ap Cornell University Sthaca, New Park COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE LIBRARY uatro obras maestras:Vicente Macip, El TTT Modern Paintings BOOKS BY MISS SINGLETON Turrets, TOWERS, AND TEMPLES. Great Buildings of the World Described by Great Writers. Great Pictures. Described by Great Writers. Wonnpers or Nature. Described by Great Writers. Romantic CAsTLEs AND Pataces. Described by Great Writers. Famous Parntincs. Described by Great Writers. Historic Burtpincs. Described by Great Writers. Famous WomeEN. Described by Great Writers. Great Portraits. Described by Great Writers. Historic Buitprncs or AmeEricA. Described by Great Writers. Historrc LANDMARKS OF AMERICA. Described by Great Writers. Great Rivers oF THE Wortp. Described by Great Writers. Famous CaTHeprats. Described by Great Writers. Famous Scutrture. Described by Great Writers. Hoitanp. Described by Great Writers. Parts. Described by Great Writers. Lonvon. Described by Great Writers. Russia. Described by Great Writers. Japan. Described by Great Writers. Venice. Described by Great Writers. Rome. Described by Great Writers. GerMANy. Described by Great Writers. SwirzerLaAnp. Described by Great Writers. TURKEY AND THE BALKAN States. Described by Great Writers. FLORENCE. Love 1n LITERATURE AND ART. Tue Gotpen Rop Farry Boox. Tue Witp Fiower Fairy Boox. Dutcu New Yorx. Manners and Customs of New Am- -sterdam in the Seventeenth Century. A GuIDE To THE OPERA, A Gutpe To Mopern Opera. How to Visir THE Great Picture GALLERIES. From a Carbon Print by Braun & Co., of Paris and New York Portrait of Whistler Boldini Modern Paintings As Seen and Described By Great Writers COLLECTED AND EDITED BY ESTHER SINGLETON With Numerous Illustrations . NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1911 CopyRIGcuHT, 1911, BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY Published, October, 1911 Preface To present in a book of this size a gallery of modern paintings that would be entirely satisfactory is manifestly impossible, for it is needless to remind the reader that paint- ing in the Nineteenth Century has undergone so many phases and developments that it would be out of the question even to include a specimen of every important school, much less to represent every famous master. When we survey French Art, for example, from the days of Gros and David to those of Manet, Monet and Degas, or American Art from the days of Copley, West and Stuart to those of Abbey, Whistler and Sargent, the field is indeed crowded with figures. It would be interesting to wander into Russia, Austria, Hungary, Scandinavia, Italy and Spain and exhibit what the artists of the Nineteenth Century have done and what of their work is individual and what has been inspired by the Spirit of the Age. Space, however, insists that we hang here only some of the most striking and famous pictures of the century that has just drawn to a close, and represent only painters who have renjoyed the greatest vogue, who have been founders of schools, or who are ever growing in popular estimation, like Alfred Stevens, for example. Vv vi MODERN PAINTINGS Hence, we have here Leys, founder of archaic realism, and his pupil, Alma-Tadema; the Romantic Delacroix; Géréme and Meissonier, famed for their exquisite detail ; Fromentin, the discoverer of Algeria as a painter’s haunt; Rosa Bonheur, entirely unmoved by the modern spirit ; mem- bers of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood; and such nature- lovers as Millet, Courbet, Corot, Daubigny, Rousseau, Dupré and the rest of the Barbizon group with the Italian Segantini, the German Liebermann, the Dutch Mauve and Israels and the American Inness whom they so greatly influenced. Standing quite alone is that peculiar genius, Boecklin, of whom Richard Muther says: “Tf it be asked who created on the continent of Europe the most fervid religious paintings of the Nineteenth Cen- tury; who alone exhausted the entire scale of sensations from the placidity of repose to the sublimity of heroism, from the gayest laughter to tragedy; who possessed the most solemn and serious language of form, and, at the same time, the greatest poetry of colour—the name of Boecklin will probably form the answer.” Another picture that stands in isolation is Munkaczy’s Christ before Pilate, which many will remember was ex- hibited in this country in a sensational manner about twenty- five years ago. In my selection, however, I have tried to emphasize those Masters who exhibit the dawn and growth of the modern spirit, those who present broad effects rather than minute PREFACE vil details and those who are poetic dreamers and lovers of luminous and aérial effects. It is, therefore, fitting that the circle begins with Turner, “the father of modern Impres- sionism ” and ends with that master of hot, quivering light— Sorolla. To this modern group we must add the portrait painter Boldini, who could not be better represented than by his distinguished portrait of Whistler. Of him, the critic al- ready quoted has aptly remarked: “From his pictures posterity will learn as much about the sensuous life of the Nineteenth Century as Greuze has told us about that of the Eighteenth.” The literary criticisms and essays in some cases exclu- sively deal more with the painter’s general characteristics than with one work. I wish here to express my thanks to Mr. William A. Coffin and the Century Company for permission to use a portion of the appreciation of Cazin which appeared in the Century Magazine in 1898; and to the editors of the Ouz- look for permission to reprint portions of Mr. John C. Van Dyke’s George Inness and Mr. Cadwallader Washburn’s Sorolla. E. S. New York, October, 1911. Contents AprroAcH TO VeNnice—(J. W. M. Turner), : % Robert de la Sizgeranne SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY THE CRUSADERS—(Eugéne Delacroix : . . Fi ‘Claude Phillips THE CHILDREN OF Epwarp THE FourtH—(Paul Dela- roche) ‘ a ‘ 3 7 3 ‘ . Léonce Bénédite Founvber oF THE ArcHaic ScHoor—(Henri Leys) ‘ Charles Blane Le Matin—(VJ. B. C. Corot) 7 ‘ - Réné Ménard © Forest Crearinc—(Narcisse-Virgilio Diaz de la Petia) William Ernest Henley Tue BANKS oF THE Lome IN Sprinc—(Théodore Rousseau) a 5 ‘ ‘ . ‘ . T. A, Castagnary Tue Bic Oax—(Jules Dupré) j ¥ ». i Ernest Chesneau Le Printemps—(Charles Francois Daubigny). David Croal Thomson Les Graneuses—(J. F. Millet) . : f . Julia Cartwright Tue GLEANER—(Jules Breton) ‘ of ta Maurice Vachon Retour A LA FeERME—(Constant Troyon), * is! Charles Blane Toe DELAWARE VALLEY—(George Innness)' ‘ . John C. Van Dyke Beata BEATRIxX—(D. e ce) ‘ . . = G. Stephens I2 19 23 4i 45 55 61 77 g2 100 CONTENTS Tue Hucuenot—(Sir John Everett Millais) . 3 John Guille Millais Tue Swapow or DeatH—(William Holman Hunt) 3 F, W. Farrar THE Mirror or VENUS—(Sir Edward Burne-Jones) : Malcolm Bell Love anp DeatH—(George Frederick Watts) F 9 Julia Cartwright Duet AFTER THE MASQUERADE—(Jean Léon Géréme) Théophile Gautier 1814—(J. L. E. Meissonier) 3 3 ‘ Lionel Robinson La CuasseE Au Faucon—(Eugéne Fromentin) ° . Louis Gonse WHERE THE DEER MEET—(Gustave Courbet) . = Philip Gilbert Hamerton THE SpanisH Marriace—(Mariano Fortuny) ‘ ‘ Baron Davillier Tue Horse Farr—(Rosa Bonheur) 3 - 3 é Réné Peyrol Sante GENEVIEVE MARKED WITH THE DIVINE SEAL— (Puvis de Chavannes) ‘< A Claude Phillips L’EMBoucHURE DE L’Escaut—(Alfred Verwée) Camille Lemonnier Au Carié—(Edouard Manet) : « . ‘ Camille Mauclair Tue Laby witH THE GLove—(Carolus-Duran) 5 % Arséne Alexandre Arter THE Batt—(Alfred Stevens) . . ‘ é Camille Lemonnier THE Net-MENDERS—(Max Liebermann) ‘ ‘ 5 . Liitticke Le REGIMENT Qui Passe—(Edouard Detaille) é a Jules Clartie 107 115 120 128 136 141 149 155 160 169 err 186 192 199 204 air 217 CONTENTS Cuamps-Etystes—(Arnold Boecklin) . ; : Antia Macmahon SappHo—(Alma-Tadema) ‘ ‘ s 5 Helen Zimmern Jeanne D’Arc—(Bastien-Lepage) ‘ ° Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch In THE DunEes—(Anton Mauve) i * é A Loffelt THE BASHFUL LovER—(Josef Israels) . : David Croal Thomson Carmencita—(J, S, Sargent) é Marion Hepworth Dizon” Tue Hoty Gran—(Edwin A. Abbey) ‘ ‘ M. H. Spielmann Portrair oF wis MotHer—(J. McNeill Whistler) George Moore PLOUGHING IN THE Encapine—(Giovanni Segantini) Helen Zimmern PortralT oF WaHistLer—(J. Boldini) . - Camille Mauclair A Dutca SEA Painter—(H. W. Mesdag) . : M. H. Spielmann Hacar AND IsHMAEL—(Jean-Charles Cazin) x William A. Coffin A Tennis Party—(John Lavery) ‘. ‘ David Martin Roven CATHEDRAL—(Claude Monet) . , é Wynford Dewhurst DansEuse EtoweE—(Edgar Degas) x ‘ ‘ George Moore Curist Berore Prrate—(Mihaly Munkacsy) J. Beavington Atkinson RETURN FROM FisHinc—(Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida) Cadwallader Washburn 224 232 238 244 251 256 265 272 279 292 298 304 308 318 325 331 Illustrations PortraIT OF WHISTLER—Boldini < ‘ 3 Frontispiece Boldini Collection FACING PAGE APPROACH TO VENICE—Turner . 3 London 2 SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY THE Cuusavans—Delacrois Paris 12 THE CHILDREN oF EDWARD | THE. Fourta—Delaroche : ‘ é : 4 5 Paris 20 Le Matin—C orot ° é 4 ‘a ‘ Paris 34 Forest-CLearinc—Diazg . 7 Paris 42 BANKS OF THE LoIRE IN Sprinc—Rousseau . Paris 46 THE Bic Oax—Dupré . A : - é Paris 56 Le PrintemMps—Daubigny 3 < * é Paris 62 Les GLaneuses—Millet . : 3 ‘ . Paris 68 THE GLeaANER—Breton . s 3 A ‘ Paris 78 Retour ALA FERME—Troyon . : z Paris 84 THE DELAWARE VALLEY—Inness : : N ew York 92 BEATA BEATRIX— Rossetti s - a - London 100 Tue Hucuenot—Millais 3 . England 108 Tue SHapow or Deata—Holman Hunt. Manchester 116 Tue Mirror or Venus—Burne-Jones . Sidney Goldman, Esq. England 120 Love ann Deatu—Watts ; . London 128 Duet AFTER THE MasQuerave—Gérdme Chantilly 136 1814—Meissonier . 