NOTES UPON CERTAIN 
 MASTERS
 
 NOTES 
 
 UPON 
 
 CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 XIX CENTURY 
 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT WOLFF 
 ET AL 
 
 PRINTED NOT PUBLISHED 
 MDCCCLXXXVI
 
 M. Albert Wolff 
 
 [E exhibition in June, 1883, in the rue de Se"ze, of 
 one hundred of the most celebrated paintings then 
 owned in Paris was the most notable event of its kind 
 that had happened in the artistic history of that city. 
 Americans who were abroad in that year and saw this 
 wonderful collection might well congratulate themselves upon their 
 good fortune ; for it was as unique as it was memorable unprece- 
 dented then, impossible now. Here were assembled in a spacious 
 gallery some eighty of the choicest pearls of the greatest period of 
 modern art. Never had such a representation been seen of the 
 phalanx of 1830. It was the final ceremony that proclaimed and 
 fixed the domain which had been conquered and shared by COROT, 
 ROUSSEAU, DIAZ, MILLET, DAUBIGNY, FROMENTIN, DELACROIX, 
 TROYON and DECAMPS the art of modern France, and its like will 
 never again be seen there. Individual vicissitudes and the insatiable 
 competition of foreigners have made it impossible. 
 
 It was a great exhibition, and it will never be forgotten in Paris or 
 anywhere that the fame of it has reached through the splendid com- 
 memoration that is afforded in the Cent Chefs-d'CEuvre of PETIT and 
 BASCHET, with its eloquent and fascinating text. The writer of the 
 latter, ALBERT WOLFF, is not only the most intelligent and culti- 
 vated of contemporary writers upon art, but he has the advantage of 
 having lived with many of these great artists and known them upon 
 terms of personal and sympathetic intimacy. He has never written 
 better, or with more sensibility and genuine emotion, than in treating 
 of the modern contingent in the Hundred Masterpieces. The idea has 
 presented itself that a reproduction of these passages in some such
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 form as the present would be interesting to people who are afforded 
 an opportunity of studying representative works of the masters of 
 whom M. WOLFF has written. There is no one in whose company 
 it is more agreeable to see and discuss the work of one of these 
 painters, and the specific information which M. WOLFF takes such 
 pleasure in imparting is always valuable. Besides, when occasionally 
 we find ourselves in the presence of the identical subject of discus- 
 sion, to see it in the light of so great a critic is a privilege not to be 
 lightly held.
 
 Jean-Baptiste Corot 
 
 >T the little hamlet of Ville-d'Avray, near Paris, a specta- 
 tor could behold, on the fine summer days of eight or 
 nine years past, the most touching spectacle ever ex- 
 hibited by an artist to his epoch. An old man, arrived 
 at the apotheosis of a long lifetime, wrapped in a 
 blouse, and sheltered under a linen parasol, whose sunny reflections 
 framed the white hair in a sort of aureole, was there, face to face 
 with the landscape ; attentive, like a schoolboy ; striving to entrap 
 some heretofore unobserved secret of nature which might have 
 escaped his seventy years' search ; smiling at the twitter of the birds, 
 and giving them back, from time to time, the chorus of some lively 
 song ; in the spirit of one who exults in his twentieth year, who de- 
 lights to live and whose soul expands under the poesy of the fields. 
 Aged as was this great artist, he believed that he had still to learn ; 
 for more than a half a century he had been contemplating creation, 
 which reported some new revelation for every day ; according to this 
 patriarch there was no such thing as absolute mastery in his art, and 
 he esteemed the life of a man, even a long life, inadequate for the 
 study of landscape on all its sides and in its incalculable variety. 
 
 This patriarch, thus living in submission to nature, was JEAN- 
 BAPTISTE COROT, one of the greatest of French painters. His 
 renown, now fixed for eternity, had erected itself slowly upon a labor 
 of fifty years, of which the first half had simply been a long strife 
 between the ancient successful routine, unrecognizant of such a 
 master, and the obstinacy of the artist himself in walking straight 
 ahead, athwart the disdain of some, the ignorance of others. In this
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 fine soul no bitterness had been left by the long combat of genius 
 with sleek mediocrity. COROT, at the culmination of his career, 
 would talk without any irony of those who for so long a period had 
 denied him. In the conversations I have had with him this mighty 
 artist never allowed the smallest trace of resentment to transpire, 
 whether against the exhibition juries who had rejected his early works 
 or against the blind spectator who had passed with indifference before 
 the revelations contained in his canvas. He would tell me of these 
 episodes in his career, not in the tone of a man willing to boast of 
 the obstacles he had cleared and the recalcitrants he had imposed on, 
 but like an intelligence replete in its achievement, innocently and 
 simply, without bitterness as without braggadocio. 
 
 When he talked in this vein, giving the recital of injustices 
 received, to the accompaniment of that easy smile which was like a 
 radiation of goodness over his fine patriarch's head, we venerated 
 him for his art at the same time that we loved him for the rare quality 
 of his heart of gold. Over one and the other the passage of the 
 years had not been able to steal away from the artist a single one of 
 his enthusiasms, from the man a particle of his childlike goodness. 
 This old man was not like other men of his years, of whom the best 
 are unable to repress a kind of chagrin in comparing the long-traveled 
 road behind them with the short one which remains to be measured. 
 He had but to install himself in the face of nature to recapture the 
 artistic ardor and the hopes of one's twentieth year. When young 
 he had strolled singing over the plains, and old age found him just as 
 free from care as he had been half a century before. We could but 
 stand spellbound before this spectacle of beautiful age, when we 
 would thus discover him bent like a schoolboy over his themes to the 
 last, now erasing with a movement of anger the study which would 
 not come up to the example of nature contemplated by the artistic 
 eye, now drawing back with sudden satisfaction to better calculate 
 the effect of the effort ; when we would hear him from far off, 
 approving himself aloud and awarding himself a prize with the 
 words " Famous, that bit !" or criticising himself roundly with the 
 sentence, " We will begin it all over again, my lad !" And then we 
 must needs look with softened eyes upon COROT the man, even as we 
 bow with emotion before his results.
 
 JEAN-BAPTISTE COROT 
 
 It must be noted, again, to account for this greenness of vitality in 
 a man of his age, that COROT had passed through life as one of the 
 chosen ones of destiny, which had conferred on this genius the boon 
 of health and spared the miseries of a struggle for daily bread. The 
 son of a merchant, he had been sheltered from his cradle against 
 need. His youth was untroubled, save by the long opposition ex- 
 tended by his father before permitting him to enter the artistic career. 
 But this resistance once withdrawn, the boy COROT, supported by 
 a pension from the father, was able to walk through life laughing, 
 and to arrive at the term of his glorious career without having been 
 delayed for an hour by the need of practical support. 
 
 It was only after a hundred doubts that the merchant COROT de- 
 cided to abandon his son to his true vocation. When the young 
 JEAN-BAPTISTE had finished his hasty schooling, he was condemned 
 by the paternal will to serve an apprenticeship with a mercer ; 't was 
 a faulty prentice, who sketched landscapes over the bills ; the em- 
 ployer scolded him roundly and said to the father at the end of the 
 second year: 
 
 "Yonder lad will never come to anything in the shop. I am 
 going to send him about Paris as my commercial traveler." 
 
 And the future celebrity began to plod through the Paris streets, 
 with a card of samples under his arm, visiting the small shop-keepers 
 and the petty tailors to recommend the goods of his employer. 
 COROT narrated to me with his own lips the incident which caused 
 him to abandon trade for all time. After having trotted about the 
 city for a whole week, he went back one evening to the shop, all 
 radiant with his first success as a salesman ; he had succeeded in 
 selling a tailor an entire piece of olive cloth, the fashionable shade of 
 the day, and he came back with the announcement to his proprietor. 
 The merchant, far from congratulating him, assumed his severest 
 tone and said to COROT : 
 
 " I have no need of your aid to sell my olive cloth, which every- 
 body is quarreling to get hold of in my store. A smart bagman 
 would force upon the shops my spoiled remnants and my old-fash- 
 ioned styles. Do you perceive ? " 
 
 The lad COROT perceived so lucidly that he was disgusted for 
 good with the trickeries of the smaller Parisian commerce. This
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 time it was past returning. He was not made to praise before a cus- 
 tomer that which his conscience found inferior. He was losing his 
 best years, he declared, in commerce, a thing which could never 
 greatly interest him. He wished to be a painter, nothing else. After 
 some protracted storms, his father agreed conditionally. His attempts 
 should be submitted to VICTOR BERTIN, a master in great vogue 
 under the Restoration, and now for a long time most effectually for- 
 gotten. The best work which BERTIN achieved in his whole career 
 was the discovery of the young COROT'S aptitude and the conquest 
 of the paternal opposition. VICTOR BERTIN promised that he would 
 make something out of the youth. 
 
 That which BERTIN called " making something out of the youth " 
 was to shape him into his own likeness, to make of him a second-rate 
 painter of what was called historical landscape, because a scene out 
 of history was set to playing in a parcel of scenery borrowed from the 
 conventions. From the pretentious arrangers of landscape in that 
 day, the seductions, the confidences, the poems of nature quite es- 
 caped. They rated the creation as something beneath their genius. 
 They openly avowed the presumptuous attempt to correct it, as they 
 said. You could not practice grand art unless you could get away 
 from the actual, unless you could breed in your head a vegetation in 
 contradiction to nature and wanting in life. This conventional art 
 was called grand art, in opposition to the quest of reality, which was 
 little art. Thus the ingenious VICTOR BERTIN produced grand art 
 during a lifetime, without leaving other vestiges of his endless indus- 
 try than certain commonplace canvases, bought in their time by the 
 Government and sprinkled through the royal residences, where we can 
 still see, as for instance at Compiegne, the low-water mark of French 
 painting at the period. 
 
 From this fatal school there was destined to emerge one of the 
 greatest landscape artists that ever existed. He disengaged himself 
 by saturating his being with nature when he had a free moment to 
 give to this fountain of all art, and in elbowing aside, one by one, 
 every mistaken lesson in his independent fashion of meeting the 
 works of creation. This disciple of BERTIN'S was simply one of the 
 predestinated, under whose impulse the whole of the ancient routine 
 stock of goods was to be criticised away into non-existence. The
 
 JEAN-BAPTISTE COROT 
 
 battle was long and furious. On returning from his first Italian tour, 
 whence he brought the admirable studies which are like the first 
 lispings of his genius, COROT found artistic France in revolution. A 
 constellation of young spirits had arisen, men who, in their impetuous 
 effort to turn back landscape painting face to face with that nature 
 it so long had slighted, raised up French art, and secured for it the 
 preeminence in the artistic history of our century. 
 
 On coming into France again, COROT felt his soul expand before 
 the aspect of his native soil. In rambling around Paris he could 
 revive the penetrating and vivid impressions of his earliest years ; he 
 could breathe freer in the midst of this scenery where he was born, 
 and which came closer to his mind and to his whole being than any 
 Italy the spot where he had made the discovery of a true vocation. 
 The allowance from his father permitted him to follow his inspira- 
 tions and to chase with a free foot the quarry of his instinct. Those 
 around him had to fight for the mouthful of each successive day, and 
 the heart-tumult which stirred within them was apt to express itself 
 by wild canvases where everything was confused as with a passing 
 storm, the phantom of the tortured lives of these pioneers. For 
 COROT existence was a developing road, cleared of every care but 
 care of art. His thought remained serene and joyous ; the whole of 
 creation smiled to him. Everything seemed impartially grand and 
 fine in that nature which unfolded to him its most gracious and most 
 poetic side ; no need to seek afar, he thought, that which is always 
 nearest us, the greatness and simplicity which dwell in truth. The 
 controlling principle in this great artist is never to strike the Philistine 
 by panoramic magnitude, but to establish in his art the vibration 
 which is in nature, to take by surprise its perpetual life, to send the 
 air circulating through space, to shake the foliage in the breeze. He 
 wishes to disengage and carry to his canvas the poet's impression of 
 the object. This poetry, he rightly deems, is not only in the composi- 
 tion ; the composition is to him of small account ; it is in the truth, 
 for nothing is of such finished poetry as truth itself. Whether it be 
 the old Bridge of Mantes, glimpsed through the tall trees which 
 reflect themselves in the sunny waters, or Garda Lake, stretching out 
 of sight into the light of dawn, with the leafage of the trees upon its 
 brink trembling in the wind ; it is always the country feeling which 
 
 13
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 this enchanter seems to apply to his canvas, whatever the aspect ; he 
 makes the cloth swim with the rosy fumes of morning, or he sprinkles 
 his embroidery with the humidity of coming night ; the reeds waved 
 by the breeze seem to stir on the face of the limpid pools, and the 
 boughs of the trees follow with new-born impulse the vagaries of the 
 air current. COROT is the excelling interpreter of serenity in nature. 
 
 We need not be surprised that a style springing, as it may be said, 
 all fresh from the nerves of a primitive artist, who sought the support 
 of no predecessor, was so long a subject of debate. The public had 
 been so habituated to see filing before its eyes a succession of rigid 
 landscapes that it was naturally troubled before the vibrating themes 
 of COROT. Those who recommence eternally the official teaching of 
 the schools rejected him desperately. And he, the quiet, inspired 
 man, heard little of the clamor in the solitude of his woods, on the 
 banks of the pool, where he opened his soul to the enchantment of 
 creation. 
 
 Wrestling with nature, as it were, breast to breast, applying him- 
 self not so much to the form and line as to the life which moves 
 nature, there disengaged himself gradually a grand artist and a grand 
 poet ; one in whose art everything charms, allures, enchants as in the 
 scene itself. There is no trick of making the foreground send off the 
 distances of the picture; an atmosphere that envelops all as in 
 nature, gives all its harmony of color and establishes all in per- 
 spective. There is no need to cut an unrecognizable landscape with 
 the track of a Holy Family; he shows humanity in its circulating 
 medium, which is the atmosphere. The fisherman on the banks of 
 his pond or the countryman Nodding through an avenue of trees is 
 sufficient to show the close umon between the country and him who 
 lives by the country. These figures are never thrown into their 
 places by hazard ; they move about the scene to make its impression 
 perfect. But this poet has hours when his thoughts take their flight 
 towards mysterious regions, and then, in some site incomparably 
 grand in its very realism, he makes the murmur of the foliage speak 
 by the supernatural apparition of nymphs and fauns, even as the bard 
 believes he hears the voices of spirits in the whisper of winds passing 
 through the trees. But these figures, whether those of nymphs or of 
 simple fishers, are always a complemental part of the scene; the 
 
 14
 
 JEAN-BAPTISTE COROT 
 
 incarnation of an emotion the artist has felt ; so true it is that in art 
 the subject is naught, and that its whole value is in the impression it 
 can communicate. 
 
 According to the homefelt sensations of the artist the art changes. 
 Sometimes, when nature strikes him by its precision of form and its 
 distinctness of line, he follows it as closely as any of the grand 
 masters. Sometimes, when his thought is arrested by the general 
 effect, he slights the detailed part and only renders that which 
 occupies himself at the time. This is why in the series of the 
 master's works, alongside of pictures where the interpretation is so 
 finished and where rests the stamp of one sole side of this varied 
 talent, there are themes wherein the painter only follows the poetic 
 impression which affects him, and where everything is sacrificed to 
 that general cast of the subject. But the mastery is always the 
 same, whatever the visible form it produces. It needs to be equally 
 experienced to stop on the wing the leafage flying in the breeze and 
 fix it in its proper key of expression and in its confused mass, or to 
 design with firm hand and with faultless lines the trunk of an oak 
 buttressed to the ground by its stout roots. COROT'S art, it has been 
 said, is a window opened upon nature, and it is true. He does not 
 return to us only with a recollection more or less felicitous of out-of- 
 doors, but the very out-of-doors is brought in with its vibrations and 
 its air. Others have looked at creation with severer eyesight than 
 COROT ; but no master has contemplated nature with more poetry, 
 more thorough emotion. 
 
 In what he has left, all is not of equal value. To insist upon its 
 illustrious distinction, we are fain to cut aside the hasty production 
 of his last years, when after long nejlect, and in the rising vogue of 
 painting generally, the army of hungry merchants and of tardy col- 
 lectors fell upon this man of genius, not always strong enough to 
 resist their solicitations. Aged now, he was flattered by this late- 
 coming enthusiasm. It did not displease him to have a mounting 
 tide of bank notes in his modest studio of the street of the Petites- 
 Ecuries. This was his compensation for the time when he would say 
 laughingly to one of his friends : 
 
 " At last I have sold a picture and I am sorry for it : the collec- 
 tion is no longer complete !"
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 It was no love of gold, however, which threw COROT into this 
 feverish production of the latter period ; the great man lived on a 
 little and gave away the surplus. Although his inherited fortune, of 
 which the yearly income was some forty thousand francs, was des- 
 tined by his childless condition to pass into the hands of collateral 
 relatives, COROT, when his father's death placed him in possession of 
 his estate, was determined never to touch it. What comes from the 
 family ought to go to the family, he would say. And he let the 
 interest accumulate on the head of the principal for the sake of his 
 nephews. " This money is not mine," said COROT. " I am only the 
 holder till my death." And he kept his word. But he needed 
 money, and a great deal of money, for the works of charity which 
 were become the grand passion of his beneficent old age. All that 
 he gained now by his painting he gave away without counting, in 
 large sums. It is known that he purchased, one day, the little house 
 in which DAUMIER, the great neglected artist, had lived for years at 
 Valmondois, and which he was under obligation to quit, because he 
 could not buy it. COROT did not spend much time in reflection ; he 
 went to Valmondois, paid for the little property in ready money, and 
 offered it to his friend ; the latter simply observed : 
 
 " You are the only man whom I esteem highly enough to accept a 
 thing from him without a blush." 
 
 Another time one of his painter friends came to ask him for five 
 thousand francs. COROT, that day in a bad humour, replied that he 
 had not the money. But as soon as the friend had gone, he began 
 to reflect. He took off his blouse, laid down his pipe that renowned 
 " pipette " which has become one of the legends of the studios ran 
 to the house of his friend, and cried : 
 
 " I beg your pardon, I am a perfect knave. I told you just now 
 that I had not five thousand francs. I was a liar, and the proof is 
 that here they are !" 
 
 Shortly before his death he made a great sale to a merchant. As 
 the latter was counting out the proceeds to COROT, the artist took 
 a bundle of ten notes of a thousand francs each, and said to the 
 dealer : 
 
 " Keep this ; and when I am gone you will give during ten years a 
 pension of a thousand francs to the widow of my friend MILLET." 
 
 16
 
 JEAN-BAPTISTE COROT 
 
 And it is in this way that the wife of another immortally grand 
 artist, dead for his part in a condition of misery, receives for the past 
 eight years this pension, offered by a fortunate genius to a genius un- 
 fortunate. Although COROT gave by handfuls in this way, not only 
 to his friends, but also to casual solicitors, and though he never 
 touched his patrimony, as I observed, there was found in his desk 
 more than a hundred thousand francs which the careless great heart 
 had never taken the trouble to invest. It was simply his permanent 
 charity fund. For himself, humble as he always was, he had no need 
 for much money. A little suite of rooms in the faubourg Poissonniere, 
 the modest studio on the fourth floor, sufficed him. His grand passion 
 outside of his art was music ; on Sundays he was seen at the popular 
 concerts, thoughtful and softened, touched sometimes to tears when 
 they played an adagio of MOZART'S his favorite master, the brother- 
 soul of this grand artist, who was himself the MOZART of painting. 
 COROT, overwhelmed with orders in his later days, adopted the sys- 
 tem followed by famous physicians for the payment of his works ; it 
 was less for one than another ; he would give away for a trifling price 
 to a needy picture dealer ; he made the middle class pay higher ; and 
 he " salted " well, to use his own word, the wealthy men who had 
 slighted him so long, and who now precipitated themselves on him in 
 his apotheosis. But all this money melted away in secret charities ; 
 he squandered himself for others. 
 
 The illustrious patriarch felt plainly that this incessant production 
 was drawing him away from grand art ; and it was for that reason 
 that, escaping from Paris, he repaired so often to his tiny house at 
 Ville-d'Avray to saturate himself once more in nature. There, at any 
 rate, it was against the rule to disturb him at his study. This retreat 
 was respected as a sacred temple, where COROT, as he used to say 
 sometimes, was reciting his prayer before the works of God. 
 
 Offended by long injustice, the artists, independently of the official 
 parties of the exhibitions, held a meeting shortly before the great 
 man's death, and with filial affection offered a grand gold medal to 
 him who was tenderly named Father COROT. Never did the master 
 appear more delighted than on that evening, when, smiling in his 
 boundless kindness, he thanked those whom he called " his children." 
 
 When COROT died, his friend and his equal, JULES DUPRE", could
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 utter these simple words, which form the best of funeral orations, for 
 they comprise the whole existence of COROT : 
 
 " It will be hard to fill the place of the painter ; it will be impossi- 
 ble to fill the place of the man." 
 
 An artist's character is always reflected in his works. That which 
 transpires through the keynote of inimitable skill is the tenderness of 
 the man to whatever touches his soul. We live with the painter in 
 his scenery ; we breathe his poetry, gentle and simple as the song of 
 the people ; we rejoice in the enchantment he feels, and which fills his 
 whole work with the happy temperament of the painter, happy to be 
 alive and to smell the field-scents that seem to envelope the land- 
 scape and possess all who contemplate his canvas. Only the art 
 which evokes such sensations is great art ; the rest is but cleverness 
 and legerdemain. When a man does not himself think when he does 
 not put his whole soul in the panel he paints when we cannot read 
 through his work the bottom of his soul, he may produce paintings, 
 but art never ! 
 
 18
 
 Jean-Francois Millet 
 
 >N evening of autumn in an indigent peasant's cabin; 
 the poorly clothed children, shivering with cold, return 
 from school ; others, mere infants, cast an apprehensive 
 look into the eating-room and ask why the table is not 
 set. The mother regards them affectionately ; her eyes 
 seem to interrogate the husband on his entrance ; and he falls despair- 
 ingly into the rude wooden armchair and rests his head upon his hands. 
 To-day there is nothing to eat in the humble home at Barbizon, in 
 the pretty village of the Fontainebleau forest. The children, saddened 
 by the silence of their parents, cling around them ; they feel that some 
 great trouble hovers over the house. The night comes on little by 
 little, and this lamentable family picture is plunged in darkness. 
 From time to time the damp wood flames up an instant and reveals 
 the discouraging group with a hasty glare, quickly extinguished. The 
 inhabitants of this home are in need of everything. The baker has 
 stopped his credit. If the family friend who went yesterday to Paris 
 does not return before an hour is out the poor people must go to bed 
 without having eaten. They count the minutes. Nothing comes. 
 
 Suddenly the father rises ; he has heard the stumping of a wooden 
 leg on the hard ground. It is he ! The door opens. " Give us some 
 light ! " cries a strong voice. From this peremptory tone they per- 
 ceive that the friend brings good news. Just now this distressed family 
 were afraid to look at each other ; now hope springs up again ; the 
 tallow candle in the old candlestick of tin is ignited ; in the doorway 
 is seen the outline of a man of tall stature, who, with an echoing peal 
 of laughter, shows an enormous loaf, which he throws on the table, 
 crying, " Come, children, come to supper ! " This savior is DIAZ. 
 
 19
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 At Paris he has sold, for sixty francs, three drawings of his friend 
 MILLET, and, after the fashion of the day when gold was not so 
 common, he has been paid in big silver five-franc pieces ; he has 
 changed one of them in passing the baker's, to attend first to the 
 needful; he draws out the other eleven pieces, one after one, from the 
 pocket of his velveteen trousers ; makes them shine in the light of the 
 tallow candle and form a fine silver wreath all around the loaf. The 
 delighted children, wondering at the treasure, have come up to the 
 table and open their eyes wide with astonishment and delight. The 
 mother thanks DIAZ with a glance ; she finds no word fit to express 
 her gratitude. The father has seized his friend's hand and presses it 
 feelingly. And now everybody is set to work ; the fire is stirred ; now 
 the boiling water hisses in the pot, and some potatoes, some pork-fat, 
 some cabbages, are found to throw into it along with the crusts. The 
 fumes of this feast mount through the house and fly to the heads of 
 the poor hungry ones, and soon the family is united around the white 
 deal table. MILLET alone is thoughtful, for he has to think of the 
 morrow. But DIAZ encourages him ; his eyes shine brightly, he gives 
 enormous thumps on the floor with his wooden leg, and cries : 
 
 " Patience ! They will come to it gradually ! ROUSSEAU has 
 sold a landscape for five hundred francs ; for my part, I have sold a 
 view of Fontainebleau for seventy-five francs. And I am com- 
 missioned to ask you for companion sketches to your drawings. And 
 this time, instead of twenty francs, they are to pay you twenty-five !" 
 
