos Schwabedrew the illustrations for theÉvangile de l’Enfanceof Catulle Mendès with the charming naïveté of Hans Memlinc, and afterwards attracted attention by his delicate, archaic pictures.
Bonnard,Vuillard,VallotonandRousselare others whose names have in the last few years become well known. Their art is built up on the foundation laid by the Impressionists only so far as they use the new colour-values discovered by the “bright painters,” in a free, harmonious manner, and place them at the service of a new decorative purpose. In exhibitions one is often at a loss how to view these decorative paintings, such, for instance, as those of Bonnard and Vuillard; the eye is astounded for a moment when, after looking at the usual array of good pictures, it suddenly comes upon works that look more like pieces of Gobelin tapestry than paintings. Then one’s mind reverts to rooms such as Olbrich, Van de Velde, or Josef Hoffmann designed with some particular purpose in view, and one understands the object of these pictures. “We can hang in our rooms any picture which is beautiful in itself and by itself.” That is the old familiar story, but that feeling never enters our minds when we stand in a mediæval room in which there are no pictures that can be taken away from their surroundings. It is a difficult task to arrange things that are individually beautiful into a harmonious whole. The realisation of the old-time principle is for obvious reasons well-nigh impracticable—the modern man is a restless, fickle creature; he must always be at liberty to pitch his tent anywhere—but we can surely make some approach to it. One may imagine in every dwelling a room in which furniture and pictures are made to fit into some conception of harmony, and the works of Bonnard and Vuillard may be conceived as parts of such a scheme for the decoration of a room, and indeed—though we must not forget similar attempts which have been made in other directions—as parts of a scheme which, though thoroughly modern and by no means a mere external copy, reverts to the style of bygone centuries.
From the historian’s standpoint these young artists scarcely come into question; they are still too much in the embryonic stage for any conclusion to be arrived at with respect to either of them. But the art lover who looks to the future rather than the past feels bound to follow with care their creations, in which the wealth of beauty that is already indicated in their first prints, the certainty of purpose with which they direct their efforts towards the point at which Impressionism has left the widest gap, seems to give a guarantee that in the future France will maintain in the province of art the position she has held during the nineteenth century as the leading artistic nation.