3 ‘ Paris 142 La CHASSE AU Faucon—Fromentin . ‘ Paris 150 WHerRE THE DEER MEET—Courbet i , Paris 156 Tue SpanisH Marriace—Fortuny Collection of the Marquise de Carcano 160 Tue Horse Farr—Bonheur “ New York 170 SAINTE GENEVIEVE MARKED WITH THE DIVINE SEAL— Puvis de Chavannes i ‘ Paris 176 L’EMBOUCHURE DE L’Escaut—Verwée ‘ . Brussels 186 Au Care—Manet . New York 192 THE LADY WITH THE Guove—Carolus-Duran ‘ Paris 200 AFTER THE BALL—Stevens ‘i é & New York 204 Tue Net-MENvers—Liebermann . - Hamburg 212 Le Réciment Qur Passe—Détaille 3 . Paris 218 Cuamps-ELystes—Boecklin . ‘ , . Berlin 224 SappHo—Alma-Tadema . 3 é Baltimore 232 JEANNE D’Arc—Bastien-Lepage . 5 New York 238 In THE Dunes—Mauve : 3 ‘ Amsterdam 244 Tue Basurut Lover—Israels : . New York 252 ILLUSTRATIONS CARMENCITA—Sargent . - . Paris PortRaIr or His MotHer—Whistler : . Paris PLOUGHING IN THE ENGADINE—Segantini 7 Turin Hacar anp IsHmMaEL—Cazin , ‘ Paris A Tennis Party—Lavery . 3 ; . Munich Roven CaTHEDRAL—Monet . : : Unknown DanseusE Etowe—Degas . ‘ 5 Paris CHRIST BEFORE Prrate—Munkacsy _ . Wanamaker “Collection RETURN FROM Fisninc—S. orolla 5 ‘ : Paris 256 272 298 304 308 318 326 332 APPROACH TO VENICE (J. W. M. Turner) ROBERT DE LA SIZERANNE E who made his way into the Turner Gallery at the Guildhall Exhibition in 1899, or has ever visited one of the rare and mysterious collections where Turner is visible on the Continent, has come out with a vision of terrestrial things revived to such an extent as to have made him feel as though he had for an hour been treading some unknown planet. A sea strewn with archipelagoes of precious stones, palatial amphitheatres rising from the waters, retaining still the shimmer of the corals and the pearls whence they have emerged, broad perrons washed unceasingly by waves which roll against the thresholds of palaces, fawning like tame panthers—a vast Venice, whose canals are oceans, whose parts are islands floating in clear and moving waters— such is Turner’s world. And when it occurs to him one day to paint a railway (see his Steam, Rain and Speed) his very railroad passes over the waters, through a water spout, amidst such a conflagration that one would think it to be an illustration of the Creation, or that day when the Waters of the Heaven were divided from the Waters of the Earth. An infinity of surprises is often within the borders of one great frame: long flights of steps, descending from lofty 1 2 MODERN PAINTINGS terraces, circling around like birds about to alight, and which, having reached the sea, tarry not but plunge be- neath the waters, leading to one knows not what watery empire, to what other submarine palaces; and trees springing up, like jets of water, green, red and orange, to the skies; gondolas crowding close to palaces in groups like little timorous children, or else apart, their gold or purple horns doubled by the reflection; whole rows of palaces with the innumerable lines of their ruined columns stretching in long alignment; whole rows of ships and caravelles, their shadows mingling and contesting in the waters—a multi- tude of things, massive and sumptuous, which hang and steep in thick and multi-coloured medley. How one can picture the hordes of Barbarians and Turks and Algerians thronging these holds, or lurking under the drapery, or sails, or rigging! And the hidden arms, the stolen treasure, and fruits juicy and o’er-ripe! What a jumble of floating oranges, and half-open pomegranates; what a mass of vegetable refuse in these Venetian waters at the approaches to the morning market-places—and at the same time what pieces of jewellery, what cunning pyrotechnic display, what cultivated flower-patch on the Riviera could equal the effect that Turner has made of all this? Has anything so rich to the eye ever left the jeweller’s hand? The gold-dusted green of the imperial beetle, the yellowish-green of the cypress, the blue of the Brazilian butterfly, the deep sapphire of the beetle, the emerald of the sacred scarabzeus, the splendours of the cicindela—all may be seen in these blots Jauin J, ao1uaA 0} Ypeoiddy APPROACH TO VENICE 3 and slabs of colour, heavy and mysterious like ancient stained-glass. What was Turner’s method of observation? Contin- uous? No, but intense and continually reminiscent. One knows his life—that of a recluse, full of monotony, buried within the darkest house in the dingiest part of London, varied by rare flights to the English seaports or to the land of Sun. As for his surroundings, we know what they, were, too, for his biographers have described for us, too often perhaps, the sordid house whence never a green leaf was to be seen, nor often the sky itself—a house so desolate that one might have thought some great crime had been committed therein; a house at which the very tax-collector might have ceased to call. ‘Some one,” remarked the policeman, “is supposed to live there.” And “some one” did live there in fact; some one endowed with a visual memory so vast, and with a reactive force so great, that he transformed this foggy, smoky place into one of radiant horizons, thrusting back the walls around him so far into space and time that neither the East nor the ages past ever equalled in splendour the luminous projections of his seeth- ing brain. And not only was this seclusion the reverse of injurious to his imagings; it was even indispensable to them. The art criticism of to-day holds it as an element, and al- most as a condition, of success that the artist should live in the midst of the surroundings he describes or paints. Now this opinion, banal as it is—so banal as to have penetrated as far as the theses laid down at the Sorbonne—is neverthe- 4 MODERN PAINTINGS less radically false. The history of art flatly gives it the lie. None assuredly painted the splendour of the Conti- nent as did this insulaire, nor the movement of the seas like this recluse. He was forever thinking of these things— and although he did not know them physically, his spirit was never absent therefrom. Here we touch on one of the profoundest traits in the British character. The English are a race for whom the Continent is a sort of Promised Land, the home of the Ideal, 2 Canaan with its gigantic grapes, something akin to what in art and poetry China was for a long time to Japan, that other satellite-isle gravitat- ing around that other Continent. The English do not tell you this—in perfect good faith they believe the contrary. But their art, their works, betray their secret thoughts by showing where their imagination lies—Italy, the shores of Provence, Spain, the mountains of Switzerland and the Tyrol, the lands of the olive, the orange and the grape. All that England does not possess haunts the Englishman’s spirit. For him the ideal is there—and especially in the sunshine, in the twilight, in those violent, burning tones which never show themselves on his isle save by accident, and then only by a superficial effect of light, not as local colour, properly belonging to the objects it reveals. Now that which is rare is precious. When Ruskin describes the paternal garden where his childhood was spent he uses a word which sounds strangely in the Southerner’s ear. “Clustered pearl,” he says, “and pendant ruby, joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked like Vine.” APPROACH TO VENICE 5 The Vine! Here is a splendid far-away symbol, promise of a nature and a civilisation, gay, smiling and perfumed. Thus the promise of the ancient world is contained entire in the little wild olive tree sprouting with difficulty beneath a rock on the hill-side of the Rhone, a hundred kilometres above Provence. The men who will attach so much senti- ment to so slight a thing are not those who will let go aught of the impressions they take in presence of the land of their dreams. They will translate them on the spot, wholly and entirely. On reaching Venice the English artist—especially at the beginning of the Nineteenth Cen- tury—coming from so far and for so short a time, has but one idea, which is to carry away all Venice in his eyes and in his heart. Compare him for a moment with his Italian confrére. The Venetian quits his calle, strolls along, looks, admires; but he will find it all there on the morrow, the Giudecca in the same place, the same domes curving against the sky, the same gondolas on the canal, and the same waters repeating the forms and the hues of the same palaces in the lisping of their reflections. He is in no hurry to reproduce all this; he simply enjoys it. He lets his fancy rock idly on these waters which will never dry up, lets it ripen in this sunlight which shall never be put out. His love, as it were, is too sure to be keenly felt—and he turns away to eat an ice at Florian’s this afternoon which will have no end! Then he goes home, . . . having done nothing. The Eng- lishman, for his part, knows well the afternoon must end, knows that soon he must be back again in the yellow fog, 6 MODERN PAINTINGS in the dense, cold atmosphere. So he inhales, devours, ab- sorbs through all the papillae of his imagination. He wants this sun; he grips this vision. His strength springs from his desire, his faculties increased tenfold by his despair. His genius is born of his love. Thus art does not spring necessarily from the milieu wherein the creator lives. Most of the great landscapists of the century—Corot, Rousseau, ‘Turner—were born in big towns, children of home-staying folk, dwelling in gloomy little shops. Withal Turner is English—English in his subjects, Eng- lish in his passion for Nature, English in his colour. His foremost subject is the sea, not the mere grey or blue line of the horizon setting off a landscape, or some unused lagoon, wherein are generated and multiply the puny lives of an inferior animal existence; ’tis the open redoutable, ever-varying sea, at times under control although in motion, occasionally narrowed in the confines of a port, but with an outlet on the infinite. He has gone in quest of the mo- ments when the water is itself, when it possesses a physiog- nomy, is not a simple track cloven by ships, or a mirror into which one gazes; but when it is at one and the same time an obstacle and a help, akin to an uncertain character, and quivering with a passion that is unstable and