 To which MILLET replies resignedly : 
 
 " If I could only sell two drawings a week at that price all would 
 go right !" 
 
 And DIAZ, blowing the smoke thick from his pipe and making 
 rings to amuse the children, says : 
 
 " Are you not ashamed ? Fifty francs a week ! Go to, you 
 financier !" 
 
 The man whom DIAZ facetiously called financier to recall him 
 from his visions of gold and bind him to the reality of things below 
 was JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET that is to say, one of the greatest 
 artists of this century. Born at GreVille in 1815, he came to Paris 
 and got himself entered in the studio of PAUL DELAROCHE. In the 
 midst of the young men who pursued their studies with the painter,
 
 JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET 
 
 MILLET made himself conspicuous by an austerity which was irt 
 singular contrast with his years. It was because he was always con- 
 trasting the style he was being taught with the style he glimpsed in 
 his own brain. No doubt it was well to learn anatomy and study the 
 structure of man ; but when this was done, it was not the thing to 
 pass one's life in painting after models in theatrical dresses and in 
 affected postures ; rather seize man in his life, in his ordinary sur- 
 roundings, in his toil. Those peasants of light opera especially, 
 shown in paintings, those peasants in Sunday rig, with clothes fresh 
 from the costumer, irritated him. MILLET had always liked the 
 country ; he betook himself to the village of Barbizon, which he was 
 doomed never to quit ; he wished to live among the peasants. Far 
 from Paris, in this unknown village, living was cheap ; and the less 
 he had to think of the money question the more time he could devote 
 to the study of art. In this insulation of his mind, in this perpetual 
 contemplation of the peasant in his own medium, the genius of 
 MILLET ripened, notwithstanding the cares and privation of every 
 day. This art proceeds, we may say, from the very entrails of 
 MILLET ; he bears upon no predecessor ; it has nature for its foun- 
 tain, and for nursing father the rope-mind of the painter. 
 
 His family increased around MILLET ; numerous children sur- 
 rounded the grand artist, and their needs became more pressing. 
 However humble was the course of living to which MILLET and his 
 flock resigned themselves, it was impossible always to face the modest 
 expense. The public, accustomed to the pretty peasant scenes in 
 vogue, asked where these earth-covered laborers came from, and 
 these rough countrymen with their trouble-crushed expressions and 
 callous hands. Such demonstrations of country poverty made a sorry 
 effect in the houses of the rich, who hung their walls with painting for 
 a diversion ; the style of MILLET rebuked their well-being, and it 
 was rejected. Whence came this melancholy art, lacking in superfi- 
 cial attraction ! It was not at all cheerful, not at all pleasant. Only a 
 few refined spirits comprehended him, but most generally it was some 
 modest collector, or a keen speculator who bethought himself that at 
 the present price of MILLET'S works one risked no great matter. It 
 was in this way that a little masterpiece, the first thought of the 
 Gleaners, which is now worth sixty thousand francs, was sold by 
 
 31
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 MILLET for twelve pieces of one hundred sous. It was an enormous 
 sum for this innocent man, for it represented bread for twelve days ; 
 in other words, nearly two weeks of independence for this genius, 
 contented in his patriarchal existence. Provided that after the day's 
 labor he had at evening the soup of the peasant with a bit of hard 
 bread and the cool water from the spring, the rest was of little con- 
 sequence. At night, when the children were put to bed, the great 
 artist would read the Bible by the light of a lamp, not so much from 
 devotion as to fortify and guarantee himself by the example of the 
 simple-living patriarchs ; often his friend and neighbor, THEODORE 
 ROUSSEAU, came to sit facing him ; then these two neglected ones 
 would take their mutual revenge for the disdain of the age, and draw 
 the strength for to-morrow's struggle out of a common enthusiasm for 
 art. Thirty years of self-denial, resignation and daily discouragement 
 were needed before the painter could at length make his mark ; and 
 as it was fated that he should be the martyr of art to the very end, 
 sickness seized upon him in the hour when he at length attained his 
 aim, plunging him in the grave just when renown attached itself finally 
 to his talent. 
 
 There is no more touching story than that of this great artist, who 
 passed his life in poverty and loneliness. The canvases which now 
 form the glory of French art passed unnoticed at the official Salons, 
 disdained by the juries ; the juries exclusively picked out of the Insti- 
 tute, which was omnipotent at that period, and which, though since 
 somewhat transformed, was then in the systematic habit of rejecting 
 the fine and living works which lift so high the art of France. 
 MILLET'S paintings, at first rejected, were afterwards admitted at the 
 Salons, but with no success ; the artist was reproached for creating 
 ugliness that is to say, for not painting the conventional peasantry 
 harmoniously shaped and garnished with all the graces. MILLET 
 saw the peasant as a being with round shoulders and hollow chest, 
 from the habit of stooping over the ground; with face and arms 
 baked in the sun and tanned by the wind. In those deathless master- 
 pieces of his the peasant appears in the majestic verity of the human 
 creature wrestling with the earth, which he impregnates and makes 
 to live. But there came no awards from the Salon, no pay, no sort 
 of encouragement, with the exception of the bravos of certain youth-
 
 JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET 
 
 ful artists and the applause of some rare art critics, who gradually 
 rallied to the side of this original genius. Through every kind of 
 neglect MILLET pursued his road, with head high and ironical lip. 
 He had on his side the approbation of those whom he esteemed the 
 most DELACROIX, ROUSSEAU, DUPRE\ COROT, DIAZ and of that 
 other great artist so long overlooked, BARYE. The common struggle 
 had established something like a brotherhood of arms among all these 
 pioneers. The little group marched hand in hand against superior 
 numbers the whole sleek mediocrity of art as a handful of heroes 
 marches to fight a numerous army, with the determination to conquer 
 or die. Of all those fine artists MILLET alone was not to know suc- 
 cess. His destiny was cruel to the end ; he fell mortally wounded in 
 the combat, at the hour of the others' triumph. When, finally, after 
 such tedious struggles and such sickening toil, his art began to be 
 talked of, the painter, struck down by sickness, had lost his strength 
 and energy. We may say of MILLET that he died of his genius, 
 conquered before his time, fallen to earth at the moment when age 
 was only just foreseen, an age that would have been gentle and happy ; 
 and that he left to posterity, which restores the balance of all things, 
 the care of keeping his name as that of one of the greatest in French 
 art. 
 
 In the exhibition of the Hundred Masterpieces the genius of 
 MILLET burst forth still more powerfully than in the past. Three of 
 his canvases, especially, represented the whole career of the artist ; 
 three absolute masterpieces, the Gleaners, the Sheepfold by Moon- 
 light, the Man Hoeing ; all three give birth to the same surprise. It 
 is that the figures, in their small dimensions, assume under the eye 
 that contemplates them the scale of nature. This mirage is ex- 
 plained by the grandeur of this art springing from nature itself and 
 drawing you to nature with all her force. The eye sees the thing in 
 the dimensions which it actually has ; and it is thus that it stamps 
 itself on the memory. A great artist is able to reduce proportions 
 without belittling the majesty of things. 
 
 That is what happens with the Angelus, for instance. When we 
 regard this grand masterpiece, which shows in all simplicity the man 
 and the woman who clasp their hands in prayer as they hear the 
 sound of the chimes through the loneliness of the fields, these two
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 peasants seem to grow under the eyes of the spectator ; they take the 
 proportions of nature ; the landscape spreads and becomes illimit- 
 able ; the glowing sky has a mysterious breadth ; as long as we abide 
 in the charm we feel this illusion. 
 
 It is the same with the Man Hoeing, one of the masterworks of 
 MILLET. The peasant is there, leaning on his hoe, panting in an 
 instant's surcease of toil that crushes. He leans forward, like a being 
 whose will revolts against the triumph of the besieging weariness. 
 The action is so keenly taken, the forms are drawn in such living 
 lines, the drama of humility wrestling with the earth is so powerfully 
 indicated, that the peasant assumes the natural proportions under the 
 spectator's eye. We suffer with his toil ; we are, like himself, over- 
 come with the superfluity of travail laid upon mankind ; he lives, and 
 we live with him ; the field he tills spreads away out of eyesight ; we 
 no longer think of a picture, so entirely does the truth of art carry us 
 to nature itself. It is just so that we have all of us seen the laborer 
 bent over the soil, and before the reality we have felt the same 
 respect and the same pity going out from us towards the simple, 
 resigned being, whose chest bursts with the sob of a blacksmith's 
 bellows, which we can hear in the solitude like an unconscious out- 
 cry of humility against destiny. The painter who knows how to 
 invest so much thinking in one sole figure, who succeeds in stirring 
 the soul with this simple rustic situation, is a grand master, believe 
 me. In none of his works has MILLET been more simply powerful. 
 I only know of one design where he has put such a poignant drama 
 into a single figure I mean the Vine Dresser. He is seated on a 
 hillock, worn out, bruised by fatigue, breathing hard, with the dread- 
 ful look of a being so stupefied by savage labor that he no longer 
 thinks of anything ; his head sinks ; his arms fall, overcome, down his 
 sides ; the hands hang inert ; there is no will left in this figure, stupid 
 after expending the last of his physical forces. None better than 
 MILLET could comprehend and render this struggle of man against 
 his work ; he, the great victim, whose entire life was the fight of each 
 day for the daily bread ; how many a time himself, panting, worn out 
 broken and discouraged, he had sat down by the wayside ! 
 
 All these fine productions only rallied to the side of the painter the 
 more enthusiastic among the young. The official juries of the Salon
 
 JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET 
 
 passed unheeding before this new force, and kept their kindness for 
 the affectations of comic opera peasant girls. They were still under 
 the controlling spell of the Italian peasant of LEOPOLD ROBERT ; his 
 elegant harvesters, with their select postures, grouping themselves in 
 tableaux vivants, and composed with plenty of good taste ; dressed, 
 too, in polychrome costume on which the delving of the earth had left 
 never a trace. It was in the full bloom of that commanding style 
 that MILLET came forward with his veritable peasantry, in their ener- 
 getic attitudes, and with their clothes that little by little had taken the 
 earth color, so completely had man assimilated himself with the soil. 
 This lacks poetry, people said ; in other words, this lacked falsehood. 
 There was no arrangement for dazzling the eye ; in this style every- 
 thing addressed itself to the thought. It was not on the surface of 
 the canvas that the poetry lay ; it was in the essence of those creations. 
 MILLET was a grand primitive bard issuing from solitude and con- 
 templation like the old poets sprung from the heart of the people, of 
 whom the names have disappeared, but whose works have remained 
 as imperishable manifestations of the human soul. 
 
 This poetic originality varied with the subject. If it terrified in the 
 Man Hoeing, it took a gentle aspect in the Gleaners. The harvest is 
 gathered ; the farmer reckons the stacks which his laborers form under 
 the limpid and cheerful sunshine. Earth has been generous to such 
 a point that even the unhappy can claim their share. Poor women are 
 gleaning the scattered stalks. They gather the alms of the fields, 
 with movements full of truth and grace ; the light is kind to all, to the 
 farmer as to the humble, to each in the proportion that destiny has 
 allotted him ; all are happy in the measure of their ambitions. The 
 artist, too, maintains his work in a contented keynote ; here the 
 poetry of MILLET relents ; the sun is not only spread over the land- 
 scape, but its rays penetrate into the soul, and warm for an instant 
 the heart chilled with poverty. 
 
 The Sheep/old is another masterpiece. The mist wraps the whole 
 scene ; the shepherd is enveloped in his cloak, and drives into the en- 
 closure his flock of sheep, who huddle together under the keenness of 
 the night ; the moon lights up the scene with its pale and undecided 
 radiance ; further than eye can see, a silence hangs over the fields. 
 This canvas is only some twenty inches wide, and it produces the 
 
 25
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 effect of a work of vastest proportions ; poetry penetrates, solitude 
 invades the fancy so completely that we think no more of the size of 
 the picture. It becomes immense, like nature. 
 
 Little by little, from the habit of identifying himself with the men 
 of the fields, MILLET had himself become a peasant. Tall in stat- 
 ure, with powerful shoulders, with a face sunbrowned but full of 
 character, dressed in poor clothes and with wooden shoes on his feet, 
 he might have been taken for a ploughman. In the peasants of his 
 works we find again the artist himself; he claimed to have got into 
 his painting that which he called the cry of the earth, and the " ugh !" 
 of the digger whose chest was crushed between his strokes. We 
 might say, too, that MILLET got into his painting the cry of art, and 
 the sob of the grand painter condemned to live in privation. 
 
 Notwithstanding, before his death MILLET could see advancing 
 towards him the step of justice, the never-dying, the eternal laggard. 
 When for the first time, at the Exposition of 1867, the public saw a 
 number of his works brought together in one spot, they were struck 
 by the variety of that art which till then had been called monotonous. 
 A first-class medal was deigned to be thrown to this grand genius, 
 who, since the Salon of 1853, had not carried off any prize ; there was 
 even added, to do honor to the order, rather than the recipient, the 
 ribbon of the Legion of Honor, which, after thirty years of noblest 
 toil, was to be the consolation of this illustrious man, a martyr to 
 every kind of affliction. When MILLET died, at sixty years, in that 
 village of Barbizon where all his humble and resigned existence was 
 passed, the Government manifested some shame at having left the 
 illustrious artist so long in abandonment. It offered his widow a 
 small pension. It is not seemly to insist too much on the poor ques- 
 tion of money when we count up the labors of a man who set disdain- 
 fully aside the considerations of success to be able to live only in his 
 art. 
 
 One day, while talking with me of the period of poverty which 
 the artists of his generation had passed through, ROUSSEAU said : 
 
 " We were always without a sou, but we never spoke of money, 
 for money counted for nothing in our ambition." 
 
 When we speak of MILLET it is more seemly, again, to touch 
 lightly on the question of prices, which prove nothing. The Man 
 
 26
 
 JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET 
 
 Hoeing, which represents a fortune, is no greater a work to-day than 
 at the period when the great artist sold it for two thousand francs. 
 The years of wretchedness which MILLET passed through will 
 be redeemed by the centuries of imperishable glory which await 
 his name in the future. The humble thatched cottage of Barbizon, 
 where the life of MILLET flowed along, pertains to history more than 
 the rich mansion of a fortunate man in easy circumstances, where 
 the stone stands generally unhallowed and unspeaking, without a rec- 
 ollection of the being whose life has slipped through it.
 
 Jules Dupr6 
 
 URING the first quarter of the century there was at Par- 
 main, on the banks of the Oise, a small porcelain 
 factory, conducted by a manufacturer of ability, M. 
 DUPR; the principal porcelain painter of the atelier 
 was a child of twelve years. He had been taught to 
 read and write, after which he was harnessed to the paternal trade. 
 Sixty years have since rolled by ; the child is now a robust old man. 
 During all his long life, JULES DUPR has no sooner quitted the 
 banks of the Oise than he has tried to get back there again with 
 greater and greater attraction. In the vicinity of Parmain, where of 
 old the little boy bent over his dishes, the great artist is now always 
 found working, in the consummation of his career. The illustrious 
 landscape painter is only separated from the village which was his 
 artistic cradle by the current of the Oise. The prospect from his 
 windows is a mass of souvenirs; every hour the enthusiasms of 
 adolescence return to the soul of the master-painter, and pay in 
 their account of the courageous and honest impulses derived from his 
 earliest years. The house at I' Isle-Adam is but a modest, or at best 
 a comfortable one, with middle-class conveniences, but no tinsel ; the 
 great ornament of the property is the name of the owner. Every- 
 thing is arranged in this refuge of a great artist to facilitate home-life, 
 work and rest. No noise of the street disturbs the painter at his in- 
 cessant labor. The family, tender and attentive to his slightest wish, 
 waits to gather round him at his hours of rest ; often a friend comes 
 to sit at his hospitable board, and then, when JULES DUPR has 
 lighted his pipe, there is familiar conversation ; or, rather, the master 
 
 aS
 
 JULES DUPRE" 
 
 talks and the rest listen, for the whole interest centres in his recollec- 
 tions. It is the glorious names of the men of 1830, as they are called, 
 which form the capital of the talk. The lively intelligence of the old 
 artist seems to grow boyish again in the sparkle of these confidences, 
 and then we see the whole procession DELACROIX, ROUSSEAU, 
 DIAZ, COROT, BARYE, MILLET, DECAMPS and TROYON ; that is as 
 much as to say, the quintessence of the artistic glory of our century. 
 Now, during the recital of the hard commencement, DUPR'S singu- 
 larly intense blue eye fires up with the light of battle ; now, the voice 
 softens, and his thoughts seem to float off in a gentle melancholy 
 towards the impenetrable mystery whither his friends have preceded 
 this last survivor of the proud pleiad of 1830. On the walls hang a 
 a few souvenirs of these noble friends, especially, among others, the 
 magnificent drawings of THEODORE ROUSSEAU, and a superb canvas 
 by COROT, bought by DUPR out of his savings, and from which he 
 has never been willing to part, though in receipt of offers of fifty 
 thousand francs. But not only is JULES DUPRE 1 the last survivor of 
 the illustrious group, he was its precursor. He indicated first in 
 modern art the return to the eternal source of nature. His admira- 
 tion for these lost comrades is so sincere that he will not allow him- 
 self to be called their chief; before posterity they form his equals, 
 but in the past it was he who showed the way. 
 
 How has this humble porcelain painter arrived at the position of 
 an important master without having ever been the pupil of any one ? 
 How was the ambition born in that young, infantine brain of twelve 
 years to bear back landscape art to the magnificences of a CLAUDE 
 LORRAIN, of a RUYSDAEL, of a HOBBEMA, before hearing these 
 names pronounced and without acquaintance with a single one of 
 their works ? It was in the contemplation of nature, in his isolation 
 amidst her influences, that the mind of the lad was open to her beauty, 
 and that her mystery was sounded by his thought. In his hours of 
 freedom the boy used to wander over the fields with sketch-book and 
 pencil. No professor interposed himself between this talent in its birth 
 and what it portrayed to dictate any narrow formula. What he was 
 ignorant of he asked but of her ; what he learned was from her 
 teaching. At eighteen, the little china painter had become a young 
 master. The crayon studies which the great artist to-day pre- 
 29
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 serves from his early years are so many surprises ; for they bear 
 witness to a comprehension of nature unique for so young a man. In 
 his odd hours, to add to his resources, he turned out for a friend of 
 the family a series of clock faces, automata in which, by means of 
 springs connected with the movement, a sailboat would shoot the 
 arch of a bridge or a hermit ring his bell from hour to hour. From 
 these low beginnings emerged our grand artist, solely by the influence 
 of nature. 
 
 The art of landscape painting was at that time lost in France. It 
 was despised as a thing of subaltern rank ; and this prejudice, not- 
 withstanding the glory which the French school derives from its 
 illustrious landscape painters of the present century, continues still 
 in the circles of official teaching to such a point that none of the 
 glorious French landscape artists has been awarded the Salon medal 
 of honor. True, they have given it themselves with their own hands 
 in the sight of posterity by their -proud, fine, lasting performance. 
 What added still more to the contempt felt for landscape under the 
 Restoration was that it had fallen into the hands of the pigmies. 
 When these subalterns were not occupied in servilely carrying on the 
 style of POUSSIN, whom they quietly imitated as if that painter had 
 not himself borne his own style to its conclusion, they pieced out 
 pictures from fragments of their own sketches, as a harlequin 
 costume is made with rags of every color. In summer they went off 
 for a booty of sketches, and in winter they stitched these studies 
 together, and made of them compositions stuffed with broken stumps 
 of trees, burst arches of bridges, waterfalls and precipices. From 
 top to bottom the canvas was piled with motivi ; it was like a card of 
 patterns of everything that the artist was able to collect on a canvas, 
 but where there lacked all emotion in the presence of nature a 
 matter which some of the painters had never felt, and which the 
 others spilled on the road in passing from the country whence they 
 fetched their sketches to the city where they made them into pictures. 
 The young DUPR said to himself, very justly, that since a painter 
 would be nearer to accuracy in carrying out his work in the presence 
 of the scene, it would be a good thing to produce pictures entirely 
 copied from nature, in order that they might catch the stamp of 
 feeling and sincerity. The day when he hit upon this profession of 
 
 3
 
 JULES DUPRtf 
 
 faith, JULES DUPRE" indicated for the French school the road to 
 follow ; he was the pathfinder of modern art, as he is now its illus- 
 trious, respected veteran. 
 
 Upon this, to the vast astonishment of the painters, the first pro- 
 duction of DuPRlS emerged, entirely done from nature. This style 
 not only spoke to the eye, as did the composition pictures of the 
 period, but it spoke also to the soul ; it carried within it the feeling that 
 the artist had undergone, his thoughtfulness in the presence of the 
 splendors of creation, with his individual way of being moved by them 
 and expressing them. The more celebrated canvases of this great 
 artist have accordingly been direct transcripts upon the cloth actually 
 used ; and thus the painted forest grew out of the incessant contem- 
 plation of the natural foliage, the pasture kept its dew, the sky its 
 transparence or the true movement of its clouds. This put an end 
 to the former old-fashioned style, where the painter, between the four 
 walls of the studio, could make no comparison between his work and 
 nature ; whereas with these pictures the artist, confronted with the 
 reality, and incessantly directed to the very source of his work, could 
 get astray no more among the jugglery of conventional examples. 
 The Pasture on the edge of a forest, which reappeared after forty 
 years at the exhibition of the Hundred Masterpieces, fresh as on its 
 first day, radiant with light, with its limpid waters and its forest 
 solidly planted into the ground, had an enthusiastic reception ; all 
 those long years had passed over the masterwork without tarnishing 
 its freshness and its impressiveness. One was ready to say that this 
 kind of painting was able to renew itself from spring to spring, during 
 a half century, even as nature's self. 
 
 I should like to estimate, in some few words, uttered in the pres- 
 ence of this precursor of the modern landscape-painting school, the 
 veritable tendency of that school. It is not a vulgar realism which 
 carries it so high ; it is the marriage of verity with emotion, the strict 
 union between what the eye contemplates and what the heart is feel- 
 ing. The soul of the painter will vibrate in the canvas with so much 
 more authority in proportion as it submits to the direct shock of 
 nature. The landscape that leaves an imperishable trace in our 
 memory does so not only because our eye has measured it, but from 
 the emotion which it has communicated to us. There is not a reader
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 but can put it to the test out of his own recollections. Let him trans- 
 port himself in fancy to the period when for the first time he felt all 
 the charm of some prospect, and just so quickly will he perceive a re- 
 newal of the sensation he then experienced ; there is a memory of the 
 heart, as of the eye. Realism in art is not to be held, then, as merely 
 the accurate rendering of a scene, but as that gift, reserved alone to 
 the higher order of intelligences, which transmits to the canvas the 
 vibrations of our life in presence of the realities of things. JULES 
 DUPR, I repeat, was the first who marked out the direct return of 
 art towards the real, and it was a triumphant surprise when the Salon 
 exhibited his first works, entirely painted after nature. However, 
 the taste for painting did not obtain then as it does in our day. 
 Picture commerce did not exist. A few merchants certainly pur- 
 chased canvases, but it was to hire them by the month to young ladies 
 who copied them. Princes and the Government excepted, there were 
 not half a dozen picture collectors in Paris. It was the DUKE DE 
 NEMOURS who bought the first picture sent to the Salon by JULES 
 DUPR. The sale made a great noise ; this son of a king paid twelve 
 hundred francs for the work ; for the young painter it was substan- 
 tially the assurance of fortune, and at the same time the official con- 
 secration of a career. The revolution of February sent the duke into 
 exile. The third republic gave him his country again. Among the 
 first visitors who came to present their respects to the duke on his 
 return to France was JULES DUPRIS. The prince and the painter 
 looked at each other for some moments, to measure the time passed 
 since their separation by each other's wrinkled foreheads and whitened 
 hairs. 
 
 " Monseigneur," said the artist, with emotion, " I can never forget 
 that my first encouragement came from your royal highness." 
 
 "I still keep your picture," answered the prince, "let us come and 
 see it." 
 
 The canvas was in fact found in the duchess' salon. In this 
 room the duke, taking the artist's arm, said : 
 
 " Your art is happier than either of us, for it has not grown old." 
 
