AND i^i^^yl4^4#^^4ip^^ ^S 'HEODORE CHILD mm r^^■i- 11 mmm !' w u.: 1 .•^-^^v,ig!s©ssA3iak-s^ ^''j(.'--''..^*i^^-'*^~ --MSiLlriLllbai-.^ REESE LIBRARY OF THK UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Received MAR. .13. 1893 , ,89 . Accessions No. 5'<3 Lf i|5~. Class No. j_ 1 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/artcriticismmonoOOchilrich [TJiriVlRSITTl 'im.'^ ART AND CRITICISM Monographs and Studies by Theodore Child lllusiraied NEW YORJC H.iRPE/^ & BKOWERS.FR/IISKLIN SQUARE IS9Z ^^ OP thb"^^ ;tJHI7ERSITT) tiW^' r /: Copyright, 1 891, by Harper & Brothers. A a rights reserved. TO THE CULTIVATED WOMEN OF NORTH AMERICA THIS VOLUME OF STUDIES IN THE FINE ARTS IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF THEIR UNFAILING SYMPATHY PREFACE. The following monographs and studies have been collected and published in a volume in the hope that they may be of use and of in- terest to the many refined minds which are seeking guidance or con- firmation in their theoretical or effective admiration of works of art. Their chief merit, supposing that they have merit at all, is the fact that they are free from verbiage. In art criticism, in the opinion of the writer, the qualities to be most desired and esteemed are sympathy, delicacy of observation and appreciation, and intelligent, reasoned, and lucid admiration. The appreciative and the creative intellect have certain points in common. No one can ever be taught to see nature, to feel nature, and to express it. The painter of genius will show you how he applies his brush, saying: "See how I do it ; go and do likewise, and may God help you !" And if God does not help you, your painting will not be worth talking about. The really great painters are their own masters ; they are men of rare and special temperament, and through this tem- perament they look at Nature and see beautiful personal visions such as none have ever before beheld. Artists of this high rank are born at rare intervals in the course of the world's history ; they fix their visions in color or in marble, and then disappear forever, carrying away with them the secrets of their mysterious intellectual and visual processes. The first aim of the painter is beauty, or, so far as the portrait is concerned, at least character; the only model and the only standard is Nature, and the whole theory and practice of painting is subordinated to the largest and the most difficult of all the arts, namely, learning to see. Nor is the summuni of art the literal imitation of Nature. The finest human model, the most charming landscape, cannot be well imi- tated except it be interpreted by the intelligence of the artist. A strong intellect is the inseparable condition of the strong artist ; for, given the sensibility of eye, the sentiment, the passion, or, in other viii ' PREFACE. words, the special temperament and " intimate " personality of the art- ist, the rendering of his visions of Nature demands the exercise of the highest intellectual qualities of analysis and selection. Painting is not a mystery; a man of average intelligence can learn to paint with a certain degree of excellence, just as he can learn conic sections or soap-boiling. And so there are multitudes of painters who produce colored images for the delight of the crowd. There are bad pictures in abundance. The critic has absolutely nothing to say about these bad pictures ; they have their raison d'etre, inasmuch as they sat- isfy the demand of an artistically ignorant public for colored wall orna- ments. Many of these painters of bad pictures are famous ; they earn, I am told, splendid incomes ; they even receive the honor of royal pat- ronage. This is only just : they are themselves of the majority, and they paint for the joy of the majority ; but their simple minds have never comprehended the multiplicity of problems which the great painter has to solve, the intelligence, the subtlety of analysis, and the delicacy of rendering which he must put into his work. The appre- ciation of these qualities demands, furthermore, a certain initiation on the part of the spectator, a natural sensitiveness of eye, intensified by observant exercise, which it is impossible to ask of a modern democratic public. Those who have not studied pictures and sculpture, those who have not reflected over the arts of the painter and the statuary, can have but a superficial enjoyment of their works. They are naturally sat- isfied with the gross and the approximate, and the mere resemblance delights them ; but the efforts of the great artist remain unintelligible to them, and the results he obtains are at best only half understood. The artist who respects himself and his art will paint first of all to sat- isfy himself, happy if he find a score or two contemporaries who really appreciate him. It is from this point of view alone that criticism seems to have a raison d'etre, in that one intellect can deal with the product of another intellect. The aspects of Nature are innumerable, and her beauty inexhausti- ble. All that we ask of the artist is to look at Nature respectfully, and to express his vision with all the daintiness or strength of his tempera- ment ; and if to his reverent and rare eye Nature reveal herself in some new phase of beauty, and if his hand succeed in expressing that vision in all the truth and splendor of form and color, he will have accom- plished the most difficult thing in the world, namely, to create beauty and the joy that it gives. ^ Th. C. April, 1891. CONTENTS. PAGE SANDRO BOTTICELLI / SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS 28 AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION 78 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET ijy MUNKACSY 755 IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING 162 THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE 168 ANTOINE LOU-IS BARYE 779 MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE 216 AUGUSTE RODIN 261 CHANTILLY, THE CHATEAU AND THE COLLECTIONS . . . 269 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION J05 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Burne-Jones's " Venus's Mirror" Frontispiece Alessandro Botticelli 3 Head of one of the Three Graces in Bot- ticelli's "Allegory of Spring" ... 11 Botticelli's "Virgin and Child and St. John" 17 Botticelli's " Mars and Venus " . ... 23 Allegory of the Sorbonne. — I. Extreme Left : History and Philosophy . . . 31 Allegory of the Sorbonne. — II. Left Cen- tre 33 Allegory of the Sorbonne. — III. Right Centre 35 Allegory of the Sorbonne. — IV. Extreme Right : Science 37 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes 39 " The Nativity " 45 " Une Ville Morte " 49 Jean Charles Cazin 51 " Charge of Cuirassiers at the Battle of Rezonville '' 57 Aime Morot 61 Pascal Adolph Jean Dagnan-Bouveret . 67 "The Benediction" 71 "Arrangement in Flesh-color and Green — The Balcony " 83 " Nocturne in Blue and Silver — ^Fragment of Old Battersea Bridge " 87 " Portrait of Miss Corder " ..... gi " Portrait of Eva H." 95 " Portrait of Leonie H." gg " Un Profil Blond— A Study in Red " . 103 "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" . . . 105 " Chateaux en Espagne " 107 PAGE " The Annunciation " iii "Le Preche" 115 " L'Appel au Passeur " 119 "UneBergere" 123 " Le Dernier Voyage " 127 "The Piping Times of Peace" . . . 131 " Corps Aile" I35 " The Winged Victory of Samothrace" — Profile 168 " The Winged Victory of Samothrace " . 171 Tail-piece (" Nike"), obverse of coin . 178 " Tiger Devouring a Crocodile " . . . 181 Head of the Lion of the Tuileries — Right Side 183 Head of the Lion of the Tuileries — Front View 184 Moulin's Bust of Barye 185 Barye at the Age of Thirty-five . . . 187 "The Tiger Hunt." — Right Side of Group. — (Cire Perdue) igi " Lion and Boa-constrictor " .... 195 " Standing Bear " 198 '' Lion and Serpent " 200 The Grand Prize of 1865 203 " Tiger and Hare " 207 " Tiger Rolling on its Back " .... 209 " Two Young Bears Fighting " . . . . 212 " Panther Devouring a Gazelle " . . . 214 " At the School Door " 217 Falguiere in his Studio 221 "Charity" 225 "Meditation" 229 " At the Goal" (Bronze) 233 Silver Bust of a Boy 237 Xll ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE ' ' The Mask, " or " La Comedie Humaine" 241 "Fatality" 245 " The First Kiss " — Double Bust . . . 249 "Grief" 253 Equestrian Statue for the Hotel de Ville 257 " The Age of Innocence " 259 Madame M 267 View of the Chateau from the Gardens . 270 Le Chatelet 273 Grand Entrance to the Chateau . . . 276 Entrance to the Conde Stables .... 279 Chapel of Queen Blanche 281 Entrance to the Chapel 2S4 Foot of the Wrought-iron Railing on the Grand Staircase 287 Top of the Grand Staircase 289 PAGE Galerie des Cerfs 293 Prudhon's Painting, "The Awakening of Psyche " 295 Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci .... 299 Raphael's " La Vierge D'Orleans " . . 301 Entrance Hall 306 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 30Q Peacock Room 312 Salon fronting Prince's Gate, with Screen and Burne-Jones's "Merlin and Vivi- ans" 315 Second Salon 317 The Blessed Damozel 323 Rossetti's " Veronica Veronese " . . 331 Rossetti's "Loving-cup" 335 Burne-Jones's " Circe " 341 fUKIVBRSlTY] ART AND CRITICISM. SANDRO BOTTICELLI. ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO FILIPEPI was the son L of a tanner established at Florence. Born in 1447, he took the name of Botticelli from that of a goldsmith to whom he was first apprenticed. At least such is the statement of Vasari. The registers of Florence do not, however, contain the mention of any goldsmith named Botticelli, whereas they do inform us that Alessandro's elder brother, the courtier Gio- vanni di Mariano, was known by the nicknarne of Botticello, which means a little barrel, and also that his second brother, Antonio, was a goldsmith. Still, there can be no doubt that he did learn the goldsmith's art, but being particularly clever at drawing, he determined to become a painter, and accord- ingly entered the studio, or bottega, of Fra Filippo Lippi. Va- sari tells us that as a boy Sandro Botticelli was full of eager curiosity, but that he had not the patience to stay in any school long enough to learn to read and write. In the study of his art this impatience did not manifest itself; indeed, his development was so rapid that when his master died, in 1469, Botticelli, then aged twenty-two, was already considered to be the best painter in Florence, and the high esteem in which he was held is proved by the distinguished patrons who employed him, besides the civic and trade corporations, the churches. 2 ART AND CRITICISM. and the convents of Florence, namely, the families of Torna- buoni, Vespucci, Palmieri, Pucci, and, above all, the Medici, for whom he painted religious pictures, profane compositions, and portraits. In 1475, when the Fazzi plot nearly overthrew the Medici, Botticelli was charged with painting the portraits of the culprits, according to the usage, on the walls of the Pa- lazzo Vecchio ; and in the archives of Florence, under the date of July 21, 1478, is a note of the payment of forty florins for these frescos. Indeed, so great did his reputation become, both inside and outside Florence, that about 1481 he was in- vited to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV. to assume the direction of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. His collaborators were Cosimo Rosselli, Domenico Ghirlandajo, Perugino, and Luca Signorelli of Cortona, and he himself painted twenty-four portraits of popes in the upper niches of the chapel, and three out of the fifteen grand frescos, namely, the " History of Moses," the " Rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," and the " Temptation of Christ." This commis- sion brought him great fame and a good sum of money, which he spent during his stay at Rome in careless living, " as was his wont," and then returned suddenly to Florence, where he remained until his death. " And being a person of speculative and analytic habit {per essere persona sofistica)^'' continues Va- sari, " he made a commentary on a part of Dante, and illus- trated the Inferno and had it printed, in which he lost much time, and the consequence was that by not working at his art he allowed his affairs to get into disorder." The same author- ity tells us that he made a frontispiece for Savonarola's Tri- umph of Faith, and became so ardent a partisan of the reform- er that he gave up painting altogether, and would have died of starvation had he not been assisted by Lorenzo dei Medici, and many other friends who were attached to him on account of his talent and virtues. His biographer represents the influence of Savonarola as having been wholly disastrous on Botticelli, but Vasari (born in ALESSANDRO BOTTICELLI. From portrait by himself in the picture of the Adoration of the Magi in Florence. .^ ^^^^^^^ [US OF THE IVBB.SIT7] SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 5 15 1 2), was, it must be remembered, the creature of the later Medici, and therefore naturally a traducer of the patriot priest, reformer, and statesman, whose life work had been the ruin of the Medicean sway in Florence. We may therefore trust that Vasari has exaggerated the misery of Botticelli's later years; we even have some indications that the loquacious biographer's statements are misleading. For instance, he tells us that, having grown old and helpless, walking with two sticks be- cause he could not hold himself upright, the painter died in- firm and decrepit, at the age of seventy-eight, in the year 15 15. The archives of Florence, the death registers, and contempo- rary evidence show, on the contrary, that Botticelli died on May 17, 1 5 10. As for his having become old and helpless, we know that after his return from Rome he continued to work, and that he was called upon whenever there was any artistic business in hand. Thus he and Ghirlandajo were charged with mosaic work in the cathedral in 1491, and com- peted in plans for finishing the fa9ade ; in 1503, Botticelli, to- gether with Cosimo Rosselli, Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, his pupil Piero di Cosimo, and others, was consulted as to the best place for Michael Angelo's colossal statue of David; while in 1496 young Michael Angelo had recourse to the intermediary of Botticelli, as the most esteemed master in Florence, when he wished to transmit a letter to Lorenzo the Younger, son of Giuliano dei Medici, We find nothing to confirm Vasari's story about Botticelli's poverty. In 1480 he was still living in his father's house; in 1498 his income-tax paper shows that he was keeping house with his nephews in the district of Santa Lucia dei Ognissanti, but at the same time he possessed a "gentleman's villa" and vine- yards outside the gates of San Friano. Furthermore, his father was a well-to-do man, as is proved by the fact that in 15 10 he was able to purchase a family vault in the church of Ognis- santi. Vasari's pitiful story about Botticelli's poverty may therefore justly be received with suspicion. 6 ART AND CRITICISM. As for the decline of his talent under the influence of Savonarola, Vasari's statements are again open to criticism. We may suppose that Botticelli became a follower of Savona- rola about 1490; in 1498 the reformer was burned, together with two of his most ardent partisans, and in 1500 Botticelli painted one of his most beautiful religious pictures, "The Na- tivity " of the Fuller Maitland collection, now in the National Gallery at London. On this picture is an inscription, in indif- ferent Greek, which has been translated as follows by Professor Colvin : " This picture I Alessandro painted at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, in the half time after the time, during the fulfilment of the eleventh John, in the' second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Afterward he shall be chained, and we shall see him trodden down as in this picture." This " Nativity," with its mystical inscription, is doubly in- teresting because it shows that, although he had his mind full of Savonarola's prophecies, and although he regarded the death of the Dominican reformer as a fulfilment of the words of the Apocalypse, Botticelli had lost nothing of the freshness and originality of his inspiration, nothing of his tender sentiment, and nothino; of that virile eleQ:ance and distinction of attitude which characterize his figures. We have this fact ascertained, that at a time when, according to Vasari, Botticelli had aban- doned painting, he produced a picture which ranks with his finest work of that kind ; and although we have no positive data, we may console ourselves with the thought that his old age was neither so inactive nor so dejected as his biographer would lead us to suppose. In his famous treatise on painting, Leonardo da Vinci does " our Botticelli " the rare honor of an affectionate and admiring mention ; and thenceforward, strange to say, his name ceased to fiit over the lips of men. The historians of art who came after Vasari passed him with brief mention or none at all. For SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 7 three hundred years, we may say, his work did not count as a factor in general culture. From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century the perfection of Leo- nardo, the Titanic magnificence of Michael Angelo, and the *' grand style " of Raphael so dazzled Western humanity that no admiration was left for their precursors — for Benozzo Goz- zoli, Domenico Ghirlandajo, Filippino Lippi, and Sandro Botti- celli, those tender and profound " primitive " painters whom it has been the privilege of modern criticism to restore to honor and influence, and to interpret to the public as sources of pure artistic joy, outside of mere technical or antiquarian interest. But, it may be asked, why were their names allowed to fall into oblivion ? Why were others permitted to monopolize the halls of Fame.f* WHiat is the explanation of this neglect on the part of the critics of the past three centuries ? To answer all these questions would lead us far away from our immediate subject into the history of the many literary and artistic move- ments which have contributed towards the formation of the modern intellect, and towards the development of that particu- lar mental habit which we call "culture." By emancipating us from the tyranny of conventional criticism, and by encouraging us to affirm the sensations that we feel to-day, instead of repeat- ing parrot -like and without question the formulas of praise which usage has consecrated in honor of stereotyped names, culture has broadened and intensified our pleasures, and stimu- lated us to seek impressions of beauty where our forefathers, blinded by fashion, saw little but quaintness, rusticity, or rank barbarity. Furthermore, thanks to modern facilities of travel- ling, to the formation of museums, and to the immense public- ity given to masterpieces by photography, the men of the pres- ent day possess unprecedented opportunities of forming their taste by self-education and habit, instead of by assimilating the ready-made opinions of the fashionable art critic of the day, whoever he may be. For culture teaches us that the joy of art ought not to be something reserved for connoisseurs, but sim- 8 ART AND CRITICISM. ply the result of the joint and instinctive working of faculties of physical perception and comparison which communicate in- timately with the senses and the emotions. The intrinsic merit of a work of art can alone procure the pure joy of art, which is an ecstasy of emotional appreciation dependent, not upon reasoning and knowledge, but upon innate aesthetic sen- sitiveness or susceptibility, developed and refined by conscious and reflective use. Sandro Botticelli was instinctively and above all things a prodigious artist. Living in an age when everybody's exist- ence was one of adventure, Botticelli has no history: there are only two events in his life, namely, his visit to Rome, and his falling under the influence of Savonarola. But behind his work we divine an immense activity of soul; a grandiose amal- gam of meditative Christianity and dreamy paganism ; a mind peopled with sublime or tender visions of nature and of human- ity ; a temperament vibrating responsively to every pleasurable impression of color and of form. In the whole domain of mod- ern art there is no man who realizes more completely and with more splendid originality than Botticelli the ideal of the con- summate artist in contradistinction to the consummate painter, of which Rembrandt is perhaps the most complete type. Bot- ticelli's work rarely excites our curiosity as to how it is done; we do not desire to get close to his pictures in order to exam- ine the brush marks ; we never find him exulting in paint and revelling in impasto, as Rembrandt does, even so far as to sac- rifice resemblance to nature. On the contrary, Botticelli is always true to nature, and his constant aim is to enhance his visions of nature with all the charms of form and color that his eye perceives ; but his delight is not in form and color alone. Take his greatest picture, now in the Academy at Florence, and generally known as an " Allegory of Spring," or, as Vasari puts it, " Venere die le Grazie la fioriscono, dinotando la Pri- maverar Day after day, week after week, have I stood for long hours before this work in the little end room of the Acad- SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 9 emy, and the longer I looked at it, the more I was astonished and charmed. Painted in tempera, like all Botticelli's pictures, the coloration of the "Allegory of Spring" has a peculiarly delicate and opaline quality, while the general aspect fascinates the eye immediately by its abundantly decorative richness, and by the grandiose beauty of what we may call the arabesque ; that is to say, the mere form and mass of the composition, without excess or insufHciency in any detail, line, or part, per- fectly harmonious, absolutely pleasurable. How can one de- scribe it.f* Is this a forest, an orchard, a Garden of Eden, some spellbound glade on Ida's Mount where the trees grow close, with straight trunks and thick branches laden with fruit ? In the foreground is a lawn of fresh grass, bespangled with lilies, daisies, chrysanthemums, and bells and flowerets of a thousand hues, as if Botticelli had bidden " the valleys low," in Milton's words, " Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes That on the green turf suck the honey'd showers And purple all the ground with vernal flowers." On this lawn the figures are placed, beneath a canopy formed by spreading fruit-laden branches of trees which occupy the whole background of the picture from end to end, showing here and there, between their trunks and the interstices of the foliage, luminous patches of pale blue sky. This is Botticelli's favorite arrangement for pictures : the foreground and the fig- ures in light demi-teinte, separated by a dark curtain of trees, architecture, or other objects from the bright glow of the dis- tance beyond. In this picture the curtain of trees opens into a sort of arch in the middle, and the space is filled by a spread- ing myrtle-tree that forms, as it were, an aureole for the central figure of a pensive Venus, over whose head a golden- haired Cupid, poised in mid -air, blindfolded, and equipped with a rose-colored quiver, shoots an arrow, from the head of which lO ART AND CRITICISM. little flames spread cup-shape in the form of a lily. Venus, the grave " Alma Venus " of Lucretius's poem — the " charm of gods and men," at whose coming the winds fall, the clouds flee away, and the earth spreads beneath her feet a painted carpet of sweet flowers — wears a white coif, and a gown of pearly lavender tone embroidered with gold round the neck ; her golden hair hangs over her shoulders in wavy tresses, and on her breast is pinned a rich jewelled ornament. Over the gown is draped a carmine red mantle, diapered with a gold design, lined with amethyst, and bordered with a fringe of pearls. Her sandals are laced with golden strings. On Venus's right hand the three Graces, holding hands, dance gravely with movements of winning harmony, each one adorned with jewels and clad in transparent draperies, embroid- ered around the neck, and fringed with pearls. The supple- ness and easy bearing of these dancing Graces, the marvellous skill with which they are drawn and painted, their tender, im- perious, or smiling expressions, and the radiant and various beauty of their forms and faces, make this group one of the most characteristic in Botticelli's work, and one of the most lovely creations of art. The beauty, however, is not that of Raphael's figures. The realism of Botticelli prevented him from idealizing his models so far as to positively change the lines and features that give what we call "character" to a face; often, indeed, he chose even ugly types, which he has made beautiful simply by the strenuous vigor of his drawing and the nobleness of his intense vision. This quality of "character," both in faces, in attitudes, and in gestures, gives to all Botti- celli's best work a perennial freshness, a human and therefore eternally modern interest. In our engraving will be seen a reproduction of the head of one of these golden - haired Graces with her strange and sumptuous coiffure — the forehead bare and high, as was the fashion in old Florence, the hair crimped and frizzed so as to hide the ears entirely, the crown decked with torsades of HEAD OF ONE OF THE THREE GRACES IN BOTTICELLI'S "ALLEGORY OF SPRING." In the Academy at Florence. V 0? THT. TJSIVBJSITY^ SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 13 pearls, and two long plaits forming a necklace from which is suspended a pendant of precious stones. A similar but even more complex coiffure of plaits and tassels of hair interwoven with strings of pearls may be seen in the Frankfort Museum in Botticelli's wonderful portrait of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, wife of Piero dei Medici, and mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Indeed, there is a whole chapter to be written on Botticelli considered as a ladies' hair-dresser and costumer, and artists in splendor and elegance will find a mine of suggestion in his works. Next to the group of the Graces a blue-eyed Mercury with abundant brown hair, wearing a helmet of oxidized steel nielle wuth gold, a diapered mantle of raspberry red, a richly wrought dagger and shoulder-belt, russet gaiters turned down with blue, to which are attached exquisite brown wings picked out with gold. This semi-nude figure, a type of virile beauty, is repre- sented in the act of reaching an apple with his caduceus. To the left of the composition is a group consisting of a winged male figure, evidently Zephyr, or a personification of the vernal breezes, who, half floating in the air, deposits on the ground a beautiful woman, perhaps symbolizing Flora, clad only in thin transparent veils bordered with gold, and with flowers issuing from her mouth and falling into the lap of a third figure, which we may take to represent Spring. But this interpretation of the subject is not absolutely satisfactory, any more than the ingenious theory of those who argue that the subject represented in the "Judgment of Paris," with Minerva, Venus, Juno, and Discord on the one side, and on the other the Graces and Paris, at whom Cupid is aiming his dart. Bot- ticelli was a man of sufficiently subtle and curious turn of mind to have composed some profound allegory out of his own head, or to have based his design upon some mystic poem of the time which has been lost or has escaped our researches. But here, as in the case of the " Nativity " above noticed, it matters little what the subject of the picture may be; its intrinsic 14 ART AND CRITICISM. beauty alone suffices to fascinate and delight us ; even if there remained of the picture nothing but the single, long, slender, flower-crowned figure of Spring, we should be justified in pro- claiming Botticelli to be a master of mysterious charm and of graceful movement. This face, with its faun -like oblique eyebrows, its blue unabashed eyes, its voluptuous mouth with parted lips so wonderfully modelled, its halo of yellow flower- sweet hair, its expression of unfathomable and triumphant as- surance, is as full of suggestiveness as DUrer's " Melancholia " or Leonardo's "Gioconda," and worthy to be ranked on the same level. How graceful, too, is the springy movement with which she advances, the balmy breeze swelling the folds of her drapery, and making, as Robert Herrick has quaintly said, "A winning wave deserving note In the tempestuous petticoat." How splendid that ivory neck, and the pure complexion tinged with the most delicate rose ! and the white dress brocaded and garlanded with flowers, and the sleeves all slashed and quilted with gold and underlaid with tender rose, and the hem of the garment serrated like the petals of a lily, and curling into fantastic scrolls ! This "Allegory of Spring," which measures ten feet long and six feet high, was painted for Cosimo dei Medici's villa at Castello, together with the companion panel of the " Birth of Venus," with life-size figures, now in the Uffizi Gallery at Flor- ence. In the cold gray light of sunless dawn two emblematical and interlaced figures of the wind blow hard over the rippling pale green water, and waft forward a fluted shell, on which Venus stands amid a rain of roses, clad only in her beauty and her long flowing hair. On the shore a figure of Spring, wearing a white flower-sprinkled robe, offers the goddess a rose- colored cloak embroidered over with daisy plants and flowers. The attitude and expression of Venus are exquisitely modest. There is even a decided look of sadness, such as we note often SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 1 5 in Botticelli's Madonnas; but, after all, to the mind of this yearning pagan, who was at the same time a sincere Christian, there was probably not a very precise line of demarcation be- tween the Madonna and Aphrodite, the daughter of the sea- foam. Botticelli, we must remember, was a contemporary of the universally learned Pico della Mirandola, who read Plato in Greek and Moses in Hebrew, and whose life's dream was the reconciliation of the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ, and of Plato's Timceus with the Book of Genesis, His friend Matteo di Marco Palmieri, the Florentine charge d'affaires at Naples, was the author of a mystical poem called " La Citta di Vita," wherein were incorporated certain unorthodox theories of Origen concerning those angels who had remained neutral at the time of the fall of Lucifer. Botticelli followed the text of this poem in painting certain zones of his large picture of the Assumption now in the National Gallery, and was conse- quently accused of heresy. We must bear in mind also that our painter's chief patron was that Lorenzo dei Medici the Magnificent whose father, Cosimo, had founded the Platonic Academy, one of whose sons became Pope Leo X., whose courtiers were Politiano, Pulci, Pico della Mirandola, and Ficino, the translator of Plato. It was an age when the natural charm of pagan story was reas- serting itself, not only as a subject of purely artistic or poetical treatment, but even in its religious significance as a rival of the religion of Christ. Every day brought to light some new treas- ure of ancient fable or of ancient thought. Ovid was printed at Bologna in 1471; Theocritus was printed at Milan in 1450; the manuscript of Lucian's works, brought from Constantinople in 141 5 by the Sicilian Aurispa, was printed in 1496. The end of the fifteenth century was one of those happy eras of intel- lectual activity, like the age of Pericles, which are productive of complete types of general culture, and in which "artists and philosophers, and those whom the action of the world has l6 ART AND CRITICISM. elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There is a spirit of general elevation and enlight- enment in which all alike communicate." It is this solidarity, as Mr.W. H. Pater has admirably observed, "which gives unity to all the various products of the Renaissance, and it is to this intimate alliance with mind, to this participation in the best thoughts which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of its grave dignity and influence." The very subjects of Botticelli's pictures show how thor- oughly he was in touch with the spirit and thought of his age. He owes to Lucian, for instance, the idea of one of his most impressive and dramatic compositions, the "Calumnia," now in the Uflizi Gallery, painted after the satirist's description of the subject as treated by Apelles. But where did Botticelli, who was no great scholar, find this description.'* May it not have been suggested to him by his senior contemporary, the learned and universally gifted Leone Battista Alberti, who was one of the members of the Platonic Academy, and whom we find in the fair gardens around Florence resuscitating the scene of Plato's Phcedrus, and like another Socrates, with the young Lorenzo dei Medici for interlocutor, charming his auditors with mellifluous discourse on the active and the contemplative life ? Alberti, in his treatise " Delia Pittura," cites this passage of Lucian where Apelles' picture is described, and holds it up to the painters as an instance of the importance of invention in historical composition. Alberti's profound essay, written fifty years before the great Leonardo summed up his art in a score of inimitable pages, contains many other texts which might also be quoted as having apparently influenced Botti- celli in the conduct of his genius, and which are most curious and interesting for the light they throw on the formation of the theory and philosophy of the modern art of painting. They prove, too, that the Florentines were preoccupied with the most subtle questions of aesthetics, and that those who talk so glibly BOTTICELLI'S "VIRGIN AND CHILD AND ST. JOHN," IN THE LOUVRE GALLERY, ■^^^^^^^ 0? THR fOiriVBRSIT SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 19 about the naivete of the primitive artists make an unpardona- ble mistake. To dwell upon these matters would, however, lead us too far away from our subject. We will therefore note only the remarks of Alberti on the movement of hair, of foli- age, and of drapery, by which Botticelli particularly profited. " Let the drapery," he says, " spread out on all sides like the branches of a tree ; from one fold let another spring, and let the movements of these folds be rendered in such manner that there be no part of the vestments where they are alike. But these movements must be moderate and easy, and devised so as to show gracefulness rather than the conquering of a dif- ficulty. And then, as we wish the vestments to lend them- selves to the movements of the body, and as by nature they are heavy and hang down towards the ground, it is well in painting to allow a breeze to blow across the composition, the result of which will be this graceful effect, that the wind striking the body, the drapery is impressed upon it, and the nude form ap- pears through the veil, while on the other side, agitated by the air, it streams and floats harmoniously." This graceful and airy floating of the drapery and the suave elegance of the movements of the figures form one of the most characteristic charms of all Botticelli's pictures. No words can give an idea of the fascination of his work; for although a naturalist in the same sense as all the primitive painters were naturalists — that is to say, keenly impressed by outward things, by flowers, trees, rivers, and hills, by nature, by man, and by things considered as plastic objects — he was essen- tially a visionary and lyrical painter; of his compositions we may truly say that they are exponents of states of soul. Far from remaining impassive before the spectacle of nature and life, he clothes everything that he sees with the color of his own moods and ideas. Look at his " Crowning of the Virgin," in the Ufflzi, or the " Virgin and Child with different Saints," in the Academy at Florence, the round " Virgin and Child," in the National Gallery, or the " Virgin and Child and St. John," 20 ART AND CRITICISM. of the Louvre Gallery, reproduced in our illustration : in all these works, after marvelling at the distinction and beauty of the composition considered as a picture, and after admiring the singular abundance of the artist's ideas, the copiousness of his invention, the depth and high import of his conceptions, we are struck by the subdued, dreamy, and uncertain look of the Ma- donna, the wistful appearance of St. John, and the preternatural seriousness of the Divine Child, as if all three were oppressed by the honor that weighs upon them, and dejected by the great- ness of its mystery. And how much more impressive are these dejected Virgins of Botticelli than the irritatingly beautiful and apathetic Madonnas of Raphael, with their look of conventional beatitude! How the greatness of the artist is revealed in the uncommonness of the point of view, in the rare distinction of the vision, as compared with the ordinary and obvious arrange- ments employed in the religious pictures of the painter of the "Belle Jardiniere"! In the Louvre Virgin, one of the most perfect of Botticelli's religious works, the effect of the expres- sion of wistful uncertainty is augmented by the quality of the atmosphere and the very composition of the picture ; it is the moment when the sun is sinking low, and when its horizontal rays suffuse the sky with rich yellow light, against which the hedge of roses spreads its upper fringe of bloom and foliage in the sharp relief of precise outline, leaving a foreground of lu- minous half-tone, in which are placed the figures. The whole theme is in a minor key ; the splendor of the day has passed ; the distance becomes veiled in golden haze ; the weary birds have ceased to sing; a mysterious halo gathers round the trees; the shadow on the hill-side deepens into an enveloping gloom ; and man's heart sinks within him, and in his mixed and uncer- tain condition, neither very bad nor very good, half believing, half doubting, sadly conscious of his lacking energy both of spirit and of flesh, he falls into vague questionings and mystic reverie. This state of melancholy and complex resignation is common to analytical minds such as Botticelli's, and to the SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 21 simple instinctive minds of the unlettered. It is manifested equally though differently in Botticelli's religious pictures, and in the wailing music in the minor key that springs sponta- neously from the lips of the conquering Moors in the gardens of Andalusia and of the humble peasants in the wilds of Brittany.* Botticelli communicates even to profane subjects a tincture of this expression of wistfulness, this silent atmosphere of dream- land, this intense consciousness of the insoluble mystery of life and death. Such a sentiment we might trace in the expression of Venus in the completely profane subject of " Mars and Venus," now in the National Gallery, and reproduced in our illustration very faithfully, so far as the drawing is concerned. But we have perhaps said enough about the moral nature of Botticelli, and indeed this illustration was chosen rather with a view to exemplifying the artist's marvellous ornamental instinct, his sentiment of the beauty of the mere arabesque of his composi- tions, his joy in associating a multiplicity of lines into a harmo- nious and lucid design. This blond Venus, with her white robe embroidered with gold, is not peculiarly beautiful ; the abstract lines of the face are wanting in nobleness ; the drawing of the neck is decidedly inadequate, and inexplicably so when we com- pare it with the fine figure of the sleeping Mars; and yet in spite of all these shortcomings, when once you have really seen and realized this face, you cannot forget it. On the other hand, can you remember the face and expression of any Venus that Rubens painted ? The museums of London, Paris, Florence, Munich, Dresden, and Berlin possess many magnificent specimens of Botticelli's work, both sacred and profane; but after the "Allegory of * For instance, this canticle, half Breton, half Latin, thus translated by Fran- 9ois Coppee : La cloche sonne I'Angelus ; On sent la bonne odeur du foin ; La terre a done un jour de plus ! L'etoile brille au ciel de Juin. Sainte Vierge Marie, O Pia, Sainte Vierge Marie, O Pia, A jamais sois benie ! Ave Maria ! A jamais sois benie ! Ave Maria ! The exquisite air of this Angelus will be found in Bourgault-Ducoudray's Melodies Populaires de la Basse Bretagne (Paris: Lemoine et Fils). 22 ART AND CRITICISM. Spring," the frescos of the Sistine Chapel, and a few of his very finest easel pictures, the most precious and charming of his works are the two frescos from the Villa Lemmi, now placed in the Louvre at Paris, at the head of the staircase facing that stupendous masterpiece of Greek sculpture, the " Winged Victory." One of these frescos represents a young woman of the Albizi family holding with both hands a cloth in which four graceful maidens, representing doubtless certain Virtues, appear to be depositing some talismans ; the other fresco represents a young man of the Tornabuoni family led by a lady into the presence of the seven liberal arts, which are personified by women seated in a semicircle in a clearing in a dark forest of pine-trees. The tenderness and flower-like delicacy of Botticelli's color can be seen in these two frescos, damaged and cracked as they are, in all its brilliancy and purity; while in the charming and decorous attitudes, the graceful movements, the flowing drapery, of this youthful assembly, and above all in the virginal modesty and ingenuousness of these maiden faces, we can enjoy some of the artist's most sympathetic and truly personal qualities. I have already insisted upon the always beautiful vision of life and humanity that Botticelli records in his pictures. It may also be remarked that he avoids painting age, even middle age, except, of course, in pictures of saints. His perfect figures are his Mercury in the "Allegory of Spring," the three Graces, the sleeping Mars, and his Madonnas ; his great delight is to paint ripening womanhood and virgin virility, and especially that charming transition period between childhood and youth, the period which the Latins call "adolescence," with its peculiar grace and its beauty still hesitating between the two sexes. In the ministering children who figure as angels, with thoughtful and eager faces, in his religious pictures, Botticelli has surpassed Donatello and Luca della Robbia in loveliness of feature, sup- ple charm of attitude, and intense rendering of character. Vasari says that Botticelli commented a part of Dante, il' 3 > E, "pi O ?SO^ 0^ THE ^^ fUFIVBESITTj SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 25 lustrated the htferno and had it printed. We know, however of no written commentary of Dante by Botticelli ; on the other hand, the first Florentine edition of Dante, published in 1481, with a commentary by Cristoforo Landini, contains some en- gravings on copper to illustrate the Inferno alone, varying in number from eighteen to twenty-one, according to the copies, which are certainly made from drawings by Botticelli ; and fur- thermore, the Berlin Museum purchased with the Hamilton collection of manuscripts a folio volume of eighty-six sheets of fine parchment, twelve by eighteen inches, containing the text of the "Divine Comedy "and eighty-six autograph designs in pencil and pen and ink by Botticelli, one of which is signed in microscopic letters, " Sandro di Mariano," the only signature of the artist that we have. This Berlin manuscript is not complete: seven sheets with eight designs belonging to it are in the Vati- can library, and five sheets are lost, or at any rate undiscovered. Dante illustrated by Botticelli, a manuscript whose pages unite the names of two diversely great Florentines, is indeed a rarity calculated to excite our curiosity. Thanks to the admi- rable fac-similes of the precious originals published by Herr Fr. Lippmann, curator of the Berlin Museum, it is possible to sat- isfy ourselves without any great difficulty. The series is most interesting ; the figures of Dante and Beatrice in the Paradiso are singularly noble ; several of the compositions are dramatic and grand ; certain of the feminine types have an exquisite grace and tenderness ; the seraphic floating draperies are full of charm ; but these drawings will be appreciated by artists and enthusiastic admirers of the master rather than by the general public. The fragment of the manuscript in the Vatican library, in which some of the designs are finished or in progress as miniatures, confirms us in the belief that these illustrations, for the most part hasty sketches and silhouettes full of imagination and spirit, are the simple notes of a preparatory plan which Botticelli never carried out. Those who wish to go more deeply into this question will find all that can be said about it 26 ART AND CRITICISM. in Herr Lippmann's learned introduction to his edition of the fac-simile plates. It was doubtless from drawings of this kind by Botticelli that Baccio Baldini made himself a name as an engraver, just as Marc Antonio became famous by engraving the sketches of Signorelli, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. Still another question which interests specialists rather than the general public concerns the engravings attributed to Botti- celli, and the supposition that he furnished drawings to the en- graver Baccio Baldini. It will suffice here to say that a series of engravings of the Prophets and another of the Sibyls may be with much probability attributed to Botticelli ; but a fact en- tirely beyond dispute is the empire that this artist exercised over the book illustrators and subject-engravers of the period, who all either copy directly his designs or borrow his pictu- resque means and processes of composition. This unanimous submission to his influence is to be explained, as M. Henri De- laborde has remarked in his studies on the early Florentine en- gravers, by the very diversity of the painter's aptitudes, by the pliancy of his imagination, which is ready to deal with all kinds of subjects and all categories of ideas, Before his time the Florentine masters had scarcely ventured outside an invariable set of subjects, provided by the Scriptures or by the lives of the saints, or if by chance some allegorical figure presented itself in company with evangelical personages, as is the case in Giotto's paintings at Padua, the mysticism of the intention and the iden- tity of the treatment transformed this profane element into a means of expression for Christian thought. But with Botticelli, on the contrary, with his charming contemporary Piero di Cosi- mo, the painter of the " Death of Procris," in the National Gal- lery, and a few years later with Filippino, his pupil, mythology began to be considered not as a subordinate resource of art, but as one of its absolute ends, sharing possession of the do- main of art on equal terms with religion, which had been hith- erto sole sovereign. It is needless, however, to repeat that under the brush of Botticelli the "Judgment of Paris" or the SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 27 " Birth of Venus " acquired a tone of tender elegance and im- pressive gravity almost analogous to that with which he infused the personages of the Madonna and the Divine Child, and that nothing could be further removed than these chaste pictures from the licentious and fleshly panegyrics which the grosser and less reputable inhabitants of Olympus obtained in a later age at the hands of the Venetian and Flemish masters. Great works of art are fatally impressed with the serenity of the mind that produced them in sure and persistent effort : they seem at first sight to have been made easily; they are fin- ished and consummate ; the}^ betray no traces of effort or of labor; in them nothing appears to be due to chance; but when we reflect we feel that this mysterious perfection has not been achieved in one day. Look at that figure of Spring, or of Flora, in the great allegory in the Academy of Florence, and think through how many phases and forms she must have passed before attaining her present springy elasticity of move- ment, her conquering assurance of look and bearing, and that perfect distribution of abundant ornateness which makes the costume a marvel of richness, fanciful originality, and exquisite taste. And those three figures of the Graces dancing in cling- ing drapery that moulds their form ! In order to achieve that complete sensation of suave and cadenced movement Botticelli must have observed and toiled infinitely ; for remark how ma- jestic their salutation is, how awe-inspiring, how Elysian, that trio of beauty dancing on the flowery carpet of the sacred glade! It is not in the propitious fever of a mere happy moment that such works as this are created ; it is not by being content with suggestions of nature and with amusing notes of passing sensa- tions; but by the long effort of an imaginative and receptive mind tenacious of its ideal, and by the mature and untiring energy of a temperament most richly and delicately endowed, both physically and emotionally. Such was the mind and such the temperament of Sandro Botticelli. SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. " Qu'il soit done permis a chacum et a tous de voir avec les yeux qu'ils ont. . . . Dans tous les arts, la victoire sera toujours a quelques privilegies qui se laisseront aller eux-memes, et les discussions d'ecole passeront comme passent les modes." — George Sand. I. WHETHER in the annual Salons, compared with anal- ogous exhibitions in other countries, or whether at great universal shows like the Paris Exhibition of 1889, the visitor cannot fail to be struck by the pre-eminence of the French painters, by the general high average of their talent, by their superior skilfulness of execution, and, above all, by the energy, the variety, and the sincerity of their vision. Preced- ing epochs of French civilization have left us in their pict- ures a somewhat abstract image of men and things. Modern French democracy will leave in its painting a portrait of itself which will be precise and absolute, for that which evidently most interests the French painters and the French public at the present day is living life, nature, reality, modernity. And the modernity aimed at is not that which is consti- tuted by clothing a figure in a coat instead of in a toga, or a tunic, but that which consists in a physiognomy, a muscular development, a habit of body which reflects the states of soul, the moral peculiarities, the conditions, struggles, and hierarchies of life, the moral intimite of a theme or figure. This modernity we find expressed with the utmost intensity in certain pictures and drawings by MM. Degas and Raffaelli, and that, too, with- out the aid of scenic arrangements, attributes, or accessories, but SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 29 simply by means of the implacable rendering of characteristic gestures and attitudes, of the perfect harmony of the figures with their natural surroundings, and of the subtle sensation of moral atmosphere which they evoke. Among the portraitists, landscapists, and genre painters, when we compare their works with those of the past, we notice an endeavor to give more refined aesthetic realizations of sensations of nature. In the genre pictures again we remark a tendency to depict scenes of real life, more especially of the life of the humble — of the peas- ants, of the workers at trades — so that the collective produc- tions of these painters will form for posterity a vast museum of moral and physical documents, as it were, a material and psy- chological iconography of the end of this troubled nineteenth century. We may even be tempted to regret that the repre- sentation of the meaner aspects of reality largely predominates in the compositions of contemporary French painters, at the expense of that which is grand, refined, delicate, or exquisite. To analyze the moral tendencies of contemporary French painting, to set forth the modifications of vision and of ideals which have come to pass within the last thirty years, to charac- terize even briefly the aims and talents of the most prominent among the French painters, would be an agreeable undertak- ing; but unless the subject were treated with considerable de- velopment it would scarcely be intelligible, much less edifying, to the general reader. In presence of the multitude of things that appeal to the attention and interest of the men of to-day, simplification and elimination of all that is unnecessary are imperative. With the rivalries and discussions of schools the general reader has no concern ; from the influences and sug- gestions of passing fashion it is less easy for him to escape ; nevertheless it will be our endeavor in the following pages to neglect entirely conventional opinions and current estimations, and to speak as concisely as is consistent with clearness of the talents and works of a chosen few contemporary French paint- ers whose personality or whose achievements have given them 30 ART AND CRITICISM. absolute distinction. Such men are MM. Puvis de Chavannes, J. C. Cazin, Degas, Raffaelli, Aime Morot, Elie Delaunay, Dagnan-Bouveret. II. M. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, although little known to the public of picture gazers, or to those for whom painting rep- resents a combination of calligraphy and house furniture — a signature, a gilt frame, and some color on a canvas — has accom- plished tranquilly, but not uncontested, the grandest and most considerable work of the present century. His mural paint- ings are distributed in monuments situated in different towns of France. In the museum of Amiens are the vast composi- tions "Concordia" and " Bellum," executed in 1861, "Labor" and "Rest" (1863), "Ave Picardia Nutrix" (1865), "Ludus pro Patria" (1882), and four symbolic figures of heroic size — the whole forming the magnificent decoration of the walls of the staircase and the grand gallery of the museum. In the stair- case of the museum of Marseilles are two vast frescos, " Mas- silia, the Greek Colony," and " Marseilles, the Gate of the East" (1869). In the town -hall of Poitiers are two frescos, " Charles Martel, Conqueror of the Saracens," and " Saint Ra- degonde at the Convent of the Holy Cross" (1875). In the Pantheon at Paris are frescos of colossal size representing the life of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of the city (1876). Besides these compositions we must mention " Doux Pays " (1882), a decorative panel for the staircase of M. Bonnat's house ; the " Bois sacre cher aux Arts et aux Muses," " Vision antique," " Inspiration chretienne," and two figures of the "Rhone" and the " Saone " (1884), forming the mural decora- tion of the staircase of the museum of Lyons ; and in the grand amphitheatre of the new Sorbonne the vast allegory of SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 31 the " University," which is reproduced in our engravings. Be- sides these works, which vie in importance with the frescos of the old Itahan masters, we may note several pictures — a " Re- tour de Chasse" (1859), now in the museum of Marseilles; "Le Sommeil " (1867), the "Decapitation of St. John," and "Mary Magdalene in the Desert" (1870), "Hope" (1872), "Summer" (1873), "The Prodigal Son" (1879), the " Pauvre Pecheur," " The Mower," " Women at the Sea-shore," " The Grief of Or- pheus." To describe all these compositions would be fastidious and useless. Let us rather select the allegory of the Sorbonne, so that the reader may complete the impression of our indigent prose by the vivid image of the engraved reproduction.* In * The original fresco forms a continuous picture occupying the whole breadth of the vast amphitheatre of the new Sorbonne. The limits of our pages have obliged us to divide the composition into four parts in order to engrave it ade- quately. ALLEGORY OF THE SORBONNE. — L EXTREME LEFT: HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY. From the painting by ^I. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. 32 ART AND CRITICISM. an Elysian landscape, whose smooth lawns are bounded by a belt of trees, the allegory is developed in the foreground, which is divided into three compartments by the distribution of the trees, the rocks, and the irregularities of the soil. In the cen- tre, under a screening canopy of trees, the old Sorbonne is seated, draped in robes of monastic cut, and having at her sides genii bearing crowns and palms, symbolizing homage to the glory of the living and of the dead. Eloquence, laurel-crowned, stands erect, and with impressive gestures celebrates the bat- tles and conquests of the human mind. To the right and to the left are groups representing the different kinds of poetry, crowned with laurel wreaths and draped in antique style, some holding inspired converse, others meditative or wrapt in dreams, all graceful in form and posture. One of these Muses is par- ticularly suave and tender in silhouette, namely, the one to the spectator's left clad in mediaeval white robes, with a long pen- dent hood over her head and her hands folded on her knees. From the rock beneath these groups, in the centre of the fresco, issues a vivifying spring, where youth drinks with avid- ity and age acquires new vigor. The compartment on the left is reserved for History and Philosophy. A group of figures symbolizes the struggles of Spiritualism and Materialism in presence of Death, the one, clad in monastic costume, assert- ing itself by a gesture of ardent aspiration, the other, draped in a rich red embroidered robe, pointing to a flower as the ex- pression of terrestrial joys and of the successive transforma- tions limited to matter. The second group, arranged against a background of antique masonry, consists of figures engaged in excavations, and represents History interrogating the past, which is figured by fragments just exhumed. The third com- partment, on the right-hand, is devoted to Science. The first group after the Muses is composed of Botany — which has fur- nished the artist with a pretext for a fine study of a back — the Sea, Zoology, and Mineralogy, whose riches, strewn on the ground, excite the wondering admiration of some young stu- SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 33 dents. Other students grouped in front of a statue of Sci- ence swear to devote their Hves to this pursuit, and the com- position is terminated by three young men absorbed in the solution of a geometrical problem. It may well be imagined that it is no easy matter to arrange in lucid and charming order the forty-four figures which form, as it were, the words of this band of symbolic writing. What can be the genesis and process of evolution of such a composi- tion ? To ask the artist himself is like asking the poet to analyze his inspiration. The question is more than indiscreet. Nevertheless, one morning, in the austere studio in the Place Pigalle, we ventured to speak with the master about the for- mula of his art, and to inquire by what stages he reached this pure plastic expression, this visionary harmony of abstractions, as if realized in dream-land. At first, M. Puvis de Chavannes ALLEGORY OF THE SORBONNE.— IL LEFT CENTRE. 