restless, yet proper to it. It is, moreover, the great highway by which England communicates with the world’s immensity, and through which the British Empire is in touch with its colonies. This passion for the Ocean conceals seemingly the vague desire of realising the poet’s aspiration: APPROACH TO VENICE 7 “ Faire une ceinture au monde Du sillon de notre vaisseau.” Again Turner is English in his passion for colour. This passion is made manifest in all English works from the Eighteenth Century to the present day, when placed in juxtaposition with the contemporaneous paintings of other countries. Such has been the goal of English endeavour, of English criticism. When Ruskin chides some Conti- nental painter, it is ever because of his lack of colour. The English were alone capable, in their strange colour-ap- petite, of discovering that the ancients, that Titian and the rest, orginally made a glaring and crude use of colour and that the softness and soberness nowadays so admired are due to the unforeseen action of two great masters to whom one always forgets to give credit—‘‘ Time and varnish.” * It is among Englishmen that Delacroix, to be followed by Monet and Pissaro, went to seek their ideas for the renova- tion of continental art by colour, or, to be exact, their col- our-technique. Turner was the first of the Impressionists, and after a lapse of eighty years he remains the greatest, at least in the styles he has treated. ‘That Impressionism came from Eng- land is proved by the letters of Delacroix and demonstrated by M. Paul Signac in his pamphlet on Neo-Impressionism. It is a fact which the reader of Ruskin, and especially of his Elements of Drawing, written in 1856, must be cognisant * Sir John Everett Millais. 8 MODERN PAINTINGS of. Turner is the father of the Impressionists. ‘Their dis- coveries are his. He first saw that Nature is composed in a like degree of colours and of lines, and in his evolution, the rigid and settled lines of his early method gradually melt away and vanish in the colours. He sought to paint the atmosphere, the envelopment of coloured objects seen at a distance, rather than the things enveloped; and he quickly realised that the atmosphere could not be expressed, except through the infinite parcelling out of the things which Claude Lorrain drew in a solid grouping and painted en bloc. He shredded the clouds. He took the massive and admirable masses, the cumuli of Ruysdael, of Hobbema, of Van de Velde, picked the threads out of them and con- verted them into a myriad-shaded charpie, which he en- trusted to the winds of heaven. Between the glint of the sun and the mirror-like reflections of the waves, palaces lost their shape, to preserve only, as in the case of gems, their brilliant sheen. Henceforth, ships possessed a motion com- mon to all, a, so to speak, “dorsal” one. Colour triumphed over line disrupted in every direction. ‘Turner’s next discovery was that shade is a colour like the rest, and that it is not necessary to represent it by a sombre rendering of the tone. He was led to this when contemplating sea effects, where light bursts forth, without, however, any great opposition on the part of shade. There is very little shade on water, or, if preferred, there is so much of it, and so little of it, that it is impossible to come to any definite deter- mination of it as exemplified in the black repoussoirs occupy- APPROACH TO VENICE 9 ing the foreground in all old landscapes. Gradually did ‘Turner wipe these sets-off from his canvases. Perceiving that Nature could produce light, without having recourse to sombre contrasts, he, imitating her, sought to dispense with them. He evolved from the luminous effect by contrast, that is to say, from opposing black to white, to the effect by duplication, i. e., by coloured opposings. Of each shade he made a quick colour. That is not all. This very colour he brought out more strongly by contrast and made it more alive than any one before him had ever done. With this object in view, he conceived the idea of laying it on in its entire purity, by imperceptible dots or lines, dividing the same tone into an infinity of diversifications juxtaposed with such skill that, however glaring they may be when viewed at close range, they blend in perfect harmony on being looked at from a certain distance. "Tis the division of colour and the op- tical blending. Here we have not only prophesied, but applied the three great discoveries of Impressionism :—Nature, rather colours than lines; shades, themselves colours; colour expressed by the division of tone. Thus does Turner, emanating from Claude, become the founder of Impressionism. But he ab- sorbs everything: his predecessors and his successors. He dispenses one from looking at Claude Lorrain and Claude Monet. On the point of closing these lines, I find I have not spoken of any painting of Turner's. It is because I have 10 MODERN PAINTINGS ¢ spoken of them all, and that in the case of a genius like his, it is impossible to make a faithful and minute transcription, no more than he himself made from Nature, one may merely attempt to give an impression. Nevertheless, if one is to select a work as being central and typical of his life, one combining the most accurate observation and the most in- tense creative power, I would say—go and see the Approach to Venice, with its sea and sky of infinite depth, its back- ground of pale-green light, shining betwixt the two like a floral star, sown with blood-hued spots, its crystalline kiss given in the bosom of the delicate haze to the slumber- ing waters, by the lips of sunset, its gondolas gliding between pellucid waters with their red cabins and their golden orna- ments, from Fusina towards Venice, between the phantoms of the Giudecca. All the benefactions heaped on humanity by Turner are there to be found. To approach Venice is to approach the city without streets, without vehicles, noises; the city of museums, resplendent with Carpaccio’s and Tintoretto’s masterpieces, of churches brilliant with metallic splendour, of sanctuaries panelled with gold and lit up with mysterious lamps and of palaces suspended from stone lacework. But nothing will be found more beautiful than the Approach itself. No robe from Tintoretto’s brush will be found to possess the splendour of the gondolas con- veying us. No Titian—that of the Mountains of Cadore, the presence of which we divine, no nimbus about the head of a saint will equal that sun, no purple these skies, no prayer the infinite sweetness of the dream experienced dur- APPROACH TO VENICE Il ing those brief delicious moments. Nothing will be found to compare with the distant vision of that city which, on the horizon, seems to be too beautiful ever to be reached, and appears to recede from the traveller’s barque. “ Ainsi que Déle sur la mer,’ gilded like youth, silent as dreams, and like happiness unattainable. SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY THE CRUSADERS * (Eugéne Delacroixy CLAUDE PHILLIPS ELACROIX’S whole career from his début in 1822 with the Dante et Virgile to his apotheosis, while he was yet among the living, at the International Exhibition of 1855, had been one of storm and combat. No man was ever more passionately worshipped on the one hand, or more ruthlessly, more absolutely condemned on the other. Thenceforward, down to his death in 1863, and for some years afterwards, his fame stood at its highest point, and the scoffers, though they might not be convinced, were at any rate silent. It is to the rise of Naturalism—that offspring of Roman- ticism which ended by devouring its parent—that the * Baldwin, Count of Flanders, and the Doge Dandolo come to take possession of the town which the soldiers are pillaging. In the foreground a knight on horseback, followed by his escort, advances on a terrace; groups of inhabitants have rushed for- ward to meet him and fall on their knees imploring his protec- tion; on the right, a young girl, half-naked, her blonde hair falling around her, weeps beside her dead mother; on the left an old man, surrounded by his family, extends his arms be- seechingly towards the knight, while a soldier is thrusting a richly-dressed Greek from his house. In the distance the town is seen in flames and also the blue waves of the Bosphorus; on the horizon, the coast of Asia. 12 X101OP ICT siapesnic, 343 Aq apdourjuvysuos jo adaig ayy, SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 13 gradual decline, if not exactly of Delacroix’s reputation, yet certainly of his popularity, may be traced. Now that the din of battle between the modified Raphaelesque Classicism of Ingres and the passionate, imaginative Romanticism of Delacroix has so long died out, critics of authority, in and outside France, are practically unanimous in acknowledging that the chief of the Romantics was and must remain a great figure in the art of the Nineteenth Century. They differ in their estimate of his technical accomplishment, and of the quality of his genius, but in this only. It is more than the mere clangour of combat, the flow of blood, the sound of lamentation, the ruthless overthrow of the weaker by the stronger, that are brought before us by his pictures, though these are his chief and most obvious themes. It is in reality, all the restlessness, the storm, the change of the modern period following upon the Revolution, and set loose after the downfall of the Empire that the master makes us feel. It is the reflection, in the shifting colours and with the transforming power of art, of the ever-restless, the deeply wounded spirit of the poet-painter, at war with the world as he found it, and aggressively disdainful of its outer aspects and inner conditions. Yet another disadvantage weighs against Delacroix. He selected most of his subjects, when they were not of a purely decorative character, from the great poets of former times, or the romantic literature of his own—from Dante, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Tasso, Goethe, Byron, Walter