 The duke had truly spoken. It is the work that leans directly on 
 nature which can outlast the fashions. The revolution of February 
 plunged the artist again into oblivion, just as his future opened smiling 
 
 32
 
 JULES DUPR 
 
 before him. JULES DUPRE" had received two important orders, one 
 from the Government and the other from the DUKE D 'ORLEANS, when 
 the revolution broke out. The two pictures, sketched out, remain in 
 the artist's studio. He has frequently of late years been offered 
 enormous sums if he would agree to finish them ; but the old master, 
 still independent as in the day of his youth, would be powerless to 
 execute any work to order. 
 
 To-day, as forty years ago, he only paints what is in his thoughts. 
 He is always the same proud artist who, having gone to housekeeping 
 with forty thousand francs of debts, rejected the offer of a merchant 
 who engaged in writing to liquidate these old obligations provided the 
 artist would engage to make some concessions to public taste. 
 JULES DUPRE 1 remained hesitating an instant ; he seemed by a glance 
 to ask the advice of his wife ; the latter, worthy of such an artist, 
 understood him and replied : 
 
 " Refuse ! We shall pay our debts slowly, in time." 
 
 The debts are long since paid. A competence has crowned the 
 faith of the brave household. Children have been reared, and their 
 future is assured. Old age has shown a pleasant face to JULES 
 DUPRE", and none more than he has deserved the peace of the latter 
 years. 
 
 The amount of his works is great. Sustained compositions, like 
 The Pasture, are numerous ; the masterpieces count by dozens. The 
 Luxembourg Gallery owns two admirable canvases by the painter; 
 no collection worthy of the name can be imagined without a picture 
 by JULES DUPRE" ; the more remarkable have been sold for a bit of 
 bread. The Pasture, representing ten months of toil before nature, 
 was purchased for two thousand francs. La Vanne, that magnificent 
 canvas owned by M. VAN PRAET, Minister of the Household to the 
 King of the Belgians, brought three thousand. But what was the 
 amount to him ? The money was not an end, but a means to go and 
 work in the presence of nature. He borrowed from the usurers to be 
 able to keep away from the city. 
 
 JULES DUPRE" had hired, at four hundred francs a year, a work- 
 ing-room in the Abbey of Saint-Pierre, in the midst of the forest of 
 Fontainebleau. He came but rarely to Paris, and then on his friends' 
 affairs rather than on his own. It was he who forced ROUSSEAU on 
 
 33
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 the merchants. It was he, too, who peddled the despised works of 
 MILLET among a few collectors of his acquaintance, and who divined 
 TROYON and protected him. He always fled the great city ; he re- 
 gained the solitude of the fields which had become a necessity. 
 Only the country could restore him the serenity of his thoughts. He 
 returned untiringly to I' Isle- Adam, the region of his early infancy, 
 where he recaptured the enthusiasms of youth. These lovely banks 
 of the Oise have always attracted the painters. THEODORE ROUS- 
 SEAU long lived beside DUPR at I' Isle-Adam. DAUBIGNY was not 
 far away at Auvers. COROT gave his kindly smile and his cheerful 
 song, from time to time, to DUPRE', whom he finally termed the BEE- 
 THOVEN of landscape. And truly, if the canvases of COROT recalled 
 the adagios of MOZART, the energetic and often terrible subjects of 
 DUPR& produced the effect of the symphonies of the immortal 
 BEETHOVEN. Like him, the great landscape painter has invented a 
 new sonorous quality, and has thrown aside the old methods to arrive 
 at the maximum of intensity in his art. The clouds swept by tem- 
 pests career over the works of DUPRE 1 with the vehemence which 
 BEETHOVEN employed when he let loose his orchestra. The land- 
 scape artist has constructed on the grand scale, like the musician, in 
 the same rank of ideas, and with the same impetuosity in going to 
 work. The characteristic mark of the productions of DUPR is 
 power arrived at its highest expression. No master has more ener- 
 getically rendered the rumbling, threatening voices of nature, its 
 overwhelming effects, before which we collect ourselves, humbled and 
 pensive, as we plunge our thoughts in a symphony of BEETHOVEN. 
 
 Sixty years of labor have not spoiled this great artist. Looking 
 back to his difficult beginnings, thinking with a bitter smile, even now, 
 of the fifty francs hardly snatched from fate in return for a canvas 
 where the young painter had thrown his whole soul and art, the re- 
 membrance of a thousaud successes lights up that fine artistic head, 
 energetic and angular, to which the white beard and the long locks 
 floating to the wind give a kind of apostolic air. Always young in 
 spirit, he now beholds, at I' Isle-Adam, which saw his first hesitations 
 as an artist, his own apotheosis. Latterly, and to be nearer his 
 grandchildren, JULES DUPRE" chose to sacrifice his weak side for the 
 fields to his tenderness for the family. He installed himself like other 
 
 34
 
 JULES DUPRfi 
 
 people in a neat house in the rue Ampere ; but the tide of visitors, of 
 merchants and collectors, the general movement and noise which arise 
 about an artist in renown, seized upon his spirit and paralyzed the 
 free course of his thoughts. Paris deprived him of his vital element, 
 of that out-of-doors where he has passed all his life ; everything was 
 lacking in Paris for the summer, the long promenades under the 
 trees ; for the winter, the melancholy of a landscape stripped of ver- 
 dure and covered with snow ; for all seasons, the solitude given up to 
 silent meditation. This he was fain to seek again in the little house 
 at I' Isle-Adam, where from his studio, at all hours, the artist can look 
 out on nature. His thoughts have need of space and air; the land- 
 scape painter cannot live far from the landscape. He needs an hourly 
 access to nature, whether in the loneliness of the fields, or before the 
 infinitude of the ocean, for which he has lately been smitten with a 
 true artist-lover's passion. In fact, at the period when other painters 
 are tired with the work they have done and only dream of rest, JULES 
 DUPR was destined to form a new evolution. He was in the habit 
 of passing some weeks of the summer at Cayeux-sur-Mer, looking out 
 on the sea from his window. One morning he awoke, and, struck 
 with the mysterious effects of the ocean enveloped in the profound 
 heavens stretched upon it, the artist said to himself : 
 
 " To have that under one's eyes and not paint it is stupid." 
 From this day dates the transformation of JULES DUPR in a 
 painter of marines. He took up this specialty, a novelty to him, with 
 an individual kind of interpretation of the sea. The master-thought 
 which guides him is discoverable, as in all the artist's work, and it is 
 here to paint the effects of mystery belonging to the ocean, the 
 melancholy which overcomes the spirit in contemplating the infinite. 
 JULES DUPR'S opinion is that the painter's entire being should be 
 reflected in his art. This is so perfectly true of the hermit of I' Isle- 
 Adam, that without knowing him we divine him from his pictures ; 
 grave and thoughtful, with a shade of sadness left upon him by the 
 years of combat. He walks straight, his hand does not tremble, and 
 the blue and gentle eye, in a most energetic head, betrays a chosen 
 soul humbling itself before nature, in recognition of the tempests 
 which she has let loose in its thoughts. 
 
 The porcelain painter's apprentice of sixty years ago has likewise 
 
 35
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 managed to perfect his literary education, which was neglected 
 among the necessities of his early years. The works of the great 
 writers are familiar to him, as if he had passed his whole life in 
 examining them. He is fond of quoting in conversation the axioms 
 of one author after another, whence he has derived the principles of 
 his own peculiar art. To a purchaser who was teasing him to finish 
 a picture in a few hours, with the aid of that sureness of hand and 
 eye which he has acquired, JULES DuFRfi replied in my presence : 
 
 " You think, then, that I know my profession ? Why, my poor 
 fellow, if I had nothing more to find out and to learn I could not 
 paint any longer." 
 
 In these words is his whole life of search and study. Truly, the 
 day when self-doubt should vanish from an artist's mind, the day 
 when he should not feel before his canvas the trouble which throws 
 the brain into fever, on that day he would be no better than a work- 
 man taking up in the morning the task of the evening before, plod- 
 dingly and without hesitation, but also without nobility. The day 
 when JULES DUPR should open his studio without a thrill and 
 leave it without discouragement he would consider that he had 
 arrived at the end of what he could do and he would be right
 
 Eugene Delacroix 
 
 >MONG the great artists of 1830, as they are called, there 
 reigned, as we have already said, a profound brother- 
 hood of spirit, founded upon the high esteem which 
 each one had for the genius of the others. But they 
 all considered EUGENE DELACROIX as the most 
 glorious among them ; they all had for him an admiration without 
 limit. He was in a sort the standard-bearer of the grand phalanx ; 
 the others grouped themselves around his art as around a sacred 
 banner. This homage paid by common consent to the genius of 
 DELACROIX was derived from sincere artistic enthusiasm and not 
 from comradeship, for the singular character of the artist, still some- 
 what incomprehensible, kept him a stranger to cordial everyday 
 relations; he shut himself away from others; his private life was 
 rigorously sealed up and his residence was inaccessible. DELACROIX 
 had the gloomiest apprehensions about his health ; every hour had a 
 double importance in his thoughts ; he intrenched himself in his soli- 
 tude accordingly, so as not to waste an instant, receiving but few 
 friends and showing himself but sparingly in society. What he was 
 in his commencements, such we find him at the term of his glorious 
 career ; his life was expressed in the single word labor. 
 
 To be able to pass his life thus without a thought of the externals, 
 EUGENE DELACROIX had an important auxiliary. His father, who 
 had held an important place in public administration and in diplo- 
 macy, left him an inheritance, some fifteen thousand francs income, 
 which really represented a fine fortune in the first half of our century. 
 Besides, he had not the slightest taste for extravagance ; he lived a 
 
 37
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 quiet life, entirely given up to art, and he had no desire to dazzle his 
 contemporaries. Only caring for an independent existence, having 
 no need to make money and no love for it, EUGENE DELACROIX was 
 thus enabled to march in his headlong path without any concessions, 
 as without hesitation. No artist was recognized as his teacher, for 
 we should not reckon the brief stay in the studio of GUERIN, an artist 
 who never concealed his profound contempt for his rebellious pupil. 
 
 It was in the contemplation of the masterpieces in the Louvre 
 that his genius developed ; and for modern work all his admiration 
 fixed itself on G^RICAULT, who foresaw the lofty destiny of his 
 youthful friend, and felt for him the truest tenderness. Between the 
 great tragic poet of the Shipwreck of the Medusa and the future 
 author of the Bark of Dante it was easy to breed a sympathy ; each 
 had the same ideal living drama. The admiration of EUGENE 
 DELACROIX for G^RICAULT was unlimited ; indeed, one day when 
 the master had asked his young friend to give him one of his sketches, 
 the youth, in the overflow of his pride and joy at such a request, put 
 knee to earth as he made his offering, like mortal before a divinity. 
 GRICAULT raised him up and kissed him affectionately, saying, 
 "You will be a master." When EUGENE DELACROIX exhibited his 
 first work, in 1822, M. THIERS, then art critic of the Constitutionnel, 
 hailed him enthusiastically. 
 
 This young man of twenty-three was in reality the master divined 
 by GfiRlCAULT. 
 
 M. THIERS'S enthusiasm for the vastest genius produced by 
 French painting has never been belied. The art critic had taken 
 up the painter at the beginning. The more DELACROIX was at- 
 tacked, the more M. THIERS exalted him ; by his pen he gradually 
 forced him on the public, and later, when he was become a states- 
 man, M. THIERS carried his favorite painter safely through the 
 uproar, and got him the order for the state decorative paintings in the 
 Louvre and the Chamber of Deputies. It is impossible to narrate 
 the glorious life of EUGENE DELACROIX without first paying homage 
 to the discernment of the art critic, and to the enthusiasm he dis- 
 played in defending the works so abundantly reviled against the 
 blind and the deaf of the time. 
 
 The controlling note in EUGENE DELACROIX'S painting is the 
 
 38
 
 EUGENE DELACROIX 
 
 dramatic note. We might say of him that he is the SHAKESPEARE 
 of art ; he has the great author's majesty of conception, his art of 
 painting a character in a few strokes, and his power of color. That 
 which interests him is the drama of all epochs, of every literature 
 and of every place. The Bark of Dante is only the first step, to 
 which succeed those memorable masterpieces, The Scio Massacres, 
 Tasso Among the Madmen, The Assassination of the Bishop of 
 Liege, The Amende Honorable, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 
 The Bark of Christ, Hamlet and the Gravedigger, The Morocco 
 Coast, The Barricade, The Death of Sardanapalus little imports 
 the subject. Whether he dip in profane or sacred history, in his- 
 torical anecdote or in the life of the wild beast, it is the drama and 
 always the drama which thrills in his magnificent canvases, which 
 inspires and overcomes us in the contemplation of his works ; the 
 drama which shakes the soul because we feel that the soul of the 
 great painter is in it ; he overthrows us by the sublimity of the pre- 
 sentment, the energy of the execution, the magic of his color. In 
 EUGENE DELACROIX genius did not wait for years ; it burst forth at 
 the first stroke, powerful, and, so to speak, in its highest expression. 
 Here the effort of the start is no mere indication by which to fix a 
 point of departure. It is the representation of the whole career ; it is 
 as the manifesto, as the programme never departed from, of a long, 
 glorious artistic reign. In truth, whatever the works to come shall be 
 like, the first canvas shows their intellectual germ ; what DELACROIX 
 occupies himself about, what moves him, is the drama. The subject 
 is no great thing for this grand artist ; it is naught but a pretext ; the 
 dramatic impression proceeding from it is everything. When DELA- 
 CROIX paints the magnificent Christ upon the Cross, a canvas which 
 appeared as one of the capital masterpieces of this exhibition which 
 reckoned so many, it is the supreme drama which inspires him ; what 
 he desires to render is the grand crime of the crucifixion, and not the 
 Crucified Himself. This Son of God is not the traditional CHRIST, 
 correctly nailed to the cross; it is the visionary apparition bearing 
 testimony against religious persecution, the martyr who has suffered 
 his doom and whom we see across the dreadful solitude which is the 
 image of his abandonment. He cares little to paint correctly an 
 academic study according to the routine formula. What he wants to 
 
 39
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 paint is the grand drama, the conclusive moral impression; his 
 CHRIST has lived, his flesh has thrilled, his heart has bled in truth ; 
 he is the incarnation of all martyrdom, of consummate crime left in 
 the midst of the indifference of nature. There are no tears, no 
 lamentations to communicate an emotion ; it exhales all naturally 
 from this sole figure, and it suffices for depicting the entire horror of 
 the scene and for filling the soul with veneration and profoundest 
 pity. This is the effect of art in its loftiest development, art whose 
 influence is terrifying in its simplicity. And thus we find the artist 
 in all his works. His tiger that rolls on the ground roaring, in a 
 landscape of grandest aspect, is like an incarnation of bestial strength, 
 scattering terror around it. The dramatic composer is always beside 
 his genius, in whatever form it is manifested. He is the earliest 
 of the Orientalists, going to Morocco, and in this sunlit country it is 
 still the drama which inspires him, whether in The Convulsionists of 
 Tangier s or in The Giaour, in The Lion Hunt, in The Horseman, 
 who, bending over his steed, with bournous flying in the wind, shoots 
 across the desert like a vision of destruction. EUGENE DELACROIX 
 had taken from the chilled hands of G^RICAULT the banner of that 
 revolt which this great genius had raised against the correct and 
 frigid art born of science, without one throb of the soul ; he carried 
 it proudly and aloft across a hundred battles to the very end for the 
 glory of French painting in our century. He became the chief of the 
 new school, called romantic, of which VICTOR HUGO was the apostle 
 in literature. Like the grand poet, the illustrious painter was vilified, 
 attacked and hissed. His art triumphed, even ]<'ke HUGO'S, over all 
 its opposers. It forced itself slowly on the public, through innumer- 
 able battles. Now it is the pride of our painting school, as the works 
 of HUGO are the radiant glory of our French nineteenth-century 
 literature. 
 
 The so-called classical school, men of a rare perfection in their 
 science, understood nothing of this art an art bursting from the 
 painter's heart, with a passion which sometimes made it rise to the 
 most impregnable altitudes, yet which sometimes, by its very ex- 
 aggeration, brought it down again to the ground ; for the works of 
 DELACROIX have their weak passages, I admit, because they are 
 human works, because they are not born of cold calculations of the 
 
 40
 
 EUGENE DELACROIX 
 
 mind, and because the vexations of the painter, in following his ideal, 
 pierce through them. But the aim pursued by DELACROIX was to 
 force upon us that tragical influence which he sought, and which he 
 always attained. We may criticise him on more than one point, but 
 not until after we have recovered from the shock of this forcible 
 genius, a shock which the most stubborn mind cannot help feeling. 
 
 In this case we should lose our labor in trying to guess the man 
 from his works. This intractable revolutionist was, in private life, a 
 coolly correct gentleman of rare distinction. When he appeared in a 
 drawing-room of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he cultivated 
 the closest relations, it was surprising to see this mutineer, as they 
 called him at the Academy, as a chevalier of most finished elegance, 
 looking far more like a diplomat than an artist who was overthrow- 
 ing his epoch. DELACROIX was of tall stature, and, notwithstanding 
 his invalid air, he allured every one by his personal grace and by the 
 lofty qualities of his mind, to which his correspondence bears witness. 
 Highly reserved and almost timid, he talked little, but never did a 
 commonplace come from his lips. His eye, of an unusual intensity 
 in a head beaming with the noblest energy, could strip his inter- 
 locutor to the very marrow. When people spoke to him about the 
 impassioned attacks against his works, he confounded the flatterers 
 with a polished, icy, discouraging smile. At bottom, it was a great 
 torture to him to see himself misunderstood, but he was too proud to 
 let this be perceived ; he made no display of his bitterness. No one 
 ever heard him complain of any person or thing whatever. 
 
 His unappreciated masterpieces accumulated in his plain, simple 
 studio, and the great artist felt no discontent. DELACROIX was one 
 of those tempered souls who rely for their satisfactions on the secrets 
 of their work, with an impartial contempt for adulation or for 
 insult. He had arranged his life in his own fashion, and above all in 
 such sort that nothing was to disturb him from his art. Except a few 
 sparse familiars, to whom were later added the princes of Orleans, 
 no one could penetrate his existence ; even woman's influence, if it 
 ever colored his life, left no trace there. No one might boast of 
 having diverted the great artist from his art ; no one ever had empire 
 over him. The flatteries of men and the allurements of women 
 remained equally ineffectual for that iron will, which would not let 
 
 4'
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 itself be indented. It is thus that DELACROIX was able to leave 
 such voluminous productions. We should be much deceived if we 
 conjectured that these masterpieces, apparently executed so freely, 
 had come without effort ; they are, on the contrary, the result of 
 painful toil and incessant hesitations. If the artist's pains do not 
 appear in them, they were none the less formidable and often agoniz- 
 ing. Before these admirable productions hostile routine was obliged 
 to lay down its arms at length. The renown of DELACROIX ceased 
 not to grow in the midst of the tumult provoked by his style. The 
 Institute, which had reviled him, comprehended that it must needs 
 make a compromise with the master who contemned it. And 
 now this mutineer, this insurgent, this revolutionary, is about to 
 enter the Academy. What protests and what alarms ! Annibal 
 ad portas ! DELACROIX undertook the siege of the Academy, and 
 went to seat himself, with a smile on his lips, among his worst 
 enemies. 
 
 His admission to the Institute was the greatest satisfaction of his 
 life to DELACROIX. He, the insurgent so long reviled, was about to 
 receive this acknowledgment of his ever-increasing influence on the 
 part of the very men who had never ceased to combat against him, who 
 had never disguised the profound scorn inspired in them by this great, 
 obstinate painter, this rebel to all official and academic art, this muti- 
 neer against routine, who till now had lived in his singularity. It was 
 not without difficulty, and this penetration of the Academy by the 
 greatest painter of our century was pushed on for many years before it 
 was effected. M. ROBERT-FLEURY, the historical artist, was the chief 
 agent in the diplomatic negotiations. Though a member of the Insti- 
 tute, he did justice to DELACROIX, and he considered with the utmost 
 good sense that the election of the great artist would be an act by 
 which the Institute honored itself. It needed to gain one after the 
 other before at last DELACROIX, a pure genius, could attain the place 
 left vacant in the Institute by PAUL DELAROCHE. EUGENE DELA- 
 CROIX, barricaded in his pride, would not consent to take any steps 
 himself; yet with his unerring tact, his fine intelligence, his innate 
 grace, he conquered the members of the Institute one by one when 
 he met them accidentally in drawing-rooms. In secret they were 
 still hostile, and their anger against the innovator continued the 
 
 42
 
 EUGENE DELACROIX 
 
 same ; but DELACROIX had grown to such a height, and his renown 
 had so effectually battered from the breach the old walls of the Insti- 
 tute, that it was necessary at last to capitulate. 
 
 EUGENE DELACROIX received the news of his nomination with a 
 joy which he did not even try to conceal. He, so reserved and self- 
 contained, gave himself up to the overflow of his triumph. Not that 
 he attached an overweening importance to the palm-embroidered coat 
 and the pearl-hilted sword, but because his art, so long disdained, had 
 forced a citadel deemed invincible. Once in his place, he won over 
 the most backward by his ready wit and high distinction. People 
 repeat the story, whenever the occasion presents, that DELACROIX 
 many times expressed regret at not having passed through the School 
 of Rome, from which most of the members of the Institute had 
 issued. This was simply the act of politeness of a great mind, noth- 
 ing more offered to the Institute to console it, on the part of a man 
 of social education, as we offer a card in a house where we have been 
 welcomed. What is certain is that DELACROIX in fact regretted 
 nothing ; and his style, which continued independent of Institute influ- 
 ence to the very close, is there to prove it. 
 
 As he had passed through life, EUGENE DELACROIX died with- 
 out any enfeebling of the will. This valetudinarian painter, who did 
 double day's work for fear of not being alive on the morrow, this in- 
 valid still more in imagination than reality, this sensitive genius 
 whom a breath seemed fit to overthrow, died in 1863, at the age of 
 sixty-four years, after having for nearly a half century endured an 
 excessive taskwork of every day and every hour. DELACROIX passed 
 through these fifty years of toil without taking a moment's rest. 
 When he went away from Paris, it was to go and work in his country 
 house of Champrosay, which was closed against the curious, like his 
 studio in Paris. He had a scorn of picture commerce ; he seemed to 
 distrust an excess of prosperity as if it were a dissolving element for 
 art; otherwise it would be hard to explain the obstinate simplicity 
 with which he surrounded himself. 
 
 The death scene of DELACROIX is of itself an imposing drama. 
 He had lived alone, and he wished to die in peace. When he felt the 
 supreme solution approaching, he directed his faithful housekeeper to 
 receive no one whatever, sent for a lawyer and dictated to him his 
 
 43
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 final will with remarkable calmness and with that lucidity of mind 
 which only left him with his last sigh. Then he firmly awaited death, 
 without a shudder, without a complaint, without a regret. He died 
 self-concentrated, as he had lived, without bravado as without weak- 
 ness ; neither complaint nor challenge, in the face of this death which 
 steadily advanced. He passed away in a last smile, as a man who 
 had well employed his life, and who was sure that his name would be 
 a possession of posterity. 
 
 44
 
 Diaz de la Pena 
 
 IAZ was already old when I had the honor of being in- 
 troduced to him. In the course of our first interview, 
 I mentioned that I had a little panel of his of fifteen 
 centimetres, a perfect gem a baby lying in a cradle 
 with the mother guarding it, and the sunshine filtering 
 into the modest chamber from an open window, with the reverbera- 
 tions of a dusty cloud of gold. The artist asked leave to pay me a 
 visit for the purpose of seeing the picture, to which belonged, he 
 said, some interesting souvenirs. He came next day and stood 
 for some time thoughtfully before his work ; he looked at it affection- 
 ately, and it seemed to me that, with the back of his hand, he was 
 wiping away a tear. He was a man of hardy aspect, and in him 
 such a sudden weakness might be deemed surprising. 
 
 " Would you be good enough to sell me this little picture ? " he 
 said : " it belongs to a part of my youth." 
 
 " I cannot sell it you," I replied ; " but since you value it, allow 
 me to offer it to you." 
 
 DIAZ protested; he could not accept a gift, and, as I declined to 
 take his money, we agreed that he should exchange the picture for 
 another. He immediately took down the little gem from the wall 
 and asked to carry it away with him without loss of time. On his 
 face, now radiant, all his joy was visible. 
 