34 ART AND CRITICISM. told US, after the commission of decorating the hemicycle had been intrusted to him, he passed through a period of despair. The subject was the Sorbonne, a personification of the soul of the University of Paris, and the longer he thought over it, the more arid it seemed. He even wrote a letter giving in his res- ignation, and he was on the point of putting it into the post-box when he met a friend. " Here," he said, " is a letter which will take a great weight off my mind. It contains my resignation. I give up the Sorbonne fresco." His friend protested, begged him to reflect, saying, " Give me the letter, and if after three days from now you are still in the same mind, I will return it to you, and you shall post it." M. Puvis de Chavannes agreed, gave his friend the letter, and went back to his studio, where the idea suddenly came to him of representing the Sorbonne as the Muse of Science. The seated figure, with her soft blue cloak so daintily embroidered, her folded arms, her sedate pose, serene, impassible, mysterious, was the starting-point of his dream, which soon became peopled with other figures and groups. For months and months the master went on making from his living models quantities of studies of various poses, attitudes, and gestures, accepting, according to his habit, the happy suggestions of chance, but always correcting them by reason. M. Puvis de Chavannes is not a painter who thinks, but a thinker who paints. He starts from some moral abstrac- tion condensed in a title such as the Sorbonne, or as in his other compositions, " War," " Peace," " Labor," " Picardia Nu- trix," " Ludus pro Patria," and then he proceeds to seek figures and surroundings that will conduce to the incarnation of his subject, which is always fixed in his mind more or less clearly before he attempts to materialize it. The consequence is that his observation of reality is reflex ; he turns to nature for har- monies and for information, as a wTiter might refer to a diction- ary ; his painting is a means of exteriorizing his conceptions ; as an excellent critic, M. De Fourcaud, has put it, he proceeds intellectually by successive mental operations of invention and SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 35 appropriation. In a composition like the Sorbonne everything is reasoned. It is impossible to work otherwise, M. Puvis de Chavannes will tell you. The happy touch of a sketch cannot be enlarged to scale and reproduced in the definitive picture. The significant gesture, the harmonious attitudes, the equilib- rium of the whole composition must be sought and worked out patiently and logically, just as if the fresco were an archi- tectural composition. Thus, if we trace a line following the tops of the heads of the figures in the Sorbonne, it will be found that this line describes a series of curves that are in themselves graceful. So each group in itself has a charm of contour of its own, and at the same time forms a sub- servient element in the grace of the whole. So, day by day, the composition grew, and at length it appeared complete, without the artist himself being able to remember precisely ALLEGORY OF THE SORBONNE.— lU. RIGHT CENTRE. 36 ART AND CRITICISM. the stages and processes through which his thought had passed ; and then the cartoon was ready to be exhibited at the Salon of 1887. This cartoon, on which the figures were drawn in black and white, and with great abbreviation, was, to use M. Puvis de Cha- vannes' own words, " the libretto which he had to orchestrate, and the difBculty began over again in presence of the problem of transforming this libretto into harmonious color music." After two years the vast panel reappeared on the walls of the Sorbonne, enriched with a dreamy veil of vapory color and framed in a gray border of garlanded leaves, tied at intervals with bands of dull gold. To describe this color is not within the power of words, for pale blue, soft red, hyaline, rose, violet, gray-green, lilac-gray, roseate white, are not even coarsely ap- proximate terms for the tones of this poet's palette — tones without reflections, without impasto, almost without materiality, as it were, etherealized and rendered abstract. As in his draw- ing, so in his color, M. Puvis de Chavannes systematically omits everything except the indispensable. He eliminates all that is contingent and transitory, and represents only the essential. Painting is an art concerned with surfaces and appearances, and yet M. Puvis de Chavannes takes no interest in details, but only in essence and soul. In a movement he sees only the general lines, and resumes them in a sort of typical gesture of exalted reality. In nature he is struck by the essential gravity of things, and, thanks to the poet's power of isolation, he has remained constantly in the serene regions of a grandiose pan- theistic dream, where man and nature are in complete com- munion. And yet, abstract as his ideas are, metaphysical and profound as his work may be, M. Puvis de Chavannes is truly modern; and to a great extent he is the instigator of some of the best and most sincere tendencies of contemporary French art. We have found it expedient to describe one of M? Puvis de Chavannes' most abstract compositions. It is to be regretted that we cannot also present to our readers some of his living SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 37 and nobly didactic frescos, such as those of Amiens, or of the Pantheon, where the episodes of the Hfe of St. Genevieve are depicted with a candor of conception and a quiet charm of presentation that win the sympathies of simple and of learned alike. As for the frescos of Amiens, they resume in the " Ludus pro Patria " the entire poem of ancient Picardy, with its woods, its peat-bogs, its groups of superb throwers of pikes, as elegant in their noble attitudes as Greek athletes, its wild- looking hunters of swans and herons, its groups of girls and boys playing near the huts at the entrance of the village, and symbolizing domestic life ; while in " Picardia Nutrix," " La- bor," and " Rest," we find that impression of intense pantheism which has inspired the artist in so much of his work, the glori- fication of Nature, of the Earth, the immortal nurse, the mother of races, the Alma Mater. And herein lies the great source of M. Puvis de Chavannes' originality and power; disdaining traditions, he has returned to the majestic simplicity of his ALLEGORY OF THE SORBONNE. — IV. EXTREME RIGHT: SCIENCE. 38 ART AND CRITICISM. own impressions; and instead of recurring to the treasure-house of Renaissance or Venetian art, he has borrowed from eternal humanity and from natural landscape those resources of inter- pretation which had hitherto been provided by superannuated allegory and rhetorical convention. From the old mythology he has taken the worship of plastic beauty as manifested in beautiful and harmonious types of human form, but he has abandoned the old names and the ancient fables, and symbol- ized in his figures those abstractions and ideals of immortal pa- ganism which belong to no age and no country, but are imma- nent in man and in nature in the nineteenth century just as much as in the days when men worshipped Jupiter and Apollo, Venus and Minerva. It is as an architectural decorator that we have a risfht to consider M. Puvis de Chavannes, and as such it is his glory to have comprehended that mural painting, forming part of an architectural whole, must appear in light upon the edifice in- stead of adding fresh obscurity to the shadows, as is the effect of ordinary pictures placed upon walls. His grand composi- tions in the Sorbonne, in the Pantheon, at Amiens, and else- where, framed in their garlands of foliage that suggest the borders of old tapestries, have the effect of windows or porticos opened over nature; their discreet and pale tonality, the tender and luminous harmony of the figures placed against a rustic horizon of flowery fields, trees, hills, and sky, produce an abso- lute illusion, and this illusion is an artistic reality — something serene, beautiful, and consolatory. M. Puvis de Chavannes has put into decorative painting a souvenir of the atmosphere of Corot, and peopled broad landscapes with human beings who are occupied in some simple and significant action, and who have an essential if not a realistic life. These frescos have brought decorative painting back to the notions of air, space, and human truth, while in the practical order M. Puvis de Chavannes has reduced their composition to such a reasoned equilibrium of silhouettes and such a perfect harmony of tone PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. vxS^ 07 THE [TJSIV1SIISIT7] SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 41 relations that the whole is intensely expressive, nothing super- fluous, and everything lucid. In the magnificent art to which he has devoted his noble talent, M. Puvis de Chavannes has achieved results w^hich place him among the masters ; he is a great colorist and a great poet. In abundance and variety of inspiration and in grand simplicity of conception he reminds us of the Italian fresco painters of the old days ; in his instinct- ive and profoundly exact observation of all that is essential in human gesture and bearing, he recalls the sculptors of the bass- reliefs of ancient Greece ; and with all this he is entirely mod- ern and original, an artist of dominating personality. The artist whose talent we have just attempted to analyze is a robust Burgundian, a most affable and genial gentleman, who, at the same time that he is a poet of Virgilian tempera- ment, an idealist living in a divine land of types and essences, is a modern man who takes a keen interest in the material and intellectual life of his own times. '^ Comme il est jeune f is a remark that his friends are constantly making. He possesses, indeed, that youthfulness of heart and of temperament against which years are powerless. Like Delacroix, Henri Regnault, Fromentin, and Paul Dubois, M. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes is a purely Latin man. His native town is Lyons, where he was born in 1824. His father was one of the government mining engineers, and he himself intended to adopt that career, but his studies in view of the Polytechnic School were interrupted by a severe illness, on recovering from which he changed his plans, and determined to become a painter. It is to be remarked that M. Puvis de Chavannes began to study art comparatively late in life. At an age when other men were far advanced in the acquirement of the technique of painting, he was still enriching his mind with a store of general culture that painters rarely possess. Hence he started in the race heavily handicapped, and honors were slow, to come. His first master was Henri Scheffer, with whom he studied two years, and then went to Italy. On his return he entered Couture's studio, where he 42 ART AND CRITICISM. stayed only a short time. The story runs that he left this stu- dio in despair. One gray morning when he was trying to ren- der the silvery tones and harmonious effects of flesh in pale light, Couture came to criticise his pupil's work. When he saw M. Puvis de Chavannes' study he exclaimed : " That is not the thing at all. Give me your palette." Couture then proceeded •to compose his light tones, mixing them, according to his own formula, with silver white, Naples yellow, vermilion, and cobalt. In an instant the study changed color, and as the master thick- ened his impasto the transformation became more complete. "What! Monsieur Couture, is it really so that the model ap- pears to your eyes }'' said M. Puvis de Chavannes, and with sur- prise and despair he left the studio, and was never seen there again. After this episode his initiators into the secrets of the technique and the ambitions of art were his neighbors Pollet and Ricard, who had studios in the historical building in the Place Pigalle, where the master still lives. The career of M. Puvis de Chavannes is marked by the great decorative works already noted. In 1861 he received a second-class medal at the Salon, in 1864 a medal, in 1867 a third-class medal at the Universal Exhibition, together with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1877 he was promoted Officer of the Legion of Honor; in 1882 the artists voted him the medal of honor at the Salon; and in 1889, on the occasion of the completion of his fresco for the new Sorbonne, he was created Commander of the Legion of Honor. Without having forced open the doors of the official studios of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and with- out having e^^en accepted, as so many eminent French painters do, the honor of forming pupils in a private atelier, he has nevertheless carried with him a great following; his influence has been manifestly dominant not only in all the decorative painting of recent years, but also in the general tendencies of many of the younger painters. SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 43 III. M. Jean Charles Cazin is one of the most original and fas- cinating personalities in contemporary French art, not greater than M. Puvis de Chavannes, but great in a different way. For that matter it is useless and impertinent to attempt to establish any hierarchy among artists of complete excellence. M. Cazin is a man of medium stature, with a massive head of large vol- ume, long gray-blond hair hanging over the shoulders, features of great strength and precision, prominent eyes with rather heavy eyelids, an expression of detachment from material things and absorption in some internal dream. In M. Cazin's impress- ive face the large blue-gray eyes at once fix your attention by their serenity and power ; you feel that they are implacable mir- rors reflecting integrally and with the most exquisite delicacy of perception all that passes before them, and at the same time you feel that they are the servants of a great soul. These eyes are not the bright, sparkling, and searching organs of the paint- ers of externality behind which you divine nothing but a skil- ful workman's hand ; they are the eyes of a poet who is a dreamer of mystic dreams. For this man painting is not a com- merce but an inspiration ; he does not sit down with the com- monplace purpose of making a mere literal transcript of reality, but rather uses nature as the means of expression, and, as it were, the vehicle of an intimate ideal; possessing superabun- dantly that intricate combination of intuitive perceptions, feel- ings, experience, and memory which we call imagination, he dominates nature, and manifests in harmonious creations the enthusiasm, the passion, the melancholy, the thousand shades of joy or grief, which he feels in his communion with the great Sphinx. M. Cazin was born at Samer, in the department of Pas -de- 44 ART AND CRITICISM. Calais, 1841. He received his first artistic education at Paris at i\\Q petite ecole, as it used to be called, over which M. Lecocq de Boisbaudran presided, and which is now a decorative art school. MM. Leon Lhermitte and Paul Renouard also went to the petite ecole, which had the advantage of not teaching too much, and of leaving the pupils free to develop their personal- ity unhampered by rigid academic traditions. After exhibiting some pictures in the Salons of 1864 and 1865, M. Cazin devoted himself with great success to teaching art, both at the Ecole Nationale de Dessin, at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, and afterwards in an art school at Tours. From 187 1 to 1875 M. Cazin was living in England, Italy, or Holland, and at one time he was engaged both in France and in England in making artistic faience. Meantime he was studying, completing his culture and his artistic equipment, and becoming a master of all kinds of technical processes. Like the artists of the Re- naissance, M. Cazin can express himself by the most various means — sculpture, oil-painting, water-colors, pastel, combinations of pastel, gouache, and wax of the most delicate aspect, to say nothing of his ceramic work, in which he has revealed such remarkable decorative sentiment. His great celebrity as an artist is now of some ten years' standing. His chief works ex- hibited at the Salon have been "The Flight into Egypt" (1877), "Le Voyage de Tobie " (1878), " Le Depart" (1879), " Ishmael" and " Tobie " (1880), "Souvenir de Fete " (1881), "Judith " (1883), "La Journee faite" (1888). M. Cazin obtained a first-class medal in 1880, and the decoration of the Legion of Honor in 1882, on the occasion of a collective exhibition of his works. Our illustration is a reproduction of an oil-painting called " The Nativity." It is evening ; the shades of night are creep- ing on and overpowering the last glow of the red sunset. A roughly thatched shed, a ladder leaning against the shed, a loose stone wall enclosing the simple shelter, a heap of straw, a mother and her babe, a man draped in brown garments and resting on a staff — such are the elements of the human scene fuBTlVBItSITYj SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 47 which is set in a harmony of gray- green and roseate gray of indescribable and enveloping mystery. This picture, like all M. Cazin's landscapes, is remarkable for the distinction of its tone, the absolute verity of the light, the quality of atmosphere and ambience. In the exquisite study of the phenomena of light and shade, and more especial- ly in the endeavor to render diffused light, M. Cazin is pecul- iarly modern. In the painting of the past twenty years, more especially in French painting, the capital characteristic to be noted is precisely this evolution of the color sense, and the con- comitant intensification of the perceptive powers of the eye. The results of this evolution are strikingly noticeable when we see a modern picture, whether landscape or a figure sub- ject, side by side with an old picture. In this particular point of atmospheric truth we remark immediately in the modern picture a photometric quality which leads us to conclude that the modern eye is sensitive to many things which our fathers did not perceive. Nor is this conclusion at all unreasonable; for modern science has demonstrated that our visual oro-ans have passed through slow degrees of progress, and that Nature has not always appeared to man in the colors which she now wears. The Breslau professor, Hugo Magnus, tells us that sensitiveness to different colors was perfected gradually in tlte course of ages, and this evolution, he thinks, is still far from being complete. And in this opinion we may well join the eminent inquirer when we think of the immense influence which a precursor like Manet has had upon contemporary paint- ing, and of the influence which another precursor — M. Claude Monet — is at present exercising. I speak of both these men merely as precursors and experimenters, because I consider that neither the one nor the other has produced a work having that complete beauty, that taste, and that mysterious and de- finitive charm which stamp the creations of the consummate artist. On the other hand, both Manet and M. Monet have studied the diffused vibrations of light in the open air with 48 ART AND CRITICISM. most complete success ; their minds, framed analytically after the model of modern rationalism, have led them to use their eyes scientifically — to decompose color, and to fix the real effect by establishing rigorously the series of relations. Hence the idea of values, of which we have heard so much of late years. Hence, too, that other idea of the integrity of the sub- ject, which is the second tenet of the contemporary French painters of the new school — let us paint what we see, and as we see it ; we need neither dramatic nor sentimental stories ; truth alone is sufficient. From Manet — or, more exactly, from Manet diluted and mitigated by Bastien- Lepage — springs in a large measure the contemporary school of French genre paint- ing, about which we shall have something to say later. Let us now return to M. Cazin. In his pictures we find neither beautiful forms, nor grand style, nor color, in the old sense of those terms as they might be applied to the works of Raphael or Paul Veronese. On the other hand, we are struck by the evidence of researches that are at once intellectual and technical, and thanks to which the eye and the hand of the artist have grown in sensitiveness, while, at the same time, his soul has become acutely conscious of the joy, the gayety, the dramatic expressiveness, the infinite poetry of light. It is by the exact and sympathetically emotional rendering of effects of light that M. Cazin invariably develops and enforces his theme. Like Corot, M. Cazin is always full of soul ; in unheroic and even familiar subjects he gives us the impression of a thought- ful, serious, and yet hopeful nature ; he is always simple, always eloquent, and always sincere; in his pictures there is no impos- ing majesty of composition, no blatant anecdote, or importunate morality; he paints men that he has seen, houses that exist, trees that really grow, skies that he has not invented, and reeds whose sad music he has overheard. Most of M. Cazin's pict- ures are representations of the simplest sites, often absolutely poor in line. One depicts the entrance of a village with a few cottages, some ragged poplar-trees, the roseate note of red-tiled SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 49 roofs, some unobtrusive figures, and a luminous sky, character- ized by a fugacious and subtle effect. Another, entitled " Une Ville Morte," reproduced in our engraving, represents the large, rain-washed, and deserted square of a provincial town, lined with rows of irregular houses ; it is night ; the rolling black rain clouds are scudding across the sky, obscuring the moon ; in the windows of the houses we see the glare of lamps ; at the door of the inn the yellow diligence stands ; and the blank square seems still to re-echo with the rattling of the wheels on the rugged pavement. " L'Orage " shows us some bright green fields, a rail-fence, a shed with red-tiled roof, a windmill, a water- course, a lurid, cloudy sky, and in the background a suggestion of forked lightning : it is a glimpse of nature seen and uncom- " UNE VILLE MORTE." From the painting by M. Jean Charles Cazin. 50 ART AND CRITICISM. posed. Poussin, treating the same subject, would have painted a complete melodrama. " La Marne " is a late evening effect. The sunset is lost in a dark haze below the horizon, while the vault of heaven is still illumined with vertical rose-colored rays. There is a bridge, a lock, the bank lined with trees, and beyond them the mass of cottages, above which rise the finer houses of the wealthy. The river, calm and vitreous, reflects with in- tensity the mirage of the landscape and sky, while in the fore- ground are figures of female bathers and of a handmaiden car- rying refreshments on a tray. The nude figures are exquisite in silhouette and in unconsciousness of pose. In its splendid harmony of gray, green, and rose, this picture is a complete and definitive vision of evening calm at the river-side, familiar, and yet grave and impressive, for the hour has something of mel- ancholy in it. A pale blue auroral sky flecked with white clouds, a pond, a landscape gayly dotted with flowers, in the distance blue hills, an impression of vastness — such is the scene in which M. Cazin depicts Toby receiving indications from the white-robed angel. Here is Hagar, the despairing mother, whom an angel has suc- cored. It has been a burning hot day ; in the sky, rosy, lumpy clouds are rolling across an arid landscape of sand-hills, dotted here and there with parched and stunted shrubs, and undulat- ing away to a distance bounded by tragic forests. Hagar, not having the courage to see Ishmael die, has left him in the bush, and sits desolate on the ground, her empty gourd beside her, clad in a sombre blue robe, and wearing a white coiffe over her head. Meanwhile the angel has appeared and spoken, and Hagar raises her head and sees a clear spring where the angel stands, and the white robe of the helpful messenger reflected in the limpid water. Here is another evening effect : An opaline and roseate sky ; in the background a group of farm buildings and cottages; in the foreground a field, some pollard willows, a felled trunk, on which an old man is seated, his head buried in his hands, dreaming or sleeping. It is a laborer, who is weary JEAN CHARLES CAZIN. ^S^A^ 0? THE [■OSIVBRSITYJ SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 53 with wielding the axe all day. The hour for rest and recom- pense has come, and beside him stands a white figure, beautiful and compassionate, crowned with golden leaves, whom he does not see, but who proffers him a crown, with gestures of conso- lation. In M. Cazin's mind this old man is Theocritus, and the phantom figure is Nature revealing herself to his idyllic soul. "Souvenir de Fete" is a decorative and allegorical panel, a vi- sion of the French national fete seen from some lofty stand- point. From the windows of his house overlooking the gar- dens of the Luxembourg M. Cazin saw the vast expanse of tree-tops flecked with the glow of Venetian lanterns, the distant domes of the Pantheon and Val de Grace garlanded with gas- jets, the vast perspective of Paris gay with lavish illuminations, the fireworks bespangling the sombre blue nocturnal firma- ment with the sudden flash of pyrotechnic stars ; and on the souvenir of this reality he embroidered his grandiose allegory of the resurrection of the nation under the auspices of Virtus, Scientia, and Labor. Here is another picture, perhaps the most important that M. Cazin has painted. The scene represents the red brick for- tifications of a mediaeval town, with sad trees waving on the ramparts beneath a cold and stormy autumnal sky. Night is approaching. All day long the smiths have been forging arms, and the fire is still alight, and bars of iron lie on the ground beside it. On the cold grass is the corpse of a young man. Outside the bastions are huddled together the sick and the in- valid, who are useless for the defence of the town. In the dis- tance is the flowery plain and the river. On the towers the inhabitants are lighting beacon -fires. The town is Bethulia, and the moment has come when Judith has vowed to kill Holo- fernes. Clad in her richest robes, dark-haired, with strong feat- ures, she leaves the town, walking with stately tread, without turning her head, as she fastens her cloak around her neck. Several common people are standing to see her pass : a young woman and her babe leaning on her husband's shoulder, an- 54 ART AND CRITICISM. other young man wearing a cuirass, a boy who salutes the grave heroine. In the distance, just outside the gates, Judith's servant meets her betrothed, and the two press one another's hands as they continue on their contrary ways. Such is the whole picture, such the vision. "Judith went forth and her servant with her, and the people of the town watched her until she had got down from the mountain. . . . Then, having lighted beacons on their towers, they remained watching that night." This " Judith " is the first of five compositions ordered by the State for reproduction in the Gobelin tapestry manufac- tory. The series will comprise the history of Judith — her going forth, Judith in the camp, Judith returning with the head of Holofernes, the triumph of the Bethulians, and the honored old age of the heroine, where we shall see her sitting in her house spinning. In "Judith," as in M. Cazin's other historical pict- ures, no effort is made to achieve archaeological exactitude. The costume of Judith is of all epochs and of none in particu- lar. The dress of the other figures is that of humble people of the present day. The fortifications are in the style of the Middle Ages. These details do not shock or surprise ; on the contrary, they convince us of the artist's sincerity, and render sympathy the more easy because we can follow the processes of his imagination. In a few words, here is the history of the work : One day at La Rochelle M. Cazin found an old Bible in which the story of Judith was artlessly told. The narrative impressed him, and his mind continued to dwell upon it until at Antwerp the sight of the old fortifications suggested a pic- torial image of the going forth from Bethulia. Then some months afterwards, at Montreuil-sur-Mer, a quaint old town with a citadel crowning the hill, the going forth of Judith pre- sented itself to the painter as a complete vision, and he gath- ered the vision as one gathers a flower, and reproduced it on canvas. ''Je Vai cueilli^' as the artist said to me one day, thereby expressing the spontaneity of his imaginative process as opposed to the conscious and, so to speak, constructive SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 55 process of a painter who would determine to paint a subject, and then immediately sit down to compose it and develop it, step by step, and in cold blood. It is to this patient waiting until the vision presents itself that we may attribute those qualities of reserve, delicacy, and fineness of emotion which characterize M. Cazin's work, and enrich it with those suggest- ive beauties which inspire a dream and awaken quick sympathy in the beholder. In landscape M. Cazin prefers to render those fugitive effects which demand the most delicate observation and abso- lute surety of eye. Vast plains, calm fields, the rose tiles of a cottage roof emerging from pale foliage, a yellow flower in a desert of sand, a cottage lost in the solitude of the dunes of Picardy, the shimmering of the crescent moon on the bosom of the sea, the moist and caressing mantle which evening throws over weary nature — such are some of the typical themes of this poet of light, this painter of pantheistic harmonies. In the manner of M. Cazin's painting we never remark rough impasto, the violence of the palette knife, or the caprices of an undisciplined brush. The aspect of his pictures is always attractive, and their suave and distinguished tone is often abso- lutely fascinating; the details are subordinated to the general unity ; the picture is one and harmonious. M. Cazin's dream of life is sweet, tender, full of compassion ; his own facial type is that of the great lovers of humanity ; the attitudes which he gives to his figures are frequently those of resignation and of accepted affliction ; indeed, in a whole series of works, some of which we have briefly described, he has rejuvenated historical painting by neglecting all academic traditions, indulging his own temperament, and simply interpreting the subject humanly, intimately, almost familiarly, and yet always with gravity. We have spoken above of M. Puvis de Chevannes as a thinker who paints. M. Cazin may be described as a painter who thinks. M. Puvis de Chavannes first of all conceives his theme by a process of metaphysical and literary reasoning, and then gives 56 ART AND CRITICISM. it expression by means of plastic symbols borrowed from nat- ure. He is, in short, essentially an idealist. M. Cazin, on the other hand, may be called a realist. Completely cultured and familiar with the legends and poems of ages, M. Cazin's faculty of pictorial conception seems to be aroused to activity only when it comes into contact with reality. He sees an actual scene in nature, and then his imagination interprets it and adorns it with some eternal symbol of compassion, of charity, of resignation, or of simple human sentiment. Constantly in- terrogating nature, incessantly recording notes of reality, mak- ing drawing after drawing and study after study, indefatigable in the court he pays to his mistress Nature, M. Cazin the paint- er and limner is the prodigiously skilful auxiliary of M. Cazin the poet, the man of wide culture, the grand artist of strong, patient, and delicate soul. IV. So far as regards talent, intelligence, physical gifts of acute and delicate perception, and absolute mastery of the processes of painting, M. Aime Morot is without a rival among the younger French painters. His career has been both rapid and brilliant. Born at Nancy, he became in due course a pu- pil of Cabanel, and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1873. At the Salon of 1878 he obtained a third-class medal, in 1877 a second-class, in 1879 a first-class, in 1880 the medal of honor, in 1883 the decoration of the Legion of Honor, and a medal of honor at the Universal Exhibition of 1889. His principal works are an episode of the battle of AqucC Sextias, "Ambron Women defending the Camp against Roman Cavalry" (1879), the "Good Samaritan" (1880), "El Bravo Toro" (1884), "Toro colante" (1885), "Battle of Rezonville" (1886), " Reichshofen" (1887), and a vast picture of the charge of the Eighth and Ninth Cuirassiers at Reichshofen, which figured at the Uni- o a > n a w o n 3 > n> PI I' > 3 > .^ o M N O r r' w '^'^-^^ OP THE [TISIVBRSITT] SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 59 versal Exhibition of 1889, and won for the painter a medal of honor. Besides the above works, M. Morot has painted a num- ber of portraits, and several important pictures of academic in- spiration — " Dryade," "Temptation of St. Anthony," etc. His last work is a ceiling for the town-hall of Nancy : our portrait shows the artist perched on a ladder, and working at this enor- mous canvas, in company with his favorite monkey, Fritz. The variety of M. Morot's aptitude is manifest from the enu- meration of his works, but that which has more especially brought him into evidence is his skill in putting movement into spectacle, in rendering dramatic action combined with the closest study of form, and more particularly his bold and novel manner of painting horses in motion. His two pictures of epi- sodes of tauromachy are the most violent and precise represen- tations of carnage that we know. His charges of cuirassiers, like that of the battle of Rezonville, reproduced in our engrav- ing, are simply marvellous. The latter is a fragment of a passing vision of cavalry soldiers fighting as they gallop across the battle-field in furious confusion, while to the right a squad- ron of cuirassiers rushes to the rescue over the brow of a hill with a wheeling movement, which the artist has expressed with the illusion of reality. Hasty observers have frequently accused M. Morot of paint- ing simply the movements of the horse as they have been as- certained by instantaneous photography. In point of fact, he has never used a photographic document ; furthermore, he had already made his observations of the movements of the horse before Mr. Muybridge revealed to the artistic world the results of his remarkable experiments. M. Morot has always been a great lover of animals. His monkey and his Scotch deer-hound are his inseparable companions, and since he was a small boy he has always been an enthusiastic horseman. While a youth at Nancy he spent nearly all his time in the manege of a friend of his family who was a horse -trainer, and if fortune had not made him a painter, his tastes, he says, would have made him a 6o ART AND CRITICISM. riding-master. In this riding- school he began to observe the horse, and his attention was directed to its movements by the theory of the decomposition of the steps which the professors taught. In this theory M. Morot, controlling facts merely by his eye, found much false doctrine, and, with the enthusiasm of his years and the love of horses for guides, he discussed the matter point by point with the riding-masters of Nancy, had fine sand laid down in the manege to catch the footprints, watched, noted, and expounded, refusing to accept the tradi- tional doctrines. In order to facilitate his observations he in- vented a little apparatus composed of a card -board tube with two horizontal slits in it, one exactly opposite the other. This tube, held before his eyes and turned sharply with the fingers, formed a shutter, or obturator, on the same principle as the shutter of a photographic camera, closing the field of vision in about the fortieth part of a second. By means of this appa- ratus he watched the movements of the horse and analyzed them, and each element of the movement impressed itself upon his finely cultivated retina so sharply that he was able to draw it immediately from memory. Thus, thanks to the extraordi- nary sensitiveness of his eye, aided by this little card - board tube and a patient pencil, he discovered nearly the whole the- ory of the horse's movements while he was still a boy. During his stay at Rome, as a student in the Villa Medicis, he always managed to have a horse to ride, and continued his observa- tions with his card -board shutter. However, none of the stu- dents would believe what he said about the decomposition of the horse's movements, until finally he made a complete set of theoretical drawings, arranged them inside a card-board cylin- der, set it spinning, and so gave a counter-proof of his theory. All these observations were again confirmed when in 1879 Mr. Muybridge brought his photographs to Paris and exhibited them in M. Meissonier's studio, to the master's great astonish- ment. But, as has frequently been pointed out, these analyt- ical photographs are of little practical use as artistic docu- AIME MOROT. ^^^ SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 63 ments, because in reality the eye does not see the movements in their instantaneous phases. In painting horses in movement some compromise has to be made between scientific accuracy and the error of popular vision, which is satisfied with a sport- ing print where a galloping horse is represented without a sin- gle foot touching the ground. Now, a horse, except when he has his legs tucked under him in the act of jumping, always has at least one foot on the ground, with the leg as straight and stiff as possible. The French have an expression for gal- loping, " ventre a terre^'' meaning the swiftest and most tearing pace, as if the belly of the horse came nearer to the ground at this pace. The Gascons even talk about galloping so quickly that they scrape the ground with their spurs. This is absurd. In galloping, a horse does not sink more than an inch and a half at the utmost, owing to the bending and play of the pastern and shoulder. Nevertheless, Gericault painted race-horses running literally in accordance with the popular phrase, ""ventre a terre'.'' In M. Morot's pictures of cavalry charges it will be found that he avoids in the principal figures all intermediary elements of movement; he selects rather the beginning or the end. In the confused mass of a cavalry charge sweeping past, he will paint one horse completely, and the rest of the troop will be bits of horses, elements of movements, all the phases which scientific analysis gives ; and this agglomeration of detail creates the il- lusion of a vision of rushing horsemen. In reality the spectator, looking at such a scene, can never see more than one horse at a time, and a confused indication of the motion of innumerable other horses. An examination of our engraving of Rezonville will explain our meaning better than words. There is one horse painted completely and in a movement of galloping ; of the oth- er horses we can distinguish only parts — heads, legs, etc. ; the whole composition is the result of observation and artistic selec- tion ; it is the work of a man who knows and loves the horse, and who at the same time is gifted with wonderfully delicate visual organs and rare powers of plastic and dramatic composition. 64 ART AND CRITICISM. M. Morot's researches and achievements in the questions of rendering violent movement are an illustration of what we were saying just now about the increasing acuity of the modern eye. It is, indeed, a curious fact that after Phidias and the friezes of the Parthenon we find no really adequate artistic representation of the horse in movement until we reach our own days and the paintings of M. Meissonier. The horses of Phidias, though small in size, are works of style and of practical truth, in which the principles of the animal's structure are never neglected. Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, and Verrocchio have represented horses walking whose movements are stiff and forced, but still in conformity with the laws of animal locomotion. These horses, however, like those in the works of Leonardo, Diirer, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, are obviously not studied seri- ously and anatomically from nature. The painters of the sev- enteeth century, Salvator Rosa, Lebrun, Le Bourguignon, Wou- vermans, Van der Meulen, treated the horse conventionally and without observation of nature. At the end of the eighteenth century Carle Vernet and Gros began to observe the horse, but inadequately. Then came Gericault, who studied carefully from nature, but yet frequently gave his horses movements which are not exactly according to the laws of locomotion. Fromentin was hampered for want of theoretical instruction, and was never satisfied with his horses. The sculptor Barye always had great difficulty in modelling horses, and his equestrian groups are perhaps the least satisfactory of his works. In the days of Geri- cault and Barye, however, it must be remembered that the move- ments of the horse had not been studied experimentally and scientifically as they have been since, notably by the physiologist Marey, by the horse-trainer Raabe, and by M. Meissonier. M. Morot, who, as we have seen, studied the horse experimentally before he thought of painting the horse artistically, has carried the representation of movement to a point where it seems like- ly to remain for some time to come, until the sensitiveness of the modern eye makes another step in its progressive march. SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 65 V. The portrait which M. Paul Renouard has sketched for us from life, complemented by the study of one of the artist's pict- ures, reveals to us the whole temperament and talent of M. Pas- cal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret He is a small, nervous man, dark-skinned, with black hair, cut straight in a "bang" that almost touches his eyebrows ; the eyes are set deeply in their orbits ; the nose is short and pointed ; the mustache and close-cut beard are fine and glossy ; the lines of the head and of the features firm ; everything in his aspect indicates tenaci- ty, patience, perseverance, and, indeed, it is by dint of these pre- cious moral qualities that M. Dagnan has achieved his high artistic position. As we see him working at his easel, apply- ing each touch with extreme care, his entire being absorbed in the task, his whole nervous system strung up in an intense and persistent effort to do his work well, to render what he sees better than he has ever done before, to surpass himself, to paint more than conscientiously, so M. Dagnan has always labored at his art, always doubting, always hoping. We must not look for impulse in M. Dagnan's pictures, nor for extreme intelli- gence ; this latter quality especially could not coexist with the naivete and simplicity of heart which communicate a charm to all that he paints. A pupil of M. Gerome, M. Dagnan achieved his first great success at the Salon of 1879 with a picture of a wedding party at a photographer's, "Une Noce chez un photographe." His principal works are "Un Accident" (1880), now in the collec- tion of Mr. W. T. Walters ; " Blessing a Young Couple before the Marriage Ceremony" (1882), reproduced in our engraving; "Vaccination" (1883); " Hamlet and the Grave-diggers" (1884); " Horses Drinking," now in the Luxembourg Museum, and 5 66 ART AND CRITICISM. " The Virgin" (1885); " Le pain benit" (1886), also in the Lux- embourg Museum; " Le Pardon en Bretagne" (1887); " Paysan Breton" and " Bernoise" (1888); " Madone" and " Bretonnes au Pardon" (1889). M. Dagnan has obtained all the recompenses that his French colleagues can give him, namely, a third-class medal in 1878, a first-class medal in 1880, the Legion of Hon- or in 1885, in 1889 the medal of honor at the Salon, and a few weeks later a medal of honor at the Universal Exhibi- tion. Our engraving gives an excellent example of M. Dag- nan's work. The benediction in question is a custom .ob- served in Franche-Comte. We are in a well-to-do provincial home, which has been somewhat upset in view of the rejoicings and feastings that accompany a marriage ceremony. It is a rosy gray sunny room, with a window at the back and a larger window to the right ; the roof is unceiled and the rafters visi- ble. To the left a mahogany bed in the style of the First Em- pire is concealed behind red curtains. Along two sides of the room a table has been improvised on trestles, and sitting ac- commodations furnished by means of boards laid across from chair to chair. Against the walls we notice a crucifix, a small mirror, a tall clock. On the table to the right is a white pot with flowers in it, piles of plates, a dish full of " pain benit," some empty bottles, a glass with wine in it. In the right-hand corner one old man remains seated at table, and two stand be- hind him. In the background, against the window, is a group of young people, boys and girls, and a baby boy, whose head just rises above the edge of the table. To the left, against the red curtains, stands the principal group, composed of the parents of the young couple, in which the most prominent figure is that of the father of the bride, with gray hair, bushy eyebrows, short side-whiskers, projecting underlip, and a face wrinkled and rav- aged by the passage of years and the struggles of life. Dressed in a brown coat with gilt buttons, the old man holds in his left hand his hat, and in his right hand a lighted taper, while he gives his blessing to the bride and bridegroom, who kneel PASCAL ADOLPHE JEAN DAGNAN-BOUVERET. Zt^y OF THE '^ fUHIVBRSITT] SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 69 before him, the bride dressed in white, with her veil, gloves, and bouquet; the bridegroom with a white rosette and streaming ribbons in his button -hole. On the floor lies the mass -book amid some scattered rose leaves. Through the window a ray of sunshine strikes across the table and flashes on the floor, filling the whole room with gayety and making the candle flame flicker palely. This is certainly a very delicate picture ; the light is lovingly studied, and the fineness of the ambient envelope exquisitely rendered. The still -life, again, is very daintily painted. The types of prosperous provincial people are full of character. They are country folks who have worked hard with some result, and whose history is written on their faces. How interesting, too, the discreet and decent attitudes of the young people, who stand wdth clasped hands, much im- pressed by the ceremony, and just a little stiff and embarrassed by their holiday clothes and their smoothly combed hair. In this " Benediction," as in all M. Dagnan's pictures, we find three pre-eminent qualities, namely, sincere observation, logical execution, and emancipation from academic influence. These are precisely the qualities which characterize the best contemporary genre painting, and which are the outcome of all the recent artistic revolutions, of w^hich the leaders have been Courbet, Manet, Degas, the " impressionists," and, in a less per- sonal, but none the less efficacious manner, Bastien- Lepage. In the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889, the unbiassed vis- itor, who judged things by the standard of his modern eye, without taking account retrospectively of the conditions and fashions and prejudices of the past, must have come away with a very small opinion of many painters of great reputation. We say nothing of the signatures which the combined efforts of the picture-dealers and of the public have made famous beyond reason. But even such recent reputations as those of Manet and Bastien -Lepage seemed inexplicable in presence of the re- sults displayed. Of all Bastien- Lepage's work, the daintiest and the most instinct with durable interest and charm seemed 5* ^0 ART AND CRITICISM. to be the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt. We must, however, re- member that in the history of art masters are to be judged by their influence as well as by their achievements. Without going back to the beginning of things, we may justly consider the precursors of contemporary French painting to have been Corot, Millet, and Courbet. Corot is a perfect master, a poet full of emotion, a painter full of charm, one of the supreme artists. Millet, whose painting so many admire because it is the fashion, and inwardly detest because it is de. void of material beauty, was a precursor in sentiment and in his choice of subjects. Courbet, while realist and modern in his themes and progressist as a painter of landscape, was purely classic in his tone and technique, and a skilful manipulator of all the methods and processes of the old masters. Then came Manet, a man gifted with delicate faculties of vision and nota- tion, but whose hand was less happy in recording than his eye in perceiving. Manet's pictures, it must be admitted even by his warmest admirers, are rarely if ever adequate. On the other hand, it is evident that Manet revealed to us a new vision. of nature and a new principle, which is known as the law of val- ues. Not that the old men like Velasquez, Caravaggio, Rem- brandt, and the Dutch genre painters neglected this law, but the application of it by Manet was more complete, more pur- posed, and more regardful of the increased sensitiveness of our modern eyes. His dominant preoccupation was to see how an object exists in the broad daylight of contemporary reality; he looked at nature simply, made no composition, painted some familiar scene, either one or two figures or a swarming crowd, guided only by the idea that light draws as well as colors an object, and that light puts each thing in its place. Hence the intense color notes of his work, the abbreviation of the draw- ing, the simplification of the figures, the treatment of all ob- jects as masses and not as outlines, the intense and direct " im- pression " which constitutes in the mind of the artist a picture, composed, drawn, and painted logically and implacably. •51 3 3 5' n P 5* 3' crq > o <^ 3 SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 73 Here let us note that the much-abused terms " impression " and " impressionist " are quite good and useful. Manet and M. Degas, to mention two leaders, seek to reproduce the pure phenomenon, the subjective appearance of things ; whereas the art of M. Bouguereau or of Cabanel superadds to the sensation perceived by the eye and the mind the uncertain acquisitions of experience and education, which have created a wholly im- aginary objective world. The impressionist endeavors to re- cord a visual sensation in all its freshness, without impairing or complicating its simple purity by the addition of hypotheti- cal lines or masses which the eye has not directly observed. The most gifted of the impressionist painters are analysts and synthetizers, who work in a great measure with the same spirit and methods as the primitive Italian fresco-painters. Manet's doctrines about light painting, open air, the respect of values, the observation and rendering of each figure in Hght and in its plane, are now accepted by all the younger French painters. M. Bouguereau still continues to paint figures ac- cording to a certain lofty and refined conventionality, consider- ing man merely as a pretext for decorative and graceful silhou- ettes. This I do not say in disparagement of M. Bouguereau's work, which has qualities of composition, of invention, and of technical perfection which his models of the old Roman school did not surpass. One may even predict that in years to come, when the golden patme of time shall have mellowed and toned down the frequent littlenesses of the brush-work, the pictures of M. Bouguereau will hold their own beside the works of those classical masters from whose names tradition has made eulogy inseparable. In the same way we must respect the talent of M. Henner, the impeccable drawing of M. Bonnat, and his rare force in the expression of character. But these are not the spirits that carry the new men with them. The leaders are, as we have already seen, MM. Puvis de Chavannes and Cazin, and the men who have adhered to the gospel of Manet, receiving it either from Manet directly or more often 74 ART AND CRITICISM. from Bastien-Lepage, who, being an admirer both of M. Puvis de Chavannes and of Manet, diluted their genius, so to speak, and made it potable for the weaker brethren, thus becoming in turn himself a "chef d'ecole." When Bastien-Lepage exhibited his picture of " Les Foins " (Haymaking) in the Salon of 1878, he was immediately proclaimed a master by a strong band of young men. At that time the picture, compared with the majority of works in the Salon, gave an extraordinary impres- sion of brightness ; the enthusiastic compared it to a window opened upon nature ; the tonality, the intensity of observation of a minute unpoetical kind, and the strong and tenacious rendering were equally striking. After this success, until his death in 1884, Bastien-Lepage exercised great influence over his contemporaries both personally and by his work. His say- ings were quoted: "Nothing is good but truth." "A man ought to paint what he knows and what he loves." " Every- thing ought to be treated as a portrait, even a tree, even a bit of still-life," etc. Of rustic birth and rustic nature, he re- mained rustic in his tastes. Italy and the splendor of Vene- tian art did not touch him ; in the primitive Italians he ad- mired only their care to treat all subjects humanly; of the intellectual aristocracy of the masters of Florence he compre- hended nothing. Of all Bastien - Lepage's admirers none was more ardent and more affectionate than M. Dagnan. After his death he wrote in a letter to a friend : " We will talk about him [Bas- tien] as much as you like, for with every new picture that I paint in future I shall try to think if he would have been satis- fied with it." SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 75 VI. There remain to be noticed now several men of eminent talent and of varied aptitudes, who cannot be brought under any special category. Such is M. Fantin Latour, who holds the highest rank as a portraitist of very searching, personal, and distinguished vision. Such, again, is M. Elie Delaunay, whose portraits have the grandeur of style of the old Italians, and the penetrating moral intimacy of a modern analytical novel. M. Delaunay does not content himself with a mere literal transcription of his model, but seeks to render the char- acteristic vision, the intensity of personal attitude and gesture, the direct and evocative image of the moral and material man, and that, too, with a freshness, a variety, and a distinction of tone of the rarest. We must mention also M. Gustave Mo- reau, a solitary artist upon whom his contemporaries have no influence, and who has no influence upon his contemporaries. M. Moreau's brilliant inventions, wholly erudite and archaic in inspiration, can be compared only with the rich and curious compositions of Mr. Burne-Jones, or with the works of Man- tegna, of whom the English and the French artist are equally admirers. A painter whose sincere talent and whose absolute origi- nality place him among the few truly and strongly personal artists is M. Jean Fran9ois Raffaelli. His pictures suggest those of no other man. They are the result of his own per- sonal emotion in presence of reality. An independent spirit, gifted with very acute faculties of visual and intellectual ob- servation, sure of his eye, of his hand, and of his purpose, M. Raffaelli has revealed to us new visions of nature and of hu- manity. He has conceived a programme of artistic activity, which he has been carrying out with unswerving persistency 76 ART AND CRITICISM. during the past twelve years, enlarging its scope as the field of his observation changes. He began with the poor, the misera- ble, the pariahs, and the social waifs who live in the desolate, melancholy suburban zones, amid the detritus of the great city, in a gray; leprous, anaemic landscape that is neither town nor country, but a wilderness of potsherds and ingenious misery. Then he painted the lower middle classes, their life and their character, the various types of Paris, English types, landscapes and marines, the Salvation Army, the portaits of Clemenceau, of Edmond de Goncourt; and for the Salon of 1889 the por- traits of two young girls, whose elegance of bearing and deli- cacy of epiderm presented a striking contrast with the popular types of absinthe drinkers and road -menders which formerly interested him so deeply. Such are the varied results of M. Raffaelli's art, which is based on the observation of character. It is an art of profound observation and universal application, attaching little weight to physical ugliness or physical beauty, but expressing a beauty of a different kind, which exists in character and not in the mere type, character being understood in the sense of that which constitutes the moral physiognomy in its constant and complete expression. It is an aesthetic curiosity analogous to the "" caracterisme'" of M. Raffaelli which has led that marvellous artist M. De^as to study series of subjects — milliners, washer- women, dancing girls, cafe concerts, the episodes of horse- racing. M. Degas has represented certain aspects of contemporary life with an implacable logic both in drawing and in color, and moreover with a synthetic and simple rendering that reproduces only the pure essence of form and omits all encumbering details. His pictures of ballet girls are, as he himself says, not simple paintings or studies, but " meditations on dancing." In them he has rendered with pitiless tenacity of observation, and often with singular violence and cruelty in the execution, the grace- ful, voluptuous, or painful attitudes of the danseuses, with an originality of vision and an intimacy and a modernity of senti- SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. ^^ ment which make him one of the grand figures of contem- porary French art — one of those independent personaHties whose works survive when those of the favorites of fashion have been forever forgotten. M. Degas is very Httle known to the pubhc ; he never exhibits in the annual Salons, and very rarely in any other exhibitions ; his aristocratic temperament and his strong respect for his art disincline him to expose to the general and unintelligent gaze works to appreciate which demands a highly developed artistic education. AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. I. SPEAKING of the American pictures at the Paris Uni- versal Exhibition of 1868, a distinguished French critic, M. Ernest Chesneau, wrote as follows : " With the exception of a few landscapes, notably Mr. Church's 'Niagara' and Mr. Bier- stadt's Rocky Mountains,' which both bear witness to a certain audacity of conception, most of the American landscapes are painted in a spirit of conventionality which is surprising on the part of a people generally supposed to have become eman- cipated from so many other conventions. In genre painting the same chain binds the American painters to the painters of Great Britain. Here and there may be noticed some pict- ures like Mr. Homer's ' Confederate Prisoners,' Mr. Lambdin's * Lost Sheep,' or the country scene in Kentucky by Mr. John- son. But the only painter who gives proof of a perfectly dis- tinct personality is the author of that ' White Girl ' which was refused at the Salon of 1863, but which, nevertheless, caused a certain agitation and awakened real sympathies in the art world." At the Universal Exhibition of 1878 the United States Fine Art section was an uninviting and justly deserted spot. The most important pictures were generally thought to be Mr. F. A. Bridgman's " Funeral of a Mummy," and Mr. W. P. W. Dana's marine entitled " Solitude," while a few pictures by Messrs. Lafarge, Vedder, Walter Shirlaw, J. G. Brown, and AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 79 Dielman were with difficulty discovered to be worthy of remark by French critics. Since 1878 American artists have made for themselves a large and glorious place in Europe. Year after year their works have attracted more and more attention at the Paris Salon, while at the same time high honors have been awarded to American painters who have contributed to the various ex- hibitions held in other European capitals. At the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889 there is no ex- aggeration in saying that the American Fine Art section was one of the strongest and most interesting of all the foreign de- partments. To justify this affirmation by comparisons would be useless. There is no common measure applicable to works of art. The important fact to be noted is that in 1889 Ameri- ca boasts an elite of artists whose names are cited in company with the most illustrious, and that men like Whistler, E. A. Abbey, W. T. Dannat, and John S. Sargent can hold their own brilliantly in a palace of art where the exhibitors, besides the great Frenchmen, are masters of the eminence of Mun- kacsy, Adolf Menzel, Herkomer, Orchardson, Madrazo, Boldini, and Alfred Stephens.