Scott; and he had thus against him from the beginning all those— 14 MODERN PAINTINGS and they must inevitably have been the majority—-who came to him with preconceived notions, who had already conjured up their own visions of the scenes which the poet of the brush boldly undertook to paraphrase rather than to re- produce. And yet the French master was not a painter of literary temperament, like our own pre-Raphaelites of the second generation, or like Mr. Watts in his later development. He was an artist who took inspiration and sustenance from literature, but saw his subjects, however imperfectly at times, with the true vision of the painter, content only when they flashed before him complete in every essential part and willing to leave nothing to the laborious processes of con- scious evolution and rearrangement. "What he did in the majority of instances—we say this remembering the un- stinted admiration expressed by Goethe for the lithographed illustrations to his Faust—was to recast the literary sub- jects chosen, to recreate them from the plastic standpoint in his own mould, so that to do them justice they must be judged by themselves, and without arriére-pensée. € For the reason now lightly touched upon the chief of the Romantic school may possibly never regain the now more than half-estranged love of the outer world. It is hardly probable either, that any Romanticist of these latter days, however enthusiastic may be his admiration, will be found to repeat those words of passionate yet not indiscriminate worship which fell from the lips and the pens of Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, and the generation of those who were SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 15 young in 1830. Still, when the artistic history of the Nine- teenth Century comes to be written, it will be found that of the Romanticists proper—leaving out the great school of landscape to which the description Romantic is sometimes, though not very appropriately applied—Delacroix, with his precursor and friend Géricault, and his contemporary, the Orientalist, Decamps, will tower high above the other paint- ers of their school, most of whom have been submerged and overwhelmed by the mere fashions, the outer défrogue of the movement they represent. Leaving out of consideration for the moment the technical defects and mannerisms of Dela- croix, the chief characteristics of his art are its intense vital- ity, the absolute sincerity of its passionate agitation, the un- conscious truth with which, while dealing with scenes far removed, not only by reason of their mise-en-scéne but in their essence, from those of his own time, it reflects the clouds and storms of that time and its passionate repudia- tion of accumulated tradition. Strangely enough, it was in the studio of Guérin, the most ultra-classic of the Classicists, that was prepared the great revolt from the frozen immobility to which the ar- bitrary principles of David in historic art had reduced his generation. Here Delacroix met Géricault (his elder by some seven years), besides Ary Scheffer, Sigalon and Champ- martin. . ‘ Born in 1799, the young student was seventeen years old when he entered Guérin’s studio. Left fatherless in 1805, and placed by his mother at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the 16 MODERN PAINTINGS ardent youth had during his school days had opportunities of visiting the Louvre, and studying the unparalleled collec- tion of masterpieces then accumulated in its halls. These filled him with unbounded admiration, and aroused a spirit of emulation which caused him to decide upon the adoption of painting as the career of his life. The real beginning of Delacroix’s serious career as an artist, the point of departure of his fiery course as the typical Romanticist, is the exhibition of the Dante et Virgile at the Salon of 1822. Every one knows Charles Blanc’s pretty and true story, telling how the young artist of three-and- twenty, being too poor to afford an orthodox frame for his large canvas, had patched up what he hoped would be deemed a sufficient one out of four laths of common wood, gilt or painted yellow. When the Salon opened—it was then held in the Louvre—Delacroix, rushing through the galleries, and failing to find the canvas on which he had built such high hopes, was reduced to despair. At last, to his amazement, he discovered it in the Salon Carré, then as now the place of honour, in a handsome new frame. His own poor substitute had fallen to pieces, and Gros, enthusiastic in his admiration of the picture, though it an- swered to his former rather than to his actual style, had splendidly replaced it. In some respects the artist rises higher in this work of his youth than he ever did again. Though drawing and modelling may in many respects be open to criticism, the picture is, what Gros recognised it to be, a masterpiece of SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 17 its kind. It is a question whether any painter has realised with a power so closely akin to that of the poet the lurid yet perfectly plastic and precise imaginings of Dante. The painter’s expedition to Morocco in 1832 had a para- mount influence in developing his system as a colourist and luminariste. The Africa he saw and painted was not, it must be borne in mind, the commonplace tourist’s resort of to-day, but a land which from the artist’s standpoint was still to be discovered. Moorish Africa must still count, notwithstanding its western position, as an offshoot of the East, and it is thence that Delacroix brought back those pages instinct with oriental life and poetry, among which the most notable are Femmes d’Alger of 1834 (Louvre) ; the Noce Juive dans le Maroc of 1839 (Salon of 1841—now in the Louvre), and the brilliant Muley Abd-el-Rhaman sortant de Son Palais of 1845 (Museum of Toulouse). The Prise de Constantinople par les Croisés (1841), which was brought from Versailles and placed in the Louvre, is the definite expression of Delacroix’s art in its later phase. In it, intensely dramatic as are some isolated passages, the dramatic standpoint, which was supreme in the earlier works, is now, on the whole, subordinated to the decorative. It is beyond doubt the sumptuous art of Paolo Veronese that has suggested this vast splendid can- vas, in which against a background of azure sky and water, of grey-white architecture such as Veronese loved, stands out the troop of mounted Crusaders, making its 18 MODERN PAINTINGS way, still in battle-array, through scenes of prolonged struggle and massacre. The colour is a feast to the eye, and notwithstanding its family resemblance to the Venetian school, quite personal to Delacroix. But, perhaps because monumental splendour has been chiefly aimed at, the dra- matic unity and intensity of expression which marked those early productions, the Dante et Virgile and the Massacre de Scio, are in some measure wanting. THE CHILDREN OF EDWARD THE FOURTH (Paul Delaroche) LEONCE BENEDITE AUL DELAROCHE (or, to be more exact according to his civil name Hippolyte, called Paul) was born in Paris on July 6, 1797. He was the son of a very well- known expert in pictures and was brought up with all the advantages of the well-to-do middle class. His elder brother had also begun his career as a painter, and the father would not allow Paul to launch on his profession until his brother gave it up. He made his début with a, landscape and tried for the special grand prix for historical landscape, in which he was beaten by Michallon. He then entered Gros’s studio, where he applied himself to the ' study of the figure and where he came in contact with the principal artists—Carter, Bonington, Roqueplan, Bellanger, etc.,—who formed that Romantic group. Delaroche exhibited for the first time in 1822. He re- ceived on that occasion the advice of Géricault and then fell under the influence of the young master, whose dawning fame began to send forth brilliant rays to guide with their effulgent clearness the new movement,—Eugéne Delacroix. His first success dates from that famous year 1824, so glorious for Romanticism, with a Jeanne d’Arc and a Vincent de Paul, in which he already displayed in opposi- 19 20 MODERN PAINTINGS tion to the beautiful follies of his master and the academic coldness of the partisans of the opposite group, those quali- ties of measure, order, and wisdom that made his reputation among that haute bourgeoisie which the roi bourgeois him- self called the “ Juste-milieu.” The happy medium was in reality the character of that art, so ingenious, learned and discreet, which does not travel too far into ‘history or drama but selects the piquant episode, delighting in the intimacies of anecdote’ and avoiding ‘the violence of conflicts and bloodshed; combining finally the drawing of Ingres with the colour of Delacroix, while em- phasising the details and the picturesque. He rapidly became celebrated from 1830, with the revolution which led the arrival of the Jourgeoisie; he became its privileged painter. Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1828, Delaroche was elected member of the Institute in 1832 and was made professor in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1833. He married in Rome, in 1835, the only daughter of Horace Vernet who died in 1843. Delaroche died on November 4, 1856. Paul Delaroche produced a great number of works; his- torical subjects, religious subjects, and—principally at the end of his life—wall decorations; above all the great decora- tion of the Hemicycle in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, made famous by the engraving of Henriquel-Dupont. He also left some good portraits, such as those of Guizot, M. de Salvandy, M. de Rémusat, F. Delessert, Emile. Péreire, Thiers, and M. de Pastoret. Following the taste of the aysoie aq ynog sy} premMpy fo udIpyIYyD ay] CHILDREN OF EDWARD THE FOURTH 21 day, evoked by the novels of Walter Scott and by the polit- ical orientation of the French bourgeoisie, turned towards parliamentary England, Delaroche voluntarily chose his subjects from the history of that country. Sometimes it was the Death of Elizabeth, sometimes the little King Ed- ward V. and his brother, the Duke of York; sometimes Cromwell opening the coffin of Charles I, and contemplat- ing his defunct enemy; Jane Grey; Stafford led to the scaffold, etc. But the dark tragedies of these troublous periods did not inspire him with throbbing and passionate works such as Delacroix conceived; he made of them scenes of sentiment, from which horror is excluded and in which reason is always associated with emotion. The Death of Queen Elizabeth exhibited in 1827, which belongs to the Louvre, is certainly not from the point of view of comprehension of the subject one of his best works; but it is one of those which brought him much success on account of the qualities that it revealed and also by the faults which were made to please the bad taste of the public. The drama which is occasioned by the death of the old queen, intelligent, but egotistical, unfeeling and wicked, greedy for power and unsatiable of life, is entirely lost in the avalanche of velvets, brocades, satins, embroideries, cushions and sumptuous costumes, in which the painter tried his budding virtuosity. But Delaroche was quickly brought to his senses and stopped on the dangerous slope of that facile dilettantism and returned to a manner that was more sober, more grave, more expressive and more in 22 MODERN PAINTINGS accordance with his picturesque temperament and his moral nature. The Children of Edward, exhibited in 1831, placed in the Luxembourg and then in the Louvre, thoroughly charac- terises this manner, which is really his true manner. Every- body knows the subject of this little drama, which his brush has rendered so touchingly and which was represented on the stage, two years afterwards in 1833, in a tragedy by Casimir Delavigne. Critics were pleased, moreover, to find analogies between the painter and the dramatic author. The two unhappy sons of Edward IV.—the young king Edward V., aged thirteen, and his brother the Duke of York, were imprisoned in the Tower of London, by the order of Richard Duke of Gloucester, who usurped the throne under the name of Richard III. Seated on the-side of a bed with their arms around each other, in the terror of solitude and the presentiment of their sad fate, they lift their eyes from Holy Book from which they are drawing their pious consolations as they hear a heavy noise behind the door,—the footsteps of the assassins who are coming to cut their throats. This little dumb scene of an eloquence so simple in its sober action, the discreet selec- tion of the accessories each one rendered with the requisite accent of realistic truth, the ingenious idea of the little dog that is running to the door and thus announces the coming of the dark messengers of the usurper,—all this remains in the public memory and assures an enduring popularity for its author. FOUNDER OF THE ARCHAIC SCHOOL (Henri Leys) CHARLES BLANC ENRI LEYS was born in Antwerp, Feb. 18th, 1815, just when that city had been taken away from France to be given to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. His father was a dealer in religious prints, and his master was a somewhat feeble genre painter, Ferdinand dc Braekeleer. About 1830, the Belgian School was directed by a few pseudo-classic professors who belonged to the fol- lowing of David, and who believed they were teaching the true principles of that illustrious master without possessing any of his higher qualities. Cold, conventional and man- nered drawing, pale and languid colour and sapless and lifeless painting were the characteristics of the Flemish School at the period in which Leys made his appearance. But it is only just to say that he was not the first to re- juvenate the art of his country. That honour belongs especially to Wappers, Gallait and De Keyser, who, how- ever, were only moderate reformers whose audacity matched that of Paul Delaroche. For a long while undecided and timid, restricted to little genre pictures, in which he did his best to revive Ostade, Metsu and Peter de Hooch, Leys lived for.about ten years without coming to the front, or at least without making 23 24 MODERN PAINTINGS himself known outside his own country; however, his pic- tures found purchasers even in France, and M. Delessert, in particular, had in his gallery three pieces by Leys, notably a Lace Maker and a Spinner, which recalled the old Dutch Masters, and which attracted no attention at the sale of that celebrated collection. Under his master, Ferdinand de Braekeleer, who was his brother-in-law, he had contracted the habit of certain yellow, clear and sweet- ish tones that made his pictures insipid till about 1846. But a day came when this debilitating concoction changed into a generous liquor, and when the painter, still young, wanted to raise himself from simple genre to historical genre. This was the time when he sent to the Louvre salon the Féte Bourgeoise, the Armurier and the Partie de Musique, which won for him a third class medal and the honour of being discussed in the Parisian newspapers. Thoré, among others, who wrote about him, observed that he had a fat and facile touch, variety of colour and transparent shadows; and he informed the public that the works of Leys which were highly prized in Belgium were often mistaken there for the paintings of Old Mas- ters. Nevertheless, it was not till the Universal Exposition of 1855 that Leys was known to the public, and that we, after having long lost sight of him, found him broadened and transformed by his labours and by explorations in the domains of the modern French school, toned (I do not say chilled) by time, serious, collected and strong. A new FOUNDER OF THE ARCHAIC SCHOOL 25 sense was revealed in his work, the sense of history. Pass- ing over Rubens, Van Dyck and Teniers, to reach the Flem- ings and Germans of the Sixteenth and even of the Fifteenth Century, he had saturated himself in the contemplation of the old imagery, manuscript illuminations, and native and foreign paintings. He had studied Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Mabuse, Memling, Quentin Matsys, Lucas van Leyden, Holbein and Albrecht Diirer; and lastly Peasant Breughel, and Van Orley, whose pretty female figures were so delicate in complexion and fine in feature. In the study of these masters, Henri Leys transformed himself. On one hand, he became so saturated with their spirit that he regarded himself as one of their race, and we may consider him not only as their fellow countryman and relative, but also as their contemporary. On the other hand, his drawings became more condensed, and he learned that harmony can be obtained with the most intense coloura- tions. The Promenade hors des murs, the Nouvel an en Flandre, and the Trentaines de Bertall de Haze are the three pictures in which his new qualities showed themselves with a vigour that surprised everybody in the Universal Exposition of 1855. Those who took interest in and kept up with the doings in the world of art were struck with the metamorphosis that had occurred in the talent of a foreign artist who—by exception—was known to them. On looking at these three works, one would have said that the painter had been born about the end of the Fifteenth 26 ' MODERN PAINTINGS Century, and had flourished early in the Sixteenth. His intuition was so true that it resuscitated the old days; and he made them live again not by virtue of erudition and archaeological knowledge, but by creating them anew, so to speak, by restoring them as if the times which are the past for us were the present for him. In his pictures, the Promenade hors des murs, the Nouvel an and the Trentaines, Leys did not imitate the old Flem- ings; he was himself a Fleming of the old days. One might have believed that on coming into the world in the Nineteenth Century, he was three hundred years behind time. Therefore we can not improve upon what Théophile Gautier has said of him. “ Leys is not an imitator; he is of like kind.” Everybody has noticed that there are mo- ments in our lives when, by a phenomenon which seems to prove that Pythagoras was right, we clearly recall cir- cumstances of a former life; we are suddenly transplanted into ‘surroundings in which we find again with terrifying precision the details of a scene in which we took part sev- eral centuries ago. But these gleams which from time to time illuminate the depths of the human soul are only lightning flashes in the night of its past. Well, with -Henri Leys, it seems that certain images of a previous existence have persisted in his spirit so that he has been able to reproduce them, not as a souvenir, but as after nature. It is not only the costumes, the aspect of the gables and silhouettes in the mist that produce this restoration of the FOUNDER OF THE ARCHAIC SCHOOL 27 past; it also results from the resurrection of the spirits that animated the people of that period. The people painted by Leys are not models of the present day wearing Renaissance clothes; they are souls of olden days. Their faces bear the trace of thoughts that are no longer ours, and of certain passions that vary in accordance with climate and creed and the evolution of history. It would be vain to stew in archaeology, to surround oneself with the wood engravings of Schauffelein, Burgmair, or Grun, to study Holbein’s Simulacra, or to grow wan over the prints of Lucas Van Leyden, Diirer and Cranach; one would never produce anything but wearisome jastiches unless one possessed that moral intuition which is so astonishing in the works of Leys, that profound and intimate knowledge of what passed in the brains and hearts of our ancestors. The Antwerp artist penetrated to the bottom of: their thoughts; he felt as they felt; he believed what they be- lieved. In that lies his veritable originality; that con- stitutes his superiority. What in another would have looked like a cold marquetry of borrowed figures is with him a sincere conception, a sort of historical revelation. Every retrospective picture into which an artist has not put his whole heart will always look like a scene played by comedians, Every century has its own figures, and it is not merely the tailor, the milliner, or the barber that makes them; it is the dominant idea, the concentration of beliefs of a period. The attitude of mind determines the facial expression. 