 " You cannot imagine the pleasure you are giving me," he said. 
 "This woman and this infant are my own family. The baby was 
 in its cradle one fine summer day ; the mother had fallen asleep 
 beside it. In one hour I did the sketch from nature. It used to hang
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 over my bed, and it cheered my awakening every day for years. 
 Then arrived a morning when we were more in want of necessaries 
 than usual. A dealer came along and offered me a hundred and 
 fifty francs. I told him I valued that study especially, and preferred 
 that he should choose two other pictures for the same price; he 
 insisted on taking that one in particular. As ill luck would have it, 
 my rent was due next day. I was not in a position to be too par- 
 ticular. He gave me a bank note of one hundred francs, and ten 
 hundred-sous pieces. I made him out a receipt, and he never per- 
 ceived that he was carrying off a bit of my heart. Ah ! it was hard." 
 
 Then, made eloquent by remembrance, DIAZ told me about his 
 beginnings and their terrible hours, the perpetual struggle for daily 
 bread, accompanying his recital by pounding the floor with his 
 wooden leg, and gesticulating like the southerner he was. He had 
 the appearance of an old soldier telling the dangerous adventures of 
 his fights. DIAZ was of lofty height ; his head was not handsome, but 
 of remarkable energy. Notwithstanding the artist's age, his hair had 
 remained conspicuously black ; his thick moustache and tuft com- 
 pleted his military air. He spoke by spurts ; his rough voice would be 
 taken for that of habitual command. On the whole, he was what you 
 would call a genuine sort of man, most free in his avowals, very open 
 in his communications, and through the simplicity of his language 
 you felt the throbbings of a heart of gold. 
 
 He wrapped up his treasure in a newspaper and made off with 
 an active step, whistling a merry tune. When he had got it home 
 he hung it up in his chamber as formerly, this family souvenir, just 
 above the bed ; and he fancied it shed on him every morning some- 
 thing like a ray of his youth. 
 
 The excellent man preserved to the end a kind recollection of this 
 early incident of our relations. If I may say for myself that I 
 venerated the aged and brave artist, I may add that for me he was 
 undoubtedly a friend ; how many long hours have we passed together 
 in his studio, in pleasant conversations about the men of his day! 
 He was one of those who gave celebrity to the village of Barbizon, in 
 the forest of Fontainebleau ; he had lived there with THEODORE 
 ROUSSEAU and MILLET ; with ROUSSEAU especially, whom he con- 
 sidered the "master"; in his private collection he had two enchant-
 
 DIAZ DE LA PENA 
 
 ing little landscapes of his ; and when you talked to DIAZ of his own 
 art, he would carry you off to the works of his great acquaintance, 
 saying : " Here are the bon-bons." In all the great artists of that 
 generation you perceived the mutual esteem they entertained for each 
 other's talent. 
 
 In the group of painters beyond the average, DIAZ DE LA PENA 
 is the great artist of the fantastical. Anything serves him as a pre- 
 text for bringing to light his marvelous aptitude as a colorist. He 
 has not the science of ROUSSEAU nor the poesy of COROT, still less 
 the severe grandeur of DUPR6. He renders the enchantments of the 
 landscape flooded with sunshine or the forest plunged in luminous 
 twilight, with beams filtering through the thick leafage ; he dazzles 
 the eye with all the seductions of a grand colorist ; by these obvious 
 qualities, which affect even the uninitiated spectator, he gets closer to 
 the latter than other landscapists of the time. He is the grand 
 virtuoso of the palette, making sport of difficulties. With him every- 
 thing is of the first impulse ; his work is thrown off with brio ; the 
 enchantment of the color carries it along. We can imagine him in 
 the solitudes of the forest of Fontainebleau, making the wooden leg 
 resound on the earth and singing with all his lungs to let off his 
 exuberant nature. The countrymen whom MILLET stopped to regard 
 with compassionate thoughts did not attract him. He dots the pond- 
 side, where the sun gleams, with peasant girls, mere little red 
 touches. In his sun-gilt landscapes DIAZ puts such figures as 
 offered, by their costumes, a pretext for the wealth of his palette. 
 The Descent of the Bohemians is the fullest expression of this style ; 
 here all is life and air ; the band is coming down a steep path ; 
 through the foliage the sun rains down its beams and floods the 
 whole picture with a transparent and luminous half-light; it is a 
 perfect dazzle to the eye, like all the works of this great colorist. 
 From the Orient, as he passes through it, he only collects the remem- 
 brances of silky stuffs and golden embroideries, spreading forth their 
 pride in the sun ; from Italy he only preserves the method of the 
 colorist VERONESE, whom he often equals in the attractiveness, if not 
 in the conception, of his work. As for mythology, it is merely his 
 excuse for modeling in full impasto and in open daylight the nymphs 
 and the Dianas. 
 
 47
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 Those who knew DIAZ in his youth remember his as the most 
 expansive of natures ; the man was alive, like his painting, always 
 acting from the first impulse. His words, guiltless of the refinements 
 of conversation, were as energetic as his brush ; he said roughly what 
 he thought, in whatever company he found himself. The style of his 
 talk was the same in the tavern or in the drawing-room. When in 
 good humor he would drown the noise of the talking by formidable 
 peals of laughter ; the least annoyance would evoke from him the 
 oaths of an old sailor, to the accompaniment of reiterated strokes of 
 the wooden leg the " pestle," he called it. When poor, he laughed 
 at hardship ; when rich, he remained simple. As money flowed in, at 
 the close of his life, he only saw in it the means for satisfying the 
 tastes of the artist, for the purchase of the pictures of his celebrated 
 friends, without any cheapening, of rare potteries and luxurious rugs, 
 which made the oddest contrast with his commonplace mahogany 
 furniture. It was the type of the old-time artist, the good fellow, 
 frank and laughing. A trifle amused his juvenile spirit ; you were 
 sure to make him laugh aloud with some old, warmed-up anecdote. 
 He would writhe in a spasm of mad hilarity when you took off an 
 actor in his presence, and a comic song at the dessert of an old- 
 fashioned dinner was worth to him all the fashionable balls in the 
 world. 
 
 At first sight DIAZ was not attractive. His nature appeared rude ; 
 except for his glowing eyes there was nothing about his person of the 
 distinction of his art. But after penetrating to his intimacy, his deli- 
 cate nature, so strangely in contrast with the surface, opened out like 
 a delicious landscape which you discover after climbing a craggy 
 road. At the heart of that rough bark you penetrated to the most 
 exquisite refinements, fatherly affection in its most touching manifest- 
 ations, and manly friendship without any grand word, but full of deli- 
 cate attentions. His element was the sunshine ; in summer he braved 
 its hottest beams ; in winter he made it live again out of his marvelous 
 palette. During the late war, at Brussels, he worked in a cold, 
 gloomy hotel chamber looking out on a court of cheerless aspect. 
 But the painter, though old, had brought along his fatherland in a 
 color-box. In this gloomy work-room, bowed down with patriotic 
 anxieties, he lived with his memory in the midst of his beloved forest 
 
 4 8
 
 DIAZ DE LA PENA 
 
 of Fontainebleau, which he transported to his canvas. The exuberant 
 sunshine of his pictures seemed to warm that sad refuge of his exile ; 
 his art was everything to DIAZ, and he found a refuge from the 
 troubles of life in his painting. His career was a long dream, in 
 which he perceived an imaginary world beside the actualities of 
 earthly landscapes ; it was something like a fairy spectacle, streaming 
 with silks and velvets and gold. Under the groves he called forth 
 pages holding greyhounds in leash, chatelaines richly dight, nymphs 
 with flesh of exquisite tone. Sometimes under his magic pencil 
 these improvisations took a more lofty flight towards grand art, as in 
 his famous Diana, who seems to have escaped from the works of the 
 old masters. 
 
 DIAZ was above all an improvisator and a creator of fantasies. 
 He himself acknowledged what was lacking in his pictures to place 
 them quite in the first rank. He found himself overflowed with those 
 powers of color which constitute his glory, but to which he sacrificed 
 the rest. Yet we hardly detect the occasional want of completeness 
 in the forms of his figures, so entirely are we under the charm of the 
 color. 
 
 After the war, when the world precipitated itself on Paris, to buy 
 at a bargain her art productions, which were expected to be at a 
 changed tariff after so many disasters, there arrived the phenom- 
 enon that the prices of pictures rapidly tripled, from the increased 
 demand. Then fortune came to DIAZ. He purchased at the seaside 
 village of Etretat a pretty villa in the midst of a garden, where the 
 flowers, which he loved so heartily and copied with such rare technic, 
 flaunted themselves in the sun. He had under his eyes, from the 
 window, with the first ray of dawn, all the astonishments of color ; 
 behind the house, which was set against the cliffs, a climbing path 
 led to the downs whence the ocean was visible. Here was where he 
 liked to rest in the contemplation of infinitude, and before this sublime 
 side of creation his artist's heart expanded. Often, in his moments of 
 familiar confidence, he expressed, among his professional comments, 
 a kind of regret, as if he had taken a false road in life. He felt him- 
 self near his end, and, instead of little pictures, he vowed that he 
 meant only to make vast pictures, in which he might express all his 
 art and all his ambition for the eyes of posterity. 
 
 49
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 The coming on of winter was always dangerous to him. In 1876, 
 DIAZ felt himself attacked by an affection of the chest which rendered 
 all work impossible. He went to Mentone, where for an instant he 
 seemed to revive with a new existence. It was there that he executed 
 his last pictures. Death took him by surprise, still at his work. It 
 was impossible to overcome this character, still full of energy, during 
 the final sickness, unless by taking the brush from his hands and 
 shattering it. Broken at once in frame and in spirit, DIAZ did not 
 resist longer. Without his work, life offered no attraction. From 
 his deathbed, through the open window, he beheld the landscape 
 bathed with sunshine, and the great enchanter died while looking his 
 last on the day-star which inspired all his work.
 
 J. L. E. Meissonier 
 
 OOKING out on the boulevard Malesherbes, at the corner 
 of the rue Legendre, is found a little mansion of fantastic 
 pattern, adapted for privacy of living. The building 
 strikes a different note from the architecture of the new 
 houses which surround it ; it has the air of imitating a 
 cloister. Through the windows, which are hardly ever opened, the 
 passer-by sees no trace of modern luxury, such as betrays itself at 
 ordinary windows by the pompous show of brilliant hangings and 
 overloaded gilding. There are no salons, properly speaking, in this 
 artistic residence ; instead, we find two large studios which com- 
 municate and occupy all the width of the first floor. Here from 
 morning till evening one of the greatest artists of our century bends 
 over a task which has continued for fifty years with the same con- 
 scientiousness, the same industry. The greatest glory of M. MEIS- 
 SONIER before posterity will be, not merely to have been one of the 
 most illustrious masters of his time, but also to have sacrificed no par- 
 ticle of his personal dignity at any period of his long career. The 
 history of all the arts is degraded by the numerous examples of weak- 
 ness manifested by the grandest talents, when, arrived at the height 
 of the position gained, they have thrown out, as a bait to the pur- 
 chaser, works conceived with the sole eye to the money return, with- 
 out a thought of self-respect or of that integrity in workmanship 
 which is due toward the public in return for the artist's prominent 
 situation. M. MEISSONIER incontestably has the credit of having re- 
 fused to sacrifice his conscience to considerations foreign to his art at 
 any period of his life. This " respectability," in the English sense, is
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 beyond contradiction ; and those who make certain reserves in praising 
 his work are bound to salute respectfully this fine professional con- 
 scientiousness. 
 
 Revolutions in artistic opinion produce a kind of inconsistency in 
 the public mind, like those of politics. DELACROIX, carrying on the 
 impulse of G^RICAULT, had passed across French art with his 
 impressive dramas, and with the fury of his style, commended by all 
 the enchantments of his incomparable coloring. Third-rate painters 
 misrepresented the principles of this grand style in adopting all the 
 defects of the master without his genius. Boldness of conception 
 was changed for a perfect oblivion of pictorial composition ; audacity 
 of coloring became wilful eccentricity, and artists lived under the 
 anarchy of a headlong romantic inspiration, whether in choice of 
 subject or in incoherent manipulation. I know no better comparison 
 for this crisis than that of our contemporary musical composition, sent 
 off its balance by the genius of RICHARD WAGNER. In the focus of 
 this disorder arose one fine day M. MEISSONIER, with his miniature 
 works of such accurate design and scrupulous execution. The 
 neglected art of the Low Countries was born again of the pencil of 
 this youth from Lyons, offspring of parents in modest circumstances ; 
 it reappeared like a protest against debauch, a final appeal to the 
 artistic conscience. In a national school committed to every extrava- 
 gance what was there left to do for a disciple of TERBURG, of 
 MIERIS, of GERARD Dow ? He was scornfully dubbed the painter 
 of little toy images. Then, as M. MEISSONIER'S studies steadily 
 brought him nearer to nature, he was treated as a photographer. 
 The indifferent copyists of DELACROIX could not sufficiently show 
 their contempt for the conscientious toiler. They argued him down 
 with the same fury and the same intolerance that the classical 
 professors of the Institute had let loose against DELACROIX himself. 
 They gave no credit to M. MEISSONIER for the severe design seen in 
 his work, for the irreproachable execution, for that lofty artistic con- 
 science incapable of ever contradicting itself, qualities which have 
 been surpassed by none of his predecessors, which guaranteed for his 
 name the respect of posterity. The moneyless youth from Lyons, the 
 pupil of LE"ON COGNIET, was destined to become one of the greatest 
 artists of the century. 
 
 52
 
 J. L. E. MEISSONIER 
 
 The principal reproach made against M. MEISSONIER was that of 
 choosing his subjects in past ages. He did not live in his epoch, they 
 said; he was not a modern. Why did he constantly go back to 
 Louis XIII. or Louis XIV. ? The merit of the Dutch, on whom the 
 style of M. MEISSONIER depended, was precisely in leaving us a kind 
 of pictorial history of their civilization in their work. It is easily 
 said. But when a painter lives at a period which has no style, and 
 which constantly refers itself towards the older furniture to garnish 
 itself with an artistic effect, a period which has no attractive cos- 
 tumes or of a nature to allure the artist, the latter is surely obliged to 
 find elsewhere the elements we deny him. 
 
 It is impossible to esteem the eminent artist at his value when one 
 has not learned by heart the length and breadth of his work. The 
 least panel by M. MEISSONIER is the result of many searchings and 
 of studies without end. The walls of his studio bear witness to his 
 conscientious method. On the eye-line, all around the two ateliers 
 are the proofs of his perpetual efforts. We can there read the sin- 
 cerity and wonderful determination of a man who leaves nothing to 
 chance, who never loses sight of nature, and who makes no account 
 of time when it behooves him to carry on a work to the pitch of per- 
 fection which the artist desires. Drawings, painted sketches, statu- 
 ettes in wax, have been prepared before the final undertaking ; it is 
 the scale-practice of this inimitable executant before he plays his 
 piece. For the least figure M. MEISSONIER makes repeated prepara- 
 tory studies ; he never attacks it finally until after he has long paused 
 before the natural object, scrutinizing it in detail before painting it at 
 large. If the pains are nowhere betrayed in the finished work of 
 M. MEISSIONIER the very charm of it being just in this apparent 
 ease they are none the less prodigious. The famous artist judges 
 that while there remains anything to do, nothing is done ; the ecstasy 
 of the critic gives little solace to his life when he is not satisfied with 
 himself. The day when M. MEISSONIER sets the signature at the 
 bottom of the finished task, he is satisfied that he has poured his 
 talent completely into his picture. If he deceives himself, it is in 
 good faith, and not by any debauchery of that professional conscience 
 which is preserved by this seventy-years-old artist ; you could not 
 get from him at any price a work which he does not himself judge to 
 
 53
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 be carried out to its full intensity. More times than one has he 
 destroyed with slashes of his knife some picture of immense pecu- 
 niary value because he has condemned it as unworthy of his great 
 reputation. 
 
 Jealous to preserve his grand situation intact in the present, M. 
 MEISSONIER is equally careful of his renown before posterity. Find- 
 ing his works dispersed in the galleries of the four quarters of the 
 globe, he has deemed that he might properly select two of his pic- 
 tures to bequeath to the Louvre. He has several times been offered 
 three hundred thousand francs for two of the panels which figured in 
 the exhibition to whose memory this work is devoted ; but The 
 Etcher, as well as The Man at the Window, will only leave the 
 studio of the artist to pass one day to the Louvre. Never has painter 
 penetrated further into nature than M. MEISSONIER has done in 
 these two pictures, which he justly considers as the highest expres- 
 sion of his art. 
 
 Another subject at the exhibition of the Hundred Masterpieces 
 indicated that evolution which was made by MEISSONIER, about the 
 middle of his career, towards military art. Before finally undertaking 
 it, the painter spent several years in preparatory studies. An artist 
 so conscientious as he could leave nothing to luck, nor satisfy himself 
 with painting his subject pretty nearly right or superficially. One 
 should see, in the studio of the master, the innumerable studies of 
 horses made before the first cavalryman was painted. Himself an 
 enthusiastic horseman, M. MEISSONIER made the horse an object of 
 long investigations. Not only did he continually draw the animal 
 from nature, but he wished to live familiarly with horses, so as to be 
 always observing them. At his country place at Poissy, the painter 
 formed a well-furnished stud, where his horses were always found 
 ready to be mounted, in order that he might observe their most 
 varied movements. Others would be grazing at liberty on the lawns, 
 always under the eye of the painter, who thus examined them in 
 action and in repose. He had them to gallop over ploughed ground 
 or in fields of grain arranged in his park, to note the disturbance 
 made by their hoofs. Patiently, with his own characteristic tenacity, 
 M. MEISSONIER made himself gradually an authority on the horse, 
 as on the human figure, and it was only after having studied the 
 
 54
 
 J. L. E. MEISSONIER 
 
 equine race for many years that this man of wonderful conscience set 
 it in his pictures. In this thorough way he has treated the epic of the 
 first Empire in a great number of compositions, of which the most 
 perfect, The Retreat from Russia in 1814, is not merely a master- 
 piece of composition and execution, but again is a grand page of his- 
 tory in limited form. 
 
 Such immense labor, with such a fine artistic conscientiousness, 
 must needs win over the most reluctant. To-day, M. MEISSONIER 
 is spectator of his own apotheosis. A half century of incessant toil 
 has made the Lyons artist the most celebrated of living painters. 
 The prices of his pictures have reached a formidable figure, unknown 
 till his time. The most valuable eulogium that can be made of M. 
 MEISSONIER is to say that he has never yielded to the seduction of a 
 million francs, though exposed to it in all its perfidy; this man of 
 seventy years has resisted all the temptations of money, in an age 
 when it overthrows and controls the bravest. The great artist, 
 whose works are so dearly paid, is not rich, as might be supposed, 
 not only because his grand seigneur's caprices absorb his revenues, 
 but because he has never done anything for the sake of money. His 
 signature has become such a capital that, by distributing it prodigally 
 on slight pieces of work, M. MEISSONIER might gain a million francs 
 a year ; but his conscience is so fine that he had rather remain for 
 whole years without making a penny than throw upon the market a 
 work unworthy of his renown. What the public pays for in the case 
 of this artist is the long, and above all, the arduous study ; the end- 
 less hesitations before any new class of work ; the professional 
 honesty of the man who reckons neither his time nor his trouble in 
 keeping up his art to the level which the master aims at, and which 
 he attains in nearly every case. The famous painter, whose works 
 sell not at their weight in gold, but at their weight in bank notes, is 
 not a wealthy man ; his whole investment consists simply in the 
 innumerable and magnificent studies kept in the atelier ; their value 
 is very great, and the artist refuses to sell them at any price, because 
 these mute witnesses of his existence seem to him like the diary of 
 of his whole professional career, written with his own hand from day 
 to day ; they are the familiars of his pains and joys ; to the spectator 
 of these thousands of studies they are the proofs of that sincerity and 
 
 55
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 determination which the painter lavishes on all his works, without 
 distinction of size, kind or price. 
 
 When we estimate M. MEISSONIER only by the pictures which 
 are presented to the eyes of the public, when we render justice, 
 simply as before the result attained, to the vast sum of talent lavished 
 often upon a mere panel of four inches square, we are far from 
 appreciating him at his just value. To establish M. MEISSONIER at 
 his veritable rank in our estimation we must make a calculation, after 
 many an investigation, of all the states through which the work has 
 passed before arriving at publicity, of all the studies which have pre- 
 pared for the actual painting and accompanied it ; nothing is left to 
 luck in this painting, every effect is based on profound reflection, on 
 watchfulness without truce, in the face of the natural model. That 
 is why M. MEISSONIER is such a great artist. To those who take 
 exception to the scale of his pictures and regret, in the name of so- 
 called grand art, that the famous painter has kept his work down to 
 a narrow measure, I may be permitted to say that in art this is a 
 secondary question, and that the picture entitled "1814," in its little 
 frame, is one of the most powerful dramas in our century's painting, 
 even as M. MEISSONIER is one of the loftiest artists of our time. 
 
 Nor is M. MEISSONIER any more responsible for his imitators, for 
 those who try on his shoes, than was DELACROIX for the daubers 
 who swarmed in his wake. People have often reproached our artist 
 for belittling the painting of his time, in setting the fashion of 
 miniature panels. It would be a more just remark to say that he had 
 brought back by his art a whole generation to a respect for nature. 
 Doubtlessly the painting of our artist is not art in its entirety, but it 
 is one of its most interesting manifestations that our age has seen, 
 and the name of the lofty painter of little pictures is more securely 
 fixed before the future than if he had misconceived his extraordinary 
 gifts and had brushed great canvases of quality inferior to those 
 which we see signed with the name of MEISSONIER, the first painter 
 of the close of our century, and one of the most astonishing artists 
 who have made it illustrious.
 
 Theodore Rousseau 
 
 |EE, neighbor," said JULES DUPR, as he entered the 
 residence of the baritone BAROILHET, of the French 
 opera, " I am going to offer you a good bargain. I 
 have a masterpiece to dispose of." 
 
 " A masterpiece ? " repeated the famous singer ; 
 " and who has executed the masterpiece ? " 
 
 "THEODORE ROUSSEAU." 
 
 " Yes ? he is a man of talent plenty of talent," said BAROILHET ; 
 " but money is scarce." 
 
 " You can pay in two installments," insinuated DuPRE 1 ; " two hun- 
 dred and fifty francs a month." 
 
 "Where is your masterpiece? " demanded BAROILHET. 
 
 JULES DUPR leaned out of a window and made signs to a porter, 
 in waiting at the door, to come up stairs. " Look here," he said to 
 his friend. 
 
 This baritone, BAROILHET, then at the height of his fame, was a 
 man of taste one of the first who comprehended the important 
 advance of landscape painting in 1830. He uttered a cry of surprise 
 and enthusiasm, for it was really a chef-d'ceuvre \i\\ich. JULES DupRfi 
 was offering him for five hundred francs. It was Le Givre, one of 
 ROUSSEAU'S most celebrated canvases, which is worth now at least 
 one hundred thousand francs. Since morning, JULES DUPR had car- 
 ried the canvas up and down through Paris without being able to find 
 a niche for it. He was unwilling to go home unsuccessful, for he had 
 surely vowed to ROUSSEAU that he would sell it. Now it was done. 
 BAROILHET counted out the complete sum with a sigh, saying : 
 
 57
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 " Paintings will be my ruin in the end." 
 
 Twenty years afterwards, when BAROILHET sold his collection, 
 Le Givre reached the price of seventeen thousand francs. 
 
 " Well," said JULES DUPR, " I hope I am not the cause of your 
 making a bad bargain ? " 
 
 "Granted," reported the vocalist, proudly; "but twenty years ago 
 you found nobody but me in all the streets of Paris who would pay 
 the five hundred francs." 
 