* The task of the critic charged with writing about the American artists in 1889 is therefore entirely agreeable; the variety of temperaments represented and the diversity of the pictures are equally remarkable; and while the general stand- ard of excellence is high, the quality of the best pictures in the exhibition is of the very finest. It is not, however, our inten- tion to attempt to classify the exhibitors in the order of their merit, and to award to this man a prize and to this other a first accessit. We attach but small importance to medals and academic honors. What we seek for above all things, and re- joice to find, is artistic individuality. In matters of art there * The number of oil-paintings exhibited in the United States section was 335 ; black-and-white drawings, water- colors, etc., 127; wood - engravings, 103. The grand total was 565 works, exhibited by 252 artists. 8o ART AND CRITICISM. are certain points clear as noonday, which people do not real- ize because they do not reason ; and one of the most obvious is that the object of painting is not to imitate nature exactly, for if such were the case there could be- only one true way of painting, whereas there are really a dozen ways, all right and good. A painter may paint like Leonardo, or Velasquez, or Rubens, or Caravaggio, or Millet, or Bastien - Lepage, or like no man who has ever existed, and provided he suggest nature, and make his picture chromatically logical and consistent, we cannot ask more. Art is a commentary, an expression, an interpretation of reality. It is strictly logical to say that one's own sensations are sufficient, and to ask why anything need be interposed be- tween nature and ourselves. This, indeed, is the argument of the Positivists, who will accept experience only as the basis of knowledge ; but in reality it is a narrow-minded argument, based on an incomplete comprehension of the word experience; for experience may be not only practical and scientific, but also sensuous, emotional, passional. Pictures, statues, religious dog- mas, or metaphysical hypotheses are never absolute to the ana- lytical mind ; they are suggestive, evocative, stimulating ; we admit them between ourselves and nature because we recog- nize in them the impressions of finer, more delicate, and more complexly sensitive souls than our own ; they have an educating influence ; they augment the sum of pleasure. Such being the case, criticism can no longer arrive at imperative conclusions, nor can it, like the dictatorial criticism of the past, distribute penalties and rewards based upon the principle that there are inflexible laws of beauty, and upon faith in certain aesthetic canons. The Cartesian dogma of the Identity of Minds has ceased to be the basis of modern criticism, of which one of the fundamental principles is the recognition of the Variety of In- telligences. Criticism is therefore no longer dogmatic, but analytic and appreciative ; it seeks to understand a painter's temperament and to see his work from his own point of view; AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 8l it may have preferences, but those preferences derive their value only from the personality of the critic who expresses them. II. For reasons which it is not our business to appreciate, the most eminent of all the American artists resident in Europe, Mr. James McNeil Whistler, exhibited in the English depart- ment, where he was represented by a number of etchings and two oil-paintings. As it is our intention to speak not merely of works exhibited at the Champ de Mars, but rather of the general standing of the American painters whose names are prominently before the public at the time of this universal ar- tistic manifestation, we shall take this opportunity of noticing Mr. Whistler's career, so far as our limited space permits. In Mr. Whistler's work let us mention first his etchings, which number nearly two hundred and forty plates, executed at intervals within the past thirty years. The finest of these etchings hold their own side by side with Rembrandt's ; the least important bear the mark of a master's hand, and have the special interest of all spontaneous notation of an artist's vison. The work of Mr. Whistler in painting begins with the "White Girl," exhibited in Paris in 1863. Born at Baltimore, educated at the military school at West Point, Mr. Whistler found his way to Paris, and in 1856 he was working in Gleyre's studio. In 1859 and i860 he sent to the Salon pictures which were refused. In 1863 the jury of the official Salon again re- jected his work; but the famous Salon des Refuses welcomed him, and enabled him to appeal against this judgment; and there his " White Girl " made a sensation, and classed him at once among the original and truly personal artists of the day. Meanwhile Mr. Whistler had left Paris and settled in London, where he produced — to note only some of his most important 6 82 ART AND CRITICISM. and characteristic pictures — " La Princesse du Pays de la Por- celaine," exhibited at the Salon of 1867, the "Symphony in White, No. 3," " The Pacific," with the sub-title of " an arrange- ment in gray and green," " The Blue Wave," " Harmony in Flesh-color and Green, No. 2 : The Balcony," " Old Battersea Bridge," and a number of less known pictures and portraits. In 1874 Whistler showed at London the portraits of his moth- er and of Thomas Carlyle, both of them " arrangements in black and gray," the .former exhibited at the Salon of 1883, and the latter at the Salon of 1884. Then followed a period of activity which produced a series of portraits called by the ar- tist " arrangements " in gray and yellow, in gray and black, in brown, in flesh-color and red, in brown and black, like the por- trait of Miss Rosa Corder, or arrangements in black alone, like the portraits of Henry Irving as Philip of Spain and of Sefior Sarasate. To this period, after 1874, belong the "Noc- turnes " and " Harmonies " about which the public has heard so much and comprehended so little. In our illustrations we have selected three specimens of Whistler's visions of nature, " The Balcony," the " Portrait of Miss Corder," and the " Noc- turne in Blue and Silver," representing a fragment of old Bat- tersea Bridge with fireworks in the distant sky. To explain to the public the charm of Mr. Whistler's art is a diiificult task. It is inevitably the destiny of artists who see nature or man in a novel manner to have to struggle for a long time against disdain or prejudice, until the eyes of the public have become accustomed to their works. Such was the case with Rousseau, Corot, and Millet, whom habit and fashion have at last induced the public to accept, and even perhaps to enjoy. And yet to admire Rousseau and Millet and other modern French artists who are so much honored in these days, and perhaps more enthusiastically in America than anywhere else, is not so difficult: the art of the landscapist as practised by those men is readily intelligible. The peasants of Millet, and the work of materialist painters of the type of Bastien-Lepage, "ARRANGEMENT IN FLESH-COLOR AND GREEN — THE BALCONY." From the painting by James McNeil Whistler. ^^S-^^ 0? THE f-OUIVBllSIT AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 85 Dagnan-Bouveret, Roll, Gervex, Friant, and other shining lights of the contemporary French school are also readily comprehen- sible to an eye of very ordinary culture. But in Mr. Whistler's work we find nothing of this kind ; his constant aim is to es- chew materiality, grossness, and ugliness, and to evoke only the most delicate visions of form and light, as in his etchings ; of form and color in luminous air, as in his portraits and pictures ; or even of color alone, with the smallest substratum of form, as in his Nocturnes and Notes. In his recent etchings of the chateaux of Touraine, as in his etchings of Venice, Mr. Whis- tler has not set himself to reproduce patiently and painfully a storied fa9ade, an oriel-window, or an elaborate gargoyle ; but he has given us a delicate and fascinating analytical vision of the chateau as it appears in the landscape ; of the carved and ornate staircase of an old town-hall in juxtaposition with the modest architecture of the busy street ; of the richly chased arabesques of the belfry as its intricate splendor of chiselled stone glitters across a maze of picturesque chimney-pots. And yet no one has ever rendered the exquisiteness, the refinement, and that aspect as of delicate jewellery which characterizes the architecture of the French Renaissance as Mr. Whistler has in these etchings of Loches, Bourges, Beaulieu, and the banks of the Loire. So, too, in his etchings of Venice, notably in the visions of the domes, campanili, and palaces seen across the lagoons, Mr. Whistler has rendered the quality of Venetian at- mosphere and the aspect of Venetian horizons with a faculty of dainty invention, a mysterious simplicity of means, and a deli- cate expressiveness which are wholly personal, and which, when once you have understood them, impress you with their de- finitive completeness. Now let us take the picture of " The Balcony," reproduced in our engraving. Thi-s is a vision of form and color in lumin- ous air — a Japanese fancy realized on the banks of the gray Thames. On a balcony of turquoise blue that is almost green, in the immediate foreground are flowery branches of azaleas, 6* 86 ART AND CRITICISM whose white and roseate petals suggest comparison with the butterflies of corresponding tones that flutter in the same plane of the picture. To the left reclines a girl in a flesh-colored dress, shading her face with a dark violet fan, and resting her elbow^ on a pile of violet drapery. In the centre, a girl with red hair, dressed in gray-green, with a lacquer red sash, leans her hands on the railing, and looks over the urban landscape that occupies the whole background — the gray Thames, the darker gray horizon line bristling with peaked factory roofs and indus- trial minarets which are nothing but common smoke-stacks, the gray sky of Middlesex, which, for those who can see, possesses the soft cloudings and striations of jade, and which the artist has made to vibrate delicately by the introduction of the dark green notes of blinds hung from the roof of the balcony. To the right of the picture are seated two girls : at the back, one dressed in grass green, with a blue fillet binding her deep red hair ; and just in front of this one a black-haired girl, wearing a white robe adorned with red flowers, and over it a blue mantle lined with red, twangs a stringed instrument with taper fingers. On the blue-green floor of the balcony stands a black lacquer tray with on it a gray bottle and two cups. All the drapery is of Japanese cut, and dotted over with suggestions of flowery embroidery. Our engraving gives the composition of this pict- ure, the elegant silhouettes of the figures, a suggestion of the dreamy atmosphere and delicate nuances of light in which the balcony and these fancy maidens are enveloped ; but the audac- ity of the chromatic scheme, the daintiness of the colors, the distinction of the gray background, the precious aspect of the whole vision, which seems to have been created rather than painted, so mysterious are the means employed, so perfect the artist's power of expression, so intense the evocation of beauty, of exquisiteness, and of color charm — all this cannot be ren- dered by black and white, and yet all this contributes to the fascination of " The Balcony," which the artist himself presents as the pretext of an " arrangement in flesh-color and green." iNUL-iukXE IN BLUE AND SILVER — FRAGMENT OF OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE. From the painting by James McNeil Whistler. V "^^-^^ OP THE IVBRSITT] AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 89 In presence of an artistic vision of such refinement as " The Balcony," I feel inclined to anticipate none of the restrictions which the inopportune wisdom of "critics" may raise. The picture is a fancy in the Japanese taste, which fact by no means diminishes its originality, as some might vainly think. To have loved Japanese art five-and-twenty years before its productions became polluted by the profane admiration of millionaire col- lectors and by the stereotyped enthusiasm of the aesthetic diner- out, is one of the many evidences which Mr. Whistler has given of the originality and the delicacy of his artistic temperament; for it is as much in the objects of his admiration as in his own productions that a man shows his personality and his taste. In " The Balcony" the Japanese influence is conscious and avowed. In the "Nocturne in Blue and Silver," here engraved, the Japanese influence is more subtle : indeed, we have no right to say that the artist worked under any influence what- ever, inasmuch as the education, the theories, the processes of the artist no more concern us than do the details of his private life, or his views on predestination and free-will. It is imperti- nent for us to pry into the secrets of the laboratory ; it is also vain, for no analysis will explain the creation of a great work of art ; it is the privilege of the masterpiece to remain mysteri- ous, and to command the silent admiration of those who are truly sensitive to its beauty. The finer the work is, the less garrulous is our appreciation. Nevertheless, while delighting in the charm of the exquisite nocturne of old Battersea Bridge looming darkly against the cold dusky blue sky, spangled in the distance with the silvery scintillations of a shower of falling fireworks that for a moment make the stars look dim, it may be of interest to note the coincidence of the almost contempora- neous activity of the Japanese artist Hiroshighe, who died in 1863, and who excelled in the domain of the nocturne. In their metal-work, in their lacquers, and above all in their albums and paintings, the Japanese have always loved to suggest by marvellously subtle and summary analytical indications the 90 ART AND CRITICISM. effects of moonlight, the luminous obscurity of night, the mys- tery of figures and landscape clothed in the veil of nocturnal shadows. In the works of almost all the great Japanese artists night effects may be found, but it is above all in the landscapes of Hiroshighe that we find the nocturne treated with a persist- ency which implies on the artist's part a peculiar sensitiveness to effects of this kind, and a determination to study and render the mystery of night, and the charm of color which has almost ceased to be color. There is one nocturne in particular by Hiroshighe, representing an episode in the history of the Ro- nins — a night fete on a river, with, in the distance, fireworks, and on the bamboo bridge people leaning over — which is treat- ed in the same spirit and with the same sensitiveness to the fascination of evanescent effects of light and gloom that Mr. Whistler has shown in his nocturne of old Battersea Bridge. The coincidence only shows that those prodigiously deli- cate and exquisitely tasteful people, the Japanese, have long been sensitive to the renderings of certain phases of nature which Mr. Whistler has been the first Western artist to appre- ciate and to depict, with especial and persistent effort, in the extensive series of studies which figure in his work under the name of " Nocturnes," and which are absolutely original, per- sonal, and unlike anything that has ever been done before. These nocturnes, in their frames of pale gold sprinkled with silver and combed with turquoise blue, have disconcerted peo- ple more than anything that Mr. Whistler has painted; and this fact need not astonish us, for sometimes they reach the very limits of the painter's art, and even penetrate beyond into the artificial paradises of Poe and Baudelaire. The nocturne, as Mr. Whistler has often conceived it, is suggestive rather than evocative, and it may convey no meaning whatever unless the sympathetic spectator brings with him a store of observa- tions and souvenirs which will enable him to travel in thought over strange sites of sky and water that form magic and yet natural landscapes. "PORTRAIT OF MISS CORDER." From the painting by James McNeil Whistler. AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 93 Mr. Whistler is great because from the beginning he gave play to his individuality, evolved a preconceived way of looking at nature, or, in other words, 2l parti pris to which he remained true in spite of ridicule, raillery, neglect, and almost starvation. It is well enough to talk of the influence upon Mr. Whistler of Velasquez and of the Japanese ; but whatever influence of the kind he may have undergone was of the subtlest and the least material kind ; a man of Mr. Whistler's strong personality could not make use of the visual or technical formulae of oth- ers ; and even if he obtained clear knowledge of them, any at- tempt to put that knowledge into practice would hamper him and deprive him of all powers of spontaneous and happy ex- pression. By processes that are inexplicable, and thanks to rare nervous and visual faculties combined with natural and intellectual refinements of many kinds, it happened that Mr. Whistler's delicate sensitiveness was most keenly awakened to the charm of form and color in light. But he never, like the impressionists, took pleasure in the coarse and obvious condi- tions of light, but rather in the light that creates exquisite color harmonies, as, for instance, the " Blue Wave " and " The Pacific;" in the delicate nuances of dreamy light that reveal infinite rich- ness in the combinations of several colors, as, for instance, " The Balcony," or " The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine ;" in the golden gray light that illumines the sober and intense gravity of the portraits of the artist's mother, of Carlyle, and of Miss Alexander, and, added to their astonishing life-like aspect, gives them something disconcerting and unearthly ; in the still more spectral arrangement of his later portraits, like that of Miss Corder, here engraved, where he represents forms enveloped in more or less luminous air against a background of airy obscur- ity in which the contours seem to be lost, without, however, ceasing to be distinct ; or, finally, in the m3^sterious attenuations and fadings of light into that which is no longer light, as, for instance, " The Bridge " and other " Nocturnes." In short, all that interests Mr. Whistler as a painter is that which is most 94 ART AND CRITICISM. delicate, most subtle, and most imperceptible and incomprehen- sible to the vulgar eye — that sincerely and normally vulgar eye which does not see that Velasquez is the inimitable colorist and not Benjamin Constant or Ziem. The portrait of Miss Corder penetrates beneath the skin, and sheds over the physiognomy of the person a reflection of her thoughts; it is a portrait in some sort psychological, like the portraits of Carlyle, of Miss Alexander, and of the many aristocratic or elegant ladies whom the artist has painted. The chromatic scheme is an arrangement in black and brown. The floor is brownish gray, the background mere luminous gloom — atmosphere that seems black without being black. Against this background, and enveloped in it, stands a life-size figure of a young woman, with blond hair tightly rolled on the top of her head, dressed in a black dress, a black jacket bordered with black fur and lined with white, holding in her gloved hand a brown felt hat with a long feather, and turning towards the spectator the calm profile of a rather severe face suffused with the rosy vibration of life. M. Florian's excellent engraving gives a not inadequate idea of the mysterious simplicity of this portrait, which is certainly one of the masterpieces of modern times, worthy to figure beside the great portraits of Velasquez. I know nothing more intensely living, more delicately true to nature, more mysteriously modelled, and more prodigiously skil- ful in drawing than the face of this portrait, and nothing more marvellous than the painting of the black dress and the silhou- ette of the whole figure, black against black, so elegant in its sweeping arabesque, so commanding in its serpentine pose and its expression of refined ennui. The painter and the connois- seur may gaze and peer at this portrait as long as they please, but they will never discover how it was painted, for all trace has disappeared of the means used to bring about the end ; it suggests no effort; it betrays no evidences of technical skill, and no marks of clever brush-work, glazing, or impasto; it is simply there in the splendor and mystery of its existence, a " PORTRAIT OF EVA H." From the painting by W. T. Dannat. AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 97 creation rather than a painting, the materialized vision of the artist whose "White Girl" already in 1863 caused a French critic to characterize him most suggestively as '' le plus spirite des peintresT III. Mr. William T. Dannat's recent and brilliant reputation is due to his pictures " Apres la Messe " (Salon of 1882), " Contra- bandier Aragonais" (Salon of 1883), now in the museum of Per- pignan, " Quatuor Espagnol" (Salon of 1884), the property of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, portrait of Mile. Eva H. (Salon of 1885), portrait of Mile. Leonie H., and "A Sacristy in Aragon" (Salon of 1886), the property of the Art Museum at Chicago. To these pictures must be added two life-size fig- ures, " Un Profil blond " and " Une Saduceenne," and an exqui- site head and bust on a black background, called " Mariposa," all three shown for the first time at the Paris Universal Exhibi- tion. In our engravings we have reproduced — as adequately as the means of black and white allow — the two portraits of Miles. Eva and Leonie H. The latter portrait represents on a dark brownish ground the pale rose face of a blue-eyed girl with soft yellow blond hair, on which the light plays and turns it into gold. The girl is dressed in a light brown dress with a velvet collar and a white frill. The portrait of Mile. Eva represents a blond girl dressed in black against a gray background. Both these portraits are admirable, and that of Mile. Eva in particu- lar seems to be absolutely definitive ; it is not possible to paint flesh more true to nature, to model a head more vividly, or to execute with more mysterious and fascinating simplicity. There is no old master of the days when men knew how to paint who can show a finer or a more complete piece of work than this girl's head. The life-size figure " Un Profil blond " bears the sub-title of a "study in red;" it represents a blond -haired 7 98 ART AND CRITICISM. woman with delicate rose and white cheeks standing and look- ing at herself in a hand-mirror; she is dressed in red, with a transparent red shawl hanging from her shoulder scarf wise ; in her hair is a rose-red flower; in the corner of the room is a red sang de bceuf vdiSQ filled with red poppies, and the walls of the room forming the background of the picture are red also. This study in red is a vision of beauty ; the general aspect as a mere color scheme has the fascination of the most exquisite reds that we know— the velvety red of pelargoniums, the red of azaleas, which has the surface of fine silk, the red of Coromandel lacq- uer, the red of the flame-licked porcelain of the Orientals, the red of the soft tissues of India, the red of the wings of butter- flies. Thus, before we realize what the picture is, we already receive an impression of something rich, rare, and precious, and at the same time of something exquisite and quintessential, for the form which we discern in the dreamy ambience is of su- preme elegance and fearless purity of line. It is the form of a woman who is an incarnation of slender and serpentine volupt- uousness, a woman of subtle physical fascination, a captivating animal of the race of that flower-crowned nymph whose enig- matic beauty triumphs at Florence in Botticelli's allegory of spring. In the whole exhibition this picture stands out as something new, unlike all that we have seen — a thing of re- fined invention. Besides being a vision of beauty, this " Profil blond " is executed with unfailing knowledge. Every millime- tre of the contour is studied with relentless persistency and drawn with impeccable firmness. As in the grand work of Velasquez, who drew nature as it is and as he saw it, the sil- houette is cut out sharply ; there is not a hair's-breadth of the outline of the skirt that cannot be followed by the eye and rea- soned about ; there is not a particle of the delicate lines of the neck, shoulders, arms, and hands which is not closely observed and mysteriously perfect. There is not an inch of the flesh of the figure where you cannot find, if you look for it, all the modelling that there is in nature — the trace of all the muscles, " PORTRAIT OF LEONIE H. From the painting by W. T. Dannat. *>• rtl* TTcrw "^. 0^ THR UH IVBRSr AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. lOI the place of all the bones ; and yet the painting of the flesh ap- pears to be of a flatness and of a unity of tone that stop just short of excess, and remain incomparable. " Une Saduceenne " bears the sub -title of a "study in white," and represents a suave young woman with an aureole of golden hair, dressed in a white low-necked dress, standing and looking towards the spectator with her head thrown back, her lips parted in a smile, her whole face foreshortened, one hand on her hip and the arm crooked, while in the other hand she holds a cigarette. The walls of the room are gray, relieved only by a bit of black curtain with polychrome Oriental em- broidery. To the left of the picture is a gray vase with blue ornamentation containing some tall branches of white gelder- roses. On the floor in the foregrouild lies one gelder-rose with scattered petals. Like the lady in the " Profil blond," the hero- ine of this study in white is a fascinating materialist; as the title suggests, she is wholly given up to the things of this world, for the Sadducees, we read, did not believe in angels, neither in the resurrection ; she is, however, more familiar, more " modern," more intime, than the woman in red. From the point of view of painting, " Une Saduceenne" is a tour de force; the head and bust are admirable in tone and delicate realism ; the white dress is really white and yet full of color; the light coming from the top of the picture, and, so to speak, trickling down over the face, the shoulders, the bust, the edges and frills of the sleeves and of the corsage, and over the folds of the skirt to the toe of the girl's shoe, is managed with rare sure- ness of means and daintiness of vision. Of Mr. Dannat's well-known picture of the " Spanish Qua- tuor" I need say little except that it occupied the place of honor in the United States section, and compared with the finest pictures, not only in the foreign sections, but also in the French, it was generally acknowledged to be one of the most striking and the most completely successful works of the kind in the entire Exhibition. In the way of realistic painting it is 102 ART AND CRITICISM. as fine as anything that has been done — admirably composed, distinguished in aspect, full of careful observation of values, and painted, like all Mr. Dannat's pictures, with the firmness and material solidity of the old masters. This latter quality is worthy of notice, for nowadays most pictures at the end of six months look no longer the same as they did when they left the artist's studio. The " Spanish Quatuor " is as bright and pure now as it looked when we saw it in the Salon of 1884. To my mind, however, the "Spanish Quatuor" is not Mr. Dannat's finest work. It has not the definitive quality of the portrait of Mile. Eva H.; it has not the singular and penetrating distinc- tion, the absolute verity and purity of tone, the sureness and directness of execution, the complete achievement, of the " Sac- risty in Aragon." In Mr. Dannat's work we find the qualities of the most gifted artists — a vision of singular acuteness and sensitiveness, a refined and delicate intelligence, perfect com- mand of the means of drawing and painting, and, finally, that taste and that aesthetic tact which enable him to avoid every excess, whether of commonplaceness or of eccentricity — those two extremes on the verge of which the masterpiece is con- ceived and consummated. IV. Mr. John S. Sargent's reputation is the result of ten years' work. His first picture, exhibited in the Salon of 1878, repre- sented some fisher-women and children on the sea-coast. In 1879 he sprang into notoriety with a dashing portrait of Caro- lus Duran painted in the master's own style. In 1880 he ex- hibited a portrait of a lady and a delicate fantaisie called " Fumee d'Ambre gris ;" in 1 881, portraits and some water- colors of Venice; in 1882, a portrait and a picture of a Span- ish dancing girl, called " El Jaleo," which created a sensation, and induced enthusiastic critics to evoke the souvenir of Goya, "UN PROFIL BLOND — A STUDY IN RED. From the painting by W. T. Dannat. Z(^ OP THE fUHIVBESlTT] AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 105 whereas the suggestion of Daniel Vierge would perhaps have sufficed. In 1883 Mr. Sargent exhibited at the Salon a por- trait group of the children of Mrs. Boit; in 1884, the famous portrait of Madame Gauthereau; in 1885, 1886, and 1888, por- " CARNATION, LILY, LILY, ROSE. From the painting by John S. Sargent. I06 ART AND CRITICISM. traits. Meanwhile, after the ferocious criticism which the pict- ure of Madame Gauthereau provoked, Mr. Sargent settled in London, and won fresh laurels with a number of portraits, and with a charming picture bearing the title of "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," which had the honor of being purchased by the Royal Academy on behalf of the Chantrey Fund. This pict- ure is reproduced in our engraving. Mr. Sargent is an artist in the noble sense of the term ; he will never consent to be commonplace ; he loves rarity ; he in- terests always by the distinction of an effort which is not that of ordinary men. His talent is prodigious ; his sensitiveness to all artistic manifestations is extremely delicate; his intelli- gence, his verve, and his virtiiosite are marvellous to such a degree that they sometimes get the better of his personality. But even in his imitative moods Mr. Sargent invariably adds something of his own which gives a dash, a brio, a novelty, and a distinction to all that he produces. Carolus Duran, Manet, Vierge, Goya, and recently Claude Monet, have in turn cap- tivated Mr. Sargent's attention, and from each one he has wrested the secret of some new means to be added to the already rich arsenal of his artistic resources. Among the old masters Mr, Sargent has carried his appreciative explorations even further back than Velasquez, for when he painted the portrait of a contemporary beauty, Madame Gauthereau, the hero of his thoughts was Piero della Francesca, the impeccable purity and the mysterious flatness of whose profiles he vent- ured to take as his model. The enterprise was entirely lauda- ble; to have sought to achieve that idealized vision, that ab- stract grace of the bounding lines, and that exalted rendering of character, truer than nature itself, which the great painter of the fifteenth century attained in the simplicity and sincerity of his mastery, was wholly to Mr. Sargent's credit. The portrait of Madame Gauthereau remains a thing of beauty; the wild and coarse criticism with which the public honored it proves only how dangerous it is for an artist to dare to produce some- 5" K > ^^ X R p ■/. ►n c. > rn •t V OH C" ;^i^?^ OF THE [TJIflVBRSn AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. IO9 thing uncommon, instead of being content to be persistently and resolutely vulgar. " Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose " is a rare vision which the ar- tist may have seen some summer evening, perhaps, as his boat glided past those fairy English gardens that slope down to the water's edge along the Thames. It represents some little girls busily lighting up a garden at dusk. The impression given by the picture renders precisely what must have been the charm of the spectacle in nature, namely, for the eye, the intensity of the color heightened by the incipient conflict between lamp- light and daylight — the lamplight only just beginning to make the paper lanterns glow more strongly than the flowers; and for the mind, the earnestness with which the children are working at this preparation for an illumination, unconsciously becoming a part of the scene, like so many moths or fire-flies. This picture is a work of exquisite beauty and refinement, one of those delicate dreams of color and dainty form that nature suggests and the artist realizes only in moments of peculiarly propitious inspiration. V. Mr. Alexander Harrison first made his mark at the Paris Salon of 1882, with a charming picture called "Chateaux en Espagne," which is reproduced in our engraving, and remains one of the artist's best works. In the Salon of 1884 Mr. Har- rison again obtained great success with a marine called " Cre- puscule," which he followed up in the Salon of 1885 with " La Vague," and in the Salon of 1886 with "En Arcadie." The above-mentioned four pictures all figured in the Universal Ex- hibition, and represent up to the present the artist's greatest and most successful efforts. The blue-eyed boy lying on his back on the sands and dreaming beside his castle of mussel- shells and reeds was painted under the influence of Bastien- no ART AND CRITICISM. Lepage, who has been Mr. Harrison's guiding genius much more than his official master, Gerome. The key-note of Mr. Harrison's art is truth to nature ; he is a disciple of the plein air movement, and of the evolution which was determined in French art by Manet, who opened the eyes of the modern painters to the diffused vibrations of out-door light, and showed them how to decompose color, and to fix the real effect by es- tablishing rigjorously the series of relations. This has been Mr. Harrison's great preoccupation in his many studies of sea and sky in the infinite variety of aspects which sunlight, moonshine, and cloud formations impart to them. In these marines Mr. Harrison is absolutely personal. His vision of the infinite expanse of the restless ocean, of the impressive stillness of the silent sky when the blackness of night looms up over the horizon, of the viscous surface of the rolling waves that seem to moan and wail in the awfulness of the vast soli- tude, has a grandeur that a poet's majestic metaphors could alone describe. It is a vision more penetrating, more complex, more prismatically brilliant, than any painter has before en- joyed, a vision now tragic and morose, but more often delicate and infinite in fine nuances like mother-of-pearl or opal. The " Crepuscule " and " La Vague," apart from their charm as vi- sions of nature, are of inexhaustible interest as studies of color and of values. The mere chromatic aspect of Mr. Harrison's marines gives to the eye direct physical enjoyment before the brain perceives that this color reproduces the instantaneous phases of cloud and water, and before analysis reveals how curious is the artist's precise notation of the appearance of the curling wave, and of the wash that swirls in successive and ever-widening curves chasing each other over the smooth sands, each with its glassy sheet of mirror-like surface that re- flects the sky. Mr. Harrison's " En Arcadie," in spite of its title, contains nothing fanciful or imported from dream-land; it is entirely from nature. The modern French school of painting of the e. a r. > OS c: n — 2 > 07 THE [UFI7BIISIT7] AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 113 past fifteen years is based on two principles, namely, the ob- servation of values and the integrity of the subject. The idea that has been professed, perhaps to excess, is that to make a picture we do not need dramatic or sentimental stories, neither the pear-shaped tears of Greuze nor the stupendous adventures of Sennacherib. The theory is that truth suffices, or in other words, all that can be demanded of an artist is sincere observa- tion, logical execution, and emancipation from academic influ- ence, or, as others might say, individuality and self-respect. " En Arcadie " contains the result of the application of this theory to nude figures in the open air. Beside a stream, be- yond which is a flowery meadow and an enclosing curtain of trees, is a carpet of velvety grass and flowers, studded with gnarled willows and silvery birches, through whose branches the afternoon sun strikes and forms a golden mosaic on the sward. In this landscape some nude women are reposing after their bath, sitting or reclining in the grass, while one in the foreground stands, and with uplifted arms grasps the branch above her head, and remains in languid pose, talking to one who sits on her left — dryads that are entirely human, and even modern, for the artist has made no effort to conceal his method of realizing his Arcadian vision : he has simply painted modern women nude in the open air, and reproduced, with the sin- cerity of contemporary analysis, the aspect of flesh that habit- ually wears clothes as it appears in the unusual conditions of nudity. In painting both the landscape and the figures Mr. Harrison has sought to attain truth to nature ; not the mere textual image and reproduction, but truth in tone and relative values. The sun is not seen in the picture itself, but it per- vades the whole in the light green of the grass, in the shadows which are only attenuated light, on the bodies of the women, which are enveloped in the caresses of varied and conflicting reflected lights. The landscape of " En Arcadie " is perfec- tion ; it is impossible to conceive a more absolute and delicate illusion of sunny woodland. 114 ART AND CRITICISM, VI. Of the landscapes exhibited the finest and the most person- al were those by Mr. Charles H. Davis, " Un Soir d'Hiver," " La Vallee sur le Soir," " Le Versant de la Colline," and " Le Soir apres I'Orage." Mr. Davis gives us refined and poetical visions of nature which are at once realistic and lyrical, and which do not remain mere cold reproductions of the material aspect of nature, but represent nature infused with the emotions that it provokes in the soul of the spectator. The cold blue- gray solitude of water, rushes, and sky called "A Winter Even- ing " is certainly one of the very best modern landscapes in the Exhibition, beautiful in tone, distinguished in sentiment, and conceived with an intensity and a completeness that are abso- lute. Another of this artist's pictures, representing a green valley invaded by the encroaching gloom of twilight, with a white cloud of pearly mist stealing over the tranquil and weary expanse of verdure, gives with equal intensity an impression of melancholy stillness, of the immensity of the valley and its bounding hills, and of the awful fascination of the majesty of Night, that covers the earth as it were with a shroud of silence and of mystery. Mr. Davis has made his mark discreetly but surely at the Salons of the last six years ; his exhibit at the Champ de Mars gives him rank among the great landscapists of the day, as an artist singularly sensitive to the soul charm as well as to the color charm of nature. Mr. George Hitchcock revealed himself, a late-comer in art, at the Salon in 1887, when his "Tulip-growing in Holland" at once made him almost famous. In the background of the pict- ure is a curtain of trees, and nestling under the trees a house, and in front of the house tulips, band after band, parallel and regular, rose, white, yellow, and red ; and in the midst of this c ri^ Of TBS [UFI7BESIT71 AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 11/ natural carpet of flowers stands the lady of the house, in Dutch costume, hesitating, scissors in hand, which tulip she shall cut. This lovely vision of floral color figured in the Universal Exhi- bition, together with " The Annunciation" (Salon of 1888), and a new picture of Dutch figures in pale and pearly landscape, called " Maternity." This last is charming in aspect and most delicate in tone ; the landscape is exquisite ; the figures alone betray the inevitable weakness of opsimathy, and that, too, all the more so as they are conspicuous in the foreground. Nev- ertheless, you feel that this picture is the work of a singularly artistic temperament. The same impression is given by " The Annunciation," reproduced in the accompanying engraving. This picture is a harmony in green and silver. In the fore- ground is a plot of tall-growing lilies in the full glory of their rich white bloom ; a dark hedge of lilac bushes, broken here and there by willows, separates the lily garden from an ex- panse of bright green Dutch landscape that fades away with infinite delicacy of gradations towards the distant horizon of pearly sky. Against the background formed by the hedge stands the Virgin, personified by a plain Dutch maid, draped in simple vestments of lilac-gray tone and a short cloak reach- ing to the waist, and wearing the white muslin coiffure of Hol- land, with streamers that hang over the shoulders. In the idea of the painter, Mary has just received the divine message, and with downcast eyes replies to the angel invisible to pro- fane eyes, " Behold the handmaid of the Lord ; be it unto me according to thy word." Mr. Hitchcock's " Annunciation " is distinguished and re- fined in composition and treatment; the color scheme of greens and grays with exquisite opaline transitions is charm- ing ; the invention of the picture implies intelligent selection, and the exercise of that rare quality which we call taste. To my mind the " Annunciation " is a beautiful work, one of the most refined and original pictures in the American section, and incontestably the vision of a man of delicate and artistic nature. 8* Il8 ART AND CRITICISM. Mr. J. Gari Melchers, whose name first appears in the Sa- lon catalogue in 1882, did not make his mark until the Salon of 1886, when he exhibited " Le Preche," reproduced in the accompanying engraving. At the Salon of 1888 his "Dutch Pilots," with their placid faces, sitting round an inn table, talk- ing about the sea, smoking, and carving models of boats, was one of the notable pictures of the year. At the Universal Ex- hibition Mr. Melchers was represented by both these works, and by a very large new picture representing the celebration of communion in a Dutch church, and containing some twenty life-size and remarkably ugly figures. Although Mr. Melchers works by preference in Holland, and although he has hitherto painted none but Dutch subjects, he is a pupil of Boulanger and Lefebvre, and thoroughly French in the modernity and quality of his vision. He paints figures round and solid, with a tendency towards the complete illusion of materiality. In all that concerns realistic work we cannot mention a French artist who is superior to him, for Mr. Melchers is marvellously skil- ful; in " Le Preche" and in the large "Communion" picture there are figures and morceaux which are simply the last word of realism in painting. At the same time Mr. Melchers 's pict- ures are rich in local color; the attitudes and gestures of the figures are full of character, studied with esprit, drawn fault- lessly, and painted with simplicity and strength ; the composi- tion is not commonplace; the relative values are keenly ob- served ; the figures admirably enveloped in air ; in fact there is no technical detail, no matter of special knowledge, no material point, in which Mr. Melchers can be found even hesitating, much less positively at fault. His three pictures exhibited at the Champ de Mars are thoroughly remarkable works, and among the younger painters of the day, not only in America, but in Europe, Mr. Melchers has won for himself a very en- viable and distinguished position. His work is new and quite personal; he has both the courage and the strength to be himself. Doubtless these pews full of Dutch women and girls > p - M —• 1/4 > cr d 7i > Cu in (P w fl p ?3 ?1 3 rr; s- f? > ' ./ ^^ ^^ ■«< >^ 5N: 1 ^ fUHIVBRSITT] AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 121 in their quaint head-dresses interest many people. The sturdy- pilots, too, and the plain-looking, cheesy-faced people gathered round the communion table in a bare and gray-walled Dutch church, will find admirers who will be struck by the sentiment of the subject, by the illusion of life and by the rendering of common -place features and ordinary characteristics that the first comers can appreciate. But is the admiration of such as these sufficient for the artist's ambition.? Is the theory of the integrity of the subject so incontestable as some maintain it to be ? Are we not beginning to have enough likenesses of ugly people of advanced age and humble station since fashion directed the painters into the path of peasant portraiture, and since experience has shown them that it is far easier to paint the wrinkled parchment face of a stupid old hag than to repro- duce the grace, the elegance, and refinement of a beautiful woman ? Mr. Melchers appears to have skill and talent enough to attempt the noblest and most ambitious enterprises. He has already shown himself to be a draughtsman and a painter ; the future will show whether this brilliant young man has the supreme gifts of taste and of beautiful invention that will make him an artist and a creator. Of the three pictures which he exhibits at the Universal Exhibition the most interesting is "Le Preche," which has certain qualities of delicacy and re- finement that make it charming to the eye. In his last and most ambitious picture, "The Communion," which is positively and frankly ugly, Mr. Melchers seems to tend rather towards following in the footsteps of Courbet, whose vision of nature is that of an impersonal observer, very searching, but without lyrism or charm — ^of Courbet, who above all things studied the volume of bodies, their thickness rather than their silhouette against the layers of transparent air, and the diversity rather than the lightness and daintiness of the effect. The remarks we have just made about the disproportion between the talent expended and the subject treated apply also to the work of Mr. Walter Gay, who was represented by 122 ART AND CRITICISM. a large picture called " Charity," by the " Benedicite " (Salon of 1888), by " Les Fileuses" (Salon of 1885), and by some genre pictures of no special interest. Mr. Gay, a pupil of Bonnat, began his career at the Salon of 1879 with " Une Le9on d'Escrime," which betrayed the influence of the For- tuny school. For some years he continued painting genre and costume pictures with extreme virtuosite ; and then, yield- ing to the influence of Liebermann, Uhde, and other realistic painters of the humble, he produced a series of old women of singular uncomeliness. Mr. Ridgway Knight's exhibition pictures were " La Ren- contre," " L'Appel au Passeur" (Salon of 1888), and " Un Deuil " (Salon of 1882). Mr. Knight first came to Europe in 1 86 1, and studied with Gleyre, After spending some years in Philadelphia, he returned to Paris in 1872, exhibited a picture called " Les Fugitives " in the Salon of 1873, ^"^^ finally settled at Poissy, when he began to paint landscape with figures under the guidance of Meissonier. A man whose masters have been Gleyre and Meissonier necessarily learns to disdain facile suc- cesses and to prize artistic sincerity. This is shown in Mr. Knight's series of pictures exhibited year after year at the Salon: "The Washer- women " (1875), " Harvesters " (1876), " Village Water-carriers " (1877), " La Vendange" (1879), " Une Halte" (1880), "Apres un Dejeuner" (1881), " Un Deuil" (1882), "Sans Dot" (1883), "Les Babillards " (1885), " L'In- venteur" (1886), "En Octobre " (1887), "L'Appel au Passeur" (1888), "Le Soir" (1889). Mr. Knight does not paint the life of country people with the austerity of Millet, who shows us the human being imbruted and deformed by his perpetual struggle against the earth and the elements ; nor, on the other hand, has he yielded too much to the urban and cloying senti- mentalism by means of which Jules Breton steals the hearts of the country cousins. Mr. Knight has an innate tendency to see the smiling and amiable aspect of nature ; he exercises the artist's right to pick and choose and select. His vision of 07 THB irjiriVBiisiTT] AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 125 rural life is that of a healthy, happy man, unperverted by pessi- mism or dilettanteism or any other excess of mental refine- ment, and consequently he finds in the fields of Seine-et-Oise peasant girls far more goodly to look upon than the rouo-h- hewn and heavy creatures whom the author of the " Angelus " has painted digging and delving, toiling and moiling, resigned and joyless. If there is any latent coquetry in a model, any elegance of line beneath the rough vesture, Mr. Knight's eye will detect it, and his brush will render it with the exaltation of idealism : in other words, Mr. Knight selects what is beautiful and pretty in the peasant, and avoids all that is hideous and unsightly. The picture reproduced in our engraving seems to us the most complete that he has yet painted, combining artis- tic and material qualities of high merit. We are on the banks of the Seine, whence we see the river winding away into the blue-gray distance between hills dotted with houses here and there, and fringed with trees around which the moisture of the autumn air clings like a luminous film. To the left in the foreground is a stretch of fresh green grass, and beyond a thicket and bushes, with withered leaves hanging over the water's edge. Two robust rustic belles, clad in work-a-day costume, checkered with those patches that are still the pride of an economical housewife, are represented in the act of hail- ing with characteristic gestures the ferry -man, whom they see with his boat in the distance on the opposite bank. The pearliness of the atmosphere in this picture, the delicately studied gradations of luminous air penetrating in between the trees on the left, the exquisitely fine tones of the landscape, the vivid attitudes of the figures, are points which the eye remarks with always new pleasure. Mr. Julius L. Stewart is a pupil of Zamacois, Gerome, and Madrazo, and more especially of the Spaniards, whose brill- iancy of execution, whose virtuosite, and whose brightness of color he rivals both in his subject pictures and in his portraits. His reputation is the result of ten years' work, the chief fruits 126 ART AND CRITICISM. of which have been shown at the Salon : " La Maja " and " La Lecture" (1878), " Portrait of Lady A." (1879), " L'Ete " and a portrait of Mile. E. S. (1882), " Une Cour au Caire " (1883), "A Five -o'clock Tea" (1884), "A Hunt Ball" (1885), "Full Speed" (1886), "La Berge, Bougival " (1887), "Portrait of the Vicomtesse G. d'A." (1888). At the Paris Exhibition Mr. Stewart made a brilliant show with his " Hunt Ball," a new picture in the same vein called the " Hunt Supper," " La Berge, Bougival," an Oriental scene representing "A Court- yard at Cairo," and three portraits. Mr. Stewart excels in de- picting scenes and details of social elegance, and in brilliant and clever painting he vies with the most skilful. Mr. Charles Sprague Pearce's first Salon pictures were a portrait (1876), the "Death of the First-born" (1877), " Abra- ham's Sacrifice" (1879), and the "Beheading of St. John" (1881). These were the work of an excellent pupil of Bonnat who had not yet found his way. In the Salon of 1883 Mr. Pearce exhibited the " Prelude," an excellent genre picture rep- resenting a girl playing a guitar, and the " Water-carrier," a peasant maid carrying pitchers in a pale Picardy landscape. Mr. Pearce's Salon pictures in the following years — " Peines de Coeur" (1885), " Une Bergere "-(1886), "St. Genevieve" (1887), " Rentree du Troupeau " (1888) — classed him definitively among the successful painters of rustic landscape-and-ligure subjects, treated with all the technical skill, close observation, and simple handling which the modern French school demands, but at the same time with a point of sentiment dominating the general realism. At the Universal Exhibition Mr. Pearce was represented by a portrait, " La Melancolie," " Le Soir," and " Une Bergere." The last, a souvenir of Picardy, is reproduced in our engraving, and represents the artist at his best. On a sloping hill-side, with a rugged path straggling up towards the horizon between fields of stubble and stacked corn, a flock of sheep is seen browsing, while in the foreground stands a shep- herdess resting, with her hands on her staff, her eyes cast down 3 I ^ r ^ m n> T! 3 S3 rn 3 ;o •-^ 3 l-H n m ?3 "< <: ^ o •— t > o fcsiVTSHSlTTj AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 129 in vacant thoughtlessness, her attitude that of stolid weariness, unless it be one of hallucination and day-dreaming. However that may be, the picture is an admirable rendering of open air, luminous distance, and gray atmospheric effects, and the figure of the shepherdess is painted with great cleverness. " Le Soir" represents a shepherd and his dog watching a flock of sheep in a landscape bathed in the silvery sheen of moonlight. The shepherd, draped in his ample cloak, leans on his crook, with his back turned to the spectator, in an attitude of singular im- pressiveness ; the landscape conveys the idea of immensity and solemn calm ; the general aspect of the picture is extremely re- fined and full of poetical sentiment. Mr. Edwin Lord Weeks began to exhibit at the Salon in 1878, and continued with subjects from Tangier and Morocco until 1884, when he sent a souvenir of Indian travel, a " Hindoo Sanctuary at Bombay." In 1885 he exhibited at the Salon the large picture reproduced in our engraving, " Le Dernier Voy- age," a souvenir of the Ganges. At the Salon of 1886 Mr. Weeks exhibited " The Return of the Mogul Emperor from the Grand Mosque of Delhi;" in 1887, some Bombay Bayaderes ; in 1888, a " Rajah of Jodhpore." At the Universal Exhibition Mr. Weeks was represented by his " Dernier Voyage," his " Ra- jah of Jodhpore," a "Hindoo Marriage Procession" pa.ssing through the quaint streets of Ahmedabad, and some minor works. Mr. Weeks is gifted with great facility ; his skill and sureness of eye and of hand in dealing with vast scenes are re- markable. No one has treated with greater effect and with such unhesitating directness the grand architectural back- grounds of India, with their pluri-color richness and splendor of detail. An excellent example of Mr. Weeks's skill in mise £11 scene is the large picture reproduced in our engraving. Two Hindoo fakirs are going on a pilgrimage to the holy town of Benares. One of them being at the point of death, his com- rade is making haste to take him across the sacred Ganges, so that he may breathe his last on its bank. Such is the scene 9 I30 ART AND CRITICISM. depicted, with, in the background, a vision of holy India — tem- ples, pagodas, funeral pyres, fakirs, and men of all kinds shel- tering themselves from the blazing sun under umbrellas that look like gigantic white mushrooms ; and, in the foreground, the broad Ganges, with its flotsam of pious corpses escorted by carrion-crows. This picture shows Mr, Weeks's dramatic and scenic qualities, and his careful observation of Oriental air and color. In the " Hindoo Marriage " and the " Rajah of Jodh- pore " we admire Mr. Weeks's faculty of composing and setting on foot a great scene comprising landscape, architecture, ani- mals, and countless figures, with all their diverse costumes, atti- tudes, and multifarious accessories. And this faculty, it may be added, is not common in these days of a " realism " which is too often content to limit its efforts to painting " studies." Mr. C. S. Reinhart, who is so well known as an illustrator of inexhaustible invention and alert expression, figured at the Universal Exhibition with two important works, " Watching for the Absent" (Salon 1888) and " Une Epave " (Salon 1887). Both these pictures are irreproachably drawn and painted ; the composition is adequate; the men and women are life-like; the general aspect is effective in a realistic way. Mr. Rein- hart has a mind peopled with souvenirs of scenes, objects, and types, an ocular memory of singular retentiveness, and perfect command of all the material processes of drawing — in short, a combination of rare gifts which make him one of the few eminent illustrators of the day. His two oil-paintings show that he has also adequate command of all the material pro- cesses of painting. Mr. Henry Mosler, although professing to be a pupil of Hebert, under whom he studied for six months, is more truly indebted to the schools of Dusseldorf and Munich for such ar- tistic education as he has received. Since 1878, when his name first begins to appear regularly in the catalogue of the Salon, he has worked sedulously and conscientiously at the produc- tion of pictures that have always proved to be interesting and ^S-Ai;^ OP THB fTj'lHVEB.SITT AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. 