28 MODERN PAINTINGS Sy When Henri Leys paints for us Albrecht Durer at Antwerp with his wife and maid servant under the porch of an inn in company with Erasmus and Quentin Metsys, we think we are looking at a page of Albrecht Diirer’s manuscript illustrated by himself. Is not this a sort of pretext to parade before the spectators, who here are the guests of the innkeeper, Joost Planckfeld, the great procession of Notre Dame, which took place on the Sunday after the Assump- tion, the artisan bodies with their banners, the archer guilds with their drums and fifes, costumed in foreign fashion, as ‘Albrecht Diirer notes in his travels. Where Henri Leys is strongest, or at least most interesting, is in the works where he expresses feelings of olden days, or even of the present day. His picture of the Catholics is touching, and it is so quite as much by the eloquence of its chiaroscuro as by the expression of the figures that come to pray in the aisle of a low and mysterious church. Two women, one of whom carries a little sick child in her arms, are having a taper lit by a choir boy. The concentration and silence that reign in this picture, tinged with sadness and veiled with shadow, make it a painting that speaks tenderly to our hearts, and, moreover, the intensity of its tone and char- acter impresses it indelibly on our memory. If I am not mistaken this picture, the Catholics, is ex- ceptional among the works of Leys, for this painter is essentially Protestant by the moral physiognomy of his paintings, and it is to the memory of the great personages of the Reformation that he has to devote his most striking FOUNDER OF THE ARCHAIC SCHOOL 29 pictures and those that show the deepest feeling, The Child Luther in the Streets of Eisenach is a work of his that one can not possibly forget. Like his Flemish or German predecessors, particularly Holbein, Henri Leys has the talent of showing us deformed faces which, how- ever, are never ugly because they are illuminated and trans- figured by an internal flame. Thus, a woman with a short nose, prominent cheek bones, and thick lips forming a wide mouth is nevertheless full of charm because her face has an expression of simplicity, or repressed sorrow, or love. ‘Also an échevin, whose cheeks are prematurely furrowed, whose nose is turned up and crooked and whose lips bulge with projecting teeth, attracts our attention because he has an air of good nature, rectitude and firmness. You see a thickset ruddy child with a snub nose, black and wiry hair and coarse facial expression with common unformed features; yet you find it as interesting as if it were a pretty face, fresh, rosy and golden haired. You ex- amine it with curiosity, and analyse its ugliness without feeling the slightest dislike for it. It stands on the pave- ment with three or four youthful companions as ugly as itself, and you are taken captive by these figures even before you know that they represent Luther and his comrades singing Christmas carols in the streets of Eisenach before towns-people who are equally lacking in good looks, with the exception of one fine lady, richly dressed, who is seated on a stone bench, and, with a charming air of Christian compassion and tenderness, looks at these poor street singers, 30 MODERN PAINTINGS one of whom one day will trouble her conscience and per- haps convert her heart. ‘The Antwerp painter next shows us Luther’s Home in Wittenberg. ‘The child of the streets has grown up; his name is no longer unknown; the little boys who sang with him in the streets have become his disciples; their names are Melancthon, Pomeranus and C&colampadus. Gathered together in Luther’s house, they are seated around a table commenting on the Scriptures which the Reformer is explaining with concentrated heat and an air of authority. The room is ‘lighted by rays that become golden by passing through the leaded panes of yellow glass which spread a poetic sentiment over this peaceful interior, with its rich and subdued tones and warm hangings. Against the window, under this stream of light stands Luther’s wife, Catherine Bora, knitting, and this sweet face, the image of domestic happiness, personifies the family life that was a characteristic feature of early Protestantism. Over a door we see a full-length portrait of Frederick of Saxony. Whether he be Protestant or Catholic, Henri Leys is a Christian painter, a pure painter, I mean that his place is in the centre of his own art, a thousand leagues from statuary, in the antipodes of paganism, like an artist who never knew that Antiquity had existed; for the predomi- nance of painting over the other arts is peculiar to the Christian epochs, the result being that, as painting does not exclude ugliness, it has been able to bring forward FOUNDER OF THE ARCHAIC SCHOOL 31 another beauty than that of the body and thus embrace the whole of nature, without condemning any model provided it has a soul. But Henri Leys does not express the Christian sentiment devotionally, after the manner of Flandrin; he expresses it like a respectful chronicler. He possesses the historic sense as much as, and even more than, the religious sense. If we measure him as a painter, leaving out his archaeo- logical erudition and his faithful relation of things of former days, Leys is an artist who stands in the front rank of the modern Belgian school, and it was not for nothing that the jury of the Universal Exposition twice awarded him the grand medal of honour, in 1855 and 1867. The competent judges admired, as we also admire, his opulent colours that harmonise under a surface of mystery, the warmth of his shadows, the force of his effects, which, how- ever, are not concentrated, and the fascination of his back- grounds, which sometimes recall those of Peter de Hooch and Rembrandt. His painting forces our observation and bites into our imagination. The sumptuous reds are in- tensified by deep greens; the oranges and yellows glow, enhanced by sombre blues; but these violences are recon- ciled, appeased and melted in a warm and reddened com- bination that resembles the subdued splendours of the old Flemish tapestries, or Cordovan leathers. It goes without saying that after receiving such honours in foreign lands, Leys became a prophet in his own country. There he became more and more respected, consulted and 32 MODERN PAINTINGS applauded. King Leopold loaded him with crosses and rib- bons, and gave him the title of Baron. But, what was worth much more to him, he was engaged to decorate the great hall of the Antwerp Hétel de Ville. This noble and important work, begun in 1863, included a number of his- torical portraits from Godfrey de Bouillon to Philip the Fair, as well as six great principal paintings destined to glorify, by examples chosen from history, the communal franchises of the city of Antwerp and the liberties granted by the law. ‘The subjects and meaning of these six mural paintings are as follows: La Joyeuse entrée de Varchiduc Charles in 1514, shows that every sovereign before enter- ing a city had to take an oath to respect its laws; L’Admission du Genois Pallavicini shows what was the ancient right of citizenship. La Défense d’Anvers and La Duchess de Parme remettant les clefs au bourgomestre reminds us that the magistracy had the sole right to con- voke the militia and city government. La Landjuweel of 1561 and L’Ouverture de la grande foire de 1562 were con- ceived with the aim of showing that the arts as well as in- dustry lived and developed under the protection of the City Fathers. The six compositions which decorate the Antwerp Hotel de Ville are painted in fresco. They display all the fine qualities of Leys in their highest degree, as well as all his faults, which consist in often giving his figures large heads and big feet, in paying no attention to aerial FOUNDER OF THE ARCHAIC SCHOOL 33 Herepective (in order to resemble more closely the Old Masters) and generally in not paying sufficient heed to the sacrifices that are necessary and indispensable in the art of painting. LE MATIN (J. B.C. Corot) RENE MENARD EAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT was born in Paris in 1796; his parents were in easy circumstances. After passing some years at the Lycée of Rouen, he was placed as assistant to a linen draper in the Rue St. Honoré at Paris. Having no taste whatever for the line of life to which he was destined, he abandoned business to study painting with the landscape-painter, Michallon. ‘I made my first drawing,” he said, “ from nature at Arcueil, under the eye of the painter, whose only advice to me was to render with the utmost fidelity everything that I saw before me. His lesson has been useful; it has remained the in- variable ground of my disposition, always inclined to ac- curacy.” It will be remarked that artists often misun- derstand their own temperament. Corot is a dreamer, and never was a realist. But if the exact rendering of na- ture is not precisely his goal, it is assuredly the safest road to reach it; and Michallon, by giving him this direction, rendered him a real service that he was first to acknowledge. Michallon, now completely forgotten, enjoyed at one time a certain amount of reputation. When only conven- tional landscape was known, with the inevitable temple in 34 i e Mat LE MATIN 35 the background, and the foreground composed of big leaves as repoussoir, Michallon was looked upon as a seeker after realism, because his subjects were chosen from nature in- stead of being composed with the sole help of imagination. Still, if he did not invent his landscapes, he painted them by routine, and was very far from the vigorous observation of nature adopted by the French school after Constable. Corot learnt with him to make nature useful, but his dreamy dis- position soon found in Victor Bertin a master more in harmony with his artistic temperament. Excellent draughts- man and indifferent colourist, Victor Bertin knew better than anybody else how to arrange the composition of a land- scape. He was not opposed to study from nature, but had no great admiration for the rustic scenes of our country, and always dreamt of Italy and the Roman Campagna. It was under this impression that Corot started for Italy, whence he sent his first pictures. Vue prise a Narni and Souvenir de la Campagne a Rome, exhibited in the. Salon of 1827. ‘These pictures did not meet with any suc- cess, and it must be said that they were far from possessing the charm of the painter’s later works. Corot groped about a long time before finding this path. His first works— could it be believed?