 In that group of landscape painters of foremost rank whose des- 
 tiny was to restore modern art in France to the magnificent position 
 of R.UYSDAEL and HOBBEMA, THEODORE ROUSSEAU is unques- 
 tionably the one who has gone furthest into the secret of nature. To 
 be just, JULES DUPR had pointed him the way; but, when once 
 launched, ROUSSEAU had separated from his comrade to pursue his 
 own destinies. A love for nature had been formed in this tailor's 
 son in the humble position which he occupied with one of his rela- 
 tions who had a saw factory in Franche-Comte'. While accompany- 
 ing his employer in his professional tours in search of growing 
 timber, this youth, among the trees, came to catch the scent of the 
 grand principles of art, of that theory on which was to rise, later, the 
 mighty scaffold of his renown. When he got leave to follow his 
 bent, at the age of fifteen years, THEODORE ROUSSEAU was con- 
 fided to an indifferent artist named R^MOND, who passed for the 
 foremost landscape painter of the time. He was taught what was 
 then called grand art, the kind of " historical " landscape where 
 figures of the Bible or of ancient history strayed through conven- 
 tional scenery. Those proud ones of 1820, those forgotten ones to- 
 day, took no notice of the vegetation which surrounded them or of 
 the contemporary figures circulating through it. There would not 
 be kept a single memory of those painters now were it not for a 
 ROUSSEAU, a DUPR, a COROT, a DELACROIX, a MILLET, who 
 suffered by them, and whose hapless story cannot be related without 
 at least citing the names of the professional ancestors who preceded 
 our group of giants. In his hours of freedom, the young THEODORE 
 ROUSSEAU would forget the ill teaching of his master before the in- 
 struction derived from the external creation. It may be claimed for 
 him that he was the pet pupil of nature, and a grateful and sensitive 
 
 58
 
 THEODORE ROUSSEAU 
 
 pupil, who began to consecrate a lifetime thenceforth to glorifying 
 his benefactress. It was in the environs of Paris that young ROUS- 
 SEAU would temper his soul after the deleterious lessons that were 
 sought to be forced on him. The illustrious R^MOND lost his time 
 when he endeavored to convince this particular scholar that it was 
 necessary to pass by, with calm and haughty indifference, before the 
 splendors of creation and contrive an art out of counterfeit. 
 
 For THEODORE ROUSSEAU the feeling for veritable art was ac- 
 companied by a profound love of his native soil. It seemed to him 
 that France was sufficiently rich in picturesque sites to inspire a 
 painter. Did not RUYSDAEL derive a part of his quality from the very 
 fact that it is the aspect of his own country which his art celebrates ? 
 Was not HOBBEMA an immortal landscape painter especially because 
 he had developed his genius by the tender study of the land where he 
 was born ? Was it not mere foolhardiness to try to construct by 
 theory a world more fine than the actual world, to disdain the glories 
 of our forests, the beauties of our plains, to go astray in the vagaries 
 of rearrangements of foliage such as was never seen but in the pictures 
 of our forefathers ? It was an inexplicable thing to the young ROUS- 
 SEAU that these blind eyes could see nothing of the splendors which 
 surrounded them. What, did their hearts never beat, did they not 
 feel the intoxication of nature which stirred the blood of this stripling ? 
 Their artificial painting was without soul, without emotion ; the 
 grandeurs of their native soil escaped them ; the poesy of our forests 
 remained for them a sealed book ; these men had never thrilled to the 
 scenery of home. And they called themselves artists ! 
 
 At the period of the French Restoration, the painters of England 
 were the first to rise in revolt against the successful routine of histori- 
 cal landscape. But their works were unknown in France ; it cannot, 
 then, be said that they showed the road to the great French landscape 
 artists ; they arose but a short time before our own ; they emerged, as 
 ours did, from the protest of all honest hearts against the artificial. 
 The instinct of truth and the need to strike deep into nature are 
 innate in humanity. Separated by the ocean and knowing nothing of 
 each other, the English and the French marched by two different 
 paths towards the same end. In this awakening of a sincere art in 
 either country, France was destined to place herself at last in the 
 
 59
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 first rank, and leave far behind her the English school. Among the 
 great French landscape painters who have not only guided the national 
 art back again to nature, but whose influence was to be so important 
 over the foreign schools, THEODORE ROUSSEAU occupies the highest 
 place, because he is the most perfect master. The grand aspects of 
 landscape and its tenderness are equally familiar to him. He renders 
 with the same mastery the smile of creation and its terrors, the broad 
 open plain and the mysterious forest, the limpid, sunbright sky or 
 the heaping of the clouds put to flight by storms, the terrible aspects 
 of landscape or those replete with grace. He has understood all, 
 rendered all with equal genius. The great contemporary painters 
 have each a particular stamp, COROT painting the grace, MILLET the 
 hidden voice, JULES DUPRI the majestic strength ; THEODORE 
 ROUSSEAU has been by turns as much a poet as COROT, as melan- 
 choly as MILLET, as awful as DUPRE" ; he is the most complete, for 
 he embraces landscape art absolutely. 
 
 The pictures of this genius were refused obstinately at the official 
 exhibitions by the gentlemen of the Institute. At every start of 
 French art in the present century we find them showing the same 
 intolerance in their presumption, ever wishing to shape the souls of 
 artists to their own fancy. This Institute of the date of 1830 is 
 responsible in our annals for an unprecedented persecution. Piti- 
 lessly fanatical in the midst of its own feebleness, it sought to strike 
 down those authentic spirits who were unwilling to be docile. Rous- 
 SEAU, penetrated with injustice and disgusted to the soul, went to ask 
 a refuge in the forest of Fontainebleau, and appealed to nature from 
 the injustice of men. He knew that he should find there another 
 reprobate of the Academicians, MILLET, the dignified martyr. Be- 
 tween the two great painters there began then to strengthen those 
 ties of friendship which nothing subsequently disturbed. Later, 
 when ROUSSEAU was more lucky than MILLET, he bethought him of 
 a cunning and kindly way of coming to his friend's aid. From time 
 to time he would buy one of MILLET'S works, letting him believe 
 that it had been purchased by an American. It is thus that we still 
 find these two, from their first steps to the very close, united by a 
 boundless sympathy for their mutual powers, and by a pathetic 
 brotherhood of soul. Their two names are inseparable, united in 
 
 60
 
 THEODORE ROUSSEAU 
 
 poverty and difficulty from the beginning to the end. We find 
 MILLET again, at the deathbed of ROUSSEAU, weeping for his best 
 friend, whose departure plunged in solitude again the great, mis- 
 understood genius of Barbizon. 
 
 MILLET was never to quit the little village which he has made 
 famous. Less misanthropic than he, THEODORE ROUSSEAU was 
 constantly planning a removal to Paris. MILLET avoided the city ; 
 ROUSSEAU was always returning thither, for he felt that Paris was 
 his veritable battlefield, in which he was to conquer or die. We can 
 mark his halting places by the injustices he met with. When finally 
 received in the Salon, the pictures of ROUSSEAU were placed in such 
 positions that it was a fresh insult added to so many others. In 
 distributing the recompenses this master was passed by with disdain. 
 There were masterpieces by him already in the galleries of all 
 the collectors when, at last, in 1852, it was decided to give him the 
 decoration of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. It was indeed time, 
 for, when the Exposition Universelle of 1855 arrived, and received 
 from the contributions of our painter one of its principal claims to 
 glory, it at once avenged this great artist for all his persecutions. 
 
 But, however striking his vindication, it could not expel from 
 ROUSSEAU'S mind the recollection of the coldness with which he had 
 been treated. There remained a deep wound in his bosom from 
 which he could not be free ; we find the trace of it in the bitterness 
 which stole over him in relation to his country. He spoke of wishing 
 to emigrate to England, to Holland or Germany, from all which 
 countries he received constant testimonials of respect. Amsterdam 
 had named him an honorary member of her Academy of Fine Arts, 
 when France would not open to him the doors of her own. With 
 advancing age ROUSSEAU was attacked with that thirst for honorable 
 recognition which in an artist is the first sign of senility. He did not 
 carry stoicism to the end, like MILLET. Though haughty and full of 
 contempt for his detractors, ROUSSEAU'S self-love had at length 
 received a wide and deep wound, made up of pin-pricks. We 
 find the signs of his bitter feelings in his correspondence, in those 
 familiar notes which were published after his death, and which 
 are like the cries of pain from the wounded heart. At this time a 
 period of hesitation begins to be seen in the work of the great 
 
 61
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 painter. We perceive that he begins to take note of the objections 
 of his enemies; we notice those infallible indications of an invalid 
 brain, the half-expressed tendencies of imitation visible in his works. 
 These tardy concessions are not convincing proofs that ROUSSEAU 
 wished to patch up a reconciliation with his persecutors, but his will 
 was yielding. The Salon of 1864 was the witness of this defection, a 
 matter of pain to ROUSSEAU'S admirers. 
 
 It is proper to point out this change towards a style polished even 
 to paltriness at the same time that it is allowable to explain it. 
 
 The wife of the artist had become deranged, and ROUSSEAU not- 
 withstanding the advice of physicians and friends, was unwilling to 
 be separated from her; henceforth this admirable artist, who had 
 gone through so much suffering in youth, saw his riper life darkened 
 by the incurable malady which had fastened upon his tenderly 
 beloved companion. We see him now begin to wander hither and 
 thither at hazard like a soul in pain, flying from the forests to the sea 
 without the ability to fix himself anywhere ; everywhere the image of 
 his wife follows and haunts him ; between nature and the artist's eye 
 this figure of madness perpetually places itself. The painter's hand 
 is still on his work, but his thoughts are elsewhere. So now we have 
 this grand type of disdain trifling with the minutiae of the outset of 
 art ; he is irritated by nothings ; nervous disease seems to be gaining 
 on him. The old animosity had not laid down its weapons in the case 
 of this grand and pure genius ; through the renown which had slowly 
 accumulated on the name of ROUSSEAU his detractors pursued their 
 warfare of intrigues and vengeance. For instance, ROUSSEAU, 
 though chief of the section of the jury at the Universal Exposition of 
 1867, did not receive the rosette of officer of the Legion of Honor. 
 To him, to DUPR, and to MILLET, there were preferred, in the dis- 
 tribution of official recompenses, G^ROME, PILS and FRANCAIS. 
 
 This time THEODORE ROUSSEAU felt that it was enough. We 
 can judge of the extent of the wound made in his self-esteem by this 
 oversight from a fragment of a letter which was found among his 
 papers after his death ; it is a draught of a protest to the Emperor. 
 ROUSSEAU gave up the idea of the letter; but he had received a 
 death wound. Penetrated with disgust, with his brains in ebullition, 
 his soul given over to bitterness, he went back to Barbizon to die. 
 
 6a
 
 Eugene Fromentin 
 
 )N France art lived for a long time on an Orient of imagin- 
 ation, where violent colors shocked each other in the 
 sunshine and spluttered with a thousand disorderly 
 fires. The actual Orient is something quite different. 
 The transparence of the atmosphere stretches some- 
 thing like a tint of silver gray, of exquisite delicacy, over the land- 
 scape, it is soft and harmonious, not violent and showy. The 
 first time I watched Stamboul from the bridge of the Bosphorus, at 
 the setting of the sun, I was surprised at the difference between 
 the Orient conventional and the Orient of reality. The first is an 
 agglomeration of violent tints where objects and people are arranged 
 in silhouettes on a flame-colored sky; the last is a gentle pene- 
 trating harmony. No artist has better rendered the true Orient 
 in its distinction of color than EUGENE FROMENTIN. He was not 
 satisfied with studying Africa in the products of his predecessors. 
 He had seen it with eyes of his own, and estimated it with his per- 
 sonal thoughts, as a poet with melting heart, an observer with 
 delicate fidelity. In this delightful artist the painter's talent was 
 enhanced by very decided literary aptitude, and thus in his works he 
 not only paints Africa, he narrates it. His Fantasia, for instance, is 
 not merely a delicious picture of an incomparable refinement of color- 
 ing, but a page of description, such as a professional writer might have 
 given, with his most individual and exhaustive powers. In the open 
 plain, before the Ameer and his escort, the Arabs pass at their fastest 
 gallop, on their small horses, uttering clamorous cries and playing 
 tricks with their long guns. Nothing can be harder to execute than 
 
 63
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 such a complicated canvas, where hundreds of horsemen are crossing 
 in a bewitched tumult. Yet the beholder's eye can embrace this 
 passing human whirlwind at the first effort and in every detail ; the 
 bournouses float on the wind ; the men are seen in violent action, 
 standing up in their stirrups or lying along on their horses' backs ; 
 everywhere is life, but uneasiness nowhere ; the transparence of the 
 Oriental sky floods the whole scene and makes it a unit in its multi- 
 plied details. This Orient does not resemble any of the African 
 pictures which were painted before FROMENTIN ; it is from the 
 artist's personal accent that the charm of the work arises, and this 
 is what gives the painter the distinguished rank which he occupies in 
 the annals of the century. 
 
 The first time I saw a picture by FROMENTIN, at the Salon of 
 1863, I think, I was immediately struck by the revelation of the verit- 
 able Orient which the painter had brought for us. It was the famous 
 Arab Falconer, which the artist exhibited at that period. The horse- 
 man was galloping through a wide landscape, carrying a falcon which 
 seemed about to fly. Into that simple scene FROMENTIN had con- 
 trived to put all the grandeur and all the poetry of African desert 
 scenery and the Arab. The man who could express so many sensa- 
 tions in such a subject was evidently a poet himself, that is to say, a 
 nature sensitive and open to all the seductions of the animated crea- 
 tion. Criticism has often reproached FROMENTIN for making too 
 many sacrifices to the literary side of his subjects, that is to say, for 
 having dwelt too much on the anecdote expressed in his pictures. 
 But it is not forbidden in art, that I know of, to tell the world the 
 peculiarities of a distant civilization and put before the public eye its 
 veritable character with a wealth of minute details and with a grand, 
 descriptive power. The utmost that can be said of FROMENTIN is 
 that he has spread here and there, over his own particular Orient, 
 something like a varnish of Parisian elegance; this proceeded rather 
 from the naturally perfect distinction of the man, who conferred on 
 his Arabs the grace of his own individuality. In this delicate' artist 
 the brain was fundamentally refined, so that whatever the eye 
 regarded assumed in the thoughts of FROMENTIN a poetical cast. 
 Every artist of worth finds it impossible to quite separate his work 
 from his personal sensations. It is really by this that the great painter 
 
 64
 
 EUGENE FROMENTIN 
 
 is distinguished from the artist of secondary rank ; the latter is often- 
 est furnished merely with the painting eye without the artist spirit ; 
 he renders marvelously what he can see, without adding the thrill of 
 the soul. Any art work which does not let us likewise look into the 
 privacy of its author remains in an inferior rank, whatever may be the 
 skill of the craftsman. EUGENE FROMENTIN is revealed from head to 
 foot in his pictures. He was a being of rare distinction, one who 
 ennobled, in some aspect, whatever passed through his mind. He has 
 regarded and painted the Orient like a poet. In his Arab hordes 
 camping in their bivouacs or crossing the desert, he has not chosen to 
 see the reality of things or the details of their degradation ; as the 
 hand of the craftsman played over the canvas, the spirit of the artist 
 was careering with a poet's flight through space. When he paints 
 the Arab at rest with his horses browsing untethered beside the tent, 
 he is awed by the mysterious grandeur of such a scene, in the desert 
 silence, under the limpid sky where the stars are shining. When he 
 paints him in action, he perceives him as a manifestation of the 
 tameless restlessness of a wandering historical tribe, a being who has 
 never learned to measure and restrain his movements. He always 
 and everywhere confers upon the creature of the Orient the real grace, 
 the distinction of the whole race. And the thoughts of the artist are 
 so overflowing with this subject that frequently he finds the art of 
 painting inefficient before the burden of all he has to express. Then 
 he lays down the palette and seats himself at the table before his ink 
 stand ; he writes charming works about the Orient, where at every 
 line the painter reveals himself through the man of letters, even 
 as his pictures reveal to us without difficulty the literary man in the 
 painter. 
 
 It has often been hinted that FROMENTIN, if he had not been a 
 born painter, might have been an author of eminence. This is com- 
 pletely to misunderstand, in my opinion, the dual faculty of this dis- 
 tinguished spirit. What gives his descriptions of travel their charm 
 and value is not alone the literary style, attractive as it is, but the 
 painter's warm and deep-colored vision added to the written part. A 
 writer, pure and simple, would have turned out a more finished 
 literary form ; but a painter only could, by his clairvoyance of the 
 image to be shown and by the pictorial color of his style, double the 
 
 65
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 charm of a literary work with that of a painted one, and complete the 
 literature with the picture. 
 
 When one had examined the pictures of FROMENTIN, his person 
 could not in any way surprise one ; it was just as I had preconceived 
 the artist that I found him, when, for the first time, but towards the 
 close of his career, I paid him a visit in his studio in the rue Pigalle. 
 He was just the correct and distinguished man represented by his 
 peculiar form of art, the painter who had passed a great part of his 
 life in the solitudes of Africa, and who had brought back from those 
 long absences, devoted to contemplation, the reticence of the Oriental. 
 He talked little, like the members of the race who inspired his pic- 
 tures. The tribes who live in the solitude of those vast spaces 
 absorb with age the silence which surrounds them. Their liveliness 
 is not noisy like ours ; they know by experience that they could not 
 fill the mighty distances with their own echoes. A contemplative 
 life makes man taciturn at the same time that it naturally gives 
 him the need to centre in himself. Among these tribes the internal 
 sensation is more intense than ours, without betraying itself by 
 abundance of speech or exuberance of gesture. We may establish 
 the truth of this observation among our own peasantry, who become 
 less excitable in proportion as the scenery of their lives becomes more 
 majestic. 
 
 From his long journeys in the Orient, where FROMENTIN had 
 passed years in contemplation of his surroundings, the painter 
 had brought back to France the silence of the Arab. His words 
 were well weighed and deliberate, his gestures measured, his voice 
 was low ; he would shut himself up in the studio, where the light was 
 admitted by one lofty window, letting the artist nurse his Oriental rec- 
 ollections without being disturbed by the sight of the Paris throng 
 passing his house. The quantities of studies in his work-room bore 
 witness to the assiduity of his toil. He had observed the Arab among 
 his surroundings, and in company with his faithful friend the horse ; 
 no one has rendered with more felicity the Arab steed in the grace of 
 his action. Whether resting or galloping in open space, the Eastern 
 horses of FROMENTIN perfectly show their race, with their delicate 
 ankles, their bearing so alert, their hides like a changeable silk, and 
 their proud carriage of the little head on the broad, powerful chest. 
 
 66
 
 EUGENE FROMENTIN 
 
 It is all, perhaps, a trifle more delicate than nature, a little more at- 
 tractive than the stark fact ; but can an artist be blamed for giving of 
 his own ideality, his inseparable faculty of discernment, to the work 
 he executes? In FROMENTIN the draughtsman caught the most 
 admirable movements ; the colorist saw the matter with his choice 
 sense of hue ; and the poet, for his part, added some mysterious, 
 delicious reverie to the compositions borne off from the suggestions 
 of actuality. See The Camp, for instance ; you fancy you hear the 
 melancholy songs of the Arabs mixed with the whinnyings of the 
 horses feeding unbridled. Africa inspired the painter with enthusiasm, 
 not only for painting ends, but he breathed its poetry and got it into 
 his canvas ; and that is just the essence of charm in the incantations 
 of our charmer. 
 
 The Orient of FROMENTIN gives me an excellent opportunity to 
 speak of the Orient of FORTUNY, who was represented, he too, by 
 several Arab scenes at the Exposition of the Hundred Masterpieces. 
 The celebrated Spanish painter only valued the East as a pretext for 
 his exercises of inimitable legerdemain, which no one has ever sur- 
 passed. But he looked at Africa as an instrument for him to play on, 
 and in consequence he never saw but the surface. These works of 
 his are masterpieces of execution, we agree, and by this execution is 
 explained the amazement with which they were greeted on first 
 appearing. But they are only what may be called the fugitive first 
 impression, attached to a canvas by a painter to whom difficulties of 
 work were but sport. To graduate the attainment of these two 
 Orientalists, I would say that they played the same morsel on the 
 same instrument, but in two very different fashions. The Spanish 
 wonder executed giddy variations on a melody which the French 
 master played simply with his whole soul. We stand amazed before 
 the prodigious ability of FORTUNY ; we stand enchanted by the pene- 
 trating accents of FROMENTIN. The Gate of the Alhambra, by FOR- 
 TUNY, is a miracle of execution ; The Arab Family on a Journey, by 
 FROMENTIN, is a master-work of sentiment. 
 
 The reader will discover, without my insisting on it further, the 
 difference between these two styles inspired in the same scenery. 
 With FORTUNY the precision of eye is irreproachable, and the hand 
 never has a moment of hesitation. With FROMENTIN we find these
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 qualities, too, but deepened by the poet's thought, by that profound 
 impression which Africa had left within his soul, and from whose 
 trace his slightest work could not be free. 
 
 Still, we should run the risk of being unjust to the memory of 
 FORTUNY if we did not recollect that death had mown down his 
 days at an early stage, whereas FROMENTIN arrived at the maturity 
 of life, and was permitted to utter the last expression of which his 
 style was capable. 
 
 If scenery holds a preponderating place in the works of FROMEN- 
 TIN it is because before becoming one of the most distinguished genre 
 painters in French art he commenced by devoting himself to land- 
 scape. His professor in this style was an excellent artist, M. Louis 
 CABAT, now director of the French Academy at Rome ; it is respect- 
 ful to mention him here, though his pupil resembles him in nothing. 
 FROMENTIN is one of those predestinate artists who give an indi- 
 vidual mark to their work. He has been a good deal imitated, but he 
 imitates no predecessor, and it is indeed on that account that his 
 grade is marked with such distinctness among the best of his time. 
 He is, to give him his right name, one of the enchanters. 
 
 Those who estimate the value of a work of art from the scale of 
 the figures used often to blame FROMENTIN for always restricting his 
 works to small proportions ; just as if such and such a tale of MER- 
 IME" E'S, for instance, was not worth a novel of several volumes by some 
 one else. But even if we admit that FROMENTIN himself condemned 
 as inferior his figures of grand dimensions, is it not a proof of the 
 fine sense of an artist when he recognizes and judges his own faculty 
 and conforms himself to it ? Nor is what is called grand art always 
 large art. It was not the comprehension of vast dimensions which 
 this choice spirit lacked. FROMENTIN wrote, about the Masters of 
 Yore, a volume of studies which shows how thoroughly his mind was 
 open to the grand works of past centuries. He was content to admire 
 them, without attempting to imitate them. 
 
 68
 
 Charles-Francois Daubigny 
 
 [UEEN of the Fays, Destiny often reserves her richest 
 surprises for the artist ; but her last endowment, and 
 the best of them all, is in conferring on the painter the 
 power of keeping to the close the illusions of his youth. 
 CHARLES-FRANCOIS DAUBIGNY was one of these 
 fairies' nurselings. At sixty years he was as young in spirit as when 
 he dipped into the simplest elements of his art, under the guidance 
 of his father, the distinguished miniature painter of the French Res- 
 toration. It is to the dweller in the open air, in the perpetual 
 strengthening contact with nature, that this freshening of the ideas 
 arrives, flowering anew with every springtime. DAUBIGNY was, with 
 ROUSSEAU and COROT, and with the still surviving JULES DUPR, 
 a lover of those banks of the Oise where a great part of his life flowed 
 along; more than the others, DAUBIGNY has made us the intimates 
 of that delightful region, where ROUSSEAU only painted a few of his 
 works, but where the whole glory of DAUBIGNY may be said to 
 repose. He loved them so that he chose to live there all his life. 
 His house at Auvers was well known. There was always a cordial 
 welcome, but it was better to let him know of your visit beforehand, 
 or you ran a great risk of not finding him at home. With the dawn 
 of day he would disappear, embarking in his boat, and letting himself 
 float away at the will of the stream ; when he met a new site, when 
 nature showed him an unexpected aspect, the boat was anchored in 
 the middle of the rivulet, and in a few hours the landscape painter 
 had seized, as it were, on the wing the impressions of the scene. We 
 might say that all his pictures were thus the intoxications of his 
 
 69
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 instants of enthusiasm, the moments when the brain of the artist was 
 enfevered by nature. He was a marvelous improvisator, and his 
 finest pictures, those to which the highest value was attached by the 
 best judges, were thus touched off in the heat of the first impulse. 
 