133 popular. The number of these works is considerable. Their titles, like the subjects treated, are generally anecdotic, such as " The Return of the Prodigal Son," now in the Musee du Luxembourg ; " The Wedding Gown ;" " The Village Clock- maker;" "The Wedding Morning;" the "Visit of the Mar- chioness;" "The Coming Storm;" a "Breton Harvest Dance;" for Mr. Mosler, it must be added, has an especial affection for the customs and costumes of Brittany. The qualities of Mr. Mosler are homely sentiment, a talent for telling an obvious story such as ordinary people can comprehend and enjoy, and an execution which is always adequate and often excellent so far as it goes. American sculpture was very sparingly represented at the Paris Exhibition. The only work of incontestable and really high merit was Mr. Paul Wayland Bartlett's bronze " The Bear Trainer," a group full of grace, intelligent observation, and intimate charm. Mr. Bartlett is an artist exceedingly skilful in execution, and always distinguished in the conception of his subjects. Mr. F. D. Millet was represented in the United States sec- tion by " A Handmaiden " and " A Difficult Duet ;" but, for reasons which do not concern us, his best picture, " The Piping Times of Peace," was exhibited in the English depart- ment. Of late years Mr. Millet has acquired a distinguished position in England, side by side with men like Marcus Stone, Henry Woods, and Luke Fildes. His work, as exemplified in the picture reproduced in our engraving, for instance, or in the "Love-letter," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888, is thoroughly English; it has the English qualities of senti- ment and of careful and dainty technique, and that peculiarly English observation which is devoted to seizing the expressive movements of the human physiognomy, and conveying with the utmost intensity the anecdotic effect of the subject. Mr. Millet does not revel in painting considered as being by itself one of the fine arts; his intention is almost as much literary Q* 134 ART AND CRITICISM. as it is artistic ; an episode of life, an anecdote, a state of soul rendered manifest in a pleasing manner and in the midst of curious and amusing accessories, studied with the minuteness and neatness of touch of the later old Dutch masters — such is Mr. Millet's conception of his art. The works above mentioned are those which made the reputation and success of the United States section, or, in other words, the cream of the Exhibition. But besides these there were many remarkable pictures, among which we may notice Mr. F. A. Bridgman's Oriental scenes, whose merits are well established ; Mr. F. M. Boggs's " Place de la Bastille ;" Mr. Julian Story's excellent portrait of his father, and a large his- torical composition of the "Black Prince on the Battle-field of Crecy;" Mr. Childe Hassam's " Rue Lafayette on a Winter Evening," a delicate rendering of Parisian atmosphere; Mr. Walter MacEwen's Dutch figure subjects ; Mr. Humphrey Moore's exquisite Japanese studies; an excellent portrait of Mr. Clinton Peters ; Mr. E. E. Simmons's moonlight marines ; Mr. Eugene Vail's " Ready About," " Port of Concarneau," " La Veuve," and "Sur la Tamise " — four scenes of seafaring life, very beautiful in color, and among the very strongest and best pictures of the kind in the Exhibition. In the United States section a broad distinction was made between the American artists resident in Europe and those resident in America, and the works of each were hung in sep- arate rooms, as if to challenge comparison. It must be said that the comparison was disastrous to the American artists res- ident in America, or classed as such. In the rooms occupied by the pictures of this latter category — mostly works of minor importance — there were but few exceptional achievements to be noted. First of all let us mention Mr. Abbott H. Thayer's " Corps Aile," a white-winged body on a blue ground, with a face of singular intensity of expression, a beautiful and fascinat- ing vision ; Mr. Ch. F. Ulrich's " Promised Land," representing immigrants at Castle Garden, a picture full of character, and AMERICAN ARTISTS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. I3S treated with all the skill and strength of the best German work of the kind ; Mr. Frank Fowler's portrait of a lady sitting on a music-stool, with a piano in the background; Mr. R. B. 'CORPS AILK." — From the painting by Abbott H. Thayer. 136 ART AND CRITICISM. Brandegee's excellent portrait of a young man ; Mr. R. F. Blum's "Venetian Lace-makers" and his charming black-and- white drawings ; Mr. W. S. Allen's " Evening at the Lake ;" Mr. J. Carroll Beckwith's three portraits, especially that of Mr. Walton, Mr. William Chase's portraits and landscape notes, Mr. Wyatt Eaton's portraits, and Mr. Kenyon Cox's portrait of the sculptor Saint-Gaudens, and the same painter's landscape " Fleeting Shadows," complete the list of pictures that we found worthy of note in the strictly American room. In the room devoted to black and white the splendid col- lective exhibit of the American school of wood-engravers was one of the chief features of the section, but the great attraction of this department was Mr. E. A. Abbey's magnificent display of the original drawings of his illustrations of old English songs. My admiration for this artist's work is boundless. Our century has produced four incomparable draughtsmen with the pen ; their names are Meissonier, Menzel, Vierge, and Abbey. JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET.* IN the Louvre there are only two unimportant- works by Jean Fran9ois Millet: a small landscape of the church of Greville, and a study of some bathers, painted while the artist was still seeking his way. In the Luxembourg Museum there is a pastel of a woman churning, and a black-and-white drawing. From such relatively insignificant elements, and from the oc- casional sight of a picture passing through a public sale, the younger generations in Paris have not been able to form an opinion as to the merits of this famous Millet, about whom they have heard so much, and whose critics claim for their idol such a high and comprehensive place in the hierarchy of the great and eternal artists. The announcement that a collective exhibition of the artist's work was to be organized at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in the months of May and June, by a com- mittee formed for the purpose of obtaining subscriptions for the erection of a statue to the memory of Millet, was, there- fore, received with satisfaction. The opening day was awaited with impatience, and during the first few weeks the public flocked eagerly to see the seventy oil-paintings, fifty pastels, and one hundred drawings which constituted this exhibition, whose nature and object had been clearly explained in many preliminary newspaper articles. We were given to understand * This chapter was written on the occasion of the Millet Exhibition held in Paris in 1887. Further study has not led the writer to change the opinions herein expressed as to this master. In the winter of 1890-91, it may be added, the too famous " Angelus " was sold to a French collector, M. Chauchard, for 750,000 francs. 138 ART AND CRITICISM. that the exhibition was intended to be a rehabilitation and an apotheosis of Millet, under the supreme patronage of the State, of the Institute, and of the leaders of contemporary art, whose names figured on the list of the committee ; that it was a glo- rious compensation for the long series of wrongs which had formed the cortege of Millet's life ; and, finally, that it marked the closing victory of the admirers of the artist over his de- tractors. Furthermore, we were reminded that Millet had "suf- fered," and copious extracts were offered from the sombre pages of his biographer.* But these considerations and these retrospective details are only of secondary interest at this moment. One can under- stand that the intelligent elder critics who praised Millet, out of conviction or out of bravado, at a time when the jury of the Salon refused his pictures, feel some satisfaction when they reflect that they have lived to see their hero placed on a pedes- tal which is, perhaps, dangerously lofty. The speculators who have forced up the market price of Millet's work must also feel flattered by this oflicial recognition of the rectitude of their judgment and of the perspicacity of their financiering. Such sentiments, however, are entirely foreign to the real question at issue, which is the intrinsic worth of the painter whose col- lected work is presented to the public for the first time to face the judgment and receive the consecration of posterity. For Millet is already an old master, and the judgment of to-day is the judgment of posterity. * Millet's friend, Alfred Sensier, devoted a whole volume to the narrative of these sufferings, which, by-the-way, he is considered to have exaggerated in order to bring into relief the role of benefactor played by himself in this life-drama of art and insufficient prosperity. According to the statements of the members of Millet's family, his children never wanted bread; the table was always well served; and their existence, though simple, was happy and abundant. In other words, while Sensier's narrative is correct as regards the facts of Millet's life, the author has been guilty of exaggeration and voluntary misrepresentations in the sombre and melodramatic aspect which he has communicated to many phases of the ar- tist's career. JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. I39 In such circumstances, and in presence of the artist's work displayed before our eyes, we are not tempted to pay much heed to anecdotes concerning his moral history. Indeed, the stronger the fascination of an artist, and the more single and absolute the artistic charm of his work, the briefer need be his biography. As regards Millet, it suflfices us to know that he was a peasant, born of peasants at Gruchy, near Cherbourg, in 1 8 14. After having spent his youth tilling the soil, he showed some aptitude for drawing, and, with the aid of a modest an- nuity paid by the municipality of Cherbourg, he was enabled to go to Paris to study art. There, at the age of twenty-two, he entered the studio of Paul Delaroche ; but, disregarding the manner of his master, he tried to acquire a more solid and richer technique by studying the old masters in the Louvre. The apprenticeship of the heavy peasant was long and difficult, and it was only in 1848 that he finally abandoned the pursuit of processes and delicacies of touch, and attempted boldly to express his ideal, which he had meanwhile discovered in the figures and scenes of French rural life. In 1849 he settled at Barbizon, on the borders of the forest of Fontainebleau, where he remained down to the time of his death in 1875, living like a patriarch, and painting the active drama of rustic life. Until during the later years of his career, Millet, it may be added, was disdained by his contemporaries in general ; but nowadays his works bring fabulous prices, and half a million francs is the price of the celebrated picture " The Angelus," which measures twenty-five by twenty-one inches, and is not incontestably Mil- let's masterpiece. Let us examine the exhibition, which, though incomplete as regards the number of pictures, is nevertheless complete as a historical collection of Millet's work, and fairly representative as regards the quality of the works exhibited. In short, it is sufficiently comprehensive to enable us to apply perhaps the only reasonable method of criticism, which consists in inquiring what has been the artist's aim ; whether he has succeeded in I40 ART AND CRITICISM. that aim; whether he has succeeded in an excellent way; whether that which he aimed at was worth doing ; and, finally, whether his achievement entitles him to a place beside the masters of acknowledged greatness. On entering the exhibi- tion, we naturally look first of all at those pictures which have the greatest reputation, namely, " The Angelus," "La Gardeuse de Moutons," "L'Homme a la Houe," " L'Homme a la Veste," " La Lessiveuse," " Les Glaneuses," " La Tondeuse de Mou- tons," " Berger au Pare la Nuit," " La Baratteuse," " La Baig- neuse," " Le Printemps." The first impression is one of dis- appointment. What, is this " The Angelus ?" Is this the reputed masterpiece of the great landscapist Millet, of the great painter of peasant life, who is described by the enthu- siasts as being great among the very greatest.? What are they doing, those two peasants who bow their heads over a basket of potatoes ? Decidedly, that irreverent wit, Manet, was right : the picture represents " la benediction des pommes de terrer But what time of day is it } Is that meant for an evening sky.? An enthusiastic spectator, who has been reading Sensier's book, professes to hear the angelus bell ringing from the dis- tant village steeple, and refers me to the description of the pict- ure in the catalogue, which I refuse absolutely to decipher, animated by a spirit of logic similar to that of the gourmet, who, when he entered a restaurant, and the waiter handed him a voluminous bill of fare, replied, " No ; I have come here to dine, not to read." So in a picture exhibition, none but lame or incomplete efforts need catalogue annotations, or printed ex- planations on the frame. The signification of a picture ought to be as immediately obvious as its physical charm is direct and instantaneous; and in the greatest painting the physical charm of the picture fascinates the eye before the subject or pretext of the picture becomes intelligibly visible. In " The An- gelus " the eye is not charmed, astonished, and ravished by purely picturesque means, by the beauty of the tone, by the JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. 141 harmony of the colors, by the suavity or majesty of the forms. Practically, the picture is a drawing in sepia, on a background of green field and gray sky tinged with red ; but these color elements are insufficiently harmonized, and each tone is neither studied carefully as color seen in the diffused light of open air, nor is it treated frankly as the conventional coloring of clothes, fields, or sky ; it is something between the two, something hesi- tating in means and meagre in effect. As for the figures, will any one venture to find majesty in the silhouette of the spin- dle-legged peasant, or suavity in the uneasy pose of the wom- an ? No ; we have only to compare this composition with the Shepherdess knitting at the head of her flock, with the Glean- ers, with the Diggers, with the Sower, or with the Shepherd leaning on his staff, known as the " Berger a la Limousine," in or- der to feel at once that "The Angelus" is not the most felicitous composition which Millet ever made, and that the two figures, whose attitude of prayer has contributed more than anything else to make the picture popular, really contain very little of that simple and impressive eloquence of gesture and of silhou- ette which was the artist's strong point. That the work is in- stinct with religious sentiment is, of course, undeniable ; that it appeals immediately and powerfully to the religious sentiments of the spectators is also undeniable ; but this only shows that the picture possesses in a high degree qualities and means of attraction which are not primarily and essentially artistic. In " The Angelus," and in the majority of the oil-paintings in the exhibition, the eye is offended by a heavy, coarse, and painful execution, which gives to all the objects the appearance of a woolly texture, and rests satisfied with summary coloring where one expects a delicate distribution of tones and values, and a subtle application of means of light and shade, or chiaro- oscuro, which is nothing more than the art of rendering atmos- phere visible, and of painting an object enveloped in air — an art whose object is to create all the picturesque accidents of shade, of half-tint and light, of relief and distance, and thereby 142 ART AND CRITICISM. to give, whether to forms or to colors, more variety, more unity of effect, and more relative truth. The two figures in "The Angelus" stand out from the landscape flatly, in hard silhouette and without an envelope of air, and the landscape is laid in heavily, and without that observation of the effect of air on distances and of those delicate photometric phenomena which have occupied the attention of the great landscapists, from Claude Lorraine down to Theodore Rousseau and the mod- erns, who are now working with and constantly increasing the vocabulary which Rousseau created, in order to express the multitude of new sensations which his implacable and tire- less eye received from nature. Modern painting, whether of the French, the Scandinavian, or the German schools, which are alone worthy of recognition as active and vivifying influ- ences in contemporary art, is remarkable neither for its splen- dor of color nor for its culte of beautiful forms, but for its study of the phenomena of light and shade. The vision of our painters seems to have become finer; by constant obser- vation they have acquired a subtle notion of differences ; and at the same time that their eyes and their instruments of expression have become more delicately sensitive, their souls, too, have become conscious of the gayety, the poetry, and the dramatic qualities of light. This intellectual and technical wid- ening of the domain of art is the outcome of the landscape art of Theodore Rousseau, and of the researches of the open- air and impressionist schools which followed in the wake of this magnificent genius. Since 1830 there has been a con- stant progress towards light in French painting, and a con- stant effort to enrich the technical language, and to render it adequate to the expression of the thousand new secrets which that sphinx. Nature, has confided to those who have interrogated her with respectful yet indefatigable obstinacy. Compare a picture by Theodore Rousseau, or a landscape by J. C. Cazin, for instance, with a picture of the same order by Ruysdael or Hobbema, and you will find that the differences JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. 143 are as great as those which exist between a page of Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and a page of description by Gustave Flaubert. In the case of the modern landscapists and of the modern prose -writers the same effort will be re- marked, the same breadth of studies, the same result in their works. The term is more precise, the observation more rare and sensitive, the palette richer, the color more expressive ; even the construction is more scrupulous. If the old Dutch masters could come to life again, they would be astounded at such abundance of scruples and stupefied at such faculties of analysis. In "The Angelus" we look in vain for that direct charm of general aspect which captivates us in the works of the greatest painters — Velasquez, Titian, Rembrandt, Leonardo, Veronese, Giorgione, Terburg, Metzu, Pieter de Hooghe ; we look in vain for those qualities of technique and analysis which touch us so deeply in the old Dutch masters and in contemporary work since Rousseau. The observation displayed by Millet in this picture is neither rare nor artistically sensitive ; his color is neither expressive nor true ; and the whole importance of the work lies in the subject, in the gesture, in the intention, and in the sentiment ; or, in other words, the interest of " The Angelus" is mainly a literary interest. The drawing of " The Angelus " in black and white by Millet himself, or the etching by Charles Waltner, contains the whole essence and the entire sentiment of the picture. The oil-painting possesses no additional charm due to the color, which might more truly be called " coloring ;" and, on the other hand, it lacks that quality of envelope and atmosphere which the engraver has communicated to his ex- cellent interpretation of the work. Without wearying the reader by analyzing one by one the most important oil-paintings in this exhibition, I will sum up my impressions briefly, in order the sooner to defend myself against the accusation of sustaining a paradox in thus running counter to opinions which have been, it is true, for the most 144 ART AND CRITICISM. part set forth by newspaper rhetoricians rather than by critics who have really seen " The Angelus " and who have studied Mil- let's painting. The first thing that strikes one, after a general examination of the exhibition, supplemented by a reference to the catalogues of Millet's entire works, is the fewness of his productions, the limited effort even of his most important pict- ures, the narrowness of his range of observation, and the per- sistent painfulness of his artistic activity. The work of his early years betrays terrible struggles between an eager brain and an unwilling hand, and rarely is there a trace of joy in the result, except, now and then, in some fragmentary nude study. Sometimes, too, in broad studies of sea and cliffs, has- tily dashed off, there is promise of coming mastery, and in the blooming orchard and the rainbow sky of " Le Printemps " we find a rich and vigorous touch which seems to have been lit- tle more than a happy accident ; for when, later in life. Millet paints his two most remarkable landscapes, the " Plain at Sun- set " and the " Plain in Winter," he seems to have had but a rebellious and brutal instrument wherewith to render the mov- ing grandeur of these impressive scenes, in which there are only two mute actors, the earth and the sky. Let it not be forgotten that control of his tools is a mark of the master, and that in the work of the really great men the execution is re- markable for a directness and easy simplicity which betray no effort and offer no key to the mysterious means employed to produce the result. The characteristic of the great masters is that, like nature, they do not reveal the way in which they pro- duce ; their facture consists precisely in concealing their proc- esses ; so that we may say, on the authority of all the master- pieces, that a picture is finished only when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared. Taking Millet's work as a whole, its chief interest is moral and literary rather than artistic ; the qualities which predomi- nated in the man were moral and literary rather than artistic ; and it is by the intentions, by the subjects, by the preachings, JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. 145 of his work, that he has finally captivated public attention. You cannot talk about Millet's work without talking about the man, whose character, aspirations, and moral and social aims are deeply impressed on every picture or drawing that he made. Of peasant origin, Millet rose very high by his own unaided strength and will ; but like all those whose early edu- cation has been neglected, his thought was not always un- clouded, nor his mental attitude without bitter and narrowing souvenirs. In his first studies at Paris, while he was acquiring in the Louvre his laborious and rude facture of successive im- pasto, layer upon layer, he fell under the influence of Michael Angelo, whom he studied in engravings. This first influence trained his eye to magnify the silhouette and to seek excessive abbreviation in drawing, coinciding with an immense and pain- ful accumulation of intentions and latent meaning, which were consequently rather confused. From this moment there ex- isted a perpetual combat in Millet between his natural peas- ant's sincerity, which made him love reality, and his taste for idealism, which prompted him to broaden and magnify every-^ thing. After a period of hesitation. Millet found his true path, and imposed upon himself a mission ; for it must not be for- gotten that Millet was not only a peasant, but a Norman, and therefore half an Englishman — a serious and contemplative man, who read his Bible with the conviction of a millenarian of the times of Cromwell. Millet had a good heart and a sad temperament. Transplanted from his natural milieu into more refined and intellectual surroundings, his strong personality resisted complete acclimatization, and rejected the softening influence of the amenities of existence, while his memory re- tained the souvenir only of the hardships, the melancholy, the austerity, of the life of the peasants, in whom his Bible readings inclined him to see always and everywhere the fallen creature of Genesis, condemned to eat his bread eternally in the sweat of his brow. These creatures he depicts solely in the occupations of their daily life of drudgery. But is there no 146 ART AND CRITICISM. joy for the peasant? we ask, after contemplating Millet's work. It is true, we see here a mother feeding her three little children on the door-sill ; here a father receiving with open arms a baby boy, who runs to meet him as he approaches his cottage ; here a little peasant girl bathing on a summer afternoon ; here two shepherd girls neglecting their duty for a moment, and watch- ing with happy upturned faces the flight of birds of passage across the autumnal sky. But this is all. Is there then noth- ing new in this peasant life ? Children are born : are there no fetes ? Peasants die : is there no mourning } Peasants marry and are given in marriage : are there no decorous fetes ? Peas- ants bargain and buy and sell. Peasants love ; furtively, it is true, and with timid courtship, but still they love, and the ex- asperation of wine and of love engenders strife. Millet has omitted these animated aspects of peasant life, and confined himself almost exclusively to the incidents of the struggle be- tween the peasant and the earth, his harsh nursing mother. He enumerates solemnly the incidents, the scenery, and the accessories of this combat, its defeats and its triumphs, just as we find them depicted in the shepherd's calendars of the Middle Ages, and in the precious miniatures of the mediaeval artists of Tours : the storm that menaces the dry hay ; the 'sun that gilds the straw; the harvest that falls a rich prey to the sickle ; the fertile earth wrapped in an icy shroud of snow ; the plough paralyzed and frozen in the furrow; the black frost which condemns the laborer to abandon the fields ; the mother at home tending her baby, or teaching her daughter to knit ; the evening watch, when the husband weaves an osier basket and the wife stitches industriously ; the weary harvesters sleep- ing at noon under the shadow of a rick ; the return from the fields ; the shepherd, half doctor, half astronomer, guarding his sheep on the lonely moonlit plain ; the sunrise glistening on the dewy grass ; the autumn sky slashed by the flight of migra- tory birds ; the falling leaves ; the red sun setting in melan- choly splendor on the distant horizon of a long, deserted moor. JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. 147 Such are the subjects which Millet painted, choosing de- liberately those of serious and superior interest, as if he had set himself the mission of rehabilitating the peasant, and of demonstrating the nobleness of the occupation of the class from which he himself had sprung. Each picture was made with the consciousness of a moral purpose, and from memory and by fixed intellectual processes ; for it is a well-known fact that Millet rarely or ever used models, seldom worked in the open air, and even painted many of his pictures in a room so small that he could scarcely stand far enough away from his canvas to see the ensemble. Throughout it was the subject, the gesture, the sentimental intention of the landscape and of the effect, which occupied his attention. He painted with the ever-present consciousness of being the graphic poet of peasant life, who sought in nature and reality only the elements and basis of his ideal synthesis. Indeed, when I think of Millet's life at Barbizon, his persistent attachment to the garb, the ac- cent, and even the wooden sabots of the peasant, his attitude of a patriarch in the midst of his family, his nightly Bible read- ings, his declared purpose to portray the dignity of agricult- ural life ; and, above all, when I see his collected works, and when I analyze the spirit that pervades them, I cannot help thinking that there was not a little affectation in the painter's manner of being, just a little theatrical arrangement, a mere suspicion oi pose pour la galerie, the slightest shade of profes- sional martyrdom. From the beginning Millet is a revolte. When he enters the studio of Delaroche, then all effervescent with the passions and controversies of the Romantic movement, he remains un- touched by the generous enthusiasm of his fellow - students ; helpless as he is, and ignorant in the manual part of his art, he despises his master, and seeks to acquire a manner of his own by laborious and blundering contemplation of Ribera and of the old Spaniards in the Louvre. Vainly he seeks, by bor- rowed inspiration, to see charming visions of nature in his pict- 148 ART AND CRITICISM. ures of mythological fancies. His heavy, serious, and almost fanatical peasant nature asserts itself in spite of himself. Diaz tells him one day that his nymphs are simply red-handed Nor- man dairy-maids. The reproach piques him, and helps to de- cide his future. Peasant he is ; peasant he will remain ; and peasants and peasant life will henceforward form the only sub- ject of his thoughts, of his brush, and of his pencil. And so Millet becomes a sort of melancholy Burns ; only his language is less clear than the racy verse of the Scotch poet. He ex- presses himself in formulas where the thought has more vigor and precision than the hand. In other words, we come back to the conclusion that the chief interest of Millet's work is lit- erary rather than properly artistic. Take any subject treated by Millet — " The Sower," " Mid- day Rest," "The Gleaners," "The Falling Leaves." In the pres- ent exhibition we find, with very few exceptions, each picture in three different presentations : a drawing in black and white, a drawing more or less heightened by pastel, and finally an oil- painting. Many of the subjects have also been treated by Millet in dry-point etchings. Now, it will generally be found that the whole of Millet's thought and sentiment is conveyed by the black-and-white drawing ; so that when we have seen the draw- ing first, it will often happen that the painted picture disap- points. In the case of " The Angelus," I imagine that ninety- nine persons out of a hundred, who have become familiar with the composition from Waltner's etching, would be cruelly dis- appointed by the original picture. But in all Millet's composi- tions, whether we look at the drawing, at the pastel, or at the oil-painting, we observe that the artist attaches chief import- ance to the silhouette of human beings and inanimate objects, and to the generalization of the different planes of his picture; that is to say, to the elements which summarize the thought and the signification. The color plays only a secondary role, which we shall examine further on. Millet sees his peasants in the performance of their functions, just as he sees landscape in JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. 149 its characteristic aspects. The making of each picture is pre- ceded by a preliminary process of thought, of synthesis, and of idealization. He remarks the toil of the gleaners, which bends them towards the ground and makes their backs ache, and he depicts three women gleaning with broad, sweeping gestures, their faces and arms burned brick-red by the sun ; in the back- ground, toilers of a higher grade are binding the sheaves under the watchful eye of the farmer, who sits on his horse, personify- ing the sedentary ease of capital in comparison with the hope- less monotony of labor. In one composition, a shepherd, en- veloped in a voluminous cloak, leans on his staff, the image of resignation and loneliness. Another composition shows us a vine-dresser, sweating, sunburned, his feet dusty, his arms hang- ing loosely between his legs, his hands knotted and tortuous like an old vine-stock, his mouth open, his eye dull, his stupid brow incapable of thought; here is a sower striding along the furrow, and scattering the seed with august gesture ; here are two delvers digging the field, and watering the soil with the sweat of their brow. These are indeed the idealized forms of those same peasants whom La Bruyere introduced to the court of Louis XIV., "those creatures who spare other men the trouble of sowing, and of tilling, and of gathering in the har- vest, and so merit not to want that bread which they have sown." Not that Millet is to be reproached with the ugliness of his figures, although there are in reality peasants fair to see, just as there are joyous aspects of peasant life. But the Biblical Millet disdains all that is charming and amiable in peasant life, or sees it only rarely, on a few sunny days, such as those when he painted the Gardeuse d'Oies bath- ing in a sylvan stream, and " The Voyageurs Egares," to whom an obliging shepherd indicates the lost path. In Mil- let's most serious work the peasant is one with nature— a type, an ideal silhouette in the grand ensemble ; and the beauty he seeks is not the beauty of feature or of epiderm, but that more abstract and ideal beauty which exists in the 150 ART AND CRITICISM. well-ordered proportions of the skeleton, in freedom and flexi- bility of limb, and in the logical and physiognomic notation of professional gesture, attitude, and costume. The drawing of Millet is truly remarkable in its abbreviation and intense signification. Generally the faces are mere types ; the folds of the dress are reduced to those which mark the projection of the shoulder, the elbow, the breasts, the hips, and the knee ; the whole expression of the figure is concentrated in the gen- eral silhouette. So, too, in the landscape, the foreground is treated with summary and rugged breadth; the background is indicated in the briefest notation of successive planes ; the sky and light are blocked in with the fewest possible strokes and rubbings ; and the whole forms a firm resume by which the artist's thought is presented in the most concise and suggestive manner. Though Millet's drawings in black and white often suffice, it cannot be denied that the thought of the artist acquires an additional charm in his pastels, which are in every respect in- comparably superior to his oil-paintings. Between 1864 and 1870 drawings in black and white and drawings more or less heightened by pastel absorbed Millet's attention almost entirely, and there is every reason to believe that the final judgment of his productions will pronounce the pastels to be the artist's most perfect mode of expression ; whereas posterity will often be inclined to excuse the juries of past Salons for having re- fused his badly executed oil-paintings, in spite of their qualities of another kind which give them a sufficient raison d'etre. But even in the pastels we see how truly the literary interest of Millet's work predominated over the artistic interest, even in the mind of the painter himself : in each case the primary ex- pression of the subject is the silhouette, the gesture, the atti- tude, and not the effect nor the arrangement of color. That which belongs to the impalpable, like the backgrounds, the en- velope, shades, and gradations, the effect of the air on the dis- tances and of the full daylight on the colors, Millet considers JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. 151 only secondarily, and generally incompletely. His first care is for the silhouette, for the hieroglyphic which sums up the func- tion, for the characteristic lines which convey the moral signifi- cation, the idea, the human sentiment, which is always expressed with extraordinary terseness and direct power. To this expres- sion of his thought, complete in itself. Millet has added a cer- tain abbreviated notation of color ; indicating, for example, in the drawing of the " Midday Rest," the color of the garments of the sleepers ; and in another black-and-white drawing warming the sky with a few touches of rose, which intensify the even- ing effect indirectly and by suggestion. Indeed, it may be said generally that in these pastels the color is simply suggestive, much in the same manner as Millet's abbreviated drawing is suggestive. While presenting the artist's thought in its most summary and abstract form. Millet's grand silhouettes suffice to set the imagination of the spectator at work ; and, provided we can accustom ourselves to the terse and uncouth means of expression, we find a certain literary and moral pleasure in embroidering our own thoughts and sentiments on the canvas where Millet has sketched the grandiose guiding lines. So, too, the touches of pastel color, which are disposed more or less thinly and streakily over the coarse basis of his black-and- white drawings, rarely pretend to do more than to direct the mind to the sensation of a particular color, existing as an ele- ment in the general aspect of nature, and not to the study of the real aspect of color in nature. Thus in the charming composition known as " Falling Leaves," the shepherd sheltered behind the tree trunk is black and white ; the tree trunks are slightly tinted with green, to indicate lichen and weather-stains; the ground, in black and white, is tinted with a darker green, vaguely corresponding to a faded shade of grass-green ; and the clearness of the sky is indicated by a few strokes of blue and rose, which are repeated broadly, and mingled with greens and browns to indicate the fugitive nuances of the landscape and the horizon. In other words, the color in Millet's pastels 152 ART AND CRITICISM. is generally a summary notation of additional facts which could not be conveniently registered in black and white ; it is not color observed and rendered for the sake of color and of the charm that color gives, or even for the sake of truly depicting the real color of nature. Millet did not frequently execute drawings wholly in colored crayons ; generally his pastels are strictly black-and-white drawings, rehausses or heightened with pastel ; often the color applied is purely conventional, and sug- gests the effect of fresco painting, in which one often thinks that Millet might have excelled had the opportunity been offered to him. Millet's technical qualities in pastel work are curious and interesting; but independent as they are, it is not in them that we must seek the lessons of this section of his work, but rather in the moral elevation of the idea and in the human eloquence of its expression. Thus once more we are reduced to the conclusion that the chief interest of Millet's work is literary, and not artistic. In a dozen works — in " The Sower," " The Woman Carry- ing Two Buckets " (in the Vanderbilt collection), " The Sheep- fold by Moonlight," "The Lessiveuse," " The Shepherdess Knit- ting as she Leads her Flock," " The Man with a Hoe," " The Diggers" — Millet has expressed a poignant sympathy with man, and with man's misery, resignation, and weariness. By the vastness of the impression and by the profound simplicity of the scenes, he has produced something grandiose and touch- ing, behind which the artist appears august and serene, the high- priest of this ideal pastoral, in which the personages seem to be accomplishing the rites of some mystic ceremony. As has been remarked by Fromentin, in his Maitres d' Au- trefois, Millet, compared with Paul Potter and the universal Cuyp, is a profound thinker. Compared with painters like Terburg and Metzu, he is a captivating dreamer. Compared with the painters of peasant life, like Jan. Steen, Ostade, and Brouwer, he is incontestably noble. But it is always from the literary and moral point of view that we accord Millet his JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET. 153 superiority. In form, in language, in that exterior envelope of style or art without which the works of the mind neither exist nor live, in picturesque faculties, or, in other words, in purely artistic qualities, Millet is far inferior to one and all of these great Dutch painters. Hitherto it would seem that the strongest leaven of thought has been able to preserve and per- petuate only such works as are in themselves plastically great. The final impression I carry away from the collective ex- hibition of Millet's work is that in the zeal of combat his admirers have gone beyond the mark, and attributed to the artist qualities which he did not possess, and which he did not persistently aim at acquiring. Millet is not a great painter, worthy to be ranked with the great masters of the past ; and even when we compare him with his contempo- raries, Delacroix and Theodore Rousseau, he sinks to a mod- est level which it may be well not to attempt to qualify too precisely. Towards the end of his life, in 1873, in a letter to a Bel- gian critic. Millet expressed the thought that, in matters of art, purely technical skill is of small consequence, and that the chief and all- important point is to see and approach things ''par leur cote fondamentair These words are not a resume of the painter's whole life, but they express the dream which absorbed the second and the mature part of his existence, and they suffice to warn us against the vanity of seeking ex- quisite artistic qualities in the work of a man who was ex- clusively concerned with the moral essence and significance of human actions and phases of nature. Millet's epopee of rural life is incomplete even from his own point of view, in- asmuch as his mental attitude and moral temperament led him to disdain the portrayal of rural joys, even of the se- vere and domestic order; but with all its limitations, both technical and subjective, it is a work of undeniable intrinsic and human interest. As has been admirably observed by James Russell Lowell, J 54 ART AND CRITICISM. " the final judgment of the world is intuitive, and is based not on proof that a work possesses some of the qualities of another whose greatness is acknowledged, but on the immediate feeling that it carries to a high point of perfection certain qualities proper to itself." MUNKACSY. MICHALY (or Michael) MUNKACSY is a Hungarian. His real name is, I believe, Leib. He was born in 1844 at Munkacz, a little village on the Danube below Buda-Pesth. He became an orphan at an early age, his parents having been killed by the Russians in 1849. His guardian then was an uncle who was a carpenter and upholsterer in the village, and a maker of those huge trunks covered with landscapes and figures in which the Hungarian peasantry keep their clothes. It was in painting these trunks that Michaly first discovered his voca- tion. His precocious talent won him the means of going to Pesth, where he learned to draw, and whence he was sent to the Vienna Academy. At Vienna he earned some money by painting portraits, and so was enabled to go to Munich, where the famous Piloty was nominally his master, but where he came within the influence of Wilhelm Leibl, a painter of ex- traordinary force of character and remarkable achievements. Leibl's impress has never left Munkacsy, and all the painters who were students in Munich at that time have noted it in his work ever since, and have attributed to the bent it imparted much of the distinction that he has since attained. Munkacsy 's next stage after leaving Munich was Diissel- dorf, where he continued to have some success with his por- traits and subject pictures, and where he first became the slave of bitumen. In 1867 the fame of the Universal Exhibi- tion brought the young painter to Paris, where he saw the 156 ART AND CRITICISM. museums and, above all, the collective exhibition of modern French art at the Champ de Mars. Munkacsy felt at once the attraction of Paris, and determined to make it his home. His work, as we have seen, was already known and salable in Ger- many. But the question was, would he be able to win the ap- probation of the Parisians ? Three years afterwards Munkacsy sent to the Salon of 1870 a picture, "Condemned to Death," representing a Hungarian condemned to death and awaiting the execution of his sentence in his cell, guarded by a soldier. The success of this picture was immediate ; Miss Wolf, of New York, paid him $6,000 for it ; the artist obtained a medal at the Salon ; the critics praised him to the skies ; the dealers gave him orders, and as soon as peace was established Mun- kacsy came and settled in Paris. Then followed the pictures "Episode of the War of 1848 in Hungary," the " Mont de Piete," the " Rodeurs de Nuit," and the "Village Hero" at the Salons of 1873, '74, '75. But all these works were inferior to the " Condemned to Death." The mere telling of the story was excellent ; the dramatic ex- position, the study of expression, of attitude, the picturesque aspect of Munkacsy's compositions were always remarkable. The artist's desire to obtain realistic effects was evident, but the painting was poor and black, dirty and bituminous. Fur- thermore, the realism of the figures was nullified by the violent and arbitrary contrasts of bituminous background and patches of light color destined to attract the eye by their very brutality. Nevertheless, admirers were not wanting, and among the most ardent was Mr. Forbes, manager of the Chatham and Dover Railway, who paid $7,000 for the "Rodeurs de Nuit," and who now possesses more than twenty works by Munkacsy. In spite of this pecuniary success, for several years Mun- kacsy felt his talent to be, as it were, paralyzed. He wandered about Paris pale, haggard, and desperate. At night he would often rub out the work of the day. His career seemed at an end. Thereupon a friendly invitation took him to the Grand MUNKACSY. 157 Duchy of Luxembourg, where he recovered courage, decorated a room in a hospitable chateau, and shortly afterwards married the chatelaine, who had meanwhile become a widow. This marriage was the end of the period of hesitation and doubt. The first picture painted after Madame Munkacsy brought fortune and serenity into the artist's home, was the " Interior of a Studio" (1876), representing the painter and his wife looking over a portfolio of engravings. This was the be- ginning of a whole series of bright interior scenes, in the paint- ing of which bitumen still figured, but with comparative moder- ation. Then in 1878 he painted for the Universal Exhibition the picture of "Milton Dictating ' Paradise Lost' to his Two Daughters," which won for the artist the Medal of Honor and European fame. This picture marks the end of the second stage of Munkacsy 's career. It is not the work of a mere virtuoso. It speaks to the heart as well as to the eyes. It marked a transformation in conception as well as in execution. The third stage of Munkacsy's career is that which pro- duced " Christ Before Pilate," the " Crucifixion," and the " Last Moments of Mozart," the period of twenty feet canvases, pan- oramic effects, drum-beating, and wholesale money-making. The only serious conversation I ever had with Munkacsy was on the subject of this picture. I went by appointment one morning to his studio to look over the scores of studies which preceded the execution of the colossal picture. The house where the painter lives, 53 Avenue de Villiers, is an elegant structure of brick and white stone in the Louis XIII. style. The studio is at the top of the house, and reached by a grand wooden staircase hung with tapestries, arms, pictures, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac in the modern taste — a sort of mixture of an Oriental bazaar and a cocotte's boudoir. The studio is immense, and full of artistic riches and rubbish of all kinds — brilliant carpets, rare tapestries, old carved wood, crys. tal, faiences, arms, embroidery, Eastern tissues, cartoons, and pictures — a gorgeous confusion of forms and colors. 158 ART AND CRITICISM. Munkacsy cannot work unless his eye is caressed on all sides by rich stuffs and bright color. Some years ago, when the American painter W. T. Dannat persuaded Munkacsy to direct the studies of a group of young men of whom he was one, the first thing he did was to decorate the walls of the common atelier with tapestry and Eastern carpets, and to crowd the room up with bibelots. If he had not taken this precaution, Munkacsy would never have come to the atelier twice. The second precaution Munkacsy's pupils took was to buy many tubes of bitumen ; and when the master came to criticise and show them how to paint, they would take turns to stand behind his chair and replenish his palette with that precious element of obscurity without which his brush was and is still powerless. In summing up the talent of Munkacsy we must never forget these two elements, bric-a-brac and bitumen. Personally, Munkacsy is a most good-hearted and amiable man, simple, unpretentious, but far from brilliant. He has very little to say for himself, and if the truth were known I dare say he is perfectly ignorant both about Milton and about his " Paradise Lost," although such is the subject of his best picture. But how could he conceive the picture, then ? By choosing a well-known anecdote a painter avoids a great deal of the difficulty of conception. The most difficult pictures to conceive and to compose are those which have no subject. In composing this picture the artist had to represent simply a blind poet dictating to his two daughters in an interior of the seventeenth century, and with costumes of the seventeenth century. To this composition he gave the title, " Milton Dic- tating 'Paradise Lost,'" and the public, on reading the title, reflected into the picture all the souvenirs, all the intensity, all the poetical connections which the subject calls up in the popular mind. So, in conceiving a work like "Christ Before Pilate," there is no extraordinary intellectual expenditure. " How did you happen to select that subject .?" I asked Munkacsy. MUNKACSY. 159 " One can't always go on painting the same thing," he replied. " I had long been thinking of painting some big biblical subject. At the suggestion of a friend I thought of doing something with Herod. Then one day I thought there might be a good picture to be made out of the scene of Christ before Pilate in the Praetorium. The subject had been treated before, but generally in a decorative manner, whereas, with my realistic tendencies, I believed I could make somethins: new out of it." " Have you ever been in the East ?" I asked. " No." " Then where did you get that architectural background for your Praetorium ? Where did you see that effect of deep blue sky at the end of the vaulted passage-way ?'' "Ah, I am proud of that. I simply imagined it, made it up out of my head. I hunted over lots of documents, of course, and then I concluded that masonry of that kind and arches must be in the character of the scene." "And your models.? You must have had considerable difficulty in finding those fine Jewish types at Paris. Some of them remind me remarkably of Jewish types I saw in the Levant only a few weeks ago." " To tell you the truth," replied Munkacsy, laughing, " I did not have a single Jewish model. My models w^ere mostly men I found on the exterior boulevard ; others were friends of mine ; the man, for instance, sitting there (pointing to a sketch of the picture), with his elbows resting on his knees and look- ing up at Christ, is the Comte G , brother-in-law of the ex- Queen Isabella of Spain. The costume helps the types a good deal, and then by slight modifications of features it is easy to transform a face and make it of the type one pleases. Besides, I will tell you that I am not a partisan of exact archaeological detail. I mean to say I would never allow such detail to have prominence to the detriment of the general picturesqueness of my work or of the psychological study of my characters. My l6o ART AND CRITICISM. picture of ' Christ Before Pilate ' differs from pictures of the same subject by other artists in this respect, that it is treated reahstically and not decoratively. The background is simple and summary. The costumes are painted broadly, and without heed for minute archaeological details which might distract the eye and the mind from the ensemble of the scene. The first thing I sought to do was to secure the picturesque whole — to make a picture of the scene." "And the details of your picture," I added, "are not archi- tectural mouldings or peculiar minutiae of costume. The de- tails are the persons taking part in the scene." " Yes," replied Munkacsy, " and still more particularly the details are the faces, with their various expressions ; the gest- ures and attitudes, with their different intentions." " How long were you actually at work on the picture of 'Christ before Pilat^.'''" " I began it in 1880 and finished it in a year. More than half the time I spent over the preliminary studies. It was very hard work, physically hard work, and then my way of painting increases the difficulties." " How so } What is your peculiar system ?'' "Well, generally a painter working on a twenty-foot canvas simply copies his studies. He composes his picture on a small scale, which he squares out and transfers enlarged to his big canvas. He makes large studies of parts, figures, and details, and then copies these studies upon his final picture. I, of course, make my sketch composition which you see there hang- ing on the wall ; I also make my preliminary studies." And, pulling aside a screen, Munkacsy showed me some scores of canvases covered with rough and finished studies of the differ- ent figures composing the crowd in the picture of " Christ Be- fore Pilate." " But when I go to work on my final canvas I do not copy these studies ; they have simply served me to secure expression, movement, or attitude, and to form my whole group. By means of these studies I have definitely determined the MUNKACSY. l6l aspect of my composition, and in painting that composition on the big canvas I paint every figure again directly from the liv- ing model. This seems to me to be the only way to secure in the final work the freshness of my inspiration, the energy and crispness of reality." In this conversation Munkacsy has well summed up his own talent and aspirations. He is above all things a picture- maker; his first and last effort is towards picturesque effect, and this he obtains by material means which he handles with extraordinary ability, but which are, after all, coarse means, and means which dispense with the display of high intelligence or very delicate sensibility. From the point of view of frank and bold brush work Munkacsy is a master-painter, but his paint- ing will not bear analysis. His violent oppositions of black and white, and the relief he obtains by tricks of perspective and modelling, are processes known to all painters of pano- ramic views who seek to produce the illusion of solidity, or, to use a French expression, le trompe-roeil. There is, in short, nothing to be learned in technique from Munkacsy's work. How much there is to be admired in his pictures, as pictures, depends entirely on the spectator. In Paris Munkacsy takes rank as a workman of talent, who handles crude, violent, and coarse means with prodigious skill, but who since the picture of " Milton Dictating to his Daughters " has made no progress, but, on the contrary, has declined, and in his last picture of the death of Mozart collapsed miserably amid the din of drum- beating and unparalleled charlatanism. IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING. IN the study of works of art it is well to be provided with a strong dose of liberalism and a large reserve of tolerance. We must be on our guard against the influence of routine and of prejudices, not only of mind, but of the eye. Let us be gentle and charitable, neither too ready to scoff nor too ready to praise, but seeking rather to comprehend the aim and inten- tion of the artist before we condemn or approve his work; for judgment implies reference to a standard, and in art what shall that standard be? Three-quarters of a century ago, on the European continent at least, no man could paint otherwise than David without incurring the disdain of his contempora- ries. Later, one Picot was reputed to have found the ideal formula of art, and the doors of the Salon were closed against Delacroix, Decamps, Rousseau, Millet, and Courbet. But now Picot is forgotten, and the revolutionaries of twenty years ago are lauded to the skies. We flatter ourselves now that the days of despotism are over, and that we are just and indulgent and perspicuous and ready to encourage intelligent innovators, and yet I remember that when the group of so-called " Impres- sionists " made their first exhibition in Paris, no ridicule, no scoffing, no exaggeration of disdain, was spared them. They even had the honors of caricature on the stage. The group in question made its first collective exhibition in 1877, and continued to exhibit annually until 1882, when desertions and internal feuds brought its militant existence to IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING. 163 an end. The Impressionists claimed as their forefathers Co- rot, Courbet, and Millet, and owned as their chiefs Edouard Manet and Degas, while the soldiers were named Claude Monet, Pisarro, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Miss Mary Cassatt, Raffaelli, Forain, Gauguin, Rouart, Caillebotte, Eugene Vidal, Zandomeneghi, Vignon. What was the bond of union between these artists ? Why did they call themselves " Im- pressionists ?" Have there not been Impressionists ever since Piero della Francesca and the masters of the fifteenth century down to Corot ? Certainly, and the Impressionists themselves recognized the fact, and at their second and succeeding exhi- bitions they simply styled themselves " Independents." Nev- ertheless, the title of " Impressionists " has clung to them, and perhaps, after all, it is that by which they may be best char- acterized. The Impressionist painter is a bitter enemy of convention- ality and of that orthodox art which has the sanction of offi- cial patronage. He rightly holds that all great artists have been the enemies of conventionality, and that the character- istics of the master are spontaneity, absolute originality, and marked personality. He maintains, rightly again, that the painter of genius creates new resources for his art, broadens the territory of the possible, and strives to work differently from his predecessors. The Impressionists, following in the paths opened up by Rousseau, Troyon, and Millet, sought to continue and complete the task of reproducing nature. They endeavored not merely to interpret nature sincerely, ingenu- ously, and without regard to convention, but more particular- ly to fix upon canvas the momentary impression, the fugitive aspect of things, however strange it may be, and even however unpleasant, for the Impressionist, being a reactionary and a creature of extremes, has rarely much respect for beauty. They tried above all to represent men and women in the am- bient atmosphere and ever-changeful light of reality; to seize the incessant mobility of the coloration of the air; or, like l64 ART AND CRITICISM. Claude Monet, to note all the sheeny reflections and scintilla- tions of sunlight upon moving water, and to fix all that is fleet- ing and fugitive in landscape effects. These problems were not unknown to the old masters ; and as for ambient atmos- phere, no one has rendered it more perfectly than Pieter de Hooghe. But still it must be admitted that the complexities of these problems were not consciously realized until modern times, and the reason is to be found in the very process of the development of painting, which proceeds invariably from the stiffness of hieratic figures on the gold ground of the Byzan- tines, through the portrait and the composed picture, to the simple landscape. The stiff lines become softer and more graceful on the one hand, while on the other the gold ground gives place to a blue ground and then to a landscape back- ground, which finally comes to exist by itself, and acquires all the intensity and curiosity of research which we find, for in- stance, in a picture of Rousseau. The development of art is then from the ideal to the real ; an abstraction is the begin- ning, and the absolute imitation of nature is the end. The attempt of the Impressionists is therefore logical and lauda- ble ; furthermore, their observation is novel, and their process- es are curious and interesting. Their pictures must always be looked at from the requisite distance, and as wholes which cannot be decomposed, for their practice is to neglect particu- lar tones in order to attain a luminous unity, just as the musi- cal composer will arrive at harmony by an agglomeration of dissonances. The Impressionists in the course of their minute observation have discovered that in certain kinds of sunlight shadows appear blue and violet, and so they systematically color their shadows; some of them, like M. Pisarro, have a tendency to see blue everywhere, and allow their ruling pas- sion to cast a sympathetic azure tint over rural nature in gen- eral ; others have carried their analysis of color in diffused light so far that no ordinary healthy eye can follow them. Several of the Impressionists, in order to conceal their igno- IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING. 165 ranee of the science of drawing, affect a curious horror of pre- cision of form, while one of them, at least, M. Caillebotte, takes delight in ignoring perspective. And yet what a sweet thing is perspective — die dolce cosa e questa prospettiva — as Paolo Uccello used to repeat so often. Another marked peculiarity of the Impressionists is the truncated composition, the placing in the foreground of the picture of fragments of figures and objects, half a ballet -girl, for instance, or the hind-quarters of a dog sliced off from the rest of his body. The truncated composition was invented and perfected by M. Degas, the greatest of the Impressionists — an observer of great acuteness and a draughtsman of the first order. Curiously attentive to the significant yet com- monly disdained details of modern life, M. Degas was led by the very nature of his observations to have recourse to special compositions for his pictures and studies. Two categories of Parisian humanity have particularly fascinated M. Degas, namely, washer -women and ballet - girls, whose types, bearing, habits of body, and other singularities he has observed with sincerity and rendered with distinction. I speak thus eulo- giously with respect to M. Degas's work up to 1880, for of late years he has indulged too evidently and too often in his favor- ite distraction of puzzling and horrifying the bourgeois. But in his good and serious work, especially in his pictures of dancing -girls, M. Degas has reproduced with wonderful pre- cision the movements and appearance of these daughters of the people, often naturally vulgar and graceless, to whom little by little the religion of rhythm communicates that grace which is more charming than physical beauty. And here we come to the explanation of the truncated composition : it is the ar- tist's means of showing clearly what his intentions are. Thus, for instance, he wishes to show the different movements and various forms of the legs and feet of a troupe of ballerines, and so his picture contains simply the lower part of the stage and the top of the orchestra ; we see the heads of the musicians l66 ART AND CRITICISM. and the legs of the dancers cut off at the level of the knees by the falling curtain. The composition is certainly strange, but it has a definite aim : it concentrates attention on the very parts where the painter wished it to fall. There is thought and purpose in all this apparent oddness, and in all the good work of M. Degas it will be found that the strangeness of the composition is invariably subordinated to some particular de- tail, some curious study of movement or pose where he brings into play his astonishing skill in drawing and his exact obser- vation of attitude, pantomime, and light. For that matter, the truncated composition is no longer looked upon as a singular- ity. Manet, De Nittis, Tissot, and others employed it largely, as also did the great illustrator Daniel Vierge. Indeed, con- temporary French artists have abused the truncated composi- tion, and often obtained by the mere oddness of their pictures an ephemeral success not justified by real artistic qualities. The r61e which the Impressionists have played in the his- tory of contemporary French art must neither be disparaged nor exaggerated. All reaction against conventionality is a good thing in the beginning, fated, however, to become con- ventional in its turn, as the Impressionists themselves have proved. Largely influenced by the study of Japanese paint- ings and color-printing, with their frank, unattenuated tones, and their reproduction of novel aspects of nature, the Impres- sionists helped to broaden our view of reality, and to call at- tention to aspects of nature which had hitherto escaped the Western artist. Above all, the Impressionists by their re- searches have simply revolutionized the French painter's pal- ette, waged fierce warfare against bitumen and obscurity, and helped the triumph of natural and non- conventional colon The Paris Salon of to-day, as compared with the Salon of ten years ago, is like a bright May morning compared with a dark November day. In the reform of the teaching of drawing the Impressionists have also had an influence for good by their protestation against abstract outline and hard contours which IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING. 167 do not exist in nature, and by substituting for these abstrac- tions the careful study of relative masses — la tache — which an object presents to the eye against the horizon. The strict ob- servance of " values " is an outcome of the study of the object considered as mass and not as outline. Not that the ancient masters were ignorant or neglectful of values ; they observed them certainly, but perhaps less consciously, less scientifically, and less curiously than the modern. Thus, it will be seen, the Impressionist movement is full of interest, and the contemporary French artists, as their works show, have not disdained to profit by all that was good and useful in the teachings of the Impressionists, but these teach- ings have consisted more in the tendencies and efforts than in the actual achievements of the group. The source of excel- lence in art lies not so much in the study of the processes or of the methods of schools as in the study of Nature herself; and excellence of the highest kind is within the reach only of privileged temperaments, which spring into existence myste- riously and irresistibly, masters by innate gifts and aptitudes, and in spite of schools and theories. If you proclaim Claude Monet and Renoir to be masters in the art of painting, you must have thrown overboard forever Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Titian. VMOTHRACE is an isl- and on the north-west of the en- trance of the Darda- nelles, opposite the mouth of the Hebrus, and distant about 38 miles from the coast. Oval in shape, and measuring some eight miles long by six miles broad, it stands very high above the water, and no island in the whole northern archipelago is so conspicuous except THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE. 169 Mount Athos. The history of this brown rock is not rich in events ; sterile and without ports, it never had either commercial or political importance ; its name is rarely mentioned by the Greek and Latin writers ; the only town on the island, the ruins of which are now called Palsopoli, derived its celebrity among the ancients from its very antique sanctuary of strange divinities called Kabeiroi, into whose mysteries many came from all parts to be initiated. The exact nature of these divin- ities has not been ascertained, but the name betrays Semitic origin, and their mystic rites appear to have been celebrated in Phoenicia, in various parts of Asia Minor, and in the island of Lemnos, as well as in Samothrace. The Kabeiroi came more particularly into favor in the Hellenic world in the second half of the fourth century B.C., when faith in the old national idols began to grow weak, and the Greeks turned towards foreign deities. The Macedonian princes were especially devoted to the service of these Great Gods, as they were called. Philip and his wife Olympias were initiated into their mysteries, and from about 350 b.c, during two centuries, until the Roman con- quest, the protecting altars of Samothrace played a great role in the life drama of several of the Macedonian and Ptolemaean princes. In 280 b.c, Arsinoe, daughter of Ptolemy Soter, threatened with death by her second husband, Ptolemy Cerau- nus, found asylum in Samothrace until she was able to pass into Egypt, where, in 279, she married her brother, Ptolemy II., Philadelphus. In 165 b.c, Perseus, the last king of Mace- donia, conquered by the Romans at Pydna, sought refuge in the sanctuary of Samothrace, which had been hitherto invio- lable ; but he found the asylum insecure, and finally surren- dered himself to the praetor, Octavius. Thus, thanks to these great patrons, the old Doric temple, situated in the valley, be- came gradually surrounded by various votive edifices, notably a new Doric temple, a portico built by one of the Ptolemaean princes, a propylsum, and an elegant rotunda erected by Arsinoe. 