—sometimes give an impression of dryness. Formerly he used to paint his pictures entirely from nature; later on, he became aware that, in order to interest with a landscape, it was less important to repro- duce a scene with accuracy than to convey the impression of it faithfully; accordingly he adopted a method of work more in conformity with his inclination, Nevertheless, he 36 MODERN PAINTINGS continued to make numerous studies from nature, and his portfolios were filled with drawings of the utmost exact- ness. But once in the studio, he painted from inspiration and in full liberty. Then his accumulated impressions ‘would combine in his brain and take the poetical colour so charming to us. Even when he found in nature a sub- ject to please him, he generally altered it on returning to his studio. We frequently recognise in Corot’s pictures the place that he has painted, the group of trees on the side, the small houses in the background, the old boat stranded on the beach, and the very cows that graze there. Before his model, he painted what he saw, but afterwards he veiled it with a vaporous atmosphere, bathed the leaves with dew, and gave to the sky the limpidity whose secret he alone possesses. It was by degrees that Corot began to be appreciated by artists. ‘There was around him a small circle of warm admirers, principally composed of young men anxious for his advice. This little success, although unprofitable, was a sort of compensation for the indifference of the public and the disdain of the family. His parents were convinced that their son had acted like a fool by giving up business for a profession which brought him nothing, and could only be considered in his case as a polite accomplishment. Corot was very much loved by young men, to whom he gave advice with a sort of paternal kindness. The num- ber of those that he helped is very great indeed, and his services were rendered with infinite delicacy. He was often LE MATIN 37 seen at the Hétel des Ventes, especially when the works | of a beginner were to be sold, because in such cases he did his best to excite the zeal of amateurs. He was a robust, corpulent man, who bore some likeness to a farmer with his red and sanguine complexion; but his eye was extremely refined and his talk delightful. Of late, no painter has been so much exalted by criticism; he was not even reproached with the uniformity of his pic- tures, nor with the calculated absence of coloured tones and rigid forms. Everybody knows that mythology is now banished from our landscapes, and that it is the fashion to laugh at the nymphs whose cadenced steps had so much charm for our fathers; still it is one of the not unfrequent inconsistencies of French criticism that it does not hesitate to praise, in Corot, a choice of subjects that it condemns in theory. It is true that his nymphs add no great value to his pictures, but they are placed with so much judgment that it is impossible to realise his landscapes without them. However, he sometimes sought to render nature without alteration; for instance in his Vues de Ville d’Avray et des Environs de Paris; but, like all true artists, Corot as- similates all he sees to his inward dream, and the varied effects of nature uniformly appear to him under the same poetical vision. Had he been painting in Egypt by the Pyramids, he would have found there his silvery tones and his mysterious bowers. Whether he evokes out of mythology some graceful tale, or whether he renders in a manner that he intends to be positive, some particular and familiar scene, 38 MODERN PAINTINGS Corot always leaves in his work a poetical perfume which is his personality, and is as good as a signature. This dreamer was not assuredly a brutal copyist nor a seeker after coarse reality, but an observer whose mind was constantly open to impressions, and never felt satiated be- fore nature. Either in his walks in the streets or in the fields, or in a railway carriage, he always carried with him a small note-book, which he filled up with memoranda un- intelligible for anybody but himself, and which were highly valuable to him. ‘They generally consisted in little rough pencil lines, in the midst of which he placed a small circle, or square, or any other conventional sign. The small circle meant the highest light, the small square the deepest shade; and these rapid indications were precious reminis- cences to him. Corot is par excellence the painter of morning. He can render with more felicity than anybody else the silvery light on dewy fields, the vague foliage of trees mirrored in calm water. He was not fond of the noonday light, and it was always in_the earliest morning that he went out to paint from nature. He has himself described his artistic impressions in letters which foreshadow his pictures, and we can not end this article better than by giving one extract out of them: ‘‘A landscape painter’s day is delightful. He gets up early at three in the morning before sunrise; he goes to sit under a tree and watches and waits. There is not much to be seen at fgrst. Nature is like a white veil, upon which some masses are vaguely sketched in profile. LE MATIN 39 Everything smells sweet, everything trembles under the freshening breeze of the dawn. Bing! The sun gets clearer; he has not yet torn the veil of gauze behind which hide the meadow, the valley, the hills on the horizon. The nocturnal vapours still hang like silvery tufts upon the cold green grass. Bing! Bing! The first ray of the sun —another ray. The small flowerets seem to awake joy- ously; each of them has its trembling drop of drew. The chilly leaves are moved by the morning air. One sees nothing; everything is there. The landscape lies entirely behind the transparent gauze of the ascending mist, grad- ually sucked by the sun, and permits us to see, as it as- cends, the silver-striped river, the meadow, the cottages, the far-receding distance. At last you can see what you imagined at first. Bam! ‘The sun has risen. Bam! The peasant passes at the bottom of the field, with his cart and oxen. Ding! Ding! It is the bell of the ram, which leads the flock. Bam! Everything sparkles, shines; every- thing is in full light, light soft and caressing as yet. The backgrounds with their simple contour and harmonious tone are lost in the infinite sky through an atmosphere of azure and mist. The flowers lift up their heads; the birds fly here and there. A rustic, mounted on a white horse, disappears in the narrowing path. The rounded willows seem to turn like wheels on the river edge. And the ar- tist paints away . .. paints away! Ah! the beautiful bay cow, chest deep in the wet grasses; I will paint her! Crac/ there she is! Famous! Capital! what a good likeness she 40 MODERN PAINTINGS is! Boum! Boum! The sun scorches the earth. Boum! All becomes heavy and grave. The flowers hang down their heads, the birds are silent, the noises of the village reach us. These are the heavy works; the black- smith, whose hammer sounds on the anvil. Boum! Let us go back. All is visible, there is no longer anything. Let us get some breakfast at the farm. A good slice of home- made bread, with butter newly churned; some eggs, cream and ham! Boum! Work away, my friends; I rest my- self. I enjoy my siesta, and dream about my morning land- scape. I dream my picture, later I shall paint my dreara.” Is not this Corot himself? FOREST CLEARING * (Narcisse-Virgilio Diaz de la Pefia) WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY HE painter of the Nymph Endormie and the Fin d’un Beau Jour— the Anacreon of the Bas-Bréau ’—was a Frenchman only by accident. His father and mother, Tomas Diaz and Maria Velasco, were Spaniards of Sala- manca, driven into exile by the failure of a conspiracy against King Joseph Bonaparte. Their child was born in Bor- deaux; while the father exiled from France, as well as from his native country, betook himself alone, to Norway, and passing thence to London, died in that city, just as his wife was on the point of setting sail from the Gironde to join him. Being utterly friendless, she came north, to Paris first, and then to Sévres, where she supported herself * He delighted in thick foliage with sunlight streaming through in pathways through woods brilliant with the setting sun. He introduced mythological figures as light-bearers to make his com- positions more splendid. At one time he made nymphs, dryads, etc, the principal objects in his pictures. Not being a draughts- man of form, these efforts were not successful and were soon abandoned. ... There are several of his pictures in the Louvre which show the three variations in his style. In the one called La Clairiére, or The Forest Clearing, there is but one figure, and that only as a light-bearer, to introduce bright spots where Diaz wished to put them and where they could not be put without the presence of a figure. This is in Diaz’s best style and an ex- cellent