 The dwellers on the banks of the Oise and the Seine knew him 
 well. The ambulant landscape painter was more especially designated 
 by the title of the " Captain," a rank which vastly flattered him, for 
 by dint of living on the water he had acquired a sailor's roughness 
 and a sailor's pride in good navigation. The boat used by DAUBIGNY 
 was arranged for long voyages ; the cooking was done on board ; 
 there was a good wine cellar ; you drank deep and you worked hard. 
 The sketches accumulated ; and when winter was come, DAUBIGNY 
 returned to Paris provisioned with the booty of art and nature, the 
 landscapes which, towards the close of his life, collectors and dealers 
 battled for. How many times I have seen him thus, in his latter 
 days, when his hair had grown white, mild and grave, good-naturedly 
 gratified and wearied at the same time by the throng of visitors, per- 
 fectly affable, but inflexible, and dismissing an intruder with some 
 whimsical bit of rudeness when he was attacked in his artistic pride ! 
 Little adapted for social civilities, DAUBIGNY regretted the good old 
 times when the dealer stole discreetly into the painter's studio and 
 carried off his purchase at a reasonable price ; but he was forced to 
 capitulate with modern customs and keep his studio open to the 
 invaders one day in the week. From nine o'clock in the morning the 
 procession began, and we may own that for DAUBIGNY it was a 
 veritable torture ; the collectors would usually pass blindly the 
 sketches of pictures to which the artist properly gave the greatest 
 value ; the dealer always asked for the same thing, and caused to 
 glisten in his eyes the money question, which, after all, had its im- 
 portance. Upon which the haughty artist, irritated in his very 
 marrow, cried out one day before the awe-struck visitors : 
 
 " Let me alone. The best pictures are the unsalable ones !" 
 This phrase deserves, in my opinion, a long discussion. It tells 
 all in a few words ; the artist's rebellion against fashion, which tried 
 to force him into one eternal style, and the artist's style which refused 
 to recognize the public vogue as the adequate compensation of a 
 painter. He would not deem that the appreciation of a work of art 
 
 70
 
 CHARLES-FRANCOIS DAUBIGNY 
 
 might rest on any other consideration than art-quality. What ! there 
 were then marketable picures and pictures not marketable ? Alas ! 
 yes, and the proof was that magnificent large-scale canvases remained 
 on the artist's hands, while people struggled to get others of a more 
 cheerful aspect which were not their equals. 
 
 All this perplexed the " Captain," who was not really happy except 
 when in his boat, afar from man. When young a journey to Italy 
 was DAUBIGNY'S dream ; but he came back very much confused, 
 bringing home nothing worth while from his inspection of the picture 
 galleries. In the scenery of his native land, which revealed itself the 
 more seductively to his mind because he had long been separated 
 from it, DAUBIGNY found instantly his proper path; this path was in 
 the ground just under his eye, in the charm of the sun-bright stream- 
 let, or in the mysterious beauties that came on with the night when 
 nature is penciled in its grand outlines. At twenty-three years of age 
 success arrived, never more to forsake him. The public was struck 
 by the novel and perfectly individual note struck by the artist, by the 
 tender accuracy of his color and by the energy of his handling. He 
 brought to landscape painting the realistic keynote in the best sense 
 of the term that is to say, the matching of real objects by a deeply 
 felt stroke, so that, with each new sensation, freshly breathed in the 
 presence of nature, he shifted his art; in one picture, where the 
 painter has paused to smile at the perfect grace of a landscape, his 
 painting is full of the lambent flatteries which accompany a beam of 
 the sun in the springtime ; in another, where the artist has found 
 himself astounded before the grandeur of a scene as in the admirable 
 view of the Chateau Gaillard\it rises to the calm height of greatest 
 art; when the landscape had struck him especially by its general 
 planes, he flung it on the canvas in those marvelous sketches which 
 the artist refused to carry on further because he had nothing to add 
 to this massy statement ; at other times he insinuates himself into the 
 details as exhaustively as possible and refines on his work to the 
 utmost limits of execution. In this way the career of DAUBIGNY is 
 based on the simple and truthful art-theory that the handling of a 
 picture ought to reflect the mood felt; that the painter can no more 
 work perpetually in the same style than the writer can employ an 
 unvarying form for the play of his thought. 
 
 7*
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 Yet success did not come without struggles to DAUBIGNY. He 
 conquered it slowly in the succession of picture exhibitions ; he had 
 his ups and downs ; he was energetically contested, and the master- 
 pieces of this master artist seemed to some people only sketches. The 
 public characterized as " unfinished " this free and astonishing mas- 
 tery of execution so long misunderstood. DAUBIGNY let them talk 
 and pursued his way steadily. Was he not the supreme master of 
 his theory ? And by what authority, save that of the endless artistic 
 routine, can an artist be directed to continue his labor when he 
 believes that he has carried it to the pitch desired ? Why force a 
 painter to finish his canvas more highly when he has judged it to em- 
 body his final expression ? It is fundamentally stupid to class works 
 of art as sketches and pictures. There are good things and bad 
 things. Every time that the critic tries to go further than this radical 
 classification in judging a work by a great man he runs the risk of a 
 mistake. 
 
 His pictures followed each other accordingly at the Salon, and for 
 a long time he accompanied them by etchings ; for DAUBIGNY loved 
 this branch of engraving, which in every age has been the passion of 
 genuine artists. It was only towards 1860 that DAUBIGNY, after 
 twenty years of labor, arrived at his complete renown ; then he took 
 definitive rank among the greatest landscape painters of his time. 
 
 Now that the artist felt himself in port, his ambition swelled with 
 his success. Great subjects arose to his mind. Between the pictures 
 called easel pictures, he undertook works majestic in scale while 
 simple in conception, thinking nothing of the sale. It was for himself 
 he worked, for his own artistic satisfaction. And it was of these works, 
 begotten independently of all practical cares, that the old painter cried 
 that the best pictures are the unsalable ones. It made little difference 
 to him. It was for his own private satisfaction and for a protest 
 against the fashion which would have imprisoned him always between 
 the same banks of the Oise that he undertook The Apple Trees in 
 Blossom, The Field of Poppies and The Grand Moonrise, admirable 
 works, which still, by their size or choice of subject, were hard to get 
 rid of. We may declare of DAUBIGNY that, though he always put his 
 whole art in whatever he did, the best part of his soul gushed into 
 these grand works, which were not conceived in view of speculation. 
 
 72
 
 CHARLES-FRANCOIS DAUBIGNY 
 
 Arrived at the maturity of age, admired by all the artists, solicited 
 by collectors, overrun by the dealers, this exquisite artist remained 
 pure and simple ; here is the secret of his juvenility of workmanship, 
 always reflecting the primitive sensation to a degree astonishing in a 
 man arrived among the sixties. THEODORE ROUSSEAU, weary with 
 ill health, made a compromise with his principle of art at the last ; 
 COROT, so long neglected, let himself be tempted, towards his seven- 
 tieth year, into hasty production ; DAUBIGNY, if not the strongest, at 
 least the firmest of them all, aimed at a loftier point of sight the 
 older he grew. He felt real regret in noticing the hasty work of 
 COROT, whom he loved above all others, and blamed him for it with 
 the earnestness of a mortification that was not unmixed with a shade 
 of bitterness. 
 
 On two or three occasions when I found myself in DAUBIGNY'S 
 company in moments of expansion he opened his whole soul, always 
 young, tender and affectionate. Beyond a doubt he was content with 
 the situation he had acquired and the distance he had made. Now 
 he dwelt on the culmination of his career ; he was just ready to touch 
 the happy moment when he could live henceforth for glory, after 
 having assured the future of his family ; he would only paint great 
 canvases, " those which are unsalable." In these intimate unbosom- 
 ings the face of the famous painter was transformed ; his heart 
 warmed itself at the touch of his juvenile ambition, as nature renews 
 consciousness under the spring sunshine. 
 
 It was delightful to note the renewal of youth in a man of his 
 age. With his elbows on the table, DAUBIGNY would rest his chin 
 on his two open hands. He must have been handsome formerly, and 
 even yet his head had that beauty of old age when the eye is thought- 
 ful and tender, which is like the radiance of a fine soul. The unlucky 
 rheumatisms which he had caught on the river, from living in damp 
 situations, had engraved the gentle face with deep lines of pain ; the 
 disease from which he so suffered was always coming back to the 
 charge after a moment's respite, and was bound to get the better of 
 the resisting powers of the famous artist ; he grew old in advance of 
 his age. In the midst of pain he did not lose sight of his art, the art 
 which had kindled the adolescent, which had been the abiding thought 
 of the man, whose mind was still musing on novel effort at the time 
 
 73
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 when the body was already laid low. We remember the last word of 
 GOETHE, who died with the cry for "Light!" DAUBIGNY, on his 
 deathbed, uttered an expression which deserves to go down to pos- 
 terity, for it was the representative voice of a painter going into 
 eternity with a final thought of that which was the aim of his life. 
 The great landscape painter crowned his long, fine career with an 
 admirable saying, depicting the artist better than the critic could do in 
 undertaking to celebrate him. We are told that, at the last hour, a 
 dying person will see instantaneously the whole life he has lived, as in 
 a mirror of the past. The end of DAUBIGNY seems like a confirma- 
 tion of this notion. He did not deceive himself as to the approaching 
 result ; he faced it without weakness, without bravado, or rebellion, 
 or discouragement at the eternal problem of death. Among his last 
 spasms for breath, his thoughts sought his rivals in renown who had 
 gone before him. 
 
 " Adieu," he said, " adieu, I am going to see up there whether 
 friend COROT has found me any new subjects for landscape painting." 
 
 In this final thought for his art the last sigh of DAUBIGNY was 
 drawn. Thus, at forty years' distance, death, which struck him down 
 in 1878, found the artist of seventy still thinking of artistic discovery, 
 as at the epoch of his first contribution to the Salon, which was 
 as early as 1838. Death seemed to the great artist the great libera- 
 tion ; and he died with a smile, in the hope of a new life where, 
 among his famous friends, he could finally realize the dream of his 
 ambition and paint the pictures that never should be sold. 
 
 74
 
 A. G. Decamps 
 
 ITHOGRAPHY, when introduced in France under the 
 Restoration, set all the artists burning with a perfect 
 passion for so novel a vehicle. The fatty body of the 
 lithographic chalk gave startling effects on the stone ; 
 and, better still, no middleman came between the 
 artist's inspiration and his executive in reproducing his work. It was, 
 thanks to lithography, that RAFFET, for example, among many 
 others, was able to throw off, on stone, the innumerable compositions 
 which made his name famous and his talent popular. Thanks to it 
 again, GAVARNI was able to reveal himself as an unapproached 
 master in his line. No engraver, however able he may be, can give 
 in a copy the impulsive charm of the design executed by the artist 
 himself. The mechanical processes by which lithography has been 
 killed have only half filled its place. They give you, if you will, the 
 exact reproduction of the work, but without the artist's feeling, com- 
 municated to the stone over which his crayon played in the creative 
 fever. Born in 1803, the young DECAMPS found in the lithographic 
 process a field open to his imagination and a resource for his 
 slender, youthful purse. Like every predestinated artist, the taste for 
 art had come to him without effort, if it was not in resisting the 
 instruction in artistic vice which he received, first from a humble 
 painter, M. BouCHOT, next from ABEL DE PUJOL, who was really 
 somebody under the Restoration, while waiting to be nobody at 
 all under LOUIS-PHILIPPE. I do not deny the usefulness of a kind 
 of primary education in art ; but, if we will but take notice that the 
 lesson inculcated is always a paltry thing when it is not augmented 
 
 75
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 by a man's individual discoveries, we need only study the lives of the 
 grand painters to whom this work is dedicated to see that not one of 
 their teachers can boast of having had the slightest influence over 
 their careers. 
 
 An artist worthy of the name always feels the stir of grand pass- 
 ing events. DECAMPS felt himself inspired by the Greek struggle for 
 independence, which aroused the emotions of the whole world, while 
 at the same time it evoked in every form of the arts the rage for the 
 Orient. 
 
 With his meagre resources, he hurried off, his head full of antique 
 Greece, his soul burning with ardor for the heroism of Greece in the 
 present. His instinct as a colorist was his salvation, artistically 
 speaking, in this perilous acquaintance, whence a man less gifted, an 
 artist less original, might have brought back some fresh revival of the 
 classical antique. Once in Asia Minor, the art of dreams vanished 
 before the realities of things. DECAMPS saw the modern man of the 
 East in his land of sunshine ; he decided that he was but little like 
 the fanciful Eastern who strutted through academic art with masked- 
 ball costumes on his back. 
 
 His first contribution to the Salon of 1831 had prodigious success. 
 His Turkish scenes had been observed and studied at their home in 
 the presence of the race. It was painting which resembled no one 
 else, no previous style ; it came from the artist's heart, and made a 
 revelation. Never had painter fastened sunshine on canvas with 
 such intensity. It was not made brilliant simply by the lively con- 
 trast of black shadow with the vivid lights, but it glowed in the warm 
 exhalation enveloping the figures and objects. From that moment 
 DECAMPS received his own rank in the group of artists of 1830, as we 
 call them ; he became the chief of a new school which dashed in his 
 train among the enchantments of the East. What gave an additional 
 charm to his work was the peculiar method of the painter, with its fine 
 breadth and an energy so immense that it was proclaimed a miracle. 
 To give greater relief to his white walls, as they basked in the sun, 
 DECAMPS had a way of building them up as it were with his paints ; 
 by a technic of his own invention, he piled up his structures in tmpasto, 
 allowed them to dry, scraped them down with a razor, and scumbled 
 his walls with glazes, taking clever advantage of all accidents ; it was
 
 A. G. DECAMPS 
 
 a curious manner of working, which while partaking of trickery, really 
 made the walls of DECAMPS'S paintings as solid as masonry. This 
 peculiar manner of painting certain surfaces was much imitated, and 
 COURBET afterwards adopted it, kneading his paint upon the canvas 
 with a palette-knife. 
 
 The Walls of Rome and The Village Street at the exhibition of 
 the Hundred Masterpieces were specimens of this singular method of 
 DECAMPS, as The Coming Out of Schcool in its time was considered 
 the most brilliant specimen of his pictures from the Orient. The 
 fixed predilection which made him recur unceasingly to the Bible for 
 his subjects was shown in The Good Samaritan, which is a remark- 
 able painting. Still the attentive student of the works of DECAMPS 
 is obliged to confess that he sometimes overdoes his violent system of 
 contrasts, showing more vigor than delicacy. This reproach, made 
 occasionally by the critics of his own day, even among the warm 
 praise they awarded him, was especially disagreeable to the artist. 
 DECAMPS, who had one of those energetic faces which you take at 
 first sight for a soldier's, was easily thrown off his balance. Another 
 point which made him suffer was, that less importance was given to 
 his historical compositions than to his Turkish subjects. 
 
 After his first success, DECAMPS was classed permanently as a 
 painter of the Orient. There is no doubt but that his powerful 
 influence was especially marked in the Eastern groups of DIAZ. 
 
 His ideas came to DECAMPS with great facility, and without 
 apparent effort ; they surged up in his sketches with giddy swiftness. 
 As for the painter himself, he was contemplative. He retained a 
 kind of dreamy mood derived from that early youth passed in the 
 fields, and this turn for reverie changed his studies of the modern 
 Orient into figures of Biblical legend. It was painful to him, amid all 
 his success, to be held to the style of Eastern anecdote. Already he 
 had thrown out his famous Battle of the Cimbri, in the midst of his 
 manufacture of little canvases. And now he appeared unexpectedly 
 in the Salon with his admirable charcoal drawings derived from the 
 history of SAMSON, and, a little later, with a series of designs inspired 
 by the New Testament. The artistic success of these veritable gems 
 was not small ; yet the public was less content. The subjects bursting 
 with the sunshine of the East were nearer its intelligence than these 
 
 77
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 austere compositions, among which we should reckon that of SAM- 
 SON burying himself in the ruins of the temple with the Philistines as 
 that in which the soul of DECAMPS uttered its highest aspiration 
 towards grand art. 
 
 Like all the great painters of his set, DECAMPS was quiet and 
 simple. These men were seldom met in the world. The crowd only 
 saw their results. Their personality was shut up in the privacy of 
 their existence. They carried so far the fear of being molested in 
 their originality by reports from without, that they lived hermetically 
 sealed in studios unopened but to the initiated. Like DELACROIX and 
 MILLET, DECAMPS retired afar from Paris ; the solitude of the coun- 
 try charmed and allured him ; there he had got the first scent of the 
 art principle, and it was his constant dream to go back to the home 
 of his earliest youth, perhaps because as an artist he was discontented 
 at not receiving the grand rank of historical painter, perhaps because 
 his mind was world-weary. 
 
 At last DECAMPS exiled himself away from Paris ; he only appeared 
 there on flying visits ; his most intimate friends dared not introduce a 
 stranger ; he had formed the list of his forbears ; nothing would 
 induce him to enlarge it, for any candidate whatever. A part of his 
 life was passed on horseback, all alone in the grand alleys of Fon- 
 tainebleau, followed by those faithful dogs he has so admirably painted. 
 When we pierce to the bottom of these retirements from life on the 
 part of renowned artists, we always find the same reason, the wound- 
 ing of an often exaggerated self-esteem. The place which his contem- 
 poraries had made in their consideration for our painter was not big 
 enough for him. The spotless glory of certain of his rivals molested him. 
 He confessed, in a sort of autobiographical screed, that one of his 
 friends, the Baron d'lvry, had the power to draw him out often from 
 his apathy, his disgust. It is a confession explaining the state of his 
 mind and the reason why he isolated himself. But does not this very 
 bitterness plead in favor of the aspiring artist who, instead of batten- 
 ing in the luxury of the praises he had won, was trying to lift himself 
 to something higher than aught he had yet done ? 
 
 Destiny did not choose that this fine artist should have an old age, 
 isolated and desolate. While riding to hounds, a skittish mount 
 belonging to DECAMPS became uncontrollable, and threw him so 
 
 78
 
 A. G. DECAMPS 
 
 violently against a tree that the painter died three hours after the acci- 
 dent. French art of the first half of our century bears inscribed the 
 name of DECAMPS in its Peerage, to complete the roll of the elect of 
 born painters those who cause the " phalanx of 1830 " to be owned as 
 one of the finest groups of superior artists of which any epoch can 
 boast. 
 
 79
 
 Constant Troyon 
 
 COUNTED in this admirable group of painters, which 
 throws such lustre on French art, are men of foremost 
 rank in every style. Historical painters, character 
 painters, landscape painters, imaginative painters, men 
 of fantasy and men of mind, technists of the palette 
 and single-hearted observers of nature all these men form in their 
 assemblage a kind of quintessence of the art-spirit of France. In 
 these rapid sketches the reader has successively seen what kind of 
 second and third-rate professors have secured in the eye of history 
 the glory of attending to the early lispings of our heroes. The latter, 
 without exception, formed themselves by the direct contact of nature, 
 not till after having shaken off the influences which weighed upon 
 their unfortunate youth. I have named one by one the subalterns 
 charged with the primary artistic education of these painters, all des- 
 tined to show the mark of genius in one kind or another. The first 
 instructor of TROYON was named RIOCREUX, a feeble light, like all 
 those pretenders who thought they could subdue to their own glimmer 
 the great stars which were rising over French art. Like JULES 
 DUPRE", the grand animal painter TROYON passed his first youth in a 
 porcelain factory ; like that fine landscapist, he played the prelude to 
 his glory with just the kind of work which contradicts grand art by its 
 timorous industry. The superb executant of innumerable master- 
 pieces grew pale over his dishes until the day when he divined his real 
 mission and took his flight. 
 
 CONSTANT TROYON was not twenty years of age when he bade 
 an eternal farewell to the Sevres factory. Where should he go? 
 
 80
 
 CONSTANT TROYON 
 
 Straight ahead, without any settled course ; everywhere that Nature 
 revealed herself to his young intelligence he made halt. When he felt 
 hungry, he offered his services to the first potter whom he encountered 
 on his route, and as soon as he had earned a few weeks' freedom at 
 this humble toil, he grasped again his staff and his color-box and 
 marched further on. Now workman and now artist, he appealed in 
 this fashion to the modest taskwork of the china painter for the means 
 to await the day when he should be a real artist. 
 
 Thus we find for all these men the same kind of boyhood, dis- 
 turbed by the struggle for the daily crust. With the exception of 
 DELACROIX and COROT, they were all forced to conquer from 
 privation the right to shed the loftiest artistic glory over their native 
 land. TROYON, for his part, only caught at a rather late date the 
 perception of his true pathway. There is nothing in his first manner 
 which could make us foresee the rank he was one day to assume ; his 
 paintings bore trace for many years of the painful labor of designing 
 on porcelain, as the slave who has fought out his liberty carries the 
 scars of the bamboo which used to plough his flesh. It needed ten 
 years of TROYON'S life to make him forget what had been taught him 
 as a lad ; it was only little by little and very slowly that the artist was 
 able to rid himself of the influences of his teaching at Sevres. 
 
 Success came hesitatingly and painfully. Not to speak of his early 
 landscapes, which do not count in his achievement, the most important 
 canvases passed unnoticed. Life was hard for the young landscape 
 painter. COROT, ROUSSEAU, JULES DUPR, DIAZ and DAUBIGNY 
 marched in the van of the movement. Through the splendors, still 
 disdained, of their painting, MILLET would throw off a landscape, 
 from time to time, in a note of severity and melancholy. TROYON 
 joined in the step, as a conscript takes the road behind a squad of 
 veteran soldiers. The first years of the painter were dogged by 
 poverty, which saturated his spirit with a bitterness from which it 
 never got free. Arrived later, by the evolution of his style, to renown 
 and wealth, TROYON preserved the gloom of these humble beginnings. 
 In this he was at fault. Did he not share the public neglect with the 
 first landscape painters of the age ? Had he suffered more, and more 
 unjustly, than the chiefs of his company ? And then, if I must express 
 my full opinion, would the canvases of TROYON, as a landscapist, 
 
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 grandly brushed as they are, have sufficed to establish his high 
 renown ? It was accident and a journey to Holland which revealed 
 to TROYON his true mission, that of an animal painter of the first 
 rank, supported, this time, by a landscapist of very great talent, but 
 not the equal of the masters. 
 
 With this development of the artist which promptly gave him his 
 rank, success came to him rapidly. At a distance of two centuries 
 TROYON continued the traditions of the celebrated Dutch animal 
 painters without imitating them. PAUL POTTER was to find a suc- 
 cessor worthy of him. In his journey into Holland TROYON had 
 studied the works of the grand master, and he took his line at once. 
 Why had he not perceived before that the art of the animal painter 
 offered inexhaustible resources to his rare endowments as a colorist, 
 while it still allowed him to remain a landscapist of lofty value ? 
 
 The surprise of the public at the advent of a great animal painter 
 was no greater than that of the artist himself at being as universally 
 praised as he had been neglected before. The special line to which 
 TROYON now devoted himself was at that time forgotten ; it only sur- 
 vived in two celebrated Belgians, KOEKKOEK and VERBOEKHOVEN, 
 the pets of all Europe, but now already left among the neglected ones, 
 if not among the victims of oblivion ; the one painted little animals in 
 landscapes frigidly brushed, the other was never tired of curling the 
 wool of his lambkins with the tenderness of a barber entrusted with the 
 head of a court beauty ; a finical art in which the childish, pitiful 
 finish took away all the life which existed to a certain extent in the 
 original design. Fancy the astonishment at the sight of TROYON'S 
 animals, with their large life, their broad brush-work in deep, pure 
 colors, studied with a discriminating sympathy for every race and 
 species, and moving through landscapes of a master's creation. These 
 were not the fashionable stuffed beasts, but living, moving herds, 
 stretching themselves luxuriously in the sun, breathing the breezes cool 
 with morning, or huddling close together at the approach of the storm. 
 The great technical skill of TROYON, his matchless control of his 
 craft, allowed him to grapple with all the effects of nature. In one of 
 his subjects exhibited among the Hundred Masterpieces he has painted 
 a rainbow struck out from clouds charged with electricity, while on 
 the other side the burst of sunshine falls upon a grand red spotted 
 
 82
 
 CONSTANT TROYON 
 
 heifer enjoying the warm rays. The Cow at the Drinking Place, with 
 The Valley of the Toucques, or The Ferry, are so many masterpieces 
 of the style, bespeaking TROYON'S vivid power, his enthralling charm 
 as a colorist. 
 
 This new line, then, began the true career of TROYON, which was 
 to make him so illustrious. Money commenced to pour in, too, along 
 with honor, yet without consoling the painter for the poverty and 
 neglect of the past. Bitterness became one of his habits, and he 
 made his years of experiment responsible for their gropings and the 
 difficulty of his quest ; his mind always dwelt on his earlier times, 
 when he used to sit drawing on the side of the road, cursing the 
 heartless fate which was always calling him off from his art dream to 
 involve him in the struggle for daily bread. Arrived at the height of 
 his position, the little china painter of yesterday never could forgive 
 the troubles of the former years ; they were always coming up in his 
 conversation, with a strongly marked resentment towards his epoch. 
 In this, TROYON, in fact, showed himself simply what he was, the 
 painter whose qualities were closed up in his art, and who outside of 
 art had not the balanced character capable of looking at things from 
 aloft. Personally I had not the advantage of knowing the famous 
 animal painter, but I learn from the friends who lived with him that 
 TROYON, beyond his painting, could bring no philosophy of discern- 
 ment to his views of life. It was useless to try to comfort him in 
 praising extravagantly the splendid position he had attained, he carried 
 the conversation incessantly back to his days of penury, and he 
 frankly advanced the idea that his contemporaries only redeemed a 
 small part of their wrongs towards him (TROYON) in overwhelming 
 him now with gold and honors. 
 