170 ART AND CRITICISM. These buildings have left considerable traces at a short distance from the modern village. A Viennese archaeologist, M. A. Conze, was the first to explore them superficially in the year 1858. In 1863 M. Champoiseau, French consul at Adri- anople, obtained a credit from his government, and began to excavate in March of that year. While the workmen were digging out the fa9ade of the portico, M. Champoiseau strolled away until, about fifty metres to the south-west, he noticed a bit of white marble emerging from the brown earth. He scraped the soil, and discovered that the marble had the form of a woman's breast. Then he called some workmen, who cleared away the earth to a depth of some two feet, and brought to light the fragments of a statue of a winged female figure. Further excavations led to the discovery of several blocks of strange form, to which little attention was paid. The French despatch-boat the Ajaccio was sent to Samothrace in all haste ; the fragments were placed on board, and subsequently con- veyed to France by one of the ships of the Levant squadron ; and at length, in 1866, three years after their discovery, these pieces were fitted together, and the statue of the Winged Vic- tory of Samothrace was placed in the Louvre Museum, in a dark corner in the Salle des Cariatides, where its beauty was, nevertheless, remarked, while its claims to be regarded as one of the greatest treasures of Greek art were fervently asserted by artists and archaeologists alike. The attention which this statue attracted caused the French government to send a second mission to Samothrace, under the direction of MM. G. Deville and E. Coquart; but these gentlemen had no faith and no enthusiasm, and their excavations were abandoned before they had given any consid- erable result. Thereupon the first explorer of Samothrace, M. Conze, who had meanwhile become professor at Vienna, in- duced the Austrian Minister of Public Instruction to send an archaeological mission to the island, and in 1873 M. Conze went out, accompanied by two architects, MM. Hauser and 'THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE." Z(^ OP THE fUFIVEESITT] THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE. 173 Niemann. In 1875 M. Conze again visited Samothrace, ac- companied by MM. Hauser and Benndorf, and the result of these two series of excavations was the clearing and the re- constitution of the plans and architectural arrangement of the various temples and edifices already referred to, and the dis- covery of a few pieces of sculpture, and of a number of inscrip- tions. The Austrian savants have given an excellent account of their labors in two finely illustrated works, Archceologische Untersuchungeii auf Samothrake (Vienna, 1875), ^•^d Neue ArchcBologische Untersuchungen, by Conze, Hauser, and Benn- dorf (Vienna, 1880). After his return to Vienna, M. Benndorf conceived the idea that the blocks of strange shape which M. Champoiseau had left when he took away the statue of Victory, and which the two Austrian missions had also neglected because they did not comprehend their use, formed the pedestal of the statue, and that when put together they would take the shape of the prow of a ship. This theory was at once suggested and confirmed by the figure to be seen on the obverse of the tetradrachms of Demetrius Poliorcetes, which represents Nike or Fame, stand- ing on the prow of a galley, carrying a trophy stand and blow- ing a trumpet. The illustration forming the tail -piece of this chapter gives a reproduction of the obverse of one of these coins in the British Museum, while the figure of Neptune shown in the initial letter of these pages is copied from the reverse of the same coin. It is only fair to state that there is a disagreement between M. Champoiseau and M. Benndorf, the former claiming the priority of the discovery of the nature of the pedestal. How- ever, in the summer of 1879 M. Champoiseau returned to Samothrace, and brought away the blocks in question, which finally rejoined the statue in the Louvre. The various frag- ments were carefully adjusted, the wings were fitted together over a supporting iron frame, and at last the magnificent figure was placed on its pedestal at the head of the staircase in the 174 ART AND CRITICISM. Louvre, where it now stands, headless and armless, but still of dazzling splendor of form, and vibrating with the eternal life of art. Our engraving gives a front view of the statue alone, while the initial page of this chapter gives the profile of the statue and of the pedestal, the whole set in a frame of appro- priate invention, due to the charming pencil of M. Luc Olivier Merson. In presence of such an exquisite and fascinating object as this Winged Victory, it seems impertinent to detain the reader with eulogious phrases. It would be still more impertinent to make comparisons with a view to depreciating accepted mas- terpieces. One fine work does not annul the magnificence of another. Let us rather leave the reader to appreciate with such fulness as his temperament may permit the imposing grandeur of the silhouette, the suave and majestic movement, the charm of the clinging drapery, the whole sensuous yet awe- inspiring beauty of this Winged Victory; and let us continue on our side to summarize such facts and conjectures as may enable us to realize the archaeological as well as the artistic in- terest of the work. Take, for example, the pedestal, which remained for so many years an inexplicable heap of stones. Thanks to a hint derived from the obverse of a coin, these stones have become a document of great importance for the better comprehension of Greek naval architecture; they form the prow of a trireme. The lower spur, or embolos, is missing ; the upper spur, or proembolion, has lost its point ; and of the curved ornament, or stolos, which surmounted the stem, only a fragment remains. On the other hand, the outer galleries or passages, parodoi which run along the sides of the trireme and rest on the catheads, or epbtides, are well preserved and of clear signification. The statue stands in the middle of the forecas- tle deck, or ikrion proras, of which we read so often in Homer, where a square hole has been hewn out to receive the plinth. /^The Victory is represented with the movement of rapid walking, as if she were accompanying the rowers, and eager to THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE. 175 spring ahead of their speed, for her wings beat the air with impatient vehemence. The fresh sea-breeze presses the drap- ery against the body and the legs, and makes it float in rolHng and rattling folds behind. The feet, the head, and the arms were carved apart, and fixed to the statue probably with iron braces ; they are now lost. Nevertheless, we have only to ob- serve the statue attentively in order to reconstitute the com- plete attitude. The late distinguished archaeologist M. Olivier Rayet, in a monograph on the subject, says that the rising of the breast indicates that the head was erect and looking into the distance, and the movement of what remains of the shoul- ders enables us to establish with precision the direction of the arms. The right arm, raised and extended in front, doubtless held a trumpet; the left arm, thrown back and hanging down, carried one of those wooden crosses which formed the interior frame or stand for trophies. In the drapery, by the ^ide of the right knee, may still be seen three holes that were drilled to receive the points by means of which the lower extremity of this cross was fixed to the statue.^- The attitude suggested by M. Rayet is confirmed point by point by comparison with the coins of Demetrius Poliorcetes, one of whose gold staters is to be seen at Florence, while specimens of his silver tetradrachms exist in most of the great European collections. These coins, we know, were struck in commemoration of a great naval victory gained by the fleet of Antigonus, under the command of his son Demetrius, over the fleet of Ptolemy, off the island of Cyprus, in 306 b.c. Now, if M. Benndorf is right in his conjecture that the figure on the obverse of these coins is a copy of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, we may go with him in further conjecturing that this statue was consecrated by Demetrius Poliorcetes himself, and consequently that it was executed in 306 or 305 B.C. This is only a hypothesis ; we can bring forward no posi- tive evidence; but the probability of the theory seems great when we recapitulate the elements of our reasoning process. 176 ART AND CRITICISM. namely, the similitude of the statue and of the obverse of the coin, the fact of the naval victory, the fact of the devotion of the Macedonian dynasty to the service of the Kabeiroi, the style of the statue, which is distinctly that of the sculpture of the fourth century B.C., and lastly, the slight but still note- worthy fact that one of the ports of the island of Samothrace bore the name of Demetrion, which is not necessarily a deriva- tive of the name Demeter, but just as legitimately of Demetrius. The next question that presents itself is, who made this Winged Victory ? Mr. C. T. Newton, of the British Museum, says, in his Essays on Art and Archcsology : "The bold and original treatment by which the flying folds of the drapery are made to express rapid movement has, perhaps, never been sur- passed in sculpture. In the execution there is a subtle refine- ment which reminded me of the master- hands by whom the statues of the Mausoleum were carved. As Skopas is known to have worked in Samothrace, it is a fair conjecture to at- tribute this Samothracian Victory to some later artist of his school." Mr. Newton's opinion has been universally accepted, and the Winged Victory is classed by modern erudition as a production of the school of Skopas. One of the most interesting results of the recent excava- tions undertaken by the German Government at Olympia has been to call attention to the work of a sculptor, Paionios, a contemporary of Phidias, and hitherto supposed to have been a pupil and imitator. The Winged Victory signed Paionios discovered at Olympia reveals, on the contrary, a personal mas- ter, whose violent chisel has suggested to some archaeologists a comparison with Michael Angelo. The figures of the pedi- ment of the temple of Olympia, which Pausanias asserts for- mally to be the work of Paionios, have likewise qualities of vigor, and even of brutality, which justify this association of names. We note the obvious characteristics of the sculpture of Olympia, which are a strong sentiment of decorative effect, the desire to strike by energy and vivacity of expression, sin- THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE. 177 cere realism which does not hesitate in presence of trivialities and even vulgarities which the Attic taste of Phidias would have effaced or attenuated. This Winged Vifctory of Paionios is more soberly and broadly modelled than the Victory of Samothrace ; the drapery is less curiously and less amorously chiselled ; but the two works have in common an intensity of life and of movement and a quality of sensuous beauty which incline us to imagine that the school of Skopas proceeded rather from Paionios than from any other master. In the fourth century the mixture of races and the com- munion of thought and sentiments had produced a Hellenic people, a Hellenic civilization, and a Hellenic art, which was carried by various masters east and west to Asia Minor and to Italy. Among the most famous of these sculptors of the fourth century were Skopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippus, whose succes- sors followed the successors of Alexander the Great to the new capitals of Europe and Asia, and produced the greater part of the works of sculpture that are now preserved in the museums of the Old World. The archaic sculpture, with its grimacing smile, does not express a state of soul ; the gods of Phidias are impassible, and their faces wear an expression of sublime tranquillity; the athletes of Polycletes are fine muscu- lar creatures of perfect proportions, but soulless, and of com- monplace physiognomy. With Skopas, Hellenic art undertakes the expression of human passions and sufferings — the agony of Niobe, the terror of her servants, the torture of her children. The Winged Victory of Samothrace is a masterpiece born of the new ideal ; it is the image of a woman resplendent with vigor, and exquisite in the vibrating rhythm of her movement — a figure in which the form and the function are in perfect harmony, a -magnificent realization in marble of a vision of beauty, rendered by a great and skilful artist with all the force and all the distinction of a temperament of the rarest refine- ment and the most delicate sensitiveness to the charms of fem- inine eurythmy. At the same time, in this body, whose suave 178 ART AND CRITICISM. effulgence seems to shine through the caressing folds of the transparent tunic, there is a sensuous fascination suggestive of Oriental influence. In no other monument of antique sculpt- ure do we find combined such strength, and at the same tim^e such delicacy and subtlety of touch. It has the severe and grand charm of the age of Phidias, and at the same time it has a more modern grace, which suggests that smile of line and that intelligent and winning material physiognomy which we find in the figures of Botticelli, of Leonardo, and, in a less de- gree, of Watteau. '^^^f^^r-' ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. IN the exhibition of the Paris Salon of 1831, the public was charmed and fascinated by a half life-size group represent- ing a " Tiger devouring a Crocodile." With ears laid back and eyes gleaming savagely, the tiger grasps the reptile with his cruel talons, and bites furiously into the scaly body, while the crocodile, winding its tail around the tiger's neck, doubles upon itself in fear and agony, writhing and struggling vainly to es- cape. Such realism in the sculpture of animals, such forcible and passionate rendering of life and movement, had never be- fore been seen. Indeed, the tiger had not been considered worthy of the honors of sculpture, much less the crocodile ; for academic zoology recognized only two animals, the lion and the horse, and both had degenerated into mere conventional forms, in the production of which the study or consultation of nature would have been misleading to the artist. This group had therefore all the attraction of novelty of subject, as well as of treatment, and the leading critics joined with the public in pro- nouncing it the strongest and most original work in the exhi- bition, and declaring its author, Antoine Louis Barye, to be the creator of a new art. In the same exhibition Barye had a statue of St. Sebastian, conceived in the academic spirit, but yet with great naturalness of posture and truthfulness in details. Whether it was for the tiger or for the saint — the latter hy- pothesis is the more probable — Barye received a second-class medal, which completed the public recognition of his talent. l8o ART AND CRITICISM. At the time of this brilliant debut Barye was thirty-six years of age, and his apprenticeship of misery, disappointment, and pa- tient labor had then lasted over a period of some twenty-two years.* Barye was born on September 24, 1795, at Paris, where his father, who came from Lyons, had married and established him- self as a silversmith. Details about his boyhood are wanting. The family was, it appears, numerous, and not particularly pros- perous, and so, after a very summary education, young Barye was apprenticed in 1809 to an engraver and die-sinker named Fourier, who manufactured stamps for clasps, buttons, and other military ornaments, and was considered very clever in making matrices of steel for goldsmiths' repousse-work. Fourier also worked in the precious metals, and many beautiful gold snuff- boxes which were presented by Napoleon to various sovereigns were manufactured by him. Barye remained with Fourier un- til 181 3, learning all the secrets of delicate chiselling and fine * This is the date in the inscription placed on the house where Barye died, by the Comite des Inscriptions Parisiennes, to wit : ANTOINE-LOUIS BARYE, SCULPTEUR, NE A PARIS, LE 24 SEPTEMBRE, 1795, EST MORT DANS CETTE MAISON, LE 25 JUIN, 1875. In Barye's birth certificate, printed by M. Anatole de Montaiglon in the Revue de r Art Frangais (April, 1886), the date of 1793 is given. Here is the text : L'an quatre de la Republique fran9aise le deux vendemiaire (vingt-quatre septembre mil sept cens quatre-vingt-treize), est ne a Paris (Seine) Antoine-Louis, du sexe masculin, fils de Pierre Barye et de Marguerite Claparede, son epouse. Le membre de la Commission: Alfred Levesque. The certificate of the sculptor's death runs as follows : L'an mil huit cent soixante-quinze, le samedi vingt-six juin, a deux heures de relevee, acte de deces de Antoine-Louis Barye, Officier de la Legion d'honneur, membre de I'lnstitut, age de soixante-dix-huit ans, profession sculpteur, ne a Paris, departement. . . ., decede hier a neuf heures du soir, en son domicile, quai des Celestins, 4, epoux de Amelie-Antoinette Houdart (sans autres renseignements). Le present acte dresse par nous, Maire du quatrieme arrondissement, officier de I'e'tat civil, sur la declaration de Paul Haal, age de trente-trois ans, employe, demeurant rue Bonaparte, 42, et de Armand-Rene Lebault, age de trente-huit ans, employe, demeurant rue Vic-d'Azir, 4, qui ont signe avec nous, apres lecture. Sign^ : Lebault, Haal et Capet. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. i8l work in gold and silver. The conscription then took him, and he was drafted into a topographical engineers' brigade, and em- ployed in making relief plans of towns and fortresses until the capitulation of Paris in 1814 liberated him from military serv- ice, and enabled him to resume his profession. But he was already tormented by the desire to become a sculptor, and de- voted all the time he could spare to drawing and modelling. Finally, by dint of efforts and sacrifices, which Barye's reserve "TIGER DEVOURING A CROCODILE." Engraved by John Tinkey. and modesty never allowed him to reveal, he succeeded at the end of 1816 in entering the studio of Bosio. But he seems soon to have become convinced that, apart from the mere mate- rial processes of the art, this master's example could only teach him what to avoid, namely conventionality, pomposity, and false grandeur; and so, in the spring of 181 7, we find Barye study- ing painting in the studio of Gros. The painter of the " Battle of Aboukir" and of the "Plague of Jaffa" cannot but have 12* l82 ART AND CRITICISM. had a good influence over Barye. There is a spirit, a senti- ment of Hfe, a dramatic accent, in Gros's work, combined with a knowledge of masses, of harmony and of expression, which certainly made a profound impression upon his pupil, and served him afterwards in his sculpture even better than in his painting. Having determined to become an artist, Barye naturally thought of profiting by the advantages offered by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and by the Prix de Rome, which enables its holder to pass five years at the expense of the State amid the treasures of the Eternal City. He competed for the first time in 1819 in the section of engraving in medals and precious stones, and obtained only the third prize. The subject was " Milo of Crotona." Barye's medallion, of which a few rare proofs exist, reveals the qualities which afterwards assured the popularity of his talent. The lion biting Milo's thigh is ren- dered with singular energy and verity of movement, and the head and attitude of the athlete express eloquently the struggle of courage against pain. In 1820, in the section of sculpture, Barye obtained only a second prize. In 1821, 1S22, and 1823 he competed in the same section, but without obtaining even an " honorable mention," and the last year he was not accepted after the preliminary trial. This series of defeats obliged Barye not only to give up all ideas of going to Italy, but even to aban- don, at least temporarily, his artistic studies, and so in 1823 he resumed his workman's tools, and entered the establishment of Fauconnier, a goldsmith then in great vogue, and enjoying court patronage. Fauconnier could teach Barye nothing, for his only quality was his ability to take advantage of the talent of others. Barye remained with him eight years, modelling all kinds of objects in gold and silver, and especially ornaments and animals, the credit of which Fauconnier naturally claimed for himself. However, after the first shock of disappointment, Barye married, settled in the Passage Sainte-Marie, where Fauconnier ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 183 had his workshop, and, his home comfort being secured, he re- sumed his ambitious projects and his art studies. The rare hours of leisure left by his work for the daily bread of himself and his family were zealously devoted to attending lectures at the Jardin des Plantes, to studying human and animal anatomy in the dissecting-rooms, to taking measurements of lengths and propor- . ^.,_ ' '""""■■^■~... tions, and to drawing from nature and after the mas- ters in the Louvre. At the same time he carefully studied all the processes and details of casting in various metals, and thus acquired a mass of obser- vations and documents, and a knowledge of all the branches of the sculp- tor's art, which enabled him finally to come forth with almost a masterpiece, and thereafter to continue his career without hesitation or uncertainty. But we must not imagine that Barye destined himself merely to the sculpt- ure of animals, or even to sculpture alone. In the Salon of 1827, when his name appears in the catalogue for the first time, he was represented by some medallion portraits and busts which passed unnoticed. From a letter of Eugene Delacroix's, dated from Tours in 1828, we find that Barye called himself a "sculpteur paysagiste." In the Salon of 1831, besides the groups of " St. Sebastian " and of the " Tiger devouring a Croc- odile," he exhibited a portrait of his two daughters, and some studies of animals in water-colors. In the Salon of 1833 he exhibited six water-colors, a frame of medallions, and eleven HEAD OF THE LION OF THE TUILERIES- RIGHT SIDE. Engraved by W. B. Classon. 1 84 ART AND CRITICISM. pieces of sculpture, including a bust of the Duke of Orleans, a fifteenth-century cavalier, the equestrian group of " Charles VI. in the Forest of Le Mans," and the famous " Lion and Ser- pent," now on the terrace of the Garden of the Tuileries. In the versatility of his talent and in the multitude of his studies Barye had something in common with those universal artists of the Renaissance who were at once architects, sculptors, painters, goldsmiths, alchemists, and engineers. Unfortunate- ly, as we shall see, he was born in an age when his talents could with difficulty find the conditions necessary for their full development. The purchase of the " Lion and Serpent " by the Govern- ment and the decoration of its author with the cross of the Le- gion of Honor seemed to open up for Barye the road to success and glory. An order to execute a bass-re- lief for the Bastille Col- umn revealed a perspective of official support without which the sculptor cannot produce monumental works. The patronage of the Duke of Orleans and of his royal brothers was also of good omen to the artist. There was talk, too, of com- missioning Barye to com- pose groups of animals for the decoration of the Pont de la Concorde, while Thiers requested him to make a project for adorning the sum- mit of the Arc de Triomphe. In short, the future looked altogether bright. Of Bar3^e's personal appearance at this time we may form HEAD OF THE LION OF THE TUILERIES — FRONT VIEW. Engraved by W. B. Closson. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 185 ffipfw'ii |nKi!!|||li!t;i|ii|i!{Mpmmi^ some idea from an excellent lithograph by Jean Gigoux, which represents him in the costume of 1835, dressed in a black coat with tight sleeves, ample collar and sloping shoulders, a long waistcoat crossed by a modest double watch-chain, a hiq;h linen collar with a black neckerchief wrapped round and round in volu- minous folds. Barye was above medium stature, rath- er slender, and always scrupulously neat in his dress and person. Even in the hard times — real misery, I have been told — of the beginnings in the Passage Sainte-Marie his linen was always spotless and his hands and finger- nails scrupulously cared for. Barye never sacri- ficed to those eccentrici- ties of unkempt hair and strange costume which were so much in fashion among the artistic revolu- tionaries of his epoch. His brown hair, slightly curling, was always carefully combed and parted on one side, and his pale face cleanly shaven, with the exception of small, closely cut mustaches left just below the nostrils. The head was vigorous- ly modelled, with strongly accentuated cheek-bones and a prom- inent chin, indicative of determination and firmness of char- acter. His forehead was high, broad, and ample, the eyebrows straight and regular, and the light blue eyes, of full oval form, vigilant and calm, looked at you frankly, but without insolence MOULIN S BUST OF BARYE. Engraved by R. G. Tietze. I86 ART AND CRITICISM. or provocation. The nose, rather thick at the bridge and slightly retrousse, was modelled in solid facets ; the nostrils, fairly open, indicated neither a sensual nor an ascetic tem- perament; the small mouth, with its thin, tightly-closed lips, seemed, as many of his friends have told me, " to have a pad- lock upon it," so hardly and so sparingly did words pass that severe barrier. The ordinary impression conveyed by Barye's bearing and manner was that of a man cold, melancholy, and not easy to get on with. His look was hard and slightly disdainful, and his rare utterances were made in a dry and curt tone, each word issuing from his lips with clean and trenchant enunciation. When he smiled his lips parted just sufficiently to show two canine teeth, which gave him literally a mordant air, and the older he grew the more mordant and caustic he became, but only in the intimate society of tried friends, for in general company he remained invariably a silent listener. But Barye was by no means a recluse. On the contrary, after working all day, he liked to amuse himself in the evening and to associate with his fellows. His society was much sought after, and he was always surrounded by a select circle of friends and of connoisseurs, for whom he worked, and among whom were the Duke of Orleans and his brothers and the Due de Luynes. Delacroix, the great romantic painter, was one of his earliest friends, and his fre- quent companion in study before the cages at the wild -beast shows in the Jardin des Plantes. Corot, Diaz, and Theodore Rousseau were also very intimate with Barye, and also the great J. F. Millet, whose neighbor at Barbizon he afterwards be- came. Barye was an assiduous attendant at the joyous dinners of artists and literary men which used to take place round the rough tables of modest cabarets and wine-shops, for in those days artists were less slaves of luxury than they now are, and their purses were rarely heavy with gold. Barye was fond of the theatre too, and his desire to study types of humanity led him into all kinds of queer places of popular amusement. On J5ARYK AT THP: AGE OK IMIkTV-FIVK, Engraved by G. Kruell, from a water-color portrait in the Walters Collection. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 189 Saturdays he used regularly to visit the horse-market ; on Sun- days he would often go to study animal life at the dog-market, and he was even a frequent spectator of the ignoble dog-fights which were then to be seen in the outskirts of Paris. A rule and a sketch-book were his inseparable companions in these ex- cursions, and he would frequently stop in the street to measure a horse or to note a movement. Like Delacroix, considering justly that the tiger is but a sublime development of the cat, he used to study the wild animal in its reduced domestic counter- part. When Barye had his studio in the Rue de Boulogne, about 1 846, one of the apprentices had reared a very fine cat to live in the workshop with the chasers and mounters, and often of an afternoon Barye would come in, sit down on a stool, and entice the cat to his knees. " Tiens ! via le patron qui va faire ses etudes /" one of the boys would say, and there the great ar- tist would sometimes sit for an hour at a time, stroking the cat, tickling her feet, in order to make her push out her talons, pull- ing her legs, and feeling the play of the muscles and tendons as he induced her by caresses and jDlayful ruses to take all kinds of positions and to execute the most diverse movements. By some happy gift of independence Barye escaped that burden of precedent which rests so heavily on the young artist, and thanks to the accident of his love of animal life, he started without having his vision troubled or distorted by the accom- plished fact of classical sculpture with its overwhelming au- thority on every point of the conduct of work. At a time when the abstract and arid school of David was in its worst and decadent stage, and when sculpture was at the lowest ebb to which the exclusive and unintelligent copying of Roman an- tiquity could reduce it, Barye boldly and simply took nature for his model and guide, and began in sculpture a reaction analogous to the reaction which Gericault began in painting by his natural and spontaneous sentiment of the picturesque and by his naive study of reality. Barye introduced into sculpture an element which several generations of artists had forgotten, 190 ART AND CRITICISM. namely, the element of vivacity, of drama, of passion. His groups of animals are all admirable in pantomime. His " Lion and Serpent " is the last word of realistic imitation ; in the play of physiognomy of the beast with his snarling mouth and up- lifted paw there is a mingled expression of anger, disgust, and fear of the cold, scaly, mysterious reptile ; it is the image of strength struggling against ruse. In his figure groups, as for instance in the "Charles VI. in the Forest of Le Mans," there is the same research of dramatic movement and expression. Nothing could be more unlike the conventional curly -pated lions which were then produced by orthodox artists under the belittling architectural term of " lions d'ornement," and nothing less like the cold, smooth, and insipid sculpture which was then accepted in high places, than these powerful and living works of Barye. It is needless to retrace here the story of the great literary struggle between the Romanticists and the Classicists ; it will suffice to remind the reader that the Institute, which then had full control over the Salon, was the stronghold of blind con- servatism, and that the members of the Academy of Fine Arts had formed themselves into a holy league for the maintenance of sound doctrines and the monopoly of all public works. The laureates of the Ecole de Rome held together, helped each other on, creating vast social and official ramifications and in- fluences, and for years succeeded in making the Institute a close corporation, into which none could penetrate unless he had passed through the regular course of submission, camara- derie, and intrigue. During the first half of this century the Institute tyrannized over French art, admitting no doctrines and no manifestations at variance with its own, and carrying its jealous care so far that the guardians of the Louvre Muse- um had orders to prevent students from drawing any but cer- tain statues selected by the infallible Areopagus. It was ab- solutely forbidden, for instance, even in the beginning of the Second Empire, to copy an Etruscan vase, the members of the THE TIGER HUNT." — RIGHT SIDE OF GROUP. — (CIRE PERDUE.) Engraved by F. H. Wellington. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. I93 Institute being of opinion that such examples would tend to corrupt the taste of the student. The Romantic movement of 1830 was directed against this positive oppression of the Insti- tute, and instances such as the one just cited will help to ex- plain the virulence of the combat. As regards Barye, who was evidently as dangerous and pernicious an innovator as Dela- croix, the Institute, unable to ignore him on account of the popularity of his works in the eyes of the public, and of the high esteem in which they were held by the independent crit. ics, adopted at first the policy of depreciating him and treating him as a mere amimalier, a modeller of animals, of beings be- longing to a lower rank of creation ! Now Barye was longing for a chance to model figures in monumental style, and when Thiers, who was one of his early admirers, proposed that he should be commissioned to decorate the Pont de la Concorde, the influence of the Institute suggested that groups of animals would be advisable, as Barye was only an animalier. In 1835, when it was decided to complete the Arc de Triomphe, Thiers commissioned Rude to decorate the fa9ades with four colossal trophies. Etex, who was then -young and zealous, and had just come to Paris, hearing, of this scheme, called upon the minister and said : " Monsieur Thiers, you must not put trophies on those vast spaces ; groups, colossal groups, are the decoration required." ""Tzensf cest une idee! your suggestion is excellent ! " replied Thiers, and Etex ob- tained an order for two groups as his reward. Rude was thus left with orders for two groups instead of four trophies; then shortly afterwards another group was taken from him and given to Cortot, a member of the Institute. Rude, furious at this unceremonious treatment, wished to refuse the commis- sion for one group which had been left to him, but his friends dissuaded him, saying : " No ; keep the order ; you will make the best group of all." And so Rude set to work and com- posed the magnificent allegory of the " Departure of the Vol- unteers of 1 792," or, as it is sometimes wrongly called, " La 13 194 ART AND CRITICISM. Marseillaise." This decoration was to be crowned by a co- lossal eagle with out-spread wings, grasping in its victorious claws the thunder-bolts, and hovering over the emblems of the nations which the empire had conquered or abased. Barye was charged with the execution of this eagle, which was to have measured some seventy feet from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other. With his usual conscientiousness the artist went to the Jardin des Plantes to study the muscles and post- ures of eagles, and then made his first sketch in wax, and after having satisfied himself as to the verity and exactitude of every detail, he invited Thiers to come to see it at the studio. Thiers came, and in his little squeaky and shrill voice complimented the sculptor: "CW ires bien, Monsieur Barye; your eagle is very fine ; but allow me to make an observation. Your eagle has not got firmly hold of the thunder-bolts; his talons do not grip well." " Pardon me. Monsieur Thiers, but I have studied that movement precisely from nature." " No, no. Monsieur Barye ; that does not matter. Your eagle, I tell you, does not grip the thunder-bolts. . . ." '' Enfin, Monsieur Thiers," exclaimed Barye, somewhat im- patiently, " you are not an eagle !" Like the commission for decorating the Pont de la Con- corde, this project also fell through. The composition of the colossal eagle trampling on the patriotic emblems of all the nations of Europe might, it was said, disturb the peace of the continent, and so no more was heard about it. Barye received, by way of consolation, an order for a colossal lion, and there was an end, for the time being at least, of all idea of exer- cising his talent on monumental public works. The Institute triumphed, and the audacious innovator was relegated to his rank of an animalier. Nay, more : in the midst of all these projects, and as it were at the very moment of his triumph, after his bronzes had won him the decoration of the Legion of Honor, and obtained for him orders from the Government, w £- > o r o r w H « a P o ^ "^^^^ OP THE .IT IVEE ANTOINE LOUIS BARVE. 197 commissions from high persons, and almost the much-desired opportunity of executing a monumental work, the Institute suddenly refused to admit his bronzes to the Salon. In 1837^ the five groups representing scenes of lion, tiger, bear, bull, and elk hunting, ordered by the Duke of Orleans, were re- fused admission to the Salon, on the ground that they were not sculpture, but goldsmith's work. From 1837 to 1847 there is a lacuna in Barye's life. Natu- rally offended by this last insult offered to his talent, he did not exhibit again at the Salon until after the revolution of 1848, when a freely elected jury had replaced the vexatious jurisdic- tion of the Academy. Meanwhile he by no means posed as a martyr, but seeing that there was no chance of producing mon- umental works, he pocketed his disappointment, and keeping all his feelings to himself, continued to live his life with that austere calm and reserve which had been as remarkable in Barye at the age of twenty-five as it was in Barye at the age of sixty. During these ten years he produced a quantity of small bronzes, mostly animals, which he himself made, published, and sold at his studio, without the intervention of any dealers or middle-men ; he worked, also, for a few intelligent amateurs ; but, above all, he worked for himself, striving ever after perfec- tion in conception as well as in execution. Barye's programme of work was free invention and slow ex- ecution ; he conceived his idea boldly, and labored patiently in order to realize it in a pure form, and with that element of se- lectness, dignity, and distinction which is called style. He was constantly meditating. Often he would go and sit for an hour or two on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, and while he seemed to be sleeping or idling, he was really reflecting over some difficulty of his art. Then suddenly he would rise to his feet, walk briskly towards the tiger or lion cages, or walk home to his studio to work. The modelling of his important groups occupied him for months and even years together. " Theseus and the Centaur," or, as it was at first called, the " Centaur and 13* 198 ART AND CRITICISM. Lapitha," was begun in 1846, and remained in hand more than two years, the clay model standing carefully covered with damp rags in the workshop in the Rue de Boulogne. Some days Barye would come in and tell one of the apprentices to uncover the model. Then, holding his chin between his thumb and forefinger, he would stand and look at it, first from one point of view and then from another ; sometimes he would break off a bit of clay and remodel some de- tail; other times he would not touch it, but telling the apprentice to cover it up again, he would return to his studio, and go on with some less noble work. But on this group, which is one of his masterpieces, and truly a work which will bear com- parison with the best mon- uments of ancient art, Barye never toiled as at a task, but waited until the happy mo- ment came — that moment of bien-etre which to imagi- native men is a moment of invention. The details and processes of casting his works preoccu- pied Barye greatly, and as his business was not extensive enough to justify him in having a foundery attached to his stu- dio, he was obliged to have recourse to professional founders, who have all retained a lively remembrance of his exacting crit- icism. Barye insisted upon having a particular alloy, which is "STANDING BEAR." Engraved by Louis Faber. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. I99 still known in the Paris founderies as " bronze Barve," and is composed of virgin copper and pure tin. He wanted the un- touched rough casting to be perfection. "Whenever a bad lot of castings came in from the foundery," said one of Barye's workmen to me, " it made him ill, and he would not be seen again in the shop for a week." His great desire was always to get absolutely faithful reproductions of his models — reproduc- tions which would not need the treacherous finishing touches of the chisel. Hence various essays of galvano-plastic proc- esses, and above all, many trials of the difificult, hazardous, and costly process of cire perdue. Barye's thoughts were concentrated rather on his art than on the making of his fortune. He neither sought orders nor did he take any particular pains to sell his bronzes for the very moderately remunerative prices which he asked. As we have seen, the influence of the Institute prevented him from partici- pating in that official patronage which is even more necessary to the sculptor than to the painter; his modesty and reserve never allowed him to vaunt his own talents, much less to vent- ure into those domains of intrigue and solicitation where self- assertion has generally more chances of success than simple genius. Add to this the fact of the great expense and restrict- ed sale of the exquisite work which he produced with unsparing labor and by expensive processes, and we shall understand with- out difficulty that when in the troubled times of the revolution of 1848 he was called upon by a capitalist to reimburse certain funds which had been advanced, Barye found himself unable to pay, and was obliged to deposit his models as a guarantee. Barye retained to the end of his life a painful memory of his pecuniary embarrassment at this epoch, and his irritation was increased by the indelicate use which the capitalist in question made of his models while they were in his possession. Indeed, it was not until 1857 that Barye finally succeeded in clearing himself of this debt and recovering his property. The revolution of 1848 brought, however, some consolation 200 ART AND CRITICISM. to Barye. The Salon having ceased to be under the control of the Institute, the artists at once testified their recognition of his talent by electing him a member of the jury in the sec- tion of sculpture, and the new administration of Fine Arts appointed him director of the "Atelier des Moulages " in the " LION AND SERPENT." Engraved by W. R. Bodenstab. Louvre Museum, where he had his own private studio, and where he introduced many improvements in the reproduction of the antique statues and plaster casts. In 1854 another mark of recognition came in his nomination as Professor of Drawing at the Jardin des Plantes, and at the Universal Ex- hibition of 1855 he received the Grand Medal of Honor in the ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 20I section of artistic bronzes, and was promoted to the grade of Officer of the Legion of Honor. This time success seemed sure, but how late it came ! Barye was sixty years of age ; he was already " le pere Barye," and when finally orders came for public works, he complained sadly that the customers were coming just at the moment when he was thinking of "putting up the shutters." But even now the orders did not come quite spontaneously, and if it had not been for the initiative of enthusiastic friends, Barye might have remained neglected until the end of his life. Barye was a regular guest at a dinner of artists founded in 1849 tjy Corot, Paul Chenavard, Troyon, and Fran9ais, and afterwards joined by Jean Gigoux, Aime Millet, Leroy the en- graver, Hanoteau, Matout, Ch. Busson, Cabanel, Viollet-le-Duc, Paul de Musset, Gustave Planche the art critic, Jules Sandeau the novelist, Asselineau, and Henri Dumesnil, M. Dumesnil being a man of means and leisure, as well as an enthusiastic lover of the arts, acted as secretary and treasurer of the com- pany. The "Amis du Vendredi," as they called themselves, numbered in all some five-and-twenty, and their weekly meet- ings always saw twelve or fifteen of them gathered round the table of some hospitable and modest wine-shop. At first the Friday friends used to meet at a wine-shop in the Rue du Chantre, an old street which disappeared when modern im- provements began to beautify the Place du Carrousel. " We were not all rich enough in those days to dine at restaurants," said the painter Fran9ais, as he related to me the history of this famous dining club. " The guardians of the Louvre Museum used to tell us where there was good wine to be had. Now it was so and so. Rue de Rivoli; then it would be another, Place du Louvre ; and then so and so, who had opened a new wine-shop at the Barriere de I'Etoile. Du- mesnil used to go beforehand, order a leg of mutton, some cheese, some wine, and a little cognac, and there was our din- ner. Afterwards we went to the Cafe Fleurus, opposite the 202 ART AND CRITICISM. Garden of the Luxembourg, but the cost of our dinner was not greatlv augmented. Those who were in funds, or who had sold a picture, or had some particular stroke of luck, paid for extra wine for the company ; this one sent in a pate de Pilhiviers; that one some other delicacy. Barye was a regular attendant, and though never speaking to the company at large, he talked abundantly to his immediate neighbor. He was particular about his food ; he had an excellent stomach, drank his coffee and his cognac, and was not worried with nervous- ness. I remember well we used often to say to him, ' Well, Barye, what shall we have by way of an extra next week ?' And Barye would reply with the sincerity and unction of a fine gourmet : '/e conuais tin certain pate de niaquereaiL de Calais. . . .' " When, after the death of Visconti, Hector Lefuel was charged with the completion of the Palais du Louvre, which was the great architectural event of the reign of Napoleon HI., Frangais and Matout being very intimate with him, pleaded for their friend, and intimated that he now had an excellent opportunity of rehabilitating Barye. They talked so well and so earnestly that Lefuel was converted, and promised that he would give Barye some lions to execute for the interior courts. " What are you thinking about T' exclaimed Fran9ais and Ma- tout. " Barye is not a mere animalier ; you must give him some figures." Having thus talked over Lefuel, Matout told Barye at their next dinner that the architect of the Louvre was disposed to give him an order; but Barye, remembering his past experience of official commissions, received the news with a lively expression of irritation and impatience. At the next dinner Matout and Fran9ais returned to the subject, but Barye received them more angrily than ever : " I pray you never speak to me of the subject again ; it is impossible." The next morning, however, Barye received the official paper ordering a figure group representing " War," and he at once went to work and modelled his sketch, and as soon as it was ready Lefuel a> < cr 73 > a < W tc > ^ ?s o o w D. ■ > z c s: c :^ „ ^ H a: F*w fill ii," 1 h. ihi,immi pitiiji iiiiiiii _ ^■$•^1 THE [tj'sivbjsitt] ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 205 went to see it at the studio, accompanied by Frangais and Matout, for the architect's great esteem of Barye's talent was minsfled with a certain fear of his humor. No sooner had Lefuel seen the group than he exclaimed, enthusiastically : " I congratulate you heartily. Monsieur Barye ; the composition is admirable — admirable. But you have placed me in a very embarrassing position." " How so ?" said Barye, springing forward with an expres- sion of mingled fear and irritation. " Mon Dieu, Monsieur Barye, your group could not be finer ; it is so admirable that really I am very much embar- rassed." " Monsieur, I beg you be good enough to explain yourself," said Barye, more and more impatiently, and fearing some catas- trophe. " Why, I shall simply be obliged to commission you to exe- cute the three other groups." It was thus that Barye obtained the order for those four groups of " War," " Peace," " Order,", and " Strength," which were executed in stone, and now adorn the pavilions Richelieu and Denon in the palace of the Louvre. The architect of the Louvre did not limit his patronage of Barye to these four groups. One of the pediments of the Louvre, representing " Napoleon dominating History and the Arts," was executed in stone from Barye's design, and over the triple archway of the Quai du Louvre he designed two recumbent figures of youths representing rivers, which served as supporters for the slab in which was inserted his bronze bass-relief equestrian portrait of Napoleon III. in the costume of a Roman emperor, his brow circled with a laurel crown. This bass-relief was modelled by Barye in the manner of the monuments of the Parthenon, and, as I have been told by those who saw it, the model was a fine work, but the reproduction in galvano- plasty by Christophle was a failure. The bronze came out full of holes, which were filled up with lead and wax, and the whole surface had a 2o6 ART AND CRITICISM. botched and soapy appearance. After the revolution of the 4th of September, 1870, this bass-rehef was hidden beneath a layer of plaster as an emblem of a hated and fallen dynasty. Now it has gone to join the statues of Napoleon I., Charles X., and Louis Philippe in that strange museum of forgotten greatness the Garde-Meuble of the Quai d'Orsay, and between Barye's two recumbent figures is at present placed Antonin Mercie's group of " Le Genie des Arts." Meanwhile Barye's " Seated Lion " found a glorious pedestal at one of the doors of the palace on the Quai du Louvre, and orders came from the prov- inces too for groups to adorn public monuments ; for instance, an equestrian statue of Napoleon for the town of Ajaccio, and four groups for the cascade of the Palais des Arts de Long- champs at Marseilles. These latter groups, representing a tiger attacking a stag, a lion attacking a boar, a lion and an antelope, and a panther and roebuck, were modelled two- thirds life-size by Barye, but he did not even superintend the reproduction in stone, and only went to Marseilles to be pres- ent at the ceremony of the inauguration of the palace. The statue of Napoleon made for the town of Ajaccio was executed by Barye with the greatest care. M. Paul Mantz, who saw the work in 1864, before its departure for Corsica, says that " Barye never modelled a finer horse than this one." Another equestrian statue was ordered for the town of Gren- oble, but the project fell through in a manner which is very characteristic of Barye. In this statue the Emperor was to be represented in modern costume, and Barye, with his usual con- scientiousness, hired a costume, for which he paid five francs a day during a whole year that he worked on his sketch. Fur- thermore, by some means he had succeeded in getting the measurements of Napoleon's body, and he tried model after model until finally he discovered a cuirassier whose height, length, breadth, and thickness corresponded precisely with the dimensions of Napoleon. Then he went to work and made his clay sketch, and when it was finished the Mayor of Gren- ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 207 oble came to see it, inasmuch as the statue was destined for that city, and as the municipahty was to pay half the cost. Unfortunately this mayor had seen the entry of Napoleon into Grenoble when he was a boy, and, proud of his memory, he ventured to suggest to Barye a change in the attitude of an arm. " It was thus that I saw the Emperor." And Barye replied with perfect politeness that the change would be easy " TIGER AND HARE." Engraved by Henry Wolf. to make, but, irritated by the interference of the worthy mayor, he never touched his model again. Some time afterwards his friend the sculptor Geoffroy Dechaume, happening to have business at the Ministry of the Interior, was told that a sum of 10,000 francs had been waiting there for Barye for several months. On his way home Dechaume called at Barye's studio 2o8 ART AND CRITICISM. and told him that there was money waiting for him at the ministry. " Yes, I know," repHed Barye ; " it is for the Napoleon. I shall not take it." " Why not ?'' asked Geoffroy Dechaume. " The order is not regular." " But the fact of the order having been given to pay you the money.''" " No matter," replied Barye, impatiently. " I shall not touch the money. Besides, I have had enough of making statues of Napoleon. I shall not execute the order." And so he vol- untarily abandoned his labor and outlay of time and money, and finally the equestrian statue of Napoleon for the town of Grenoble was made by another. In 1866 Barye yielded to the solicitations of his friends and offered himself as a candidate at the Institute — at that hated Academy of Fine Arts which had been so persistently hostile to him, but which had finally to accept Delacroix under penalty of losing all public esteem, and was by this time gradually becoming a little more liberal. He obtained nine votes, and vowed never to make the experiment a second time. Thanks, however, to a friendly subterfuge, he was in- duced to become a candidate again in 1868, and this time he was elected, and so, thanks to the efforts of Lefuel, the Institute was saved from the shame of not having counted Barye among its members. The story, as it was related to me by M. Henri Dumesnil, is this: Lefuel, after having talked several times to Barye about again becoming a candidate, in- vited him to breakfast one morning. After the coffee Lefuel pretended that he had a number of visits to make, and insisted that Barye should come with him in his carriage. " We can continue our chat en route," said the architect, as he put Barye in his coupe, and gave the coachman the address of a member of the Institute. When the carriage stopped at the door, Le- fuel said to Barye, " I am just going up to see so-and-so ; you C/} 2 > n V ►^ OP THE ^ ITT^ UHIVBE ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 211 know him ; come up with me ; he will be delighted to see you." And Barye went up with Lefuel, and as they were coming down-stairs, when the visit was over, he said to the sculptor: " There ! you have made your first visit. Now go and make the others, ce n'est pas plus difficile que 9a." And at last, after the renewed assurances on the part of Lefuel that his election was this time certain, Barye made the visits which the etiquette of the Institute demands from all candidates, and so he was finally elected. After 1848 Barye had lived successively at Rue St. Ana- stase in the Marais quarter. Rue des Fosses St. Victor, and Rue Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, and finally he had settled on the Quai des Celestins, where he continued up to the end of his life to publish and sell his own bronzes. Having lost his first wife and the children he had by her, he had remar- ried, and a new family had grown up around him; but for reasons which we need not seek, Barye never invited friends to his house, and very few ever entered even his private studio. He generally received visitors in the show-room, where his bronzes were arranged, and where Madame Barye presided over the sales. Barye himself took but little interest in busi- ness matters ; he rarely wrote a letter in his life, and if it had not been for the care and attention of his wife, it is hard to say into what state his affairs might have fallen. Whenever, for instance, a bronze happened to be a very fine proof, and chiselled and mounted in a thoroughly satisfactory manner, Barye would caress it, examine it with loving eyes, and recom- mend his wife to put it aside, or at any rate not to sell it except " to a real amateur." Naturally the good lady piously disregarded these injunctions on more than one occasion. But Barye was so devoted to his art, so scrupulous and so severe a critic of himself, that when an order came for a new proof of one of his works he would often revise and improve the model in this or that detail, so that in many cases the proofs made under his direction and sold directly by him are from a cer- 212 ART AND CRITICISM. tain point of view unique. This fact, together with the ex- cellent quality of the bronze, and the beauty of the patine, which Barye obtained by the most subtle manipulations when he had sui^cient time allowed him, explains the high prices now paid by amateurs for old proofs of his works, whereas modern proofs may be bought at an ordinary figure. With the exception of summer visits to his cottage at Barbi- zon, where he amused himself with making studies of the Fon- tainebleau rocks and trees in oil and water- colors, Barye passed his whole life in Paris. His health remained excellent until towards the last five years of his life, when he suf- fered from gout and swollen legs. During this time he spent most of his days paint- ing in water-colors in his cabinet on the Quai des Celestins, and more rarely handling the modelling tools. In the begin- ning of 1875 gout became complicated with dropsy; he was tapped two or three times, and lingered on for several months, "TWO YOUNG BEARS FIGHTING. Engraved by J. Tinkey. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 213 an unruly patient, and having no faith in doctors. On June 25, 1875, he died, at the age of seventy- nine, full of years, and full of hardly and late conquered honors, which were enu- merated as follows on the funeral card : "Antoine Louis Barye, Statuary, Officer of the Legion of Honor, Member of the In- stitute, Member of the Superior Council of Education, Mem- ber of the Royal Academy of Belgium, Professor of Drawing at the Jardin des Plantes." At the exhibition of Barye's work at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, a few months after his death, everybody was struck by the immensity and variety of his genius. The show was im- posing by its quantity as well as by its quality, for it comprised no less than 350 bronzes and plaster models, 100 oil-paintings, 70 water-colors, and upwards of 100 drawings and sketches. These works represented the contents of Barye's studio at the time of his death. To it, in order to form an idea of his life- work, we should have to add many unique pieces dispersed here and there in private collections or in public galleries. But, as it was, what an impression of mighty creative genius, what a sensation of sublime beauty, and what a thrill and glow of life was conveyed by the sight of all those men, heroes, and mon- sters, surrounded by all the animals of the field and of the des- ert and forest^ howling, roaring, snarling, fighting, panting, and devouring each other in virtue of their mysterious internecine destiny ! Theseus was seen on the point of plunging his pon- iard into the stupid brow of the Minotaur; in another group Theseus, his knees firmly grasping the flanks of the centaur Bienor, is dealing a death-blow upon the human head of the strange antique monster ; here is the hippogriff, half bird, half horse, straining forward over the waves in mid-air, and bearing on his back the romantic hero of Ariosto's story, who holds in his stalwart arms the graceful form of Angelica; here are equestrian statues that remind you of the precious bronzes of the Renaissance — Gaston de Foix, Charles VIL, Tartar and Arab cavaliers, and the great Caesar of our century. General 14* 214 ART AND CRITICISM. Bonaparte; here are the goddesses of Olympus, Venus, Juno, and Minerva, seated beneath a triple-faced chimaera from which spring the twelve floriated branches of a candelabrum, around a crowning group composed of the three Graces ; here are the plaster models of the groups of " War," " Peace," " Order," and " Strength," and the " Lion of the Bastille Column," that splen- did bass-relief in which Barye has solved the great problem of reconciling the ideal with the real, and achieving sublimity without abandoning truth. We cannot conclude our sketch of Barye the sculptor with- out devoting a few words to Barye the painter. The pupil of Gros, all sculptor that he was, loved color as well as form, and r-'= " PANTHER DEVOURING A GAZELLE." Engraved by F. A. Pettit. delighted to study, against some background of bowlders and trees, the tones of a tiger's tawny coat, the spots of a leopard, or the blue and yellow markings of some knotted serpentine mon- ster. How sincere, profound, and varied are these studies of animals which the stay-at-home painter, by mere force of imagi- nation and sympathy, has succeeded in depicting in appropriate and suggestive scenery ! Some of his water-colors are magnifi- cently executed, and of a splendor of color which perhaps ex- ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 215 plains why Delacroix used to profess a warmer admiration for the paintings of his friend Barye than for his sculpture. For Barye himself these water-colors, even the least successful of which bear the stamp of a master's hand, were a simple amuse- ment and distraction ; he worked upon them in the intervals of his other labors, or during his summer rambles at Fontaine- bleau. But even during his lifetime they were much sought for by his admirers, and now they are most highly prized wher- ever the name of Barye is known. Nothing could be more characteristic of the great sculptor's temperament than their sincerity, frankness, and vigor. So rudely did he sweep the surface of the coarse-grained paper that Theophile Gautier used to say that Barye's brush was made with the mustaches of a Numidian lion. MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. HOW chilling, how dead, how tiresome is a museum of sculpture ! How unsympathetic those rows of statues gazing fixedly into space with their big white eyes ! How re- pulsive a collection of plaster casts with their crude whiteness glaring against bare walls ! It is no wonder that so many peo- ple profess not to feel the charm of sculpture when they see it, as it were, impaled on paltry pedestals, each piece like a prisoner bearing its name and its number. Sculpture is not an unsociable art. In the beginning its function was to bring the divinity nearer to man, to assure the family that there was ever present, and even visible among them, a divine guardian of the hearth. It was the privilege of sculpture to perpetuate the memory of heroes and of noble deeds ; to embody in beau- tiful forms the vague and eternally human syntheses of the poets ; to transport vulgar facts into the radiant sphere of art. So it became the office of sculpture to contribute to the solem- nity of temples and to the decoratic^ of palaces, and to lend its charm to gardens and to dwellings. We should see sculpture revealing its majestic forms in the soft light of cathedrals, or enthroned in gay saloons decked with rich stuffs and flowers, amid the movement and animation of fetes ; we should see it in the parks and public places scintillating in the changeful- ness of light and shade, with the flitting reflections of foliage and clouds playing upon its surface, and seeming to give it the thrill and pulsation of life. We should have lovely statuettes " AT THE SCHOOL DOOR." — By M. Alexandre Falguiere. MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 219 in the rooms where we live; and in the adornment of our houses, of our furniture, and of the dainty objects of daily use, the sculptor should have his role. But if we form our ideas from the occasional sight of the Farnese Hercules, of a muti- lated Venus, or of a colossal statue of some modern statesman hiding himself in the voluminous folds of a bronze frock-coat, it is only natural that sculpture should seem to us generally to be profoundly tiresome and uninteresting, not to say hid- eous. Now this is precisely a conception of the art which I will ask the reader to abandon, if he has it, before we begin to consider together our theme of modern French sculpture. The Greek marbles which constitute the basis, and gener- ally the only contents of museums of sculpture, are not the beginning, the end, and the last word of the modeller's art. The theory that sculpture is essentially a classical and abstract art is an arbitrary statement of the critics ; nor are the only legitimate subjects of sculpture those furnished by classical antiquity. The French are there to show that even if the Greeks and Romans had not bequeathed them the songs of their poets, they would have been sculptors still. And the proof is written on the fa9ade of the Cathedral of Reims, and repeated yearly in the exhibition of the Paris Salon. In France sculpture is a truly national art, not owing its origin, like French painting, to foreign inspiration, but a spontaneous manifestation of natural gifts. Italy, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, displayed incomparable sculptural genius. The masters of that period, Lucca della Robbia, Donatello, John of Bologna, Ghiberti, Michael Angelo, and Verrocchio, are great among the greatest masters; but after them the plastic genius of Italy fell asleep, and since the Renaissance there has been no really great sculptor south of the Alps. As for Canova, he can hardly be regarded as more than a tenth-rate modeller of insipidity, who disdained to study nat- ure, while the modern Italians, with the exception, perhaps, of Jean Dupre, are simply marvellous hewers of marble, skilful 220 ART AND CRITICISM. even unto a miracle in carving the pattern of a lace collar, or imitating the texture of a tweed shooting-jacket. Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries boasted Pieter Vischer, of Nuremberg, certain metal-workers of Augsburg, and many carv- ers of polychrome wooden images who were great artists, but left no successors. There is no country richer in museums than modern Germany ; no country where Greek archaeology is held in higher honor ; no country where antique art is stud- ied more carefully, more profoundly, and with more complete educational apparatus ; and yet we can name with respect no modern German sculptor except Ranch. Spain has never had a school of sculpture ; England has invariably called upon for- eigners to perpetuate the forms of royalty; Scandinavia can claim but one sculptor, Thorwaldsen, the Dane, and he was a docile pupil of Canova. In France, on the contrary, we find that sculpture has flour- ished naturally and uninterruptedly ever since the Middle Ages, when the tailleurs dHmages covered the Gothic cathedrals with statues and bass-reliefs which owe nothing to foreign teach- ing. These image-carvers, in their allegories of the vices and virtues, of the wise and foolish virgins, of the last judgment, and in all their naive transpositions of the mysteries of religion and eternity into the formulas of common life, were rationalists, r^2X\?>\.'s>, frondeurs, observers and lovers of nature, always ex- pressive, and always appealing directly to their contemporaries. Their work is a mirror of the whole originality of the French intellect; in Gothic sculpture we detect the same qualities which produced the prose of Montesquieu and Voltaire, name- ly, an innate need of giving to the conceptions of the mind and to external facts a translation and a presentation so ade- quate, so direct, so natural, and so precise, that there remains nothing vague, enigmatic, or mistakable. With all its short- comings in execution, Gothic sculpture is always clear, logical, and measured — three essential qualities in plastic art — and from the twelfth to the fifteenth century these Gothic sculptors FALGUli}RE IN HIS STUDIO. ^:ei^^ OP THP. [USIVBRSITTJ MODERxN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 223 produced masterpieces enough to prove that, before the Re- naissance was dreamed of, France had her national school of sculpture, the development of which was perhaps more hin- dered than forwarded by the influence of the revival of clas- sical art in Italy. This question is complex, but it is interesting to notice the tendency of many modern French critics to lament the tri- umph of the Renaissance in art and literature, and to accuse that movement of having hampered the modern mind with the nightmare of antiquity, of having perverted French architect- ure, and dethroned living French national art in favor of a dead and cold pagan ideal. That the Renaissance perverted French architecture we may perhaps admit, while still admiring the wonderful buildings which we owe to that perversion ; that the Renaissance perverted French sculpture from its true path is less evident, the more so as people are divided in opinion as to which is the true path. The fact, however, remains that since the twelfth century sculpture in France has flourished without eclipse, and the succession of great masters has con- tinued without interruption through Michel Colomb, Jean Goujon, Germain Pilon, Barthelemy Prieur, Anguier, Coysevox, Puget, Coustou, Houdon, Pajou, Pigalle, Lemoyne, Caffleri, Clo- dion, Falconet, David d'Angers, Rude, Barye, Carpeaux, to men- tion only the greatest ; and certainly when we look at the work of these great men we do not remark so much the hampering influence of classical formulas, but rather the puissant and indi- vidual originality of each one of them. In brief, we may say that sculpture is the art of imitating, in the solid, human and animal forms, abstraction being gener- ally made of color. But this latter qualification must be made with prudence, for there is no longer any doubt that the Greeks colored their statues, as the Gothics did ; furthermore, the fine works of the Renaissance and of earlier and later artists in colored wax must undoubtedly be admitted to rank as artistic sculpture, as also the polychrome wooden figures by Verbrug- 224 ART AND CRITICISM. gen of Antwerp, and the figures of the altar screen of the Cathedral of Amiens. It is difficult to say that the artist must only work thus and thus, and that his limits are such and such, or the essential conditions of his art so and so. Critics have written volumes about the various schools of sculpture, about the ideal in sculpture, about the laws of sculpture, building themselves narrow systems on the vain basis of a science which does not exist, but whose name, " aesthetics," sounds in the ears of the public with the authority of a trumpet commanding silence. The day when Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Pro- fessor of Philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, first coined this word, meaning thereby the science of sensations, he little thought what a field he was opening up for the critics, and what a dark net-work of pedantic paradoxes they would, thanks to this new pseudo-science, interpose between the eye of man and the complex verity of art. It is easy to shut one's self up within a system, therein to preach at one's ease ; but there is no system vast, spacious, and commodious enough to contain the universe of art. Some unexpected and spontaneous prod- uct will be always springing up to confound our paltry science. In vain we shall alter or extend our criterion ; the manifesta- tions of beauty will ever be too varied and too numerous to be forced into the narrow pigeon-holes of our presumptuous clas- sification. Rather than submit to the humiliation of incessant apostasy, let us be modest ; let us be satisfied to feel ; let us seek an asylum in the impeccable naivete of instinct. The joy of art and the activity of the artist are phenomena belonging still in a large degree to the domain of instinct; we cannot ultimately explain them; and the moment we quit the histor- ical and archaeological stand-point we can only speak in vague generalities either about the artist or his work. Science has yet to explain physiologically and psychically the action of form and color on the human organism. Meanwhile perhaps all that we can say is that art is nature seen through the temperament of the artist, and the artist is a man naturally gifted with some " CIlAKii \ . ' — By M. Paul Dubois. ^0^^^^^ 0? THR MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 22/ special aptitude of eye or of ear, a native capacity to perceive the germs of beauty that exist in the external world, and then, under the influence of obscure creative faculties, to give a new life to the materials he sees — the life of thought — ideal life. And by the ideal we mean something ulterior to nature, some- thing less real and yet more true, something more complete in its kind, and more strongly characterized. As Lowell finely says : " The true ideal is not opposed to the real, nor is it any artificial heightening thereof, but lies in it, and blessed are the eyes that find it. It is the mens divinior which hides within the actual, transfiguring matter of fact into matter of meaning for him who has the gift of second -sight." And this is why the first quality of the artist is intelligence, and the second is sympathy. The most complete knowledge of the technique of art will not replace the preliminary exercise of the intellect. Before painting or modelling, the artist worthy of the name must learn to think. What strikes us and attracts us first of all in a work of art is the thought, the aspect, the unity of it. The details will appeal to us afterwards, and a thousand deli- cate things will ravish us, but the first general imposing impres- sion is that of the form, and this form is the expression of the artist's thought ; it is the proof that he has opened the hand in which Nature keeps her mysteries clasped, that he has read her secrets, interpreted them in his work, and rendered them sensi- ble to men, seizing the fugitive appearance of things, and fix- ing their intimate reality in plastic immobilized shape. The painter and the sculptor take the motives of their compositions directly from nature ; they imitate, or rather interpret, models furnished by the outer world. But the painter or the sculptor does not copy servilely; in presence of Jiis model his sympa- thy comes into play, and in the process of selection, which is the essence of his creative faculty, he instinctively chooses the traits which his own nature readily and sympathetically discov- ers and appreciates. The more gifted the inner nature of the artist, the more wide and profound is his field of sympathetic 228 ART AND CRITICISM. action, and the more vividly does he feel and the more exactly does he render the traits of the model. The artist has a psy- chic superiority which leaves its stamp upon the representation he makes ; hence a work of art is doubly expressive, for it ex- presses at once in indissoluble unity the essence of the model and the essence of the artist. A picture or a statue has there- fore not only an objective, but also a subjective, expression, and interests us as much by one of these qualities as by the other. To return now specially to sculpture, we can see that each sculptor, according to his temperament, influenced as it must be by the epoch and milieu in which he lives, will devote him- self by preference either to purely corporal beauty, or to the beauty of passional expression, or to decorative beauty, consist- ing chiefly in the ponderation of masses and the felicitous har- mony of lines. Three typical sculptors are Phidias, Donatello, and Jean Goujon. In the domain of sculpture our admiration ranges in the past over a wide field, beginning with the works of the Egyptians and Assyrians, dwelling long among the mas- terpieces of the Greek and Roman epochs, passing wonderingly among the marvels of the Gothic and the Renaissance periods, enjoying even the dainty realism of the Japanese. And with all these various masterpieces in our memories, shall we accept the dicta of those who maintain that the art of Phidias is the beginning and the end of sculpture ? Shall we admit that the sole aim of sculpture is to reproduce the human figure in its ideal perfection, purged of all that belongs only to the individ- ual, of all the accidents, feelings, and actions of a special mo- ment, reduced, in short, to a type, to a majestic abstraction ? For the Greeks who lived an outward life this ideal was suffi- cient. The climate, the morals, the religion, and a thousand details of the life of ancient Greece inclined the taste of the sculptors towards athletic and voluptuous forms, and led them to prefer the expression of the vegetative life of a typical vig- orous body to the expression of the moral life of a special soul. To this preference we owe the frieze of the Parthenon, the MEDITATION." — By M. Paul Dubois. *^V TS^' ^ 0? THT'^ MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 231 Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Venus of Syracuse, im- mortal monuments of athletic grace and radiant visual beauty. But it is absurd to tell us that the limits and laws of sculpture were eternally fixed by the Greeks, and that if we will sculp we must follow the example of Canova and Thorwaldsen, and carve images of Psyche and Apollo to the end of time. The reign of Greek sculpture ended when people ceased to go about half naked, and when bodily vigor and beauty became a secondary thing. In the same way epopee disappeared with the age of individual heroism : epic poetry and artillery are in- compatible. The torso of many a headless and legless Greek statue is magnificent beyond a doubt, but it requires a tech- nically educated eye to feel its beauty. The expression of the Belvedere Apollo is full of serene majesty, but do not affect to admire it if you do not really feel its charm. We modern men are not bound to admire all the Greek statues and fragments of statues which are to be seen in museums. Many of the en- thusiasts of Greek art are victims of a superstition. They do not reflect that they have arrived at their present state of admi- ration by a roundabout and retrospective way. They eulogize the calmness and majestic repose of Greek art because they know a more complex and living art which they choose to dis- parage. Their admiration is reflex and unconsciously contrast- ive : they love the simplicity of Greek art often only because they have had experience of a more tempestuous and complex art, namely, the art of Christianity, which accentuated the ex- pression of moral life as exclusively as pagan art accentuated the expression of physical life. These two hostile movements, paganism and Christianity, have instigated in turn the finest and most exact analysis of the opposite characteristics which express the whole essence of man in his visible form. On the one hand we have the Venus of Syracuse, and on the other the Christian Virgin ; on the one hand Apollo, and on the other the crucified Saviour. These antitheses represent the extremes of the key-board of expression in the plastic arts. That such 232 ART AND CRITICISM. contrary conceptions and such opposite moral ideals should be capable of expression by means of slight modifications of form and insensible linear variations is a subject of profound aston- ishment for the thinker. The extreme expression of physical life represented by Greek art, and the extreme expression of moral life represented by Gothic art, each achieved complete development unmolested by rival tendencies. While the primitives were carving their altar screens and tombs and cathedral portals, the gods of an- cient Greece were slumbering beneath the ruins of their temples awaiting the hour of resurrection and revenge. The Renais- sance delivered them at last from their dark prison, and the fragments of their statues revealed to the Italians, who first had the joy of contemplating them, a plastic ideal which had been for ages unjustly sacrificed. From the Greek marbles Dona- tello learned that a muscle may be expressive, and that the flesh is not merely the servant of the spirit. Henceforward the more the study of the relics of ancient Greece is pursued, the more does corporal beauty invade the sanctuary of psychic beauty which the primitives had so severely guarded. But the revenge of the Greek gods happily resolves itself into conciliation, and physical beauty, instead of being reinstated as the supreme ideal of sculpture, becomes the handmaiden of beauty of another order. Only let it be remarked that the artists of the Renais- sance never allowed their admiration to deviate from that ele- ment of Greek sculpture which they could really appreciate, namely, its plastic perfection ; the calmness, the abstract seren- ity, the repose, of the Greek masterpieces they left to be ex- pounded by the perspicacity of modern criticism. The great sculptors of the fifteenth century and their suc- cessors in modern times have shown by triumphant examples that the expression of moral life, of the most intense passion, and of the most powerful thought is not only compatible with pure plastic beauty, but even enhances that beauty and lends it a higher signification. To us moderns the ardent and pas- "0^-^^ 0? THE IVBE.SI TT £4£rFo\'5^ MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 235 sionate artists of the Renaissance are more closely interesting than Phidias or Praxiteles, for the simple reason that they ex- press the emotions and troubles of modern man. In the works of Donatello first, and then in those of Michael Angelo and John of Bologna, we find that exuberance of nervous life which has never since ceased to be the ideal of the great sculptors. On the other hand, in the works of the immortal artists of Greece we moderns make two parts, distinct and unequal in honor, namely, in the first place, absolute perfection in the syn- thesis of human proportions, and in the second, attitudes, move- ments and gestures inherent in manners and habits of life with which we are not familiar. The proportions of Greek statues realize forever the ideal of human physical beauty; but their attitudes and movements, if they convey any meaning to us at all, retain only a vague archaeological interest. The tendency of the French sculptors of the present day is to pursue the work of conciliation begun by Donatello ; indeed, with rare intervals, the process has been going on ever since the Renaissance. The sculptors have this advantage over the painters, that the conditions of their art are very stable. The sculptor's tools are his hands. No industrial discovery and no progress of science has benefited him. Oil-colors, varnish, pastel, canvas — all that has revolutionized painting within the past five hundred years has no equivalent in sculpture. Clay, sticks, supporting rods of iron, a compass, a plumb-line, mallet and chisels, and a block of marble — such are the sole auxiliaries of genius in the plastic art, coarse tools which have remained unchanged since the days of the builders of the Pyramids, tools of no value, which leave to the artist the undivided honor of his creation. The sculptor's model is nature ; his only criterion is nature; without nature he can produce nothing. His art is long, difficult, unlucrative ; his apprenticeship absorbs fully ten years of his life ; his studio is generally a conservatory of rheu- matism ; the material creation of his work is dirty, laborious, and costly ; in fact, the career of the sculptor is hedged round 236 ART AND CRITICISM. with SO many obstacles and inconveniences that none but those who have an irresistible vocation are bold enough to enter upon it. Then, again, the ideal is so obvious, and the means of at- taining it so inexorably limited, that the sculptor is not tor- mented by the shifting breezes of fashion. Even during this present agitated century, in the midst of all the political, philo- sophical, religious, literary, and artistic revolutions which have never ceased to trouble men's minds, the traditions of sculpt- ure have remained firm. The only points in dispute are ques- tions of degree, which are raised in virtue of certain so-called laws, of which certain critics are the self-constituted guardians. Carpeaux, for instance, is still accused of having put too much life and passion and too much realism into his work, while Fal- guiere is called to order because he has fixed in bronze grace- ful phases of instantaneous movement. The argument, as set forth by the eminent critic M. Ch. Clement, is this : " Carpeaux gives astonishing reality and life to his work. But there is nei- ther ideal nor repose in his sculpture, nothing of that serene, tranquil, and somewhat abstract beauty which the Greeks re- garded as the supreme end of the art ; nothing, either, of that beauty nearer to reality, but impressed with a personal, moral, and new sentiment, which we find in the sculpture of the Re- naissance." This is an intelligible criticism based on the postulate that sculpture can only exist as a calm and austere art, and that it is a mistake to make it picturesque and realistic. But this postulate may be contested. Carpeaux was an enthusiast of life and color. The master quality of his work is intense vivac- ity, a very thrill and quiver of life — or, as he used to say, le fremissement — and one of the elements which most contribute to produce this impression is the skilful handling of light, half- tones, and shadows, or, in other words, the sense of color, which Carpeaux displays in his modelled compositions. A master- piece in this respect is the high relief of Flora, surrounded by a ring of dancing children which adorns the fa9ade of the SILVER BUST OF A BOY.— By M. Antonin Mercie. ^ OF THE ^^ fUHIVBRSITT] y OB" MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 239 Pavilion de Flore in the Louvre. Add to this quality of color admirable truth of proportions, unerring construction of inte- rior framework and muscular envelope, and a caressing model- ling of the surfaces which finds singular artifices* in the work- ing of the clay in order to render the very palpitation of the epiderm. But, after all, there is no solution to the difficulty. Carpeaux worked according to his temperament, and never sought those qualities of calmness and austerity which M. Clement reproaches him for not having displayed. The only question that we can reasonably put is not whether Carpeaux's work is in conformity with the Greek ideal, but whether it is a realization of Carpeaux's ideal, and whether it is beautiful and delightful in itself. The condemnation of M. Falguiere's rendering of instan- taneous movement is based upon a similar petitio principii. M. Falguiere has made two statues representing the move- ment of running ; one is a running boy called the " Vainqueur au Coq ;" the other is a nude female figure, " Nymphe Chasse- resse," representing an Arcadian huntress in the act of dis- charging an arrow as she runs at full speed, poised momen- tarily on one foot on tiptoe. This statue of bronze is a marvel of intense vivacity, life-like movement, and exquisite modelling. But certain critics object that violent movement is unfitted for sculptural representation. Their process of reasoning is sim- ple : you go to the museum of antiques, pick out all the statues representing attitudes of solemn and motionless majesty, and proclaim them masterpieces; then you pick out the statues in which motion is represented realistically, and proclaim them to be works of inferior artists or of a period of decadence. This was the method of reasoning which enabled Charles Blanc to * The process referred to of modelling a la boulette is used by M. Falguiere and other contemporaries who share Carpeaux's enthusiasm for intense vivacity. The clay or wax is applied in small pellets closely juxtaposed, so that the smooth parts of the model are really composed of an infinity of asperities, which catch and reflect the light, and so seem to vibrate with the pulsation of life. 240 ART AND CRITICISM. accumulate a whole volume of dogmatic absurdities, which still survives under the title of a Grammaire des Arts du Dessin. When Barye modelled his magnificent group representing the winged hippogriff flying through space with Roger and An- gelica on his back, he utterly transgressed this esthetic law of immobility, and nevertheless he produced a masterpiece. But a moment's reflection will convince us that form isolated from movement is an impossibility. Even in death the form that subsists is the trace and effect of the vanished life. The maj- esty of the most majestic Greek statues is not absolute immo- bility; it is movement suspended for a longer or shorter time, but still it is movement. The question, therefore, lies not be- tween immobility and movement, but between more or less movement. It is not a question of principle, but a question of degree, and therefore of taste, opinion, and individual sense of measure. In short, we come back to the great and obvious truth that statues, like pictures, are made to be looked at, and not to be talked about. This truth I shall ask leave myself to respect, for it is not my intention to weary the reader with descriptions of works which are not before his eyes, and which he may never see. I have laid before him a view of the nature and theory of sculpt- ure, I have stated and briefly explained the general tendency of modern French sculpture, and now I have only to complete these remarks by a few words on each of the eminent artists who have been chosen, literally six out of six hundred, as being most worthy to represent particular manifestations of contem- porary plastic art in France. As sculptors, the modern French artists are simply without rivals in the world, and in the history of their own nation one can mention no epoch which has pro- duced more remarkable artists or a richer harvest of admirable works than this present nineteenth century. Undisputed head of the present brilliant pleiad of French sculptors is M. Paul Dubois, member of the Institute, Director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Born in 1829, M. Paul Dubois THE MASK," OR " LA COMEDIE HUMAINE." — By M. Ernest Christophe. yk^ OP THE ''>^ fUHIVERSITT] MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 243 studied first of all for the legal profession, and did not enter a sculptor's studio until he was twenty-six years of age. From 1859 to 1862 he studied at Naples, Rome, and Florence, where he became an enthusiastic admirer of the artists of the fifteenth century. Under the influence of their work he conceived his statues of "St. John" (1864) and of the "Florentine Singer" (1865), which made him at once famous and popular. Twenty years ago France had almost forgotten the very existence of the "primitives." M. Dubois's "St. John," if the allusion may be permitted, was a forerunner in sculpture. By his inspired movement, by the prophetic ardor of his gesture, by his delicate boyish head, with fixed eyes and speaking lips, he carried with him all the young French sculptors, and led them to Florence, where they proclaimed Donatello to be the honored ancestor of modern plastic naturalism. After this first success there fol- lowed the " Birth of Eve " and only minor works until the Salon of 1875, when M. Dubois exhibited the tomb of General Lamoriciere, the result of twelve years' labor. This work won its author by acclamation the first place among living sculptors, and classed him on a level with some of the greatest of the past. In this magnificent monument bronze and marble are married with perfect art. The martial figure of the general, draped in his shroud, like a soldier in his cloak, rests under a pillared can- opy of marble, guarded, as it were, by four seated figures at the angles of the tomb — Faith, Charity, Meditation, and Military Courage. Faith, a virginal and pure figure of a maiden, raising with fervor her clasped hands heavenward ; Charity, holding in her lap two nurslings, seems like a vision of Andrea del Sarto or of Bernardino Luini realized in sculpture ; Meditation, in the guise of an old man with finely intelligent features furrow- ed by reflection ; Military Courage, clad in the armor of a war- rior, resting on his sword, pensive and resolute, calm, superb, and strong. The Cathedral of Nantes possesses in this monu- ment a work as fine as the finest work of the Renaissance, as fine as the tomb of Louis XII. at St. Denis, as fine as the 244 ART AND CRITICISM. tomb of the Dreux-Breze at Rouen. Nay, it is even finer, for the Hfe in M. Dubois's statues is more intense, the moral ex- pression more profound. I have compared these statues, as I have compared the " St. John," to Renaissance statues, but the comparison is only just so far as style and purity of conception are concerned, for M. Dubois's work is animated by modern sentiment, and impressed with the character of contemporary life and thought. When asked once which were his favorites among the ancient masters, M. Paul Dubois replied : " I am altogether eclectic. But whether ancient or modern, I am al- ways attracted by those who show the largest dose of ideal or of execution." The sculptor's dream is perfection of form and elevation of idea. In the tomb of Lamoriciere it has been M. Dubois's privilege to realize this dream. M. Alexandre Falguiere (born 1831) was a pupil of the Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he is now one of the lead- ing professors. After having shown in his statue of St. Vin- cent de Paul how exquisitely and touchingly he could render the expression of charity and joyous compassion, M. Falguiere has returned since to the problem which led him to produce the work that first made him popular, the " Vainqueur au Coq" (1864), now in the Luxembourg Museum: I mean the problem of rendering movement in sculpture. By his grandiose but still unexecuted project for the decoration of the summit of the Arc de Triomphe, representing Republican France erect in a chariot drawn by four colossal and impetuous horses, and by the bronze statue of the running " Nymphe Chasseresse," to which reference has been already made, M. Falguiere has won his cause. Indeed, one may safely say that there is no living master whose influence has contributed more than the influ- ence of Falguiere towards emancipating sculpture from aca- demic routine, and encouraging independence of conception and of treatment. Take, for instance, his marble " Diana," and that charming group shown in our engraving, and entitled "At the School Door." M. Falguiere's " Diana " may riot come di- " FATALITY." — By M. Ernest Christophe. hrSlVB^SITTj MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 247 rectly from Olympus, and the academic critics of the old regime may discuss the angles of her silhouette and the vivacity of her expression, for she is not a mere variation of the usual muse- um Dianas, but an original and majestic figure, animated with the breath and spirit of modern life. /{iThe marble seems to have softened and grown warm and quick^ under the sculptor's chisel ; nature has been closely consulted, and has revealed to the master a few delicate touches which serve to accentu- ate the movement, and to give to the flesh that morbidezza which is the illusion of the softness and palpitation of life. The modelling of the back of the Diana is admirable and marvellous beyond all that words can say. The group shown in the engraving speaks for itself; one cannot imagine a more naive and intimate rendering of the simple reality of every-day life. And yet how charming is the silhouette of the group, how serene the aspect, how grave and dignified the figure of the mother! Remark, also, how simply the common peasant costume is treated, how sober are the accessories, and how dis- creetly the story is told by means of gesture and attitude. The great difficulty in sculpture is the group. The single figure, the monologue, so to speak, is a simple enterprise ; but to group together several figures in view of common action and of a collective drama, and to render the composition inter- esting, expressive, and decorative from all sides, is a formid- able problem. In creating his bronze runners, " At the Goal," M. Alfred Boucher complicated the difficulty of the group with the difficulty of rendering movement. Three runners, with outstretched hands and craning necks, are straining tow- ards an invisible goal. During three years M. Boucher worked away in his studio, merely observing movement and muscular play ; and how difficult this observation was may be imagined from a glance at the group. Nearly all the time the sculptor required his three models before his eyes, and in order to enable them to hold the pose, he rigged up in his studio a system of ropes and stays suspended in such a man- 248 ART AND CRITICISM. ner that the models could spring forward with the movement of running, catch the ropes, and so immobilize the character- istic motion ; but even with the aid of all this apparatus the models could not hold the pose for more than four or five minutes at a time. It was by dint of such prolonged and patient observation of nature that M. Boucher marked every detail of running movement, and finally synthetized the results of his study in this group " At the Goal," which has been cast in bronze at the expense of the French government, and re- mains eternal and definitive. M. Boucher has thus beQ:un his brilliant career by a work which is perfect and complete; he has monopolized and exhausted his subject; his group of run- ners is typical and definitive, and worthy to take rank with the few great and eternal masterpieces. M. Antonin Mercie (born 1845) holds a place of honor in the young school of French sculpture next to MM. Dubois and Falguiere, who are his seniors, and of whom the latter was his first teacher. The works which have made M. Mercie famous are two statues, " David before the Combat with Goli- ath," " David after the Combat," the high relief of the " Genie des Arts " on the fa9ade of the Louvre, the group " Gloria Victis," the statue of " Renown " on the summit of the Tro- cadero Palace, the tomb of Michelet, the magnificent tomb of King Louis Philippe, and a high relief executed for the tomb of a beautiful young lady, which was the success of the Salon of 1885. M. Mercies works are so well known that it is need- less to reproduce them in engraving. Our illustration of a charming silver bust of a boy suffices to bring into evidence two characteristics of Mercies genius, namely, intensity of feel- ing and unerring sentiment of beauty in form. I use the word " genius " expressly, for M. Mercie, of all contemporary French sculptors, seems the most gifted by nature and the most fa- vored by mysterious and inexplicable inspiration, to employ traditional words which express vaguely what we vaguely ap- prehend. M. Mercie is a man who lives outside of contem- THE FIRST KISS"— DOUBLE BUST.— By M. Rene de Saint-Marceaux, rj(^>' OF THB >^ fUHIVBRSITT] MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 25 1 porary life, reading neither books nor newspapers, taking no part in civic or patriotic business, frequenting but rarely the society of a few friends, and being, in fact, a sort of artistic hermit isolated in the studio. And yet M. Mercie at the op- portune moment created that famous group " Gloria Victis," which symbolized with thrilling intensity the moral state of patriotic France in 1874, vanquished, but conscious of heroic deeds and noble resolves, grateful to her fallen sons, and more glorious in her defeat than was the Teuton foe in his brutal victory. But how did M. Mercie conceive this group ? Why did the clay assume this form ? How came the sculptor to express so vividly the latent thought of a whole nation ? The simple fact is that the clay which became ultimately the model of "Gloria Victis" assumed successively the forms of "Samson and Delilah" and "Judith and Holofernes," but being satisfied with neither of these projects, M. Mercie transformed the clay into the group which is called " Gloria Victis," and which was conceived and modelled in ten days. To take another in- stance : when M. Mercie was asked to make a funereal monu- ment in memory of Michelet he had never read a page of the historian's works, yet he needed only to read a single chapter in order to comprehend Michelet thoroughly and to conceive a perfect monument. So in all his work and in all his concep- tions we are struck by the modernity of M. Mercie's inspira- tion, and by the fulness of his sympathy with the complex and passionate poetry of the age, and with the intellectual move- ment of his epoch. But how does this hermit contrive to be so well informed ? Why is his sympathy so vivid ? Simply because M. Mercie is an artist ; that is to say, a creature whose function in the world is to be a seeing and a feeling creature, an instrument of most exquisite sensitiveness. We speak of genius and inspiration simply because we ordinary mortals, with our laborious, reflective, logical, and sequential faculties, cannot imagine how prodigious is the perceptive faculty of a great ar- tist, and how intense his powers of sensation and retention. 252 ART AND CRITICISM. M. Ernest Christophe (born 1827) was a pupil of Rude, and had the honor of signing with his master the tomb of Cavai- gnac in the cemetery of Montmartre. The signature runs thus : " Rude et son jeune eleve Christophe." M. Christophe is a thinker, a poet, almost a savant^ as well as a sculptor. So se- vere a critic is he of himself, and so intent is he upon putting thought into his work, that he will meditate and ponder over a group for years before he will send it out of his studio. The statue of " The Mask," or " La Comedie Humaine," remained in hand fifteen years before it was finished in 1876 and placed in the garden of the Tuileries, where it now stands, strange, enigmatic, and beautiful. Looking at it from one side, we seem to see a woman smiling behind a smiling mask ; looking at it from the opposite side, we see a totally different figure of a woman standing and holding up the drapery around her person, as if the serpent that she spurns with her foot had waked her in horror from her sleep. Her head is thrown back in that posture of dejection and depth of sorrow which Michael Angelo has given to his figure of a bound slave. She writhes under the burning bite ; her face is drawn with the intolerable pain of it. And yet can it be the mere physical pain of the serpent's sting which inspires that look of anguish ? Is it not perhaps memory, or jealousy, or disgust of life, or terror of death ? Is not this mask an allegory of the Comedie Hu- maine, of the tragi - comedy of life ? Another work by M. Christophe, called " Fatalite," is enthroned in precious chis- elled bronze in the Luxembourg Museum. The figure is that of a beautiful young woman — Fortune, Destiny, or Fate — who glides along on her ruthless wheel over the body of a child with the legs of a faun, while another child laying near the hapless victim, amid flowers and grapes, reads tranquilly in a book, and heeds not the crushing wheel. There is a philo- sophical and symbolical idea of great interest in this group. The pedestal, a monument in itself, indicates at once the sig- nification of the principal figure. The woman carries in one " GRIEF." — By M. Augustin Jean Moreau-Vauthier. ^^l^^ 07 THE fTj'FIVBB.SITT] MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 255 hand a sword, and with the other hand she holds the long band of stuff which, passing across the body and mounting up the back, terminates in the original and charming head-dress. The attitude of the figure is very picturesque, and has enabled the sculptor to develop the elegant and grand lines and pure forms of the body. The head, motionless and impassible, com- pletes the impression of inexorable and blind Fatality. This fair creature is indifferent; she goes on her course without feeling pleasure or pain ; she crushes some without pity or grief; she avoids crushing others without consciousness of her mercy. Fortune, Fatality, Destiny, or the personification of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, M. Christophe's bronze expresses clearly a philosophical idea which will always be interesting. In drawing and modelling, " Fatality " is the work of a distinguished and strong artistic personality, and in conception it is the product of an original and profound in- tellect. M. Rene de Saint-Marceaux (born 1845) won the medal of honor at the Salon of 1879 with a composition representing a ^'genius guarding the secret of the grave." In 1880 he exhib- ited a clever statue of " Harlequin," which has become univer- sally known through Barbedienne's reduction. In 1886 M. de Saint-Marceaux exhibited a " Danseuse Arabe," a statue in the round on a background in relief representing an arched door- way decorated with Arabian ornaments. A nude dancing girl, her head decked with jewels, is just issuing from this door; her right hand still holds up the portiere which has given pas- sage to her beauteous form, and with her left hand raised in the air and her body bending slightly backward, she stands on tiptoe in the attitude of her commencing step. One cannot conceive a more lovely vision of voluptuous beauty and move- ment than this statue of the "Danseuse Arabe;" it is distin- guished, graceful, full of color, perfect in attitude, perfect in execution. M. de Saint-Marceaux has not produced much, but what he has produced has been of such a high order and 256 ART AND CRITICISM. SO varied in inspiration that he is justly considered to be a master, and a master of rare, exquisite, and independent talent. Our illustration represents a double bust by M. de Saint-Mar- ceaux, " The First Kiss," which in grace, purity, and finish of expression is one of the most charming groups that have been conceived in modern times. M. Augustin Jean Moreau-Vauthier demands a place among eminent contemporary French sculptors as the continuer of the traditions of the precious decorative sculpture of Benve- nuto Cellini and of the fifteenth -century artists. M. Moreau- Vauthier's exquisite ivory statuettes, enriched with gold and precious stones, have made his name famous far beyond the limits of his own country. Our illustration shows M. Moreau- Vauthier as a sculptor in marble, and represents a statue of " Grief," destined to adorn a tomb — a female figure, standing, the drapery drawn over her head and falling in slender folds down to the feet. The head is slightly bowed; the right hand covers the face ; the left hand holds the drapery to the breast ; on the pedestal are scattered flowers and a wreath of immor- telles. This statue is full of feeling; the bearing and the gest- ure are most expressive, and the technical treatment is mas- terly in simplicity. M. Emmanuel Fremiet (born 1824), a pupil and nephew of Rude, is perhaps the most prolific and variedly powerful, from the realistic point of view, of all the contemporary French sculp- tors. As an anirnalier he alone can be said to succeed without replacing Barye, and as a sculptor of the human form he exhib- ited in the Salon of 1886 a " Denicheur d'Oursons," which was universally acknowledged to be a masterly creation. In the Salon of 1887 his colossal statue of a gorilla of Gaboon carry- ing off a woman obtained the medal of honor, and now stands in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, a most powerful and a most terrific vision of monstrous and grinning bestiality. M. Fre- miet has created many equestrian groups and statues, among which the finest are that of Jeanne Dare, on the Place des Pyra- EQUESTRIAN STATUE FOR THE HOTEL DE VILLE.— By M. Emmanuel Fremiet. MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 259 mides in Paris, and that represented in our engraving. These two equestrian statues are admirable in attitude, movement, veracity of gesture, and expressive unity, and they may be justly ranked with the few excellent and powerful equestrian groups that have ever been made. Our other engraving shows M. Fremiet in a more familiar vein. This " Age of Inno- cence " represents a kitten and a fledgling feeding amicably out of the same platter, neither being sufficiently advanced to "THE AGE OF INNOCENCE." — By M. Emmanuel Fremiet. know that nature has destined one of them to be the prey of the other. One of M. Fremiet's best known works is a " Faun playing with Bear's Whelps," of which the original marble is in the Luxembourg Museum. This charming vision of fantastic woodland life, conceived one day in a mood of Arcadian rev- erie, is a graceful group, full of happy invention and full of life. A souvenir of Greek art, it will be said. Where did M. Fremiet ever see a faun with hairy limbs and cloven hoofs .'' Simply in eternal nature, where the old Greeks saw fauns and dryads too, 26o ART AND CRITICISM. and Pan piping to the joyous band. It was Nature, too, who taught the sculptor how to combine the diverse forms of a man and of a goat into a creature which has a logical anatomy and can stand on its legs. Is not Nature the nursing mother of Art, the inexhaustible well-spring where alone Fancy can fill her sparkling cup } AUGUSTE RODIN. THE name of the most original, the most realistic, and at the same time the most Hterary of contemporary French sculptors, is not to be found in Vapereau's dictionary ; yet he is no longer a young man. His works are not to be seen in the shops of the bronze dealers, and few even in public places ; yet he is famous, and for him alone do the newspapers and the painters find words of unmitigated praise. The sculptors, it is true, are less ardent in their admiration, not surely from jeal- ousy, but from temperament, for his sculpture is not like that of other men, nor does he follow in the obvious ruts that the art of the past has traced. The artist in question is Auguste Rodin, born at Paris in 1840, third-class medal at the Salon of 1880, decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1888. He is a man below medium stature, blond, with blue, smiling eyes, short hair, a long flavescent beard like that of a river god, a soft voice, and a certain engaging simplicity of manner and speech. Rodin's childhood was poor and his youth laborious. His dream was art. He sought admission to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but was refused. He frequented Barye's class at the Museum, but for no long time. Barye, with his silence and his sad looks, always inwardly wrestling wdth his monstrous genius of creation, was not an ideal teacher; he had not the ample gestures, the sonorous words, the communicative joy that charm and lead youth. Thus Rodin left Barye's class; and, as Carpeaux in his early years worked for the makers of trade bronzes in the Marias in order to gain his daily bread, so Rodin had to become a workman, and his patron was Carrier- 17* 262 ART AND CRITICISM. Belleuse, a clever, simpering, and commonplace artist, whose models, reproduced in Sevres biscuit and porcelaine, are the delight of provincial old maids. Rodin was the collaborator rather than the pupil of Carrier-Belleuse. In the same way, after 1870, he was the collaborator of a Belgian sculptor who, with his aid, decorated the Bourse and several other monu- ments at Brussels. In this subordinate and varied labor Rodin acquired rare experience in the figure and in ornament, and at the same time in all the technical details of the sculptor's art. In 1878 Auguste Rodin, "eleve de Barye et Carrier-Bel- leuse," as the catalogue says, figured at the Salon with a bust of Madame X., to which no one paid particular attention. At the Salon of 1879 Rodin exhibited another bust and a statue of "John the Precursor;" at the Salon of 1880 again "John the Baptist" and the "Age of Brass." This was the beginning of fame, but it came in a curious way. Certain parts of the "Age of Brass" were so admirable and so life-like that the jury would not believe that a sculptor yet unknown to them could do such work. Rodin was, therefore, accused of having moulded his statue from nature, although the merest intelli- gent glance revealed that the bronze was larger than life, and although experience has shown time after time that moulding from nature gives only an impression of dead flesh and an enserrible of lines without vigor. The controversy was hot and stupid, but Rodin had no difficulty in clearing himself of the absurd charge, while at the same time he won the sym- pathy of several journaHsts, who have devoted their pens since then incessantly to the service of his talent, the more so as Rodin is peculiarly literary in his inspiration and intellectual in his vision of nature. During his twenty years of obscure labor in France and in Belgium Rodin educated himself by wide and abundant reading, and acquired habits of assiduous reflection and observation which led him to proceed from the study of movement to the study of the will that produces the movement, and thence to all the dependent phenomena of pas- AUGUSTE RODIN. 