specimen. It is quite small, only about one and a half feet by one foot—D. Cady Eaton, 41 42 MODERN PAINTINGS and her child by giving lessons in Spanish and Italian. At the latter place she died, and Narcisse-Virgilio, now a boy of ten, was adopted by the Protestant pastor of Bellevue, with whom he remained until he came to Paris to seek his fortune. When he was fifteen, he got stung in the left foot by a poison-fly (he was to die of a snake-bite more than half a century after), and twice he had to suffer amputation. But his energy, of mind and body alike, was extraordinary, and he went on riding and dancing and swimming as before. Being called upon to choose a trade, he took—like Raffet and Jules Dupré—to china-painting. But, whenever he could, he engaged himself in oils as well. He worked un- der Souchon (1787-1857) ; and in 1831 he got his first pic- ture into the Salon. At this time, and for some years, he was only, as it were, an understudy of Delacroix. He painted flowers, battles, portraits, naked women, anything that would sell (it is on record that for some of these works he was content to take as little as five francs apiece; and even his colour—in after years so rich, so distinguished, so eminently personal—was imitated from his leader’s. At forty he was still learning to draw; but so early as 1836- 37, he had fallen under the inspiring influence of Rousseau, and was on the way to become the great artificer in sunshine and leafage that we know. ‘For a dozen years or so he exhibited rather unsuccessfully than not. But in 1844 he won a Third Class medal with a Bas-Bréau, an Orientale and a Bohémiens se rendant a Forest-Clearing Diaz FOREST CLEARING 43 une Féte; in 1846, a Second Class, with the Délaissées, the Magicienne, the Jardin des Amours, an Intérieur de Foret a Léda; and in 1848, a First Class with a Diane partant pour la Chasse, a Meute dans la Forét de Fontainebleau, a Vénus et Adonis; while in 1851 he exhibited a portrait, a Baigneuse, and his Amour Désarmé, and received the rib- bon of the Legion of Honour. Henceforward life was easy enough; and though in 1855 he failed with his most ambitious work—the much-debated and much-ridiculed Derniéres Larmes—he succeeded splendidly with half a dozen others: the Rivales, the Nymphe tourmentée par l’Amour, the Fin d’un Beau Jour, among them. His last Salon was that of 1859; but if he abstained from exhibiting, he nowise ceased from production. In 1860, he lost his son Emile, a painter like himself, and, like himself, a pupil of Rousseau; but not even that great affliction could break his spirit or abate his interest in Art. There were fifteen years of life before him still—‘ railleur, mais non amer, Spirituel, parfois un peu brusque, au fond bon et franc comme du pain de froment”’—and fifteen years of work. To the end he lived but to paint; and, as we have seen, his death, at sixty-eight, was a result of accident. Millet and Corot had passed the year before; and when he followed them, of the great and famous group to which we owe the best of modern art only Dupré and Daubigny were left alive. Diaz had many masters—Delacroix, Correggio, Millet, Rousseau, Prudhon—and succumbed to many influences 44 MODERN PAINTINGS in turn. But, if he followed, it was only that he might learn to lead; if he copied, it was the more completely to express himself. His master qualities are fancy and charm; but, capricious as he was and enchanting as he never failed to be, he was a devout student and a rare observer of na- ture. “ Personne,’ says M. Jules Dupré, “ n’a compris mieux que lui la loi de la lumiére, la magie, et pour ainsi dire la folie, du soleil dans les feuilles et les sous-bois.’ What gives his work its peculiar quality of delightfulness is the combination of lovely fact with graceful fiction! His world would be Arcadia if it were not so real—would be the world we live in if it did not teem with exquisite impos- sibilities. I think of him as an amicable and light-hearted Rembrandt. He had a touch of the madness of genius, or that madness of the sunshine (of which his old companion speaks) would certainly have escaped him. And rightly to express his ideas and sensations, he made himself a won- derful vocabulary. His palette was composed, not of com- mon pigments, but of molten jewels; they clash in the richest chords, they sing in triumphant unisons, as do the elements of music in a score of Berlioz. If they meant noth- ing they would still be delicious. But beyond them is Diaz—the poet, the fantaisiste, the artist; and that makes them unique. THE BANKS OF THE LOIRE IN SPRING (Théodore Rousseau). T. A. CASTAGNARY T is an old truth that eclogues and idylls have almost al- ways been the consequence of social agitations. Irritated by the tumult of the world, the poets and dreamers take ref- uge in the peace of the meadows and in the contemplation of calm and serene nature. The resurrection of landscape in France in the last few years* arises in great part from this cause. The literary and political quarrels of this century have repelled many minds in the direction of peace, and engendered, by way of reaction, the current of ideas to which we owe, in litera- ture, La Mare au Diable, Jeanne and Les Paysans; and in art, the works of Rousseau, Troyon, Daubigny and Rosa Bonheur. ‘The exaggerations of Romanticism and the debauches of colour have precipitated this double movement. It seems that, disgusted with its own corruption and satiated with violent emotions, society has made a general return towards the truth. It has experienced a sudden thirst for calm and sweet emotions. A vague odour of the farmyard, brought by the country breeze, has reached its nostrils. It has perceived, far from infected towns, *(Written in 1857). 45 46 MODERN PAINTINGS grouped as in one of Leopold Robert’s pictures, rural life with its labours, its pleasures, and its simple and touching poetry. It has remembered the hidden path in the wheat, the mill turned by the wind, the water lapping among the roots of the willow, blue distances and mysterious depths of background. Then it has demanded nature and much nature from those who serve it. And the poet, the novelist, the painter and everybody has set to work to gratify it. It is not only Théodore Rousseau transporting to canvas living nature with its lights, its scents and its rustlings; it is not only Rosa Bonheur applying her robust touch and virile manner to pastoral life; it is Lelia, disillusioned, try- ing to calm the tempest of her heart with the spectacle of the fields, and coming to pour out the currents of her deeply troubled soul in the breast of the universal mother; it is Balzac asking the woods and plains for a few leaves and cooling breezes to refresh the weary actors of the Comédie humaine in the evening of their long day. By these latter landscape has entered into literature, and has taken a place there which action no longer thinks of dis- puting. In the last serious work of this period, Madame Bovary, nature follows the developments of the story step by step, mingles with the intimate life of the characters, and takes such a part in it that to some extent it makes itself an accomplice of their actions, and when the heroine succumbs, nobody can say whether she yields to the elo- quence of her seducer, or the voluptuous excitation of the environing landscape. nvossnoy sulids Ul dIIOTT 94} fo syuvg THE BANKS OF THE LOIRE IN SPRING 47 In spite of the radical difference between the proceed- ings of the poet and the painter, I have insisted on not sep- arating these two movements that issue from one single effort. In both courses, in literature as in art, the at- tempt has been crowned with full success; but it is par- ticularly the interpretation of nature by colour that has made rapid progress. In less than a quarter of a century, landscape in France has been raised to such a height that I do not know that the artistic sovereignty of Hobbema, Cuyp and Ruysdael, has not found itself threatened. In any case the old Dutch masters are the only ones left whose work in this field can still bear comparison with ours. One of those who have contributed most to the elevation of landscape among us is Théodore Rousseau. Théodore Rousseau is a true master of the art in the old sense of the word; he has shared in genius and all the miseries which pertain to it. His obscure struggles, his en- ergy and his perseverance are sufficiently known to the pub- lic. It was not till 1849, after twenty years of fierce efforts, that the greatest landscape painter of the present.day found himself admitted to the honour of a medal of the first class. The hour of just reward never arrives for the good work- man until his task is almost completed. During the hard times of his youth, he had no support except the esteem. of a few scarce friends, and beyond that he knew neither the sweetness of encouragement, nor the taste of praise. But afterwards, he received compensation. The Universal Ex-- position by bringing into full view the many sides of this 48 MODERN PAINTINGS splendid genius, the clearness, precision, freshness and ex- quisite finesse of this deep and charming mind, consecrated his tardy reputation, ‘To-day, Théodore Rousseau has reached maturity; he is in full possession of himself; and he possesses to the very depths all the resources of his art. It seems that in the road he has chosen, he can hardly reach a higher eminence. The six canvases which he exhibits, ad- mirable fruits of his ripe talent, do not show us anything new or unexpected, but they fully confirm all the qualities with which we are already acquainted in him. The most remarkable of these landscapes is called Les Bords de la Loire au printemps. It is one of those small canvasses in which Rousseau loves to widen and extend an immense horizon. ‘The grey river, admirably transparent, swells between its winding banks lapping the sides as it ad- vances. On the right is a little house, with a red-tiled roof, sheltered by poplars.