 Undoubtedly it would have been more dignified, and even more 
 just, to refrain from traveling eternally over those years of effort ; but 
 so was TROYON constituted. It was his nature to dwell on a fixed 
 idea ; the recognition coming from all quarters was only his due ; he 
 could not put it to the credit of his contemporaries ; he had been so 
 long in the struggle that he fancied success and prosperity might again 
 leave him in the lurch. We might even discover, perhaps, at the 
 bottom of this morbid nature an exaggerated attribution of genius to 
 himself. It was thus that he took measures in his lifetime for assur- 
 
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 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 ing his name an immortality in establishing a prize, bearing the name 
 of TROYON, and pledging to the successful competitor among the 
 young animal painters the means of working in peace for a term of 
 years. 
 
 Over the death of TROYON there has been formed a legend pre- 
 tending that he was killed by disease resulting from the poverty of his 
 youth. There is no truth in this. The admirable painter of animals 
 had only to blame his own exacting temperament if death mowed him 
 down towards his sixtieth year, when all the other grand artists, whose 
 sufferings had been as sore and even greater than his own, were for- 
 getting the first troubles with the first success. A man does not die 
 of poverty after he has finally bidden it farewell for more than twenty 
 years. TROYON died comparatively young because his temperament 
 killed him by overreaching itself in everything, good as well as evil. 
 He worked too much and tormented himself too much ; he indulged 
 himself more than was proper with the joys of life ; and that is the 
 reason he died at an age when, with more self-balance, he might have 
 seen before him long years of production and celebrity. 
 
 8 4
 
 Antoine Louis Barye 
 
 >NTIMATELY associated with the great phalanx of 
 genius so sympathetically and instructively considered 
 by M. WOLFF was one who in his own region of art 
 stood second to none that then was or that had gone 
 before. This was BARYE, the greatest and, in his 
 time, the most misunderstood genius of the century. Inasmuch as a 
 not indifferent opportunity is afforded to know the work of the great 
 sculptor, it will be interesting to note what that accomplished critic, 
 M. GUSTAVE PLANCH^, wrote of him in 1854, when there were yet 
 to be unfolded over twenty years of his glorious career. 
 
 jOR twenty years BARYE'S works have been before the 
 eyes of the public; they are numerous, and deservedly 
 admired, but notwithstanding this, no one has yet taken 
 the trouble to study them as a whole. I am going to 
 try to fill that vacuum. M. BARYE'S talent is at the present time 
 in the fullness of its maturity, but he has not spoken his last word. 
 Notwithstanding its continuance and its diversity, it is to be doubted 
 if he stops at the point he has attained. Therefore, what I will 
 say of his collective work must not be considered as final. Is it 
 necessary to add that I do not pretend, in expressing my own opinion, 
 to anticipate that of posterity ? In a case like this, modesty is always 
 prescribed by good sense. If I venture at present to form an opinion, 
 it is because M. BARYE'S talent, without being false to its origin, has
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 nevertheless already undergone a succession of transformations ; and 
 that there is in these same transformations matter for interesting 
 study. I am perfectly sure that to this day M. BARYE adheres to the 
 convictions he held twenty years ago ; but in ferreting out with as much 
 ardor the secrets of nature, which he took as a model and a guide, 
 he has from year to year found it impossible not to attribute a greater 
 importance and authority to the traditions and to the monuments 
 of ancient art. Of an eminent and progressive mind, and without 
 deserting the principles he adopted in the beginning, he has known, 
 nevertheless, how to profit as well by the teachings of the past as by 
 the living models placed before his eyes. Between the Lion exhibited 
 at the Louvre in 1833 and the Combat of the Lapithtz and Centaur 
 that we have admired this year, there is a great difference of style, 
 though the author in the latter as in the former work has compelled him- 
 self to strive against nature. To me it seems useful to trace the path 
 he followed from the start to the point now reached. 
 
 The Lion exhibited at the Louvre in 1833 raised a hue and cry of 
 astonishment among the partisans of academic sculpture. Soon anger 
 took the place of astonishment ; for the public, in spite of all the re- 
 monstrances addressed to it by the professors, and by all those who 
 swore by their theories, obstinately praised M. BARYE as an artist as 
 bold as he was skillful. It was in vain they kept repeating that this 
 was not true sculpture ; it paid no heed to these noisy disclaimers, and 
 when reproached with ignorance, answered by crowding round this 
 new work. When the model was purchased by the civil list, and cast 
 with uncommon accuracy from the wax by HONOR GONON, and 
 placed in the Tuileries, it was said that an artist, known of old for the 
 unalterable inflexibility of his principles, exclaimed with ingenuous 
 anger : " Since when have the Tuileries become a menagerie ? " There 
 is in this outburst, which I did not hear with my own ears, but which 
 was repeated to me by a man worthy of trust, every element of a 
 judicious and complete criticism. Under the appearance of ridicule 
 there lies a hidden admiration, of which it is itself unconscious ; even 
 anger does involuntary homage to the power of talent. The lions 
 which we are in the habit of seeing in our parks, the lions placed in the 
 Tuileries, on the side of the Place de la Concorde, have nothing in 
 common with the lions of the menagerie. They are nameless figures, 
 
 86
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 bedecked with Louis XIV. wigs, that are far from recalling the mon- 
 arch of the forest. This type of the lion gloriously inaugurated by M. 
 PLANTARD, and multiplied ad tnfinitum by his pupils, are termed, in 
 architectural language, ornamental lions. To endeavor to imitate with 
 the boaster the roaring lion, who with glistening eyes and bristling mane 
 watches and then devours its prey, was an act of disrespect towards 
 that blessed type. There was, therefore, some irreverence in M. 
 BARYE'S daring, and the ingenuous character of the anger I was 
 describing just now needs no explanation. 
 
 M. BARYE'S lion clutches a serpent in its fangs and is preparing to 
 devour it. The expression of the eye, the movement of the shoulders, 
 the whole attitude of the figure, concur admirably in the expressiveness 
 of the subject. No one can mistake the author's meaning. The 
 looker-on has before him what he might see in a menagerie. Not- 
 withstanding the unusual intelligence of this grouping, and though the 
 eye glances under the axilla of the lion whereas it should be on a level 
 with the shoulder, all the parts of the model are executed with such 
 learned precision, there is in the reproduction of all the details so much 
 delicacy and skill, that the sight of the work is productive of a kind of 
 horror. I am not in fear, though, of its acting upon the women of 
 Paris as the Eumenides of ^Eschylus did upon the women of Athens. 
 Yes, in this group, assailed with such violence by the partisans of 
 academic sculpture, and defended by the masses with so much good 
 sense, imitation is carried to its utmost limits. To me it seems impos- 
 sible to go any farther in that direction ; it is a prodigy of energy and 
 accuracy. Still, the rare work does not blind me to the faults with 
 which it is marred. All the details, given with so much cleverness, 
 are too numerous. The suppleness of the limbs, which surprises us 
 with good reason in this palpitating bronze, does not conceal the 
 absence of large masses, which are indispensable to sculpture. The 
 flesh is treated in a masterly way, the muscular contractions are 
 rendered with a prominence leaving nothing to be desired, but the 
 framework is not made with sufficient breadth ; therefore the figure is 
 wanting in masses. It would be useless to dwell upon the marvelous 
 fidelity of the imitation ; this very fidelity, to be complete, imposes 
 upon the sculptor the duty of dividing his figure, whether it be man or 
 lion, into large masses. Unless this imperative duty be fulfilled, art, 
 
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 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 though true, has nevertheless not attained to supreme beauty. In M. 
 BARYE'S group the coat of the principal figure has not been treated 
 with sufficient simplicity ; it would have been better to have effaced 
 part of these details and to have worked boldly at the principal parts. 
 As I said before, the absence of masses forbids our finding in this 
 group, otherwise so admirable, a work of truly monumental character. 
 Notwithstanding the fierce joy expressed in his glance, notwithstanding 
 the strength with which the lion seizes its prey, we realize that the 
 hand which modeled this group is not yet master of all the secrets of 
 art. M. BARYE himself needed no warning to detect the defects 
 I have pointed out; his work was barely finished before he felt, 
 better than any one, all it was wanting in. This group, presenting 
 his conception in a tangible form, opened his eyes, and he saw how 
 long was the road he had to tread before reaching the goal he had 
 dreamed of. 
 
 However this may be, if M. BARYE had created only the lion ex- 
 posed at the Louvre, he would undoubtedly have acquired the right to 
 hold an exalted rank among modern sculptors, for no one has on such 
 a subject carried the power of imitation to so high a degree ; but he 
 possessed too much foresight to be as easily satisfied as the multitude. 
 Notwithstanding the admiration that welcomed his d6but, notwith- 
 standing the truly legitimate praise won by his first work, he felt that 
 he should, that he could, do still better, in order to make a worthy 
 return for the sympathy he had met with ; he determined to fill the 
 void he found in the expressiveness of his sketch, to obey the condi- 
 tions he had unwittingly violated, and I will easily prove that he kept 
 his word. 
 
 Between the Lion of which I have just spoken and the Lion in 
 Repose that faces it, there is an interval of fourteen years, the latter 
 bearing the date of 1847. The most superficial examination is suffi- 
 cient to demonstrate that in modeling it the author no longer had for 
 realism as exclusive a love as in 1833, and, above all, that he felt the 
 necessity of dividing the figure into larger masses. The shoulders 
 and the thighs are vigorously accentuated, the chine is forcibly delin- 
 eated, the skeleton is indicated with great precision. All in all, this 
 figure has more strength than the first, without being any less supple. 
 The opinion I express here is not the one generally adopted, still I 
 
 88
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 think it to be true. In fact, we must not allow ourselves to be misled 
 by the first impression received from this work. 
 
 If we will step back a few paces to contemplate the outline and the 
 bulk of the figure instead of raking over the details, it seems to me 
 impossible not to admit the superiority of the Lion in Repose over the 
 Lion Holding the Serpent in its Claws. A few steps are sufficient, 
 in fact, to restore all the grandeur, all the truth to the statuary's 
 design. The divisions that Greek art has so firmly established, that 
 she has used so sparingly, that Roman art has so often applied with- 
 out feeling, are recalled by M. BARYE to their pristine meaning ; the 
 Lion of iSjj is a skillful work, the Lion of 1847 is monumental. If 
 HONORS GORTON had cast the second, as well as the first, not a doubt 
 would remain on the subject. 
 
 At this day it is not only the multitude who consult their im- 
 pressions without going to the trouble of analyzing them, but several 
 men of serious mind, whose authority on this subject must be taken 
 into consideration, prefer the first of these works to the second. I 
 state the fact without accepting it as final proof. I trust to the work 
 of time, and I hope it will demonstrate to the most incredulous that 
 the literal transcription of all the details seen in the living model can 
 never authorize us to dispense with the principal divisions established 
 by the schools of ^Egina, of Sycion and of Athens. If the Lion in 
 Repose had even been cast by HONOR GONON, who died several 
 years ago, and who has left no one to take his place, it would never 
 present the same effect as the lion clutching its prey. Even if the 
 metal had reproduced all the meaning of the author, this work 
 would still be distinguished by the voluntary sacrifice of several very 
 lifelike details, but at the same time very unnecessary to the general 
 effect. For my part I accept and admire this voluntary sacrifice, as 
 the proof of a mind initiated in the most delicate secrets of art. To 
 make the Lion of iSSj a very careful eye and a very skillful hand 
 were required ; to make the Lion in Repose, the sharp eye and the 
 skillful hand were not all-sufficient. The new work required something 
 more. A perfect knowledge of the general rules of art and of its 
 facilities, with the courage to sacrifice, is at once one of its rules and 
 one of its means. To apparently neglect, to leave in shadow a part of 
 the object in view to better display the part that should claim the 
 
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 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 attention, is a cunning trick which the most illustrious masters have 
 often put in practice, and their example should not be lost upon us. 
 M. BARYE remembered it, and I am beholding to him for so doing. 
 
 The beginnings of M. BARYE were of the most humble kind, and 
 a knowledge of his early life adds to my admiration of his talent. 
 When I compare what he started from with the goal he has reached, 
 I am compelled to acknowledge how much can be accomplished by a 
 strong will. Born under the Directory, four years before the end of 
 the last century, he was, when thirteen years old, bound as an 
 apprentice to FOURIER, who engraved for goldsmiths the steel moulds 
 used in making the work we call repousst. Thus, when scarcely 
 beyond childhood, M. BARYE was being initiated in the elements of 
 the art which he was soon to acquire in its fullest extent and in all its 
 varieties. The master chosen for him by his father was at this time 
 admitted to be the most skillful by the unanimous consent of his 
 colleagues. It was in FOURIER'S studio that M. BARYE obtained a 
 complete knowledge of all the secrets belonging to the goldsmith's art, 
 from works in niello to the most delicate chasing. He tried in succes- 
 sion all the tests imposed by the Florentine arts of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries. He did not rest satisfied with a sterile contempla- 
 tion of the works, by turn ingenious and bold, of BENVENUTO CELLINI, 
 but he endeavored to cope with that incomparable artist, whose talent 
 renders all imitators hopeless. It would be interesting to collect and 
 examine all the matrices engraved by the young pupil of FOURIER 
 from 1809 to 1817; unfortunately, the most earnest zeal could not 
 succeed in bringing together all these documents. On this subject we 
 are reduced to mere conjecture ; we can but judge of the past by the 
 evidence of the present ; that is to say, it would be better not to make 
 the attempt. Though I have not at hand a single stamp engraved by 
 the pupil of FOURIER, I do not think it unnecessary to make mention 
 of this first apprenticeship here, as these obscure studies which seemed 
 destined to make of BARYE but a skillful mechanic have borne most 
 glorious fruit. In 1819 the Ecole des Beaux- Arts gave, for competi- 
 tion in engraving in medals, Milo of Crotona, and FOURIER'S young 
 pupil did not hesitate to enter the ranks. I have before me this work 
 of 1819, the first to make an epoch in the life of M. BARYE, the first 
 that has left an indelible impression, and I think I can safely say that 
 
 90
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 it has all the attributes that in later years have confirmed the popular- 
 ity of his talent. 
 
 The subject handled in the seventeenth century by PIERRE PUGET 
 with so much vim and energy was understood with marvelous 
 accuracy by FOURIER'S pupil. The lion biting the thigh of the 
 athlete is rendered with a capacity rarely met with in the pupils of the 
 Academy. The head and the attitude of Milo eloquently express the 
 struggle of courage against pain. The stamp of M. BARYE, notwith- 
 standing the approbation of all connoisseurs, was awarded only 
 honorable mention and a medal of encouragement. The first prize 
 was adjudged to M. VATINELLE. 
 
 The following year 1'Ecole des Beaux-Arts proposed for the prize 
 in sculpture, Cain Cursed by God after the Murder of Abel. M. 
 BARYE, who had passed just one year in Bosio's studio, was received 
 en loge that is to say, admitted to competition. His figure, which 
 bore at once the impress of shame and of anger, received the second 
 prize. The first was given to M. JACQUOT. In 1821 the school 
 selected as a subject of competition, Alexander Besieging the City 
 of the Oxydraquce. M. BARYE again placed himself in the lists; 
 the first prize was given to M. LEMAIRE. In 1822, Joseph's Coat 
 Brought to Jacob by his Brethren. M. BARYE competed for the 
 third time, and the prize was given to M. SEURRE, Jr. In 1823, 
 Jason Bearing away the Golden Fleece. No prize. The following 
 year M. BARYE was not even admitted to competition, and he left the 
 school. 
 
 This rapid laying down of facts is not without interest. Messieurs 
 VATINELLE, JACQUOT, LEMAIRE and SEURRE, crowned by the 
 fourth class of the Institute, are enjoying at present a most legitimate 
 obscurity ; M. BARYE, rejected after five years of laborious work, has 
 found the way of attracting and compelling attention. Where is the 
 stubborn memory that can recall at this day the gross and lascivious 
 women, loaded with necklaces and bracelets, sent to the Louvre by 
 M. JACQUOT, and his full-length portrait of LOUIS-PHILIPPE, whose 
 royal mantle resembles a leaden cope ? Where are the admirers of 
 the pediment of the Madeleine ? To the erudite I leave the labor of 
 discovering the works of M. VATINELLE. As for the works of M. 
 SEURRE, Jr., I have never heard of their being subjected to criticism ; 
 
 9 1
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 insignificant and vulgar, they offend the principles of no school and are 
 protected by the most perfect neglect. 
 
 From 1823 to 1831 M. BARYE employed all his time. in modeling 
 animals for M. FAUCONNIER, a jeweler enjoying then a certain 
 celebrity. Without permitting himself to be discouraged by the 
 rewards showered upon his comrades, he accomplished the obscure 
 task that fell to his lot. Hope sustained him ; he felt that the hour of 
 justice could not fail to come. These eight years of assiduous labor 
 have left nothing more to mark them than the five years spent with 
 FOURIER. M. FAUCONNIER is the only one who could tell us how 
 many ingenious works, how many graceful or bold figures sprung into 
 life under the boaster of M. BARYE. His is the only testimony we 
 can rely upon, and M. FAUCONNIER is not here no answer. Thus it 
 is that M. BARYE has passed through many trials before obtaining 
 popularity. When his name was for the first time given to the public, 
 I mean to the multitude which takes little interest in the Academy 
 competitions, he was thirty-five years old, and for twenty-two years he 
 had unceasingly studied every branch of his art. An engraver of 
 matrices for jewelers, an engraver of medals, a modeler of animals 
 and of a few figures that were multiplied without acknowledging his 
 name, he did not once grow despondent of the future, and the good 
 judgment of the public, endorsing the opinions of the connoisseurs, 
 has taken upon itself to justify this confidence. The laborious work 
 of M. BARYE must be offered as an example to all impatient souls 
 who complain of being misunderstood. Here is a man whose worth 
 is to-day made manifest to all, who had to work for twenty-two years 
 before seeing his way ; who saw JACQUOT, LEMAIRE, SEURRE and 
 VATINELLE preferred by the Academy, and who, though aware of his 
 own merit, never thought of complaining of his judges. Excluded 
 from the competitions after four trials which left no doubt as to the 
 extent of his knowledge, he did not then throw the helve after the 
 head ; he had promised himself that sooner or later the public would 
 do him justice, and, in waiting for the day of retribution, his only 
 thought was to perfect his studies. Pride did not blind him. He 
 felt that he was superior to MM. VATINELLE, JACQUOT, SEURRE 
 and LEMAIRE ; but he was also aware of how much remained 
 to be learned before he could present his ideas to the public. 
 
 92
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 The animals that were modeled for M. FAUCONNIER, none of 
 which I have seen, obliged M. BARYE to study with equal care the 
 habits as well as the forms of the figures he had to represent. For 
 eight years he watched, he learned all the instincts which to-day give 
 life to his compositions. He initiated himself, to satisfy the require- 
 ments of his art, into all the mysteries the learned seem to arrogate to 
 themselves as a sacred patrimony denied to the profane. From the 
 gazelle to the panther, from the humming-bird to the condor, there is 
 not a chapter of BUFFON with which M. BARYE is not familiar. He 
 studied the entire succession of animals before attempting to repro- 
 duce them. Therefore, when he was enabled to shake off the yoke of 
 obscurity, when he could put his signature to his own works and sub- 
 mit them to public judgment, he found himself in possession of a 
 knowledge so diversified, so well tested that he made light of all 
 other difficulties. He no longer groped his way, he had himself opened 
 the path he was to follow; he was thoroughly acquainted with the 
 peculiarities of the models he undertook to reproduce ; he was from 
 this time protected against all doubt ; he was going to reap the fruit 
 of his perseverance. 
 
 The groups composed by M. BARYE for the Duke of Orleans, and 
 destined to form the principal part of an epergne, have a value far 
 beyond the uses they were destined for. This sort of work is gene- 
 rally entrusted to workmen of more or less skill ; it is rare to order 
 them of artists worthy of the name. Provided the different parts of 
 an epergne are well cast and well finished, the purchaser usually de- 
 clares himself satisfied. The Duke of Orleans had the happy thought 
 of applying to M. BARYE, and left him free to choose his subjects as 
 well as the disposition of the pieces ; this intention, suggested by a 
 judicious taste, was not faithfully carried out. M. BARYE composed 
 nine groups, of which five are hunting scenes ; the rest of the epergne 
 was entrusted to many different hands. I am not called upon to 
 speak of the epergne as a whole, as it was designed by M. Aiut 
 CHENAVARD. That architecture in this composition held too promi- 
 nent a part is beyond controversy ; that M. BARYE, working untram- 
 meled, in accordance with the original idea of the Duke of Orleans, 
 was capable of producing a work of more elegance, more harmonious, 
 more sensible than the epergne designed by M. CHENAVARD, is a fact 
 
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 useless to demonstrate. My task at present is limited to the study of 
 the nine groups. The subjects chosen by M. BARYE are distinguished 
 both by richness and variety. The Tiger Hunt, the Bull Hunt, 
 the Bear Hunt, the Lion Hunt, the Moose Hunt, afforded him 
 the opportunity of displaying all the knowledge acquired in the last 
 twenty years. 
 
 In the first of these groups the Indian hunters are placed on an 
 elephant and are brandishing javelins. At each side of the elephant a 
 tiger springs and climbs to the assault, the hunters' mount resembling 
 a stronghold. The opinion generally held is that the elephant is for- 
 ever ugly, whatever may be its color or age. I would not attempt to 
 reinstate it by comparing it with the tiger, the lion, or the panther 
 that would be pure folly. It has certainly neither their suppleness nor 
 their elegance ; and still, whatever may be said to the contrary, it has 
 a beauty of its own, the beauty belonging to the evidence of strength. 
 To translate this kind of beauty we must by stolid study prepare our- 
 selves for the difficult task, we must be perfectly conversant with the 
 form, the action and the habits of the elephant. M. BARYE possessed 
 all these requirements ; therefore he solved without difficulty the 
 problem he set himself. There is in the construction of his elephant a 
 precision, a power which leave nothing to be desired. It comes for- 
 ward majestically ; the claws and the teeth of the two tigers, clinging 
 to its flanks as they climb up its sides like a lizard on a wall, make no 
 breach in its thick coat. The two tigers are marvelously supple. 
 There is nothing conventional in their action. It is an action taken 
 from nature, understood with accuracy and rendered with fidelity. 
 They climb with such agility, the hunters must soon feel their sharp 
 claws, their furious teeth, if they do not hasten to attack them vigor- 
 ously ; if their blows are misdirected they are lost. 
 
 The two hunters are not less cleverly handled than the elephant 
 and the tigers. From the top of their living tower they gaze unmoved 
 upon the enemy they are about to strike. Their looks express courage 
 unmixed with fear. The presence of danger animates but does not 
 frighten them. Therefore the Tiger Hunt, considered in the light of 
 invention, is of a style satisfying to the most severe judge, and inven- 
 tion is not the only merit of this work. All the characters taking part 
 in the action, elephant, tigers and hunters, are executed with a care, a 
 
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 ANTOINE LOUI8 BARYE 
 
 patience, that give additional value to the composition. Here spirit 
 does not exclude accuracy. The ignorant keep repeating continually 
 and on all occasions that inspiration is not consistent with accuracy of 
 detail ; it is a maxim well suited to idleness. If it needed refutation, 
 if common sense had not done justice to it long since, the Tiger Hunt 
 of M. BARYE would prove to be a victorious argument. This group, 
 so ingeniously conceived, in which each actor fills so distinct, so con- 
 spicuous a part, where life shows itself under three different forms, 
 equally true, equally taken from nature, is, nevertheless, irreproachably 
 accurate. Each is firmly knit, and there is nothing fanciful in the 
 action. But where is the use of dwelling upon this point ? Has it not 
 been proved long since that the boldest art is consistent with the 
 deepest science? Those who maintain the opposite have excellent 
 reasons for persisting in their opinion, or at the least in their assertion. 
 As they went to work before they had studied every branch of their 
 trade, it is most natural they should accuse science of sterility. Well, 
 let them look upon the works consecrated by long-timed admiration, 
 that have resisted all the caprices of fashion, and they will understand 
 that science, far from interfering with fancy, on the contrary gives it 
 more freedom and more powers, since it places within its reach in- 
 creased and more accurate means. 
 