263 sion and soul. Thus, thanks to a strong cerebral organism, and to a certain aptitude for metaphysical conceptions, Rodin has manifested himself a great thinker in bronze and marble, a representer of many of the subtler attitudes and aspirations of contemporary souls. In his " John the Baptist," now in the Luxembourg, together with the "Age of Brass," there is no souvenir whatever of classical forms, no research of beauty of form, but, on the other hand, a passionate study of nature and humanity, and of the forms and attitudes that nature gives. Rodin's St. John is an austere and violent anchorite, big boned, lean from fatigue and fasting, unkempt, his hairy face at once brutal and inspired, his whole body dolorous and disdained, his feet callous and deformed by the rough stones and burning sands of the wilderness. The mouth opened to utter impreca- tions, the arms making a violent gesture of anathema, nude, mystic, and terrible, the precursor advances with long strides, announcing the wrath to come and hastening to his inevitable martyr's end. But this anchorite has nothing antique or ori- ental in his person. Rodin calls him "John the Precursor," but who shall say that John the Baptist was uppermost in his mind ? Why should this precursor be conceived as an iso- lated phenomenon which was observed once in Palestine? Among the Socialists, the working-men, the thirsters after jus- tice of all ages and all countries, do we not still see savage types of affirmation like the wild fanatic that Rodin has mod- elled ? It is true that police regulations and climatic conditions do not permit even fanatics to go about naked; but against the nudity of the bronze we have no right to object, since the character of it helps the sculptor to express his idea. To say that Rodin's " Precursor " is ugly is no argument. It is a work logically conceived, consistent, eloquent, and having a beauty of character that may or may not be appreciated, ac- cording to the spectator's moral and intellectual sympathies. The "John the Precursor" was followed in 1881 by a deco- rative figure, ordered by the State, representing the "Creation 264 ART AND CRITICISM. of Man," in which the play of the muscles is rendered with an exaggeration that suggests Michael Angelo; and in 1882-85 and 1888 by an admirable series of busts of Victor Hugo, Rochefort, Legros, Dalou, Antonin Proust, and a number of women, full of intense life and of sensual charm. Thanks to these busts, more than to his statues, Rodin forced the public to pay heed to his talent. Meanwhile, somewhat by way of a compensation for the wrong done to him by that absurd accusation of moulding from nature, the State, through the initiative of M. Turquet, at that time Minister, gave Rodin a commission to make gates of bronze, such as Ghiberti made for the Baptistery of Florence. These gates were to adorn a museum of decorative art which is not yet built ; the subject was to be taken from Dante's Infer- no. For some ten years Rodin has had this colossal work in hand, and still it remains in his studio in the Rue I'Universite a magnificent ruin, and a magnificent ruin it will doubtless re- main, moulded in white plaster, fragile as an ensemble, eternal in fragments. Over the door are three men whose gestures seem to imply the dreadful line: "Abandon all hope ye who enter." In the centre of the lintel, on a console, Dante sits meditating, while along the lintel in the sea of lava and infer- nal liquescence are arms, legs, torsos, heads that are charming or horrible, figures of anguish, of revolt, and of eternal tears. On the side posts are the insatiate souls of the damned. On the panels on one side Ugolino and his children, and on the other Francesca da Rimini ; and amid the broken ice and horrid circles of Dante's hell, in which these principal heroes move, are innumerable groups of centaurs, satyrs, and men and women, in whom are impersonated all the sins that Dante has mentioned, completed by more modern sins referred to by Baudelaire in his Fleurs du Mai. For, strange to say, Rodin, while taking his subject and his chief characters from Dante, has sought his sensual and more modern inspiration in Baude- laire and in the corruption of contemporary humanity. These AUGUSTE RODIN. 265 gates of hell are truly a prodigious conception, and the frag- ments of them detached from the ensemble augment the im- pression of terror and trouble which the contemplation of the work as a whole produces. In minor exhibitions you see small bronzes, marbles, or plaster-casts, in which Rodin has executed a detail of the gates, groups, and single figures, faunesses, Da- nai'des, amorous couples, interlaced figures, chimeras, sphinxes, centaurs, all full of strange passion and violent symbolism, novel in attitude and expression, intensely expressive, although they are often only roughly blocked out of the mass, with a mere fragment "finished," in the usual acceptation of the term. To the superficial observer and to the Puritan eye Rodin's work may often appear dangerously sensual, but in reality it is only intensely pitiful. In the "Gates of Hell" Rodin has ren- dered the ferocious battle of the sexes with a force and elo- quence that no sculptor has hitherto equalled ; but at the same time that which is uppermost in his mind is that other battle of man against the ideal, the struggle of our dolorous comrades in reality against the insatiable Sphynx which symbolizes our never-to-be-attained aspirations. A great work by Rodin, one that has attained complete ac- complishment, is the group of the " Bourgeois de Calais," which was exhibited at the Petit Gallery in 1889 — at once a human drama and a vision of history. Froissart tells the story, how, after the deliberation on the market-place of the famished town, the six citizens went to give themselves up to King Ed- ward of England and sacrifice their lives. " lis partent de la place du marche," says Froissart in his text, and that is precisely the scene which Rodin has depicted. They are starting from the market-place. The six figures are not grouped on a pedes- tal according to the tradition of the schools ; the composition is not pyramidal nor yet in bass-relief, neither sigmatic nor po- lygonal, but simply natural and processional, if we must have an epithet. Eustache de Saint-Pierre walks at the head bowed down by his great age ; the others follow in sincere and touch- 266 ART AND CRITICISM. ing attitudes, full of resignation ; their gestures have that vagueness and want of decision that suits the state of the souls; their faces, each having its distinct character, are uni- fied, as it were, by a common aureole of immortality. They are types of civic martyrs, of self-sacrifice, of human pity, and of human helplessness. So touching, so profound, and so splendid an evocation of the soul of history as Rodin's " Bourgeois de Calais " is a work sufificient to immortalize his name. A French admirer of Rodin has quoted a passage from Stendhal's History of Painting in Italy, where, writing in 1817, the author refers to the almost complete annihilation of strong passions in society, through the influence of two cen- turies of moral artificiality. Strong passions, he says, are to be found nowadays only among villagers. The nineteenth century, however, will restore passion to its right. The public has been prepared by the novel and by the stage, and this being the case, continues Stendhal, " if a Michael Angelo were given to us in these days of light, where would he not reach } What torrents of new sensations and new joys he would re- veal! Perhaps he would create a modern sculpture, perhaps he would force that art to express passions, if it be suited to the expression of passion. At any rate, Michael Angelo would make it express states of soul." In these words Stendhal, un- consciously prophetic, foretold the coming of Auguste Rodin, who is truly a modern sculptor, a seer, an analyst of the con- temporary soul, a sculptor after Stendhal's own heart, a sculp- tor of states of soul. In my brief sketch I have dwelt more upon the intellectual force of Rodin's work than upon its plastic beauty, and the reason is that often he is satisfied v*^ith a minimum of plastic beauty, provided his thought is sufficiently expressed by atti- tude, gesture, and the silhouette of the mass. He esteems moral beauty and beauty of expression and of character more highly than simple beauty of form. Hence he has been led to MADAME M. make works in bronze and marble that are reproductions of human ugliness seen with the eyes of art and of pity. Such is one of his latest statuettes, representing, in a state of complete 268 ART AND CRITICISM. nudity, a poor old woman, whose body is a mass of wrinkles and whose whole person is a wreck, the very synthesis of Ron- sard's poem on poor old women. At the same time, in the original project for the statue of Victor Hugo, in the magnifi- cent marble bust of Bellona, in the group of " Le Baiser," and in a score " morceaux," detached from the " Gates of Hell," and executed in marble, Rodin has achieved an exquisiteness of formal beauty and delicate modelling that words cannot de- scribe. In the modelling of the bust of Madame M., now in the Luxembourg, we find the same delight in exquisite work, in the vibration of fair flesh, in the sensual fascination of a lilial neck. Yet another instance of the sculptor's appreciation of beauty of form — of the form that is still inchoate, hesitating, undecided — is a group of two children, made in 1886, so grace- ful and simple in conception, and so admirably cast by the cire perdue process, that when sold by auction four years later at Christie's in London the dealers began to bid for it as a fifteenth century Italian bronze, until one, more prudent than his fellows, looked at the pedestal, and found both signa- ture and date. So far as we can see now, and supposing that the present decade reserve for us no surprise, our nineteenth century will have produced three great sculptors, Barye, Carpeaux, and Ro- din, the sculptor of wild beasts, the sculptor of the dancing group of the opera, and of the figures of the Pavilion de Flore, and the sculptor of the " Bourgeois de Calais," and of the " Gates of Hell." Amid the impeccable and impassible works of contemporary French sculpture, very admirable in their way, Rodin's figures stand apart and fascinate by the intensity of the life, of the expression, of the thought that animates them. Rodin is a great artist, but there is no immediate danger of his becoming popular, and there is not even a remote probability of his ever being either comprehended or appreciated, except by those who have been sfifted with an artistic nature or with sin- cere simplicity of heart. CHANTILLY. THE CHATEAU AND THE COLLECTIONS. I. ON October 25, 1886, MM. Bocher, Denormandie, and Rousse, acting all three in the name of Monseigneur Henri Eugene Philippe Louis d'Orleans, General of Division, Member of the Institute, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, accomplished, in presence of the notary Fontana, the due legal formalities connected with the handing over to the Institute of France of the gift made to it by their principal, then in exile. This gift consists of the domain of Chantilly, comprising woods, forests, and watercourses covering an area of upward of 22,640 acres; guard-houses and other buildings; the cha- teaux of Enghien, Saint-Firmin, and La Reine Blanche ; the Conde stables ; the chateau of Chantilly, with its library and other artistic and historical collections ; its furniture, statues, and trophies of arms ; its archives, its fountains, its gardens, its chapel. The chateau of Chantilly is to be preserved ex- actly as it stands at present, to be called hereafter the Conde Museum, to be opened to the public at stated times of the year, and at all times to students, artists, and men of letters. The approximate value of the gift may be estimated as fol- lows: the land, twenty-one millions of francs; the buildings, ten millions ; the objects of art and other collections, fifteen mill- ions. Finally, when all the mortgages and legacies and other servitudes have been paid, it may be calculated that the clear 270 ART AND CRITICISM. "3^-i!fc;S** S=-- ■ _.-^'^;a^i^^^^^^^^^^cxj^-^WBr^ "^ if^r - *_'''- p."j VIEW OF THE CHATEAU FROM THE GARDENS. revenue which the Institute of France will derive from the do- main will amount to 350,000 francs a year at least. This sum will be devoted to keeping the estate, the chateau, and the collections in good order; to purchasing objects of art of all kinds, and ancient or modern books, chosen with a view to enriching or completing the collections ; to the creation of pen- sions and annuities for indigent literary men, artists, or sa- vants ; and to the foundation of prizes for the encouragemenrt of those who devote themselves to the career of art, science, or literature. Such is an outline of the nature of the Due d'Au- male's gift to the Institute of France — a gift, however, of which the donor reserves the usufruct during his own lifetime. The Conde Museum, as the Due d'Aumale has conceived and realized it, is a museum of all the great manifestations of French art, and at the same time a commemorative museum of the families of Montmorency and Conde, which played of old such a brilliant role in the history of France. In order to help the reader to form an idea of the importance of the future CHANTILLY. 271 Conde Museum, we will consider first the history of the mu- seum, which is the history of the chateau itself, and next we will glance at the most remarkable objects contained in the galleries and the library. Thus we shall appreciate the casket and the jewels inside it, and at the same time we shall see how both the casket and the jewels came into existence. II. 9 To the north of Paris, about twenty-five miles from the cap- ital, Chantilly is situated on the confines of vast forests, in an undulating region watered by an affluent of the Oise called the Nonette. Amid the marshes formed by this river arose un- expectedly a triangular mass of limestone rock, and on this rock, which was naturally difficult of access, there was built in course of time a fortified tower, which had developed into a stronghold in the thirteenth century, when it fell into the hands of Guillaume Boutillier, a seigneur of the court of the Counts of Senlis. From the Boutillier family the stronghold passed into the hands of Jean de Clermont, Chancellor of France, who was killed at the battle of Poitiers, and who be- queathed it to Guy de Laval (1356). In his turn Guy de Laval bequeathed Chantilly to Pierre d'Orgemont, Chancellor of France and President of the Parliament under Charles VI. In 1422 the Burgundians seized the castle; three years later it fell into the hands of the English, who held it four years, until Charles VII. entered Compiegne and Jeanne d'Arc drove the enemy out of France. This Pierre d'Orgemont left the do- main to his sister Marguerite, who married Jean II. de Mont- morency, Grand Chamberlain of France, and who took posses- sion of it in 1429. Jean de Montmorency left the domain to his son Guillaume, who in his turn left it to one of his four sons, Anne de Montmorency, born at Chantilly in 1493. 272 ART AND CRITICISM. This Anne de Montmorency, who became High Constable of France, was the real founder of Chantilly. Anne de Mont- morency was the last of the great soldiers of fortune, and the first grand seigneur that France produced. In 1538, at the age of forty-five, the great captain returned from the wars, riddled with wounds, loaded with honors and glory, and rich as he could desire to be. The feudal times were over; the foreign foe had been driven out; Charles VIII., Louis XII., Francis II., had led French troops into Italy; the great captain had com- manded there, and had admired the marvels of the Renaissance. He had seen what wealth and art could do to embellish life, and having resolved to make Chantilly his residence, he proceeded to transform the old feudal fortress into a sumptuous habitation. Anne de Montmorency called in the aid of Jean Bullant, a young architect who had just come back from Rome, and who afterwards helped Philibert Delorme to build the Tuileries — Bullant, the architect of the chateau of Ecouen and of the ho- tel de Soissons, built for Catherine de Medicis. The mediaeval stronghold had gradually grown to be an agglomeration of buildings flanked at every angle by tall machicolated towers with conical roofs, like the towers of Nuremberg, perched on the triangular rock, and surrounded on all sides by water. In adapting this stronghold to the usages of a grand seigneur's res- idence the architect preserved in the exterior fa9ades the forti- fied character of the primitive edifice, but relieved their severity with certain reminiscences of Gothic times, particularly in the details of the dormer-windows. Furthermore, Bullant con- nected the chateau with the main-land by constructing the vast artificial slope still called " Le Connetable," on the summit of which was placed a superb bronze equestrian statue represent- ing Anne de Montmorency. The slope of the " Connetable " was honey-combed with casemates, galleries, and barrack-rooms, which were placed in communication with the similar case- mates and galleries which had been quarried out of the trian- gular rock foundation of the chateau. Part of these under- CHANTILLY. 273 ground rooms Bullant arranged for the accommodation of the military and civil services of the High Constable, others were devoted to the kitchen service, and others were connected to- gether so as to form a small theatre. But so numerous was the household of the High Constable that even all this accom- modation above-ground and below-ground was insufhcient, and LE CHATELET, so to the left of the chateau a bridge was thrown over the deep moat, and the little chateau, or Le Chatelet, was built in the purest Renaissance style, and remains to this day a type of a charming private habitation. These modifications and additions having been made. Chan- tilly formed a complete whole, full of interest from the artistic 18 274 ART AND CRITICISM. point of view, as we shall see when we come to examine the modern reconstruction of this prototype, the image of which remains faithfully recorded in Androuet Ducerceau's famous book, Les plus excellents Batiments de France. The chatelain was worthy of the castle, for he was not only the first grand seigneur of France, but he was also the typical grand seigneur. He was of most noble descent At the age of twenty-nine he was Marshal of France ; he became successively the personal friend and omnipotent minister of two kings ; he was ambassa- dor at Rome and ambassador at London ; he was duke, peer, and High Constable of France ; lord of twenty fiefs ; chatelain of Ecouen and Chantilly ; possessor of five mansions at Paris ; a great lord whose wealth, splendor, and magnificence were unparalleled at that time. The Mussulmans sent the retired captain greyhounds, falcons, and hawks from Morocco ; the grand Soliman and the famous Barbarossa, according to Bran- tome, offered him all the rich and rare products of their states ; and so the High Constable had great store of Eastern arms, Levantine carpets, and embroidered stuffs. He also laid under contribution the art of his own time and the art of the past; he was a collector of all kinds of rare and beautiful objects ; his books and manuscripts were famous ; Michael Angelo's chisel adorned his home ;* Jean Bullant was literally discov- ered by him, and Bernard Palissy, the famous potter, was proud to sign himself "architecteur et inventeur des grotes figulines de Monseigneur le Connestable." * The two recumbent figures of "Captives" by Michael Angelo, now in the Louvre Museum, formed part of the decoration of the chateau of Ecouen. CHANTILLY. 2/5 III. Anne de Montmorency died in 1567, and the chateau of Chantilly passed into the hands of his son Henri II., Mare- chal de Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc. This Mont- morency married an Orsini — or, as the name is written in French history, Marie FeHcie des Ursins — and this lady, famil- iar with the rustic architecture of the Pitti gardens, gave to the land and to the staircase leading from the "Connetable" to the gardens of Chantilly that Italian air which they retain to the present day. So each successive possessor has contributed a personal note to the harmonious whole which the domain now presents. This Henri II. de Montmorency rebelled against his king, and was beheaded in 1632. His property was of course confiscated, but King Louis XIII. restored it to the rebel's own sister, Charlotte de Montmorency, who had mar- ried Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Conde, and who became the mother of the Grand Conde, of the Prince de Conti, and of the Duchesse de Longueville. Thus the domain came into the Conde family, in whose possession it remained until the last of the Condes bequeathed it to his nephew and godson, the Due d'Aumale. The Grand Conde, the glorious victor of Rocroy, was thirty- nine years of age when he settled down at Chantilly. It was in 1660; the chateau was such as Anne de Montmorency had left it; but in six years the new seigneur pulled down the whole structure except Le Chatelet, rebuilt it in the style in fashion in the reign of Louis XIV., canalized the waters, arranged won- derful fountains, and had his gardens laid out by the famous Le Notre. The Grand Conde was as magnificent a seigneur as Anne de Montmorency had been, and so when he had fin- ished rebuilding his chateau he invited his Majesty Louis 2/6 ART AND CRITICISM. XIV. to honor the house-warming with his glorious presence. The visit of the king was the occasion of a dazzHng fete, and also of the tragic incident of the suicide of the cook Vatel, immortalized by Madame de Sevigne in a letter which every- body of course knows by heart, except our country cousins, for whose benefit I will beg leave to quote a passage from it. The 26th of April, 1671, Madame de Sevigne wrote to her daughter : " Here is the matter in detail. The king arrived GRAND ENTRANCE TO THE CHATEAU. on Thursday evening; the promenade and the collation, laid in a spot all carpeted with jonquils, passed off admirably. We supped, and some of the tables were short of roast. This up- set Vatel, who said several times : ' My honor is lost ; I shall never get over this disaster.' He said to Gourville : ' My head is swimming; I have not slept for the past twelve nights ; help me to give my orders.' The prince invited Vatel into his room, and said to him: 'Vatel, all is well; nothing CHANTILLY. 277 could have been finer than the king's supper.' He replied : ' Monseigneur, your kindness overwhelms me ; I know that at two tables the roast fell short.' ' Not at all,' said the prince ; 'do not worry yourself; all is going on nicely.' Midnight ar- rived ; the fireworks were not a success, for they were envel- oped in a cloud; they cost 16,000 francs. At four o'clock in the morning Vatel made a round, found all asleep, and met a small tradesman who brought him only two loads of sea-fish ; he waited some time; he became very excited, thinking that this much was all the fish he would have; he went and found Gourville, and said to him: 'Monsieur, I shall never recover from this disgrace.' Gourville laughed at him. Vatel went up-stairs to his room, placed his sword against the door, and ran himself through the heart, but only after three attempts. Meanwhile sea-fish were arriving in quantities; the servants were seeking Vatel to distribute it ; some went up to his room, knocked at the door, opened it, and found him bathed in his blood. The prince was in despair. However, Gourville did his best to make up for the loss of Vatel, and succeeded ; the dinner was excellent ; we lunched, supped, went for a walk, played, and hunted ; everything was perfumed with jonquils ; everything was enchanted." Louis XIV. was delighted with his visit, and asked the Prince de Conde to sell him Chantilly at his own price. "Maj- esty, it is yours for the price that your majesty pleases to fix. I ask only one favor — that I may be appointed guardian." " I understand you, cousin," replied the king. " Chantilly will never be mine." Soon after this visit Louis XIV. began the palace of Versailles, after the model of Conde's Chantilly, and took into his service Conde's gardener, Le Notre, to lay out the parterres and labyrinths of his royal park. The Grand Conde passed the rest of his life at Chantilly in the little chatelet, which he had arranged delicately for his private use, whereas the grand chateau was fitted up as if it were intended exclusively for the reception of the king. He 18* 2/8 ART AND CRITICISM. spent his time peacefully in company with his friends, and with men of letters like La Bruyere, Moliere, La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau, and Bossuet. The latter was, indeed, one of the ha- bitues of Chantilly, and in his funeral oration in honor of the victor of Rocroy he recalls the charm of the trees and mur- muring waters of the park in whose superb alleys Conde used to delight to talk with his friends, " to the sound of those gush- ing waters that were silent neither by day nor by night." The Grand Conde died in 1686, and Chantilly passed into the possession of his son, and then of his grandson, Louis Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Conde, seventh of the name. This prince was a passionate lover of hunting and horses, and it was he who built the famous stables, which are the master- piece of French rocaille architecture, an immense and mag- nificent pile, so splendid that at first sight the stranger might mistake the stables for the chateau itself. Built on the main- land at some distance from the chateau, these stables are the realization of a colossal dream of wealth. The monumental entrance is gigantic; the drinking trough, guarded by splendid sculptured horses, is colossal enough to throw into the shade the architectural immensity of Persepolis and Susa; in the vast stalls there is accommodation for 240 horses; in the rooms overhead there are suites of apartments for fifty guests. The splendor and grandeur of these stables impress one with the idea that something extraordinary must have presided over their construction. The fact is curious: the Prince de Conde's residence in Paris was the Hotel Montmorency, in the Rue Saint-Avoye ; the banker Law wished to hire the mansion for the offices of his famous Mississippi Bank ; the prince became personally interested in Law's speculation, and retired in time with immense gains, thanks to which he was able to spend many millions on this Babylonian structure, which was no less than sixteen years in building — from 1719 to 1735. The archi- tect was Jean Aubert. The Revolution brings the history of the old castle of CHANTILLY. 279 Chantilly to an end. The Condes emigrated; the spoilers razed the palace to the level of the rock, and scattered the pre- cious collections to the four winds. The equestrian statue of Anne de Montmorency, which stood on the esplanade of the "Connetable," was broken, and the bronze re- melted to make cannons ; broken too were the stat- ues of Henri IV. and Louis XIII., and Coysevox's statue of the Grand Conde. Soon there re- mained of Chantilly noth ing but the foundations and the substructures in the rock, and even the love- ly chatelet was on the point of being demolished and sold stone by stone, when the Min- ister of War saved it, under the pretext that its stabling would be useful for cavalry. The Conde stables and the chateau of Enghien were saved from destruction in the same way. ENTRANCE TO THE CONDE STABLES. 28o ART AND CRITICISM. IV. One wonders how any of the monuments of monarchical France, and how any objects of art whatever, survived the terri- ble troubles of the French Revolution, or escaped the rapacity of the foreign dealers who bought by the ship-load at the sales of the national domain. These sales explain why England, Russia, and Germany are so rich in French art of the eigh- teenth century. But France herself, how does it happen that she is not entirely despoiled of all her historical souvenirs ? How does it happen that the Louvre is so rich ? The story will not take long to tell, and it is intimately connected with the history of the collections of Chantilly. At the time of the outbreak of the Revolution, Alexandre Lenoir, then some thirty years of age, was studying painting at the Academic Royale, and had some reputation as a critic. In 1790 he conceived the idea of saving all the objects of art he could; he was a friend of Bailly, the Mayor of Paris, and through Bailly's influence he appeared before the National Assembly, explained his views, and obtained a decree authorizing him to seize at public sales, in the convents . and elsewhere, all objects of art worthy of be- ing preserved for the nation. The convent of the Petits Au- gustins, on the spot where the Ecole des Beaux -Arts now stands, was assigned to him as a depot and warehouse for his treasures, and a few unfrocked monks who had remained in the building helped him in his generous task. At first the seizing of objects took place in a regular manner in the name of the nation, but in 1 793 the rage of destruction set in, and in order to preserve bronze from the melting-pot and marble from the iconoclast's hammer, Lenoir had brought hurriedly and pell- mell to the Petits Augustins' pictures, statues, monuments, and precious objects of all kinds, from the convents, monasteries, CHANTILLY. 281 and churches. It was thus that he succeeded in saving more than 500 precious historical monuments, tombs of kings, and mausoleums of great families. At the time when the abbeys were sacked and pillaged he saved 2600 pictures, a selection from which subsequently formed the original nucleus of the present Louvre Museum ; but, alas ! all could not be saved, for I remember to have been shown by the venerable son of Alex- andre Lenoir receipts for 600 pictures claimed by the Revolu- CHAPEL OF QUEEN BLANCHE. 282 ART AND CRITICISM. tionary committees, and publicly burned as souvenirs of roy- alty. Furthermore, Lenoir saved upwards of 8000 pieces, such as manuscripts, precious books, arms, armor, and models of va- rious kinds, which have since found a resting-place in the National Library, in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, and in the Museum of Artillery; also quantities of Greek vases, busts, and statuettes, which were taken from the monas- teries of Sainte-Genevieve and of the Petits Peres, and which are now in the National Library. In fact, in his depot at the Petits Augustins, Lenoir assembled an immense mass of mate- rials, which, after the restoration of peace and order, were classified and distributed among the various museums of Paris, while some objects were returned to their rightful owners, and others — for instance, the tombs of the French kings — replaced in the once more respected sanctuaries of Saint- Denis or Notre Dame. We shall see shortly how great were the serv- ices which Lenoir rendered to Chantilly. V. At the Restoration the castles of Ecouen and Chantilly came again into the possession of the Condes, who returned from England in 18 18. When the last Conde died, in tragic and even sinister circumstances, he bequeathed the domain of Chantilly to his nephew, the Due d'Aumale ; and Ecouen, the other splendid Renaissance monument built by Jean Bullant for Anne de Montmorency, he directed to be transformed into an asylum for the children and descendants of officers of the armies of Conde and La Vendee. This provision was annulled during the second empire, and the castle of Ecouen is now a school for the daughters of army ofiicers, under the direction of the Chancellerie of the Legion of Honor. About 1840 the Due d'Aumale first conceived the idea of CHANTILLY. 283 rebuilding Chantilly, but his projects were interrupted by the revolution of 1848, and by the decree of exile passed against the Orleans family in 1852. A fictitious sale transferred the domain to the English bankers Coutts and Company, and it was not until 1872 that the Due d'Aumale became once more its legal owner. But no sooner was he able to return to France than the duke proceeded to carry out his idea of re- storing Chantilly to its pristine state of splendor, and the archi- tect, M. Henri Daumet, member of the Institute, was called upon to prepare his plans according to a general programme, which the Due d'Aumale had carefully meditated, and of which this recent donation to the Institute of France is the last and final clause. The Due d'Aumale was a widower ; his two sons, the Prince de Conde and the Due de Guise, were dead. There- fore he required no accommodation for family life. Chantilly in its new avatar needed only to have the character of a resi- dence designed for princely receptions, and, above all, of an architectural monument recalling and containing all the sou- venirs of Chantilly at the time of the Renaissance. The recon- structed Chantilly was to be an architectural commemorative monument, and a magnificent museum and treasure-house of French art. During forty years the Due d'Aumale had sedu- lously collected all the remnants of the splendor of the Mont- morencys and of the Condes that he could find. M. Daumet was asked to build a palace worthy to receive these precious souvenirs. But, like his predecessors, M. Daumet was limited by certain natural conditions. The marvellous subterranean rooms and galleries existed still, and the moats, and the strange- ly shaped triangular rock, and this subterranean plan dictated and commanded the form of the structures above-ground, be- cause the foundations remained, and on this honey-combed rock it was next to impossible to displace them. The plan of the castle of the Boutilliers, of the Montmorencys, and of the Grand Conde had to be followed by the Due d'Aumale. The strange perimeter had to be respected, and the new fa9ades 284 ART AND CRITICISM. inevitably reproduced the big towers at the angles, the strong spurs, the posterns, and the draw- bridges which existed from the earliest times in the ground-plan. The technical difficulties which the architect had to sur- mount were immense, es- pecially the works un- dertaken in the honey- combed rock with a view to supporting the pro- jected structure above- ground. In brief, his performance was this : to follow rigorously the pe- rimeter of the old Renais- sance castle, to provide fine state-rooms and gal- leries for the reception of certain specified ob- jects of art, to accommo- date the chatelet for liv- ing purposes, and to build a chapel, in the adorn- ment of which were to be utilized stained glass, sculpture, wood - carving, statuary, and faience slabs saved by Lenoir from the chateau of Ecouen. M. Daumet began his task in 1876, and the works were finished in 1883. The materials employed were partly limestone quarried out of the rock of Chantilly ENTRANCE TO THE CHAPEL. CHANTILLY. 285 itself, and partly the fine limestone of Saint- Wast. The total cost of the rebuilding of the chateau was eight millions of francs. VI. The general aspect of M. Daumet's monument is graceful and harmonious. The new chateau marries happily with the beautiful Renaissance chatelet ; the tall roofs of the galleries, the cupolas of the towers, the lofty walls and slender spire of the chapel, form bold and picturesque silhouettes against the verdure of the background. The e7isemble is full of elegance and distinction, and the variety of the parts and details is really remarkable. How original, for instance, is the position of the chapel, and how its elegant and slender mass dominates the whole building! How rich and how suggestive of princely splendor and magnificent leisure the Renaissance loggia, colon- nade, and pavilion gate-way of the front fa9ade ! How charm- ingly the grace and elegance of the Renaissance are combined with the suggestion of strength of a mediaeval fortress in the tourers and balconies and storied surfaces of the northern fag ad e ! Let us now mount the gentle slope of the " Connetable," and pause a moment on the esplanade to admire Paul Dubois's equestrian statue of the Connetable, inspired by Verrocchio's famous work at Venice, and studied, so far as the likeness is concerned, from the splendid contemporary enamel portrait by Leonard Limosin, now in the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre. In the garden, too, we notice a statue of the Grand Conde, sur- rounded by the writers and artists in whose society he took pleasure — Bossuet by Guillaume, La Bruyere by Thomas, Mo- liere and Le Notre by Tony Noel. So, after glancing at the garden, whose symmetrical arrangement has been executed according to the old design which Le Notre made for the 286 ART AND CRITICISM. Grand Conde, we cross the moat and pass under the central pavilion into the Cour d'Honneur, into which the sun pene- trates freely over and through the loggia. To the right a flight of steps leads to the picture-gallery ; to the left is the grand vestibule leading to the reception-rooms ; and also to the left, in the corner, is the entrance to the chapel, where we will first direct our steps, for the chapel is one of the most remarkable features of the Conde Museum. The stained-glass windows represent Anne de Montmorency and his two sons, and Made- leine de Savoie, his wife, and her two daughters, kneeling with clasped hands, and guarded by their patron saints, St. John and St. Agatha. These windows are admirable specimens of Re- naissance art. Like the beautiful inlaid wood-work, and the altar with its bass-reliefs, they were saved from the chateau of Ecouen by Lenoir at the time of the Revolution. The altar is composed of hard limestone most delicately carved, with col- umns of black marble, and bass-reliefs in white marble repre- senting the sacrifice of Abraham, the four evangelists, and allegorical figures of Faith, Religion, and Strength. " This magnificent sculpture," says Alexandre Lenoir, in his catalogue of the treasures "which he gathered in the convent of the Petits Augustins, " passes for the work of Bullant, who was a particu- lar friend of Jean Goujon, from whom he received lessons in sculpture." Now, however, the most competent judges con- fidently attribute the altar to Jean Goujon himself, and fix the date of its execution at from 1541 to 1547. The windows, the wood-work, and Jean Goujon's altar make of this chapel of Chantilly a cherished place of pilgrimage for the lovers of French Renaissance art. Behind the altar is the mausoleum of Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Conde, which has become the resting-place of the hearts of all the Conde's. This monument was erected in 1663 in the Church of St. Paul, at Paris, to the memory of the Prince de Conde, by Perrault, President of the Chambre des Comptes. It was saved from the vandals of 1793 by Lenoir, CHANTILLY. 287 who tells us that it excited the particular admiration of the famous sculptor the Chevalier Bernin, when he visited Paris. The monument of consists ot four seated figures of Faith, Prudence, Religion, and Charity, fourteen bass-reliefs repre- senting subjects from the Old Tes- tament, and two geniuses, the one holding a sword, and the other a tablet with on it an inscription — the whole model- led by Pierre Sa- razin, and cast in bronze by Perlan and Duval, who were the ablest metal - workers of the seventeenth century. Leaving the chapel by an in- ner lobby, we find ourselves at the foot of a majestic horseshoe stair- case which leads to the upper story of the chatelet. The bal- ustrade of this staircase is remarkable as being the most FOOT OF THE WROUGHT-IRON RAILING ON THE GRAND STAIRCASE. — Designed by M. Daumet. 288 ART AND CRITICISM. sumptuous piece of ornamental iron-work executed in France in modern times. The design of the balustrade is due to M. Daumet, and the execution in wrought-iron and beaten brass to MM. Moreau, of Paris. The chatelet, as we have seen, escaped intact during the troubles of the Revolution. Outside, it remains exactly as Jean BuUant built it for Anne de Montmorency ; inside, it still offers complete examples of the decorative art of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, notably in the Prince de Conde's apartments, the Galerie des Batailles, the Salon de la Grande Singerie, and the Cabinet de la Petite Singerie. The gallery of battles is devoted to the glory of the Grand Conde, whose warlike deeds are recorded in pictures of the Van der Meulen school, and whose arms and flags are grouped in a trophy over the chimney-piece around a medallion in gilt bronze by Coysevox, representing Conde as he looked the year of his death, with the inscription : " Lud. Princeps Condasus 1686." The great and the little "Singeries" are two rooms decorated with grotesque panels, in which monkeys are repre- sented in all the circumstances of French elegant life in the eighteenth century, playing at pastoral life like Madame de Pompadour, paying court to fair coquettes, and exhibiting all the foibles of frivolous humanity. These panels, which are usually attributed to Watteau, are more probably by his mas- ter, Gillot, but in any case they are masterpieces of graceful and witty decorative painting. The chatelet also contains the Cabinet des Livres — that is to say, the library of the Due d'Aumale, president of the Societe des Bibliophiles Frangais — one of the most magnifi- cent and precious private collections in existence. This li- brary consists only of the choicest books in the finest preser- vation, and in choice bindings, mostly of old morocco, bearing the arms, stamped in gold, of illustrious owners in days gone by — first editions of Greek and Latin authors, romances of chivalry, old French poets and story-tellers, French classics of TOP OF THE GRAND STAIRCASE. Yjf^ OP THE [UHIVERSI CHANTILLY. 29I the seventeenth century, illustrated books of the eighteenth century. By dint of perseverance and money the Due d'Au- male has succeeded in reconstructing almost completely the private library of the Grand Conde. But it is difficult to give even a rough idea of the innumerable marvels of the Chantilly library, for the Due d'Aumale did not amass his treasures one by one, but bought en bloc the already selected treasures of others. Thus the basis of the Chantilly library is the com- bined riches of the collections of the Prince de Salerne, Stand- ish, and Armand Cigongne, the last purchased in 1859 for the sum of 600,000 francs. The Chantilly library possesses more than forty manuscripts adorned with miniatures, and among them is the finest illuminated manuscript book in existence, namely, the Grandes Heures, or Hour Book of the Due de Berry, uncle of Charles VI. The Due de Berry was a great lover of illuminated Horcs. He is known to have possessed no less than eighty-nine, out of which number fifty-seven are in the National Library at Paris, and four in the library of Chan- tilly. The Grandes Heures, executed at the beginning of the fourteenth century, is the most magnificent of all, and the most interesting, on account of the numerous pictures it contains of French royal castles under Charles V., notably the Louvre, the palace of St. Louis, the Sainte-Chapelle, Vincennes, Pierre- fonds, etc. The history of the adventures of this immaculate and priceless volume is not without interest. By way of inher- itance it came into the possession of the House of Savoy, and thence, at the beginning of this century, into the hands of Cardinal Spinola. By some accident it next became the prop- erty of a modest professor who lived at Genoa. This professor knew that the book was valuable, but he refused to sell it, and the only course left to the bibliophiles was to hope the excel- lent professor would soon die, and to be ready to treat with the heirs. This was the plan of the Baron Edmond de Rothschild; but, as fortune would have it, the professor died one day when the Due d'Aumale happened to be passing through Genoa. 292 ART AND CRITICISM. The heirs heard that he was a purchaser of fine curios, and so they immediately offered him the coveted treasure. The Due d'Aumale bought the Grandes Heures without a moment's hesitation for 25,000 francs, and when Rothschild's agent ar- rived it was too late. If this Hour Book could be put up for public sale in Paris or in London, the bidding for it would be- gin at 500,000 francs. The archives of Chantilly, stowed away in strong rooms hewn out of the solid rock on which the chateau stands, con- tain treasures which have never yet been ransacked by histo- rians. The Conde archives comprise more than five hundred volumes and portfolios, some of which materials have been used by the Due d'Aumale in his History of the House of Co7t- de. Then there are the Montmorency archives, which are also voluminous, for the High Constable Anne de Montmorency preserved and classified all his papers — a rare thing in the sixteenth century. Now, Anne de Montmorency was not only the greatest Frenchman of his day, he also actually governed France, commanded her armies, and held at Chantilly a sort of court, at which all the great poets, writers, and artists of the Renaissance appeared. Imagine, then, how interesting his cor- respondence must be, and what joy is in store for the students whom the Due d'Aumale's munificence will one day admit to this feast of unpublished historical documents. These archives the duke has himself augmented by purchases of historical autographs, including more than two hundred autograph letters of Louis XIII, addressed to Cardinal Richelieu, a manuscript of Tallemant de Reaux, which, by-the-way, is too risky to be ever printed, a manuscript biography of his father by Brantome, autograph notes of Montaigne, Rabelais, Racine, Bossuet, and other celebrated men, written on books or manuscripts once in their possession. CHANTILLY. 293 VII. Leaving the books and archives, we pass through the grand dining-hall called the Galerie des Cerfs — a lofty and noble room, lighted by vast windows opening on to the French gar- den of " La Voli- ere." At one end of this gallery is a trib- une for musicians in carved stone in the Renaissance style; at the other end is the chimney-piece surmounted by a strange panel paint- ed by Paul Baudry, and representing St. Hubert — in the like- ness of the Due de Chartres — struck by the vision of the symbolic stag ; while along the wall oppo- site the windows is a series of Gobelins tapestries, executed from cartoons by Van Orley. From the Galerie des Cerfs we go directly into the vast rooms devoted purely to the art col- lections, namely, the Picture-gallery, the Tribune, the Treasure GALERIE DES CERFS. 294 ART AND CRITICISM. Tower, and the Galerie de Psyche. This latter is a long and comparatively low gallery, running along the northern fa9ade of the chateau between the Museum Tower and the Treasure Tower, and constructed specially to receive a very important series of painted glass windows saved by the worthy Alexandre Lenoir from the chateau of Ecouen — most precious works, painted in grisaille, and representing the various incidents of the legend of Psyche. This series was executed for Anne de Montmorency by Bernard Palissy, if we may believe a tradition which many experts are inclined to ratify. The cartoons are attributed by the same tradition to no less an artist than Raph- ael. Whether this be exact or not, there can be no doubt that the designs are Italian, and as the lege^id of Psyche was very much a la mode 'va the sixteenth century, it is not surprising that the original cartoons were vulgarized by the engravings of Marc Antonio Raimondi. The series is composed of some forty subjects, each of which is explained by an octave of verses, and these verses are the same as those found in an edition of the Amours de Psyche published in Paris in 1546, with wood- cuts. The verses are by a forgotten poet named Jean Maugin, of Anvers. This painted glass, executed in 1545, is most in- teresting and curious, and, with the exception of a few of the subjects, it is in excellent preservation. The long wall facing these "vitraux" is covered with historical portraits in crayons, and at one end of the gallery is a bust of Henri IV. in colored wax, an inestimable contemporaneous document. Without staying to examine the excellent arrangement and the splendor of the decoration of the rooms in which the Due d'Aumale has lodged his works of art, let us take a very sum- mary view of the art collections, beginning with the collection of drawings. This was begun in 1 861, by the purchase en bloc of the Frederic Reiset collection, composed of 381 drawings, chosen after the careful sifting of several thousands. Then followed the purchase of the Wellesley collection, and of Alex- andre Lenoir's collection of French crayon portraits, which was CHANTILLY. 295 originally sold in London in 1836 to the Duke of Sutherland. From the Bernal and Northwick collections the Due d'Aumale also obtained many fine drawings, and now the Chantilly collec- tion of crayons can rival the collections of the Louvre and the Albertina at Vienna. The fashion of portrait heads executed prudhon's painting, "the awakening of psyche," in the chantilly ART gallery. in crayons of two or three colors was set by Holbein in Eng- land ; the French took it up, and under the reign of the Valois the fashion became a craze, and every courtier made a collec- tion of portraits of contemporaries, many of which have come down to our own day, carefully preserved by families and pri- vate and public libraries. The fashion lasted from the time of Fran9ois I. to the time of Louis XIII., and the fashionable artists were the Clouets, who came from Flanders, the Du- 296 ART AND CRITICISM. monstiers, the Quesnels, and the Lagneaus — for there were whole famihes of crayon workers. The last of the school was Robert Nanteuil. The gem of the Due d'Aumale's collection of crayon portraits is that of Isabelle de la Paix, the daughter of Henri II., who was married to Philip II. of Spain. The girl is represented at the age of fifteen, and the portrait, by the most famous of the Clouets, namely, Janet, was executed about 1559. The work is extremely fine, the face is most delicately moulded, and the whole portrait is a masterpiece of the deli- cate art of crayons, with its light evanescent grace, its soft col- oration, obtained by two or three simple tones, its charming handiwork, and its naive, sincere, and penetrating sense of physiognomic fidelity. In the collection of drawings there are specimens of the work of Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, and nearly all the great masters. The French masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are also represented by the choicest speci- mens that patience and money could procure. VIII. The nucleus of the Chantilly gallery of pictures was formed by purchases made by the Due d'Aumale during his first exile in England after 1848, and successively enriched since, more especially by the purchase en bloc/m 1879, of the Reiset collec- tion. M. Reiset had only forty pictures, but each picture was a gem of the kind. Thanks to this purchase the Chantilly gallery boasts a Giotto, a most poetical and delicate picture of the Siennese school, representing a group of angel virgins with long floating hair dancing joyously before the sun, and a " Mar- riage of St. Francis of Assisi with Charity, Poverty, and Hu- mility," by Sano di Pietro (1406-83), that rare painter, as his epitaph says, "pictor famosus et homo totus deditus Deo." CHANTILLY. 297 Nothing in Florentine art equals the artlessness and candor of this pious vision. Fra Angelico is represented by two little panels, St. Matthew and St. Mark, from the church of Fiesole, where the companion picture of the Virgin alone remains, while the Predella is the pride of the National Gallery at Lon- don. Lippo Lippi, the jovial Florentine, claims attention with a little picture of St. Peter, on the back of which some former enthusiastic possessor has written in antiquated characters, " Non e il grande che fa il buono." There are two Botticelli's, one, " Autumn," or " Abundance," painted under the influence of Mantegna, and full of allegoric and moral intentions, and the other, a seated Madonna, with on her knees the infant Jesus, to whom she offers a rose. A beautiful long-haired angel, with one of those intelligent Tuscan heads with irregular and most expressive features, looks at the divine group with a sort of melancholy smile as he stands holding a basket of flowers on his head. The cataloguers and expert critics Crowe and Cavalcaselle would attribute to Botticelli the portrait of Simo- netta Vespucci, which is one of the show pieces of Chantilly, and one of the most perfect specimens we have of Florentine style.*" M. Reiset, however, attributed the painting to Antonio Pollajuolo (1426-96), and this is now the received opinion. Apart from its extraordinary artistic qualities, this picture is of exceptional interest, because it is indubitably an authentic por- trait of the distinguished lady whom Pulci and Politian have celebrated in their verses, comparing the divinized patrician to Thalia, Minerva, and Diana. Simonetta Januensis Vespucci was a Genoese by birth ; she married a Cattani, lived in Flor- ence, was adored by Giuliano de' Medici, and was courted by all the poets and artists of Italy, who noised abroad the fame * There is an ugly picture in the Pitti Gallery, which has until lately been cata- logued as the likeness of Simonetta, but this is an evident error. M. Reiset pur- chased the picture in the Chantilly gallery from the Vespucci family, in whose possession it had been for centuries. The inscription, too, written deeply in the impasto of the picture leaves no room for doubt. 298 ART AND CRITICISM. of her wit, her beauty, and the elegance of her life. Simonetta died young, and, as Pulci tells us, she greeted death with a smile. It is unnecessary and impossible to mention even all the striking pictures at Chantilly. It will suffice to say that the collection is rich in specimens of the different Italian schools, while it also contains fine works of the early German, Flemish, Dutch, and English painters, notably a magnificent picture by Thierry Bouts, a pupil of Van Eyck, two portraits by Van Eyck, a portrait of the Batard de Bourgogne by Antonello da Messina, or perhaps by Roger van der Weyden, and a little diptych by Memling, representing on the right a Calvary and on the left Jeanne of France, wife of' Jean, second Duke of Burgundy, kneeling amid a group of figures. The collection of French pictures, both ancient and modern, is also most im- portant, and peculiarly rich in the works of two masters, Pous- sin and Prudhon, and in historical portraits, such as Corneille by Fran9ois de Troy, Moliere by Mignard, Richelieu and Maz- arin by Philippe de Champagne, Louis XIV. by Rigaud. Among the modern pictures are works by all the celebrities ; a portrait of Napoleon, First Consul, by Gerard ; five paintings by Ingres ; works by Meissonier, Rousseau, and Jules Dupre ; ten pictures by Decamps, including the " Corps de Garde maro- eain," of the Salon of 1834, which cost 80,000 francs at the sale of the Marquis Maison; Boilly's "Cafe Corazza in 1820." In 1848, when the mob invaded the Palais Royal, an anonymous visitor took a fancy to Boilly's picture, cut it out of the frame in small pieces, and carried it off. After passing through mys- terious adventures, which have not yet found a historian, the fragments of the picture were all found and carefully pieced together, and in 1875 the picture was sold to the Due d'Au- male. > We now come to the two works by Raphael, which are nat- urally considered the rarest treasures, if not the finest pictures, CHANTILLY. 299 PORTRAIT OF SIMONETTA VESPUCCI, IN THE CHANTILLY ART GALLERY. in the Chantilly gallery. One of these pictures is known as the " Vierge d'Orleans," and was bought by the Due d'Aumale in 1869, at the sale of the Delessert collection, for 150,000 francs ; the other, representing the " Three Graces," and in- spired by an antique marble group which Raphael saw at Siena when he was helping Pinturicchio paint his frescos in 1506, cost the Due d'Aumale 600,000 francs. This little pict- 300 ART AND CRITICISM. ure, scarcely four inches square, was once in the Borghese Pal- ace. About 1797 it came into the possession of Fabre, a painter of Montpellier, from whom Woodburn, the well-known London dealer, bought it. Woodburn sold it to Sir Thomas Lawrence, at whose sale it was purchased by the banker-poet Samuel Rogers. Subsequently it was bought by Lord Dudley, and in 1881 M. Thibaudeau had it for sale once more. M. Thibaudeau, the London dealer, came over to Paris to show the picture to the Due d'Aumale, but the duke had just gone to Italy. Thereupon M. Thibaudeau showed the picture to the authorities of the Louvre, and had an interview with M. Jules Ferry, then minister, who intended to ask a special grant of Parliament to enable the government to purchase the work. A few days afterwards M. Ferry was defeated in the Chamber, and retired from the head of affairs. At the same time it was found that the picture could not be disposed of without the consent of the Court of Chancery, and M. Thibaudeau returned to London. A few months afterwards the Due d'Aumale wrote to know whether the picture could still be had. Thereupon the necessary legal steps were taken, and the Raphael went to Chantilly. The history of the " Vierge d'Orleans " apparently begins with the visit which Raphael made to Urbino, also in the year 1506, after the death of his parents, for while in Urbino, Vasari tells us that he painted for Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, then Captain of the Florentines, " two pictures of Our Lady, small but very beautiful, and in his second manner, which pictures are now in the possession of the most illustrious and most ex- cellent Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino." In 1763 this Madonna was in the Crozat gallery at Paris, whence it passed through the hands of Passart and Decamps, who sold it to the Due d'Orleans. Thus the picture entered the Palais Royal galleries, and acquired its name of the " Vierge d'Orleans." Now, the story runs that in 1782 Philippe Egalite, Duke of Orleans, playing at billiards with M. de Laborde de Mereville, the banker RAPHAEL'S " LA VIERGE D'ORLEANS," IN THE CHANTILLY ART COLLECTION. V 0? THE ^HIVEBSITTJ CHANTILLY. 