 The Bull Hunt is not less cleverly composed than the Tiger 
 Hunt. Here is the same boldness of conception, the same delicacy of 
 execution. 
 
 There is much left to the imagination in this work, so true in knowl- 
 edge and in accuracy, and this is not, in our eyes, its least claim to 
 praise. To represent the Bull Hunt with as much elegance, without 
 detracting from the energy which should characterize the scene, it is 
 not sufficient to bring the model before us merely ; we must be able 
 to recall it when out of sight, and add the power of reflection to the 
 testimony of the senses. Such a spectacle can last but an instant. 
 
 The bull bends and vomits a torrent of blood, or the disemboweled 
 horse falls and throws its rider. Therefore it is not a question of copy- 
 ing what is before us, we must be satisfied to see it plainly, and when 
 the time comes for beginning the work, the imagination then enlarges 
 upon the real elements retained by the memory. M. BARYE by a 
 happy privilege has at the same time respected the rights of the imagi- 
 
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 nation and of science. I say by a happy privilege, because it is seldom 
 we find exactness consistent with invention. And still the fine works, 
 the works destined for time, cannot be produced without this con- 
 dition. This assertion does not coincide with the generally received 
 opinion ; is that a reason for not maintaining it ? Every day I hear it 
 said that knowledge stifles the imagination, and this silly nonsense 
 finds many an echo ; so many are interested in accepting it as the 
 truth ! It is such a convenient maxim for idleness ! Voluntary ignor- 
 ance is the first step towards genius ! Nevertheless, I question history, 
 and history answers that the most productive genius never could dis- 
 pense with science. If at the outset he made simple, spontaneous 
 compositions, if he produced unassisted by study, he was not long in 
 admitting that, relying alone upon his own strength, he would soon 
 be obliged to stop, and that he devoted himself to study in order to 
 continue in the lists and assure his own victory. In every branch of 
 the arts I find the same evidence. MOZART, BEETHOVEN, ROSSINI, 
 pre-eminently spontaneous geniuses, were thoroughly conversant with 
 all the secrets of science, and science, far from weakening their im- 
 petus, sustained them and led them at a swifter pace up to the highest 
 summit of art. In poetry I find DANTE and MILTON, who are pos- 
 sessed of all the knowledge of their epoch, and who, notwithstanding 
 this rich burden, found time to write the Divine Comedy and Paradise 
 Lost. In the art of drawing I meet with DA VINCI and MICHAEL 
 ANGELO, who studied all their lives, and who bequeathed us immortal 
 works, and who left this earth still unsatiated with knowledge. 
 
 In the Bear Hunt the cavaliers wear the costume of the time of 
 CHARLES VII., and this costume is executed with much elegance. 
 The horses, vigorous and boldly modeled, recall G^RICAULT'S manner, 
 and it is not the only analogy that can be drawn between the painter 
 and the sculptor. It is with M. BARYE as with the author of the 
 Medusa, the love of truth, sustained by persevering studies, impresses 
 upon each part of the work the stamp of truth, which at first awakens 
 sympathy, and later resists analysis. The bear presents the same 
 difficulty as the elephant, as the ugliness of both these models is 
 equally proverbial. M. BARYE has solved the second problem as 
 successfully as the first. To create a fine horse passes in the eyes of 
 the multitude for an easy task, and still we are driven to the belief 
 
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 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 that the multitude is mistaken, since it so seldom happens that the 
 thing is carried out. It is not sufficient to visit the studs, assist at 
 the races of Chantilly, follow cavalry drills, to succeed in this task 
 said to be so easy; we must begin by the beginning and the 
 beginning, what is it? The anatomy of the horse. G&UCAULT 
 understood it perfectly, and I'Ecorcht (a figure divested of the skin) 
 that he has left us is superabundant proof that it is so. M. BARYE 
 studied it with no less care, and the hunts executed for the Duke of 
 Orleans leave no doubt on that score. He was not satisfied with 
 looking at the horse in motion ; he wished to understand the cause of 
 the action, the attachment of the muscles and the form of the muscular 
 fasciculi, the general skeleton of the model to account to himself, in a 
 word, for all he had observed. This method, so rarely followed, 
 because it is reputed too slow, is nevertheless the only one that leads 
 to the goal. As for the bear, we are not accustomed to think it worthy 
 of sculpture. At the utmost we consent to see it figure in the silver- 
 smith's art. M. BARYE took upon himself to refute this opinion 
 believed in so long, and to prove that there is not in all created 
 nature a model unworthy of art. On each stem of the living scale 
 a practiced eye finds the subject of an interesting work. If beauty is 
 unequally divided among animals, it is allowable to affirm that all 
 forms perfectly understood offer to the statuary as well as to the 
 painter the subject for a glorious effort. Imitated by a skillful hand 
 they acquire a real importance. So the bear even, which, compared 
 with the lion, with the horse, is certainly not handsome, can never- 
 theless, under the boaster or the brush, assume a certain beauty. If 
 the painter or the statuary succeeds in expressing the mixture of force 
 and indolence which composes the character of the model, he is sure 
 to interest us. The bear of M. BARYE fills all these conditions. In 
 the accuracy of the imitation there is nothing literal ; it is life taken on 
 the spot, the bronze breathes. The form is reproduced in a way that 
 is at once so faithful and so free that each motion is in keeping with 
 the action that the author has tried to represent. This is praise that 
 no one will deny to M. BARYE'S group, and the union of fidelity and 
 liberty in imitation which seems to be indispensable to all his works is 
 sufficiently rare for me to take the trouble of pointing it out. 
 
 To say that his horsemen sit well in their saddles, that the horses, 
 
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 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 full of spirit, are worthy of the horsemen, is not sufficient to character- 
 ize the merit of this group. There is a foresight in the disposition of 
 the figures that compose it, a skillfulness that adds new value to the 
 accuracy of the imitation. The form of the horses contrasts success- 
 fully by their elegance with the short and thick-set limbs of the bear ; 
 in this work, which by its proportions seems to belong to genre sculp- 
 ture, there is not a detail brought forth by chance, or represented in 
 an incomplete manner. Everything is reckoned, ordered, and com- 
 bined with as much care as if it were a work executed in lifelike pro- 
 portions. Those who judge the works of the chisel and the brush by 
 their size may consider the work of calculation was carried too far, or 
 at least that it was time lost. Those who only take form and design 
 in account, and for whom size is of no importance, will not fail to 
 admire the method M. BARYE has followed. This lavish care has not 
 chilled his composition. Nothing is done carelessly, everything is 
 expressed and everything is living. 
 
 What I wish to indicate in the three groups I have just analyzed is 
 the astounding variety the author has been able to throw into these 
 compositions. Labor I mean effort is nowhere made evident. To 
 produce seems like play to the author, so easy is it for him to collect 
 all the personages that are to concur in expressing his conception. 
 His models, with whose physiognomy, habits and character he is well 
 acquainted, are obedient to his will, and dispose themselves in a way 
 to conciliate beauty of outline with energy of action. The variety I 
 point to is not only due to the fullness of the imagination ; it depends 
 particularly upon the intelligence, the complete understanding of his 
 subjects. The most fortunately gifted of statuaries would never attain 
 this variety if he did not always have at his command the perfect 
 remembrance of the figures he wishes to put into his works. With a 
 knowledge hastily acquired and badly digested he never could give to 
 the figures the individuality that belongs to them. With M. BARYE 
 variety was not a thing to be wished for, but a necessity. Familiarized 
 as he was with his models, he could not fail in assigning them the 
 expression, the attitudes belonging to them. In the obedient clay he 
 found without effort all the motions he had witnessed and remem- 
 bered ; therefore, the hunts composed for the Duke of Orleans pre- 
 sent to us a succession of living scenes. In them art and science are 
 
 98
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 found combined in such equal measure that we are compelled to 
 admire. 
 
 These groups, so varied and so true, consigned M. BARYE to a 
 place among the most ingenious artists ; but the minds accustomed to 
 feed only on the commonplace are obstinately bent on considering 
 these powerful works as mere pieces of genre. In their eyes, it is true, 
 heroic subjects are the only ones admissible for great works. A cava- 
 lier of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, were it ever so skillfully 
 treated, is deserving of no serious attention ; it is only a pastime, an 
 amusement nothing more! It was, perhaps, as an answer to this 
 hackneyed reproach that M. BARYE decided upon selecting from the 
 heroic period of Greece the subject of a new composition. From the 
 manner in which he presented it, the independence he displayed in the 
 action of his personages, I am led to think that these silly declama- 
 tions were the immediate but not the real cause of his determination. 
 The Combat of Theseus with the Minotaur does not partake of any 
 academic tradition. 
 
 M. BARYE, in presenting it to us, understood the advantage there 
 would be in representing the two figures standing. This disposition 
 enables him to give more breadth to the Minotaur and to establish a 
 more striking contrast between the limbs of the monster and the 
 limbs of the hero. 
 
 The Theseus is full of elegance and nobility; in his movements 
 there is nothing preconceived, nothing studied. He moves and does 
 not pose. His whole body is a model of beauty. The torso and the 
 limbs are expressive at once of strength and energy ; the head, im- 
 pressed with manly vigor, is in perfect keeping with the character of 
 the figure. There is neither in the torso, in the limbs, nor in the 
 head anything that recalls in a servile manner the monuments of 
 antique art. It is, nevertheless, easy to see that M. BARYE is not 
 ignorant of the Theseus of the Parthenon, and that he has often con- 
 sulted it, for the large massing in the torso is inspired by the admirable 
 fragment now placed in the British Museum. In questioning these 
 remains, so full of teaching, M. BARYE made use of a right that no 
 one can dispute him. He freely and boldly profited by the lesson ; he 
 remembered without copying ; and he did not confound docility with 
 impersonality. While accepting the advice of an illustrious master, 
 
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 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 he always remained himself. It was the safest, the most decisive way 
 of proving to those who utter commonplaces, that to raise one's self 
 above genre sculpture it is not necessary to have at one's command a 
 block of marble ten feet high. M. BARYE'S Theseus is not fifteen 
 inches high, and still it is handsome, it is grand in the fullest accepta- 
 tion of the term. 
 
 Let some rich and intelligent man entrust to the author the trans- 
 lation of his conception into life-size proportions, and I am sure the 
 model will lose nothing by the transformation, for there is not in this 
 composition that can be held in the hand a single detail omitted. In 
 a hand-to-hand struggle with Theseus, the Minotaur, whose limbs 
 are entwined with those of the hero, happily contrasts his ponderous 
 strength with the agile strength of his adversary. The bull's head 
 placed upon the human body, breathing forth a wild brutality, 
 seemed destined to make the intelligence and delicacy that animate 
 every feature of Theseus more striking. The spectator, in contem- 
 plating this struggle, knows that the Minotaur will be vanquished, 
 because he feels that Theseus is measuring his blows instead of multi- 
 plying them, and that the monster will soon roll at his feet, stunned 
 and bleeding. 
 
 From the Cain Accursed to the Theseus Victorious, what an im- 
 mense interval ! The work of the youth, energetic and true, was full 
 of promise ; the work of the artist in his maturity realizes all the 
 hopes awakened by the Cain ; a simplicity of gesture, an elegance of 
 execution, a happy choice of harmonious lines, all are found united in 
 this work, so cleverly conceived that the ignorant, looking on it, can 
 say as they would after reading one of LAFONTAINE'S fables : Where 
 is the one among us who could not do as much ? Herein truly lies 
 the distinctive character of all the compositions that recommend them- 
 selves by their simplicity. The labor is so well disguised that each 
 one of the ignorant thinks he can do as much ; but let him take up the 
 boaster or the pen and he will learn its value, and at what price this 
 simplicity, which seems within the reach of every one, was purchased ! 
 
 Angtliquc et Roger furnished M. BARYE with an opportunity to 
 display his talent in an unexpected light in the attitude of graceful- 
 ness. When I say unexpected I am not speaking of enlightened 
 minds, because it is very evident that the expression of strength does
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 not exclude the expression of grace. Moreover, to the masses accus- 
 tomed to circumscribe the development of the mind to a determined 
 circle, the group of Angdlique et Roger had all the charm of the 
 unforeseen. This work, required of M. BARYE by the Duke of 
 Montpensier, but required on the most liberal conditions, since the 
 artist could, by restricting himself to the given dimensions, choose the 
 subject of his work to suit himself, is certainly one of the most 
 ingenious inventions of modern art. Roger, mounted on the Hippo- 
 griff, holds in his arms the beautiful Angilique. I need not recall 
 this episode, borrowed from ARIOSTO'S poem. On this side, as well 
 as beyond the Alps, Orlando Furioso for a long time past has enjoyed 
 a legitimate popularity, and the characters of this admirable book are 
 familiar to every one. My task is limited to characterizing its concep- 
 tion and execution. The genius of ARIOSTO, the first poet of Italy 
 after DANTE, suited the turn of M. BARYE'S mind marvelously well, 
 and the French sculptor, in consulting him, reaped useful lessons from 
 this intercourse. On either side there was the same freedom, the 
 same passion for the flights of fancy. See, therefore, how faithfully 
 the boasting tool has translated the poet's idea ! Angilique, with her 
 full and rounded limbs, exemplifies sensual beauty. Her figure, grace- 
 ful in its strength, is charming and seductive to the eye and to 
 the imagination. She would recall the Flemish types by this richness 
 of form, were it not for the purity of the outline that carries our 
 thoughts back to the works of Greece. There is truly in this admir- 
 able creature something that partakes at the same time of the nymphs 
 of RUBENS and of the maidens of Athens whose graceful profiles 
 decorate the temple of Minerva, a happy blending that charms and 
 bewilders us. The eye never tires of contemplating this beautiful 
 figure, every part of which is handled with exquisite care. The bust 
 and the hips are rendered with a precision that leaves nothing to be 
 desired. The shoulders and the back offer to our astonished sight a 
 perpetual source of study. There is nothing conventional, nothing 
 systematic ; it is nature taken on the spot and freely interpreted. 
 Suppleness, strength and grace nothing is wanting in this beautiful 
 creature to charm her lover. Roger, who holds her in his arms, clad 
 in solid armor, adds to the beauty of the woman who is all his own, 
 by the energy of his attitude, by the power of his glance ; he looks at
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 her most lovingly, he dominates her so resolutely by his love that hope 
 lends a new charm to this lovely being. I do not think it possible to 
 present Angtlique and Roger under a more attractive aspect. All 
 those who beheld in M. BARYE a man devoted without repeal to the 
 expression of force must have been very much astonished. As for the 
 enlightened minds, they hailed with joy, but without surprise, this new 
 side of M. BARYE'S talent. 
 
 The Hippogrtff, whose type sketched by Ariosto allows, more- 
 over, a free course to the artist's fancy, has not been interpreted less 
 felicitously than Angtlique and Roger. This marvelous horse, of 
 which nature furnishes no model, partakes at once of the eagle and 
 of the horse ; he devours space as did Job's courser and breathes fire 
 from his delicate nostrils. The wings attached to the shoulders, at 
 once light and powerful, move with a rapidity which defies the eye. 
 Moreover, there is in this singular ensemble such a skillful combina- 
 tion, such perfect handicraft, that astonishment soon ceases to make 
 way for the most attentive study. The Htppogriff of M. BARYE is so 
 naturally conceived that it loses its fabulous character. Though 
 science has not yet discovered anything like it, and even proves to us 
 by victorious reasons that nothing like it will ever be offered to our 
 sight, we voluntarily accept the Hippogriff as a horse of a peculiar 
 nature, but as one which has lived, that still lives, and which we might 
 meet with. This impression a purely poetic one, and one that reason 
 does not acknowledge explains itself by the accuracy with which the 
 author was able to weld, by an art that is peculiar to himself, the horse 
 and the bird. If he had not possessed in a masterly way the full 
 knowledge of these two natures, so unlike, he would never have suc- 
 ceeded in coupling them under this harmonious form. Initiated in all 
 the secrets of their structure, he is able without an effort to unite the 
 wings of the eagle to the shoulders of the horse. 
 
 I must not pass over in silence the equestrian statuettes, which, 
 notwithstanding the exiguity of their dimensions, are deserving of 
 serious attention : Charles VI., Charles VII., Gaston de Foix, 
 General Bonaparte and the Duke of Orleans. 
 
 Charles VI. is not a purely decorative statuette, because, as M. 
 BARYE has represented the moment when the king, stopped in the 
 forest by an unknown man seizing his horse by the bridle, is suddenly
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 bereft of reason. The expression of the face is in keeping with the 
 scene the artist has proposed to interpret. Charles VII. and Gaston 
 de Foix, deprived of the charm of action, interest us by their elegance. 
 The costume, though faithfully depicted, claims but the importance 
 belonging to it. The effeminate character of Charles VI., the manly, 
 resolute character of Gaston de Foix, have offered the author an 
 opportunity to display, as he understands it, the harmony of the face 
 with the mind. 
 
 A candelabra composed of nine figures, and asked of M. BARYE 
 by the Duke de Montpensier, will no doubt hold its place among 
 the most exquisite works of our times. At the base are Juno, 
 Minerva and Venus ; half way up are three imaginary figures ; at 
 the top the three Graces ; this is the triple subject the author has 
 chosen for a candelabra with twelve branches formed of foliage. I 
 am not afraid to state that the Renaissance never conceived anything 
 more ingenious nor more pure. The three godesses sitting at the base 
 are drawn with an accuracy, a variety, which does not allow the mind 
 a moment's hesitation as to the names of these personages. Juno's 
 features manifest pride, and every one must recognize the queen of 
 Olympus. Minerva fully expresses that virginal gravity we admire in 
 the Colossus of Villetri ; as for Venus, her glance is animated with a 
 divine tenderness. The figures of the three godesses are modeled to 
 concur in expression with the three physiognomies that are so truly 
 characteristic. We find in Venus a development of form suggestive 
 of maternity ; in Minerva a more sober elegance that admits of no 
 such thought ; in Juno there is a majestic severity, indicative of the 
 spirit of command. The three chimeras that form the centre of the 
 composition are a clever invention. It would be difficult to interpret 
 more skillfully the traditions of mythology. The three Graces who 
 crown this charming edifice recall, through their litheness, the group 
 so well known to all travelers who have visited the Cathedral at 
 Sienna. And yet, although the Graces of M. BARYE carry our 
 thoughts back to the Graces of Sienna, there is not a trace of imita- 
 tion in the work born in our midst. The Graces of the candelabra 
 are nude, and their nakedness, at once chaste and voluptuous chaste 
 by their attitude, voluptuous by their youth and the choice of outline 
 would safely bear comparison with the small figures found in the 
 
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 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 plains of Attica. M. BARYE is carried away by an all-powerful in- 
 stinct towards the Flemish school. The women of RUBENS attract 
 him with an irresistible charm ; but, however, the study of the antique 
 models has revealed to him how much there is in these types, other- 
 wise so rich and varied, which is inconsistent with sculpture. And 
 this conviction bears its fruit. He finds, though, even in the monu- 
 ments that Greece has left us, a figure which shows him which path to 
 follow, and which reconciles lineal purity with the exuberant force so 
 assiduously pursued by the Flemish school. The Venus of Medici 
 placed in the Tribune at Florence has only a conventional beauty ; the 
 Venus of Milo, as strong, as supple, as developed as the nymphs of 
 RUBENS, surpasses them in beauty of outline and in the division of 
 masses. And it was to this divine model that he rallied. Therefore, 
 the candelabra asked for by the Duke de Montpensier, which is 
 conceived with a boldness and treated with a simplicity worthy of the 
 most learned epochs, has obtained the greatest suffrage. It charms 
 ingenuous minds accustomed to consult only their own impressions, 
 and satisfies the minds initiated by study into all the intricacies of art. 
 I am now coming to M. BARYE'S last work, the Combat of the 
 Lapithce and the Centaur, in which culminate in such a striking 
 manner all the ideas he has expressed in the last twenty years. He 
 has been able, in this last work, to unfold all his treasures of knowl- 
 edge, and to demonstrate to the most incredulous that he knows the 
 human form no less perfectly than he does that of the lion or the bull. 
 He had to struggle against a terrible memory, against the metope that 
 decorates the British Museum. He freed himself from this adversary 
 by choosing a new path. His group has nothing in common with the 
 fragments brought to London by Lord Elgin. The Centaur, by M. 
 BARYE, in its action, in its form, severs itself distinctly from the Greek 
 tradition without disparaging it. The author inspired himself from 
 nature and devoted himself to reproducing all its details he had 
 observed. He easily understood that he could not, without exposing 
 himself to censure on the ground of rashness, try to reproduce in full 
 embossment the high reliefs sculptured by the hand of PHIDIAS, the 
 perfection of which disheartens the most skillful sculptors. A lover 
 of the ideal, he sought it by processes almost always neglected by 
 the Greeks. The Attic school, the most learned of all the schools, 
 
 104
 
 ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 
 
 seldom concerned itself with energetic action, or at least, when it did 
 undertake to produce iti tempered strength with majesty. It is for 
 action expressed with entire freedom that M. BARYE claims our atten- 
 tion ; the novelty of his work and the designs conceived with sagacity, 
 accomplished with courage, deserve the approbation of connoisseurs. 
 The subject alone carries our thoughts back to the Acropolis of 
 Athens. As to the style of the group, it is beyond the limits of com- 
 parison. 
 
 The Centaur of M. BARYE is excellent in its parts borrowed from 
 the horse, young, vigorous, and boldly accentuated ; in its human part 
 it belongs to realism by its minuteness of detail ; the ideal intervened 
 only in the uniting of these two natures and in the conception of the 
 action. The head of the Centaur held in the powerful grasp of 
 the LapithcB, and who struggles convulsively while threatened with the 
 club, is an invention full of novelty, deserving of the highest praise. A 
 sculptor of the highest order only could conceive and execute a group 
 of this kind with so much freedom. All those who have been abso- 
 lutely bent until now in recognizing M. BARYE only as a sculptor of 
 genre, are compelled, when facing the group of the Lapithce and the 
 Centaur, to abandon their restrictions and acknowledge him as a 
 sculptor capable of taking in hand and of executing at any time the 
 most difficult and the greatest variety of subjects. Who is there, in 
 fact, among the masters in charge of public teaching, competent to 
 make such a group as the Lapithce and the Centaur f 
 
 Here is certainly a well-filled life, and still M. BARYE did not do 
 all he might have done, if he had found, in the men appointed by the 
 State to distribute the works, more benevolence, more sympathy, and 
 especially more enlightenment. The Centaur has been purchased and 
 will be cast in bronze. This is an act of justice. It was easier to have 
 done still better ; they should have doubled the size of the model and 
 had it executed in marble. This work would show to great advan- 
 tage at the Tuileries. Opportunities have not being wanting to wor- 
 thily employ the talent of M. BARYE. Unfortunately, all these oppor- 
 tunities ended in promises, or in most peculiar, I might say most 
 ridiculous, orders. A crocodile smothering a serpent excites admira- 
 tion. The author is required to model a bust of the Duke of Orleans. 
 A lion carries all before it by acclamation. A statue of St. Clotilda is 
 
 105
 
 NOTES ON CERTAIN MASTERS 
 
 required of the author. Do not such orders seem like a challenge 
 against common sense ? The statue of St. Clotilda, placed in a chapel 
 of the Madeleine, is certainly not devoid of merit ; the face is impressed 
 with serene gravity, the drapery is adjusted with grace ; but to require 
 the portrait of a prince or the statue of a saint as a recompense to the 
 author of a crocodile and of a lion is most certainly an odd way of 
 apportioning the works. When there was a question of crowning the 
 Arc de Triomphe, to efface the excrescence that dominates the acro- 
 tera, M. BARYE was required to present a subject. His sketch, known 
 to all artists, filled every requirement of the programme. The im- 
 perial eagle, with outspread wings, held in his powerful claws the 
 animated armorial bearings of the vanquished nations, which were 
 represented in the four corners of the acrotera by four rivers held in 
 duress. Was it possible to crown more worthily the monument raised 
 to the glory of the French army ? Could they have looked for a pro- 
 ject more in keeping with the victories carved on the fasciae of the 
 arch ? Austerlitz and Jemmapes, Arcola and Aboukir, were they not 
 epitomized in that crowning imagined by M. BARYE ? No one would 
 dare to contest it. Good sense, facts, spoke for him. Then came 
 diplomatic scruples. The wise man who had the happy thought to 
 address himself to M. BARYE was afraid to wound the self-love of 
 the Councils by accepting his design, and the sketch so deservedly ad- 
 mired was soon condemned to be forgotten. 
 
 106
 
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