303 and financier, lost an enormous sum of money, and being un- able to pay his debt, he gave his creditor all the Italian pictures in the galleries of the Palais Royal. The banker sent the pictures to London to his correspondent, Mr. Bryan, who sold the lot for ;^43,ooo to the Earl of Bridgewater, the Earl of Carlisle, and Lord Gower. The three lords reserved for them- selves a number of pictures estimated at ^40,000, and in 1 798 they exhibited the rest for sale in London. The exhibition re- mained open eight months, and what with gate-money and sales the three noble speculators realized ^42,500, and felt justly sat- isfied with their bargain. Among the pictures sold were twelve Raphaels, of which the " Vierge d'Orleans " was one. Its pur- chaser was Mr. Hibbert, who paid for it 500 guineas. After passing successively through the hands of Vernon, Delahante, and Aguado, it appeared at the Aguado sale in Paris in 1843, and was bought for the sum of 27,250 francs by M. Fran9ois Delessert, in whose gallery it remained until the Due d'Aumale bought it in 1869 for 150,000 fi-ancs. The "Vierge d'Orleans" is about twelve inches high by eight inches broad. It is very delicately painted, and derives an additional interest of a certain kind from the traces of hesita- tion in the composition which the painter has not thought fit to efface. We seem to see Raphael at work ; we can almost follow every stroke of his brush. Here we see him retouch- ing the contour of the figure in order to give it more grace ; here he strengthens the outline of the chin, and lightly indi- cates a dimple ; here he modifies the modelling of the nose ; and here he caresses exquisitely the expression of the mouth. As we have already seen, this picture is about contemporane- ous with the picture of the " Belle Jardiniere " in the Louvre, dated 1507. The figures stand out with remarkable solidity. The Virgin, it will be noticed, has very delicate hands, and the type of her face is different from most of Raphael's Vir- gins. The " Vierge d'Orleans " is rather the portrait of a young mother surprised by the painter in the intimacy of her 304 ART AND CRITICISM. maternal joys and cares. The babe alone in this composition has a suggestion of something more than human in his face. To do justice to all the treasures of Chantilly — pictures, drawings, engravings, bronzes, Limoges enamels, miniatures, gems, manuscripts, and other precious objects — would require volumes rather than pages, for they are counted by hundreds, and even by thousands. I must be content to have endeavored to give a general idea of the historical and architectural inter- est of the castle itself, and a mere glimpse at the literary and ar- tistic riches which it contains. Chantilly and its treasures really constitute, to quote the words used by the Due d'Aumale in drawing up the deed of gift to the Institute of France, " a com- plete and varied monument of French art in all its branches, and of the history of my father-land at glorious epochs." A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. THE house which we propose to visit is not a masterpiece of architecture. It is not one of those red brick man- sions in the style of Queen Anne, with ample windows and capricious gables, such as have transformed the appearance of western London within the past twenty years ; it is simply one of the commodious, rectilinear London residences of the pre- cesthetic period, whole rows and streets of which may be seen in the immediate neighborhood of Prince's Gate, where it is situated. The outside of the building offers no interest; the inside has been transformed by the architects Norman Shaw and Jeckyll, aided by a man of exquisite taste, Mr. Murray Marks, into a dwelling of perfect harmony, where noth- ing offends the eye and everything charms it, and where, sur- rounded by a most choice collection of pictures by the primi- tive Italians, and by the so-called English pre-Raphaelites, the inspirer and owner of the mansion, Mr. F, R. Leyland, realizes his dream of living the life of an old Venetian merchant in modern London. The first thing that strikes you when you enter the vast entrance hall, lighted by ample windows in the daytime and by electric lamps, distributed over the ceiling, at night, is the staircase, with its fine balustrade of gilt bronze, which once adorned Northumberland House, before that building was de- molished to make room for the avenue that now bears its name. This balustrade, of admirable design, was made at the 3o6 ART AND CRITICISM. end of the eighteenth century, at prosaic Birmingham, in the days when taste had not yet utterly abandoned that industri- ous town. The pillar from which the hand-rail starts is sur- mounted by two crowned female figures, one of which waves a long oriflamme. This group of gilt wood in all probability adorned originally the prow of a Venetian galley, and Sanso- vino may have designed it. The tonality of the hall and of the ENTRANCE HALL. staircase, from the foot to the top of the house, is green. The whole is panelled in shades of willow. The dado of the darker shades is enriched with panels imitating aventurine lacquer, decorated with delicate sprigs of pale rose and white flowers in the Japanese taste. These panels are the work of no less a master than Mr. James McNeill Whistler. On the walls of A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 307 the staircase are hung Burne-Jones's " Circe," Rossetti's " Lov- ing-cup," Alphonse Legros's " Rehearsal," while on the walls of the hall itself are placed the " Sea Spell," the " Dis Mani- bus," and " La Pia," by Rossetti ; " Cupid reviving Psyche," by Burne-Jones ; and a portrait of Rossetti by G. F. Watts, which give the key-note of Mr. Leyland's tastes. The place of honor in this house we shall find is divided between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sandro Botticelli. The furniture of the hall is effective and discreetly rich. The mosaic floor is partly covered with Oriental rugs, and dotted here and there with gigantic vases of cloisonne enamel. In the centre is a circular divan, and around the walls gilt Ve- netian seventeenth-century chairs. The entrance hall, which is of course preceded by a vestibule, thus forms a fine room in itself where one may sit and contemplate beautiful objects. To the right of the entrance hall is the morning-room, and to the left the dinning-room. The morning-room is exceed- ingly cozy and comfortable, and at the same time every object in it is in good taste. The walls and ceiling are panelled with oak, inlaid with black and white woods in a simple geometrical design. The walls above the dado are covered with three large and six smaller pieces of Beauvais tapestry, with .Teniers subjects, in perfect preservation and freshness of color. On the floor is a bright Oriental carpet. The cabinets are of Indian, Tyrolese, and Italian work, beautifully inlaid. The bibelots and ornaments are all choice, but discreetly arranged, without that crowding and ostentation which make a room look like a museum. For the wood-work and general arrange- ment of the walls, ceiling, and chimney-piece, Mr. Norman Shaw is responsible. The dining-room is famous in the art world under the name of the " Peacock Room." This appellation it owes to the deco- ration with which Mr. Whistler has enriched the walls. To be appreciated properly this room must be seen by artificial light, with the shutters of the three windows closed, and forming each 3o8 ART AND CRITICISM. a splendid decorative panel. The general scheme of the room is turquoise-blue and gold, and the only ornaments are pieces of blue and white china, displayed on shelves of carved and gilt wood designed by Jeckyll, who was the architect of the room, with its fine panelled ceiling and pendentives terminating in gas lamps, to which have now been added stars of electric lights. The room, as it was originally conceived by Jeckyll, was hung with Spanish leather, and it was by a mere accident that Mr. Whistler came to decorate it. The story is this: Mr. Leyland having bought a picture by Mr. Whistler, represent- ing a woman in a Japanese robe, hung it over the fireplace, where it still remains. The master, having inspected the ar- rangement, complained that the red flowers scattered over the gold ground of the Spanish leather hurt the harmony of his pict- ure, and proposed to paint them out. Mr. Leyland had paid a thousand pounds sterling for his Spanish leather, but he never- theless allowed the master to have his way ; whereupon Mr. Whistler went on painting and painting until the Spanish leather disappeared entirely, and a new and absolutely unique decorative scheme of blue and gold, in which the chief motif \v2iS peacocks and their feathers, appeared in its place. Walls, wood-work, and ceiling are entirely covered with these compositions in the Japanese taste. The framework is lacquered and clouded, or treated like aventurine, and the panels are filled in with im- brications of peacocks' feathers of exquisite invention. Over the buffet, at the end of the room opposite the fireplace, is an oblong panel sixteen feet long, where Mr. Whistler has depicted two peacocks in aggressive attitudes, designed in gold on a blue ground. One peacock, of extreme and un- ruffled elegance, is supposed by some subtle interlinear read- ers to represent the artist, and the other peacock, with dis- ordered plumage and irate mien, standing on a pile of shekels, is identified with the artist's patron. The background is dotted with flying feathers and masses of gold, and the whole composition has reference, we are told, to a difference that DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. From a painting by G. F. Watts. A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 311 arose between Mr. Whistler and Mr. Leyland with respect to the price of the work. This cryptic panel was the painter's vengeance, but its hidden meaning is so discreetly concealed that it would remain forever lost in the spirited charm of the whole, had not anecdotic memories treasured up the souvenir of the artist's wrath and of its ingenious manifestation. The tall panels formed by the closed shutters of the case- ment windows are exceedingly fine in design. The panels to the right and left represent peacocks with their tails spread fanwise, advancing in perspective towards the spectator, one behind the other, the peacocks in gold and the ground in blue. On the middle panel are perched two peacocks with pendent tails sweeping down to the ground, and presenting an arrange- ment of lines and masses of blue and gold of singular splendor. The remaining wall space is occupied by the smaller panelling already described, and the shelves and cages in which the blue china is displayed. The fireplace is panelled with turquoise- blue mosaic. The andirons are gilt-bronze sunflowers. The carpet is turquoise-blue. Thus the whole room forms a com- pletely harmonious arrangement in turquoise-blue and virgin gold. The shelves and cages, designed by Jeckyll, are worthy of notice for the distinction and originality of their construc- tion and the exquisiteness of their decorative carving. It is a curious fact that besides estranging Mr. Whistler and Mr. Leyland, this " Peacock Room " had a more tragic conse- quence. Jeckyll, the decorative artist who had designed and completely executed the room when Mr. Whistler entered upon the scene, had already suffered several disappointments, owing to accident having deprived him of the credit of his work, and his hopes were then all centred upon his efforts in Mr. Ley- land's house. Alas ! when he saw the Spanish leather disap- pear and the peacock harmony in blue and gold become the talk of the town, he went home and began to paint the floor of his bedroom gold, and in a few weeks he died mad in a private lunatic asylum. 312 ART AND CRITICISM. PEACOCK KOOM. From the entrance hall, down a few steps, we notice en passant a fine head by Rembrandt, and then find ourselves in the merchant's sanctum, a long room panelled with American walnut and hung above the dado with old-gold Spanish leather, with a soft floral design interspersed between bold red-brown arabesques. In the centre is a marquetry table in the Louis XIII. style, dating from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV., incrusted with floral designs, and enriched with finely chiselled bronzes. On the end panel will be noticed four white jasmine blossoms, which are supposed by experts to be the signature of the maker. Jasmin. Whether this conjecture be exact or not, the fact remains that this floral signature is found A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 313 on many of the finest pieces of marquetry work of this style and epoch. The furniture of the room is completed by in- laid cabinets of German and Italian origin, Chippendale chairs, modern easy-chairs, a grand piano, a Louis XVI. bureau, and an Italian cassone, or marriage coffer, which was made for some noble Florentine family. The pictures on the walls are of the choicest. Over the cassone hangs a fresco by Luca Signorelli (1441-1523), representing an episode in the history of Corio- lanus. This fresco has been detached from the wall on which it was painted, and transferred to canvas. It forms one of a series of four subjects, of which two remain at Siena, while the other is in the National Gallery at London. The original sketch of a part of this fresco, covered with pinholes, is in the British Museum in the collection of drawings. Over the cabinet, to the left of the cassone, is a Madonna by the Floren- tine Pesellino (142 2-1 45 7), with, on one side, a boy Bacchus by Giovanni Bellini (1428-15 16), and on the other a portrait of a man by Giorgione (1477-15 11), which is a masterpiece of char- acter and of color. Over the piano hangs a splendid Madonna, with the infant Christ and Saint John, by Sandro Botticelli {1446-15 10), with, on one side, a Saint George and the Dragon, and on the other a Saint Peter and Saint Paul, both by Crivelli { 1 430- 1 493 .f*). This Madonna ranks with Botticelli's tenderest and most perfect treatments of the subject. We now go up-stairs to the first floor, where the landing is adorned by three delicate figures of ideal women, by Albert Moore. The whole of this floor is occupied by three salons communicating with each other, and capable of being converted into one vast rectangular room, which would be square were it not for the block that is reserved for the staircase and land- ing. One salon fronts on Prince's Gate, the other on the garden, while the intermediate salon has a glass roof and a large alcove built out over the vestibule. The general scheme •of decoration in these three rooms is the same. The ceilings are identical in design, also the wainscoting, the wall hangings, 314 ART AND CRITICISM. and all the details of the wood-work and fixed drapery. Let us enter first of all the intermediate room. The furniture is com- posed of divans, chairs, inlaid Indo-Portuguese cabinets, and a harpsichord by Ruckers, with a finely painted and lacquered case. On the walls, as usual, are some notable pictures — Sir John Millais's, " Saint Agnes' Eve," Rossetti's " Salutation," Ford Madox Brown's " Burial of Christ," Burne-Jones's six panels representing Day, Night, and the four Seasons, and the same painter's exquisite picture called " Venus's Mirror." The salon fronting towards Prince's Gate is the shrine of some of the most completely beautiful productions of modern English art. The furniture consists of modern upholstered chairs, a grand piano, incrusted Boule cabinets, an elegant chest of drawers by Riesener, and a variety of tasteful pieces. On the walls are hung, on the right and left of the fireplace, " Lady Lilith " and "Veronica Veronese," by Rossetti; over the piano the same master's " Blessed Damosel," with, on one side, his " Proserpina," and on the other his " Mnemosyne ;" and at the opposite end of the room Burne-Jones's " Merlin and Viviane " and " Phyllis and Demophoon." Our illustration shows a corner of this room, with the screen and curtains of cherry-red Genoa velvet on cloth of gold. This screen, designed by Mr. Norman Shaw, was suggested by the roodloft of the cathedral of Bar-le-Duc, which was sold by Mr. Murray Marks to the South Kensington Museum, where it now stands. Mr, Shaw's screen is composed of a frame of panelled and carved walnut, with bars of burnished brass, and it is so arranged that it can be entirely removed when it is desired to open the two salons and the intermediate room and to form one grand reception salon. The idea of this division is very felicitous; the screen adds greatly to the variety of aspect of the room, and the combi- nation of carved wood, brass grating, and splendid draperies possesses a richness, lightness, and elegance which no door, however ornate and monumental, could ever rival. Below Burne-Jones's " Merlin and Viviane " will be noticed a very A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 315 handsome Venetian commode of marquetry and bronze, with feet formed by a complete bull's leg, surmounted by the head, which makes the console on which rests the slab of verd- antique. The bronze ornaments on this piece of furniture are SALON FRONTING PRINCE'S GATE, WITH SCREEN AND BURNE- JONES'S " MERLIN AND VIVIANE." apparently the work of the Cafheri family, perhaps of Philip Cafiieri, who subsequently went to France to work on the deco- ration of the royal chateaux under Le Brun. The second salon is uniform in style and decoration with the first and intermediate drawing-rooms, inasmuch as when the dividing screens are removed, the three are intended to form one grand room seventy feet long, with a spacious wing 3l6 ART AND CRITICISM. at each end. The ceiling is therefore panelled in natural wal- nut, with caissons of gilt arabesque design. The walls above the dado of American walnut are hung with silk of old-gold tone ; on the floor are laid immense Oriental carpets, leaving the waxed boards visible round the edges. The window cur- tains are cloth of gold, with a rich design in red velvet ap- plique-work of Portuguese origin. The smaller under-curtains or blinds are of thin straw-color silk, and the wood-work of the windows is gilt. One side of this salon is taken up by the three casement windows, through which we see a characteristic landscape of aristocratic London, Prince's Gate garden, with its symmetrical lawns of intense green, the severe elliptical curves of yellow gravel-walks, the sturdy silhouettes of trees, whose blackened and intricately gnarled branches bear witness to a long and dismal struggle against uncongenial elements ; and,, described around this square of verdure and protecting rail- ings, the great parallelogram of rectilinear houses with unim- aginative fa9ades and uniform porticos. Without is London, within is Italy, for both the furniture and the pictures which adorn the walls are Italian. On the panels between the win- dows are Venetian mirrors ; the tables and cabinets are Mil- anese inlaid work of the seventeenth century; the chairs, with the exception of the modern upholstered seats which match the silk wall hangings, are of the same period. The bronzes scattered here and there are dainty specimens of fif- teenth century cire perdue casting; the chimney-piece is a handsome remnant of an Italian Renaissance house, surmount- ed by a carved wood over-mantle, designed by Mr. Norman Shaw. The five niches of the over-mantle contain four black enamel Oriental vases of the Ming period, and, in the centre, a tall brown enamel vase of extreme rarity. Between the win- dows two fine cylindrical Chinese vases from the San Donato collection, and a gigantic old cloisonne-enamel perfume burner, add a sharp note of Oriental splendor to the discreet richness of the harmony of brown and gold in which the pictures are A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 317 displayed. All are admirably framed and advantageously hung, so that it is unmixed pleasure to look at them. These pictures are of the Italian schools of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. All of them are choice, and several of them are pearls of the first quality. Over the chimney- SECOND SALON. piece is a " Mars and Venus " by the Venetian Palma Vecchio (1 480-1 5 28), with, on the left, a round picture of a Madonna by Botticelli, and on the right a round picture by Filippino Lippi (1406-1469), representing the "Adoration of the Magi." On the long wall to the right of the fireplace is a rare and beau- 3l8 ART AND CRITICISM. tiful portrait of a lady by Bernardino Luini (1475-1533 ?), the tender pupil of Leonardo, who combined the perfect skill of his master with something of that sweetness of temper and human simplicity which characterize the artistic vision of the Primi- tives. Those who have seen Luini's work at Milan, especially the frescos in the Brera Gallery, will have realized the direct- ness of presentation and the charming purity of his feminine figures. Next to the Luini portrait hangs a " Madonna and St. Joseph adorning the Bambino^'' by Lorenzo Costa (1460-1535), and then a curious variation of Leonardo's picture of "St. John" in the Louvre, doubtless by some pupil. On this same wall are hung two exquisite pictures, "A Madonna and Child," by Botticelli, and another " Madonna and Child " surrounded by cherubs against a background of blossoms by Lippo Lippi. On the panel beyond the door is a picture by Memling (14301^-1495), representing the Virgin and two female saints clad in splendid robes ornamented with pearls and precious stones. Two angels hold a crown above the head of the Vir- gin, who sits enthroned against a background of architecture, flowers, and trailing vines, with landscape vistas to the right and left, showing a castle on a hill on one side, and on the other a town and port with shipping. On the end wall of the room the pearl is a votive picture by Giorgione, representing, as was the custom in those days, the portraits of the donor and his wife in the act of adoring the Holy Family. By a curious and fortunate coincidence, Mr. Leyland possesses a separate portrait by Giorgione of the donor depicted in the present composition, and both the votive picture and the por- trait, so full of character and so admirable in tone, are perfect examples of the great colorist. To have hanging on the walls of one's drawing-room speci- mens of the work of Lippo Lippi, Memling, Giorgione, Luini, is no small privilege, the more so when those specimens are not merely adequate but of rare excellence. As for Botticelli, the idol and inspirer of so many contemporary English paint- A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. ^ 319 ers, but whom the critics and the pubhc ahke neglected twenty- years ago, Mr. Leyland was one of the first connoisseurs in England to seek his works and to give them places of honor in the intimacy of his aesthetic life. We have left for the last the four compositions by Botticelli, which are the chief ornament of this drawing-room. The subject is the touching and mirac- ulous story of Nastagio degli Onesti, related by Boccaccio in the eighth tale of the Fifth Day of the Decameron. In his bi- ography of the artist, Vasari tells us that Botticelli painted four pictures with small figures from this tale. '' Similmente in casa Pticci fece di figure piccole la novella del Boccaccio di Nastagio degli Onesti in quattro qtiadri di pittura molto vaga e bellal'' The four pictures were placed in the Pucci Palace at Florence, we may suppose, about the year 1487, and remained there until the middle of the present century, when they were bought by the English collector, Mr. Barker, at whose sale they passed into the hands of Mr. Leyland, in a state of perfect freshness and absolute authenticity. As we find among the accessories depicted in these compositions the united arms of the Pucci and Bini families, we are perhaps justified in the hypothesis that the pictures were painted on the occasion of a marriage, probably that of Pier Francesco di Giovanni Bini and Lucrezia Pucci, which was celebrated in the year 1487. We may even carry our conjectures still further and reconstitute a whole love romance, in which we may imagine that Lucrezia had at first disdained the suit of Pier Francesco Bini, and that Boccaccio's story of the punishment of heartless and disdainful maidens may have had some peculiar appropriateness to her case. Boc- caccio's tale, the reader may be reminded, is that of a very rich gentleman of Ravenna, Nastagio degli Onesti, who fell madly in love with a lady of nobler family than himself, but who was so stupidly proud of her birth that the more assiduously he courted her the more cruelly she disdained him. In despair, Nastagio retired with some friends to a country estate near Ravenna, where he had tents pitched magnificently, and spent 320 ART AND CRITICISM. the time in feasting and joyous company, seeking to forget his grief. But one Friday, being alone and thinking still of the cruelty of his mistress, Nastagio wandered into the neighbor- ing pine forest. Suddenly he was startled from his revery by piercing cries, and saw, to his horror, a young and beautiful woman pursued by hounds and followed by a man on horse- back. Nastagio attempted to intervene, but in vain. The hounds threw the woman, the horseman dismounted, killed her with his sword, cut out her heart, and flung it to be devoured by the dogs. Meanwhile he explained to Nastagio that he was violently in love with this woman, who treated him so cruelly that he killed himself, and was condemned to hell-fire. The woman did not long survive the pleasure which his death gave her. She died soon after, and, not having repented, she too was damned. The punishment imposed upon the unhappy pair was that she should flee before her disdained lover, and that he should pursue her as if she were his greatest enemy for as many years as she made him suffer months. Each time he caught her he pierced her with his sword, tore out her heart, and threw it to his dogs, who devoured it, whereupon the woman immediately resuscitated, and the terrible chase began anew. Incessantly the pursuit goes on, and in every spot where the cruel mistress had done anything to thwart the knight's love his hounds throw her, and the knight tears out the heart that was always so hard towards himself. Every Friday, the knight informs Nastagio, the chase ends at this point of the forest, only to begin again immediately. Nastagio at this spectacle was divided between horror and compassion, but reflecting upon what the knight had told him, he conceived a plan whereby the adventure might prove useful to himself. He sent messengers to his parents at Ravenna, telling them that he was ready to follow their advice and give up all thoughts of changing the cruel heart of his disdainful mistress if they would grant him a last favor, namely, to induce the lady, her parents, and their friends to go to dine with him A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 321 in his woodland solitude the following Friday. This request was granted readily ; Nastagio had his tents pitched and the table spread in the pine forest at the place where he had wit- nessed the terrible scene ; and the following Friday the guests were horrified by the repetition of the spectacle in the midst of the banquet. The young lady in particular was so struck by the application of the adventure to her own case that she made amends to her disdained lover, whose offer of marriage she ac- cepted, and the pair lived happily together ever afterwards. The first of Botticelli's compositions represents Nastagio in the forest of pine-trees, attempting to save the woman from the hounds. The second shows the same forest, with the knight, clad in gold niello armor, tearing out the heart of the woman. In the foreground, the knight, dismounted, flays open the woman's back, while his horse stands watching the scene ; to the right, the dogs devour the heart ; to the left, Nas- tagio turns away in horror; and in the background we see the sea-shore and the chase resumed. The third composition rep- resents the dinner party in the pine forest interrupted by the fearful spectacle of the pursuit of the woman by the knight and his hounds. The above compositions seem to have been paint- ed by pupils from Botticelli's designs, for we do not find in the drawing, in the gestures, or in the painting the skill, the grace, and the delicacy of the master himself. The conception of the pictures is wholly due to Botticelli, but, as was the custom in those days, the execution was evidently intrusted by him to other hands working under his supervision. As regards the fourth composition, however, representing the wedding feast of Nastagio, there can be no doubt ; it is entirely by the master's own hand, and one of the daintiest of his works. The whole picture is a completely beautiful vision of life. In a green meadow, constellated with flowers and bathed in soft and warm gray light, such as Botticelli excels in shedding over his fresh and fragrant landscapes, the feast is taking place under the shelter of a splendid arcade supported by twelve 21 322 ART AND CRITICISM. Corinthian pillars of blue marble with gilt capitals, five along each side and one at each end. In the background is a tri- umphal arch adorned with statues and bass-reliefs ; and beyond the arch, in the distance, water, hills, and the monuments of a town. The three pillars in the foreground are decorated with rings, torch-holders, and branches of laurel, and above the capi- tals are placed the enwreathed escutcheons of the Bini and Pucci families. Two tables are laid, one on each side, parallel with the columns. In the centre of the composition, and in the immediate foreground, is a dresser laden with rich plate and vessels of gold and silver, such as Benvenuto Cellini wrought ; and behind the tables are hung, head high, screens of beautiful brocade, fringed with garlands of verdure, which form a sumpt- uous background to set off the figures. At the table to the right are seated eleven men, on one side of the table only, and at the table on the left, eight maidens, likewise along one side only, while Nastagio alone sits opposite the bride, in an arm- chair of gilt foliated scroll-work. The ladies are clad in robes of rose, blue, yellow, green, lilac, purple, rose and green, and other delicate combinations, and their sweet and serious faces are turned towards each other in the act of conversation. The men, too, seem absorbed in talking, but at neither table does laughter distort the features of the guests nor unseemly frivol- ity mar the reposeful dignity of their attitudes or gestures. But conversation is not the sole joy of the feast ; the fringed white cloth is strewn with fruits and sweetmeats, which Nasta- gio offers to the bride in a shallow, blue, gold-rimmed bowl of fine faience, and which the guests eat with knives and forks ; to the left and right, too, the servitors, slender and elegant youths, dressed in bright-colored costumes, advance with rhyth- mic tread and gracefully undulating movements of the body, each one holding aloft a dish wound round with a long scarf- like napkin that streams over his shoulder and floats in the breeze. .How charming and precious in every detail is this representation of a Florentine feast ! How minutely refined A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 325 must this Florentine civilization have been, we may imagine from the notes that are to be found in contemporary memoirs and documents, and more particularly from certain chapters of Francesco Colonna's Hypiierotomachia, where the curious may read a description of a feast given by Queen Eleutherilda — a literary companion piece to Botticelli's picture. We need not penetrate into the privacy of the bedchambers of the Leyland house, which are furnished in the English style of the eighteenth century, and, it is needless to add, with the same good taste that characterizes the whole dwelling. Mr. Leyland's own chamber and dressing-room are full of original drawings by Rossetti, whose faithful friend and admirer he was. Indeed, it is the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones which gives to Mr. Leyland's house its peculiar interest. The Italian pict- ures are of the choicest, and the like can only be found in the great museums of Europe ; but nowhere else, whether in mu- seums or private houses, can you see a collection of the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones such as Mr. Leyland possesses. On the walls of his rooms hang the masterpieces of both these artists, whose fame is so great and whose works are so little known. The explanation of this phenomenon is simple. With the exception of his first oil-painting, *' The Girlhood of the Virgin," executed in 1 849, and three water-colors shown at Liverpool in 1852, Rossetti never exhibited his pictures, nor made any at- tempt to impose himself upon the public, but lived within a chosen circle of friends and admirers, exercising a sort of occult royalty over a considerable part of the intellectual elite of his country. Once only did he again enter the lists, in 1870, when he published his Poems, which were a signal for the re- newal of the whole so-called pre-Raphaelite question, and for the furious polemics of Swinburne, William Morris, and Bu- chanan about the " Fleshly School of Poetry." In 1881 Ros- setti published another volume of Poems and Ballads, which were accepted without protestation; and in 1882 he died, at the 326 ART AND CRITICISM. age of fifty-four. Burne-Jones, in the same way, shrank from ex- hibiting in promiscuous company, and the public never saw his work until the Grosvenor Gallery was founded and became the scene of the final triumph of his master Rossetti and of himself. In speaking of Rossetti and Burne-Jones we are obliged to refer to the word pre-Raphaelite, which has obtained a hold on the public mind in connection with these men. In reality it would be desirable to blot this word out of our memories, and to consider each man as an individuality, without endeavoring to attach him to an artificial group or school of any kind. Pre- Raphaelitism was a literary rather than an artistic movement. It was an echo of the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of the Tractarian movement, and of the Gothic revival. It was a manifestation of certain moral and philosophical preoccupa- tions that have little in common with the permanent accepta- tion of art. We might even go further, and say that Rossetti and Burne-Jones are great artists not because they were pre- Raphaelites, but in spite of pre-Raphaelitism. I will quote two documents which throw light on the real position that Rossetti occupies in English art. The first is a citation from Ruskin's Oxford lecture, in which he says that Rossetti's name " should be placed first on the list of men who have raised and changed the spirit of modern art, raised in ab- solute attainment ; changed in direction of temper. . . . He was the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern romantic school in England." We must note here that Ruskin attaches a noble sense to the word " romantic," meaning thereby the habit of regarding the external and real world as a singer of romaunts would have regarded it in the Middle Ages, and as Scott, Burns, Byron, and Tennyson have regarded it in our own times. Furthermore, Mr. Ruskin explains that romance does not consist in the manner of representing or relating things, but in the kind of passions appealed to by the things related, as Wordsworth tells us the life of the soul is fed " by admiration, hope, and love." A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 327 The second document is a letter written by Rossetti in 1868 to a French critic, M. E. Chesneau, who had spoken of him as the chief of the pre-Raphaehtes. Here I translate from Rossetti's French the principal passages, italicising a few words of especial interest as a definition : "Concerning the qualification of chief of the pre-Raphael- ite school which you attribute to me, I must assure you as warmly as possible that it is by no means due to me. Fame always clothes the unknown with mysterious qualities ; and it is to this phenomenon alone that I owe the stories about my- self which I have found in your book and elsewhere. Far from being the chief of a school by priority or by merit, I can hardly recognize myself as belonging to the school at all, if the style of what little I have done in painting were to be com- pared with the works of other painters called pre-Raphaelite. Thus, when I find a painter so absolutely original as Holman Hunt described as my disciple, I cannot help feeling humiliated in presence of the truth, and hastening to assure you of the contrary. The qtialities of emotional but extremely m,inute real- ism which particularly characterize the style called pre-Raphaelite are to be found principally in all the pictures of Holman Hunt, in most of those of Madox Brown, in some bits by Hughes, and in the admirable work of the youth of Millais. It is camarad- erie rather than real collaboration of style which united my name with theirs in the days of enthusiasm twenty years ago." In these two statements we find, in brief, the indications that are of permanent interest concerning Rossetti. In the future men will care little for personal details about the painter whose work will endure only by virtue of what is human and universal in it. Already we have no time to read about the vague theories and aspirations of the pre-Raphaelite Brother- hood with its talismanic signature, P. R. B., and its short-lived mouthpiece The Germ. The memory of modern man, sollicited by an ever-increasing multitude of facts and impressions, can only avoid plethora and intellectual dyspepsia by a constant 328 ART AND CRITICISM. process of elimination. Anecdotic psychology of individual artists, complete estimates of the scope and character of their works, minute analyses of their lives and thoughts, are luxu- ries in which the few may indulge if such be their good pleas- ure, but which have very little real interest. An artist lives by his works and not by what his friends and admirers write about him. In future years, when we walk through the rooms devoted to the English painters in the National Gallery, we shall sum up the history of the art of the century in a few broad sen- tences. We shall find that the mass of the English painters have relied simply upon nature, and persistently contented themselves with portraiture, the sentimental drama of daily life, and the patient transcription of the phenomena of sea, sky, and landscape. At the beginning of the century we shall notice that some painters named Barry, Fuseli, West, and Haydon were haunted by poetic ambition, and imagined that it was pos- sible to begin where Raphael and Michaelangelo had left off, and so continue to interest mankind by the rearrangement of lifeless formulae and worn-out conventions. The productions of these men remain, however, mere historical curiosities. Then we shall observe a change in the current ideals of art and the appropriation of new stores of poetry and romance, of national legend and universal myth. But amid the leading exponents of the new ideals we shall not distinguish common qualities other than evidences of wide literary culture, a tendency to dreaminess, symbolism, and definiteness of sensible imagery, and 2i parti pris of imitative admiration of the works of the in- tense and complicated artists of the fifteenth century, like Botti- celli, Mantegna, and Memling. Among the artists of this category two will be found to stand out with all the force of their poetical and ultra-refined personalities, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, the former the more original of the two, and the latter the more assimilative, being content in much of his work with A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 329 variations upon or studies from the masters of the fifteenth century above mentioned. Rossetti is not a preacher, a symboHst, a moralist, an ascetic and fervent expounder of abstractions, like Holman Hunt, but he is, nevertheless, equally spiritualist, mystic, and full of per- sonal and recondite meaning. He is the strangest mixture which chance has yet produced of the Latin and the Northern spirit. Of Italian origin, born in England, but having very little English blood in his veins, Rossetti, like the Italian painters of the Renaissance, devoted himself to painting man in prefer- ence to nature, but at the same time what attracted him was not the physical man, the human animal, but the inner man. Therefore he disdains the fine forms of the body, and seeks only expression and that kind of facial beauty which renders expression most manifest. He is mystic in the sense that he seems to have lived in an uninterrupted state of ecstasy, com- parable somewhat to that mental attitude of Dante which sup- presses the difference between the real and the imaginary, and permits the poet to dwell in " the sphere of the infinite images of the soul." Hence all Rossetti's pictures seem to be dreams full of silence and solemnity. Like his sonnets and ballads, his paintings are visions — visions that are often so personal to himself, so esoteric, that the painting is not completely intel- ligible without the intervention of the poet's exegesis. Take, for instance, "'The Blessed Damozel," with its predella and ex- quisite frame designed by Rossetti himself. This is, in the first place, a beautiful and impressive object to look upon, sugges- tive, so far as color is concerned, of the splendor of Giorgione and the Venetian masters, although wholly lacking their tech- nical mdestria. As to the subject of the picture, whether we have read the poem or not, we seize the idea of a beautiful young woman who has died in the pride of youth, and who awaits in paradise the coming of her lover, who still dwells upon earth, and whom we see in the predella reclining under a tree and yearning for the lost one as she yearns for him. 330 ART AND CRITICISM. Nevertheless, we appreciate the picture more fully when we have read the artist's lyric : " The blessed damozel leaned out From the gold bar of heaven ; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even ; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven. " And still she bowed herself and stooped Out of the circling charm, Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm. And the lilies lay as if asleep Along her bended arm." Take again the picture of " Proserpine." Here we are once more in dream-land, in one of the corridors of the palace of Hades, momentarily illumined by a gleam of light from the upper world. Proserpine, draped in blue, with deep brown hair streaming over her shoulders, regretful eyes and ideally beauti- ful face, stands for an instant as she passes, holding the pome- granate in her hand — that fateful pomegranate of which she had eaten one grain only, but which was sufficient to enchain her to her new throne of Empress of Hades in spite of the pleadings of her mother Ceres. Beside her stands an incense burner "as the attribute of a goddess. The ivy-branch in the background (a decorative appendage to the sonnet inscribed on the label) may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory." I quote these explanations from a letter by Rossetti, for few peo- ple, when they have ceased reading Ovid and Lempriere, can carry in their minds the key to the symbolism of ancient Greece and Rome. Doubtless this impressive conception of Proserpine is full of literary and philosophical intentions, but it is beautiful as a work of art not on account of those inten- tions but in spite of them. In " Veronica Veronese " the mystic intentions are not im- ROSSETTl'S "VERONICA VERONESE. ^^-^^ OF THE uiriviRsiTr OB" ^ilFO A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 333 mediately obvious, nor does any explanation seem necessary. Here is a beautiful blond maiden clad in olive-green velvet, with a white neckerchief and a reddish-purple girdle. She is seated on a dull -red chair, and leaning over a table on which are some primroses and a daffodil. As she listens to a canary- bird singing, her fingers stray over the chords of a violin, and before her the paper lies ready to receive the record of the notes. The absolute originality of the composition, which sep- arates the causes in opposite corners of the picture, and unites the effects in the intensely expressive face, at once strikes one. Such an arrangement as this has not been conceived before. No artist has painted hands in such a position. This is some- thing strange, intimate, and at the same time dreamily beauti- ful, comparable with nothing that ancient or modern art has produced — something so refined, so harmonious in effect, and so complete and direct in expression that the charm is as in- stantaneous as it is lasting. But even in this case the artist has thought fit to accompany the picture by a few lines of ex- planation printed on the frame — a quotation from the fictitious letters of Girolama Ridolfi, describing how Veronica wrote the first notes of a composition on a clean sheet of paper; then she grasped her bow in order to realize her dream ; but before tak- ing down the instrument she remained an instant motionless, listening to the inspiring bird, while her left hand wandered over the strings seeking the motif. It was the marriage of the voices of nature and of the soul, " the dawn of a mystic creation." " Lady Lilith " represents a woman of our own time, seated in what might be a modern chamber. She is clad in a white underdress and a white fur dressing-gown, with her bosom bare, a diadem of eglantine on her lap, and a coral bracelet on her wrist. In her left hand she holds a mirror, and with her right she combs out her golden hair. At her left side is a dark- green glass jar with a poppy in it, and on the antique coffer, on which stands a candlestick and a mirror, reflecting foliage and garden scenery, is laid a branch of pink foxglove. The back- 334 ART AND CRITICISM. ground of the picture is a mass of white roses with pink and red buds. The two dominant colors of the picture are thus red and white in all their shades and varieties. Such is Ros- setti's conception of Adam's first mate Lilith, the purely animal woman who preceded Eve, and who still remains soulless yet animated by an immortal spirit. We will describe one other picture by Rossetti, which shows him at his best as a conceiver of beautiful visions, a master of arrangement and composition, a deviser of harmo- nious and charming completeness. This is a comparatively small work, called the " Loving-Cup," and bearing on the frame the salutation, " Douce nuit et joyeux jour, O chevalier de bel amour." The subject represents a fair young lady advancing towards the spectator, holding in her right hand a golden loving-cup, and in her left the cover. She wears a red robe with long white sleeves. Fixed behind the head, with its brown wavy hair, is a green veil that falls around her neck over the right shoulder. On her neck and bosom are necklaces of coral and pearls. This beautiful blue-eyed maiden is painted against a white background diapered with blue and crossed by a shelf, on which is a row of brass plates, with, on the wall below, some trailing green ivy. This picture is so lovely that even in a simple black-and-white reproduction it can speak for itself, and dis- pense with the praise of halting prose. Other pictures by Rossetti are subjects suggested by Dante, by poems of Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Robert Browning, the Arthurian cycle, the Bible, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, or Goethe ; and various allegorical works bearing sonorous Latin or Italian titles, such as " La Donna della Finestra," " La bella Mano," " Venus Astarte," " Le Ghirlandata," " Ligeia Siren," " Sibylla Palmifera," " La Bionda del Balcone," " Aspecta Me- dusa," " Hesterna Rosa," etc., all of them essentially literary in their inspiration, many of them virtually illustrations of some ROSSETTl'S "LOVING-CUP." ^0^^*-^^ ^^F THF. ITT A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 337 particular text, and unintelligible without the help of the pre- cise words referred to, but at the same time remaining suffi- ciently instinct with purely pictorial genius to enable the spec- tator to enjoy and appreciate them without comprehending a tithe of the hermetic significations which instigated the artist in his composition. Edward Burne-Jones is more erudite though less intense than his master, Rossetti. He attaches higher importance to the material representation of a thought than to the thought itself; he is more pagan than Rossetti; he recurs to the myths of antiquity and the vague symbolism of the Middle Ages rather. than to the Christian legend; he is greatly preoccupied with beauty of form; and, unlike Rossetti, whose technical de- fects are too evident to need particularizing, Burne-Jones is at once a draughtsman and a colorist. On the. other hand, his in- spiration remains essentially literary and transcendental rather than picturesque ; he never paints merely for the pleasure of painting. Burne -Jones has a palette of his own, composed of soft and tender tones that melt into gray harmonies of infinite delicacy, and contrast markedly with the hot colors a la Gior- gione in which Rossetti delighted. Our illustration represents one of Burne -Jones's most ex- quisite compositions, called " Venus's Mirror," a large picture two yards long, where we see Venus and nine nymphs, blondes or brunettes, grouped around a pool, some standing, some kneel- ing, and looking at their reflected faces. The scene is laid in an imaginary landscape of hills and mossy lawns, beneath a pale-blue, luminous sky, the whole painted with the clearly de- fined and equal minuteness of Memling. Every cranny in the distant hills is drawn. Every petal of the forget-me-nots that grow around the pool, every vein of the lily leaves that float upon its surface, every sprig of the myrtle bush that Venus fin- gers as she stands erect in the azure splendor of her divine ele- gance, is depicted with the most scrupulous exactitude and the most inflexible respect for the minutiae of nature. Each figure 338 ART AND CRITICISM. is studied in the same patient way. The drapery, of azure, violet, red, purple, lilac, is painted with equal application. Nothing could be more unlike the pictures of the modern real- ists than this dreamy and highly imaginative rendering of poetic conceptions which seem to float in an atmosphere of beauty that fills the spectator with a sort of religious awe, and carries him away from coarse materialism into a region of ten- derly ecstatic reverie. The same minuteness of execution and the same incom- parable charm of aspect characterizes another famous picture by Burne -Jones, "Merlin and Viviane," unintelligible to those who are not familiar with the legend of the magic circle in which the bard and the fairy imprisoned their love, and yet in itself a vision of beauty, thanks to the intensity of the expres- sion of the two figures against the background of hawthorn bloom. Similar, again, are the qualities of the admirable pict- ure in the Leyland collection of " Phyllis and Demophoon," where we see the maiden half metamorphosed into a blossom- ing almond -tree, draped in hyaline robes and grasping des- perately the terrified Demophoon, her hands locked around his body. The expression of desire in the face of the maiden and of terror in the features of the young man, impress one all the more vividly in comparison with the placid and indifferent landscape in which the scene is laid, with a limpid spring sky overhead and golden crocuses studding the green lawn in the foreground. In the picture of King Cophetua offering his crown to the beggar-maid, in the " Circe," so expressive in the fe- line attitude of the sorceress, in the " Seven Days of the Crea- tion," " Laus Veneris," " Love in the Ruins," " Day and Night," and " Cupid Reviving Psyche," in the Leyland collection, we are struck by the intensity of the imaginative effort, the marvel- lous gift of personification, and at the same time by the love of archaism, abstraction, and symbolism. Burne -Jones has cer- tainly a personality of his own, but he is as certainly a post- humous disciple of the erudite masters of the fifteenth century. A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 339 Were we to attempt to establish any comparison between Burne-Jones and Rossetti, we should note the fact that ot all the imaginative painters that England has produced, the former is the only one whose talents of composition, draw- ing, and color are sufficient for the adequate rendering of his poetical conceptions, whereas Rossetti's inspiration and inten- tions are always superior to his treatment. Yet we must not look for fine execution in the work of either of these masters, for they have no conception of painting as Velasquez, Rem- brandt, or Titian understood the art. Fine impasto, la belle pate, the charm of mere material painting, is unknown to them. They have a different conception of art, which in their eyes is something far nobler than a more or less careful representation of nature. Their art is indeed rather literature than painting. Their inspiration, as we have seen, is almost exclusively liter- ary. Rossetti in all his pictures remains a pure poet, a dreamer of visions of profound signification, which he expounds and an- notates in poems and sonnets. The qualities of a painter that he has are an impressive and resplendent originality of compo- sition, a delight in rich accessories, and a love of brilliant color in the Venetian taste. His drawing is continually at fault; his technical acquirements are obviously inadequate in all re- spects, except only in the representation of flowers, the pro- fusion and beauty of which form always so charming a feature in his pictures. But in spite of these faults his pictures have an artistic as well as an incontestable poetical value; they fas- cinate and move us by the supreme intensity of the expression that he has given to his figures without having recourse to ex- aggerated gestures or violent movement. Burne-Jones, though more completely equipped than Rossetti as a mere painter, is less vigorous as a poet, and dwells by preference in an atmos- phere of slightly monotonous, very delicate, and undoubtedly fascinating tenderness. Of the two, Rossetti is the original genius, and Burne-Jones the accomplished and erudite assim- ilator of the intellectual attitudes of old masters like Botticelli, 340 ART AND CRITICISM. Pollajuolo, and Mantegna, of whom he has made himself, so to speak, a spiritual contemporary by dint of a persistent mor- al and intellectual effort, aided by unerring scholarship and abundant fancy. On the other hand, Rossetti and Burne -Jones are equally admirable in their noble and disinterested concep- tion of the dignity of their art, in their persistent contempt of all that is vulgar and mercantile, and in their faithfulness to an elevating and aristocratic ideal, whose only disadvantage is that it is incomprehensible except to the few. We must not, however, be too hasty even in this assertion that a sublime ideal is a disadvantage because it limits the domain of the artist's influence on the public ; for, after all, how can art, worthy of the name, be other than a privilege of an aristocracy of intellect.'* What does democracy care about art.f* What sway has Rossetti ever exercised over the life and thoughts of the multitude of Englishmen ? How many per cent, of the population of London or New York find the con- ceptions of Burne -Jones comprehensible, not to say pleasur- able ? In the same way, when we consider the superior mul- titude of those who walk through museums and control the exactitude of Baedeker s guide-books, docile sitters upon those velvet benches which kind curators place in front of the tradi- tional masterpieces of contestable masters, do we find in their sensations or in their preferences a proof that art can be any- thing but the privilege of a few.? Is not the bench in front of Paul Potter's famous bull one of the most incessantly oc- cupied seats in any Continental museum.'* Why.'' Because anybody can see that the subject of the picture is a bull ; the fact can be readily controlled ; the very hairs on the hide might be counted. But the moment art rises -above the com- monplace imitation of reality the estrangement between the artist and the multitude begins, and lessens only as the edu- cation of the public eye and of the mind progresses. The more complete the education of the eye the more varied and intense is the merely sensual enjoyment of art in its material A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 341 aspect ; and the more extensive the culture of the mind the wider becomes our field of appreciation and the more rapid our faculty of entering into sympathetic and spiritual com- munion with the artist, whether he be a painter of natural truth, like Velasquez, a creator of definitive visions of beauty, like Botticelli, or a genius of complex intention and complete accomplishment, like Leonardo da Vinci. BURNE-JONES'S "CIRCE." The art of Rossetti and Burne -Jones is not to be judged by the purely material and exterior criticism which would be adequate in the case of a Bastien- Lepage or a Dagnan-Bou- veret. Any student fresh from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts can scoff at the preternaturally swan-like necks, the enormous hands, and the countless physical deformations of Rossetti's ideal women ; he may even lament that Burne-Jones does not 342 ART AND CRITICISM. base either his drawing or his color on a more strict observa- tion of natural truth. But such criticism is vain. We are here in presence of two personal artists whose works either give us pleasure or do not give us pleasure ; the record of our impres- sions will therefore be either an affirmation of joy or of disgust, and that joy or disgust we shall be able to analyze and account for with reference to our own temperaments or to chosen typ- ical temperaments. This is really all we can say with safety. In presence of the variety of the productions of art and of the certain pleasures that we receive from the most diverse mani- festations of artistic genius, we feel less and less inclined to pursue the chimera of criticism based upon principles. Such principles as have hitherto been laid down by authoritative speculators are constantly proving to be inadequate. At one time it is some wholly recalcitrant element, like Japanese art, which at once claims attention and defies judgment upon accepted theories. At another time it is the increasing deli- cacy of the development of our organs of sight, which requires the entire reformation of all the tenets hitherto applied to the appreciation of landscape painting. Finally we discover that all our serried battalions of prin- ciples are an embarrassment, and our tendency becomes more and more to trust less to dogma than to impressions, for we can be sure of our impressions, but we can never be sure of so-called aesthetic principles. " I know nothing about art, but I know what I like." This remark, so commonly heard, is worthy of respect. It is the obscure cry of the natural man who yearns and craves for sincerity. To criticise according to given principles is easy. Such is the method of the pedant, of the college essay, and of the do- cile and malleable citizen who is sincere in a sort of non-per- sonal way, and takes his stand upon a creed, upon authority and tradition. But, surely, to assimilate and live by cut-and- dried principles and conventions is a poor occupation for an in- telligent man or woman in this our complex and aspiring age. A PRE-RAPHAELITE MANSION. 343 Criticism, like art and literature itself, must follow the move- ments of the ever-changing spirit of the times, of that Zeitgeist which is continually modifying our manners, our thoughts, and our pleasures. What is really valuable and interesting is the record of a sincere impression, and the analysis and explana- tion of that impression which will render it intelligible to a sympathetic mind. The fact that the people of the past cen- tury pronounced Raphael to be divine, and obtained a sum of pleasure from the contemplation of his work, has a retrospective interest. The sincere impressions of a typical and character- istic modern man in presence of Raphael have an immediate interest. The art of Raphael remains the same, but the eyes and the minds of the men of the nineteenth century are widely different from the eyes and minds of the men of the sixteenth century, or even of the men of twenty years ago. That is the reason why effective, didactic, and dictatorial art criticism is a vain illusion. The aim of the critic should be disinterested; he should not say, " This is good," or, " That is bad," or, " This should be admired and that detested," but rather, " These are the impressions which such and such a work produce in my mind, and these are the concomitant circumstances and more or less complete explanations of the aesthetic phenomena which I experience." To such a record of sincere impressions the reader would attach importance according to the sympathetic emotions which they might provoke in him, and according to the esteem in which he might hold the intellectual personality of the writer who emitted them. As Mr. Walter Pater has ad- mirably said in a recent volume, in all questions of the dis- crimination of schools, whether of art or of literature, and in all controversies between tradition and innovation, whether we are concerned with production or with criticism, "the legitimate contention is not of one age or school of art against another, but of all successive schools alike against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulg-arit v which is d ead to form." iisHaAinnj ,^aHj, go ^ I K VALUABLE AND INTERESTING WORKS FOR STUDENTS OF ANCIENT AND MODERN ART. Harper & Brothers will send any of the following works by 7na.ii, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. For a full list of works published by Harper & Brothers, see Harper's Revised Catalogue, 8vo, which will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, on receipt of Ten Cents. ' THE QUIET LIFE." Illustrated by Abbey and Parsons. " The Quiet Life." 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